Voiding the Touch
Mike Nelson’s The Asset Strippers
Earlier this week I spent some time walking through Mike Nelson’s extraordinary installation at Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries: The Asset Strippers. Nelson has filled the adjoining rooms of this space with large pieces of industrial salvage, factory machines for sewing, spraying pain, moving earth, sawing and other purposes unknown. In addition, the artist has installed used wooden doors and timber walls to divide up the space into rooms that accentuate the sensation of entering an industrial workshop.
What struck me most about the exhibition, something which was stronger than almost any other installation I have seen anywhere, was the intensely tactile nature of the materials. In a superficial sense of course this is not surprising, these are objects which were designed to be touched: to work and be worked. However, this experience was complicated by the gallery setting, in spite of the mask which Nelson has applied to it. The gallery is somewhere which is (naturally) primarily visual, but where other senses, most commonly sound may be engaged. Galleries also engage the feet; installations in particular often present works that are walked through rather than merely observed. Touch however remains the least engaged and most actively prohibited sense in the gallery, for some sensible reasons (protection of fragile works and so on) and some less sensible ones. In this case one need only think of the issues around Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds [Kui Hua Zi] which visitors were prevented from touching the work despite this being explicitly in contradiction with the work’s intention. In The Asset Strippers the desire to touch is overwhelming. The machines ask for the hand, they demand the body to move them, as though embodied in them were the absent labour required to be performed, the work still to be done.
In trying to think about this effect, there were two ways of approaching the exhibition which immediately presented themselves, both of which seemed wholly inadequate: namely, viewing the works as relics, or else taking them to be examples of ready-mades in the now long-exorcised spirit of Dada. However, in thinking about why this exhibition seemed to be beyond their grasp, or rather to be doing something altogether different, certain elements of the effect The Asset Strippers started to come to light.
To begin with then, one might have expected these machines of large-scale industrial production, acquired in scrap auctions after the decommissioning of the factories or workshops where they were in use, to appear to us, inhabitants of a technologically-accelerated globalised contemporary form of capitalism as relics. That is, that in the present world of virtual reality, touch screen interfaces, proliferating ‘white collar’ office work and immaterial service industry labour, that these obsolete pieces of equipment, whose functions in some cases are unknown to us, might appear entirely alien. Here the effect would be similar to that of a museum exhibit, presenting the viewer with ancient pieces of a lost civilisation; disconnected from the present by a gulf which cannot sufficiently be crossed. However, the overtly tactile nature of the works seems to undermine this. These are not works which inspire awe or wonder, they do not hold an aura of un-recognition, quite the reverse. They present their inherent usefulness as a challenge to the space surrounding them.
The question of aura, of the status of the work as work is at the heart of the function of the ready-made. At the most basic level one can summarise the principal activity of the ready-made, its questioning of the status of the artwork and the concept of Art (with a decidedly capital letter), as one performed through alienation. To clarify, the effect created by the ready-made is as a result of the inclusion, the presence in the gallery space, of an object which would ‘not normally be permitted’, such as a tin of soup or the infamous urinal. The ready-made, like many radical actions within the field of artistic practice, is a gesture which cannot remain potent for long before being recuperated into the ‘ordinary’ functioning of the institution of art. This potential of the ready-made is one effected via a tension between the ready-made object and the space it inhabits: the gallery which contextualises the work as a work and yet which the object seemingly resists. The questioning of the object by its surroundings and vice versa are amplified by the alien, and alienating, relation between them. There is a paradoxical character to this relation then, in the fact that the gallery space, which lends the object its “authenticity” which grants autonomy to the work from the other objects of its kind, is precisely the force which is being put into question by the object itself. The ready-made undermines the very process by which its power to interrogate the status of the work of art is formed. Its antagonism to the institution is, necessarily, immanent.
These are not, however, ready-mades. The gesture is not one akin to Duchamp (or perhaps to Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven). In the case of The Asset Strippers something different, though related, is taking place. Not only are these objects not ready-mades, they are not, however much one might admire their shape and form, sculptures and they do not appear as such. The way they are displayed emphasises this. There are no plinths, no barriers and no signs instructing visitors to refrain from touching the works. Nelson’s installation, rather than taking part in the auroral concretising (and reifying) force effected by the gallery on an object placed within it, degrades both the objects and the surrounding space. The gallery becomes a workshop, deliberately segregated from the rest of the gallery via temporary, and decaying structures. This workshop resists the transformation of the machines into sculptures and reduces all around them to their own level of materiality. It forms a place for touching and for work, for fashioning and shaping materials. The works within it are no longer works of art (because they never were); they are machines for performing labour.
We are dealing here with a different kind of paradox. Here the unstable relation of work and space comes from the fact that the process of degradation, degradation of the both gallery and of the objects within it, is the mechanism by which the installation performs its most radically artistic (and aesthetic) gesture. In trying to interpret this movement, one might suggest that the works seek to re-centre the question of production in artistic practice. In this sense the works serve as a reminder of the fact that art above all is a practice, a form of labour, one whose materials are not dissimilar from those of industry (paint, sheet metal, textiles etc). Further, that the space in which art happens is not merely in circulation, but in production, in the studio, the workshop, a place rough unfinished and, in opposition to the gallery, the sense of touch is absolutely primary. Alternatively, one might think of it as a comment on the work of art as commodity, Nelson enacting a kind of subsumption, transforming the gallery into a workshop in order to draw a parallel between works of art and factory commodities.
Beyond this however, the title of the installation alerts us to the idea of a labour which is missing from these works which are being displayed, the labour being that of Britain’s industrial past, the place from which these assets have been stripped and “re-purposed”. The question then is how this act of re-purposing has failed to come about. The heavy presence of touch reveals the element of the past which is undeniably present. The industrial has not been neatly segregated from our present time, it remains. What I want to suggest is that the sense of touch, of wanting to work these machines, which the installation presents is the sensuous result of the necessary failure of the transformation of these objects from tools of labour to sculptural works of art. And further, that this failure reveals something about the capitalism of today which is far more interesting than would be the case had the transformation succeeded.
The world of contemporary capital is one which is sold to us as increasingly virtual, immaterial, and ever-accelerating with opportunity. We communicate electronically, become social through media, and are encouraged to lead second lives in virtual worlds some fantastical others close models of our own kept alive by processing power. Money is traded and accumulated at speeds faster than human thought. There are even rumours about the potential for transferring consciousness from the brain to a computer in the not-too-distant future, immortality commodified as immateriality.
However, this is just the world as it is sold. What The Asset Strippers does is to render visible the corporeal nature of capitalism: its unyielding commitment, no matter what it might seek to tell us to the contrary, to the physical expenditure of human labour. Capitalism is a system by which value, and therefore profit, is only ever created by a differential relation between the value created by the expenditure of human labour in a given time, and the cost of reproducing that capacity to labour crystallised in the wage form. Capital can make innovations and revolutionise technology and transform lives, it can do almost anything but give up wage labour, its only source of value. Our tools have changed but the wage relation remains the same. Added to this, of course is the sense that these machines are not, in actuality, obsolete. Production is not done here any longer but it has not been superseded, merely displaced to countries where that labour is cheaper: India, Vietnam, Bangladesh and so on.
The power of the gallery to imbue an object with the status of a work of art is refused by the objects in The Asset Strippers and instead the gallery space becomes a site of potential work. The machines in this way retain and express a kind of abstract human labour, one through which the installation crystallises an experience of contemporary capitalism. The desire for these objects to be transformed into that which cannot be touched, dissolved into flux and transfigured into sculptures seemingly autonomous from commodity production, objects to be held under glass or separated by alarmed stretches of wire, fails. In doing so, this failure reaffirms the necessity for the presence of human bodies underlies the surface fluidity. This is one of capital’s great contradictions: its tendency, through technological proliferation, to expel the human activity from which it is able to accumulate value. As a result, it must exponentially intensify production, including the subsumption of all life processes and time ‘outside’ or work into the mechanism of accumulation. Every space of life’s expression becomes a potential site of exploitation.
Ultimately, the key achievement of The Asset Strippers is its questioning of two powers of transformation: the power of the gallery space acting on the commodity object considered a work of art; and the power of capital to conceal human labour beneath a mask of fluidity, opportunity and progress, through a disconcerting interrelation of the two. All that is solid does not melt into air, the hand hesitates, then reaches out toward its object.
‘The Asset Strippers’ is at Tate Britain until 6th October 2019
