Minerva-Conference, Groningen, November 14, 1998



Michael Fehr

DUMP OR MUSEUM 
Terminals in Western Industrial Societies



Ladies and Gentlemen,

Working at the Museum for Modern and Contemporary of the City of Hagen, a city and a place, most of you will never have heard of, I am, almost daily, confronted with the question whether what collect and exhibit, what we have done in the past or plan to do in the future, does have or, at least, promises to have any value. This question derives from a complex of facts and prejudices which to unravel in details would be possible, and probably interesting, but in its more general aspects shows a more or less typical face known to all who fight for, and live with any form of Contemporary Art within communities dominated by the spirit of the lower middle classes. Therefore I will not try to tackle an analysis of this complex, or bother you in complaining about how deeply misunderstood we feel by our contemporaries, or even argue that we nevertheless got hold of some valuable things you should know about. Instead of that I will try to sketch some parts of the theoretical bricollage on value, and rubble, I work with for some years, hoping that you find them at least somewhat amusing.

First, I would like to mention that in German there are two words for what in English is named rubble, two words which draw a distinction between its different forms. One, in German: "Schutt", defines rubble as more or less unusable material resulting from a destruction-process, natural as well as man-made, that is a grain-like substance having the characteristic of material which can be poured. (Maybe this understanding meets what you associate with the word rubble.) The other one, in German: "Trümmer", defines a sort of rubble consisting of more or less big chunks resulting from the destruction of anything created by men, chunks which allow the reconstruction of what was destroyed at least in a virtual sense, rubble which is the material that the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was probably thinking of when he described the function of what he called "plastische Kraft", that is the "sculptural power", meaning, as he put it, the human capability "to grow out of itself in a peculiar way, to redefine what is past and strange and to incorporate it; to heal wounds, to replace what is lost, and to reshape forms which have been smashed." 

Second, I would like to remind you of the "Rubbish Theory", published by the British author Michael Thompson almost 20 years ago, and not as known as it should. In his theory, Thompson develops some distinctions and thoughts which, I believe, are most valuable for our discussion, and this is why I want to recall some of its essentials. Thompson points out, that everything we deal with can be divided into three categories: the Transient, the Durable and Rubbish. Things which belong to the category Transient are things with an estimated lifetime within which they continuously lose value down to the point where it hits zero. Actually everything we deal with once belongs to this category when it enters the market and is sold or bought. I believe, you know what I am talking about, if not, just look at your new car. Things which belong to the category Durable, however, have an unlimited lifetime within which they gain value. Things kept in museums are durable in this sense for sure, but anything of value which is out of the market usually belongs to it as well. Now, the interesting point of Thompson's Rubbish Theory is to explain that these two categories, at least within Western societies, are open categories, meaning that each community sets its own convention on what is seen as transient or durable, so that each member of this community can define and recognize which category a given object is relating to. All other items, that is all items which can not be related to one of these two categories, Thompson calls Rubbish. That is, Rubbish is defined as things which have no social definition at all. Based on a lot of examples from different social fields, Thompson from this derives his "law": That things can change from the Transient to the Rubbish category and from the Rubbish category to the Durable, but that there is no way from the Transient to the Durable other than the one leading through the Rubbish.

Taking up these distinctions and definitions, now the path can be developed that things normally travel on within Western societies. Let me just sketch this path in an general manner - in life, of course, objects will have quite an individual and specific career. When it enters society, that is usually the market, a given object will have a certain value, and an expected lifetime, and belongs by definition to the category Transient. In this state it will remain for the duration of its expected lifetime or as long as it can be used, but will lose value in a continuous way. Sometimes, if it is repaired or resold, it can regain some value, but in general it will lose its value down to the point where this tends to zero, no matter if the object is still in use. If its value is zero, the object will pass over to the Rubbish-category. This transition from the Transient to Rubbish in most cases will be a gradual change of status, a change one might not see or feel directly, because it usually occurs within a long period of time: The object slowly moves to the margins of social life, maybe is given away, or is inherited, or will be stored somewhere until it might get into a dump. In any case, especially if the object is not destroyed, it will live in this obsolete status for some time, maybe a long time, how long actually nobody can tell. But some day someone will draw it to the light, look at it, blow the dust off it and will put up the question if it could be of any use. If this question is answered negatively, the object will remain within the rubbish, or be dumped. But if this question is answered positively, the moment has come where the object can pass over into the category of the Durable. 

It is very important to notice, that considering objects from Rubbish at first hand means, that their value can be estimated only by ignoring current social standards, or conventions, that is only by individuals who feel free to decide by themselves whatever value or use can be ascribed to the object they picked up.

Now, if the object is considered to be somehow valuable or usable, the individuals who made up this assessment usually will start to search for these objects, and similar ones, and will collect them. This movement will draw the attention of other individuals onto these objects, and in consequence more individuals will look for them, followed by professional collectors and traders. As a result of this interest the market for these objects gets tight, and their price takes off. The next step of this development will be that scientists get interested in these objects and do research on them. This again will confirm the collector's interest, and especially when it becomes known, maybe as a conclusion of research-work, that the number of objects is limited, we will have a run for the objects, and their value grows more and more. Now utilization-interests take command, and museums get interested as well, and will start to collect them, and their new rating will be published in exhibitions, catalogues, and other form of listings. At this point, in fact exactly at the point where the objects have been priced at such a level that it gets more or less impossible to trade them, they will be taken out of the market, and are put into museums where they not only keep but gain value - but do not affect the economic process anymore. Only if this has occurred the new assessment of the objects is accomplished, and that means that they now belong definitely to the category Durable, and will stay there usually for an unlimited period of time.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you accept this sketch of the basics of Rubbish Theory, I assume, you will not be astonished, if I now postulate that the relation between the Transient, the Durable and Rubbish does not only apply to the handling of material things, but to the handling of knowledge, theories, opinions, and ideas as well. And I assume that you also will agree that anybody who has just an idea of the function of Rubbish Theory will try to utilize it to make money, either by diving into the rubbish, looking for objects which could be transferred into the category Durable as many and fast as possible, or, though it is theoretically excluded, by jumping over the Rubbish category, and trying to produce things which can pass directly from the Transient to the Durable. The first move led, as you know, to the development of a big and well established business-branch, reaching from flea-market, second-hand trade, and dealing antiques to recycling trash and leftovers from production processes. But most of the things, and goods, which are moved by this branch just return to the Transient where they again start the career I tried to sketch. The second move, however, that is, the attempt to skip the Rubbish category, and reach the Durable directly with transient products, is naturally, as you may have guessed already, at least in general the business of the art-scene. But here or there, in fact, only a few objects pass the border to the durable category, and the most interesting question rising now is what qualifies things to get transferred into the Durable. To recognize and define these qualities actually is the heart of the phenomenon we are talking about, and it is very clear, I believe, that in order to understand the process of reassessment of things, and ideas, one has to investigate who, and by which means, is setting up the criteria from which the estimation of qualities of objects is derived.

Since Thompson's Rubbish Theory does not answer this question, I have to confront you with my own theorems on this topic. The first may sound a little paradoxical but nevertheless will find, I believe, your approval: Those who believe in standards, and are normatively oriented to a system of values, create, despite their selfunderstanding, rubbish and rubble, whereas those who do not believe in a fixed system of standards, and deal with rubbish and rubble, create values. My second theorem will support this idea and clarify it, since it states: Those who create values have an aesthetic competence: the competence to distinguish between function, form, standards, and value; and that it is artists, scientists, and critics, who have this competence - if they do good work. But my third theorem says, that the business resulting from the knowledge of these theorems is more or less ruined, even though many, maybe most of the people do not want to admit this.

Let me elaborate on these theorems somewhat more: The general understanding of the function of art within modern Western societies can be described in short as the attempt to create and establish new values by reflecting current standards and values which usually is performed by deconstructing, and reconstructing their form, and function. In other words: The general understanding of artists' work is that their business is situated within the Rubbish category, and is basically transferring objects from Rubbish to the Durable. This understanding of the role of art evolved to the same degree as its traditional function vanished, and artists would lose their economic foothold within the vicinity of the leading social groups, or the dominating systems. This was a long process with many frictions, and dissimultanities regarding the development within different European countries, a process which started maybe with the beginning of the 16th century, and which was understood as a discovery and as an emancipation of the subject. In effect it led to the point where the artists were free to do what they wanted to do but had, in fact, to pay for this freedom by losing a fixed social function as well. At this point, I would like to date it with the official presentation of the first technical form of image-processing, that is the invention of photography, in 1839, the artists had no other chance but to work within the Rubbish category being themselves within a social Rubbish category, which, in German, we call Lumpenproletariat (raggle), or, more euphemistic, Bohemian. The signature of this state of the art was to establish new concepts of looking at the world, against the increasing fixture of a one-eye-perspective organization of experience established by image-processing machines. It is most interesting to notice that all these new concepts developed by artists were immediately understood in the sense they were intended - but refused by the public as Rubbish styles: the names they were given, for example, Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism and Cubism make this very clear.

A new step in this development was reached when these Rubbish styles proved to be more successful than the art of the Salon, and entered the museums. Since this conquest demonstrated to everybody for the first time, and in large scale, that products from Rubbish could be transferred into the Durable, and that current values could be made Rubbish as well. This experience, however, was the platform for avant-garde artists who would now concentrate on questioning the values and the function of art, and tackle its institutional aspect, the museum. On the other hand this experience led to the insight that nobody could tell, at least regarding recent art, what would prove valuable in the future, and as a consequence whatever looked like art was bought and collected. This new demand met an increasing production of works of art which partially was the result of an artistic strategy against the bourgeois understanding of art, and the museum, and partially resulted from an utilization of this strategy: More and more people became interested and felt capable to become an artist, since producing art not only promised a fast dollar, but the techniques to produce art appeared to be easily appropriable. In effect, the art scene started to boom, slowed down only by external circumstances, like the depression, or the World War. 

After the Second World War the boom rose again, but the mechanism, as I tried to point out, now caused a new phenomenon, a sort of self-induced overkill of the art scene. One reason for this, at least in Germany, was that the public art supporting system, namely the museums run by communities, and the state, which actually comprises about 90% of all museums concerned with art, could not match any longer the art boom by their means, and lost influence, in addition challenged by a growing number of private collectors who could buy whatever they were interested in, and who started to colonize the museums with their collections. 

And this is the situation now: Along with the fact that the whole of the public services, and public funds, the museums, and other institutions dealing with art at least in Germany get poorer and poorer, relatively, and absolutely, and in comparison with the private sector we have to take in account that new, and powerful value-system arose: the complex of electronic Media. These Media, for example in form of the Cyberspace-Museum created by such powerful companies like Gates have the task, and the options to re-value what we deal with by conventions based on a new form of aesthetic competence, a machine-made aesthetic, having no better name, I like to call aesthechniques: What the Electronic Media can grasp, and reproduce they display aesthechniques, its signature, at first hand, the elimination of all remnants of what one might call factura, that is what is the made-of-aspect of all the things, and objects we usually deal with: Such, that even being in fact obsolete or rubbish, products of this aesthechnique still do look clean, and good - almost like any piece from nature which has not been touched by man. In consequence we will, as far as we do not already, experience a revaluation especially of objects belonging to the category of the Durable, that is a revision in the true sense of the word which will not stop in front of the museums but more likely chose them as fields easily to tackle, and to demonstrate the new convention with a maximum effect: Not only the conventions on values and standards regarding art will turn fragile as well as the canons built up by the museums will get relativized, but even more, the museums as the institutions of art start themselves will start to crumble. There are quite a few signs of this development to be seen, and this is why one can expect a total collapse of the whole system built around art affairs which developed within the last two to three centuries.

To draw a conclusion in short: What we experience these days is not a shift within the system, a move making some Durable Rubbish, a shift which, by the way, museums perform daily by putting valuable things into their magazines, but a real crash of the system of producing and distributing art. I do not believe in a resumption of the development caused by the invention of photography - swallowing traditional functions, and roles from artists on one hand, but triggering them to set up and achieve new aims as well. I rather think that artists, at least in Western societies, will lose their conventional function in general, since handling rubble and rubbish in the sense I tried to point out in my preliminaries, that is, recalling Nietzsche, the human capability "to grow out of itself in a peculiar way, to redefine what is past and strange and to incorporate it; to heal wounds, to replace what is lost, and to reshape forms which have been smashed", since this capability will be a function of aesthechinque: taken over by the New Media and be done by machines.

Nevertheless there will be whole fields of aesthetic experience as well as knowledge stored objects the Electronic Media will not be able to reproduce or even to see, as they are bound into technical limitations, the most important of them the two dimensional screen. Anything which can not be reproduced on that screen in an appropriate, and by this seemingly meaningful way - Malevich's Black Square no less than any space, dialectic thinking as well as any direct human interaction, just to name a few fields- will fall back into the Rubbish Category where it can be re-re-valued. Understanding itself not as an institution of the Durable but of the Rubbish the museum, especially the art museum, could be, I believe, developed to place where such a revaluation could be performed, and reflected.
 
(c) Michael Fehr 1998





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