The Metronome of Capital

Superflex: One Two Three Swing!
Tate Modern, London
03.10.17 – 02.04.18

Superflex’s Hyundai Commission for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall operates in three sections. Descending the gentle slope into the Hall takes you over the first: a striped tongue of carpet, derived from the colour palette of British banknotes. Above hangs a silver wrecking ball, lolling back and forth – mildly menacing, but never threatening. An orange beam snaps back and forth at abrupt right angles through the Hall, a three-dimensional manifestation of the swells and crashes of an unidentified financial market. Attached to this beam are three-person swings. Together, these constitute the second section of the installation. The swings are assembled in a small ‘workshop’ in the third section at the end of the Hall, before they are attached to the orange beam. These three sections are dedicated, respectively, to ‘apathy’, ‘movement’ and ‘production’, as part of an attempt to question the individual’s role in the face of overwhelming economic forces, and the possibility of challenging them collectively.

On the basis of this show, we might as well give up now. Lying under the pendulum, presumably I am expected to acknowledge how tragically hypnotised I am by the metronomic dance of capital. Instead, I’m reminded of the dictum ‘It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.’¹ That lack of imagination seems to infest this exhibition: after claiming to address a vague notion of ‘the economy’, it is entirely bereft of any idea of where and how we might actually go about generating a shift in its conditions, other than suggesting an equally vague notion of doing it ‘together’. A purpose is heralded without there really being one, alluding to some cliché of resistance, while being entirely complicit in ensuring the futility of that proposal. This is not benign: it reinforces the belief that there cannot be any genuine challenge to the status quo of the current economic system and, more specifically, that art cannot offer a perspective on that challenge. The work reinforces the apathy it claims to address.

In the wall text, Superflex suggest we might ask ourselves: ‘Is it gravity or the economy that pulls us down?’ From what we can see here, there is no difference between the two – both are so natural, irrefutable and immobile that they cannot even be challenged in an exhibition proposing to do exactly that. What is troubling is that this is not delusional: neither the artists nor the curators really seem to believe the work is capable of offering a critical position relating to its stated themes of ‘apathy’, ‘movement’ and ‘production’, in the name of ‘change’ – neither practically nor metaphorically. It is as if all hope that this work could even position itself critically has been lost.

This ultimately permits Hyundai, the corporate sponsors proudly described beside the work, to piggyback on the exhibition’s pseudo-critical posturing. The prime mechanism is a vagueness in ambition so profound it permits the intrusion of other ( corporate ) interests. Superflex are keen to depict their artworks as ‘tools’, but it is imperative that they take responsibility for how their tools are used, and for whose benefit. The wall text asks ‘Watch, rest and reflect – will you stay or go?’ ‘Swinging together has greater potential than swinging alone’, encouraging you to ‘Swing into action on the count of three!’ What ‘action’? ‘Potential’ for what? Collective labour here is elided with mechanisms of generating ‘change’, where swinging is ‘conceived of as an assembly line for collective movement’. This harks back to the Turbine Hall’s former life as part of Bankside Power Station, but also alludes to the happy worker in the car assembly line of, for example, a Hyundai. In contrast to those forms of industrial production, however, this feels more like the hamster wheel: energy expended as movement, without direction or ambition.

In fact, this particular ‘assembly line’ is for the age of the service economy, and looks more like the playroom of a Google office, with a façade of fun that exists to accelerate the transfer of capital – where play primarily exists to facilitate work. As a participant in this installation, then, for whom am I working? As with the rest of the show, it’s nebulous and easily co-opted: in the absence of any other direction, perhaps the only work I’m doing is for Tate, by posting myself on a swing on social media, or buying a Tate-approved bedside lamp in the design store by the exit, or even thinking about Hyundai ( for once ).

The ‘participation’ of the viewer interacting with a work of art may too readily be assumed to be an inherently more open, more democratic and more worthy practice. That a 2018 exhibition dependent on the value systems of relational aesthetics is still doing the rounds suggests that this format still holds a special, powerful place in the contemporary art institution. Claire Bishop, who expounded a thorough critique of Nicolas Bourriaud’s 1990s theorisation of relational aesthetics, has proposed a critical reason for its enduring appeal, noting that it ensures that the museum ‘becomes marketable as a space of leisure and entertainment’.² Tate Modern is currently a venue where posters reminding us where to EAT and SHOP are as prominent as ones directing us to ART.³ A playground is an ideal installation for a mall, a convenient ready-made where uncritical leisure and entertainment can be relabelled as art, simply by virtue of being located in an art museum. The art can then operate to enable allied institutional goals of achieving more visitor numbers and supporting itself as a site of commerce. Swing! will get away with it, because it brings people in, keeps them there, and prompts numerous photo opportunities. None of these things necessarily makes it valuable as an artwork. The dependence on visitor numbers and revenue that might be applied to a leisure centre funnels all institutions down the same path. What is at stake here is the possibility for contemporary art within institutions to maintain a genuine position of criticality in current economic conditions. Tragic though it is, this could consequently be the worst Turbine Hall Commission to date and also, by Tate’s own terms, one of its most successful.

On the evidence of Swing! there appears to be an almost wilful disregard for development in this field. Here the nature of participation is entirely prescribed – the viewer either commits to join the assembly line, or leaves ( ‘Will you stay or go?’ ); the choice is binary, and neither option holds any critical weight. What is odd about this is that the artist’s involvement of the viewer is usually a mechanism for increasing unpredictability in a work, and relinquishing a degree of control. Swing!, however, seems to offer a point of connection entirely on its own terms, reluctant or incapable of permitting any genuine sense of viewer choice or potential. In this regard Swing! treats its viewers as a homogeneous mass of commodified spectators. This points to the ongoing need for exploration beyond the permitted limits of Swing! and its ilk, including asking how individuals engage with participatory work in ways that cannot be prescribed and controlled; the degree to which a viewer is complicit in the rules of the work they’ve entered ( and likewise the artist in the actions of the viewer within that work ); and how participation holds certain responsibilities, dependencies and obligations within complex structures of control and dynamics of power, rather than being presumed to embody emancipation or engender some abstract notion of ‘community’.

Bishop’s advocacy of antagonism may be seen as critical in this regard – namely, the negotiation of conflicting positions in interpersonal relations, rather than their amalgamation in pseudo-collective apparent consensus.⁴ Hal Foster has made a not dissimilar point in respect to relational aesthetics, emphasising the necessity for art to at least take a stand, even if that position generates conflict.⁵ This conflict is precisely, and deliberately, what is avoided and disabled by Superflex. For antagonism and taking a position of some sort enforce debate, disagreement and potential controversy, and embody risk. Risk, of course, is the enemy of financial investment. But it should be remembered that risk is to the benefit of artistic practice and exhibition-making, without which there is no experimentation, with nothing at stake, producing exhibitions entirely devoid of agency. It is in this wasteland that the potential for art as a mechanism of critique perishes, and ulterior agents already widely represented in our current economic system are able to flourish.

1. Noted by Fredric Jameson and, subsequently, Mark Fisher.

2. Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October, no. 110 ( Fall 2004 ), pp. 51 – 79 ( p. 52 ).

3. Of a total of sixteen floors now at Tate Modern, only seven have any art exhibitions at all, and another seven are devoted entirely to shops, restaurants, cafés or bars.

4. See Claire Bishop, Double Agent, eds Claire Bishop and Silvia Tramontana, ICA, London, 2008, p. 101.

5. Hal Foster, ‘Chat Rooms’ ( 2004 ), in Participation, ed. Claire Bishop, Whitechapel, London, 2006, pp. 190 – 5 ( p. 194 ).