Suchergebnisse

Speculation is an artist's capital, enabling the emergence of the new. This is art's capacity to bring about new frames of reference—new kinds of questions, experiences, events or encounters— to leverage difference in order to open onto an indeterminate future. As Elizabeth Grosz (2014: 123) notes, '(i)f art reads as other than an artistic expression, it is always about the summoning up of a new future, and as such it's always a kind of political gesture'. Brian Massumi (2018: 25) regards this gesture as a means of reclaiming value from its reduction to the economic logic of the market, in order to emphasise the intensities of experiences that have value in and of themselves, such as the singular vivacity of an experience of colour. Excess is at the core of this theory of value, the unselected that forms the virtual background, a world of surplus. However, Massumi argues that capitalism produces an impoverished version of surplus value, dependent on a continual accumulation of increasing quantity to the detriment of the singular quality appearing as such. Artists' social, affective and material speculations, their attempts to create something new, produce a processual surplus value as an affective excess that differs in kind from the surpluses of capital accumulation. We will argue that these speculative practices ought to be understood primarily in terms of an ethos actualised in an artist's practice and not, as is so often the case, only in terms of the speculative financial returns the products of such practices may yield in the global art markets. The paper will explore the affective aspects of speculation through an investigation of the practice of Belgian artist Joëlle Tuerlinckx. Her associative mode of working produces a web of processual thinking that forms connections as well as leaving loose ends open, often reactivating forgotten or abandoned objects, in a manner that produces a different order of value. Grosz, Elizabeth and Esther Wolfe (2014). 'Bodies of Philosophy: An Interview with Elizabeth ...

The image surplus of the 21st-century' directly maps a crisis of critical new ideas, as well a social shift away from confronting economic, environmental and political consequences. Today, in the economy of images, exchange is the formal determinant of a distracting means of re-production. In an age of Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook, photography is a form of both abstract labour and enjoyment. While we usually consider photographs to be equivalents of a diverse number of things – when they show our faces, our sunsets, our favourite food, our pets, our holidays and our celebrations – ultimately they fail to maintain this assertion, under even minor scrutiny. What if photography contains within it the capacity to be more than a representation of some thing or other? Would this not provide a radical re-reading of photography and a means to reimagine the structures of capital? In other words, to engage with photography as a way of thinking allows us to begin to rephrase the discourses of production and exchange. Following Marx's formula of commodity-money-commodity I suggest there is a process of experience-image-experience, when an experience is photographed. I argue that in the digital world we are undergoing an inverted shift to image-experience-image. This occurs when the creation of images becomes the primary aim and objective. In this new formula, image becomes more than image: it is the mediation of experience into something incrementally excessive of simply image and becomes a new means for a different mode of production.

The image surplus of the 21st-century directly maps a crisis of critical new ideas, as well a social shift away from confronting economic, environmental and political consequences. Today, in the economy of images, exchange is the formal determinant of a distracting means of re-production. In an age of Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook, photography is a form of both abstract labour and enjoyment. While we usually consider photographs to be equivalents of a diverse number of things – when they show our faces, our sunsets, our favourite food, our pets, our holidays and our celebrations – ultimately they fail to maintain this assertion, under even minor scrutiny. What if photography contains within it the capacity to be more than a representation of some thing or other? Would this not provide a radical re-reading of photography and a means to reimagine the structures of capital? In other words, to engage with photography as a way of thinking allows us to begin to rephrase the discourses of production and exchange.Following Marx's formula of commodity-money-commodity I suggest there is a process of experience-image-experience, when an experience is photographed. I argue that in the digital world we are undergoing an inverted shift to image-experience-image. This occurs when the creation of images becomes the primary aim and objective. In this new formula, image becomes more than image: it is the mediation of experience into something incrementally excessive of simply image and becomes a new means for a different mode of production.

Speculation is an artist's capital, enabling the emergence of the new. This is art's capacity to bring about new frames of reference—new kinds of questions, experiences, events or encounters— to leverage difference in order to open onto an indeterminate future. As Elizabeth Grosz (2014: 123) notes, '(i)f art reads as other than an artistic expression, it is always about the summoning up of a new future, and as such it's always a kind of political gesture'. Brian Massumi (2018: 25) regards this gesture as a means of reclaiming value from its reduction to the economic logic of the market, in order to emphasise the intensities of experiences that have value in and of themselves, such as the singular vivacity of an experience of colour. Excess is at the core of this theory of value, the unselected that forms the virtual background, a world of surplus. However, Massumi argues that capitalism produces an impoverished version of surplus value, dependent on a continual accumulation of increasing quantity to the detriment of the singular quality appearing as such. Artists' social, affective and material speculations, their attempts to create something new, produce a processual surplus value as an affective excess that differs in kind from the surpluses of capital accumulation. We will argue that these speculative practices ought to be understood primarily in terms of an ethos actualised in an artist's practice and not, as is so often the case, only in terms of the speculative financial returns the products of such practices may yield in the global art markets. The paper will explore the affective aspects of speculation through an investigation of the practice of Belgian artist Joëlle Tuerlinckx. Her associative mode of working produces a web of processual thinking that forms connections as well as leaving loose ends open, often reactivating forgotten or abandoned objects, in a manner that produces a different order of value. Grosz, Elizabeth and Esther Wolfe (2014). 'Bodies of Philosophy: An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz', Stance 7, April, pp 115–126 Massumi, Brian (2017). 'Virtual Ecology and the Question of Value', in General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm, Erich Hörl with James Burton (eds.), London: Bloomsbury, pp 345–373.