HESCAH Talk

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While twentieth century modern and abstract art could be traced in parallel to market-driven subsumption, the artist’s mark offers a site of articulation within and against capitalist constraints. Isabelle Graw has called the dialectical and ever deepening relationship between art and the market “Value Reflection.” Cy Twombly’s gesture has for instance long preoccupied art historians, philosophers and theorists for its enigmatic relation to the withdrawal of painterly plenitude and evacuation of interiority (Krauss, Barthes, Agamben), while Warhol’s serial structure has been interpreted as a symptom of capitalist realism (Baudrillard, Foster).

Arte Povera, specifically the work of Marisa Merz, has long evoked the combined and uneven temporality of belated industrial subsumption in Italy (Celant). Taking the history of modernist abstraction to be in tension with real abstraction internal to capitalist acceleration, within which the conquest of time itself becomes necessary to surplus accumulation through socially necessary labor time and debt, this talk locates those practices as three instances of visual time across the twentieth century. From a Marxian framework in which skill, labour and time reconstitute the second nature of everyday like within a capitalist totality, Twombly’s grapheme sets melancholia into a seeming atemporal, universal condition while Warhol’s “paint by numbers” articulate a traumatic mimetic register and Marisa Merz’s fragile sculpture’s precipitate an accursed share that augurs an unknown future anterior and with it a people to come.

Description from Harn Museum of Art.

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