Grève Humaine (Interrompue)
Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey in conversation
John Kelsey: After five long days of work, we never did finish installing Grève Humaine (Interrompue), 2009*. We could have finished but we didn’t, because I think we all began to agree that this sculpture worked better as something potentially but not necessarily complete. Recent, similar Claire Fontaine text sculptures were perhaps better planned, and in the end the matches were all ignited as planned, leav-ing nothing but smoke on the wall and a video document of the work going up in flames. The interrupted version at Reena Spaulings, on the other hand, is not only incomplete but treated with a fire retardant spray. It’s an inhibited fire, and retarded. So in all these ways the idea of the “strike” invaded the sculpture, dividing it from itself, transforming it as it was being produced, discussed and realized. You had spoken about Claire Fontaine works being formally and conceptually closed on themselves, but in this case I see a certain openness surviving the professionalism of the artist and the plan of the work.
Fulvia Carnevale: The concept of human strike contains a paradox that can’t be resolved on a formal level. There is something deeply non-programmatic and alien to the idea of organization in the concept of human strike. It’s not a movement that opposes one identity to another. On the contrary, it deconstructs the given identity we are prisoners of, and this prison is made out of gestures and words, their connection and their disjunction. More generally, there is something problematic when language and images are used to provoke an effect of emancipation. This type of paradox is present in many of Claire Fontaine’s works: they give form to something that is impossible to name within the purely political field, but in order to do so they have to transfer it into an inertial and potentially neutralized space. It’s an alchemic operation that can go seriously wrong and isn’t safe, but it can look very easy or cynical if seen from the outside.
The cabalistic idea that a radical transformation will consist in a small displacement of something is very important in what we try to do. Small displacements and small changes happen all the time but they are not valued enough or not in the right perspective. Professionalism, whatever it means for an artist, is a form of efficiency, that allows to put forward an implicit hierarchy of values. It’s a means of intensification of presence, and then the question is what is the purpose of the presence itself. Professionalism is a form with no determined content, it’s a means and not an end.
J. K.: Human strike can be described as an experimental production of possible and non-programmed displacements, but such redistribution implies the violence of stopping, of interruption or suspension. In other words, there is a musical or rhythmic aspect of the strike, which is an important part of the experience.
Here in the art world, professionalism means a certain rhythmic efficiency, a punctuality of production, being in the right place at the right time and showing up with the goods, etc. It involves a certain timeliness regarding the making of what is called contemporary art. When we opened Reena Spaulings Fine Art, our first impulse was not to open up an alternative “space” but to open up other temporalities of art in New York, other productive rhythms that included extremely non-productive moments, too. The city, as we saw it, was already full of spaces, but was clocked by a single, dominant rhythm that affected not only the way things were being made and exhibited, but social behaviors and relationships. It seemed important to find a way of interrupting the gallery and the artist in New York, or to find another rhythmic relation between the two. Meanwhile, since her first show with us in 2005, Claire Fontaine has become an extremely prolific artist who is now represented by several galleries, doing many shows in many cities per year and releasing an impressive quantity of works into the marketplace. Grève Humaine (Interrompue), 2009, is the first unfinished Claire Fontaine: work I’ve ever seen, I think. So I am interested in how this particular instance and articulation of “strike” relates to your idea of professionalism as a weapon and a means, and to your working strategy in general.
F. C.: Interruption is one of the aspects of human strike, but after the interruption something else begins, something different, unexpected, disquieting, and this can be more intense than what existed before. Here you seem to say that irregularity leaves more space for spontaneity, or that, to tell it in musical terms, it’s easier to improvise outside the score. This isn’t systematically true, especially if you want people to recognize a jingle or a rhythm and to associate it to something radically different. Generally speaking, music, as much as love and friendship, is something that involves a sort of training, a continuous stream of energy to channel into it; it’s work, but a passionate one. Enforced regularity is the fuel of the cultural market, but it doesn’t suit us, so sometimes Claire Fontaine goes faster, other times it goes slower than she should. Since 2005, we have used our works as sentences of a long speech and there were a lot of repetitions with variations. This was definitely a musical choice and not a pedagogical one: the jingle and the slogan are rhythmic translations of a journey out of one’s own fear and impotency. In Chatwin’s book on the Aborigines 1, the song that describes the road and the road itself become one experience, because the song contains both the cadence of the march and the description of the landscape. I would also like to say that the regularity of the market is a false one, that the superficial efficiency is there to hide the atrocious structural problems that poison the foundations of the capitalistic system. In fact, in the post-Fordist world many possibilities to compose with the productive imperatives are on offer. There are no reasons that an irregular structure can’t make money or be run successfully. Look at the Italian social centers managed by the autonomous movement: they are money machines! They produce wealth by serving a poor population that happily pays for the warm beer, the slow bar service, and for being served by somebody that isn’t a professional waiter but a militant. In the 90s, Toni Negri theorized the biopolitical entrepreneur as a new life form that maybe is more necessary for contemporary capitalism than diligent and regular people. It seems difficult to attribute to efficiency a reactionary or negative connotation, and it’s not possible to say that it’s always good either. Starting from these considerations we have kept questioning the idea of human strike. Experimenting always implies separating a space and a time from all the rest, so we have experimented with our working context, which was the speculative bubble, the art fairs, the commercial galleries. But we haven’t been cynical–because it wasn’t interesting at all–and we have treated ourselves as a product of this situation, a paradoxical product. Our relative success for us is part of the problem and not of the solution. It doesn’t disqualify our work but it doesn’t prove that the system is being radically transformed by it either. The decision of keeping Grève Humaine (Interrompue) unfinished actually came from our discussions with you: it was a way to make present in the sculptural aspect of the work its performative dimension. We worked with the workforce and its limitations, and leaving the artwork unfinished meant showing the effort of the production, the arbitrary decision of a concerted interruption.
J. K.: I guess we shouldn’t lose sight of the difference between spontaneity and improvisation when we talk about something like a strike or even, why not, a gallery or an artwork. While “spontaneity” is linked to neo-liberal notions of free choice, free movement and worker flexibility, improvisation is a more strategic attention to the concrete conditions one is faced with, and to the impossibilities too. We don’t improvise outside the score, but with the score (what Sun Ra does with Disney soundtracks, for example, or how slave music improvised with the repetitive rhythm of field labor). The strike itself is a strategic improvisation within and against a given set of productive relations. So I agree that we shouldn’t advocate some romantic idea of irregularity in the art industry, which sounds way too bohemian, in a bad way.
Still, I am interested in the capacity of any producer in this context to interrupt themselves, their work, the relations they are a part of, etc., in order to transform the situation that includes them, at least for a moment. While Reena Spaulings has somehow played on this capacity for self-interruption by switching between the roles of artist and dealer, never settling into just one function but sometimes using one to interrupt the other (which is hopefully not the same as multi-tasking), Claire Fontaine and its works are perhaps more built to last, as objects and as values. A typical Reena move is to freeze the gallery work and its economy at a sudden, questioning distance in occasional art objects, whereas Claire’s weapon is coherence, perhaps, and happens as a flooding of the market with (sometimes paradoxical) products. I see a lot of the same ideas at play in both practices, but I also see differences in strategy. A work like your neon Capitalism Kills Love, especially when presented in the context of an international art fair, for example, announces a critique of capitalism but is not exactly an anti-capitalist move, at least not at a first glance.
Meanwhile, there is interruption built into some of your other Naumanesque neons, when double or contradictory messages alternate, or when a motion detector causes the light to turn off as a spectator enters the room. Here I see a performative strike at work in the objects themselves.
In art, interruption rarely happens as one monolithic or apocalyptic moment, but it is always somehow there in the process and in whatever it is we mean by “event.” Every painter I know produces interruptions about a hundred times a day! I am also thinking here of discourses and visual processes that proceed by stammering, and of the “intermittence” that Georges Didi-Huberman discusses in Survivance des lucioles, that book you brought me from Paris.
F. C.: Warburg’s notion of interval and Brecht’s notion of “extraniation,” the suspension that creates the distance for desubjectivisation, are both very interesting in this sense. Didi-Huberman has been working within the magnetic field that takes place between these two ideas for a long time now, but he became fully aware of the political dimension of this space only recently.
Continuity can be hidden behind plenty of false ruptures–psychoanalysis insists even too much on these kinds of tricks. But also, a constant insistency on things that don’t seem to generate any change can allow unexpected explosions. I don’t think that art in itself can help events to happen, not in a direct way. An artwork is the most non-eventful thing on earth, it’s a mute and weird object that after a manipulation starts to respond to one’s feelings or arouses some new ones. There is no immediacy in the sharing of the aesthetic experience in contemporary art, but the deep emotional movement that sometimes accompanies it can change the psychosomatic organization of the singularities.
The event takes place when one can say “we.” Liking something or someone is the zero degree of the we: the kindergarten (or the philosophical) experience of astonishment. Taste or fashion communities are the opposite of communities. I agree that Capitalism Kills Love doesn’t create a major interruption within the perceptive continuum, but it’s somehow a slogan disguised as an advert, or the other way around, it’s a work for the public space and not for the white cube. It creates anger, irritation and a certain anxiety, which are already interesting effects because they compromise the way it can be exhibited: people don’t want that stuff on their building or in front of their store, they understand it does something although they can’t exactly say what. There is something intriguing in the situationist notion of détournement, at least in the aesthetic Trotskyism it implies: since we live in a visually and symbolically colonized space, we can only adopt visual entryism, and then the rupture is displaced on a deeper level. The shape of the commodity, or of the solid sculpture, includes the promise of a cohabitation with the spectator or the collector, and maybe Claire Fontaine’s works need a long time of coexistence with the viewer to release their potentiality. I attempt to think that all artworks do. But coming back to the interruption, and to improvisation, the question that seems politically essential nowadays is how to organize a continuity that protects us from parasite interruptions in order to make some real ones possible. You know this quote by Lidia Falcon from the Letters to a Spanish Idiot where she complains about the impossibility to capitalize on her work and to recognize it even for herself? When you have a physical space you can use discontinuity in an interesting way, whereas if you depend on the temporality of other spaces you can only fight it or adapt to it.
J. K.: If an artwork is mute (even as it says “Strike”) and as far as possible from the event, what and how does it tell us anything about human strike, or our distance from it as artists? Can artworks ever enter the world of the strike, or are they only a way of putting “strike” at a further distance? Détournement, for example, makes little sense if it’s not experienced as a sort of event in itself.
You talk about minor displacements and deep, major events or disturbances. When you say continuity do you mean communism?
F. C.: Well, starting from the last of your questions, continuity has to do with a specific temporality, not the one of the project, or the deadline, or the holiday. Continuity deals with the weight of everyday things, these things which if not shared push housewives to human strike. The continuity we are interested in is probably a form of communism, a way to share time and money, a mutual commitment that doesn’t depend on the liberal racket and makes itself as solid as possible to keep us away from poverty, repression, desire of success and consumption. Communism is a theory of distances and mediations, it’s not an invitation to fuse or dissolve singularities. Events aren’t necessarily big, they can be small and intense, but they always depend on the fact of being shared. A détournement can generate events, why not? But it’s a conceptual operation, and so is contemporary art. In these hard times of police repression, politicized people display a generalized contemptuous attitude towards everything that isn’t direct action or explicit conflict. This position, although understandable, leads straight to misery. Life is made of several layers of complexity, and no one can afford to submit every choice to an accountability based on offensiveness towards the established order. By getting older inside collective situations, one experiences that even friendships depend on one’s affective/economical situation. Sometimes we can’t stand to be close to people who are making choices that we are refusing now, but we will accept them in five years. Affective/economical stability and affective/economical instability can both be revolutionary, but in different ways. Either one takes part in a strike when one is forced to do so by miserable material conditions or as an ideological move, but what counts is the intensity, and the score is created by the composition of the forces. We do believe that any revolutionary process is fully open to anyone, that there is no need to show a pedigree or an ID to take part in it and accompany it towards its best, and that of course there is a great need for improvisation in this process.
J. K.: Intermittence is maybe an interesting way to think about how the strike happens under repressive conditions or in a colonized, visual space. It is like a signal on the move, perceptible for a moment and then not, not a major or final interruption but a potential and constantly repeated one. Didi-Huberman says that images themselves are intermittent. He revisits Pasolini’s article on the disappearance of fireflies, using the idea of this weak, irregular light to explain the survival of minor histories, refugees, revolutionary desire, etc., that would otherwise be lost in the glare of the now. These are images that know how to move, and move in relation to darkness. I don’t know if they are stable or unstable but their intensity is nothing like the blinding one of a spotlight or television screen, because it is linked to the need for displacement and interruption. Human strike is a potential interruption that we carry along with us and it’s also a means of carrying on. It gets interesting when these signals locate each other again and begin to compose something together (even across history), but for that we do need darkness.
Sometimes I get the feeling that for Claire Fontaine: becoming an artist is itself a form of human strike, a refusal of a politics of direct action and its attendant miseries.
F. C.: Surely Claire Fontaine in itself is an act of human strike–but so is Reena Spaulings in a different way. Darkness is hard to find anywhere today, but what is sure is that in prison the light is always on. Jean-Marc Rouillan 2 wrote that prison steals the night, and with it everything that the night makes possible. The exposure of one’s work can be more respectful of one’s anonymity than the inevitable repression of activism would be.
In another book on Warburg (L’image survivante), Didi-Huberman focuses on the idea of the surviving image, a kind of unconscious retinal persistency, a return of the past with a different meaning and in another context. This was the red thread between the tables of the Mnemosyne Atlas. This phenomenon is very visible in the demonstrations and in the iconography of the struggles in France where it seems as though ghosts from the commune or from ’68 had broken free from their graves. Warburg spoke about the migrating images and the surviving ones. Today more than ever it’s clear that forms do migrate and that contemporary art is a big land of exile for them, with all the dispersion, the misunderstanding and the complication that exile implies. We often say that Claire Fontaine is a device made to save phenomena, like Plato was doing in philosophy, but now one can only do it in art. When a possibility, an object or a life form disappears from the everyday landscape, it starts to inhabit representation (we were talking about this in our conversation with Rancière 3). Many things with a political charge can still be said and expressed but we can’t live them. If they disappear completely, even from the language and the visual field–as it happens to the fireflies in Pasolini’s analysis–it becomes impossible to think straight. Didi-Huberman accuses Agamben of refusing to see the fireflies, which are both a metaphor of revolutionary hope and potentiality and a manifestation of vitality and freedom. On the other hand, an excessively optimistic position like Rancière’s risks undermining the amplitude of the disaster, for example we know now that the ecosystem is being destroyed every minute and there is no possible political agreement to stop this. These things must be felt because anesthesia is easy and even necessary to contemporary life. Foucault used to say that one needs to shake the familiarities. I like this expression. Maybe that’s something that can be done through art.
J. K.: You’ve said before that Claire Fontaine is above all a mode of survival. You’ve also called her a refugee. It’s a funny way to survive though, in some ways an ambitious kind of survival that locates itself in some rather glaring representations.
The art world really is a ghostly place filled with dead or unlivable contents whose forms still somehow persist . . . as artists and works. To really shake the familiarities, I think, we’d have to upset the ghosts too, or what is most ghostly in art. These forms would have to come back and haunt life again, perhaps as a sort of strike, perhaps as a “distribution of the sensible” whereby what is no longer livable comes back to reclaim its bodies and gestures.
F. C.: Maybe a radical interpretation of the idea of the sharing of the sensible would help upsetting the ghosts. Nevertheless madness will always remain the most powerful way to shake the familiarities. The impertinent question: “what is ‘reality’?” immediately materializes the zone where ethics and aesthetics meet, where what we see influences the way we get together and the things we can accept. In deep solitude it can become a matter of life and death to use one color or another, to draw or not to draw. Jean Oury talks about this. For example, he tells the story of a peasant who was an incredibly gifted painter and draughtsman: he had shot his brother one day because he’d seen a frightening animal on him, an eyeless and hairless creature called Tze that could even penetrate one’s bloodstream. He even drew one for Oury. But one day this patient told him he would never draw again because there was a Tze at the end of the pencil and it would have come out and killed them if another single line had been traced. Also, when Oury talks about the case of Paulette, he states that as long as her crisis lasted she was a living masterpiece, an artwork in herself. But this was only a temporary state of grace, and as soon as she started to feel better her peasant parents dressed her up to make her look presentable: the magic was over. Maybe these exiles are human strikes, they negotiate the idea of reality and to a certain extent they influence it.
Did you ever think about opening a space to make surviving images and surviving life forms offensive? New York seems the right city for that. One can’t really live in a purely political space or in a purely aesthetical one, although isn’t the idea of the dandy partly connected to this second option?
J. K.: The paradox of the dandy is that at the extreme limit of its expression, the bourgeois suddenly touches something revolutionary, but only by refusing to explode. Instead, he makes himself his own living end, in a way. Maybe, in the end, he sees a communard staring back in the mirror. But what is most disturbing here is the refusal to be disturbed. Human strike can produce a sort of displacement that happens only by preferring not to be moved. In the heart of a movement or within a situation of enforced mobilization, the invention of a new immobility. Depression, too, can be a mode of human strike–a refusal to participate in the post-Fordist exploitation of our most human capacities. I don’t think RS ever imagined itself as a survivalist enterprise. Doing a lot of things can be a way of doing nothing, or nothing in particular. It can approach a kind of joblessness in the midst of work.
And there is always a space left open for non-art. People that hate art drop in and help us forget that this space is a gallery.
F. C.: I wouldn’t be so sure about the communard, maybe it’s a tramp that lurks in the mirror. There is this quote from Rilke4 about the bourgeois fear of being “recognized” as a beggar by the beggars or, even worse, of being unmasked as nothing but a well-dressed and well-behaved piece of human trash. Maybe the dandy exorcizes this fear by flirting with it, by being eccentric within the regulated and violent landscape of social classes. He doesn’t fight the laws of social gravity by denouncing their effects but he gracefully ignores them and dances through life. In that sense I think one can say that dandyism is a form of human strike.
About the disturbing stillness that you see in human strike, it’s a great description of it but it’s not always possible since it takes a lot of energy to stop something from within the productive vortex. Sometimes the only possible thing to do is to invert the energy or to find the way to use the energy of the machines (productive, desiring, etc.) against themselves, to jam them. It would be interesting to isolate the preliminary and radically heterogeneous movement that happens inside the everyday routine and deregulates it for good, causing the start of the human strike. It can be an accumulation of factors, something that goes wrong, a sudden change, but no consciousness can cause human strike. It’s definitely a subcortical movement, an inevitable accident. That’s why it’s a desubjectivization and never an affirmation of the individual against the system.
J. K.: The dandy discovers something “inhuman” in aesthetics. It’s putting aesthetics into the service of human strike and finding a paradoxical use value in uselessness.
Art is a space where we can say things like “I hate the police” or “capitalism kills,” or even spell these sentiments out in lights and sell them. Works that spell things out, like a slick graffiti that puts the political slogan into a relation with the corporate logo–can we call these dandyish? The dandy loves language too, but he doesn’t love messages. He exploits the efficiency and promiscuity of language. But I see him as more of a magician using the word to produce a disappearing act, like the poems Mallarmé wrote on ladies’ fans. Here, language and commodity merge in a fluttering, folded movement that introduces a sort of intermittence of meaning and silence, of appearance and flight. A volume of poetry is also an object that learns to live in shop windows. Here, language goes on sale and shows itself, putting symbolic and libidinal economies into play with the economies of money and fashion. This is a high point and perhaps an end of poetry, anyway a very charged meeting point of language and commerce.
F. C.: Language and commerce aren’t as separated as we all wish they were. As soon as the word is written it can be sold and it generally is, although nowadays the Internet offers a modest amount of possibilities for sharing writings more or less for free. The market needs a lot of things that aren’t marketable in themselves in order to reach its goal, so language, poetry, slogans have a long experience of cohabitation and complicity with the commodities, and so do our feelings, our bodies, our diseases and everything non-commercial we can think of. I don’t want to undermine your objection nor affirm that this plain of confusion between poetry and advertising, for example, doesn’t belong to a specific historical moment, as Broodthaers explained. But as a matter of fact, today what declares itself as alien from the commercial circuit either doesn’t circulate or ends up circulating as a luxurious and exclusive commodity–like Debord’s films before they came out in DVD. There are ways to inhabit the problematic space of the commodity without being defeated by its poison. After all it’s what we do every day when walking on the streets of a metropolis.
J. K.: What I am interested in is how language inhabits the spaces of art and commerce. We know that it is very much instrumentalized here, on these pages of May for example. But how does it do its job and how does it go on strike? A text in neon . . . these are all over the art fairs nowadays, a ubiquitous example of language showing up as contemporary art. Texts distributed on the Internet, e-flux, blogs, etc., are also part of the normal situation of art today, extending its discourse and its space, making the industry go while also sometimes questioning it. I’m imagining a thousand texts on human strike circulating for free online, wondering if this information is now mostly an expression of the program…
F. C.: Do you really want an answer? Or the question is more interesting than any answer? Maybe that’s the end of all we can say about human strike before we start to capitalize on it and we find ourselves prisoners of an uninteresting contradiction.
* “Inhibitions,” Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York, December 17, 2009—January 31, 2010.
1 Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (New York: Viking Press, 2001).
2 Jann-Marc Rouillan, Je hais les matins (Paris: Denoël, 2001).
3 “Art of the Possible: Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey in conversation with Jacques Rancière,” Artforum,
no. 7 (March 2007): 256–269.
4 “True, my collar is clean, my underwear too, and I could, just as I am, walk into a café I felt like, possibly even on the grand boulevards, and confidently reach out my hand to a plate full of pastries and help myself. No one would find that surprising; no one would shout at me or throw me out, for it is after all a genteel hand, a hand that is washed four or five times a day . . .Though there are still one or two individuals, on the Boulevard Saint Michel for example, or on the rue Racine, who are not fooled, who don’t give a damn about my wrists. They look at me and know. They know that in reality I am one of them, that I’m only acting . . . And they don’t want to spoil my fun; they just grin a little and wink at me. . .Who are these people? What do they want of me? Are they waiting for me? How do they recognize me? . . . For it’s obvious they are outcasts, not just beggars; no, they are really not beggars, there is a difference. They are human trash, husks of men that fate has spewed out. Wet with the spittle of fate, they stick to a wall, a lamp-post, a billboard, or they trickle slowly down the street, leaving a dark filthy trail behind them . . . It is possible that one fine day they will decide to come as far as my room; they certainly know where I live, and they’ll manage to get past the concierge.” (Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge)
Image : Mounting of Grève Humaine (Interrompue) by Claire Fontaine at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, N.Y., 2009. Plaster wall, approx. 80 thousand stick matches and flame retardant, five days with five workers working eight hours a day, dimensions variable.