Dryness loves neon
Everything must be entered, deciphered and passed on. Artists are like everyone else- redistributive nodes in a network, referring elsewhere, unfinished, points of aggregation in a floating mass… ‘What a time you chose to be born!’
‘the roots of opportunism lie in an outside-of-the-workplace socialisation marked by unexpected turns, perceptible shocks, permanent innovation, chronic instability. Opportunists are those who confront a flow of ever-interchangeable possibilities, making themselves available to the greater number of these, yielding to the nearest one, and then quickly swerving from one to another. This is a structural, sober, non-moralistic definition of opportunism. It is a question of a sensitivity sharpened by the changeable chances, a familiarity with the kaleidoscope of possibilities, an intimate relationship with the possible, no matter how vast. In the post-Ford era mode of production, opportunism acquires a certain technical importance. It is the cognitive and behavioral reaction of the contemporary multitude to the fact that routine practices are no longer organised along uniform lines; instead they present a high level of unpredictability. Now, it is precisely this ability to maneuver among abstract and interchangeable opportunities which constitutes professional quality in certain sectors of post-Fordist production, sectors where labour process is not regulated by a single particular goal, but by a class of equivalent possibilities to be specified one at a time… Opportunism gains in value as an indispensable resource whenever the concrete labour process is permeated by a diffuse ‘communicative action’..
dan fox
‘A high premium is placed on signalling this culturally aware urbanity and theoretical engagement, rather than necessarily enacting it. If the modern city displays, as Raban puts it, ‘a pornography of taste’, these signals are crucial to our recognition of the art professional’s authoritative self-image. It is a form of subcultural recognition, which can run from the micro – two students, for instance, who might each clock the fact that the other is wearing the current male art school uniform of deck shoes, waxed Barbour jacket and 1940s-goes-1980s short-back-and-sides haircut – to the macro, such as the way an art magazine squares up to its readers. Interviewed in Thornton’s book, the former Artforum editor Jack Bankowsky observes that ‘You have to understand the pieties […] Seriousness at Artforum and in the art world in general is a commodity. Certain kinds of gallerists may want the magazine to be serious even if they have no real co-ordinates for distinguishing a serious article from the empty signifier of seriousness abused.’10 You have to understand the pieties: the weight of an artist’s monograph or how many times their name crops up on e-flux announcements; someone’s preference for reading October rather than frieze; the internationalism of the contemporary art world – some romantic residue of the idea that, if you travel regularly by plane, you must be high-powered because your business reaches far outside your locality; artist names exchanged as collateral by those jockeying for position in the marketplace of curating or criticism. These are the little curlicues that adorn the edifice of the professional arts establishment.’
‘‘artists look like everyone else, worry about their weight, book foreign holidays’’
is an oblique conversation, a speculation on deciphering the conversational as a device across scenarios of the production of art, work and leisure. Operating as a question of the conversational as a mask for unifying operations, it is also suspicion of the ability to talk and articulate. But the work is complicit with the communicativity that it discusses and functions in relation to that which it traces. Articulation is considered as product yet frozen material posted on a blog and the seeming circulation of ideas towards the openness of a conversation resist the complete commonality they might imply. Whilst it discusses a conversation, it is the silent speech of writing. Communication that dissolves into obscurity, openness that becomes structural, diversity that becomes homogeneous is traced- and this is an understanding that is and has been a potential for further articulation.
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deciphering
