By Mike Pepi
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Ben Davis, '9.5 Theses on Art and Class', 2013. Cover art by William Powhida.
Clement Greenberg once said ‘someday it will have to be told how anti-Stalinism which started out more or less as Trotskyism turned into art for art’s sake, and thereby cleared the way, heroically, for what was to come.’ But for many on the left (and right) the once heroic project of modernism instead reads like a tragedy. Ben Davis’ book ‘9.5 Theses on Art and Class’ (published in July 2013 by Haymarket Press) is a counter to the modernist narrative accepted by the academic left and critical establishment, who still engage in a discourse that is too often abstracted through neo-Marxist ‘theory crit’ and the cultural construct of ‘the art world.’ Davis’ collection of essays, organized around his piece ‘9.5 Theses on Art and Class’, originally published in 2010, diagnoses the source of many of the inconsistencies facing artists working today. In doing so, he revisits many of the concerns of the cultural left, overrun as they were by the art market, academia, and neoliberalism.
Mike Pepi: Your ‘9.5 Theses…’ pamphlet starts at .0, which states ‘Class is an issue of fundamental importance for art.’ Can you elaborate?
Ben Davis: Most theorizations of art and class are relatively external: They are about a specific artist’s background, or the audience for his or her work, or its subject matter. My question is, ‘What class do artists belong to as artists?’ Not to oversell the book, but I think that it’s the particular way that I present the question of class that is its most original contribution.
In general, the way people talk about class is pretty confused, some combination of social background, income, and power. It’s as if there was this gradation where you start at the bottom, and then you gradually shade upwards from working class to middle class through to ruling class. But then there are instances where this way of thinking about things clearly seems to get in the way of explaining what’s going on. When people talk about the destruction of the middle class here in the US, for instance, they often really mean the destruction of secure union – that is working class – jobs. On the other hand, when we talk about how the working class in China has surged in recent years, we clearly are more talking about a change in the fundamental means of subsistence for masses of people; many more people are working in factories, in offices, while moving off of the land.
So, in both my pamphlet “9.5 Theses on Art and Class” and in ‘Art and Class,’ the first chapter of my book, I talk about the Marxist tradition of looking at class as a question of the place of one’s labour in the economic order. Working-class people sell their labour power to someone else; capitalists are bent on extracting profit from other people’s labour. And then there’s this third term, the middle class, a term which is used a lot but actually under-theorized, in my opinion. It refers to people who are their own boss in some respect, like a small business owner. And artists are one of the classic examples of the middle-class in this way of thinking about the question – Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto talks about ‘petty artisans,’ distinguishing them from both proletariat and bourgeoisie.
Once you have this very simple idea, I think, you have an incredibly powerful tool to clarify a lot of issues that seem pretty vague without it, and lead to all kinds of theoretical tangles. Just to give one important example, you have a way to talk about what seems to be the distinctive character of artistic labour, what makes it seem different than other forms of labour in the economy, without resorting to some kind of mystical theory of creation.
MP: Some might argue that we’ve left behind the direct cultural politics of the Cold War that lay at the heart of your discussion about class politics. So why are such untidy issues still relevant today?
BD: These ideas about ‘class,’ which I really do think help clarify an awful lot, came to me through Marxist theory. And inasmuch as what ‘Marxism’ means to people has been warped by the way it was framed during the Cold War, I do think you still have to return to these debates in order to look clearly at the present. My feeling is that as long as we haven’t really reckoned with how the particular form of theory that is still being taught, the kind of ‘Western Marxism’ that became dominant in the academy, was a reaction to the warped version of ‘Marxism’ inherited from Stalin and Mao, then I think there’s an important argument to be had, and I hope my book helps jump-start it.
MP: What is your relationship to the history of such debates in the cultural left?
BD: My book is mainly about contemporary art. There aren’t very many good materialist theories of contemporary art, actually, so if I make a contribution to that discussion that is enough.
As for the historical debates of the ‘cultural left,’ for me one of the key points for me is that when working-class politics are discredited, a lot of radical energy gets deflected into culture, and this creates dilemmas for both politics and art. Artists are forced, in some kind of tortured way, to bear the hopes for revolutionary change that seem foreclosed elsewhere. I don’t think that’s healthy: the expectations this line of thinking raises for art are too high, while aesthetically, it can only be narrowing, since questions of taste are essentially turned into matters of political principle.
And it’s at this point that going back specifically to the debates over Trotsky seems to me very useful. On the one hand, he was one of the leaders of the Russian revolution; he never gave up on the idea of the working class as the key agent of anti-capitalist struggle. But he also began a critique of the Soviet Union. I don’t know that he ultimately arrived at a clear analysis of the USSR, but the existence of a Trotskyist tradition is a powerful counterweight to the whole line of thinking that says that the classic Marxist emphasis on the working-class is discredited by what happened in the USSR.
It’s no coincidence that Trotsky also has a much wider view of artists’ relationship to struggle than you typically find in art theory. He frames the problem in a different way than we are used to: instead of starting from artistic practice, and asking how art can intellectually supplement, substitute for, or serve collective struggle, he starts from collective struggle, and asks what artists have to gain from it. And he says that the answer is freedom. Consequently, the deflection of politics into culture doesn’t happen, but at the same time there is a basis for a relationship between the two.
I think this is a pretty amazing heritage to draw on, one that’s not talked about enough, and one that helps solve a lot of dilemmas that art theory returns to again and again.
MP: You are clear in 9.5 Theses… that the sphere of art has a predominantly middle-class character. You also acknowledge how this statement immediately brings up several problems. Chiefly, there is a certain line of Trotskyite thinking that maintains that the classless nature of artists is their most essential quality, the very basis for their privileged role in an otherwise class-based society. Trotsky meant this, in part, as a means to advocate for a particularly free art independent from party influence, but perhaps also to liberate (or detach) art from political concerns. How do we avoid complicating this when we situate artistic production as wrapped up with the ideology of a particular class?
BD: There’s a difference between ‘art’ as a general capacity and ‘the artist’ as a specific profession. There’s a Marxist tradition that sees art as the refracted image of possible ‘unalienated labour’, and there’s a Trotskyist concern with propagandizing for the ‘free revolutionary artist.’ These are actually slightly different themes layered on top of one another, and it helps to peel them apart and look at them one at a time.
Creativity is part of the human experience. Even when doing the most routine tasks, there are moments when you find your own way to do it. That’s actually a part of workplace struggle, the fight against standardization and so forth. At the same time, creativity is something you express when you are not at work. You feel most creative when you get to make things you want, not what your boss wants. And that’s also an aspect of struggle: the fight to have more vacation time, that the day not be so intense that you leave work brain dead, and so on.
Seen this way, creativity is not a monopoly of a particular set of professionals; it passes through the entire social world. And when you start there, you can also see how ‘art’ in this very general sense relates to the image of what a more equal society might look like: If there was more democratic say about workplace conditions, there wouldn’t be such soulless standardization; and if resources were better distributed, people would have more time to be creative on their own or with others, time we don’t have now.
The place of visual artists in culture is connected to this general idea of ‘art’ – but it’s also distinct, because artists are a particular set of professionals, essentially specialists in being creative. Visual artists definitely have a certain kind of class position; they’re small operators, selling things they create, on their own initiative. They are therefore typically middle class, in the technical sense that Marxists use that term (visual artists are different from designers, the most common kind of creative labourers, who don’t have the same input into what they do).
In a kind of idealized way, the figure of the artist derives its cachet because it stands for expression that is ‘unalienated,’ that is, self-directed in the way that a normal worker can’t be. But again, Trotsky’s intervention rests on the fact that although this is what artistic expression might potentially be, and what artists are promised, it’s not actually how things shake out. Because we live in a warped society, there’s still political censorship, and indirect censorship because of the realities of the economy – after all, very few artists are actually ‘artists’ in the real sense; most are mainly making their money elsewhere while they hope someday that they’ll get paid for doing what they want. Even those who succeed often find that their patrons want them to just keep repeating the same thing over and over, and so on.
So, finally, you can see the question of the relationship of ‘art’ and ‘the artist’ as two-sided. On the one hand, the idea of the ‘artist’ is where the idea of ‘art’ as unalienated labour gets bottled up, and turned into a lifestyle or a specific professional category that can be sold to people. On the other hand, while the idea of the ‘artist’ promises free creativity, the realities of our world mean that it doesn’t live up to that promise. And consequently, I think there is political energy there – it sparks the debate about how our world has potential in it that it doesn’t deliver on.
MP: The essay ’9.5 Theses…’ was originally written in conjunction with ‘#class’ in 2010, an exhibition curated by Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida at Winkleman Gallery, New York. Have any of the notable political events that have occurred since that time caused you to reconsider your points?
BD: Definitely. I felt as I was writing the book like I was racing, because things were changing so fast. Occupy Wall Street, which had this exciting creative component, raised a whole new set of questions. A lot of this I try to deal with in the book’s newest essay, ‘Collective Delusions.’ In some ways, it made the stakes of what I had been writing about for a long time clear to me, but in some ways it changed the discussion, because now the new questions weren’t about forms of symbolic political art hidden off in galleries, but about actual political actions being informed by artistic theory. In that kind of volatile situation, the questions I take up in the book – issues of artists’ individualistic practice versus the demands of collective struggle, the place of art institutions in the economy, etc. – suddenly have a different level of practical urgency. You saw this, for instance, in the example of this rogue Occupy Artists Space action near the start of OWS, when a splinter group led by artists tried to occupy the New York nonprofit space, an action that seemed logical as an extension of a certain kind of radical art practice, but that appeared to almost everyone as a non sequitur. You can get led down a blind alley if you don’t get the theoretical questions right.
MP: Throughout the 20th century left, groups have attempted to re-organize cultural production under moral and political grounds in order to address the inequalities that you’ve discussed. You demand a higher level of political accountability from cultural production. Yet on the other hand you praise a free and independent, almost Trotskyite, relationship between art and politics. Is there an ideal balance among the two?
BD: All I demand of political art or artists engaged in politics is some kind of accountability, not unusual accountability. People sometimes talk about the notion of ‘political art’ as if it’s this great thing by default, and forget to figure out the stakes of the specific politics involved.
In general, the more social struggle there is, the more social struggle will be a reference point for art. That’s a fine thing. But ultimately, I don’t think the role of an art critic is to come up with a general formula that tells artists what kind of art to make. I don’t care if art is specifically political or not. I’m more interested in whether artists are political or not. Political art is great; apolitical art is fine too. They just do different things, serve different functions. You can have deeply felt reactions to art that aren’t political in any straightforward way. And heck, maybe your watercolour paintings of cats are what you do to relax at the end of a long day of political organizing – in that sense, apolitical art can serve a political function too.
MP: You nicely capture the challenges facing criticism in your reading of the 1938 artistic manifesto ‘Towards a Free Revolutionary Art’ (co-signed by Diego Rivera and Andre Breton, but believed to be written by Breton and Trotsky). You balance Trotksy’s call for an art undetermined by political commitments with his opposition to a ‘so-called pure art.’ The false construction of the “imaginary freedom of the ‘art world’” is for you, the central reason for our impoverished discourse. Do we even have a contemporary model for criticism that might strike a balance?
BD: The example I come back to most right now is not an art critic. It’s the radical sports critic, Dave Zirin, who writes for the The Nation. He has a column, Edge of Sports and I think he’s hit on something key with this: In sports writing, politics by necessity takes place at the edge, as much off field as on, and the discussion is about how specific kinds of politics get channeled into pastimes that have rules of their own, that can’t be directly political.
Now, I’m not really a huge sports fan. But Dave Zirin makes me like reading about sports, because he connects them to all this off-field stuff that I care about – about sexism, nationalism, racism, transgender rights – and, even more importantly, he shows how that stuff isn’t a side note, but is part of what makes the game worth investing passion in in the first place, because athletic competition is a natural metaphor for our aspirations and struggles.
Commentators rightly fret about how ‘art world’ discussion seems to lack relevance to an audience beyond the initiated. If we want to be an ambassador for contemporary art, we have to look for the ‘Edge of Art’ the way Dave Zirin writes about the ‘Edge of Sports.’ If you can show how artistic struggles intersect with struggles outside the gallery, outside the classroom, then I think you can make even people who feel intimidated by art – the same way I feel intimidated by sports – care. That’s my working hypothesis, at least.
I’ll use a more poetic metaphor: I was thinking that maybe the best way to frame things is not art as a ‘world,’ but art as a moon – it looks like an independent body, it’s this fascinating other sphere in the sky above us, but actually it’s orbiting around our everyday world. It can have certain mysterious effects on us, its motions affect the tides, and so on; but on the other hand, its brilliance, the way it waxes and wanes, is determined by the shadow of the Earth passing across it. So, I would just say: I’m for lunar art criticism.
MP: Criticism is, as many camps might attest, in a calcified, almost self-destructive state. A certain constituency would even prefer if it just took its crumpled, corduroy jacket and died a quiet death. Still, it seems that some of the metaphysical criticism still carries out a necessary function as a check on our culture’s free-market tendencies. Which is to pose to question: isn’t an impoverished, theory-laden criticism still preferable to no criticism at all?
BD: Absolutely. I wouldn’t spend so much time sparring with art theory if I didn’t think there was energy there that was worth doing something with. I actually think some kind of revitalized theoretical discussion is key at a lot of levels.
At the same time, I admire a certain muckraking spirit that sometimes gets lost with theory, I think by its design. The whole incident that touched off the ‘#class’ show that inspired my ‘9.5 Theses…’ essay in the first place – the anger at the New Museum’s show of art from the collection of Greek millionaire Dakis Joannou – was driven by the art blogosphere and angry artists, not the art magazines. And it clearly opened a discussion about money and its influence on art institutions, one that I don’t think would have happened if we had to wait around for the theorists.
Often art-theory politics boils down to something like this: ‘activist rhetoric is simplistic; reality is complex, and therefore the only good argument focuses on the complexity of things.’ But what if we translated this argument to mathematics? In general, some super-complex equation is probably more interesting than 2+2=4. But it might be an actually meaningful equation, or it might just be a jumble of symbols that just looks complex. Complexity in itself has no value – not in art, not in politics.
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