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Article Excerpt
John Roberts. The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade. London: Verso, 2007. 250 pp. $27.95, paper
In The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade, the British art historian John Roberts "elaborates a labor theory of culture" (1). What that phrase means, and what his project insists on, is, first, the understanding that any cultural practice is "always and already embedded in the technological relations of its time" (14), and, equally, if not more importantly, that "artistic technique" is not only "subordinate to, but also reflective on, general social technique" (18). "General social technique," too, might need some unpacking; it crosses the transformations of productive and reproductive technologies--of commodities and images, and their iterations and processes--with those of social and cultural life: "Social reproduction and technical reproducibility become indivisible," and each is marked equally by "the fundamental logic-of-repetition of commodity-production" (15). Thus, Roberts insists, "the technologies of copying, simulacra and surrogacy"--terms and procedures quite familiar in the art of the past four decades, and that have troubled traditional definitions and assumptions about the object of art and the skill of the artist--are "not mere stylistic options," but "the material basis of art's modern semiosis" (14). For Roberts, what that semiosis, that meaning-production, points to is labor and "the kinds of labour contained in artworks, as a reflection on a wider debate about artistic labour and productive and non-productive labour and the limits and possibilities of authorship" (1). He and the artists he addresses--Marcel Duchamp, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and a handful of others--are, then, involved in the same project. They, too, elaborate a labor theory of culture, something Roberts claims at the outset: Duchamp is "a theorist of artistic labour" (5), insofar as the readymade "brings the labour of others--ideally at least--into view" (24).
One thing the readymade brings into view quite clearly, precisely as it presents the labor of others, is the division of labor between Duchamp's intellectual, immaterial labor and that of the anonymous line workers who assembled the snow shovel Duchamp designated In Advance of a Broken Arm (1915) or cast the porcelain urinal he recast as Fountain (1917). Duchamp's readymade has long been understood as a reflection on the commodity, of course, but since the moment of the arrival of the rejected Fountain at Alfred Stieglitz's gallery in 1917, it has been situated on the side of consumption: "Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance," wrote Beatrice Wood in The Blind Man. "He CHOSE it." (1) Roberts argues the opposite: "For all the suasiveness of this model of interpretation, Duchamp is not an artist of consumption. ... Duchamp's relationship to mass consumption was one of a producer" (40-41, Roberts's italics here and throughout).There is an interesting slippage here in the designation "a producer"; it's difficult at first to say whether Roberts means labor or, so to speak, management. He means both: the readymades "are congeries of two kinds of labour (artistic labour and productive labour) made homely and unhomely by their proximate relationship to one another" (41). This distinction is crucial to Roberts's labor theory of culture and to what Roberts terms the "dialectic of skill and deskilling" (5); their coincidence, their hybridization, is central to Duchamp's theorization. Neither the industrial object--whether urinal or snow shovel--nor the intellectual practice of designation could be said to be an instance of traditional artisanal skills; both mark a certain--and certainly different and historically related--kind of deskilling. One marks the reduction of traditional, relatively autonomous, and unalienated craft skills--those embodied by and belonging to pre- or early industrial workshop manufacture--to industrialized, alienated, and replaceable wage labor; the other the displacement of traditional sensual artistic skills, those of copying and crafting, by technology and, increasingly, by the intellectual labor of the reskilled artist.
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"Isn't art after Duchamp--and certainly conceptual art--the apotheosis of deskilling? Haven't artists cut themselves off from all craft skills?" (87). The questions Roberts ventriloquizes are asked from a couple of different directions: from those who lament the loss of traditional skills...
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