The Obligation to Self-Design

“Modern design is the attempt to bring about such a metanoia- an effort to see one´s own body and one´s own surroundings as purified of everything earthly, arbitrary, and subjected to a particular aesthetic taste. In a sense, it could be said that modernism substituted the design of the corpse for the design of the soul.” p.31

“By taking ethical and aesthetic responsibility for the image they offer the outside world, however, consumers become prisoners of total design to a much larger degree than ever before, inasmuch as they can no longer delegate their aesthetic decisions to others. Modernconsumers present the world the image of their own personality – purified of all outside influence and ornamentation.” p.33

“In the white city, in the heavenly Zion, as Loos imagines it, design is truly total for the first time. Nothing can be changed there either: nothing colorful, no ornament can be smuggled in. The difference is simply that in the white city of the future, everyone is the author of his own corpse -everyone becomes an artist-designer who has ethical, political, and aesthetic responsibility for his or her environment.” p. 33

“In a society in which design has taken over the function of religion, self-design becomes a creed. By designing one´s self and one´s environment in a certain way, one´s declare one´s faith in certain values, attitudes, programs, and ideologies. In accordance with this creed, one is judged by society, and this judgement can certainly be negative and even threaten the life and well-being of the person concerned.

Hence modern design belongs not so much in an economic context as in a political one. Modern design has transformed the whole of social space into an exhibition space for an absent divine visitor, in which individuals appear both as artists and as self-produced works of art.” p. 34

“In his day, Beuys said that everyone had the right to see him – or herself as an artist. What was then understood as a right has now become an obligation. In the meantime, we have been condemned to being the designers of our selves. ” p. 36

The Production of Sincerity

“… how I deal with the way in which the world designs me.” p. 41

“… the production of sincerity and trust has become everyone´s occupation – …” p. 42

“… the modern artist has always positioned himself or herself as the only honest person in a world of hypocrisy and corruption.” p. 43

“… we are able to see things as they truly are – only when the reality behind the facade shows itself to be dramatically worse than we had ever imagined.” p. 43

“Where we once had nature and God, we now have design and conspiracy theory.” p. 44

Politics of Installation

“On the contrary, the installation is material par excellence, since it is spatial – and being in the space is the most general definition of being material. The installation transforms the empty, neutral, public space into an individual artwork – and it invites the visitor to experience this space as the holistic, totalizing space of an artwork. Anything included in such a space becomes a part of the artwork simply because it is placed inside this space. The distinction between art object and simple object becomes insignificant here. Instead, what becomes crucial is the distinction between a marked installation space and unmarked public space.” p. 56

“The artistic installation is a way to expand the domain of the sovereign rights of the artist from individual art object to that of the exhibition space itself.” p. 56

“The regime under which art operates in our contemporary Western culture is generally understood to be one that grants freedom to art.” p. 56

“Here the artist acts as legislator, as a sovereign of the installation space – even, and maybe especially so, if the law given by the artist to a community of visitors is a democratic one … democratic order always emerges as a result of a violent revolution. To install a law is to break one. The first legislator can never act in a legitimate manner -” p. 59

“everyone must do what he or she likes, including committing crimes of any kind.” p. 61

“The goal of art, after all, is not to change things – things are changing by themselves all the time anyway. Art´s function is rather to show, to make visible the realities that are generally overlooked.” p. 69

The Loneliness of the Project

> “… documentation of life-in-the-project – …”

“The archive is the site where past and future become interchangeable.” p. 83

Comrades of time

“The present is a moment in time when we decide to lower our expectations of the future or to abandon some of the dear traditions of the past in order to pass through the narrow gate of the here-and-now.” p. 86

“In another work, Alÿs presents the labor of a shoe cleaner as an example of a kind of work that does not produce any value in the Marxist sense of the term, because the time spent cleaning shoes cannot result in any kind of final product, as it is required by Marx´s theory of value.” p. 93

“Already Nietzsche has stated that the only possibility for imagining the infinite after the death of god, after the end of transcendence, is to be found in the eternal return of the same.” p. 93

The Weak Universalism

“One repeatedly hears and reads that we need change, that our goal – also in art – should be to change the status quo. But change is our status quo. Permanent  change is our only reality. And in the prison of permanent change, to change the status quo would be to change the change – to escape the change. In fact, every utopia is nothing other than an attempt to escape from the historical change.” p. 109

Marx After Duchamp, or The Artist´s Two Bodies

“The artist today shares art with the public just as he or she once shared it with religion or politics.” p. 134

Groys, Boris, Going Public, e-flux journal, Sternberg Press.