Third Text

3 August 2023

Paul O’Kane

R.I.P. Germain: “Jesus Died For Us, We Will Die For Dudus!”, Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London, 22 February – 14 May 2023

R.I.P Germain, ‘Jesus Died For Us We Will Die for Dudus’, 2023, installation view, image by Mark Blower, courtesy of the ICA

What happens if a contemporary artist places a jewellery shop inside a gallery? Indeed, in the very heart of the British contemporary art world at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London? Perhaps a historical circle is closed, and the outcome is culturally explosive.

While ‘art’ and banking both became established as more professional and autonomous disciplines in the time of the Italian Renaissance, now, it seems, we can visit a gallery to see all that art and its corresponding economy grew from; the ‘primitive accumulation’, as Marx called it, of material wealth, from which, and on which, modernity (including modern art, and the so-called ‘contemporary’) eventually developed. It is also at this point that a continuing and notorious dialogue between art and class also emerges.

Jewellery is art too, of course. A visit to London’s Victoria & Albert Museum is incomplete without tracing the history of art and design, not just through sculpture, painting, furniture, architecture, ceramics, glassware, silverware, etc, but also through the museum’s spectacular jewellery galleries. Jewellery might seem a long way from the modern artists’ idea of ‘ornament’ as ‘crime’, first promulgated by Adolf Loos in a near-eponymous essay written in 1910, ^[1]  but that might only be because it is the least mitigated of all the arts, relying upon the innate worth of its material make-up, its base materiality, for much of its cultural and aesthetic value (notwithstanding the role of the designer). Even a picture of the swinging 1960s icon Twiggy, draped with the then state-of-the-art, plastic Op Art earrings, seems to trumpet the novel currency and value of plastic as something that, in her heyday, was akin to a precious wonder material and thus subject to such forms of cultural investment, temporarily displacing diamonds, gold and silver from the ears of the young and fashionable.

Meanwhile, as I write this, in the week of the coronation of an English King, we should also consider the heavy collections of stones (some controversially and colonially appropriated) made highly visible during that grandiose ritual. They remind us that, at the very heart (we might also say the ‘foundation’ or the very ‘top’) of the nation’s power, its identity and its class structure (it is difficult to call it a ‘system’), lie jewels and jewellery, precious stones, ostentatiously displayed and celebrated as something apparently sacred and possibly magical.                                                    

In the upstairs gallery of London’s ICA, for R.I.P. Germain’s show ‘Jesus Died For Us, We Will Die For Dudus!’, the clientele of his temporarily installed jewellery dealership are shown (through a six-hour loop of relevant YouTube clips) to be mainly young black men, who we know are able to trace a heritage to the diaspora enforced by the slave trade that brought millions of Africans to the Americas and Europe over the course of three to four hundred years. These young men, part of a diasporal generation that is finally and for the first time ‘getting paid’, creates wealth through the art of adept rhyming, along with avant-garde beats construction and the equally conscientious construction of their image. They might invest in high status houses and cars, but they also go for the ostentatious jewellery that has always been a part of Hip Hop culture. And gold, silver and diamonds might well be valued as the most reliable and fundamental form of investment as a direct exchange of unmitigated or raw value, predating and pre-empting modern capitalism. Dealing in diamonds, silver, gold, etc, might be a way of closing a historical circle wherein the fundamental source of modern, Eurocentric wealth, obtained through slavery, mineral extraction, appropriation, expropriation and colonisation, here comes home to roost on the chests and ring fingers of contemporary rap stars keen to display their wealth in unmitigated form.

The artworld is not just a privileged and rarefied space that generates and exchanges certain values; values that are also a form of power. The artworld is – more seriously – the very engine and basis of those values and that power. And now, despite the fact that we are here involved in the very middle-class activity of professional (perhaps synonymous with ‘middle-class’) art-writing and art-reading, we can call these values middle-class values, and call this power middle-class power.

The modern middle class grew out of those privileged as both white and connected to the original, ‘primitive’ colonial acquisition of wealth that initially set them apart. And this continues to subtly – and it could be said, insidiously – ‘socially distance’ the middle class from the so-called ‘less fortunate’ who have not yet been beneficiaries of that accumulation (the ‘meek’ perhaps, who might, as is implicitly promised by the modern project, one day ‘inherit’ wealth, rights, respect and status of a kind that could be described as a just socio-economic equality).

However, according to the current state of the world, it seems that primitive accumulations of capital must necessarily precede the acquisition of greater human rights, although the politically left-leaning political machine promises the converse, ie that improved rights and conditions can lead to improved prosperity.

Modern times, modernism, modernity – all describe different aspects of the international assertion of a Eurocentric worldview; an assertion that began in the fifteenth century, contemporary with the colonising of the Americas. It cultivates the unprecedentedly profitable trade in slavery while producing a contemporary and corresponding approach to knowledge, reason, belief, religion and truth. Paul Wood and Leon Wainright’s usefully bowdlerised collection Art in Theory: The West in the World introduces many historical encounters between European people and their others, while often referring to precious stones and minerals. ^[2]  This reminds us that such precious stones and minerals, whether in the hands of Europeans or their others, form the basis of a value system out of which, eventually, the more mitigated, mediated, abstract and complex value system of modern capitalism has grown.

Fast forward to the eighteenth century, and we find revolutions in Haiti, North America and France, along with political reforms in Britain, which together install modern values – not just rooted in the spectacle, beauty or utility of raw materials, minerals, precious stones, etc, but in the more abstract enlightenment values of ideas such as liberty and equality that also implicate the abolition of slavery. The slogan of the French revolution, ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’, and the written, thought and spoken idea that ‘all men are created equal’, are examples of abstract values of the modern kind that were subsequently consolidated and extended following two twentieth-century world wars. But some might argue that they are ‘just’ or ‘only’ ideas, a form of rhetoric that cannot be trusted. They produced the institutionalisation of organisations such as the UN, UNICEF and The International Court of Human Rights, for example, to police and protect human rights, but these organisations are themselves expressions of enlightenment ideals manifest in the form of gathered intellectuals, of reasonable, rational, modern thinkers making decisions on a similar basis. Perhaps this is right and proper, fair and correct, simply because it represents the best of humanity, the best we can do, and yet it has to be conceded that it is only a partial representation of a wider humanity, and is, therefore, inevitably un- or mis-representative.

Modern institutions remain both the fruit of and at the heart of a middle class that has steadily, over hundreds of years, constituted the hegemonic core of modernity – so hegemonic, in fact, that what we call ‘the middle class’ can barely be seen, demarked or described. Clearly it has always been acquisitive (‘a nation of shopkeepers’ indeed); however, it has proved incapable of acquiring its own image or the ability to recognise itself, except perhaps as and when it is reflected in its others, whom it seeks out, draws in and ‘tolerates’, whom it colonises, accepts, appropriates and assimilates in order to address, compare and expand its own identity, its own strengths and weaknesses, moral virtues and failings.

How can we discuss this object (is it even an object?) – this ‘middle class’ that we can neither clearly see nor define? Its sphynx-like elusiveness may have always been its greatest power, one that enabled its original primitive accumulation through expropriation. Its slippery surface disallows anyone from taking hold of, shaking and changing it, or even knowing whether or not they are sufficiently inside or outside of it, some part of it or not. Middle-class elusiveness thus cultivates doubt and uncertainty, amounting to disabling paranoia amongst its others, rendering them powerless or regarded as unfit to comment or contribute. 

Revolution, it seems, is not, after all, something available to all ages and classes, but was, perhaps, simply the tool of a specific class at a certain moment, used and useful to achieve its own particular ends in the establishment of a power that operates (again elusively) from the ‘middle’ and no-longer from the top down, or from the bottom up. The radically philosophising French double-act Deleuze & Guattari once wrote admiringly of grass growing not from the tip or from the root but from the middle (and therefore rhizomatically). This elusive image of a mobile middle, which is also a central source of growth and energy, might remind us that when we speak of a ‘middle class’ we always speak of something impossible for us to adequately or clearly identify or comprehend. But is ‘the middle class’ (as an object) or ‘middle-class’ (as an adjective) just an idea, then, or a social phenomenon, one that emerges from certain ways of thinking, speaking, dressing, eating, living, etc; emerges from certain political or philosophical views and positions and from a certain degree of wealth (the ‘comfortable’ but not rich) and/or certain associated levels of education?

Along the journey of modern, middle-class ascension, religion has exerted a certain missionary zeal, only to suffer at the hands of modern reason, materialism and rationalism. This leaves the middle-class core of social modernity to reduce its belief to various forms of secularity – modernist existentialism (at one stage and extreme), or postmodern neobaroque (at another). According to the implied holistic relativism of postmodernism, faith, reality and hope can all fall by the wayside while we laugh with a special gallows humour, or black humour perhaps, at our meaningless plight. ^[3]

Comparing austere, existential, over-meaningful modernism, with cornucopian, meaningless postmodernism leaves us teetering on the edge of valuation itself. The Romantic philosopher Nietzsche wrote of ‘transvaluing values’, one of those memorable phrases that seems to give shape to the edges and limits of his own unsystematic ‘system’ of philosophy, one which, we suspect, he would readily agree was incomplete. It may remain difficult for us here to translate this ‘transvaluation’ but let us at least consider the implicit assertion of a loss of values per se, which might, for Nietzsche, be a consequence of the modern, middle class’s effective killing of its own God, thereby collapsing and dissipating its value system.

We also glean from Nietzsche the idea that at a certain point in European cultural evolution an Apollonian approach to organising religion into reasonable thought displaced a Dionysian embrace of a more fundamental chaos. Philosophy (and the accompanying art of rhetoric perhaps) therefore supplanted religion with reasoned and structured debate (see Plato/Socrates), setting all other forms of thought beneath it as one more object of philosophy’s sceptical and expansive enquiries.

Now, enquiry, question and debate come to rule where fear and awe and esoteric privileged wisdom once reigned over the production of dances, masks and augury, and where the role of the shaman acted as a kind of lightning-rod connecting unworldly thoughts and feelings with the material, real and actual world. Perhaps it is out of this move, away from religion and towards philosophising, that modernity was really born, and is therefore far older than we usually determine it to be. If so, modernity seems ready to confess to the fact, given that its own histories so often cite the Plato/Socrates nexus as a root or source.

Belief and religion have always been associated with art, with acts, images, rituals and performances that channel, translate and mitigate all the fear and power that may ‘cause’ religion. Art gives forms to and thereby ‘organises’ what is otherwise ineffable, awarding a body, a shape to a kind of shared fear, awe and intrigue, regarding all that we feel we cannot otherwise comprehend, and which is otherwise dangerously disorganised. However, the assumption that art emerges originally from religious impulses and creates images in response to some sense of awe (the sublime, the dark, the fear of unknowing, etc) could be challenged by the reversal of this logic – ie what if religion emerged as a way to understand and represent art? What if human beings, having found that they habitually made images, told stories, made dances, masks and rituals, saw a need to organise these objects and activities into expressions of belief, faith and hope, involving piety and humbling worship?

Anyone who has read Brian O’Doherty’s famous primer Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space will have sensed that the modern art gallery inherits a legacy from the church, the chapel and the cave, as well as with places variously blessed with religious significance that are still associated with an esoteric feel and purpose. ^[4]  We go to such places for sacred-sounding ‘private views’, wearing our best or at least our better clothes. We drink wine (with sacrificial connotations) and mutter judgemental incantations provided by a hymnsheet-like press release. We make sure we see this ‘show’ while we can, between the exclusive dates of its opening and closing. And, of course, we travel to the more or less fashionably sanctified, trending or blessedly emerging parts of our city in which the space and the show are situated, ‘catching’ it before it disappears and thus demonstrating that art remains an act of revelation, ascension and deposition, involving a mysterious arrival (manufactured precisely for the specific space, out of sight, behind the scenes) and a subsequent evaporation.

While the middle class may appear sphinx-like to its others, the contemporary art gallery is (and despite modernist commentators’ desire to distance art from transcendence, metaphysics and magic) a box of tricks, partly responsible for gracing art with enduring values of some strain of magic. After all, it is carefully constructed to create various illusions, including that of a supposed objective, transparent and equal shared ground created by pure white walls, polished concrete floors, and increasingly bright lighting.

The gallery appears to turn the ‘water’ of wood, canvas, paint, video footage, sculptural materials, etc, into the ‘wine’ of art, thereby creating value and upholding, promoting, and in some cases (at best perhaps) changing values. The religious church and the practice of the mass have been doing the same for thousands of years, enlisting art to provide the ceiling paintings, statues, songs and rituals that make it convincing. Yet we make a distinction between the secular value-machine of art and the spiritual value-machine of religion.

But let me return from these too distant and too lofty realms to the contemporary art world and to the question of values proffered by R.I.P. Germain’s exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London. The artist collaborated with a supplier of ‘bling-tastic’ jewellery to stars of Hip Hop culture. Installed in the gallery were new security doors and a new security regime (apparently staffed by an external security company) and plenty of diamonds, gold and silver, all displayed as a kind of tableau reproduction of an actual or real shop located elsewhere in central London. Looking back to colonisation and slavery, we might be reminded that these shameful and revolting modernist practices were focused on material gain, on the acquisition of wealth through iniquitous and immoral, trade, ­although for hundreds of years it does not appear to have been sufficiently ‘immoral’ to have brought about its abolition. At some point, and for certain reasons, it became either financially or morally (or a mix of both) unviable, and thus, a critical mass attained, abolition (and corresponding compensations for slave owners and profiteers) was finally set in motion – although, again, only after three to four hundred years.

As Nietzsche also suggested, there is no such conceit as ‘morality’ per se, only a ‘genealogy of morals’ in the branches of which we are each and all entangled. Today’s predominantly white middle-class wealth, both financial and cultural, lies at the core of modern capitalism and ideas of modern democracy, constituting a central and aspirational value. And yet all of this remains built upon direct, material, historical associations with slavery.

While trading in slaves may have produced unprecedented profit margins (said to have been in the realms of 1,000 per cent), colonisation was also concerned with avidly stripping the colonised world – Africa, the Americas, the Antipodes, Polynesia, Asia, etc – of its mineral wealth, of the rare, precious and semi-precious stones belonging to the colonised peoples and found in their land, their art and their objects of worship. The transactions also became perverted in such a way that the island of Manhattan could notoriously be bought by Dutch settlers from the Indigenous people for a few cheap trinkets and gems. The value of gold, silver, diamonds, pearls, etc, was established and well-known; as were, presumably, the values of human life and the variety of possible qualities of human experience. On the backs of slaves and of slavery, plus the hoovering-up of much of the world’s precious minerals, the modern world built itself an enviable edifice to which all others, and its pre-modern predecessors, might be in thrall to, might envy and should aspire to (albeit taking into account the ‘alter-modern’ latecomers’ route – or backdoor – to modernity once thoughtfully proffered by the curator Nicolas Bourriaud). ^[5]

As for art, bigger, wider, higher, brighter spaces and ever higher prices for artworks represent, in some ways, the zenith of modernity, illustrating, embodying and celebrating its own modern beliefs and achievements – which are not those of religion, nor of banking. Paintings, drawings, sculptures, videos, performances and installations stand in for the sums, the wealth, the cash and the comfort that circulates via the commercial gallery’s specially sequestered sales room, in the fee given to the art writer to produce a monograph that raises the value of the work, or perhaps in the publicly funded exhibition and institution that boosts an art or artist’s market value. The wealthy invest in gold, diamonds and currencies, but also in art, ^[6] which clearly remains connected to the value systems of a religion.

Looking back to the art of the pre-Neoplatonic, pre-humanist, so-called pre- or early Renaissance, we find religious objects that display their value, faith and belief in God in their imagery, but also in the gold or other precious materials, such as lapis and other colours, literally and materially moulded out of the beauty, preciousness and rarity of certain stones. ^[7]  Renaissance artists however, seemed to have disposed of much of this value system, consigning its own use of pure and real gold to the gilding of picture frames, and leaving the skill, finesse and renown of the artist themselves, along with new technological and processual innovations, to fill the picture with value. The picture frame therefore and henceforth becomes a threshold or borderline (later bravely eschewed by modernists) at which the realm of material values ends, and the newly disciplined, professional, autonomous value of ‘art’ begins.

Meanwhile, the value of pure and actual gold, lapis, etc, becomes subordinated to and/or mitigated by the skill, the life, the style of the art and the artist, who now also begins to brandish the ‘brand’ of their name and authorship (recalling here that Michelangelo audaciously carved his name into the sash of the virgin mother in his Pietà), all occurring within an arena or milieu that also sees the beginnings of organised banking, whereby money becomes less dependent upon literal, physical and material value and newly dependent upon more abstract values arising from exchange, investment, risk, interest, speculation and the passage and vicissitudes of passing time.

In conclusion, and on reflection: the white middle class that still runs contemporary society, art and culture (and so politely and perhaps piously, without direct or vulgar reference to the real financial, mineral, moral and material wealth that enables and has always enabled its dominance) nevertheless knows how to allow selected ‘barbarians’ within its gates, as a way of enriching itself and annulling greater and further threats of outsider-dom. Even the boldest strategies (see R.I.P. Germain) or most artful (see another recent critical intervention in the ICA by artist Cameron Rowland) ^[8] of blithely emerging artists, to rock the white middle-class cultural world and its institutions, seem always bound to fail. And yet, these artists at least provide hypotheses that enable us to keep imagining another world, one of truer, more equal equality, like the one from which, as Jacques Rancière once said, ‘we begin’. ^[9]

In R.I.P. Germain’s show, in the downstairs gallery of the ICA, could be found a Mike Nelson-like tableau of a drug dealer’s den, complete with a fake shop frontage and a backroom marijuana farm. It all felt very ‘street’, very ‘hardcore’, and again a subculture barely considered in the predominantly middle-class culture of fine art was boldly included for a change. But this was clearly not the ‘real deal’. It was all-too-obvious fakery, a form of theatricality that the ICA’s sophisticated fine art audience could see through all too easily and hence find it hard to take seriously. No, it was those (apparently) real diamonds, with their added security, upstairs that (whether they were real or not) really set the interpretive mind rolling, and very quickly, along lines of historical, political, cultural and social interpretation of the most profound kind, as if leading us, quite directly, to the very heart of all that we call ‘art’.
 

^[1]   See Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime, Penguin Classics, London, 2019 [1913]

^[2]    Paul Wood and Leon Wainright with Charles Harrison, Art in Theory: The West in the World – An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Wiley Blackwell, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2021

^[3]    The term ‘black humour’ was coined by the Surrealist supremo Andre Breton as part of his redefinition of the modern condition

^[4]    Brian O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1999) was originally published as a series of essays in Artforum in 1976

^[5]    Here I am referring to Bourriaud’s ‘Altermodern’ essay in his catalogue for the Tate Triennale, 2009; see Nicolas Bourriaud, Altermodern: Tate Triennial, Tate Publishing, London, 2009

^[6]    Hip Hop stars, having attained financial and material wealth in the form of real estate and jewellery have recently turned towards contemporary art as a region or realm of superior speculation and kudos

^[7]    It is hard to resist including here the following long citation from Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Storyteller’ essay in which he can be seen to explore ancient, pre-modern values of precious stones, if only as analogous to the process of storytelling:  ‘ … The lower Leskov descends on the scale of created things the more obviously does his way of viewing things approach the mystical. Actually, as will be shown, there is much evidence that in this, too, a characteristic is revealed which is inherent in the nature of the storyteller. To be sure, only a few have ventured into the depths of inanimate nature, and in modern narrative literature there is not much in which the voice of the anonymous storyteller, who was prior to all literature, resounds so clearly as it does in Leskov’s story “The Alexandrite.” It deals with a semi-precious stone, the chrysoberyl. The mineral is the lowest stratum of created things. For the storyteller, however, it is directly joined to the highest. To him it is granted to see in this chrysoberyl a natural prophecy of petrified, lifeless nature concerning the historical world in which he himself lives. This world is the world of Alexander II. The storyteller – or rather, the man to whom he attributes his own knowledge – is a gem engraver named Wenzel who has achieved the greatest conceivable skill in his art. One can juxtapose him with the silversmiths of Tula and say that – in the spirit of Leskov – the perfect artisan has access to the innermost chamber of the realm of created things. He is an incarnation of the devout. We are told of this gem cutter: “He suddenly squeezed my hand on which was the ring with the alexandrite, which is known to sparkle red in artificial light, and cried: ‘Look, here it is, the prophetic Russian stone! O crafty Siberian. It was always green as hope and only toward evening was it suffused with blood. It was that way from the beginning of the world, but it concealed itself for a long time, lay hidden in the earth, and permitted itself to be found only on the day when Czar Alexander was declared of age, when a great sorcerer had come to Siberia to find the stone, a magician. ... What nonsense are you talking,’ I interrupted him; ‘this stone wasn’t found by a magician at all, it was a scholar named Nordenskjöld!’ ‘A magician! I tell you, a magician!’ screamed Wenzel in a loud voice. ‘Just look; what a stone! A green morning is in it and a bloody evening ... This is fate, the fate of noble Czar Alexander!’ With these words old Wenzel turned to the wall, propped his head on his elbows, and ... began to sob.” One can hardly come any closer to the meaning of this significant story than by some words which Paul Valéry wrote in a very remote context. “Artistic observation,” he says in reflections on a woman artist whose work consisted in the silk embroidery of figures, “can attain an almost mystical depth. The objects on which it falls lose their names. Light and shade form very particular systems, present very individual questions which depend upon no knowledge and are derived from no practice, but get their existence and value exclusively from a certain accord of the soul, the eye, and the hand of someone who was born to perceive them and evoke them in his own inner self.’  Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Schocken Books, New York, 1969, pp 106–107

^[8]    Cameron Rowland’s exhibition ‘3 & 4 Will. IV c. 73’, opened at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London in January 2020; see Guy Mannes-Abbott’s review in Third Text Online

^[9]    ‘Rancière's main political idea is that a democratic politics emerges from the presupposition of equality. Equality is a starting point, not a goal or destination. This idea is articulated to various degrees in all of Rancière's books. It finds its most polemical expression in Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, published in 1998, although it is argued with equal force in the lesser-known book The Ignorant Schoolmaster, where Rancière considers the pedagogical ideas of the post-revolutionary philosopher of education Joseph Jacotot.’ From Rye Dag Holmboe, ‘Interview with Jacques Rancière’, The White Review.org, an extract from The White Review, issue 10, April 2014.

Paul O’Kane is an artist, writer and senior lecturer at Central Saint Martins (CSM), University of the Arts London (UAL). He also teaches at SOAS, University of London. His book, History in Contemporary Art and Culture, was published by Routledge in 2023. He has also published numerous professional pieces, including articles, essays, reviews, and a group of artists' self-published books. His writings have appeared in Third Text's refereed journal, as well as Third Text Online and numerous other platforms, including Art Monthly. His long-running seminars ‘Technologies of Romance’ and ‘A Thing of the Past?’ (on history in contemporary art) contextualise the impact of today's ‘new’ technologies on art, life and culture, while attempting to use history to see, interpret and theorise our times.