Art, Emerging From the Ashes

In a technocratic cultural landscape where we are being pelted with fragmented information, art’s inextricability from economic influence feels particularly pertinent.

I’m listening to Oblivion by Grimes, I’m a glass of Aldi Pinot Noir in, and I have the holiday blues. There’s obviously something perverse inside my psyche that draws me to this particular musician and record producer – who is also the richest man in the world’s ex – whilst writing an article about capitalism, but the self-proclaimed pagan polytheist and surgically-induced elf does have a lot to say herself about technology. “Providing everyone on Earth with a phone… sometimes I wonder if you sat in a room for 20 minutes and thought of how to fix Earth, you could do something like that”, she said in a recent PAPER magazine interview with fellow musician M.I.A. I’d recommend the read for a laugh – except really, I don’t.

Grimes’s ex Elon Musk, who is also the father of her child X Æ A-12, bought Twitter in late 2022, which makes her comment even more tragicomic. Suddenly Trump is back online, and the ecologies of information output are shifting further to the right. Ye – only recently reinstated on Twitter since his account was suspended for antisemitic remarks – has once again been banned after spewing fascist vomitus. As the German filmmaker and essayist Hito Steyerl succinctly writes in Duty Free Art (2017): “the idea of technocratic fascist rule– supposedly detached, omniscient, and sophisticated– is realized as a barrage of dumbed-down tweets”.

I’ve got this terrible, foreboding sense of chaos which won’t go away, a bit like the Babadook. Or maybe my moodiness is just triggered by a weekend in Copenhagen, during which I visited an exhibition at the Kunsthal Charlottenborg called ‘Post-Capital: Art and Economics of the Digital Age’, curated by Michelle Cotton. The struggling creative… fashion’s working-class protégé, Kafka’s starving artist: the relationship between art and economics is hardly undiscussed. Except post-industrialism seems absurd, and madness has always been enough to hook me.

As the exhibition text reads, there is an “inherent paradox within a capitalist system that is both dependent upon and threatened by technological progress”. Enter post-capitalism, in which the arrival of a new currency of information disrupts capitalist principles. After all, markets rely partially on the scarcity of resources, and information is not scarce. It will surpass even semio-capitalism, which Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi describes best in Heroes (2015): “Capitalism is based on the exploitation of physical energy, and semiocapitalism is grounded in the subjugation of the nervous energy of society.”

One of those exhibiting at the Kunsthall was Martine Syms, who I’ve been told is a masochist, although I don’t really see it. The Los Angeles-based artist has depicted herself dying in various brutal ways (DED, 2021), but art is suffering and whatnot. Still, Syms’s work – which spans from publishing to filmmaking – has been called violent, and ambivalent, and ambivalent to violence. Others have not been exempted from her dark wit, either. Earlier this year, at a Prada Mode dinner party, she installed various live stream videos and close circuit television screens to watch guests in a criticism of surveillance culture. The installation also remarked upon digital documentation as social engagement and, if you’ve watched any fashion shows recently, phones as the body’s latest upgrade; our newest organ.

In the exhibition, Syms installed a film called Mythiccbeing (2018), in which her AI avatar convulsed across the screen like an absurd digitized marionette, whilst excerpts of her digital existence flashed by: text messages, found imagery and mundane video clips. A merging of interiority and data (i.e. exteriority), it felt weirdly invasive but familiar, a bit like the time when I went through my ex-boyfriend’s phone. In previous iterations, Syms-bot (is it Syms? Is it a version of Syms? Is it a separate entity?) had been receptive to audience interaction, replying to text messages in a knowingly egotistical manner (“I started texting my crush again/ I just want some attention”). The artist described it as an ‘anti-Siri’; a blank space between representation and lived experience, particularly for Black women.

Syms’s subjects are endowed with information which reflects the artist’s identity, but also defies and grows beyond it. In The Glen Park Library: A Fairy Tale of Disruption (2018), art historian Pamela Lee writes: “[They] occupy a liminal zone in their own right, not the grey economy of Bitcoin or the digital soup of libertarian pirates but one that charts difference as the relative value of all values, in the ways that memes are their own fungible currency and hashtags license distinct meanings for their respective subscriber”.

A version of feminism which believes gender equality is best achieved through putting women in positions of power arguably goes some way in satiating capitalism’s hunger for oppression, achieved through exploitation and subordination. After all, how can you dismantle a system which you stand with? I began to ask myself what the fuck an artist could do about this. After all, the art industry isn’t exactly a beacon of political neutrality.