Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War

‘You can play your music in an airplane??!?!??’

‘I can play my music in a submarine!’

According to this Spotify advert, the capacity to play music in a submarine is the latest development available to paying subscribers of the streaming platform. Pay monthly, and they offer you advertisement-free music wherever you might be, whether in the depths of the Atlantic or the dark side of the moon. There is a major paradox, however, in this free-music-for-all logic. While Spotify offers a resource, a free-from-subscription gold mine for those that through stoicism and patience can bear the intruding adverts, it also offers an enlightening example of the contemporary – and seemingly paradoxical – dynamics of freedom, surveillance, and corporate domination. While the music platform offers a service facilitating access to a whole new and free world, it also, and simultaneously, casts music as tracking device, where listeners’ musical habits and data are recorded, if not sold (Drott, 2018).

As with many other online platforms, this logic signals a system of privileged access: the global universe of music is at the public’s feet, if the public is willing to pay for it, and if they have access to the internet. The dictum of cultural theorist Homi K Bhabha – that ‘the globe shrinks for those who own it’ (Bhabha, 1992: 88) – is an apt description of this reality based on consumption. Intervening into these contemporary debates, Berlin-based artist Hito Steyerl contributes a collection of opinionated, creative, far-reaching public talks and essays successfully urging the reader to rethink the dynamics behind present currencies of art. It plunges crucially into an ever-growing feld that embraces art, contemporary politics, unleashed consumerist systems of economy, and growing digitalization.

Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War situates art at the crux of present questions of confict, surveillance, and virtual corporate domination. For Steyerl, art is both the object of, and symbolizes, tax-free markets and extra territorial geographies, removed from the nation’s history and sovereignty (pp. 76–79). Art, she argues, has become a tool deeply dependent on present neoliberalist systems, while serving as a proxy for a biased global economy. ‘Contemporary art’, she writes, is made possible by neoliberal capital plus the internet, biennials, art fairs, parallel pop-up histories, growing income reality … Contemporary art thus becomes a proxy for the global commons … it is defined by a proliferation of locations and a lack of accountability. (p. 78)

Contemporary art exhibitions have recurrently served as platforms to reflect on, criticize, and analyze such networked systems of manipulation and their effects on the individual: from explorative shows such as Big Bang Data (2015–2016) at Somerset House in London, to surveys like Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today (2018) at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Similarly, post-global economy and systems of digital surveillance politics have been at the forefront of a number of cultural critics’ and theorists’ concerns in the last decades (Terranova, 2004) while providing a source of exhibition material ready to be explored; examples of this would be The Art of Detection: Surveillance in Society (1997, MIT List Visual Arts Center) and Exposed Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera (2010, Tate Modern). While Steyerl’s book remains wide in its scope and open-ended in its conclusions about these concerns, each essay provides thorough arenas for debate.

For each chapter, Steyerl creates detailed scenarios submerging the reader into specifc situations. She draws from diverse sources such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s problematization of the desire to compound theory into action, Michel Foucault’s understanding of power via force of order and command, or Walter Benjamin’s employment of language as a form of power. Through intellectual provocation, and in a sequence of essays that feel mostly inconclusive, Steyerl questions the conditions of the possibility of art, whether they be the art object or its institutional frame. This is because Steyerl relentlessly dismisses all a priori binaries: there is no distinction between representations and the represented, aesthetic value and market value, fction and reality, the political and the cultural. As she observes: ‘It is striking how much reality has been created’ (p. 158). This is crucial as Steyerl does not suggest that these differences never existed, but rather the paradigms of differentiation have changed, and that former definitions have blurred.

While questioning the binary between political and cultural representation, for instance, she uses a clear example: ‘The more people are represented culturally, and the more they snap one another on their cellphones and submit to Facebook surveillance schemes, the less they matter politically’ (p. 175). In each chapter, Steyerl not only re-positions art within a wider tax-evading and proft-driven context but, most importantly, she analyses everyday cultural sources and the dynamics driving cultural assumptions, consequently encouraging the spectator to question them. Two telling examples illustrate this point. The chapter ‘Digital Debris’ launches from a well-known pop culture reference, Monty Python, as a basis to explain the origin of the world ‘spam’; while the word derivates from a factual object (that awful post-war reformed meat that Monty Python’s waitress offers repeatedly until it becomes ingrained in the client’s mind), the author analyzes how the term came to represent a mode of address (p. 112). A few decades later, ‘spam’ refers to the commercial advertising rubbish clogging everyone’s email inboxes, the superfluous and the dispensable brought together. This helps the author to ask: how did this shift, this system of invasion by repetition, affect the individual’s approach to labour (p. 114)?

Engaging with Benjamin’s and Foucault’s theories on language, she argues that the words, in this case ‘spam’, come to constitute actions. Such is the ‘creative force of naming’ (p. 128). ‘If You Don’t Have Bread, Eat Art!’ is a further instance of Steyerl’s unique scrutiny of the systems behind the present market-driven cultural scape. In her analysis of the dynamics driving the art market, she rejects the aesthetic value of the object as a core category, highlighting instead the factors that have subsidized art production. ‘Throughout history’, she explains, it has been artists and art workers, more than any actors, who have subsidized art production … But more generally, everyone involved also contributes in all sorts of other ways to art’s circulation, thus making it stronger as currency. (p. 188) The value of art therefore is constituted in the process, not in the object per se (p. 189), a statement that raises questions as to the hidden labour behind the art market, notably those who play active and unpaid roles. Moving away from the formal analyses that have marked art history for decades, Duty Free Art situates art at the crux of neoliberal politics and pop culture. Most importantly, it reconciles a series of paradoxes: the anti-elitist discourse of culture is reconciled with the elitist reality that still characterizes the art world, the national value of culture with the uprooted reality of contemporary art production and diffusion.

Steyerl’s use of pop culture, and the familiar tone in which she couches her arguments, lend this book a dynamic and engaging quality. She succeeds in questioning cultural assumptions by laying bare the mechanisms that enable visual culture, whether they are specifc to the art world – such as the diverse and inter-connected dynamics driving the art market – or more broadly related to the individual’s modes of understanding, such as the use of language. Her insights, however, occasionally limit further possible approaches because her poignant examinations situate her vision at the center of the analysis, giving an undeniably discursive strength to her narrative, but remaining inherently subjective nonetheless. Yet it is this inimitable voice that marks the text, an unapologetic voice that jumps from one scenario to another, embracing facts and fction altogether. The essays contain myriad bits of information, from politics to aesthetics and informatics, and the reader may feel lost among the details before being taken back to their relevance to contemporary art. This is precisely Steyerl’s point. Art, pop culture, public and private cultural platforms, and language are not separated from wider dynamics and developments such as technology and sciences. If anything, the book opens up the prospect of questioning the present reality, the ‘ripping reality’, as Steyerl had it so perceptively (p. 191).

Tally de Orellana

References

Bhabha HK (1992) Double visions. Artforum, January: 88 Drott EA (2018) Music as a technology of surveillance. Journal of the Society for American Music 12(3): 233–267. DOI: 10.1017/S1752196318000196 Spotify Available at: https://www.spotify.com/uk (accessed 2 December 2019). Terranova T (2004) Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London: Pluto Press.

Originally published online April 16, 2019, The Journal of Visual Studies