Daughter: Our calf is sick. Please come and see.
Vet: Sure, what happened? Is it newborn? Did it get the first milk of its mother?
Mum: No, it didn’t get the colostrum. There was no milk. The labor was difficult. It started five times over and stopped again.
Daughter: The other calf reached first and drank all the milk, we didn’t realize it.
Daughter: Mum, where is the calf?
Mum: [calls into the stable] Where is it? My little pistachu, where are you?
The Terror of Total Dasein: Economies of Presence in the Art Field
The International Artists’ Strike in 1979 was a “protest against the ongoing repression of the art system and the alienation of artists from the results of their work.” Djordjevic mailed invitations to numerous artists around the world, asking if they would be willing to take part in the general strike. He received thirty-nine, mainly unsupportive responses from the likes of Sol Lewitt, Lucy Lippard, and Vito Acconci. Susan Hiller replied: “I have, in fact, been on strike all summer, but it has not changed anything and I am anxious to begin work again, which I shall do very soon.”1
Dear Goran, Thanks for your letter. Personally I am already on strike of producing any new form in my work since 1965 (i.e. 14 years). I don’t see what I could do more—Best Regards (Daniel) Buren.2
When legendary conceptual artist Goran Djordjevic tried to rally artists to go on a general art strike in 1979, some of them responded that they were on strike already—i.e. did not produce work or new work. But it made no difference whatsoever. Clearly, at the time, this seems to have confounded received ideas of what a strike was and how it worked. A strike was supposed to drain needed labor power from employers who would then need to make concessions to workers’ demands. But in the art field things were different.
Today, the artists’ reactions seem obvious. No one working in the art field expects his or her labor to be irreplaceable or even mildly important anymore. In the age of rampant self-employment, or rather self-unemployment, the idea that anyone would care for one’s specific labor power seems rather exotic.
Of course, labor in the art field has always been different from labor in other areas. One of the current reasons, however, might be that the contemporary economy of art relies more on presence than on more traditional ideas of labor power tied to the production of objects. Presence as in physical presence, as in attendance or being-there in person. Why would presence be so desirable? The idea of presence invokes the promise of unmediated communication, the glow of uninhibited existence, a seemingly unalienated experience and authentic encounter between humans. It implies that not only the artist but everyone else is present too, whatever that means and whatever it is good for. Presence stands for allegedly real discussion, exchange, communication, the happening, the event, liveness, the real thing—you get the idea.
In addition to delivering works, artists, or more generally content providers, nowadays have to perform countless additional services, which slowly seem to become more important than any other form of work. The Q&A is more important than the screening, the live lecture more than the text, the encounter with the artist more important than the one with the work. Not to speak about the jumble of quasi-academic and social media PR formats that multiply the templates in which unalienated presence is supposed to be delivered. The artist has to be present, as in Marina Abramović’s eponymous performance. And not only present, but exclusively present, present for the first time, or in some other hyperventilating capacity of newness. Artistic occupation is being redefined as permanent presence. But in the endless production of seemingly singular events, the serial churning out of novelty and immediacy, the happening of the event is also a general performance, as Sven Lütticken called it, a quantifiable measure of efficiency and total social labor.
The economy of art is deeply immersed in this economy of presence. The market economy of art has its own economy of presence which revolves around art fairs, with their guest lists, VIP areas and performative modes of access and exclusion on every level. People have been saying that previews of mega-shows have become completely inadequate for HNWIs. Really important people are only present for the pre-preview.
There are some rational reasons for an economy of physical human presence in the art field: the physical presence of people is, on average, cheaper than the presence of works that need to be shipped, insured and/or installed. Presence puts so-called butts on seats and thus provides legitimacy to cultural institutions competing for scarce funding. Institutions sell tickets or even access to people—this is usually done in the scope of para-academic formats like masterclasses or workshops—and capitalize on people’s desire to widen their networks or add contacts. In a word, presence can be easily quantified and monetized. It’s a thing that few people get paid for and a lot of people pay for, and is thus rather profitable.
But presence also means permanent availability without any promise of compensation. In the age of the reproducibility of almost everything physical, human presence is one of the few things that cannot be multiplied indefinitely, an asset with some inbuilt scarcity. Presence means to be engaged or occupied with an activity but not hired or employed. It means more often than not to be locked down in standby mode, as a reserve element for potential engagement, part of a crowd of extras to provide stochastic weight.
Interestingly enough, the demand for total presence and immediacy arises from mediation; or more precisely from the growing range of tools of communication, including the internet. It is not opposed to technology but its consequence.
According to William J. Mitchell, the economy of presence is characterized by a technologically enhanced market for attention, time, and movement—a process of investment that requires careful choices.3 The point is that technology gives you tools for remote and delayed presence, so that physical presence is just one option and probably the scarcest one. According to Mitchell: “Presence choice occurs when an individual decides whether face-to-face presence is worth the time and money.” Presence in fact becomes a mode of investment.
But the economy of presence is not only relevant for people whose time is in demand and who could basically sell (or barter) more time than they have; it is even more relevant to those who have to work multiple jobs in order to make a living, or even not make a living, to those who coordinate a jumble of microjobs, complete with the logistical nightmare of harmonizing competing schedules and negotiating priorities, or to those who are on permanent standby in the hope that their time and presence will become exchangeable for something else eventually. The aura of unalienated, unmediated, and precious presence depends on a temporal infrastructure that consists of fractured schedules and dysfunctional, collapsing just-in-time economies in which people frantically try to figure out reverberating asynchronicities and the continuous breakdown of riff-raff timetables. It’s junk-time, broken down, kaput on any level. Junktime is wrecked, discontinuous, distracted and runs on several parallel tracks. If you tend to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and if you even manage to be in two wrong places at the same wrong time, it means you live within junktime. With junktime any causal link is scattered. The end is before the beginning and the beginning was taken down for copyright violations. Anything in between has been slashed because of budget cuts. Junktime is the material base of the idea of pure unmediated endless presence.
Junktime is exhausted, interrupted, dulled by ketamine, Lyrica, corporate imagery. Junktime happens when information is not power, but comes as pain. Acceleration is yesterday’s delusion. Today you find yourself crashed and failing. You try to occupy the square or bandwidth but who is going to pick up the kid from school? Junktime depends on velocity, as in the lack thereof. It is time’s substitute: its crash-test dummy.
So