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May 5, 2011
In his Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade (Verso, London, 2007) John Roberts moves the discussion of Marcel Duchamp’s original radical gesture away from the ‘desire-value’ of mass culture and firmly into the realm of artistic and productive labour and the displacement of the artist’s identity.
According to Roberts, in his early readymades Duchamp overtly shows what had been largely hidden since the decline of the old studio-system: that every artist must start from readymade things (for example in the use of industrial paint), and consequently that all art relies on the collaboration of artist’s hands and non-artist’s hands. Moreover, in the stripping out of the traditional artisanal base for art Duchamp aligns his readymades (to) with the general historical process of deskilling as the result of the division of labour under capitalism and the law of the value-form.
In the Preface Roberts says that:
In the 1980s the debate on simulacra, copying, surrogacy and authenticity dominated Anglo-American art discourse. There was a widespread assumption that claims to subjective expression and aesthetic originality on the part of the artist were a myth, a delusional hangover from the Cartesian fantasy of the ‘inner self’ as an authentic expressive self. Since the 1920s and the social claims of the early avant-garde the continual expansion of technology into art’s relations of production made it increasingly difficult to equate normative value in art with such claims. Touch and manual dexterity had lost their place as markers of artistic taste and authority. As such, the artist was no longer seen as a self-confirming ‘creator’, but as a synthesizer and manipulator of extant signs and objects.
What largely united these shift in early modernism was a theory of montage as social praxis in which avant garde artists saw themselves, essentially, as artistic constructors and fabricators. n the 1960s and 1970s, this, in turn, was taken to be part of a deeper historical shift in the subjectivity of the artist: the dissolution of the creative singularity of the (male) artist.
The post-gendered monteur was now merely an ensemble of techniques, functions and competences. In the 1980s much critical art and much art theory under the banners of postmodernism and post-structuralism was produced within this framework.
Today this sense of a ‘paradigm shift’ is the commonplace stuff of postmodern history and theories of the ‘end of modernism’, taught in art schools and art history and cultural studies departments in Europe and North America. Where once the expressive skills of the (male) artist were existentially inflated, now they are deconstructively deflated.
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