Hito Steyerl. Duty Free Art. Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War

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Hito Steyerl
Duty Free Art. Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War

London, New York, Verso Publishers, 2017, 244 pages

Review by Francesco Mazzaferro

[Original Version: March 2018 - New Version: April 2019]

Fig. 1) The cover page of Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War

I read the latest book by Hito Steyerl, an artist born in 1966 in Munich and now residing in Berlin (where she teaches ‘Art of new media’ at the Universität der Künste - University of the Arts) almost by coincidence. I had already watched her video-installation Factory of the Sun at the German pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale (and I saw it a second time at the exhibition Like a Moth to a Flame at the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation in Turin); then I found in a bookstore the volume that I am reviewing here and the issue of the monthly magazine Art Review that proclaimed her first in the ranking of the  most influential and representative figures of contemporary art in 2017 (for the ranking, see https://artreview.com/power_100/), defining her as "artist and theorist, theorist and artist". It must be said right away that the book contains a very hostile evaluation from her precisely on this kind of classifications, largely created mechanistically on the basis of algorithms [1].  Steyerl, in short, is one of the protagonists of the art world in our day, but also one of its most radical criticists.

Great was my curiosity to understand what role a well known figure for the use of the most sophisticated technological tools has reserved for the traditional written word. The book collects her most recent contributions, in particular those prepared for conferences and magazines from 2011 to today, very often published in a well-established but decidedly alternative art journal, the e-flux journal (www.e-flux.com), available only on the internet. The author dealt with the theme of writing already in 2014, in an interview with the young Polish critic Łukasz Zaremba: “I was always writing. For a long time I supported myself as a writer, a journalist. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why I try to make sure that my articles are never illustrations of my video works. Another reason is my training as a visual artist. I was taught that the image should never be an illustration of a text, so I think in a similar way about my writing – it should never be an illustration of my images either. There should be a tension between them. It’s all about keeping tension and respecting the autonomy of each language” [2]. It's the same view by Lessing against the ut pictura poesis theory, which he theorised in his Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766). 

So allow me - in answer to my original question - to make some preliminary considerations that may perhaps seem surprising compared to Steyerl's intentions. I would like to note that, on many occasions, history of art has made us know artists who, at least in the perception of their age and later, focused on the problem of how to compound the creation of images and the dissemination of ideas. Their objective was to break historically consolidated thought structures, using the force of new intellectual conceptions: often, they went beyond the simple formulation of innovative aesthetic preferences and expressed new ontological convictions with their pictures. The expression 'painter-philosopher' was used first in connection with Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) in the Éloges de Nicolas Poussin by Nicolas Guibal (1725-1784) in 1783. Also in the eighteenth century, the term was extended to Anton Raphael Mengs (1728-1779) by Stefano Ticozzi (1762-1836). It is not surprising that this concept knew its fortune in the age of Enlightenment. Since then, an extraordinarily high number of personalities of the nineteenth and twentieth century were called "philosopher-artists". Another strand of artistic creation that seems relevant to me is linked to the invention of virtual realities: think of Piranesi, but also of all the metaphysical painters of the twentieth century.

Well, although Hito Steyerl does not mention any of these artists (I assume that she probably considers them all an expression of a world ideologically very far from her) and despite her claiming of the independence of artworks and writing, her book made me think that her aesthetics must be based on the tradition of philosopher-painters. These were also artists who, denying the earthly reality, pointed to a philosophical reconstruction of a different world and produced parallel appearances of truth. Steyerl is in this sense an heir of Poussin. I would like to add that, when in 1869 Charles Baudelaire wrote on German art of the previous century (an art shaped by Winckelmann's conceptions in the mid-eighteenth century, which influenced Nazarenes and neoclassicals) he branded it with the expression "philosophical art", or an art whose creators aspired to offer a synthesis between the exterior and the interior world. According to a famous expression, philosophical art was for Baudelaire "a plastic art which sets itself up in place of books, by which I mean as a rival to the printing press in the teaching of history, morals and philosophy” [3]. And so, I feel that Steyerl was not only the expression of a philosophical and fundamentally anti-romantic art, but also the heir of a tradition that has been very present in German culture for centuries. With the clarification that, as often happens, what for Baudelaire was a negative term, should be read today in a positive sense: Hito Steyerl’s art is part, in its ambitions, both of moral and political philosophy.

A further clarification is needed before analysing the collection of writings more closely. Contemporary art is often considered as a magmatic mass, which nevertheless has a common expression in the expository moments and aesthetic liturgies marking its development: regular exhibitions (like biennials and triennials) now widespread throughout the world, art fairs, magazines, etc. Well, what may seem a vastly diverse universe, but at least the expression of a global public opinion of connoisseurs and amateurs of contemporary art (capable of communicating on a planetary level and expressing, even in all their contradictions, the existence of a transnational world) is instead, for Steyerl, a true battleground. For her, there are a globalised regime art, on the one hand, and an art that radically questions the legitimacy and existence of that regime, on the other hand. Her installation Factory of the Sun narrates, in the form of video, the same conflicts on which the artist writes in Duty Free Art. One day, one will perhaps look at her art with the same detachment with which we can take note today of the passions that moved Honorè Daumier (1808-1879) or Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) against Louis Philippe and Napoleon III; in those days, however, their art was also an expression of political struggle. In this review, I have allowed myself to make selective quotations: I have avoided all those terms and references that I consider out-of-measure and perhaps offensive, precisely because I believe that many of the artist's arguments should be read sine ira et studio, catching in them those suggestions that may be valid even for those who do not share all her motivations.

Duty free art

The title of the book is based on one of the key concepts of Steyerl's thinking. In her opinion, contemporary art should be free from all dependencies, including the claim to define political and territorial identities (and therefore art should always be free of duty, or to use the best known expression, duty free); it should in fact reject any economic sponsorship [4], be based on cooperative platforms [5] and at the service of a process of constructive economic descent [6], that signs a change of pace in the global development model. In her opinion, an art of this kind would be something more complex than the simple proclamation of an 'autonomous' art, because artists should be fully aware of the reliance of contemporary art from the systems of power [7].

Contemporary art is very far from this paradigm, according to Steyerl. The production of works of art, in fact, has become an element of acceleration of the economic system (using a neologism, Steyerl speaks of ‘Circutionalism’ [8]). In practice, art has become a physical investment for a small group of super-billionaires around the world, who take it into consideration and buy it as an alternative to money. Quoting the Californian collector Stefan Simchowitz, “art will effectively continue its structural function as an alternative currency that hedges against inflation and currency depreciation” [9].

“Rather than money issued by a nation and administered by central banks – Steyerl writes in a key passage of an essay written specifically for publication in the volume – art is a networked, decentralized, widespread system of value. It gains stability because it calibrates credit or disgrace across competing institutions or cliques. There are markets, collectors, museums, publications, and the academy asynchronously registering (or mostly failing to do so) exhibitions, scandals, likes, and prices. As with cryptocurrencies, there is no central institution to guarantee values; instead there is a jumble of sponsors, censors, bloggers, developers, producers, hipsters, handlers, patrons, privateers, collectors, and way more confusing characters. Value arises from gossip-cum-spin and insider information. Fraudsters and con artists mix helter-skelter with pontificating professors, anxious gallerists, and couch-surfing students. This informal ecology is eminently hackable, but since everybody does it, it sometimes evens out – even though at highly manipulated levels. It is at once highly malleable and inert, sublime, dopey, opaque, bizarre, and blatant: a game in which the most transcendental phenomena are on collectors’ waiting lists” [10].

It might seem like a conviction without extenuating circumstances, but in reality it is not: art would indeed be - according to the author - the first form of an anarchic economic system, entirely based on alternative mechanisms, not linked to the production of goods, but to the creation of contacts: “The result is a solid tangle of feudal loyalties and glowing enmity, rejected love and fervent envy, pooling striving, longing, and vital energies. In short, the value is not in the product but in the network; not in gaming or predicting the market, but in creating exchange” [11].

There is however a second reason why art is defined as "duty free". For reasons of taxation, investors keep the artworks they purchase in international free ports (the most famous is Geneva [12], but many others have been opened, such as in Singapore, the Principality of Monaco and Luxembourg) where they are not subject to tax, but cannot be seen by anyone. And here there is a contradiction: art is not art if it cannot be seen, but today its visibility is threatened by the fact that it is largely kept in "secret museums" [13] where no one can scrutinise it, except when it is temporarily moved for exhibition events around the world.

While there was a time when contemporary art was visible to an ever growing part of humanity thanks to the great universal expositions (think of Guernica, exhibited outside the Spanish Pavilion in Paris in 1937), our years - Steyerl writes - are marked by the emergence of a huge asymmetry between those who can enjoy beauty (it is the famous 1% of the society that holds an absolutely disproportionate share of goods) and those who are excluded from it. Until a few years ago, Internet was still believed to be a liberating tool of globalization, and it was hoped that the web could create a global community of intellectuals to free the energies of which the whole world was full. Instead, today the internet is experienced as a superstructure that manipulates world public opinion, a “techno-leviathan” [14] which operates through instruments of “decentralized artificial stupidity” [15]: they are “social technologies of disruption (…): Twitter bots, trolls, leaks, and blanket internet shutdowns deployed to accelerate autocratic rule (…). Disruptive innovation is causing social polarization through the decimation of jobs, mass surveillance, and algorithmic confusion” [16]. The most recent installation by Hito Steyerl, presented in Münster in 2017 on the occasion of the ten-year sculpture exhibition "Skulptur Projekte 2017" was dedicated to robotization.

Duty free art, depending on the case, can therefore be a friendly or hostile art; accordingly, a real civil planetary war is fought also in the field of contemporary art production. The Planetary Civil War is here defined as the mix of a series of traditional regional conflicts (e.g. in Syria and in the Kurdish regions in Turkey), new forms of unconventional warfare through the tools of technology (it is the story of Factory of the Sun), an increase in economic inequality and the seizure of property through the use of copyrights on images in a world governed by the Internet. Steyerl, citing the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, writes that this sort of civil war is well characterized by the ancient Greek word στάσις (stasis), which indicates at the same time civil war and immutability, extreme dynamism and impossibility of change. It is a process in which “what was public is privatized by violence, while formerly private hatreds become the new public spirit” [17]. It is a war that takes place not only in theatres of hatred of the world, but also in the halls of museums, and whose goal is not to preserve the past, but to prevent the future. And it is a war that art can win: the function of museums, therefore, should not be that of “preserving the past [… but …] creating the future of public space, the future of art, and the future as such” [18].

Why museums are not neutral spaces

The author notes that the neutrality of museums (and their function, which is to organize time and space of the visit) is, always and only, apparent. In line with Peter Osborne [19], she considers, in particular, pure fiction the impression that museums of contemporary art would inspire the idea of a universality of values in the public. Contrary to what I personally believe, according to Hito Steyerl there is no global contemporary art: “Contemporary art shows us the lack of a (global) time and space. Moreover, it projects a fictional unity onto a variety of different ideas of time and space, thus providing a common surface where there is none” [20]. In these pages Steyerl is very tough with contemporary art, which “is made possible by neoliberal capital plus the internet, biennials, art fairs, parallel pop-up histories, growing income inequality. Let’s add asymmetric warfare – as one of the reasons for the vast redistribution of wealth – real estate speculation, tax evasion, money laundering, and deregulated financial markets to this list” [21].

Hito Steyerl quotes the essay Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson [22], confirming that, in order to create a nation, it may not be necessary for that nation to exist, but it is absolutely essential to define its identity within a museum. The author refers in particular to the Louvre, which became a symbol of power from the revolutionary epoch onwards and was besieged every time there was an insurrection in nineteenth century Paris; she then cites Assad's plan to create a new National Museum of Syria in Damascus and the existence of exchanges of correspondence of the Assad family with the star architect Rem Koolhaas in the WikiLeaks archives; moreover, she mentions a very specific case, that of the municipal museum of Diyarbakir, which in 2014 was transformed into a refugee camp for the Yazida minority, persecuted by ISIS in Iraq, and thus became a place where the identity of that group was cemented (before the Isis committed a horrible terror attack on the museum itself). Finally, Steyerl does not forget that totalitarianisms of the twentieth century (Nazism and Stalinism) first emptied and then filled museum spaces, using the concept of degenerate art to eliminate dissent, while accusing to the contrary artists of elitist attitudes every time they did not adapt to regime directives [23].

Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War

The subtitle of Duty Free Art is "Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War". Art participates in the planetary civil war in many ways. In an isolated (but paradigmatic) case, the pro-Russian separatist troops of Kostantinovka, in Ukraine, freed and set in motion a IS-3 tank from the pedestal on which it stood (it was a real WWII tank, which was part of a monument to celebrate the liberation of the city in 1943) and took him to battle in June 2014. In this case, history invaded art. “This history is not a noble endeavour, something to be studied in the name of humankind so as to avoid being repeated. On the contrary, this kind of history is partial, partisan, and privatized, a self-interested enterprise, a means to feel entitled, an objective obstacle to coexistence, and a temporal fog detaining people in the stranglehold of imaginary origins” [24]. And, in the future, art locations could be at the centre of fight, as shown by two film directors recently: Doug Liman in "Edge of Tomorrow" (in which the Louvre is the center of the invasion of aliens) and Alfonso Cuarón in "Children of Men" (where what had remained of the semi-destroyed art after a global civil war was kept in the premises of the Tate Gallery in London, turned into an unassailable bunker to which only a privileged part of the survivors had access). The obvious reference is to the destruction of Palmyra and many other archaeological sites of Mesopotamia by Daesh.

Art in a technology-based world

How will art look like in the coming world? 3D printers will facilitate the creation of surfaces, in line with the figurative tradition [25]. But this will be the least of the innovations. It cannot be excluded - Steyerl writes - that one day art will interact with the public. Thanks to facial recognition and interaction programs between robots and the reaction of the human face, robotized artworks will adapt to the taste of the individual. There will no longer be works, in this technology-led world, that public would not like. Will art robotization enhance the power of judgment by the public, or will it on the contrary create a greater dependence of citizens on centralized power? Steyerl fears that the second will occur, thereby forcing a logical redefinition of all terminology and concepts of art criticism spread in the twentieth century. In short, technology will not permit the public to free itself from an ever more incomprehensible contemporary art, but will rather mark another episode of the affirmation of a global control on society (the authoress dedicates two articles to the dangers of a new electronic fascism).

Waiting for new technologies, Hito Steyerl is not afraid to make use of those already existing, which are based on virtual reality. Instead of imitating nature, the artist can and indeed must change it using computer technologies (and here it seems to me that, conceptually, Steyerl is in line with neoclassical ideology, which replaces the imitation of the ancients for the imitation of nature; the electronic game is a new Arcadia). Many of his videos reject any reference to nature and therefore resemble huge screens for electronic games. “The point is that games are not a consequence of computers making the world more unreal. On the contrary, games made computers become real. Games are generative fictions” [26]. In other words, the author believes that they can generate “some change in real relations” [27]. And that is why she complains that his fellow artists tend to deny the fundamental role of electronic games in art, because “socially irrelevant or not real enough” [28].

Images in an interconnected world

If, for centuries and at least since Cennino Cennini, painters have dedicated themselves to the issue of image production through the technological use of pigments, in the electronic age Hito Steyerl devoted her attention to electronic creation. It is the theme of the installation How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, presented in 2013 at the MoMA in New York and later in many other venues, as a series of five lessons on visibility and invisibility.

In Duty Free Art, Steyerl focuses on the illusion that every image is a personal creation, when it is almost always the result of interaction with vast and ubiquitous computer networks. It is the theme of the writing Proxy Politics: Signal and Noise of 2014, originally published in the e-flux magazine [29], and republished in the 2017 volume.

“A while ago I met an extremely interesting developer. He was working on smartphone camera technology. Photography is traditionally thought to represent what is out there by means of technology, ideally via an indexical link. But is this really true anymore? The developer explained to me that the technology for contemporary phone cameras is quite different from traditional cameras: the lenses are tiny and basically rubbish, which means that about half of the data being captured by the camera sensor is actually noise. The trick, then, is to write the algorithm to clean the noise, or rather to discern the picture from inside the noise. But how can the camera know how to do this? Very simple: It scans all other pictures stored on the phone or on your social media networks and sifts through your contacts. It analyses the pictures you already took, or those that are associated with you, and it tries to match faces and shapes to link them back to you. By comparing what you and your network already photographed, the algorithm guesses what you might have wanted to photograph now. It creates the present picture based on earlier pictures, on your/its memory. This new paradigm is being called computational photography. The results might be a picture of something that never existed, but the algorithm thinks you might like to see. This type of photography is speculative and relational” [30]. In short, the technology enhancement that allows a few billion people to produce in one single day many more images throughout the world than it ever happened over years, is entirely due to the availability of individual photographic tools at a relatively low price and of probabilistic calculations based on the new power of computer networks. More and more technology (already used today, for example, by large computer networks to sift continuously images in social networks, identifying and excluding through algorithms unacceptable images, such as those that show a male sex) will filter the contribution of individuals, using proprietary criteria defined by IT giants.

Obviously, this raises important implications from the point of view of the originality of the artistic act, as producing your own art becomes increasingly difficult (the algorithm is based on the probability of repetition). But there are also more general aspects of free access to IT visibility: according to which criteria will the substance of data captured by IT tools be identified and separated from the noise of information that has no valuable content? In very practical terms, how can we be reassured that - in identifying materials as terroristic, pornographic or otherwise unacceptable - the system will not voluntarily marginalize information that contains an unwanted political message? And how can we avoid that collective discussion on art will be intentionally distorted by computer robots?

Concluding

Reference was made to the 2014 interview of the authoress with Łukasz Zaremba, in which Hito Steyerl proposed a dichotomy between her artworks and her writings. I respectfully allow myself to remain unconvinced on that point. The reading of Duty Free Art increased, and did not diminish, my ability to understand the art creations of the German artist. In the last years, I often read writings and memoirs by artists that were absolutely surprising: from those pages I drew impressions and information that were sometimes very divergent from those that the vision of their works had brought not only to me, but to great part of the public and the critics. Here, instead, there is absolute consistency.

One could of course comment on the author's political orientations, which clearly belongs to the field of the most radical adversaries of globalization. And yet it seems to me that, in a democracy, it is normal to come across with those who think very differently. If anything, a point of weakness seems to me the dependence of Hito Steyerl's aesthetics on the development of technologies: if it is true that the recipes for the tempera and the fresco of Cennino (at the intersection between Gothic and Renaissance) are not very different from those that were still used in the Nineteenth century, the speed with which technological development has made old many of the avant-garde works of the late twentieth century is exceptional. Many of Hito Steyerl's insights will ultimately depend not only on the permanence of the technologies used, but also on the direction that technology will take. Whether electronics well be an instrument of liberation or oppression of humanity - in the field of art as in that of everyday life - it is not yet decided.

NOTES

[1] Steyerl, Hito - Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, London, New York, Verso, 2017, 256 pages. Quotation at page 164.

[2] Zaremba, Łukasz - To Work as a Pixel. Interview with Hito Steyerl. In Szum, 20 dicembre 2014: 

https://magazynszum.pl/to-work-as-a-pixel-interviev-with-hito-steyerl/.

[3] Baudelaire, Charles - L’Art romantique, Paris, Michel Lévy Frères, 1869, 471 pages.

[4] Steyerl, Hito - Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, (quoted), p. 188.

[5] Steyerl, Hito - Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, (quoted), p. 188.

[6] Steyerl, Hito - Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, (quoted), p. 18.

[7] Steyerl, Hito - Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, (quoted), p. 97.

[8] Steyerl, Hito - Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, (quoted), p. 150.

[9] Steyerl, Hito - Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, (quoted), p. 181.

[10] Steyerl, Hito - Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, (quoted), p. 182-183.

[11] Steyerl, Hito - Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, (quoted), p. 189.

[12] Steyerl, Hito - Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, (quoted), p. 79.

[13] Steyerl, Hito - Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, (quoted), p. 81.

[14] Steyerl, Hito - Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, (quoted), p. 41.

[15] Steyerl, Hito - Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, (quoted), p. 16.

[16] Steyerl, Hito - Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, (quoted), p. 15.

[17] Steyerl, Hito - Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, (quoted), p. 3.

[18] Steyerl, Hito - Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, (quoted), p. 8.

[19] Osborne, Peter – Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, London, New York, Verso, 2013, 282 pages.

[20] Steyerl, Hito - Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, (quoted), p. 78.

[21] Steyerl, Hito - Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, (quoted), p. 78.

[22] Anderson, Benedict - Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York, London, Verso, 2006, 240 pages. The italian translation was brought out in: Anderson, Benedict - Comunità immaginate. Origini e fortuna dei nazionalismi, Translation by M. Vignale, Milano, 2009, 238 pages.

[23] Steyerl, Hito - Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, (quoted), pp. 184-185.

[24] Steyerl, Hito - Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, (quoted), p. 2.

[25] Steyerl, Hito - Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, (quoted), p. 192.

[26] Steyerl, Hito - Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, (quoted), p. 157.

[27] Steyerl, Hito - Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, (quoted), p. 169.

[28] Steyerl, Hito - Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, (quoted), p. 169.

[29] See: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/60/61045/proxy-politics-signal-and-noise/ .

[30] Steyerl, Hito - Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, (quoted), p. 31.