The InTangIbIlITIes of form
By John Roberts
Verso, £16.99 / $27.95 (paperback)
of nonautonomous labour. Roberts is impatient
The cover of last month’s artreview, by sci-
with death-of-the-author theories, and while
fi comic artist Ian Gibson, depicting the artist
acknowledging that authorship is no guarantee
of the future creating her artworks using a
of a self-expressive, ‘Cartesian’ artistic subject,
mindreading machine, is an oddly appropriate
authorship nevertheless resides in the interaction
way into John Roberts’s complex and ambitious
between artists and the technologically and
reinterpretation of the place of skill, technology
economically changing forms by which we make
and authorship in art since Duchamp presented
and remake our world. Authorship and authenticity
his signed urinal in 1917. Art today is characterised
are never divisible from real forms of production,
by a chaotic diversity of forms of making, from
and Robert’s book makes a fascinating account of
the most stubbornly traditional paintings to
the emergence of the Renaissance artist’s studio,
neo-Duchampian readymades to newer digital,
with its many apprentices and assistants, through
relational and situational practices, all messily
to the conceptualist collaborative artwork typified
coexisting in different sectors of the artworld. How
by the group Art & Language. What to make as
artists make art after art’s split from technique-
art and how to make it, in a society where work
based ideas of what it ‘should’ be can be seen,
is otherwise subordinated to the production of
Roberts argues, in terms of their relationship
commodities, is, Roberts argues, the key dynamic
to technological and industrial ways of making
in the political and aesthetic division between art
– the difference between artistic labour on one
and life.
hand, and the conditions of wage labour under
Roberts draws on a variety of nonart
capitalism on the other. It makes for a surprising,
disciplines to develop his theme, most waywardly
illuminating, sometimes impenetrable discussion
in his discussions of artificial intelligence, robotics
of how we should think of what work means in art,
and evolutionary neurobiology as ways into how
and what art means for work.
human subjectivity, work and technology interact,
Roberts makes the case that Duchamp’s
and while he wants to stand up for human
readymades, objects selected and presented as
exceptionalism, his more strident acceptance of
art, do the job of separating the real ‘work’ of an
the ‘post-Cartesian’ tends to subvert his account
artist – intellectual work – from what was, up to
of human experience, reducing it into a strangely
painterly Modernism, a false identification of
purposeless concatenation of techno-prosthetics,
artistic work as the work of artistic ‘craft’ – putting
language and biological necessity. And while
paint onto canvas, sculpting and so on. Roberts,
he is on strong ground relating Marx’s critique
a longstanding Marxist critic of art, explores how
of wage labour, surplus value and commodity
this short-circuit – of presenting a repeatable
to early avant-garde practice, his exploration of
product of industrial labour as an unrepeatable
more contemporary Marxist-influenced critiques
product of artistic labour – exposes artwork, and
of the contemporary economy, especially around
aesthetic experience, to what it excludes: the
theories of immaterial labour and how they relate
alienated form of wage labour in capitalism.
to recent art practice (Hardt and Negri, and
‘Reskilling’, however, is what Duchamp and
Nicolas Bourriaud are the usual suspect here) are
other avant-garde artists do once the association
more tentative. Nevertheless, The Intangibilities
between art and traditional craft has been broken,
of form will rightly produce some much-needed
and Roberts’s account of Duchamp’s lifelong
controversy on the real meaning of Duchamp,
investigation into hand production and industrial
and on why the accusation that ‘anyone could do
reproduction and reproducibility proposes that
that’ could be met with the retort ‘anyone should’.
the history of the avant-garde is a continuous
J.J. Charlesworth
By Daniel H. Wilson
reflection on how the notion of artistic authorship
Bloomsbury, $13.95 (paperback)
interacts with both technology and the sphere
April_Books.indd 149 6/3/08 16:03:40
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