In the past year, I have found myself thinking a lot about icebergs. Not because of global warming, which should be the reason, as for everything now. Icebergs are an interesting phenomenon. A peak of blinding whiteness floats majestically on the ocean, dark waters concealing a mountain of ice. Icebergs pose danger to unaware captains, like sirens of the polar circle. But that is not a path I follow here. My venture is a different one. This essay is a chain of reflections on the political economy of (in)visibility, examining the opposition between visible and invisible labor as a dynamic social process, the analysis of which is necessary for understanding the exploitative modes of production in contemporary art and, more broadly, capitalism. Icebergs are a business of opacity and radiance: they are composed of a visible peak towering above an invisible bulk, the surface of the water working as a mirror, reflecting the radiance above and concealing the space below.

An image of the iceberg is used by J.K. Gibson-Graham, the pen-name of two feminist economists, to conceptualize the exploitation of feminine labour.1 Their theory inspired the foundation of the Centre of Plausible Economies (CPE), which I established with Kathrin Böhm in London in June 2018, to explore the economic underpinnings of art and to apply artistic imagination to the sphere of economy. The CPE logo is an iceberg, employed to explain the regimes of visibility in the mainstream art world and, more broadly, the capitalist economy. 

Imagine as the peak of the iceberg commodities and art works, factories and galleries, entrepreneurs and artists. Blinding us with their stolen light, radiant as they are deceitful, their super-visibility conceals the realm of socially necessary human labour, which underpins the production, distribution and reception of both art and commodities, hidden beneath the surface. To turn an image into an argument, let me float the iceberg on the expanse of political economy, triangulating three systems of reference: the Marxist critique of commodity fetishism, feminist critique of capitalist economy, and materialist critique of artistic circulation. From this vantage point, one can analyse the relation between opacity and radiance not as a contradiction but as dialectical phases of a process in which something and/or someone is made (in)visible.

J.K. Gibson-Graham’s iceberg metaphor refers to the vast realm of unwaged labour that underpins the capitalist economy. The peak of the economic iceberg consists of capitalist enterprise, commodity markets and the contractual systems that regulate the exchange of labour for wages. That system is founded upon and towers over the vast domain of economically unregistered and yet socially necessary types of labour (for example feminized care work), modes of exchange (like gift economies), and forms of organisation (like informal communities). This hidden mass is made opaque by an economic system that only traces financial flows, and which works for the benefit of capitalist enterprise. For example, a global corporation that settles somewhere temporarily, pollutes the environment, wrecks the infrastructure and tears apart communities, just to leave in search of another resource-rich environment after a decade or two. The unpaid labor of entire communities can be exploited at will because they are not monetised, and thus remain economically opaque, not accountable. This example also relates to contemporary art, and the relationship between its hyper-visible commodities and the unpaid labor that sustains them. But first, Marx’s analysis of the commodity will help us to understand the relationship between capitalism and visibility.

Marx famously devoted the opening pages of Capital to a critique of commodity fetishism. He states there: ‘A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’.2 What is so subtle about the commodity? It appears as if a solid object, valued according to its rarity, appeal or usefulness. But it is a result of a social process of production, and its value derives from the labour invested in its creation, but the commodity appears on a capitalist market as if it was self-evident and self-contained. As Marx says: ‘the mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things’.3 Such a relationship between the visibility of the commodity and the invisibility of labour invested in its production is inherently exploitative, because the commodity form obfuscates a social relation between exploiting capitalists and exploited labourers as an objectified relation between mere things. Using the metaphor already floated here, the commodity can be understood as the peak of the iceberg, a thing radiating with exploited social energy, i.e. with the labour of people invested in its creation, only a part of which is paid.  

The relationship between exploitation and invisibility is one of the definitive features of the contemporary art market. Just as capital shines with stolen light, so the upper echelons of artistic circulation glimmer with social energies not of their own making. This is the fundamental proposition of Gregory Sholette, a New York-based artist, activist and academic, in his book Dark Matter.4 He uses the metaphor of dark matter, the physical phenomenon that pulls the universe together despite its own invisibility, to discuss the political economy of artistic visibility. Like J.K. Gibson-Graham, who posit that monetised economy exists only because it is underwritten by the realm of unmonetised community economies, Sholette emphasises the importance of the unrecognised mass of artistic labour, located at the bottom of the pyramid the contemporary art market. Sholette argues that art celebrities, blue chip galleries, auctions, fairs, biennales and large museums can exist and reproduce themselves only due to the unregistered presence of the multitudes of less successful artists, art students, amateurs. Artistic dark matter maintains the gravity of the art world by attending art colleges, buying supplies, spreading reputations, flocking to exhibitions, maintaining infrastructures, creating and communicating artistic idioms. Dark matter is the invisible bulk of the iceberg. The regimes of social visibility, which operate both formally (academic journals, art media, market indexes, curatorial selections, collections) and informally (gossip, tacit knowledge) work like the surface of the water for the iceberg. They multiply images of what is found above the line of visibility, endowing people and objects with a social radiance, while, due to the opacity of their own medium, rendering unimportant and unworthy everything else. Sholette suggests that this political economy of visibility is a means to reproduce the domination of a tiny percentage of celebrated individuals and institutions, who reap the benefits of unrecognised and unremunerated social labour exhausted daily at the bottom levels. Sholette’s analysis is more aligned with the feminist critique of the monetary economy than with the traditional Marxist analysis of surplus value, since he does not focus on the exploitation of contractual labour, but rather on indirect ways of harnessing labour conditioned upon the invisibility of those who perform it.

We have now treated the significance of the metaphor, but now we encounter another metaphorical peak, since the iceberg constitutes only a first object in this analysis of radiance and opacity. It is high time to move on.

A cloak

Just as the commodity was the theological mystery at the center of the capitalist market, the art world revolves around the artwork. These radiant things, imbued with an aura of desirability and uniqueness, have also been dissected by keen sociological eyes as fetishes. In his classic study The Rules of Art Pierre Bourdieu analyses how artworks accumulate social energies generated by the interactions and frictions multiplied in the artistic milieu, a field of relations linking artists, critics, agents and institutions.5 Responding to the classically theological question, ‘Who creates the creator?’, Bourdieu claims that the social field of art, with its hierarchies, traditions, power games, and claims for universality, imbues both artworks and their creators with special powers. Their allure is an effect of social interactions between art makers, commentators, collectors, and lovers, that create the value of any artwork. In this way, Bourdieu tries to square the theological circle of ‘creatio ex nihilo’, offering a sociological explanation of the Romantic idea of art genius, who sprouts masterpieces as automatically, in Marx’s own memorable metaphor, as a silkworm produces silk.6 Bourdieu argues that what seems to be a force of nature is rather a set of social forces, which means that artworks are worth only as much as the fields that constitute their meaning. The auras of artworks and artists are socially reproduced illusions that purposefully obfuscate the economic mechanisms underpinning artistic autonomy. Art needs to be deemed priceless in order that artworks can fetch high prices, and artists need to maintain the image of lofty individuals disinterested in earthly riches in order to make a living. The opacity of the field supports these handy illusions, or at least it has done so until recently, when artistic circulation became integrated more directly in the symbolic and monetary economies of financial capitalism. Where art is business, attention is commodity, auras and identities become co-opted as sales points. 

Discussing ‘the production of belief’ that imbues the artwork with its value, Bourdieu compares it to the ‘court cloaks’, the dresses, capes and robes donned by aristocrats attending the court: 

The ‘court cloak’ evoked by the old economists is valid only for a court which, in producing itself and in reproducing itself as such, reproduces everything making for the life of the court, that is to say, the whole system of agents and institutions charged with producing and reproducing the habitus and the ‘habits’ of the court, with both satisfying and producing the ‘desire’ for a court cloak (which the economist assumes to be given). As a quasi-experimental verification, the value of court dress disappears with the court and the associated habitus, once the fallen aristocrats no longer have any choice but to become, in Marx’s words, the ‘dancing masters of Europe’ . . .7

Artworks are ‘court cloaks’, charged with desire that lasts as long as the fields on which they rely. So what happens after the courts are dissolved? The situation of contemporary art might seem much better than ever before, considering the extremely high prices that art fetches at the market and global notoriety of blue chip artists. But can the valorisations be sustained when the autonomy of the field of art dissipates, and art becomes incorporated within the flow of capital and commodities? Can Romantic ideals be cast away like tattered cloaks?  But if art is just a business as usual, why does it cost so much? In other words, is an invisibility of the business acumen a necessary condition for an art business to succeed? To quote the Yugoslavian conceptual artist Mladen Stilinović: just as money is paper, so the gallery is a room. Just as the court cloak is no more than a piece of cloth outside of its relation to the court, a painting, when taken outside of the field of art, is no more than a piece of canvas. This is an argument of the institutional theory of art, whose most famous exponent Arthur Danto defined the art world as a process which imbues mere boxes, beds, and black squares with a plethora of meanings: ‘To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry—an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld’.8 According to this argument, the idea of art beyond the artworld is as nonsensical as the idea of a human shedding their skin. Just as skin is not a cloak to be disbanded at will, art is inseparable from the artworld that sustains it. 

Yet, this perspective is limiting, flattening the complex dialectics of opacity and radiance into the bland statement ‘either you are in or out of the art game’ (a temptation to which institutional critique succumbed, at least partially, but that’s another story). Paradoxically, a sociological analysis aimed at dispelling social illusions reproduces the ontology of the field in question, mistaking the peak of the iceberg for its support, reifying the hierarchies of the field. There is not only life beyond the field of art, one can find art there too, often better than that found among the circulation of artistic commodities.

Without a cloak

Stephen Wright, the author of a modest in size but theoretically ambitious work, Towards Lexicon of Usership, has proposed a new science of ‘escapology’. He refers to the Latin roots of the word ‘escape’, which comes from the vulgar Latin excappare, meaning being out of (ex-) the cloak or a robe (-cappa).9 He inaccurately attributes this ‘being out of a cloak’ to the situation when a thief escapes, leaving only a cloak in the hands of its pursuers. It is more likely that excappare referred to the mass defections of medieval monks who – while abandoning monasteries in search of the secular life – left their habits behind once they were free from monastic discipline. In both cases, for the unsuccessful monk or the successful thief ‘being out of a cloak’ signifies an array of new possibilities. Similarly, for Wright, escapology:

refers to the rapidly growing field of empirical enquiry and speculative research into the ways and means, tactics and strategies of escaping capture. […] Capture may be epistemic, terminological, but whatever its configuration, escapology is about fleeing its normative clutches. The mode of escapology most widespread in the mainstream artworld has to do with escaping the onto-logical capture that is the bane of autonomous art practice, whereby actions or objects have their very mode of being (their ‘ontology’) captured as art; just art.10

Isn’t it interesting that the very modes of imbuing art with radiance are also the means of rendering it opaque by eliminating other possibilities of what art and artists are or might be? This is the essence of ontological capture: that people and things radiating with opportunities are transferred into mere commodities. This operation is deeply ingrained in the regimes of visibility dominating the field of art and reproducing its elites: the peak of contemporary art’s iceberg presents itself as the only milieu where good art appears, and the rest is regarded as not worthy of attention. Against this view, Wright argues that there are many other art-sustaining environments, which provide us with both means and ends for making, using, and appreciating art. Responding to the massive outflow of social energy outside of mainstream art, the American collective Basekamp published an atlas of plausible art worlds, a conceptual cartography of hacker communities, autonomous flotillas, self-organised universities, and collectives of urban gardeners, who engage in a multiplicity of art-like practices.11 The conceptual architecture of escapology resembles the politics of exodus defined by Paolo Virno as a productive exit from the systems contested:

Nothing is less passive than the act of fleeing, of exiting. Defection modifies the conditions within which the struggle takes place, rather than presupposing those conditions to be an unalterable horizon; it modifies the context within which a problem has arisen, rather than facing this problem by opting for one or the other of the provided alternatives. In short, exit consists of unrestrained invention which alters the rules of the game and throws the adversary completely off balance […] we need only think of the mass exodus from the regime of the factory, carried out by American workers in the middle of the nineteenth century. By venturing into the “frontier” to colonize inexpensive land, they seized upon the opportunity to reverse their own initial condition.12

Just as American workers described by Virno left the factories of their oppression to colonize the frontier, artists are exiting the field of art, organising their own shadow economies, using the opacity of social matter to avoid surveillance and capture, behind leaving only their own habits.

But isn’t this vision a bit too shallow? The notion that grass is always greener elsewhere, an escapist fantasy of the world uncorrupted by the earthly powers, a drive to yet again feel the unmediated bliss of a close-knit community?

I am not compelled to look for an exit strategy, but rather for a way of revolutionising the means of artistic production, and its own regimes of visibility. It is like changing clothes as a child when one has outgrown them. You can feel nostalgic for the old clothes, but you won’t wear them to a party. The same is true of autonomy and its institutions. The arrogance of the peddlers of autonomy and pompousness of its aristocratic custodians is not only unacceptable, it is untenable when the field of art expands, when dozens of new plausible art worlds emerge yearly, both in terms of mainstream market niches and alternative art economies, and millions of artists enter into the fold and billions are made on artistic speculations.

Zygmunt Bauman calls our times the ‘age of the mountain-pass’, comparing humanity to a group of travellers who approach a pass in the high mountains, and start their descent, knowing only what they had left behind, not yet being able to see the country at which they will eventually arrive.13 He compares our global society to the feudal kingdoms of Europe’s Late Middle Ages when Europeans experienced a moment of turmoil from which the new political and economic order emerged - the age of capitalism, colonisation, and nation states, which currently approaches its end. Ours are the times when old solutions do not suffice and new challenges emerge. Immanuel Wallerstein – when discussing the systemic bifurcation of the current phase of capitalism – calls for ‘utopistics’, a renewal of social and political ideas that loosen the grasp of conservatives, neoliberals, nativists and fascists on the political imagination.14 Contemporary art should not be any different, and revolutionising the political economy of artistic (in)visibility is of strategic importance to the success of this enterprise.

An ironing board

This transformation involves art works, artists, and artistic institutions all reworking old and constituting new regimes of visibility. Wright employs a notion of usership, a mode of using artistic competences in all walks of life beyond the conceptual edifices of modern art, drawing on Duchamp’s concept of the ‘reciprocal readymade’:

Anxious, he claimed, ‘to emphasize the fundamental antinomy between art and the readymade,’ Duchamp defined this radically new, yet subsequently never instantiated genre through an example: ‘Use a Rembrandt as an ironing-board.’ More than a mere quip to be taken at face value, or a facetious mockery of use-value, Duchamp’s example points to the symbolic potential of recycling art – and more broadly, artistic tools and competences – into other lifeworlds. In that respect, the reciprocal readymade is the obverse of the standard readymade, which recycles the real – in the form of manufactured objects – into the symbolic economy of art.15

Using Rembrandt as an ironing board is like turning an iceberg upside down, a topsy-turvy fetishism, an operation which makes the previously opaque realm of social labour and use value radiate with its own light. Using a Rembrandt as a domestic appliance would become a daily ritual, something usual, just the way things are. Greg Sholette, in his review of Wright’s Lexicon, points out there are many better ironing-boards than Rembrandts.16 He has a point. However, the operation is not really about the use value of a painting when used as an ironing board, but about the conceptual competence  involved in reframing the former as the latter. Considering ‘reciprocal readymades’, the theory of escapology becomes more substantiated. Instead of dumping art theory and history of art altogether, one can recycle old idioms and create new artistic facts, to make use of them outside of the field of art, refashioning what art is the way a tailor restitches the old cloak to give it new life. One can imagine a person ironing on a Rembrandt radiant with joy, energised by the play drive described by Friedrich Schiller:

man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays. […] I promise you that the whole edifice of aesthetic art and the still more difficult art of life will be supported by this principle.17

There are many contemporary examples of the employment of artistic facilities, many of them stored on the digital shelves of the Museum of Arte Útil, an online archive of socially applied art. Coming back to Sholette’s point, obviously ironing on a Rembrandt would be a waste. But employing an artwork as a reciprocal readymade is a gesture of defiant leisure that turns art into a collective luxury. 

People who are afraid that this would mean the end of art are mistaken, or only partly correct. It would mean the end of a very narrow notion of art cherished at the peak of the artistic iceberg. When the field of art becomes reintegrated with the flow of social labour (rather than with the flow of capital), artistic energies change their state but do not disappear. And in any case such worries are a bit preliminary, as the hierarchies of the art world will not disappear in the foreseeable future. Also, it is important to add that this transformation involves both artistic institutions and individual artists, and does not simply make them obsolete. The tectonic changes in the regimes regulating (in)visibility require concerted action, as a result of which new institutional forms emerge at the thresholds between public institutions and bottom-up initiatives – useful, deviant, emancipated, radical, conspirational, constituent  museums that help us to envision new institutions of the commons. Instead of working as gatekeepers, these new institutions rewrite the boundaries, re-considering their publics as users and constituents, and artists as partners. Instead of capturing artistic energies, they redirect them back to where they originated, to the bottom of the artistic iceberg, so that the artistic dark matter becomes visible.

Using Rembrandts as ironing boards might come in handy, considering the challenges we have to face, willingly or not, and the process of liquifying petrified artistic energies might release an unparalleled radiance, fulfilling potentials that might never have come to fruition otherwise. And it can be fun. Let me conclude with a practical example.

This image documents the demonstration of paintings, organised in Warsaw in March 2019 by a group of artists, post-artists, and not-not-artists at an annual anti-fascist march. The demonstration of paintings was inspired by a painting by Henryk Streng, a communist painter who in 1934 painted Demonstration of Paintings that depicts a group of painters carrying their paintings as if they were banners, expressing artistic and political ambitions of the Popular Front against fascism. In 2019 we returned to Streng’s image and to potentials unrealized in the 1930s. An ad-hoc artistic and curatorial block took the reproduction of ‘Demonstration of paintings’ to the actual demonstration of paintings, putting conceptualist tautologies to a better use, thus endowing an otherwise obscure painting with new energies and revolutionising the political economy of (in)visibility. These collective energies are generated in the process of production and use, they are normally concealed by mainstream artistic economies, and their release can help to revolutionize artistic production and its regimes of visibility. This is militant conceptualism in the making. With this shift, individual works do not disappear but radiate with collective use, the lifework of old heroes is assimilated to current creative energies, and new institutions emerge as custodians of ideas held in common, a storage facility for ironing boards in waiting, to be used by the many, and not by the few.