Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War
Hito Steyerl
(Verso £9.99)

IT’S not always the case that art professionals — artists themselves, critics and connoisseurs, historians and theorists — ground their thought and language in the distinctions, connections and contradictions revealed in a materialist scrutiny of the images that they create, consider or curate.

[[{"fid":"10630","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"1"}}]]While the idea that the products of cultural work can be studied and understood independently of the circumstances in which they are produced persists, the very speed and complexity of the contemporary and highly mediated world allows little time for the quiet contemplation of classical beauty.

We are assailed by a perfect storm of images that have as their purpose the transformation of our thinking, the manipulation of our behaviour or the choices we make.

In this book, German film-maker Hito Steyerl insists that “as images start pouring across screens and invading subject and object matter the major, and quite overlooked, consequence is that reality now widely consists of images: or rather, of things, constellations, and processes formerly evident as images.”

Her assertion that one cannot understand reality “without understanding cinema, photography, 3D-modelling, animation and other forms of moving and still image” cannot mean quite what it says.

Even the devotees of EastEnders know, at one level or another and without the benefit of a degree in media studies that — although the TV is an object real enough — the programme merely depicts an idealised version of London life.

But the world Steyerl describes is realistic enough. She grounds her helter-skelter analysis in the superstructural manifestations of contemporary financialised capitalist society — malign instances of deep-state surveillance, proxy wars and proto-fascist movements in a post-democratic world in which citizens of the European Union are faced “by a host of institutions that are not democratically legitimised (among these, again, financial institutions which are not subject to any political control.)”

Steyerl’s focus on the perverse manifestations of capital’s dictatorship of the art world, its degradation of language and the neoliberal assertion of hierarchies of class and status in this culture of commodification and unequal exchange is a useful repudiation of theories that deny the intimate connections between cultural production and the economic base of society.

Perhaps inevitably, in a book that is essentially a collection of articles and talks, the texts lack much of a connective and analytical rigour. Although this does not detract from its compelling descriptive passages and a very useful and extensive set of references, the lack of any sense of human agency renders the staccato prose style an empty device.

A deeply pessimistic standpoint finds its clearest expression in a passage which misunderstands the function of the advertising artefacts of the Productivists Mayakovsky and Rodchenko during the NEP period in Russia, during which the Bolsheviks succeeded in reviving production in their war-devastated socialist state. It condemns the construction of a modern soviet state as “a Stalinist cult of productivity,” and as a “dictatorship sustained by a cult of labour.”

There is no sense in this book that people are not passive subjects, that real life for millions of people is the basis of their critical repudiation of the mediated world that capital commands them to consume, or that building a society free from the very real dictatorship of capital frees the creative potential of millions.