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20 years of TEXTE ZUR KUNST (/veranstaltungen/) 94 DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSENTIME, OBJECT, COMMODITY Conductor John Fiore with theDuisburg PhilharmonicOrchestra, Gütersloh, 2009From the time it takes to learnto make, to the time it takes tomake, to the time that an endproduct remains on exhibitionor in storage – theorganization of time arounddiscrete works is an essentialelement of value-formation inthe field of art. Today,everyone from exhibitinginstitutions to viewers tocollectors have come toaccommodate dematerializedand time-based art forms. Andthese are often based onsome sort of contract – be it awritten documentcommensurate to the workitself or a tacit agreementleading to and determining thenature of a performativeexchange.As conceived by DiedrichDiederichsen, value is notonly determined by theamount of time invested inproduction, but also in termsof the investment of our – theart world’s – time in receptionand participating. This is thesocial contract that we, asacting members of thislandscape with vestedinterests and time invested inour own production as individuals, have entered into with the subject of our attention. Works of value, however,must also evade identification as a commodity, and thus easy consumption, in order to retain purchase on our continued attention.Let’s imagine an object, beyond its physical existence, as the more or less durable recording or storage of allthose processes in time that were required for its production. When Robert Morris made a technical recording ofthe sound of making an object and then incorporated the recording in it, he limited himself to the acoustic tracesof the manual production of a wooden box (“Box with the Sound of Its Own Making”, 1961). But of course, thetime someone spent learning the skills required for such craftsmanship is likewise part of the time crystallized inthe object. So an object “contains” not only the time it took to produce, but also the time it took to produce theproducers and, if we want to be precise, even the time it took to produce the institutions that produced theproducers, though prorated, needless to say, in proportion to the time it took the producer to make this object as afraction of all the other time he or she spent applying the skills once acquired elsewhere and to other purposes.For the present discussion, we will limit ourselves to the time that people spent with material – and the materiallikewise has its historical and geological, its biological and cosmic time. Our interest, however, is in the time thatmay be exploited, and that is labor time.The arts know three primary methods of making objects in this sense.The first would be the technical recording of a practice such as music or dance that’s not in and of itself object-oriented. A sound or image recording is taken that is, in a certain way, an object-like product of a time-basedartistic activity; beyond merely being contained in the object, that activity may even reproduced or read out from it(not without some degradation, needless to say). It has long been possible to process these recordings further, tomontage and layer them. That would mean crossing back to the side of sculptural operation, whose temporaldimension, as a time of montaging and layering, doesn’t lend itself to being read out.That’s because, in the second method, the object is the end product of a purposive activity that, unlike the soundrecording or the video documentary, cannot be brought back to life once production is complete. One examplewould be a sculpture. Writing musical scores is an activity of this sort as well, since it’s not its own temporaldimension that will subsequently be read out; only the temporal dimension of a performance implementing theinstructions of the score may be read out using the first method. But one may spend a lifetime working on aten-second composition. The third – and least object-like – method is the product of artistic learning processes inliving people such as musicians or actors – body memory, memorization, mastery of techniques, symbols, thoughtstyles. This method, that is to say, represents a sort of living abstraction: Acquired knowledge abridges previouslytime-consuming activities, but only after the individual has invested time in learning, time during which he or shelearned to abstract from the time-consuming activity. Only institutions of the dissemination of knowledge and skillsturn the latter into something stable and object-like that’s passed on.Yet there is another, a fourth form of producing an object that contains works of art and/or the time required fortheir production. That would be the juridical form. I define a part of the time, or the entire time, the work requiresas the object of an agreement and an action regulated by law or stipulation. More particularly, I define by way ofagreement and legally binding obligation the future time, the possible fates of the recording of past time, howeverthe latter is made. It has turned out that even living people and fragile situational constellations involving humansand other participants may be contractually defined, represented, and determined in forms that are fairlyobject-like. Needless to say, that’s a popular means of production in contemporary art – from Yves Klein to TinoSehgal. Jugend musiziert (german national competition for young musicians), Stuttgart, 2012 All four types of objects or aggregations of past time and labor time have in common that they are the ontologicaland material basis making it possible for the time spent on their production to become compatible with thecommodity form. All four types of transformed time may in turn be exchanged for money, which may subsequentlyindeed be said to read out time. It’s well known that time may be bought, most immediately the time of others; ourown time we can buy only indirectly. Only then does the concept of storage make sense; only money (and, with agreat deal of constructive effort, exchange) makes the storage medium render back what was put into it: Time.Time bought but not adequately paid for (which is to say, time paid less for than the entrepreneur maysubsequently realize by reselling it in a different form) is a familiar part of everyday life in capitalism: Surplus valuewould not come into existence without this use of living people selling their time. Due to the relative predominanceassociated with the commodity of the exchange value over the use value in capitalist societies, certain methods oftransferring, aggregating, and storing time are superior to others in the eyes of the exchange-value pragmatist – methods, such as money, that abstract as much as possible from differences between the objects. That’s not tosay that eccentric aggregate phases could preclude exchangeability altogether; still, exchange-value pragmatismby and large tends toward abstraction, and so has generated not only money but also container ships and – thewhite cube. Both represent lesser stages of abstraction than money, but they point in the same direction.With the white cube, objects of the second type, which is to say, spatially extended things of all sorts, may besymbolically stacked on its inside, just as the containers of the container ship make it possible to stack thecontents of the containers. In one case as in the other, the contents become equivalent in a sense. But it’s onlywith the extended model of the objectivation of time in art production, which, just as material objects aggregatepast time, turns the past and future time stipulated in juridical objects into stackable art, that the current expansionof the commercial exploitation of artistic production appears on the horizon. There is still money in the private-sector economy of the visual arts, and those who spend this money just as privately have gradually learned torecognize and appreciate non-object-like “objects” as no less suitable and exchangeable storage media of livinglabor time. By contrast, the business model of the multiplicative reproduction of recordings has distinctly sufferedfrom the digitalization of its environment. The physical storage media of skills and abilities, for their part, sufferfrom the scarcity of government dough and the consequent devitalization of the educational institutions andvenues for music, dance, performance art, theater, and so on. So both forms of objects will probably playdiminished roles in the future, whereas the white cubes – including those white cubes camouflaged as somethingelse called a project – and the binders with contracts look forward to a great future, because they assembleobjects on which private individuals spend money (and which they may also liquidate again, perhaps to spend onprestigious urban architecture that bears their own name) and because they depend neither on paying audiencesnor on technical reproduction or public funding. That’s true even though works of art that take the form of acontract rarely reveal their status as objects – or do so at most with a nostalgic nod to Conceptual Art, to whoseadministrative aesthetic we indeed owe several techniques of the contractual form.It may be objected that collectors collect what is rare or of rare quality, and not what took a lot of work to make.But no – they collect what took a great deal of work, qualitatively and quantitatively – to make, with the rightmixture between good artistic work and the work of classifying good art. Value comes into being through humanlabor. That’s no less true of the value of the rare object. Nothing is absolutely rare; what is rare is so as somethingthat must be regarded as culturally relevant. The idea of rarity conceived as absolute merely covers up anotheractivity, one that’s highly specialized and therefore used to be expensive; the activity of ascribing relevance – ofdistinguishing relevant from irrelevant rarity. Because everything is rare, even the dirt under my fingernails, onlyrich Mr. Suckercleaner, PhD, the highly educated waste manager, doesn’t know yet that he needs a contract thatassures him of the rights to this dirt; because no ascriber of relevance, or even better, chain of ascribers ofrelevance, has explained it to him. What I’m getting at isn’t the old Philistinism that the status of art is nothing buta scam in which intellectual gasbags sell lemons to credulous well-heeled clients. On the contrary. This selling oflemons and this ascription of relevance are not haphazard operations. They must refer to qualities that are
