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    Sewn in the Sweatshops of Marx: Beuys, Warhol, Klein, Duchamp
    Sewn in the Sweatshops of Marx: Beuys, Warhol, Klein, Duchamp
    Sewn in the Sweatshops of Marx: Beuys, Warhol, Klein, Duchamp
    Ebook117 pages4 hours

    Sewn in the Sweatshops of Marx: Beuys, Warhol, Klein, Duchamp

    By Thierry de Duve and Rosalind E. Krauss

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    About this ebook

    Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Yves Klein, and Marcel Duchamp form an unlikely quartet, but they each played a singular role in shaping a new avant-garde for the 1960s and beyond. Each of them staged brash, even shocking, events and produced works that challenged the way the mainstream art world operated and thought about itself.
     
    Distinguished philosopher Thierry de Duve binds these artists through another connection: the mapping of the aesthetic field onto political economy. Karl Marx provides the red thread tying together these four beautifully written essays in which de Duve treats each artist as a distinct, characteristic figure in that mapping. He sees in Beuys, who imagined a new economic system where creativity, not money, was the true capital, the incarnation of the last of the proletarians; he carries forward Warhol’s desire to be a machine of mass production and draws the consequences for aesthetic theory; he calls Klein, who staked a claim on pictorial space as if it were a commodity, “The dead dealer”; and he reads Duchamp as the witty financier who holds the secret of artistic exchange value. Throughout, de Duve expresses his view that the mapping of the aesthetic field onto political economy is a phenomenon that should be seen as central to modernity in art. Even more, de Duve shows that Marx—though perhaps no longer the “Marxist” Marx of yore—can still help us resist the current disenchantment with modernity’s many unmet promises.
     
    An intriguing look at these four influential artists, Sewn in the Sweatshops of Marx is an absorbing investigation into the many intertwined relationships between the economic and artistic realms.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateOct 15, 2012
    ISBN9780226922393
    Sewn in the Sweatshops of Marx: Beuys, Warhol, Klein, Duchamp

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      Book preview

      Sewn in the Sweatshops of Marx - Thierry de Duve

      Thierry de Duve is an art historian, critic, and curator. His publications in English include Kant after Duchamp and Clement Greenberg between the Lines.

      The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

      The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

      © 2012 by Thierry de Duve

      All rights reserved. Published 2012.

      Printed in the United States of America

      21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12    1 2 3 4 5

      ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92237-9 (cloth)

      ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92238-6 (paper)

      ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92239-3 (e-book)

      ISBN-10: 0-226-92237-5 (cloth)

      ISBN-10: 0-226-92238-3 (paper)

      ISBN-10: 0-226-92239-1 (e-book)

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Duve, Thierry de.

      [Cousus de fil d’or. English]

      Sewn in the sweatshops of Marx : Beuys, Warhol, Klein, Duchamp / Thierry de Duve ; Translated by Rosalind E. Krauss.

            pages cm

      ISBN 978-0-226-92237-9 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-92238-6 (paperback : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-92239-3 (e-book) — ISBN 0-226-92237-5 (cloth: alkaline paper) — ISBN 0-226-92238-3 (paperback : alkaline paper) — ISBN 0-226-92239-1 (e-book) 1. Art, Modern—20th century. 2. Beuys, Joseph. 3. Warhol, Andy, 1928–1987. 4. Klein, Yves, 1928–1962. 5. Duchamp, Marcel, 1887–1968. I. Krauss, Rosalind E., translator. II. Title.

      N6490.D8813 2012

      709.04—dc23

      2012011387

      This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

      Sewn in the Sweatshops of Marx

      Beuys, Warhol, Klein, Duchamp

      THIERRY DE DUVE

      Translated by Rosalind E. Krauss

      University of Chicago Press :: CHICAGO AND LONDON

      Contents

      Preface 2009

      Joseph Beuys, or The Last of the Proletarians

      Andy Warhol, or The Machine Perfected

      Yves Klein, or The Dead Dealer

      Marcel Duchamp, or The Phynancier of Modern Life

      Postface 2009

      Notes

      Preface 2009

      Milton produced Paradise Lost for the same reason a silkworm produces silk. It was an activity of his nature.

      KARL MARX, Capital, Book IV

      If the silkworm were to spin in order to provide for its existence as a caterpillar, it would be a perfect wage-worker.

      KARL MARX, Wage-Labor and Capital

      This book started as a commission—of the kind you instinctively tell yourself: there is trouble ahead, an irresistible incentive. In December 1987, a French publisher approached me on behalf of a Parisian art gallery with a specific request. The gallery in question was soon to stage an exhibition gathering works by Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein, and Andy Warhol. Would I write an essay linking those four artists together? I politely declined the invitation, on the grounds that catalogue essays were by principle not critical of the artist, and I might be very critical of Yves Klein.¹ But when the reply came that I was to produce an independent book published merely on the occasion of the gallery show and that I would be granted all liberty, I said I would think it over. I didn’t sleep much that night, for I was hooked. In my insomnia, a red thread imposed itself that would indeed, and convincingly, link the four artists together, as well as articulate my own writing to its material circumstances: money. Not money per se, but money as symptomatic of a phenomenon that I had an inkling was constitutive of modernity, and which our four artists had brought to a close, completed, terminated: the perfect mapping of the aesthetic field onto that of political economy. You might say I espoused Walter Benjamin’s intuition that politics and economics had displaced religion as the relevant interpretant (in Peirce’s sense) for art, but with a retrospective twist that made Benjamin more a part of the phenomenon he analyzed than its outside analyst.

      The next day I called the publisher and told him I accepted the commission. Four months later I sent him the manuscript, and he refused it. I had written critical things about Yves Klein, and the book was in effect a catalogue exhibition in disguise. So much for my naiveté.

      I waited a year and then offered the manuscript to a publishing house whose policy I felt affinity with. Art Edition was happy to publish it (my gratitude to the late Jean-Louis Maubant for this). We gave the book the untranslatable title Cousus de fil d’or: Beuys, Warhol, Klein, Duchamp.² As a literal rendering conveying what my red thread had been, Sewn with Gold Thread is fine, but it doesn’t conjure up the French cousu de fil blanc, a phrase that intimates blatantly transparent reasoning and means something like worn on one’s sleeve. The reason for that innuendo had to do with the tongue-in-cheek avowal of banality I wanted the title to connote. If its English adaptation, Sewn in the Sweatshops of Marx: Beuys, Warhol, Klein, Duchamp, suggests that some gross appeal to Marxism, too gross to be taken at face value, connects these four very different artists, then it wears its own deception on its sleeve, and it is not a bad title. But I should not give away why I think so.

      For quite a while the English version of Cousus de fil d’or did not have a title because it did not require one. Having read the manuscript and upon hearing why the publisher refused it, Rosalind Krauss offered to issue it in four installments in October magazine. Moreover, she did the translation herself.³ My gratitude to her is matched only by my gratitude to Susan Bielstein, who has offered to harbor several books of mine at the University of Chicago Press, and who has made me wonder why I waited twenty-one years to reunite those four October articles in their original book form. Here they are, with only minor retouches to the translation and none of any significance to the original manuscript.

      In the month that followed my acceptance of the commission, I frantically read or reread all of Karl Marx’s economic writings, from the Manuscripts of 1844 to Capital. I took notes, many. Then I filed all this away and wrote the book in three months, without a footnote. No doubt it suffers from this haste; whether it also gains from the speed and energy the reading of Marx imparted is for the reader to judge. Marx really is its red thread—which, to be fair, doesn’t make it a Marxist (or an anti-Marxist) book for all that, but something Marxian came together for me in the first months of 1988. I was certainly not the first intellectual to realize that if Marx was as young as ever, it was not for the predictive but for the explanatory value of his writings. For many, this was cause of suffering. For me, it became an uncanny source of exhilaration: Marx can still help us make sense of modernity—in art and elsewhere—without obliging us to endorse or, for that matter, reject, mourn, or lament his political hopes. Because his writings cannot totally be stripped of their utopianism, they offer themselves as a projection plane for modernity’s many unfulfilled promises, as a map, a translation device, an interpretant (again in Peirce’s sense). Marx helped me treat the disenchantment with modernity that characterizes so much contemporary thinking with the same cruel gaiety with which the thinkers of the Enlightenment treated what Max Weber has called the disenchantment of the world. The choice is not between postmodern melancholy and postmodernist cynicism. When myths and utopias are read against the grain of their authors’ wishes, they release new, liberating meanings and feelings. My exhilaration in reading Marx in the first months of 1988 resembles Kant’s enthusiasm at a remove when he was confronted with the French Revolution. Kant did not rejoice at the sight of the revolution; he rejoiced at the sight of the enthusiasm for the revolution among those who had more to lose than to gain from it. Similarly, studying Marx in 1988 with the results of Marxist utopias in mind could hardly have been enthralling. But that Marx’s

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