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With or Without Capitalism: old and new values of an art involved with
society.
Frdric Herbin
In 2004, the exhibition The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere, organized by Nato Thompson at the MASS MoCA,
demonstrated the persistence of a politically involved art beyond the 1980s. The forms on view, which remained somewhat
discrete in the art world because they were aimed rather at an efficiency in the everyday social sphere, were classified on the
basis of their intervention strategies: nomadism, action in the public place, annexation of intellectual discourses and education,
the creation of clothing and accessories improving the autonomy of individuals, and political action. The exhibition catalogue,
produced with Gregory Sholette,(1) borrowed that structure and was intended to be a users manual for the creative disruption
of everyday life.(2) Although Nato Thompson noted therein the degree to which cultural and political contexts have changed
since the 1960s, readers could subsequentlybut with surprisenote the significance of certain forms of action directly
inherited from that period in the works selected.(3) He pinpointed two tactics developed by the Situationist International, and
always very present in the works on view. Appropriation (dtournement) and drift (drive).(4) But it was possible to make that
observation for the whole curatorial projectfrom the choice of artists to the catalogues formwhich seemed overtaken by the
nostalgia of the political and artistic avant-garde movements active during the 1960s and 1970s, in both France and the United
States. Apart from the Situationists, Michael Rakowitzs inflatable, and the moveable structures of Lucy Orta, Dr Wapenaar and
N55 might call to mind the research of the Utopie group,(5) when the bus circuit conceived by e-Xplo and Reverend Billys
sermons against the consumer society were in keeping with the experiments undertaken by the pioneers of happenings.(6) To
borrow the words of Jean-Louis Violeau, it was thus this nebula in which the far left tradition, Situationist thinking, and the
imprint of H. [Henri] Lefebvre all coagulate,(7) which seemed to be the reference for this undertaking.

Use of this reference raises the issue of the updating which may be made in its regard today, in the field of an art keen to become
involved in social reality and make it evolve. The fact that the Situationists, the members of Utopie, and Jean-Jacques Lebelone
of the first people to have practiced and theorized about the happening in Francecan highlight values such as autonomy,
nomadism, ephemerality, and adaptability, is easily explained in the context of the 1960s. But the fact that we may still find them
being applied in 2004, by a new generation of socially involved artists, is surprising, given the conspicuous differences which
hallmark these two distant contexts. So it seems necessary to us to observe whether, over and above this apparent community
of issues and techniques, what is indeed involved is a complete re-utilization of the legacy of the 1960s and the 1970s. We have
to make a decision about the fact of knowing whether the values of the present-day forms of a politically committed art are the
same as those of their forbears. By extension, we will ask ourselves if these values still have a subversive character, or if they
should be replaced by new values.

Building a new world

The latest political and artistic avant-gardes, which we have referred to, share a common desire to go beyond just the artistic
arena, in order to act in a subversive way at the level of the entire society. Placing themselves explicitly within a revolutionary
perspective, their aim is to act on all the factors which condition the existence of every individual, in order to free people from all
forms of alienationin a word: transforming life itself. It is this idea which opens the Rapport sur la construction des situations et
sur les conditions de lorganisation et de laction de la tendance situationniste internationale written by Guy Debord in 1957, which
is the common base governing the creation of the movement of the same name: We think, first of all, that it is necessary to
change the world. We want the most liberating change in the society and the life in which we are confined.(8) To this end, a
struggle, no less, is being waged against all the (super)structures which form the capitalist industrial society, at the same time as
the emergence of a criticism of the Soviet system: Conservatism reigns East and West, mainly in the domain of culture and

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mores.(9) Everything which appears to be an established framework is immediately likened to the reactionary forces of a
bourgeois world which is breaking down.(10) Accordingly, these avant-garde groups are cultivating a marginal and critical
position with regard to political parties and towards recognized art movements and the authorities which legitimize them.

Starting from such an observation, it is not surprising that the values espoused by this nebula are the complete opposite of
what it is fighting: wandering, a non-respect for taboos, open-mindedness, an ongoing concern for evolution, all this is
erroneously arrayed against civilization and the rules of life which it imposes everywhere (except in the maquis).(11) The
methods of action used, be they the happening for Jean-Jacques Lebel, unitary urbanism for the Situationists, or Utopies
inflatable structures, are all aimed at creating these new patterns of social behaviour, and this new way of existing which should
help to sweep away the society of exploitation.(12) Pitted against an established order synonymous with immobilism,
conservativism, and alienated masses, it is a matter of promoting an intensification of the experience undergone, leading to
more authenticity. The individual must get away from a passiveonlookersposition in order to take an active partin this
sense participation is another of the powerful values of these protest movementsin the transformation of his environment.
Emancipation is thus conceived through the tropisms of mobility, adaptability and autonomy, for the advent of a new world
which, in contrast with the old one, will always be on the move, unstable, and deregulated.

Looking at the new forms of capitalism

On reading Nato Thompson, one understands that the artists of The Interventionists are acting in this new world that has become
reality. So, if they focus on the issue of mobility, for some of them this is because they are reacting to a world increasingly
forced to stay on the move. When they act in favour of individual autonomy, this involves, above all, providing means of
resistance and survival(13) for populations who are plunged in precariousness. Dr Wapenaars tents are like refuges in the
face of the world round about, its movement and its individualism. Krzystof Wodiczkos Homeless Vehicleand Michael Rakowitzs
ParaSITE are developed with the aim of helping out homeless people. Lucy Ortas Refuge Wearseries, for its part, is conceived to
help displaced people to survive. These projects undoubtedly hallmark the existence of a very different context to that of the
1960s and 1970s. These works actually still incarnate a critique of capitalist society, yet mobility, adaptability and autonomy are
no longer goals to be reached, but situations which are denounced and whose adverse effects on people must be reduced. With
these artists the object of protest has thus perceptibly shifted, as have forms of action, in relation to the context of the 1960s
and 1970s.

This situation tallies with the observation that Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello make about the state of criticism a few years
previously. In their famous analysis of the new spirit of capitalism, they note how, in the face of this latters development,
criticism is disarmed: it either uses anachronistic argumentsthose of the nebula of the 1960s and 1970sor it now only
operates on a charitable and humanitarian position, focused on the face-to-face encounter, on the present situation (as opposed
to a distant future), and on direct actions aimed at relieving the suffering of the wretched,(14) as is illustrated by The
Interventionists. What these criticisms are missing to spread the more adjusted representations, [are] renewed analytical models
and a social utopia.(15) In fact, as these sociologists show, the values highlighted by artistic criticism during the 1960s and
1970s are those which capitalism has adopted since the end of the 1970s, in order to renew itself. Taken up by Jean-Louis
Violeau about Utopie (16) and by Patrick Marcolini with regard to the Situationist International (17) this thesis leads to the
conclusion that what might be subversive for these groups no longer is, and that a socially involved art, today, must espouse
new critical values.

For Patrick Marcolini, it is now a question of being conservative,(18) thus defending the community, that is to say the
autonomous forms of collective life and popular culture, and working on the re-appropriation of what is its loam: the vernacular
gestures and know-how which are the guarantee of an auto-production of the wherewithal of existence, and thus of an
independence with regard to all manner of power....(19) For Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, in the face of the connectionist
world which typifies the new forms of capitalism, it is necessary to oppose the possibility of slowing down the

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connections...(20) and guarantee a certain stability brought in particular by the existence of collectives striving to keep
identities what they are [...] whose energy is galvanized by the struggle against rootlessness.(21) As we well understand, to
contravene the new capitalist order, protests must play with a form of footholdat least partialin terms of place, time-frame,
status and collective organization.

An art of collective experience

Though not very present at the moment of The Interventionists, we may consider that these forms of foothold renew the
physiognomy of a socially involved art through the development of arrangements of situated (insomuch as they respond to a
particular context) collective experiences. It is not a question, here, of clinging to the tendency of relational aesthetics,(22) whose
limits have already been pointed out.(23) In our view, it is rather in the framework of public or semi-public art and the production
methods which it gives rise to, that these new arrangements take place. In the wake of what Suzanne Lacy has called new genre
public art,(24) we can think of Culture in Action in Chicago and the examples quoted by Claire Bishop: Artangel in London, SKOR
in the Netherlands, Nouveaux Commanditaires in France....(25) It is the last of these examples which interests us because it
stands apart in several respects, in particular for having ushered in its own theorization by claiming to be a possibility of art
without capitalismthe title of the book written by Franois Hers, the artist who invented this system, and Xavier Douroux.(26)
So in taking root within a criticism of the public commission, like the other systems referred to, it has the distinctive feature of
being detached from the usual operation of the art market, and even of the whole art circuit, by refusing the policy of supply in
favour of that of demand.

Introduced by the Fondation de France in 1991, the Nouveaux Commanditaires (New Patrons) are a system for commissioning
and producing public art, based on the idea that this art can respond to a social need expressed by any individual or group of
individuals. In a way, these principles do not contradict the usual expectations of artistic criticism in terms of autonomy,
because they make it possible to escape from the pitfall of an art that is imposed from on high, by a public power, by market
forces, and even by art institutions. They also invariably strive to re-establish a form of authenticity in the relations which are
established between the producerthe artisthis productionthe workand people, by being placed outside the traditional
consumer relations of capitalism: people placing commissions are not purchasers. But from this viewpoint, the Nouveaux
Commanditaires are not directly opposed to the new forms of capitalism which have, for the most part, absorbed these
criticisms. What is more, Franois Hers does not include his idea within a revolutionary perspective similar to that of the 1960s
and 1970s. For him, that time is over: there is no avant-garde anymore.(27)

The Nouveaux Commanditaires are rooted in the reality of the connectionist world, as illustrated both by an action conducted
by way of many different concomitant projects, and a networking of the territory by a system of mediators whose job is to bring
them to fruition. The way in which this system seems capable of opposing neo-capitalism resides in the particular arrangement
which it undertakes for these different elements. Franois Hers has devised a protocol which, while being based on the
democratic model, seeks to renew the exercise of it through the idea of a sharing of equal responsibilities.(28) This latter fixes
the functions and statuses of the different people involved in the commission and the production of the work: the party placing
the commission, the mediator and the artist. The protocol thereby establishes an initial form of foothold, a form that fixes
relations, in the face of the ceaseless changes being organized by the new forms of capitalism. The second form of foothold
involves the fact that the work produced responds to a need associated with a specific situation. By being included within the
logic of site-specific practices,(29) where one of the original driving factors is to withstand the way the moveable work becomes
merchandise, this latter is literally attached to the context of its appearance. So in addition to this static state inherent in the
conditions of its productions, the work contrasts the logic of the ephemeral and the short-term, which hallmarks the new
capitalism, with a third form of foothold in time. If the projects undertaken within the framework of the Nouveaux
Commanditaires present time-frames which vary a great deal, we can already note that most of them are developed over a
relatively long time span between the expression of the need and the delivery of the work which responds to it. The work
produced thus materializes this path for the parties placing commissions, and incorporates it within time because this latter is
often lomng-lasting.

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So all the specific features of this arrangement are so many resistances put up against the values of adaptability, mobility and
change espoused by the political and artistic nebula of the 1960s and 1970s, which neo-capitalism has since adopted as its own.
This evolution of values and methods of protest also merits being observed in the way it is articulated with both the work and the
viewer. If the movements of the 1960s and 1970s turned their back on traditional political iconography, preferring to look for the
means of fighting against capitalist society on its own terrainthat of the everyday environment--, the Nouveaux
Commanditaires mark a new stage. In fact, this arrangement shifts the expression of criticism principally to the terrain where the
work is produced. It is here, for example, that the question of participationalready very present in the 1960s and 1970sis
engaged, but in new ways: The commission is an act which demands to be assumed by all those who are involved in it, from its
statement to its result, which does not mean participation.(30) Likewise, the collective experience undergone during the
production of the work is often absent from it. Most of the time, the work does not illustrate the process of its creation and all
the questions that it contains are thus not to be altogether found in its accomplishment.
It is perhaps at this level that the critical limit of the Nouveaux Commanditaires is to be found. While the collective experience
proposed by this arrangement seems very rich to us, in terms of what it involves by way of resistance to the functioning of neocapitalism and in terms of what it proposes by way of renewal of the democratic model, the works which result from it rarely play
the role of echo chamber or even amplifier of this critical load. It must be admitted that what takes place during the process of
producing the workthat real and not naive exercise of democracy, which is expressed through tensions and conflicts(31)is
probably difficult to bring together, in the final object, with the functionality which it should assume. The fact remains that the
system thus conceived in fact puts a boundary between the experience of the person placing the order and the experience of the
spectator, who do not seem to us to be of equal interest at the critical level. So by assigning a precise role to the artist within the
context of the commission, the protocol may act like a brake on the fact that this latter itself bears the critical load. These latter
observations lead us to conclude that if the Nouveaux Commanditaires appear to us like a new model for socially involved art,
they are also the demonstration of two significant changes. One has to do with the values which are put forward and which can
no longer be the same as they were 40 or 50 years ago. The other involves the place where this involvement is situated. With this
art of experience, as represented by the Nouveaux Commanditaires, the artist and the work are no longer the only bearers of the
involvement; this is now more sharedthe necessary consequence of a real distribution of responsibilities.

Text published on additionaldocument.org Frdric Herbin et Documents d'artistes, juin 2014

Translated by Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods

1. He is one of the founders of the artists collectives Political Art Documentation/Distribution (1980-1988) and REPOhistory (1989-2000).
2. Nato Thompson, Gregory Sholette (eds.), exh.cat. , The Interventionists. Users Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life, (North Adams, MASS MoCA,
29 May 2004 - March 2005), North Adams, MASS MoCA Publications, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2004.
3. Nato Thompson, Trespassing Relevance, in Nato Thompson, Gregory Sholette (eds.), op. cit., p. 13-22.
4. Ibidem, p. 16.
5. See Marc Dessauce (ed.), The Inflatable Moment. Pneumatics and Protest in 68, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1999.
6. Suffice it to think of the Wold Vostells PC Petite Ceinture or the actions of Jean-Jacques Lebel, in particular 120 minutes ddies au Divin Marquis.
7. Jean-Louis Violeau, Jean Baudrillard, Utopie, 68 et la fonction utopique, Paris, Sens & Tonka, 2013, p. 29-30.
8. Guy Debord, Rapport sur la construction des situations, Paris, Mille et une nuits, 2000, p. 7, [1957].
9. Idem, p. 17.
10. Id., p. 16.
11. Jean-Jacques Lebel, Le happening, Paris, Editions Denol, 1966,p. 55.
12. Mise au point, a declaration signed by more than forty international representatives of the happening, in Jean-Jacques Lebel, idem, p. 76.
13. Nato Thompson, op. cit., p. 19 : a world increasingly forced to stay on the move and p. 20 : of resistance and survival.
14. Luc Boltanski, Eve Chiapello, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, Paris, Editions Gallimard, 1999, p. 459.
15. Idem, p. 27.
16. Jean-Louis Violeau, idem, p. 41-42.
17. Patrick Marcolini, Le mouvement situationniste. Une histoire intellectuelle, Montreuil, Editions Lchappe, 2012, p. 314-323.
18. For him, the term is by no means plitical, in the traditional sense of the word.
19. Idem, p. 328.
20. Luc Boltanski, Eve Chiapello, idem, p. 634.
21. Idem, p. 635.
22. Nicolas Bourriaud, Esthtique relationnelle, Dijon, Les Presses du reel, 1998.
23. See in particular Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, London, New York, Verso, 2012.
24. Suzanne Lacy, Cultural Pilgrimages and Metaphoric Journeys, in Suzanne Lacy (ed.), Mapping the Terrain : New Genre Public Art, Seattle, Bay Press, 1994, p.
19-30.

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25. Claire Bishop, The Social Turn : Collaboration and its discontents, Artforum, vol. 44, n6, February 2006, p. 178-183.
26. Franois Hers, Xavier Douroux, Lart sans le capitalisme, Dijon, les presses du rel, 2011.
27. Franois Hers, Les Nouveaux commanditaires / Rcit, in Franois Hers, Xavier Douroux, op. cit., p. 9.
28. Franois Hers, Le Protocole, in idem, p. 53.
29. On this subject see Miwon Kwon, One place after another : site-specific art and locational identity, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2004.
30. Franois Hers Les Nouveaux commanditaires / Rcit, in idem, p. 16.
31. Franois Hers, Le Protocole, in idem, p. 53.

Frdric Herbin is Temporary Teaching and Research Assistant at Franois Rabelais University, in Tours.
He is finishing a doctoral thesis in contemporary art history about the different ways of taking museums into account in works of
the late 1960s and 1970s in France. So his research is concerned with the birth and definition of the site-specific, institutional
criticism and sociological art in the French context. He is currently working on two publications at the ENSA Bourges : Les
Organisations despaces de Jean-Michel Sanejouand (1967-1974). Pour une gnalogie des pratiques in situ en France, in the wake
of the exhibition he organized on this subject, and LObjet de lexposition : Larchitecture expose, a collective volume which he has
edited.