— THE INTANGIBILITIES OF FORM Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade JOHN ROBERTS VERSO London» New York20 THE INTANGIB! OF FORM ONE THE COMMODITY, THE READYMADE AND THE VALUE-FORM (Gag) of pctypen Cotiray votes ene poole who ex will se fxarca trata, that's tone who we sufi lene tha hey x abet bul wpa logy pene ct pests. Whe is epee iin pen buena tpn to cc acw and noel applictons of hese protons by ne of ‘oa al caomcty fa mor piso Sling in he pe (ale ss On eompleiy theory, ser, for example Pj Capa, Te Hiden Common A Ste ments of consumption, s for example wom-out and ll-ocen rags of ine inthe fr Sead Lig, Pais, Lon, tog Sex tn; Nias Laban, Aa Sa tranufacese of paper. Bat noone proces nen in onder hat should become, a8 Almost all articles of consumption ean reenter the production process as exere- ‘Syren, Sanford Univesity Press, Stanford, Califor, 3000 tgs, the raw material for paper. It only gets this form after the linen weaved’ prodiuer as such has entered consumption. Only as excrement of tis consumption, fas residuum and product ofthe consumption process, can it then go into & new production sphere as means of production. Kadi Marx’ ‘The nomination of found objects and prefabricated materials as ‘ready- ‘made? components of art is the crucial transformative event of early ‘wentieth-century art. This much is self-evident and is reflected in the extensive literature on the readymade in art criticism, art history and philosophy since the r960s. Indeed, the readymade looms vast over ‘wenticth-century art carrying all before it, invoking both feelings of horror (at the supposed loss of artistic value), and of sanguine relief (of having the burden of academic naturalism finally lifted). But in a sense we ‘ean only see this now. It was only with the theorization of the importance ‘of Duchamp's works from 1910-40 in the r9ses and 1960s, coupled with | the recovery of the revolutionary content of Constructivism, Productivism ‘and Surrealism in the 1960s and 1970s, thatthe readymade has been able to | work its retrospective and prospective power on the development of ‘wentieth-century art. In other words, the occluded but dominant ten- dencies of twentieth-century art had to be brought into practice again for their criticality to become visible. The European New Objectivism andtheory of the readymade fer se. A number of conceptual artists were vehemently opposed to the Duchampian tradition because ofits perecived ted” readymade as an enfecbled anti-art sgesturalism.* However by installing the readymade within an unfolding theoretical reflection on practice, Conceptual art was also the point where the imation of the readymade was reopened to a new set of historical ‘demands and conditions, Hence, there is a way of se and art a experience. Through this gap between art and aesthetics rushed the readymade-ideology which has underwritten art since the late 1960s. ‘Yet, despite the extensive literature on the readymade, there has been artists and their representatives and presented to an artworld pul This is because the analysis of artistic value in these discourses mative use-values of the readymade into correspondence with technical THE COMMODITY, ‘THE READYMADE AND THE 'VALUE-FORM for Benjamin the readymade is constitutive of the interrelationship be- ‘tween art and technology. Yet today Benjaminian discourse on the ready- made is largely divorced from the labour theory of culture. His primary the Benjamin scholarship of the moment, it is distinguished by its indifference to the relationship between the readymade and labour theory. ‘Thus, the issue here is not just that the ‘deskiling” imposed by the readymade on the artwork dissolves the residual artisanal content of modernist painting and sculpture, or that the dissolution of the category scholarship is certainly correct: the readymade has been crude and reduc that the abandonment of painterly sl ‘nomination and transformation of found and prefabricated mate- tials represents a technical and cognitive readjustment on the part of the artist to the increasing socialization of labour. By presenting, a discrete commodity, ora constellation of fragments of commodities, in the form of ‘a montage as a meaningful artistic act, the modernist artist insists on a point ‘of mimetic identification between artistic production and social produc- tion. Art and social production (mechanization, reproducibility) become conjoined. The technical and cognitive demands of the readymade, then, derive from the perceived phenomenological inadequacy of painting, The dabbing, pushing and smoothing of paint actoss a surface is held to be utterly residual, a process that can no longer be made to seem homologous with the experience of modemity, of living in a world of hard, reified things. Consequently, what these cognitive and mimetic demands intro- duce into att in this period is a very different relationship between the eye the artist's hand is able to act on intellectual decisions in a qualitatively