#5 Hito Steyerl "Is a Museum a Factory?"

"What else is desperately missing from the museum-as-factory? An exit. If the factory is everywhere, then there is no longer a gate by which to leave it - there is no way to escape relenteless productivity" (p.232)
Hito Steyerl1

"Liden offers blankness - and its aural handmaiden, muteness - less as a critique or a way out than as a condition [...] In her work I sense a tacit acknowledgement that the jig is up, that being an artist is just another way of getting by, a coping strategy for living under late capitalism" (p.223)
Helen Molesworth2

I didn't think of this until opinions that Steyerl's claims are unsubstantiated prompted me to, but could the essay "Is a Museum a Factory?" be considered a manifesto? After all, art manifestos often intend to provoke strong reactions with their rhetoric. Steyerl's bold claims, the article's deliberate legibility (larger-than-usual, non-academic font), the political content - do these tick the boxes of what qualifies a piece of writing as a manifesto?

The manifesto's innate belief in revolution seems to be denied by Steyerl's less-than-optimistic 'there is no way to escape' conclusion. The seeping of work into leisure, the transformation of spectators into workers, Beller's idea that 'to look is to labour', the gallery/museum as a site of hyper-production: these ideas seem so all-encompassing and are presented so matter-of-factly it can be difficult to see a different reality.

But attempts to see a different reality do exist. Helen Molesworth offers Klara Liden's work as an example of an artist trying to 'break out' of this all-consuming system. Molesworth interprets a perceived 'embodied silence' in Liden's work as approaching the position of the Neutral. As proposed by Roland Barthes, the Neutral is the 'third term that disrupts the binary logic underwriting Western civilisation' (Molesworth, p.223) and possibly 'the only way out of the unbearable way in which we have all been turned into consumers' (Molesworth, p.223).

Yet, Molesworth later nudges her 'delight' towards 'something less than hope' by suggesting that Liden's work may be a description of the times rather than a critique (so what could have been an exit is really just another problem to work through). Steyerl's 'exit' is offered to us in a glib one-liner, devoid of any commitment to its realisation in the typical manner of final sentences. What is it about our current environment makes us so cautious to hope for something?

Regardless, the possibility of the manifesto comforts me. Steyerl's claims may or may not be substantiated, but her boldness in conceptualising a difficult reality remains commendable.

References

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   Steyerl, Hito. "Is a Museum a Factory?" e-flux journal reader 2009, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009, pp 28-42.




2. Molesworth, Helen. "In Memory of Static." Artforum 49.07 (2011): pp.215-223. Print.