The Ideology

of Duration
in the
Dematerialised
Monument:
Art, Sites, Publics
and Time
Dave Beech
 Locating the Producers The Ideology of Duration in the Dematerialised Monument

In order for the implications of art’s social relations to be played people of the site, involving direct communication
out in full, many contemporary projects find that they must live, and interaction over an extended period of time,
adapt and persevere with any given situation (and all its tensions). had been a well-established tenet of socially
Duration is required to allow the artwork to test its own hypoth- responsible and ethically sound public art.1
esis, but duration is also its ethic, its mode of address and its com-
mitment to the process of a culture coming into being. In recent Kwon’s affirmation of ‘intensive engagement’ is symptomatic of
years, durational work has become exemplary of a certain strain the ideology of duration. I am aware that the accusation of speak-
of discourse which calls for an ethical foundation for the relation- ing ideologically is commonly misunderstood today, so, in order to
ships developed between an artist and a community. I will begin proceed, I want to explain precisely why I think the current trend
by examining these claims in detail, spelling out the ideology of to speak of ‘intensive engagement’, ‘long-standing commitments’,
duration that is found not only in contemporary thinking on pub- and so forth, corresponds to the Marxist concept of ideology.
lic art but also in contemporary ‘public relations’ practices and big In the Marxist tradition, ideology is never reduced to falsity.
business. I will go on to contrast this ideology of duration with a The key to ideology is the way it separates ideas — true and false
politics of what Thomas Crow calls ‘a strong version of site-specific alike — from over-determined social reality. This is why it is ideo-
art’, in which the very possibility of duration is a sign of the failure l-ogical to say that ‘Prince Charles is a decent bloke’ even if it is
to engage seriously with the contradictions of social space. I will true. If ideological ideas were simply false, then it should be rela-
conclude, however, that it is a mistake to take sides, on principle, tively easy to dispense with them. But ideological ideas, like the
with duration or against it. Duration may not be a cure for social existence of God and the good character of members of the Royal
ills, but this does not mean that it is to be avoided at all costs. What Family, persist regardless of their truth or falsity. We need a dif-
we need to develop is a conjunctural analysis of art’s relationship to ferent tack. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels argue that
specific sites, publics and flows of time. ‘morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology (…) have
Consultation, participation and collaboration have become key no history’ except the history of material production and material
concerns within and around art practices that come into contact intercourse. ‘Viewed apart from real history’, Marx and Engels say,
with, engage or serve communities. By the late 1980s, a new ethic ‘these abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever’.2 We
had crystallised regarding art’s relationship to its local publics. As can add, though, that specifically, when ‘viewed apart from real
Miwon Kwon explains, community involvement history’, these abstractions appear to have a value all of their own.
What Marx and Engels argue is that if you want to know the es-
 eant the expanded inclusion of nonart
m sence of an ideological idea, then you should look neither to the ab-
community representatives in the selection panels stract concept nor to the particular circumstance to which it refers
and review committees of public art commissions. (neither to good-bloke-ishness, nor to Prince Charles himself), but
More significantly, it suggested a dialogue between to the ensemble of particulars to which the particular belongs (i.e.
the artist and his/her immediate audience, with to what it means for someone today to say that a prince is a good
the possibility of community participation, even bloke, as opposed to saying that Ken Livingstone is a good bloke
collaboration, in the making of the art work. For
many artists and administrators with long-standing 1 M iwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational
commitments to community-based practices since Identity (Cambridge, MA, and London, MIT Press, 2004), pp. 81-82.
the 1960s (…) an intensive engagement with the 2 K arl Marx, The German Ideology (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1974, CJ
Arthur ed.), p. 48.

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or Stephen Fry is a good bloke). Countering the ideological state- of our supposedly highest ideals, therefore, are necessarily ideo-
ment that ‘Prince Charles is a decent bloke’ with the ‘truth’ that logical. Ideology separates ideas from social life, whereas politics
Prince Charles is, in fact, a super-rich obnoxious git entirely misses reconnects ideas with social life. Ideology is both pleasurably af-
the point (it focuses on the particular against the abstract without firmative and opposed to politics. Let us revisit the affirmation of
referring to the ensemble of particulars). The statement ‘Prince duration in light of this short discussion of the Marxist concept
Charles is a decent bloke’ is ideological because the ostensive fact of ideology.
that Prince Charles is a good bloke is ideologically separated from In contemporary thinking around art’s relationship with its
two key material conditions. The first separates the fact from ma- publics, duration is ideological because it is isolated and abstracted
terial conditions of his privilege, wealth and influence as a prince as something valuable in itself. It is only by first separating dura-
and the second separates the statement from the complex circum- tion from actual cultural practices that duration then returns to
stances of the speech act (to say that the statement is true is to sepa- normatively shape cultural practice. What’s more, duration inter-
rate it from the motivations of saying it as well as its consequences). pellates individuals — artists, curators, participants, funders etc. —
The ensemble of particulars, then, is material intercourse embed- as the proper subjects of art’s socially responsible institutions. It
ded in material production, or, to put it another way, the politics of acts simultaneously as an injunction to perform competently and
speech acts as they are played out in real historical circumstances. as a measure of that competence. It links these individuals to the
Hence, a critique of ideology involves tracing the social life of ideas universal social body. It also assigns legitimacy and privilege. In
in which the most abstract thought derives its content and value other words, it is ideological currency. When we speak of the ethics
from the world in which it circulates. of duration, participation, and so forth, we must take this seriously
In the 1960s, the French philosopher, Louis Althusser, fleshed as the ideological threat that it is; duration is ideological in the
out the Marxist theory of ideology by examining in detail what was way that sexism is ideological (it has real consequences, causes real
meant by material intercourse embedded in material production, harm and its affirmation is always simultaneously an assault on that
deepening our understanding of the politics of speech acts and which it negates).
insisting on conjunctural analysis (i.e. thought as always embed- The affirmation of duration in contemporary art is ideological
ded in material conditions to which it must respond) as opposed to even if duration can be shown to have all kinds of social, artistic
speculative thought (i.e. thought abstracted from material condi- and ethical benefits. A critique of the ideology of duration does
tions from which it remains aloof). Althusser expands the concept not have to invert its values or show it to be harmful. We could
of material intercourse through an analysis of what he calls inter- counter the ideology of duration, then, neither by opposing it on
pellation, the process by which individuals are formed as subjects principle (i.e. in abstraction) nor by referring only to what specific
within specific social institutions. He argues that ‘an ideology al- forms of duration achieve under certain specific circumstances (i.e.
ways exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices’.3 in particularity), but by reconnecting the affirmation of duration
As such, ideology and subjectivity are not mental but practical, to the ensemble of particulars — the discourses, practices, rituals
existing not in consciousness but in rituals, practices and institu- and institutions — from which it derives (i.e. the conjunctural). It
tions. When ideology interpellates us as good citizens, it system- is ideological to say that duration in art is good, but it is political to
atically confuses complicity with pride, joy and pleasure. Ideology say that the affirmation of duration is ideological. This means not
is necessarily linked to these kinds of affirmations of the subject; only linking the affirmation of duration in art with the affirmation
rather than coercing individuals to do what is required of them,
ideology offers exemplary ideas to which individuals can aspire. All 3 Louis Althusser, On Ideology (London, Verso, 2008 (1971)), p. 40.

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of duration in business and public relations, but also linking the new genre public artists draw on ideas from
affirmation of duration in art to the conditions imposed by funders vanguard forms, but they add a developed
and institutions on those artists and curators charged with having sensibility about audience, social strategy, and
pastoral care over their publics. It also means reconnecting the af- effectiveness that is unique to visual art as we
firmation of duration to practices and discourses that disaffirm dur- know it today.4
ation, opening up a whole field in which art questions its relation-
ship to site, publics and temporality. What’s more, if we are not to One way of understanding this shift in new genre public art is to see
be carried away by the ideology of duration in art, we will need to it applying the ontology of dematerialisation to the public context
combat the pleasures that it interpellates, which means combating in which ‘community arts’ came to replace what we might call ‘old
our own desires, our willingness to be ‘good’ artists and citizens. genre public art’, namely monumental sculpture. Grant Kester also
I will not be able to address all these approaches in this short advocates the ‘movement away from the artwork as self-contained
essay. Instead, I will focus on the way in which the ideology of entity and toward a more dialogical relationship to the viewer’,5 by
duration in art has been justified in terms immanent to art since linking the new dialogical art with the legacy of dematerialisation.
the 1960s, seeming, therefore, to provide an historical, rather than Below I will re-describe the shared position of Lacy and Kester in
ideological, case for the affirmation of duration. It is by placing terms of what I call the ‘dematerialised monument’.
the ideology of duration within the context of post-minimalist art Having rejected the monumental object of public art, new
practices that it is found to be critical rather than complicit. One genre public art does not sacrifice monumentality altogether but
of the results of making this link, however, is that it opens up the converts it from being a quality of the object into a quality of the
possibility of alternative readings of post-minimalism that do not temporal experience of community arts projects. Duration asserts
support the ideology of duration. itself in the ‘monumental time’ of the dematerialised public work.
The ideology of duration dovetails with a reading of the post- The dematerialised monument is a monument to the community
minimalist legacy of contemporary art, linked to the ontology of built out of the social relations of the community itself. Time be-
endurance in performance, installation, video art, Land Art and so comes monumentalised within an ethic of the artist’s prolonged
on. This provides the ideology of duration with an artistic pedi- engagement with the public. In emphasising the value of social
gree that recommends it in the highest terms. Suzanne Lacy made process over aesthetic product, dematerialised monuments are
this case in 1995, through her introduction of the concept of ‘new often judged according to the conduct of the artist, not least by
genre public art’: the artists themselves. Among such judgements, artists are often
praised for their early involvement of the community in substan-
 he term ‘new genre’ has been used since the late
T tive decision making and the amount of time spent with the com-
1960s to describe art that departs from traditional munity. Claire Bishop argues this point cogently in her critique of
boundaries of media. Not specifically painting, relational art,6 rightly arguing that relational art from the 1990s
sculpture, or film, for example, new genre art
might include combinations of different media. 4 S uzanne Lacy, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle, Bay
Installation, performances, conceptual art, and Press, 1995), p. 21.
5 Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community & Communication in
mixed-media art, for example, fall into the new Modern Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2004),
genre category, a catchall term for experimentation p. 60.
6 Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October 110,
in both form and content. Attacking boundaries, Fall 2004.

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onwards trades in ethics rather than politics. In my terms, she Matta-Clark’s Window Blowout exemplifies a ‘strong’ version of
demonstrates that the new art is ideological. site specificity:
It is possible to imagine that there has been a fortunate conver-
gence between the rhetoric of vanguardism (as found in the criti-  atta-Clark was invited in 1976 to contribute
M
cally loaded commitment to endurance in the first generation of to an exhibition at a New York architectural
performance art) and the demands of funders. There is consider- think-tank, the Institute for Architecture and
able consensus that the artist or curator should spend as much time Urban Studies (…) But late in the process of
as possible with the work’s audience, community or site. The ideol- installing the show, he arrived armed – literally
ogy of duration allows artists, curators, funders and participants – with another conception, one which put in
to affirm the monumentalisation of time in community projects as the foreground his own activist concerns with
having a value in itself. We recognise this ethic from other fields, housing conditions for the city’s poor (…) he
particularly from public relations, market research, the commu- secured the worried permission of the organizer
nity investments of big business and the rise of consultancy within to break a few windows that were already
professional politics. The ideology of duration is not only a key cracked. But in the event he shot out every single
normative element within contemporary realisations of the dema- one with a borrowed air rifle. The destruction
terialised monument; it is also deeply embedded in contemporary took place at 3 a.m.11
practices of business management and social control.
With this in mind, I want to raise some questions about the This work is site-specific, not in the sense of adapting to a space or
ideology of duration in the dematerialised monument by explor- the space somehow adapting to the sculpture, but by engaging with
ing two opposed, but indispensable, lines of enquiry — the first, the space performatively or, as Crow reminds us, as an ‘activist’.
by Thomas Crow, in his book, Modern Art in the Common Culture, Crow goes on to explain that ‘Matta-Clark would have known that
in which he distinguishes between ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ versions of the imprint of his action would be extremely short-lived’,12 and this
site-specific art; the second, by Miwon Kwon, in her book, One is the key to its politics of space, to its being an example of strong
Place After Another, in which she develops a ‘deterritorialization of site-specific work. Crow advises us not to
site’7 on the basis of ‘the impossibility of community’.8
In the chapter ‘Site-Specific Art: The Strong and the Weak’, first c onsider the piece only in the sudden violence of
delivered as a paper at the Association of Art Historians’ confer- its inception. The eradication of the piece, which
ence in 1992, Crow carefully unpicks the factors differentiating the amounted to an instantaneous summoning
site-specific works of Richard Serra and Maya Lin, on one side, and of resources to repair the damage, actually
Michael Asher and Gordon Matta-Clark, on the other. Crow completed it. The critical point was neatly made,
makes a compelling case for separating them in terms of what we with greater power than any polemic, because
might call a politics of place. Each artist seeks ‘to defeat the effect
of ornamenting a space’.9 but the different strategies they adopt to 7 K  won, op cit., p. 165.
do this are telling. Serra’s approach suggests that public sculpture 8 Ibid, p. 155.
9 Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven, Yale
should ‘cause its surrounding space to “be understood primarily University Press, 1996) p.131.
as a function of the sculpture”, and not the other way around’.10 10 Ibid, p. 146.
11 Ibid, pp. 133-134.
For Crow, this is a ‘weak’ version of site-specificity. By contrast, 12 Ibid, p. 134.

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its immediate object was made to act it out in a arecognition that if site-specific art seems no
state of unreasoning panic: if the deterioration longer viable – because its critical edges have
was intolerable for even a moment at the Institute dulled, its pressures been absorbed – this is partly
for Architecture and Urban Studies, why was it due to the conceptual limitations of existing
tolerable day in and day out in the Bronx?13 models of site specificity itself. In response, many
artists, critics, historians, and curators, whose
Crow draws the vital conclusion that ‘the duration of the strong practices are engaged in problematizing received
work is limited because its presence is in terminal contradiction to notions of site specificity, have offered alternative
the nature of the space it occupies. Contradiction is the source of formulations, such as context-specific, debate-
its articulateness’.14 specific, audience-specific, community-specific,
If we take Crow’s recommendations seriously, then it is not only project-based.17
the half measures of monumental Minimalist sculpture that ought
to be regarded as having a weak politics of space. The current spate As the title of her fourth chapter suggests, Kwon describes the shift
of place-making monumental sculptures — which, in the wake of ‘from site to community in new genre public art’. Central to the
The Angel of the North, are thematically rooted in a place — must new forms of site specificity is that they are ‘structured as com-
be included too. But we also have to extend our critique beyond munity collaborations’18 which encourage ‘community coalition-
permanent physical sculpture. In doing so, we cannot avoid Crow’s building in pursuit of social justice and attempts to garner greater
distinction between weak and strong site-specificity simply by institutional empowerment for artists to act as social agents’.19 So,
shifting our conception of space and place to the social. If endur-
ance is a sign of failure to seriously engage in the contradictions of a  he new formulation of community-based public
T
space, then ought we not to radically question the ideology of dura- art proposes a new partnership in place of the
tion that runs through dematerialised monumental practice today? partnership between artist and architect valorized
Let us turn to Kwon’s account of site specificity and her support in the design team collaborations of the 1980s. The
of durational practices. Kwon is critical of the kind of physical con- dialogue is now to occur between an artist and a
ception of site that is at the heart of Crow’s analysis. The starting community or audience group.20
point for her book is the expansion of the concept of site specificity,
brought on by institutional critique, which goes some way towards Kwon has her reservations about how these projects understand the
‘complicating the site of art as not only a physical arena but one communities that they serve — commenting, for instance, that com-
constituted through social, economic, and political processes’.15 munity is itself ‘a highly charged and extremely elastic political term’21
But if the early generation of artists undertaking institutional cri- — and she carefully distinguishes between ‘sited communities’,
tique unearthed these social processes within galleries and mu-
seums, a later generation sited itself outside the art institution in 13 Ibid, pp. 134-135.
14 Ibid, p. 135.
order to engage with ‘much broader cultural, social, and discursive 15 Kwon, op cit., p. 3.
fields’.16 And so Kwon follows developments in site-specific practice 16 Loc cit.
17 Ibid, p. 2.
from the physical to the institutional and from the institutional 18 Ibid, p. 100.
to the discursive. ‘Current efforts to redefine the art-site relation- 19 Ibid, p. 105.
20 Ibid, p. 111.
ship’, she says, are inspired by 21 Ibid, p. 112.

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‘temporary invented communities’ and ‘ongoing invented com- social ontology of site to Crow’s physical and formalist account,
munities’. Finally, she adopts Iris Marion Young’s suggestion ‘that but at the same time regard Crow’s politics of place to be superior
it may be politically expedient to drop the term community alto- to Kwon’s de-territorialisation. What we can’t do is retain Crow’s
gether in favor of a politics of difference’22 in order to unpack ‘some commitment to the short-lived as well as Kwon’s ethics of duration.
of the hidden premises of community-based art’.23 A decision will have to be made. But, rather than choosing one or
Like Crow’s politics of space, then, which he shows to be weak- the other — the ideology or the opposition to it — we would be
ened by the exclusion or neglect of contradiction, Kwon shows well advised to follow the process of ideology critique, which is
that the politics of new genre public art is weaker if it fails fully to Marx’s injunction to reconnect the abstract ideological idea to ma-
register the differences, oppositions, antagonisms and difficulties terial intercourse embedded in material production. If we do so, we
within any given community. will find ourselves among the ensemble of particulars rather than
Kwon’s emphasis on the social sheds new light on Crow’s ana- opting for one particular or another. Theoretically, this means
lysis. It renders the latter’s conception of space as too physical, too avoiding a speculative solution to our practical problems. In terms
positivistic, perhaps we might even say too formalist. His analysis of art practice, it means resisting the ideology of duration without
of site-specificity is stuck in a kind of modernist self-referentiality. being seduced by its simple negation, adopting neither a fetishism
Anticipating institutional critique while holding on to key con- of time spent nor a fetishism of the short-lived.
ceptual components of high modernism, Matta-Clark’s Windows Time should not be managed and deployed by artists according
Blowout might be seen, amongst other things, as an extrapolation to a single ahistorical principle that is meant to be true no matter
of a Greenbergian interrogation of the relationship between the what the circumstances. Different conjunctures will call for dif-
‘mark’ and its ‘support’ — expanding the support from the surface ferent qualities as well as different quantities of time. Pace must
of the painting to the supporting institution. be adjusted not fixed according to ideological imperatives. There is
Kwon’s critique of site-specific sculpture is predicated on the something dreadfully wrong about the way in which the ideology
very limitations of this kind of account. However, her discursive of duration has been keeping tabs on time. We need to free time
conception of community lacks the bite that Crow demands. What from this ideology. Duration may have its virtues but it cannot be
gives ‘ongoing invented communities’ their ‘sustainability’, ac- affirmed today while the ideology of duration feels like the right
cording to Kwon, is ‘the artists’ intimate and direct knowledge thing to do. Duration is problematic because it is presented as a so-
of their respective neighborhoods’.24 In other words, instead of lution for art’s social contradictions, whereas the only viable polit-
contradiction being, as it is for Crow, the source of the work’s ar- ical solution must be to problematise time for art. If we are going to
ticulateness (which seals its fate as necessarily short-lived), it is the think politically about art, site, publics and time, we need to put the
work’s complex articulation of the contradictions in society that ideology of duration behind us. We have to stop keeping tabs on our
allows the community-specific work to persist. All that Kwon asks own use of time. Let’s think instead about delay, interruption, stages,
is that the artist is sensitive to the tensions within the community, flows, of instantaneous performances and lingering documents, of
while Crow insists that the work itself takes on the tensions of the temporary objects and permanent mementos, of repetition, echo
contradictory site by sacrificing its permanence. and seriality and break with this binary opposition altogether.
Do Crow and Kwon cancel each other out, or is there a way of
combining them? Can we discard the weaknesses in each and keep
their relative strengths? Certainly, each develops compelling argu- 22 Ibid, p. 150.
23 Loc cit.
ments that shed light on specific practices. We may prefer Kwon’s 24 Ibid, p. 134.

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