inside abstraction

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Sven Ltticken

InsideAbstraction

Writing in the German weekly Die Zeit, a novelistand entrepreneur diagnosed the Occupy protestsas a revolt against abstraction, a revolt that heconsidered irrational and misguided precisely tothe extent that it aimed at abstraction as such.1

But is it really, fundamentally? It is true that thedizzying complexity of contemporary financialproducts and transactions creates a craving fortools to understand and attack this rarefied

sphere. A brochure called Demystifying theFinancial Sector: A Nuts and Bolts Guideillustrates the longing for concretion with adrawing of a screw and a bolt on the cover.2

However, while some subscribe to a fundamentalcritique of money as agent of abstraction andalienation, what is more dominant is surely thecritique of the financial sector as driving force (orit just enabler?) of a debt-driven economy.What is under attack, therefore, is a veryspecific form of financial abstraction, weighedheavily against ordinary consumers and small

businesses. And this abstract system obviouslyhas very concrete consequences; if on the onehand it appears Byzantinely abstract, at thesame time it can be all too concrete. Paul Chanhas reminisced about his local McDonalds in thecrisis of the early 1990s: The McDonalds whereI went now and then closed toward the tail end ofthe 91 recession; so did other businesses in thearea. At the time I didnt think much of it, and if Idid, I thought it strange. The place seemed to dogood business, since the neighborhood didnthave a grocery store or any kind of communitycenter, so it doubled for those. Chan remarksthat he was too young and naive to know muchabout the causes of the depression, andeconomic lingo was as abstract and remote tome as the actual reasons behind the appearanceof a recession are in reality.3

During this period, Survival had nothing todo with measuring the rise and fall of economicindicators, but the cunning of living betweenthese inhuman quantifications, and finding novelways to be unmoved and unmoored by theirmovements, in any direction. Progress was notchasing profit, but standing firm where you

happened to have found yourself, against theforces that bull or bear either way.4 But how dothese inhuman quantifications actually shapethe in-between spaces that we traverse ordoggedly occupy? As the case of Chans localMcDonalds shows, abstract quantifications havea habit of becoming seemingly concretequalities.

1. Failures of the Abstract, Failures of theConcrete

A 1928 photograph by the abstract painter

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Poster designed by CsarDomela for AEG, 1928.

Csar Domela, Ruth, 1928.

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Csar Domela shows his wife Ruth in front of oneof his paintings: a Van Doesburg-like countercomposition with diagonal lines. Following VanDoesburgs example, in the 1920s Domela brokewith Mondrians neoplastic aesthetic ofequilibrium, which was based on an essentialistopposition between vertical (male) andhorizontal (female). The diagonal stood for arejection of the latent naturalism in Mondrians

abstraction and the embrace of a dynamic, time-based approach to art.5 It also meant that theeasel painting was no longer necessarily thepreferred medium. In Van Doesburgs design forthe Cin-Dancing at the Aubette (192628),abstraction becomes a transforming force ofdaily (nocturnal) life, and the diagonals join thefilm image in celebrating dynamic urban life asthe real new reality, over and beyond artisticdogma. The point was to go beyond an idealistform of abstraction to concrete social situations.The term abstract was on its way out; in a 1927

Elementarist manifesto, Van Doesburg statedthat the terms abstract and concrete wereboth nothing but formulae, but by 1930 he wasadvocating art concret. What mattered wastreating lines and forms not as abstractions ofreality but as concrete elements within it, as realas a brick or a person.6

While Domela did not cosign the 1930manifesto, the counter-composition on the 1928photo sees him partaking in Van Doesburgselementarist phase, and with the photographhe stages a dialectic that recalls (on a smallerscale) that of the Aubette: the painting is placedin dialogue with the woman, and in a way thatdiffers markedly from the manner in which HenryVan de Velde integrated his wife into hisdecorative schemes, by making her an element inthe overall composition with the dresses hedesigned. Without being in any way formalized,Ruth Domela her head in profile exists onequal terms with the composition that is behindher, but is more than a mere backdrop.7 Apainting such as this, the image seems to say, isonly complete when it is integrated into socialsituations. Mondrians studio and the artists

working life surrounded by his art proved highlyfascinating to critics and photographers, yetMondrian could only conceive of his praxis asanticipating a future life that was as yetimpossible. With Van Doesburg and Domela, thefuture is now. The discussions in the late 1920sand early 1930s about abstraction versusconcretion were perhaps never more succinctlyencapsulated than in Domelas photograph,which reframes the idealist utopia of abstract artas concrete lived reality.The growing preference among artists for

the term concrete around 1930 reflects the factthat art, as aesthetic practice, addresses the

senses in some manner and thus cannot help butconcretize abstraction. Mondrians paintingswould be impoverished without theirimperfections, without their signs of vacillation.In fact, Liam Gillick has diagnosed aconstitutional failure of the abstract in modernart, which promises and abstraction that itcannot deliver:

By making the abstract concrete, art nolonger retains any abstract quality, itmerely announces a constant striving for astate of abstraction and in turn producesmore abstraction to pursue. It is this failureof the abstract that lures and hypnotizes forcing itself onto artists and demandingrepeated attention It is theconcretization of the abstract into a seriesof failed forms that lures the artist intorepeated attempts to create the abstract fully aware that this very act produces

things that are the representation ofimpossibilities.8

Art as the concretion of the abstract into a seriesof failed forms a more succinctcharacterization of the logic of modern art canscarcely be imagined. Modern art is marked byan ongoing and uneasy dialectic of movementsbetween abstraction and concretion, creatingpotent yet failed forms.Failures of the abstract, but also failures ofthe concrete: a staple of Marxian criticism is thediagnosis of the artwork as apseudo-concreteentity. It is not so much that art no longerretains any abstract quality, but that itsconcretions are a matter of appearance only, forthe artwork is really an abstract commodity:exchange value. This Marxian indictment of theartworks lack of concretion is one partial andpartisan articulation of the dialectic of theabstract and the concrete within modern art. Itshows that this dialectic cannot be thought of asa purely formal affair operating in splendidisolation from the version of the dialectic ofabstraction and concretion that marks the

capitalist economy. Marx criticized Hegelsphilosophical notions because they remainedphilosophical abstractions, in spite of their claimto concretion.9 The abstraction that is money, onthe other hand, is a real abstraction, as theMarxist Alfred Sohn-Rethel put it.From the End of World War I to the early1970s, Sohn-Rethel developed his theory of thesecret identity of value form and thought form.Starting out in a dialogue with Bloch, Benjamin,Kracauer, and Adorno, Sohn-Rethel sought todemonstrate that the intellectual superstructure

mirrored the base more specifically, that Kantscategories were secretly indebted to those

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Details of Joseph Beuys' installation Wirtschaftswerte, 1980.

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regulating capitalist exchange. Philosophicalabstraction deludes itself by not acknowledgingits base in economic abstraction, which is a realabstraction.10 This repressed relation predatesKant and ultimately goes back to the antiqueMediterranean economy and Greek philosophy,but Sohn-Rethel focuses on Kant as the primemodern example of philosophysunacknowledged debt to real abstraction. Kants

fundamental concepts or categories thatregulate the understandings processing ofthings secretly mirror market categories. It isonly by being blind to this that philosophy canlay claim to its logical autonomy.11 Theconceptual framework of both modern scienceand of modern philosophy which developedpartly in tandem during the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries is based on exchange.Economic exchange abstracts from an objectsuse value and therefore its qualities, turning itinto pure quantity at the moment of exchange.

The abstracted value-form is expressed ordoubled in money. Money, like Kants categoriesof the understanding, abstracts from the worldand imposes abstract categories on the sphereof things, repressing all historical and economicspecificity. The transcendental subject is themirror image of money.12

In his attempt to show the fundamentalidentity of Kantian and economic categories,Sohn-Rethel pays insufficient attention toelements of Kants blindness and onlyseemingly autonomous philosophy that mayactually represent moments of non-identity,moments that resist or problematize suchidentification. Still, his somewhat quixoticproject also contains productive points. As hestresses from the start, the development of thecapitalist mode of production was both aneconomic and an intellectual process. Thedevelopment of new technologies, of newindustries, necessitated an increasing splitbetween Kopfarbeit and Handarbeit. Intellectuallabor and manual labor are both essential tocapitalism, but they are no longer in directcontact; it is capital that mediates between

them.13 Modern intellectual labor has become aquantified exact science, while manual labortoo has been rationalized. Intellectual laborersdesign production processes and products forentrepreneurs or companies that then put theminto production. Marx already noted that thegrowth of scientific power and itstransformation into fixed capital was bothfuelling and ultimately undermining industrialcapitalism.14 Thus the real abstraction of money(and of money in the form of capital) is complicitwith the real abstraction of technoscience of

science that has become immediatelyeconomically productive.15

In the early twenty-first century, the relationbetween capital and technoscience is of coursecloser than ever. In the financial sector,technology allows for an ever faster and moremassive circulation of capital, of capital-as-data. In his video Unsupported Transit (2011),Zachary Formwalt combines footage of theconstruction site of the Koolhaas-designedShenzhen Stock Exchange with a voice-over

recounting Eadweard Muybridges collaborationwith the railroad tycoon Leland Stanford thatshowed there was a moment of unsupportedtransit in a horses gallop. The laterdevelopment of time-lapse photography by aformer stockbroker and the use of this techniquein showing large buildings being constructedseemingly within minutes and without humanagency reminds of what Karl Marx described asthe abbreviated form of capital capitalseemingly breeding capital on the stock market,rather than being generated as surplus value

through production.16

Formwalt recountsStanfords wish that Muybridge create apanorama photo showing trains laden with silverand gold extracted from mines moving to thecommercial centers, as well as the Golden GateBridge and ships in the Pacific. Gold and silverare of course the ultimate concretization of thereal abstraction that is money. The ShenzhenStock Exchange stands for its ultimatedematerialization, even as the financial crisissees gold prices soaring, as investors are lookingfor safe assets; the German tabloid Bild evenheld a raffle in which readers could win real goldbars. Meanwhile, capital circles the globe inways that seem to escape representation. It hasconcrete effects, but the effects seem to springfrom mysterious and overly complex causes.Formwalt notes that as capital spends lesstime in production, its moments of concretionbecome rare; it circulates in the form of money,which is to say: of data. Formwalts previousvideo film In Place of Capital (2009) muses on the(un)representability of capital in relation to theinvention of photography, and in particular onFox Talbots photographs of the London Stock

Exchanges in which passersby appear asimmaterial specters due to long exposure times.His book Reading the Economist (2010) is asimilar montage inquiry into capital and visibility,remarking on the basis of Marxs notations fromearly issues of the Economist magazine, Theinvisibility of the instruments of exchange wasmeasure of their efficiency; the less visible, themore efficient they were in the circulation ofcapital.17When a crisis hits,

suddenly visible instruments of exchange

are all that will do and the sudden demandfor such instruments, for all other

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instruments to be converted into cash, orsomething very close to it, produces arupture in the field of visibility thefinancial suddenly appears directly, not assomething buried comfortably in behindanonymous glass building facades orcompany logos in the Business and Financesections of the press, but directly on thefront pages as people demanding their

money.18

Inhuman quantifications, then, take on visibleform again. Formwalt seeks out failures of theabstract, for it is here that his art can intervenein the dialectic of abstraction and concretion.Next to capital and technoscience, modern andcontemporary art is a third manifestation of realabstraction, interacting with the other two. If artis marked by a dialectic of (failed) abstractionand (failed) concretion, something similar can besaid of the other types of real abstraction.

Blundering between failed abstractions andpseudo-concretions, artistic practice reflectsand can reflect on the instability of any type ofreal abstraction. Chans reflections onMcDonalds and Formwalts video essays onstock exchanges and visibility drive home thepoint that todays techno-scientific capitalism ismarked by a botched dialectic of abstraction andconcretion. Examples of this abound. Suicidesand riots at FoxConn would seem to make theabstract tangible in a rather radical manner but for most consumers, the site of productionfor Apples gizmos is conveniently remote andtherefore abstract, so they can focus theirattention on the pseudo-concrete iPhone theycovet so much. We can look at this case from thevantage point of contemporary artistic practice,but in a sense art is already at the heart of thematter: we are dealing, after all, with branded oraestheticized capitalism.In the late 1920s, when Csar Domela joinedthe ranks of abstract and Constructivist artistswho applied their photo-typography toadvertising by working for companies in theavant-garde of capitalist technoscience, such as

AEG, this application of modern (graphic) designwas still at a remove from the product itself; bynow, the object itself is a design product. Asproducts of technoscience, capital, and aspecific design aesthetic, the iPhone and theMacBook stand for the increasing integration ofdifferent strands of real abstraction. Thisintegration makes the dialectical interplaybetween moments of the abstract and itsconcrete manifestations ever more complex.When, for instance, a corporation planned a fieldtest of a new genetically modified (GM) animal

vaccine, it met with fierce local protests thatwere immediately publicized via the media, and

its stock took a hit in the process affected bystockbrokers but perhaps even more by theblack boxes making calculations faster thanany human. This drives home the point thatcontemporary capitalism pervades daily life inmuch more complex ways than it did underclassic industrial (Fordist) capitalism, when theconveyor belt and punch-clock still seemed like aviolent imposition of abstraction on life. Writing

in the 1940s, Adorno and Horkheimer could stillthink of abstraction only as a liquidation ofconcrete objects; now it is obvious thatabstraction does not so much liquidate as liquefyand transform the concrete from within.19

The increasing integration of economic andtechnoscientific real abstraction, and of artisticreal abstraction in the guise of design, has led toa regime that Deleuze called a society ofcontrol, in contrast to the old disciplinarysociety.20 The society of control is a regime ofconcrete abstraction. Here, from social media to

GM foods, abstraction is not just real andoperative but has transformed the nature ofconcretion itself. This does not mean that thedialectic of abstraction and concretion isabolished, just that it becomes ever morecomplex and refined. Institutions that are stillperceived as impositions on the true subjecthave been supplemented and reshaped bynetworks that invite participation andinvestment. School can be out; Facebook neveris.

2. The Ends of MoneyIf a lot of modern and contemporary art hastaken the form of what Gillick calls theproduction of replacement objects that scatterthe globe as reminders of the failure of theconcrete in relation to the abstract, somepractitioners have challenged this by either usingor bypassing the object in order to make theeconomic system a whole concrete and(potentially) subject to human intervention. Artthus takes the form of an alternative political

economy foregrounding and potentiallyintervening in the production of failed forms,rather than merely and merrily proliferatingthem. Asger Jorn, in his Critique of PoliticalEconomy(1962), lambasted Marx for creatingconfusion over value with his notions ofexchange value and use value. Noting that moneyis pure convention, especially after the end ofthe gold standard, Jorn predicted the end ofmoney under proper communism, which wouldsee the realization of the Situationist project ofart becoming identical with the totality of life.21

Life would therefore be ruled no longer bycapitalist surplus value, but by a different

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Workers at a FoxConn rally organized in honor of the company after a number of suicide attempts by its workers.

surplus altogether: aesthetic surplus. With Jorn,then, we do indeed have a radical rejection ofmoney as a quantitative abstraction and art asthe purveyor of ineffable qualitative sensations.A similar dichotomy underpins PierreKlossowskis La Monnaie vivante: that of theobsessive phantasm versus utility the latterbeing associated with industrial production. Inan analysis that develops elements from his own

and Georges Batailles work from the 1930s inthe context ofAcphale and the Collge deSociologie, Klossowski problematizes andultimately collapses this dichotomy. With Sadesnarratives of secret societies using great wealthto realize phantasms, or stage them, weencounter a kind of hidden market which is themirror of the market of commodity-objects; inlater capitalism, in which advertising anderoticism played an ever increasing role, Sadebecame industrial reality.22 Without Klossowskiemphasizing the point, the text revolves round

capitalisms cognitive and affective turn whichencompasses even commodities that seemuntouched by it.23 Klossowski notes that theatom bomb is a useful good that producesphantasms (fear), and that the work of art (asculpture of Venus) is just the laughing side ofthe bomb.24 In general, the repetitions of mass

production, which devalue the individual objectand make it disposable and ephemeral, take on acompulsory and Sadean quality.Conversely, phantasms generate aproduction of simulacra that can be integratedinto the economy, that can be submitted to therule of the universal equivalent. With Sade,suggestion and the living object still had tocoincide; in later capitalism, suggestion could be

produced independently through audiovisualmedia. No need to stage elaborate and costlyrituals in remote castles. The market appears tobe based on neutral exchange of goods viamoney, but in fact this covertly becomes anexchange of human beings; it is universalprostitution. Thus the contradiction between theuniqueness and untranslatability of obsession onthe one hand and the rule of equivalence on theother is mitigated, as the tat impulsionnel isturned into a productive activity.25 Money itself isfantasmatic, an imaginary value, and Klossowski

imagines a regressive scenario in which moneywould be replaced by living objects of desire, byhuman beings that would be the opposite of theculture industrys industrial slaves such asSharon Tate, whose visual qualities and theemotions they produce can be preciselyquantified, expressed by numbers.26 In

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The German tabloid Bild announcing its raffle where readers could win gold bars.

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Andrea Fraser, Index, first published anonymously in Artforum, Summer 2011, p. 431. Produced for 24 Advertisements, a project by Jacob Fabricus, withdesign assistance by Santiago Prez Gomes-de Silva, Studio Manuel Raeder. Graph represents the Mei Moses 2006 annual all art index and S&P 500 totalreturn index (1956-2006).

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Klossowskis scenario, the living beings mightend up becoming a new form of currency, moneyin a new guise; alternatively, they would baseexchange value on the basis of the emotionsgiven. In the latter case, they would embodyvalues beyond abstract measure.27

Klossowskis book was published in anintegral German translation in the catalogue ofthe exhibition Museum des Geldes, organized by

Jrgen Harten and Horst Kurnitzky at theKunsthalle Dsseldorf in 1978, as something of asequel to Marcel Broodthaerss Der Adler vomOligozn bis heute.28 With a catalog containinganthropological-economic speculations byKurnitzky, placing a premium on the religiousaspect of money and its origins, the exhibitionincluded a plethora of ethnographic and antiqueobjects as well as works by artists ranging fromBroodthaers and Kosuth (the dictionarydefinition of abstract) to Beuys. If Das Museumdes Geldes was mostly interested in forging a link

between neo-avant-garde and conceptualreflections on the commodification of art and thedeep-time of economic (pre)history, Beuys in thelate 1970s and 1980s advocated a redefinitionand a different use of money.For Beuys, the problem was that money hadbecome a commodity, and therefore an object ofspeculation. Money should never be treated as acommodity; it should instead be a legaldocument (Rechtsdokument) that can be used asa regulatory instrument.29 Money, in other words,should not be seen as belonging to anautonomous economic system; it is a socialentity. In a contentious 1984 discussion witheconomists in which Beuys repeated his notionof money as a legal title in a mantra-like manner,he joined the banker and author Johann PhilippBethmann in attacking the established positionthat money can be adequately defined by itsthreefold function: universal means of exchange,calculation unit, and device for storing value.Bethmann argued that in fact money had to beseen as a result of debt: money is createdthrough every new loan. Debt creates money.30

This credit theory of money had already been

circulated in the nineteenth century, and DavidGraeber revisits it in Debt: The First 5,000Years.31 In spite of all economic narratives aboutthe emergence of money in coin form to replacebarter, and then its gradual dematerializationinto credit, Graeber asserts that historically,credit money comes first, and credit systemsexisted before coins.32 Graeber stresses theinequality of the debt equation: in ancientempires as well as in the age of sub-primemortgages, the game is weighted in favor of thecreditor (except when the debtor is a large bank

or corporation, and the creditor is the state).Thus, far from being the product of a

progressively abstract capitalist system, debt isthe beginning of money.Even so, over much of the history of money,gold and silver gave a body to the creditinstrument and universal means of exchange.The collapse of the gold standard inaugurated anage of increasing financialization, of floatingcurrencies and ever more complex financialproducts. Marcel Broodthaerss eagle-stamped

gold bullion, to be sold for twice their currentmaterial value, articulated the role of art asinvestment under a postindustrial regime ofabbreviated capital. Beuyss proposals are theother side of Broodthaerss precision irony. Withhis 1980 Wirtschaftswerte installation andrelated objects, Beuys in effect created acounterpoint to Broodthaerss gold bars: intaking the trouble to import them and exhibitthem in the West, Beuys problematized thecoexistence of two flawed economic and socialsystems.33 Beuys was obviously not unaware of

the value he was creating by turning theseobjects into his Wirtschaftswerte, but the projectmight be said to be not about the result butprecisely about the interval between socialistsub-commodity and artistic hyper-commodity,

just as the Broodthaerss bullion are about theinterval between material and art value.Money is an aggregate of functions, and ifeconomists have long stressed its function asuniversal means and measure of exchange, thenew or renewed focus on its status as a propertytitle and/or credit instrument is potentially ameans to challenge the actually existingGeldwirtschaft. Beuys used the termWirtschaftswerte to denote both humancreativity and its products; those are the onlyreal economic values. The problem with moneywas that it was seen as a means of exchange andtherefore as a universal commodity.34 Instead ofa means of exchange, it needs to become a legalregulatory instrument expressing rights andobligations. In his Aufruf zur Alternative, Beuyshad claimed that money had in fact already cometo function in this manner; with the emergence ofcentral banks and modern monetary policy,

money became a legal regulatory instrument forall creative and consumptive processes.35 WhatAufruf zur Alternative presents as anestablished fact money is a tool for regulation Beuys presents as a demand in the 1984discussion money has yet to be legalized. Thereal breakthrough in the reconceptualization ofmoney had not yet been made.Characteristically, Beuyss solution to theproblems of capitalism consists of a highlyrhetorical slogan. Yet this need not beunproductive; it is worth asking what it would

mean to conceive of money as a legal documentencompassing obligations and rights, and by

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implication as a regulatory instrument that doesnot just try to regulate the market. At the veryleast, it would have to entail the rejection of thecrude abstractionism promoted by thefinancial sector and its ideologues: the idea offinance as an autonomous sphere of pureabstraction, which should not be meddled with inany way. On the contrary: if financial abstractionimpacts the local McDonalds, this is one

manifestation of a dialectic of abstraction andconcretion in which we can and must intervene.

3. Fatal StrategiesBut how to intervene? If art is theconcretization of the abstract into a series offailed forms, then the question is which formsand structures provide the most productivefailures now that art is itself being financialized.When hedge fund manager Eduard Pomeranz

presented an overview of his collection ofcontemporary art at the Jewish Museum inVienna earlier this year, press reports focused onhis use of a computer program advising him onhis artistic investment algorithmic collecting!36

As finance and its real abstractions transform artfrom within, the question of a possible responsebecomes urgent. This requires a shift fromtreating abstraction as a symbolic trope in artand art discourse to a reflexive intervention inabstraction as a condition of art. Abstractionshapes arts material conditions even whiletransforming materiality itself. To deal with onesimplication in concrete abstraction and the waysin which todays drive towards integration offormerly disparate realms transforms not onlyart but also academia demands a move awayfrom finished form to the matrix of form, to theconditions that produce the varied forms offailure.In her essay Le 1%, cest moi, AndreaFraser investigates the burgeoning art marketand the rise of a class of super-collectors investors who may also happen to have paidbribes to get control of Russian natural reserves,

or who received an astronomical bonus beforetheir company collapsed and gave $150,000 toan organization seeking to limit publicpensions.37 Going beyond such enumeration,Fraser cites a paper in which three economistsargue that there is no relationship

between art returns and overall incomevariables (such as GDP or total personalincome), but only with income inequality:art prices do not go up as a society as awhole becomes wealthier, but only when

income inequality increases. Their analysissuggests that one percentage point

increase in the share of total incomeearned by the top 0.1% triggers an increasein art prices of about 14 percent. Theyconclude: it is indeed the money of thewealthy that drives art prices. This impliesthat we can expect art booms wheneverincome inequality rises quickly. This seemsexactly what we witnessed during the lastperiod of strong art price appreciation,

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Art, then, is now an integral loop in the circuits ofabbreviated capital. It is a commodity whosewhims were always hard to explain away usingthe labor theory of value and indeed theartwork has become the model for a wholesegment of branded or culturalizedcommodities where the profit margin isdisproportionately high. In the top segment, thedisproportion between the material side of theartwork and its value becomes so pronounced

that it takes on stock-like characteristics. Theconclusion, then, is unavoidable: what is good forthe art world is disastrous for the rest of theworld.39 The question, as always, is what is to bedone on the basis of this insight. Fraser proposesan affirmation and exacerbation of the dividebetween different types of artistic/institutionalpractice: European museums should secedefrom the art market and the blue-chip art andartists it produces.

If this means that public museums contractand collectors create their own privatelycontrolled institutions, so be it. Let theseprivate institutions be the treasure vaultsand theme-park spectacles and economicfreak shows that many already are. Letcurators and critics and art historians aswell as artists withdraw their culturalcapital from this market.40

The danger, of course, is that the freak show willbecome the only available model of art for anever greater group, and that the other art worldwill become ever more marginalized. Already,

prominent newspapers can see no other logicthan that of the blockbuster and spectacularprivate patronage: De Volkskrant, a Dutchnewspaper whose art pages have becomelaughable, dedicated its entire front page to theannouncement by Joop van Caldenborgh, ownerof a sub-par collection of blue-chip art, that hewas going to build his own museum.41 The freakshow is the new normality, and publicinstitutions are scrambling to be part of this neworder. Furthermore, a secession could also havethe unwanted effect of [colluding] in the

distancing of affect and the dissimulation of ourimmediate and active investments in our field,

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an effect on which Fraser has writteneloquently.42 Is there any sort of gain to be hadfrom split off and distancing part of the art world deciding that thats not us?

Zachary Formwalt's In Place of Capital production stills on theBukowskis web site for the Abstract Possible auction.

Contrary to the secession model, MariaLind collaborated with an auction house for herproject Abstract Possible at Tensta Konsthall.Abstract Possible created a constellation ofdifferent forms of abstraction, including formalabstraction in art and economic abstraction.Goldin+Senneby made an artwork in the form ofa book containing investment advice on theartists in the show. Only the buyer of this piececould access the contents, not regular visitors tothe exhibition; the work was sold at a Bukowskisauction that also included other works byAbstract Possible artists includingproduction stills of Zachary Formwalts In Placeof Capital. Whos mocking whom here?Protest swiftly arose, with critics homing inon the Lundin family, owners of Bukowskis andthe Swedish businessworlds most ethicallyunacceptable family: Maria Linds exhibitionAbstract Possible is allegedly exploring thenature of abstraction and the economy of todaysart world, but the institution nowhere exposesthe ownership of the auction house or therelationship between the funding of theexhibition and Lundin Oils horrific operations in

Africa. To make things worse, the suburb inwhich Tensta Konsthall is located is also home tohundreds of exiled families from exactly thoseparts of Sudan which Lundin Oil has madeuninhabitable.43

But the criticism went beyond the post-ethical Lundin family to see Bukowskis as asymptom and symbol of the destruction ortransformation of the publicly funded artinfrastructure in Sweden; here as in theNetherlands, right-wing cultural policy isdraining public funding and imposing private

patronage as the normal and desirable way ofdoing things without, of course, acknowledging

that this is in fact a way of targeting certainforms of art production and reception.44

Referencing a remark by the artist HendrikAndersson during a debate at Tensta Konsthall,Frans Josef Petersson noted that

Linds ideas form a perfect match with theideology that Storkers made his career inmarketing: capitalism as an exchange of

floating, abstract values, separated fromthe human bodies in Ogaden or otherplaces which in fact produce the surplus-value that this market builds on exploiting.That Storkers expressed several timesthroughout the night his admiration for theclarityof Linds ideas is, in other words, notsurprising: they both speak capitalismslanguage, as I seem to rememberAndersson putting it.45

The project can indeed hardly be defended as an

act of immanent critique; lots of immanence,certainly, but hardly any critique. While theinclusion of Formwalts work in the auction couldgenerously be seen as confronting the piece withits economical-ideological conditions andcontradictions, thereby introducing a higherdegree of reflexivity, this would be a ratherinsane critique that operates by making thingsworse and ends up being a strategy ofVerelendung in every way but financially.Is the alternative, then, to adopt thesecessionist model? This would seem to be asdysfunctional a model, as fatal a strategy, asLind-style immanence but it is precisely asimpossible models, as models that have alreadyfailed, that both have their value in a situationwithout easy answers and clearly-labeledemergency exits. Perhaps Linds project,seemingly an affirmation of abstract values,was in fact marked by a failure of the abstract:after all, Lind was accused of taking bloodmoney. The notion of blood money suggests thatmoney has a biography, that blood can stick to it that financial transactions can be a gothicnovel.

Follow the money: Andrea Frasers 1% essaydeveloped from a research initiative termedArtigarchy, which and was first proposed in 2010.The idea was to create a web-based dataplatform visualizing the economic, artistic andpolitical entanglements of top collectors andmuseum patrons. How does one'sentrepreneurial activities as a manufacturer ofscrews, nuts and bolts relate to his statementsabout taxation and his dealings as a collector?And how can such relations be made sensible,tangible? The initiative is now developing under

the auspices of Slought Foundation inPhiladelphia as an expanding collaboration of

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organizations and individuals, presentlyincluding Derek Curry, Fraser, Jennifer Gradecki,Aaron Levy, Ken Saylor, and Orkan Telhan. Theinitiative, which is still in its early stages, hasdeveloped from a focus on individual collectorsand patrons to the visualization of distributionsof income and resources within the art field andits institutions, as well as its correlation to thedistribution of resources within and among

sectors (public, nonprofit) and to distributions ofwealth in national contexts with active artmarkets. One of the primary manifestations ofthe initiative will be charts and statisticalgraphics that visualizes networks and actors inconcrete-abstract diagrams.

Rather than only focusing on individualsand their sources and levels of income, wehope the initiative will be able to representthe systemic relationship betweeninequality and the art field today. At the

same time, we hope to activate the data bylinking various points in these distributionsto specific individuals and their incomelevels, to the prices of specific artworks, toinstitutional budgets, and so on, which willplace them in the context of directlyinvested experiences and interests. We alsohope to develop visualizations that trackthe political affiliations of art collectorsand patrons, as well as involvement offinancial institutions active in the art worldin fraudulent dealings, like the sub-primemortgage crisis, LIBOR manipulation, etc.46

In the regime of concrete abstraction, the failureof form needs to be repeated, over and overagain. Form needs to fail again and fail better,without turning into replacement objects. Formin the realm of concrete abstraction needs to bedefined not in terms of some branded signaturestyle, of replacement objects accompanied bydiscourse, but in terms of the constellations weenter and the ways in which we affect them.This article takes up a line of inquiry from my article/book

chapter Living with Abstraction. It is part of my long-termprojectArt and Thingness.

Sven Ltticken teaches art history at VU UniversityAmsterdam. Sternberg Press published his bookIdolsof theMarket: Modern Iconoclasm and theFundamentalist Spectacle. His book History in Motionis scheduled for early next year.http://svenlutticken.blogspot.com

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1Ernst-Wilhelm Hndler, Lgengegen das Kapital,Die Zeit,April19, 2012.Seehttp://www.zeit.de/2012/16/Europa.

2Demystifying the FinancialSector: A Nuts & Bolts Guide(s.l.: Corporate Watch, 2012).Seehttp://www.corporatewatch.org/?lid=4171.

3Paul Chan, The Spirit ofRecession,October129(Summer 2009): 3.

4Ibid.

5Challenged by Van DoesburgsElementarism, Mondrian notedthat he did not reject thediagonal in principle. The crucialthing was theright angle. He did,however, reject the theoreticalunderpinnings of Van Doesburgsuse of the diagonal. See CarelBlotkamp,Mondrian: The Art ofDestruction (London: Reaktion,

2001), 192.

6Theo van Doesburg,Schilderkunst en plastiek.Elementarisme (Manifest-fragment),De Stijl Vol. 7, No.7(192627): 85. The art concretmanifesto was published in 1930in the only issue of the magazineof the same name (1).

7A related photograph by RaoulHausmann shows both Csarand Ruth Domela in front of thesame painting.

8

Liam Gillick, Abstract (2011),liamgillick.info.Seehttp://www.liamgillick.info/home/texts/abstract.

9Karl Marx,Grundrisse, trans.Martin Nicolaus (London:Penguin, 1993), 100102.

10Alfred Sohn-Rethel,Geistige undkrperliche Arbeit(Frankfurt amMain: Suhrkamp, 1972 [1970]),3845.

11Ibid, 108.

12Some of Kants qualities actuallypertain to the objects qualities,but they arelogical abstractionsof qualities; quality becomes aphilosophical concept asabstracted from specificqualities as quantity itself.Ibid., 2022, 4557, 88115.

13Sohn-Rethel, 2627, 107.

14Marx,Grundrisse, 750. In thelate 1960s, Hans-Jrgen Krahlwould use such remarks by Marxfor his argument that the

scientific/academic caste was anow a productive class on par

with the proletariat, and neededto develop its own forms ofpolitical and social action. SeeKrahl, Thesen zum allgemeinenVerhltnis vonwissenschaftlicher Intelligenzund proletarischemKlassenbewusstsein(1969),Konstitution undKlassenkampf. Zur historischenDialektik von brgerlicherEmanzipation und proleratischerRevolution. Schriften, Reden undEntwrfe aus den Jahren

19661970 (Frankfurt am main:Verlag Neue Kritik, 20007 [1971],336351. On Krahl as an earlytheorist of the cognitariat andthe need for new organizationalforms, see Franco BifoBerardi,The Soul at Work: From

Alienation to Autonomy, trans.Francesca Cadel and GuiseppinaMecchia (Los Angeles:Semiotext(e), 2009), 6667.

15The term technoscience wasintroduced by Gilbert Hottois inthe 1970s and used by Lyotardand Latour, among others. I useit to denote the increasinglytight and complex integration of

science and industry, whichturns science into anoperativereal abstraction.

16The reference is toCapital:Volume 3, trans. David Fernbach(London: Penguin, 1993), 515.

17Zachary Formwalt,Reading theEconomist (Utrecht/Porto:Casco/Serralves, 2010), 16.

18Ibid., 135.

19Die Abstraktion, das Werkzeug

der Aufklrung, verhlt sich zuihren Objekten wie dasSchicksal, dessen Begriff dieausmerzt: as Liquidation, inMax Horkheimer and Theodor W.Adorno,Dialektik der Aufklrung.Philosophische Fragmente(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer,1988 [1947]), 19.

20Gilles Deleuze, Postscript onthe Societies of Control,October59 (Winter 1992), 37.

21Value and Economy (1962), inAsger Jorn,The Natural Order

and Other Texts, trans. PeterShield (Aldershot: Ashgate,2002), 117217.

22Pierre Klossowski,La Monnaievivante (s.l.: Jolle Loesfeld,1994 [1970]), 3035.

23Ibid., 1821.

24Ibid., 13.

25The artist as maker of simulacraobeys two masters, both theinstitutionalized world of

equivalence and sublimation(productivity) and obsessional

world of phantasms (sterility); itis because of this that art canunveil the secrets of thecommodity. Klossowksi,LaMonnaie vivante, 48.

26Ibid., 72.

27Ibid., 70.

28Jrgen Harten and Horst

Kurnitzky (eds.), exhib. cat.DasMuseum des Geldes, Vol. 1(Stdtische KunsthalleDsseldorf/Kunstverein fr dieRheinlande und Westfalen,1978), 7899.

29In the earlier Aufruf zurAlternative (1978), Bueys hadused the termRechtsregulativ(legal regulative instrument)instead ofRechtsdokument.Joseph Beuys, Aufruf zurAlternative,FrankfurterRundschau, December 23, 1978.Seehttp://www.impuls21.net/pdf/aufruf_zur_alternative.p df.

30Joseph Beuys et al.,Was istGeld? EinePodiumsdiskussion(Wangen:FIU-Verlag, 2009), 43.

31David Graeber,Debt: The First5,000 Years (Brooklyn: MelvilleHouse, 2011), 4371.

32Ibid., 18.

33On the Wirtschaftswerteinstallation, see alsoMaxRosenberg, Through the Wall,Slowly:Joseph Beuys's Economy

of Transformation,Texte zurKunst 85 (March 2012): 7081.

34Beuys,Was ist Geld?, 48 a.o.

35Beuys, Aufruf zur Alternative.

36See Almuth Spiegler, Extremberechnend und unglaublichberhrend,Die Presse, May 23,2012,23.

37Andrea Fraser, Le 1%, cestmoi,Texte zur Kunst 83

(September 2011), 114.38Ibid., 118, 120.

39Ibid., 122.

40Ibid., 124.

41De Volkskrant, March 28, 2012.

42Andrea Fraser, Theres No PlaceLike Home, exhib. cat.WhitneyBiennial 2012 (New York:Whitney Museum of American

Art), 33.

43Boycott Bukowskis!,bojkottabukowskis.blogspot.com.Seehttp://bojkottabukowskis.blogspot.com/2012/01/boycott -bukowskis.html.

44Ibid.

45Frans Josef Petersson, CriticalCollapse at Tensta Konsthall,

kunstkritikk.no.Seehttp://www.kunstkritikk.no/international-edition-en/critical-collapse-at-tensta-konsthall/?lang=en.

46The Artigarchy website may befound here (underdevelopment.)http://www.artigarchy.org.

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