The Readymade as Social Exchange: Everyday Tactics of Resistance in Conceptual Art

Abstract

Ever since Marcel Duchamp introduced the readymade, the mass-produced object has played a key role in modern and contemporary art. As commodity culture became increasingly dominant in the decades following the second world war, artists turned to the readymade in the context of two movements that continue to be influential for the art of today: Pop art and Conceptual art. In the work of many contemporary artists, we have witnessed the tendency—inspired by Pop art’s engagement with consumer culture, to heighten the fetishistic nature of the commodity image. Conversely, many artists, influenced by Conceptualism’s methods of relocating and redefining aesthetics, have employed the readymade as a device to explore how objects mediate relationships within specific cultural contexts. This essay examines the implications of both paradigms using the theology of Michel de Certeau as a point of reference. The framework of mystical Christianity found in de Certeau’s writing, particularly with regard to his theory of “everyday practices”, provides a rich interpretation of the work of John Knight and Gabriel Orozco. The conceptual practices of both artists, particularly in the examples studied here, suggest deeper spiritual themes, and demonstrate the applicability of Christian ethics to readings of contemporary art.

1. Introduction: Commodity Art and Idolatry

In 1967 Guy Debord, in his celebrated work, The Society of the Spectacle compellingly exposed the reach and influence of commodity images in modern society. Marx’s critique of nineteenth-century capitalism and its production was updated by Debord’s Situationist International group to confront the next phase of capitalism, in which its dominance would be organized around the consumption of media. Originally an alliance of avant-garde artists, writers, and poets, the Situationist International was an attempt to draw together various theoretical disciplines in response to a burgeoning consumer culture. The Situationists updated the Marxist focus on the factory and its production of goods to the mediation of social relations through new forms of technology and image production. The Society of the Spectacle has continued to be influential and examining the proliferation of images and the alienating desires they breed has proven critical to understanding the workings of contemporary society.

Debord and the Situationists were shaped by attempts to merge art and politics in the avant-garde movements of Dada and Surrealism. Consequently, influenced by the Situationists, Jean Baudrillard’s writings on simulation and the hyperreal have impacted postmodern art in substantial ways. In its engagement with both cultural theory and political activism, it is noteworthy that art has played a critical role in confronting commodity fetishism. However, there is also a strong tendency towards acquiescence to commodification in much contemporary art, and many of the most commercially successful artists working today embrace spectacle. In fact, much of their work’s meaning can be derived from the ways in which these artists situate their production in relation to the marketplace.

Today it is a widespread practice to appropriate mass-produced images and objects into art, a strategy first introduced by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the collages they made from 1912 onwards. Appropriation of pop cultural material developed further in the readymades of Marcel Duchamp, the collages and sculptures of the Surrealists, and the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, both of whom deeply influenced Pop art. Yet as the commodity image has increased its dominance in every sphere of society, strategies of appropriation have evolved. Many artists today have zealously capitulated to the commodification of art, choosing to make work that embraces and celebrates consumer culture by replicating it as art. Such work tends to eliminate any critical distance between art and consumer culture. In this context, the question of what it means to include the mass-produced or everyday object in art has changed.

Yet, many artists who came to prominence during the Conceptual art movement of the late 1960s were already deploying the readymade in projects concerned with human relations. They had discerned in the readymade a strategy for interrogating and illuminating specific historical and cultural contexts. In the process, these artists’ diverse practices expanded art’s field of critical inquiry. This deeper potential of the readymade paradigm would have a considerable influence on later artists, particularly the diverse group associated with relational aesthetics.1 Indeed, some of the most challenging art being made today commonly utilizes the readymade strategy to deconstruct commodity culture. This spirit harkens back to the Modernist’s original, subversive use of appropriation to question the nature and purpose of art, as well as to explore the connection between art and the everyday.

However, in the work of many contemporary artists, it is the fetishistic nature of the commodity that is most appealing. Art has capitulated to our society of the spectacle, following the lead of the commodity image to become an object of desire while the artist’s identity becomes a brand. The use of manufactured objects for their seductive qualities and the adoption of sophisticated methods of fabrication transforms the borrowed object. It is made more dazzling as it partakes in the aura of art. In return, it introduces novelty, adding to the seductive or provocative quality of the painting, sculpture, or installation within which it has been incorporated. Sometimes, the everyday object is simply another element in the artwork. Other times, the artwork as a whole borrows from the object its look, materiality, or mode of production. The following examples will help to demonstrate this tendency, common in some of the most internationally recognized and prosperous artists working today.

Working as a commodities trader early in his career, the American artist Jeff Koons parlayed the skills he learned on Wall Street to transform himself into an art world brand.2 He first achieved fame by exhibiting manufactured products found in department stores which he encased in vitrines.3 Following the example of Andy Warhol, his strategy was to recontextualize commodities by displaying them in the art gallery. Rabbit (1986), now an icon in the contemporary art world, was one in a series of sculptures Koons produced based on inflatable toys. His work has been fabricated by technicians and a staggering number of studio assistants using advanced technologies of image production, but also in traditional materials that appeal to middle-class taste, such as painted wood, ceramics, and porcelain. In form and material, sculptures like Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988) are seductively crafted, oversized celebrations of kitsch.

Much of Koons’s work is industrially produced, sometimes at a monumental scale (e.g., his Balloon Dogs)4 with highly polished surfaces. Though most of his art, which is made in series like seasonal fashion collections,5 takes the form of sculpture and installation, Koons produces paintings through his studio as well. However, here too the output is dictated by a capitalist logic of efficient mass production. He avoids touching a paintbrush, instead directing assistants through an exacting process of reproducing slick computer-based images that have been spliced into complex configurations. These grandiose paintings mimic advertising in their calculated appeal to consumer desire.

In 1991, the British artist Damien Hirst exhibited a tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde at the Saatchi Gallery in London, owned by the advertising mogul Charles Saatchi. Titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, it led to Hirst’s nomination for the Turner Prize and international acclaim (Thompson 2008a). Like Koons, Hirst has crafted a brand identity so that along with the art, his personal image too becomes a commodity. Hirst has continued employing readymade objects in sensational ways, producing a platinum cast of a human skull studded with 8601 diamonds (For the Love of God),6 and gargantuan anatomical models that recall medical illustrations and anatomy kits.7 He has also made paintings—one series created using spin machines and others incorporating live and dead butterflies (Thompson 2008b). In addition to his continued stream of encased animal carcasses, Hirst has exhibited enlarged ashtrays filled with cigarette butts and cabinets stacked with found objects, including pharmaceuticals. The value of Hirst’s commodities arises from their desirability as objects that shock and provoke, with precious material qualities that lend them added importance. They are flawless designer items made according to demanding industrial standards. In some cases, such as Anatomy of an Angel (2008), material such as Carrara marble links his art to precious works of art history. As with Koons, Hirst directs teams in the production of the art branded with his name, replicating Warhol’s Factory.8 Hirst also mimics the fashion world by selling a diffusion line of items featuring images of his work on T-shirts and posters for those who cannot afford the art.

Operating as shrewd bourgeoisie capitalists, Koons and Hirst purchase labor power in the form of production teams, using its surplus to expand their studios like small corporations. The accumulated capital earned by their studios’ massive output is invested into media campaigns that promote the image of each artist as an enfant terrible or provocateur. Earnings also maintain the high production value of subsequent projects, which are priced beyond the reach of all but the most wealthy and influential collectors.9

More recently a force from the East has blown through the international art world. Dubbed the Japanese Andy Warhol, Takashi Murakami is known for his appropriation of anime and manga aesthetics. He retains multiple studios and runs a company called Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. that makes art and designs merchandise. Murakami’s range of activities is broader than his Western counterparts, but like Koons and Hirst, his image and art production are fused in a commodity spectacle. His paintings, sculptures, and installations made up of cartoon-style flowers, mushrooms, skulls, and Buddhist iconography, serve as trademarks identifying his brand, which also operates in the worlds of fashion, animation, television, and music (Thornton 2008). His sexualized sculptures, such as Hiropon (1997) and My Lonesome Cowboy (1998) adapted from an erotic form of manga called Otaku, celebrate the reified commodity through the reinforcement and simulation of desire, and harken back to the sex-oriented images and sculptures of Koons.10

Collapsing the space between art and commerce, Murakami’s company manages and produces for other Japanese artists and runs an art festival called Geisai. In 2000, the artist launched his own art movement, Superflat. It references the aesthetics of traditional Japanese art and Japan’s pop culture, both of which Murakami’s images draw upon for inspiration. Like Koons and Hirst, Murakami’s work relies on commercial manufacture to seamlessly enter into and partake of commodity culture. Moreover, in the spirit of Warhol’s Factory, his own Hiropon Factory ensures consistent production and quality control (the artist is known for his strict micro-management). Murakami’s reputation rests on provocation, an appeal to consumer taste, and the art world’s embrace of appealing, stylistically recognizable objects with the sheen of luxury products.

What happens when artists allow themselves to be co-opted, or willingly partake in the operations of consumerism, with its emphasis on the design and production of seductive objects? The three artists discussed are extreme examples, but the appeal to viewers’ desire through surface and simulation is a common trend in contemporary art. When artists surrender to the systems of capital, the art object often veers into fetish. In the operational logic of the simulacra, art, such as the advertisement, becomes capable of creating its own world, absorbing the viewer as it fulfills a perceived lack. The passive subject is thus made complete in the image of consumer desire.

Remaining intact outside the viewer as it is visually introjected to fulfill desire, art’s permanent object status strengthens it as a fetish. Moreover, when it is produced and distributed as an alluring commodity, adapted to best accommodate the market, critical distance erodes, and art succumbs to the spectacle. The worship of the commodity image is a fundamental feature of our society of the spectacle and places us squarely in the domain of idolatry. In the private encounter with an object that has been sanctified by the market, the alienated consumer of art is beguiled with the promise of transcendence.

Ironically, in 2008 Damien Hirst produced a piece titled The Golden Calf. The sculpture contains a calf with eighteen-carat gold hooves and horns, sporting a golden disc on its head, suspended in a tank made of glass and gold-plated steel. It of course refers to the false idol worship of the Israelites as Moses went to meet God on Mount Sinai. However, unlike the irony of Duchamp, for whom the readymade served to rupture mental constructs, Hirst’s gesture draws us into a hyperreal gulf. Not only is he uninterested in the role of art as critique, but Hirst also perversely clutches at excess, signifying a wholesale acceptance of art as an idol. In theological terms, the sculpture is an enactment of pure idolatry. Hirst ignores the liberating potential of the readymade to provide critical distance from commodity culture. Instead, his productions seek to lure the viewer into worshipping at the altar of designer luxury.

2. Duchamp and the Legacy of the Readymade

Koons, Hirst, and Murakami are directly indebted to Warhol, but the lineage of artists whose work contends with the images and objects of mass production extends further back to Marcel Duchamp. In a practice that continually challenged the very meaning of the art object, Duchamp engaged with material culture in ways that would have a far-reaching impact on both modern and contemporary artists. His idea of the readymade was arguably the most significant influence on twentieth-century art and paved the way for both Pop art and Conceptualism. Each relied heavily on Duchamp’s idea, in which a mass-produced object is removed from its usual context and designated as a work of art. Committed to destabilizing expectations, readymades like Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (1913), Fountain (1917), and L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) led the Pop artists and conceptualists alike to include modern techniques of reproduction and everyday objects in their art.

Pop art and Conceptualism remain two of the most enduring influences on the art of today. While they may seem antithetical due to formal differences, both shared a critical engagement with consumer society and the dominant forms of media spectacle (TV and advertising). Both movements have continued to evolve, interpreting and applying Duchamp’s legacy to the relationship between art and consumerism in radically different ways.

For Duchamp, assigning ordinary objects the status of art through selection and display in an art context directly addressed industry and manufacturing. However, by the mid-twentieth century, consumer culture began its dominance in the West. Warhol and other Pop artists, by appropriating the images and methods of the new spectacle society, used the readymade to challenge traditional ideas about authenticity, originality, and aesthetic taste. Pop art maintained a critical tension, playing in the gap between art and consumerism. However, in the 1980s, when Koons arrived on the scene, art would become big business. The distinction between art and the commodity was precipitously dissolved as artists such as Koons, Hirst, and Murakami exploited what they had learned from Warhol to seamlessly conjoin art and commerce.

Along with Pop art, the other line of descent from Duchamp most significant to contemporary art is conceptualism. Duchamp is considered the forefather of Conceptual art, which is indebted to his philosophical approach and critique of the art establishment. Emerging in the 1960s, Conceptual art placed more importance on the idea behind the work than the finished object. Countering Pop art’s ironic sensibility and Minimalism’s blunt materiality, conceptualism expanded the aesthetic field, challenging ideas about art in its dematerialization of the object. Its concern with institutional critique has been taken up by post-conceptual artists, and the more recent movement of relational aesthetics also owes much to conceptualism’s expansion of aesthetics into the everyday. In its original form and later variants, conceptualism would move against the grain of commodity fetishism in works that challenged the viewer’s attachment to the object, directing attention to how the artwork is embedded in culture.

While it is commonly assumed that conceptualism placed little concern on aesthetics, it would be more accurate to say that the artists associated with the movement displaced aesthetics within an expanded field of object relations. Conceptual artists attempted to bypass an increasingly commercialized art world by producing work that did not fit neatly into established genres or formal categories. In addition, much of their work contained a strong socio-political dimension and, in this way, engaged with issues in the larger culture, beyond the sanctified spaces of the gallery and museum. The practices of many conceptualists were nomadic. More artists began working on multiple sites and without a traditional studio. It became commonplace to travel and produce work in situ, (i.e., in response to a site’s history and context).

For many artists, Duchamp’s breakthrough has mainly implied that any manner of image or object can become art in the gallery context. However, othersinfluenced by the tenets of conceptualism and thus wary of fetishizing art, recognized in Duchamp’s original gesture as a path to liberating art from the status of a mere commodity. In their work, the readymade becomes a vehicle to move beyond the exhibition space to an engagement with the social and political realities of the everyday. In so doing, these artists invoke the ethical dimension of the readymade, in which art becomes a means for reorientation in the world. Such works draw our attention from discrete objects to the power structures embedded in material relations.

The mass-produced object is one element among many the artist can use to confront systems of power or to initiate transformative encounters. Opposing commodity fetishism with actions that recognize aesthetics in the everyday, much conceptual practice bypasses the spell of the hermetic object, opening to interdependence and relationship in a world mediated through things.

3. Conceptualism in Urban Space

Beginning his practice in the nascent years of Conceptual art, John Knight is an American artist whose work consistently interrogates systems of object production, display, and distribution. Like many conceptualists, Knight adopted a post-studio practice, with projects designed, organized, and made to operate outside the confines of a traditional artist’s studio. His site-specific work resiliently avoids the traps of commodity fetishism in the art world. Rather than producing isolated and discrete objects for gallery exhibition and sale, Knight’s in situ projects are initiated by invitations from art institutions or organizations and often draw attention to economies of exchange within the marketplace. The readymade plays a critical role within the construct of Knight’s practice. Through it, the artist confronts and reveals overlooked relationships of power that underlie the design aesthetics of commodity culture.

In 1991, Stroom (The Hague’s Center for Visual Arts) invited Knight, along with fourteen other American and European artists, to participate in a public art program reflecting on the unique history and character of The Hague. For his proposal, Knight considered both the extensive use of the bicycle and the historical importance of various forms of design in the Netherlands. His contribution to the occasion, titled The Campaign (1992–1993) involved commissioning an industrial designer to produce a bicycle bell emblazoned with the logotype of a stork, found on The Hague’s official seal. The outer shell of the bell was transparent, making the engraved monogram JK,11 visible at its base. In place of the standard sound of a bicycle bell, Knight’s redesign made a croaking sound. Both the frog and the stork are endangered species in the Netherlands and are linked in the food chain (Pelzer 2014).

An advertising campaign was created, including bus ads, to inform the public that Stroom would offer the new bell in exchange for used bells, which would be collected and shipped to Cuba, another nation in which the bicycle had become ubiquitous. Due to political circumstances in Cuba, which had led to the American embargo and problems with trade relations elsewhere, petroleum was in short supply. As a result, the bicycle had become an essential means of transportation. The new bells would thus function in the Netherlands as safety devices, a reminder of a delicate ecosystem, and a sign of unity with the people of Cuba. Along with each bell, participants in the Netherlands received a postcard in which Knight described his project, a copy of The Hague’s Center for Visual Arts’ journal, and a handlebar advertisement made to prompt others in the city to participate.

Putting into urban circulation and trade a functional object, Knight’s bell foregrounds aesthetics through its replication of industrial design in an art context. His object is a mass-produced sculpture endowed with unique visual and aural qualities. Appropriating a logotype and including everyday objects (used bells), The Campaign also makes use of advertising. The project’s elements slip into the stream of commodity culture, borrowing capitalist modes of representation not to create fetish objects, but to open up systems of exchange. In doing so, Knight’s project lays bare social, economic, and political realities.

Among the generation of artists who have built upon the legacy of Conceptual art, Gabriel Orozco has used the impetus of a post-studio practice to directly engage with the materials of the everyday. Originally from Mexico, Orozco has lived and worked in cities around the world, his nomadism being a primary influence on his production. In his travels through urban environments, he collects and incorporates found materials into a range of work, particularly in the form of sculpture and photography. For Orozco, the readymade activates collective memory and compels viewers to consider how we assign value to objects and spaces in the context of shared histories. The artist transforms the items he collects, blurring the readymade’s boundaries within the larger piece. In doing so, his art critically examines the traditional distinctions between art and the everyday, widening aesthetic inquiry to explore the way material culture shapes us.

In Horses Running Endlessly (1995), Orozco transforms a chessboard by manipulating its color, pattern, and pieces (only knights).12 An example of his interest in games, the sculpture subverts expectations by changing the rules and opening a paradox of time and space.13 La D.S. (1993) consists of a Citroën automobile with its middle third removed, altering the object’s identity as a symbol of France’s industrial design dreams in the post-war period. Its aesthetic qualities are emphasized as its utilitarian purpose is discarded. Perception and memory intermingle in an object which no longer functions as intended. The Citroën as an image is emphasized through Orozco’s flattening. For Black Kites (1997) and Mobile Matrix (2006), Orozco drew intricate patterns in graphite over a human skull and whale skeleton, respectively. Here, the remains of once-living beings push the readymade beyond the manufactured object or image to encompass artifacts of the science museum, imbued with symbolic meaning.

In a work reminiscent of Knight’s project in The Hague, Until You Find Another Yellow Schwalbe (1995), (Hodge 2015) is a piece in which Orozco expands aesthetics into the everyday using an industrially designed object of mobility (Buchloh 2000). Here too, the readymade is embedded within the complex socio-political history seeping through urban space. Living and working in Berlin by means of a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service, Orozco purchased a bright yellow used Schwalbe (the swallow) moped, a popular vestige of East German production from the 1960s. Driving it around the city for approximately three months, the artist would stop each time he came across another yellow Schwalbe, park his own next to it and photograph both vehicles together. At each point, he would leave a note inviting the moped’s owner to join him at a gathering in the parking lot of Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of Germany’s reunification. In addition to the notes, Orozco also placed an announcement in a motorcyclist’s magazine. Ultimately, only two of the owners attended, and in the group of photographs exhibited, the three mopeds are shown together as the final picture in the series.

The 40 color photographs that document the performance are arranged in a linear sequence. In each, the two mopeds are dominant. Orozco cropped each photograph so that very little surrounding space is included, though it is clear that the vehicles were parked together in a variety of locations around Berlin. The artist also inverted some of the images so that those which originally showed the vehicles pointing left would point right. The sequential arrangement of the photographs in the exhibition, the uniformity of the vehicles’ color and design, as well as the pairing and multiplying of industrial objects reference Minimalism. Restricting his parameters to a particular object, random encounters with only yellow Schwalbes, and the traversal of a specific urban territory, Orozco’s performance/installation recalls the strategies of conceptualism. Within a set of strict operational guidelines, unpredictable and surprising connections emerge.

In both The Campaign and Until You Find Another Yellow Schwalbe the implications of the two-wheeled vehicle referencing a bird of flight seems to be directly taken up by the artists. Each project navigates urban space in a movement free of the constraints of global capitalism, which organizes spaces and relations in the city and the world to its own advantage. “As the crow flies” is an apt phrase to describe how these works flout the imposed order of urban planning. By relating to specific histories and social spaces both works also insist upon the physicality of urban environments as against the virtual nonplace of the society of the spectacle. Each project invites encounters with others in the urban fabric. Whereas commodity culture is predicated on the isolated consumer, the works of Knight and Orozco join people and communities through chance, while encouraging solidarity in the context of shared histories and economic links. These works critique the priorities of capitalism by undermining its organizing logic and bringing attention to how it separates and dominates through consumer fantasy.

Reaching out to others, Orozco’s readymade was an object representing East Germany’s version of affordable and functional design. As an obsolete relic of the divided past that had become trendy since Germany’s reunification, the Schwalbe was repurposed to document the artist’s movement in a culture that would view him as the Other. Orozco’s journeys suggest how material culture can function as a mode of social transaction that opens new paths to community. For Knight, the challenges of the restrictive conditions in Cuba required that he negotiate a complicated bureaucratic tangle to see his project through. These circumstances indelibly become part of the work’s life and meaning. As such they are, like in Orozco’s project, chance events that unfold within a methodical set of conditions and which, in this case, make visible political and economic systems that disadvantage some nations while empowering others.

4. Theological Interpretation: De Certeau’s Everyday Practices

The concern with a renewal of urban life sitting at the core of both Knight’s and Orozco’s projects resonates within the work of Michel de Certeau, the twentieth-century French Jesuit and scholar. His study of the dynamics of urban communities in works such as The Practice of Everyday Life14 provides a valuable interpretive framework for understanding the works discussed. Applying the theological implications of de Certeau’s writing to these and similar conceptual artworks unveil a host of deeper meanings that extend into the realm of Christian ethics.

Influenced by psychoanalysis and his work as a historian of religion, de Certeau developed a theory of everyday life to account for how individuals unconsciously navigate space (Sheldrake 2001). He used the concepts of strategy and tactics to explain how ordinary routines such as walking through the city can become forms of resistance to institutional control. Though de Certeau’s writing ranges widely in its interdisciplinary reach, his investigation into how the everyday routines of ordinary people constitute resistance to structures of power is informed by a religious sensibility (Sheldrake 2014). His early work on the history of religion included the study of mysticism as a distinct category. Moreover, his interest in mystical life as a social practice, rather than subjective experience, had a decisive influence on his thinking about the city.

Philip Sheldrake points out that de Certeau was an expert on Ignatian spirituality, and states,

Throughout The Practice the Ignatian focus on finding God in everyday practices is implicitly echoed in de Certeau’s attention to the everyday tactics of ordinary people on the street. De Certeau’s approach to everyday practices is value-laden. In describing everyday life, its practices and “ways of proceeding”, he was not making a detached social scientific observation. Rather, he sought to inspire his readers, in the spirit of the Examen, “to uncover for themselves, in their own situation, their own tactics (a struggle for life), their own creations (an aesthetic) and their own initiatives (an ethic).

Sheldrake continues: “De Certeau wrote that ‘daily life is scattered with marvels;’ and his reading of ‘the everyday’ has a transfigured, even mystical quality.”15

For de Certeau, the Ignatian drive towards the unknown and unfixed allows for engagement with the public in ways that are disruptive of the strategies of official cultural policy. In the same way, mysticism is disruptive to the social and religious order in its radical emptying of self (Wolfteich 2012). Mysticism is a subversion of norms, encouraging perpetual movement such as the bicycles and mopeds in the works of Knight and Orozco. This journeying can be traced back ultimately to the wanderings of Christ, and the discipleship he encouraged: “My kingdom is not of this world.” (John 18:36). Both of the artworks discussed stake out their own paths in public space, perpetually sliding over borders and yielding new encounters outside the known.

The readymade in both artists’ conceptually based practices serves as a catalyst within a system of relationships, outside of which it is incomplete. Today, no form of artmaking can fully escape commodification, even the most dematerialized Conceptual art. Yet, these projects by Knight and Orozco cannot be properly understood if their components (redesigned bell, framed photographs of Schwalbe’s), were to be fetishized as discrete objects in a gallery. Their meaning is dependent on context—the larger set of operations and interactions produced by the insertion of the designer object into a flow of relationships. In each case, the object disrupts the strategies of city planning and international relations with aesthetic tactics that initiate new experiences of public space.

Shifting the emphasis from autonomous object production to an expanded field of urban practices, both artists establish a spatiotemporal dimension in their projects. Aesthetic contemplation evolves into corporeality through the participation of others in the realization of the work. The role of the artist is displaced now that the art happens outside of medium-specific boundaries. The situations generated by the artist’s act constitute innumerable aesthetic extensions.16 Following the conceptualist paradigm, Knight and Orozco create conditions that open their work to context and environment. The rhythm of simulated croaks on busy streets, the mirroring of a moped in mapping a trajectory, and the documentation of incidentals that transpired during the life of the project are all aesthetic elements in these works. Each project frames the everyday such that our attention is directed to the aesthetic dimension of culture—how we make and use the material to interact with others in a shared environment.

Recalling Augustine’s two cities, the City of God appears in the denial of the city that serves man’s law. The readymade circulates as an alternate mode of exchange which, like the mystic’s quest, is never final. Through chance encounters and unfamiliar interactions with the other, these works remake the old maps as they circulate along unexpected routes, continually remixing the planned order of the environment. The city of God cannot be known in advance. It reveals itself in a perichoresis17 free of imposed boundaries.

Knight and Orozco inevitably realize de Certeau’s theory of the everyday partly because the overall practice of each defines art as an experience rather than a product to be sold. For Knight, it is the experience of interrogating invisible power structures that organize our reality. His institutional critique incorporates the readymades of design culture to denaturalize the society of the spectacle, exposing its methods and agendas. Orozco finds his readymades in the everyday practices of the street—in the poetics of human interaction imprinted on material culture, and the way citizens (as opposed to consumers) repurpose their environment.

5. Conceptualism and Mystical Contemplation

Both The Campaign and Until You Find Another Yellow Schwalbe rely on social connectedness for meaning. As in Christian ethics, the other is contiguous with the self. The work of both artists embraces the city’s diversity, enacting the transformative potential of art in the context of the shared daily life of its inhabitants. If each project thus relies for its meaning on an awareness of human interdependence, does it not also suggest that we can only know who we are in a relationship with others? The artists invite an intermingling between home culture and those who, regardless of geographic distance, are part of us. This same unity is pictured in the New Testament as a vine and its branches or a single body with Christ as its head. The chance events each project puts into play call into question the overemphasis on manageability in urban planning, imaginatively remaking urban space as redemptive.

Using the readymade to initiate action, art plays on the gameboard of the city. Thus, The Hague, Havana, and Berlin become sites of knowing as well as resistance to top-down practices. Community involvement is encouraged, as citizens move outward beyond the organizing schemes of power as manifested in official cultural and urban policy. Both projects also point to the diversity of unofficial cultural practices in the daily lives of ordinary people,18 and serve to recommit art to the transformation of culture.

What each project suggests is how culture may be opened up to the other and governmental policy adjusted to accommodate, rather than simply tolerate international movement. In their embrace of the heterogeneity of urban space, each artist uses the readymade in an expanded field of action that promotes difference, calling attention to the customs and voices of the immigrant, the disenfranchised and the overlooked. The diverse community that gives life to the city, mobile and active like these projects themselves, in the Christian view, is reconciled in the Spirit of God through mutual love and communion.

When biblical teachings about idolatry and loving our neighbor are applied to the conditions of commodity culture, the implications are radical. Contemplative action in the Christian tradition opposes the notion of a docile consumer, isolated in a free-market belief system that promotes self-aggrandizement and aggressive competition. If the Christian response to a broken world is guided by the teachings of Jesus, action is informed by meditation and discernment. The symbiosis of contemplation and action is indicative of the mystic, who constitutes a threat to the city of man (i.e., organized society) because he/she is guided by a contemplative vision of life in God, not the dictates of those in power. This commitment to divine law places the mystic at the margins of society. In an analogous way, Knight’s and Orozco’s projects in the city, like de Certeau’s tactics, create detours, shortcuts, and new links in real space. They also open an expansive view of human existence as interdependent, as opposed to the illusion of self-sufficiency propagated by commodity culture. Conceptual methodologies like these serve as gateways to deeper truths, providing a means of moving beyond ourselves to the recognition of our need for others. Crucially, they ask us to see others and our environment as extensions of ourselves.

Linked together in the larger body of Christ, which includes our relationship to the cosmos, a view of relationality lies at the center of all life. Knight’s choice of the stork and frog speaks to the interdependence of humans and the natural environment, prompting us to reflect on how our actions endanger fragile ecosystems. The exchange of bells between Dutch and Cuban communities draws attention to economic disproportion as it reaches across the globe to unify diverse cultures in resistance to government bureaucracy and economic exploitation. It is a question of responsibility—of recognizing our place and thereby the impact of our choices on the larger world. These actions reflect a Christian ethic,19 modeled on the gospels.

That ethic teaches that love and care for others begins when we see them in ourselves. The society of the spectacle replaces bodies with images, and art that embraces this condition adopts strategies and mechanisms from the marketplace to create its own spell. Knight’s and Orozco’s projects move out to encounters in the real world—into the sights, sounds, and smells of the city, using the readymade to prompt reflection on the history of specific places and on practices of the everyday. Exaltation of the self under the spell of a fetish is exchanged for renewal in a unitive consciousness.

A rigorous conceptual methodology encourages the artist to think outside genre and follow an idea free of preconceived formal considerations. The images or objects produced, and their manner of production is dictated by the idea. However, they may take form in a diffused way, or by attaching themselves to the everyday. Knight and Orozco are both deeply invested in the influence of material culture, using its artifacts as readymades to move against dominant practices so that relational flows are set free. Their aesthetics are thereby mutable, continually reforming to meet the needs of context, and so always engaged with the real. The readymade as a designer object, logotype, or vehicle is activated to remake social relations in public space. It is this concern with how we use and understand the objects of culture that drives their work. Using the readymade as a vehicle to illuminate relationships of interdependence, generate solidarity, and celebrate the organic, fluid nature of urban life, Knight and Orozco create new maps. Applying a Christian lens, The Campaign and Until You Find Another Yellow Schwalbe suggests that strangers can become our family in Christ. Each work offers a much-needed antidote to art that cynically grasps at commodity culture to promote the artist as a celebrity.

As viewers, we are asked to exercise our imagination with these conceptual works of Knight and Orozco. Not just because their projects may differ from our expectations for art in their form or context. We are invited to see reality itself free of our conditioning and open to a new vision of what art can do in drawing us outwards beyond ourselves. Through means of appropriation, the everyday object becomes a medium for transformation and change. In these works, the readymade goes beyond Duchamp’s reframing of the commodity as art to question wider cultural boundaries. In each case, mass-produced objects are used as engines to catalyze and make visible a set of relations. This projects us beyond a critique of institutions to the ethical dimension of the everyday, using art to bridge neighborhoods in urban space. Though the readymade was born in the hallowed space of the gallery, by setting it into circulation, Knight and Orozco gave it a renewed purpose: to connect people and places. In doing so, their art reorients us to the world.

Knight and Orozco make the readymade a radical gesture again. Unlike many artists who have remained stuck in formal manipulation, they understood that the readymade could be something more than it had been or was. By using it to disrupt strategies of control in urban space and reconnect people and places, they bring the readymade to its ethical fulfillment. In drawing people to one another the commodity’s meaning is transformed to become like the sacred object of spiritual tradition. As in the liturgy, the material of culture serves as a gateway leading to the network of relations where the individual finds themselves part of a collective life.

The awareness these artworks promote is akin to what the gospels teach about loving others and the interrelationality of an abundant order. Each project activates the readymade’s potential for liberation as opposed to novelty, shock, or seduction. Both artists devised systems of exchange and interactivity to deploy the readymade as a counterstrategy to the commodification of urban space. Cutting against the self-absorption promoted by the gleaming idols of consumerism, they reconfigured modest objects as mediums for social transaction, interaction, and discovery.

When we turn from an overemphasis on supernatural experiences to an appreciation for the quotidian, are we not in the realm of the religious mystic? The mystic dwells in the everyday love of God, breaking free of the ego’s vanity, which includes excessive pride in spiritual accomplishments. Such a view propels the desire to share with and partake in the unique expressions of being we encounter in every city. Its gift is in knowing oneself as part of the body of Christ, in the particularities of here and now, unbounded by space and everlasting in time.