Smash the Surface / Break Open the Box / Disrupt the Code

[This text is an expanded version of a talk given at the Pro@Contra
symposium in Moscow (May 2000) and at CFront 2000 in Plovdiv, Bulgaria
(June 2000). Though the text does not specifically address the position
of artists and the cultural world in Eastern Europe, it does provide
incentives towards the development of practices and tools for cultural
resistance and autonomy that can be applied in this context.]

A double conversion….

In the age of NASDAQ mania, technology and new media have become the
principal sites of manifestation for the next transformation of the
negative dialectics of avantgarde art. This tradition is by no means
dead, it is simply transferred to a new domain. The death of art, and
its subsequent rise from the dead, is followed by the death of the
avantgarde, and the subsequent discussion if either of them is actually
dead or alive. That discussion can be skipped. Art still exists and is
very much alive, in countless magazines, in art sections of news papers,
in web environments, in countless art galleries, in museums world-wide,
and above all in the art market.

The avantgarde has, however, performed a double conversion upon the
sacred concept of art: it has turned the profane into an object of art,
but more importantly; with this act, accepted, sanctified, and
legitimised by the very figurations that determine what actually counts
as art, it has simultaneously converted the objects and practice of art
itself into profane entities. As a result art has become part of the
conventional economy, part of the secular cycle of demand and supply,
production and consumption - it lives on but without the aura of the
sacred.

Avantgarde practice itself might be a more difficult case, since its
operations rely on the 'shock of the new' or the 'blow of the sublime',
which it brought about by negation of the existing order of art
practice, the negation of the positive sign; the sign that wants to
communicate that points towards something it wishes to indicate, some
message it wants to convey. After a long century of avantgardes,
practised in the most violent and destructive epoch since the dawn of
human existence and civilisation, the avantgarde has apparently
completed its task - Art has been deconstructed beyond repair. It is now
completely obsolete, irrelevant, superfluous, out of date and out of
touch with any significant social reality. It is dead beyond dying, born
again in insignificance, a notion nobody wishes to take serious anymore,
a playing field at the edge of the social sphere that is reduced to pure
amusement, a fancy for the tourist industry. A domain where 'anything
goes' because nobody cares.

The end of negation?

The avantgarde, in short, is left with nothing to negate. It would seem
that the avantgarde has lost its 'raison d'