Underground

underground

Janneke Wesseling

In a lecture delivered on 20 March 1961, entitled ‘Where do we go from here?’, Marcel Duchamp predicted that in the future artists ‘will go underground. The reason for this, Duchamp claimed, was that art had ‘degenerated’, as he called it, into a gigantic artistic production that was determined by supply and demand, rendering the art object into a commodity. This in turn had led to a dilution of artistic values and to the dominance of mediocre art. The response of serious artists to this deterioration of art would be, according to Duchamp, ‘an ascetic revolution’.

A short elaboration on the notion of underground, as used by Duchamp, is needed here. Two years after Duchamp’s lecture, the experimental film Flaming Creatures by American film director Jack Smith was first shown (at the Bleecker Street Cinema, on 29 April 1963). This film, which celebrates free and queer sex, marks the beginnings of the Underground Film Movement in New York, which would include artists and filmmakers such as Andy Warhol and the Kuchar brothers. The Underground Film Movement also developed ties with hippie subculture and is associated with the writers of the Beat Generation.

This is not the notion of underground that Duchamp was referring to. In my view, Duchamp talked about going underground in the sense of a secret operation, of disappearing from public view as an artist and going into hiding beneath the surface of the earth. How he dealt with his own last work, Étant donnés, over a long period of some twenty years between 1946–1966 during which he was believed to have stopped making art altogether, can be seen as an example. Underground is used here in a more literal sense, and that is how I will refer to the notion of underground in this essay. An early example is the case of Dick Raaijmakers (1930–2013), Dutch avantgarde composer, performance artist, and founder of Dutch electronic music in the 1950s. Raaijmakers once described his way of operating as follows:

I dig burrows underground and every once in a while, I stick my head above ground: hello, here I am! When I receive a blow on the head I go back into hiding, I dig further, and try again at a later point in time. If I am hit on the head once again, I withdraw again into the dark. Until finally somebody appreciates the value of my work and is willing to collaborate with me. That is the moment I can show something above ground.

Going underground enables the artist to retain a certain freedom in carrying out the artistic practice, by severing ties with art institutions and remaining at a distance from the marketing system and from neoliberalist cultural policies.

We find ourselves right in the middle of, in Duchamp’s terminology, such an ‘ascetic revolution’—although this revolution differs from what Duchamp had in mind, the main difference being that ‘the great artist of tomorrow’, as Duchamp called him (for Duchamp, the artist is male), is largely absent as an individual. Forms of collectivity and collaboration are at the heart of the present ascetic revolution. Artists join forces in collective endeavours and projects on a global scale. In doing so, values that traditionally have determined artistic production in the Western world are abolished, such as personal signature, copyright, property, marketing values, fame, and the individuality of the artistic genius. All of the contributors to the Making Matters symposia and to the present book testify to this ascetic revolution. These artists have gone underground by withdrawing from the traditional platforms of the Western art world and by rendering themselves and their art to a certain extent invisible, that is, invisible as manifestations of individual art practices.

Going underground might sound like a defeat to some readers, but in fact it means quite the opposite. Going underground is not an exodus from the art world and society, it is not a flight, a retreat, or a search for refuge. Going underground, in the sense it is used here, entails a refusal of solitary gestures, and it aims for a re-grouping, a re-assembling, a re-connecting of forces, a re-configuring of social bonds. It is about reaffirming relations, rather than about cutting ties. It is, therefore, a political act.

Politics of Withdrawal (2020), a volume edited by the Dutch cultural theorists Joost de Blooijs and Pepita Hesselberth, addresses the meaning of withdrawal as a political act. In their introduction, ‘Toward a Politics of Withdrawal?’, De Blooijs and Hesselberth suggest that withdrawal

is not a retreat from actuality per se, but from certain of its aspects: from our present-day ‘always-on’ culture, from surveillance capitalism, from neo-liberal management, and so on. …The gesture interrupts the forward motion of late-capitalism, as withdrawal is not oriented toward the future but rather invested in the possibilities of a different way of life …

Indeed, underground artists resist the idea of art practice as a form of commercial entrepreneurship aimed at maximum financial profit for the individual entrepreneur, and they refuse to define the value of art as economic value. They distance themselves from neoliberalist policies, and from Western post-colonial dominance in the fields of art and culture. The ways in which this happens are manifold and may include practices that adapt late-capitalist technologies and systems (such as business models, the logistic↵ of the warehouse and of digital distribution systems) to critically reflect on and inverse capitalist value systems. The distancing can equally happen as overt political activism or as a silent, un-outspoken way of operating that may lead to a certain degree of invisibility. Taking a distance therefore does not involve a negative act of withdrawal in the sense of refusal or seclusion (cf. Henry David Thoreau in Walden). Instead, it is a reconnecting that may take the shape of embeddedness, of communality or radical inclusivity.

The critique of global capitalist logistic↵ structures and the questioning of the place of technology in culture does not necessarily prevent a positive embracing of new technologies. In fact, a precondition for going underground seems to be an active engagement with the Internet and with technical infrastructures, enabling an opening up of new zones of global collaboration and political action. Thinking with, and through, digital technology and its role in the co-existence of humans and other-than-humans is precisely one of the focal points of the new underground art.