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Time, object, commodityDiedrich DiederichsenTexte fr kunst 82, diciembre 2012

From the time it takes to learn to make, to the time it takes tomake, to the time that an end product remains on exhibition or instorage the organization of time around discrete works is anessential element of value-formation in the field of art. Today,everyone from exhibiting institutions to viewers to collectors havecome to accommodate dematerialized and time-based art forms.And these are often based on some sort of contract be it a written

document commensurate to the work itself or a tacit agreementleading to and determining the nature of a performative exchange.As conceived by Diedrich Diederichsen, value is not onlydetermined by the amount of time invested in production, but alsoin terms of the investment of our the art worlds time inreception and participating. This is the social contract that we, asacting members of this landscape with vested interests and timeinvested in our own production as individuals, have entered into

with the subject of our attention. Works of value, however, mustalso evade identification as a commodity, and thus easyconsumption, in order to retain purchase on our continuedattention.Lets imagine an object, beyond its ph ysical existence, as the moreor less durable recording or storage of all those processes in timethat were required for its production. When Robert Morris made atechnical recording of the sound of making an object and thenincorporated the recording in it, he limited himself to the acoustictraces of the manual production of a wooden box (Box with theSound of Its Own Making, 1961). But of course, the timesomeone spent learning the skills required for such craftsmanshipis likewise part of the time crystallized in the object. So an objectcontains not only the time it took to produce, but also the time ittook to produce the producers and, if we want to be precise, even


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the time it took to produce the institutions that produced the producers, though prorated, needless to say, in proportion to thetime it took the producer to make this object as a fraction of all theother time he or she spent applying the skills once acquiredelsewhere and to other purposes. For the present discussion, wewill limit ourselves to the time that people spent with material and the material likewise has its historical and geological, its

biological and cosmic time. Our interest, however, is in the timethat may be exploited, and that is labor time.The arts know three

primary methods of making objects in this sense. The first would be the technical recording of a practice such as music or dancethats not in and of itself object -oriented. A sound or image

recording is taken that is, in a certain way, an object-like productof a time-based artistic activity; beyond merely being contained inthe object, that activity may even reproduced or read out from it(not without some degradation, needless to say). It has long been

possible to process these recordings further, to montage and layerthem. That would mean crossing back to the side of sculpturaloperation, whose temporal dimension, as a time of montaging andlayering, doesnt lend itself to being read out. Thats because, in the second method, the object is the end productof a purposive activity that, unlike the sound recording or the videodocumentary, cannot be brought back to life once production iscomplete. One example would be a sculpture. Writing musicalscores is an activity of this sort as well, since its not its own temporal dimension that will subsequently be read out; only thetemporal dimension of a performance implementing theinstructions of the score may be read out using the first method.But one may spend a lifetime working on a ten-secondcomposition. The third and least object-like method is the

product of artistic learning processes in living people such asmusicians or actors body memory, memorization, mastery oftechniques, symbols, thought styles. This method, that is to say,represents a sort of living abstraction: Acquired knowledgeabridges previously time-consuming activities, but only after the


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individual has invested time in learning, time during which he orshe learned to abstract from the time-consuming activity. Onlyinstitutions of the dissemination of knowledge and skills turn thelatter into something stable and object- like thats passed on. Yet there is another, a fourth form of producing an object thatcontains works of art and/or the time required for their production.That would be the juridical form. I define a part of the time, or theentire time, the work requires as the object of an agreement and anaction regulated by law or stipulation. More particularly, I define

by way of agreement and legally binding obligation the futuretime, the possible fates of the recording of past time, however thelatter is made. It has turned out that even living people and fragile

situational constellations involving humans and other participantsmay be contractually defined, represented, and determined informs that are fairly object- like. Needless to say, thats a popularmeans of production in contemporary art from Yves Klein toTino Sehgal.


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"Jugend musiziert" (german national competition for youngmusicians), Stuttgart, 2012All four types of objects or aggregations of past time and labortime have in common that they are the ontological and material

basis making it possible for the time spent on their production to become compatible with the commodity form. All four types oftransformed time may in turn be exchanged for money, which maysubsequently indeed be said to read out time. Its well known thattime may be bought, most immediately the time of others; our owntime we can buy only indirectly. Only then does the concept ofstorage make sense; only money (and, with a great deal ofconstructive effort, exchange) makes the storage medium render

back what was put into it: Time.Time bought but not adequately paid for (which is to say, time paidless for than the entrepreneur may subsequently realize by resellingit in a different form) is a familiar part of everyday life incapitalism: Surplus value would not come into existence withoutthis use of living people selling their time. Due to the relative

predominance associated with the commodity of the exchangevalue over the use value in capitalist societies, certain methods oftransferring, aggregating, and storing time are superior to others inthe eyes of the exchange-value pragmatist methods, such asmoney, that abstract as much as possible from differences betweenthe objects. Thats not to say that eccentric aggregate phases could

preclude exchangeability altogether; still, exchange-value pragmatism by and large tends toward abstraction, and so hasgenerated not only money but also container ships and the whitecube. Both represent lesser stages of abstraction than money, butthey point in the same direction.With the white cube, objects of the second type, which is to say,spatially extended things of all sorts, may be symbolically stackedon its inside, just as the containers of the container ship make it

possible to stack the contents of the containers. In one case as inthe other, the contents become equivalent in a sense. But its onlywith the extended model of the objectivation of time in art


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production, which, just as material objects aggregate past time,turns the past and future time stipulated in juridical objects intostackable art, that the current expansion of the commercialexploitation of artistic production appears on the horizon. There isstill money in the private-sector economy of the visual arts, andthose who spend this money just as privately have graduallylearned to recognize and appreciate non-object- like objects as noless suitable and exchangeable storage media of living labor time.By contrast, the business model of the multiplicative reproductionof recordings has distinctly suffered from the digitalization of itsenvironment. The physical storage media of skills and abilities, fortheir part, suffer from the scarcity of government dough and the

consequent devitalization of the educational institutions andvenues for music, dance, performance art, theater, and so on. So both forms of objects will probably play diminished roles in thefuture, whereas the white cubes including those white cubescamouflaged as something else called a project and the binderswith contracts look forward to a great future, because theyassemble objects on which private individuals spend money (andwhich they may also liquidate again, perhaps to spend on

prestigious urban architecture that bears their own name) and because they depend neither on paying audiences nor on technicalreproduction or public funding. Thats true even though works ofart that take the form of a contract rarely reveal their status asobjects or do so at most with a nostalgic nod to Conceptual Art,to whose administrative aesthetic we indeed owe severaltechniques of the contractual form.It may be objected that collectors collect what is rare or of rarequality, and not what took a lot of work to make. But no theycollect what took a great deal of work, qualitatively andquantitatively to make, with the right mixture between goodartistic work and the work of classifying good art. Value comesinto being thro ugh human labor. Thats no less true of the value ofthe rare object. Nothing is absolutely rare; what is rare is so assomething that must be regarded as culturally relevant. The idea of


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rarity conceived as absolute merely covers up another activity, onethats highly specialized and therefore used to be expensive; theactivity of ascribing relevance of distinguishing relevant fromirrelevant rarity. Because everything is rare, even the dirt under myfingernails, only rich Mr. Suckercleaner, PhD, the highly educatedwaste manager, doesnt know yet that he needs a contract thatassures him of the rights to this dirt; because no ascriber ofrelevance, or even better, chain of ascribers of relevance, hasexplained it to him. What Im getting at isnt the old Philistinismthat the status of art is nothing but a scam in which intellectualgasbags sell lemons to credulous well-heeled clients. On thecontrary. This selling of lemons and this ascription of relevance are

not haphazard operations. They must refer to qualities that areverifiably present. But by bringing some meaningful order to theconfusing mass of objects being produced, they put a sort offinishing touch on these art commodities. And this operation is

becoming ever more important and more expensiv e; its ultimatelyresponsible, even more than the activities of the notoriousassistants, for ensuring that prices rise and profit margins risefaster still because this highly specialized operation is somethingyou and I almost always do for free. Not primarily when we writean article or give a lecture, thats merely the official fringe of ourrelevance-ascribing production, but most importantly in the placeswhere, and to the degree to which, we are the art world. Its not somuch the experts who ascribe relevance to the art objects, butmuch rather the visible presence of beautiful, important, authentic,and otherwise desirable living people at parties and in socialnetworks associated with the production and presentation of art. Inthe age of the contract, our activity is becoming even moresignificant, because, like so many components of contemporary

production, and contemporary cultural production in particular, itsderegulated. Contracts can capture the results of deregulatedrelations without having to determine the processes themselves.Within the arts, higher degrees of abstraction are known by anothername progress. Thats not just a fallacy. With the contractual


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form, infinitely complex and far-reaching objects or processes may be defined as coherent entities that no physical format, no formcould ever contain. But what is crucial is that works of art addsomething, a counterweight, to their compatibility with thecommodity form, however inevitable the latter of course alwaysalso is; add a counterweight to in that they cannot be read out atwill, that there is something concrete about them that dialecticallyrecaptures the abstraction. This concrete something must relate tothe recipients and to their time. Money may in most cases be readout only as the time of others, whose labor and time spent on it is

being bought. Aesthetic experience, by contrast, relates to its owntime and its openness, and not to the openness of a juridical form

thats moreover increasingly losing its other storage fo rmats. Oncethese other models of time storage will have been utterly devaluedand liquidated, the temporal forms of reception will atrophy aswell. Nothing will then remain of the great artistic freedom thecontractual form seems to afford but the juridical framework andthe coherency it enables the task of lending it relevance willultimately be up to its dry parsings, on the one hand, and on theother hand to grand DeMille-style productions staging as muchhuman and art world material as possible.Thanks to Tom Holert for a conversation on contracts.

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