Art and the Prosthetic Gaze

Enter the millennial spectator. One hand holds the smartphone, the other a leaflet in which artists, curators, and the artworld aristocracy still pretend that art operates in a pre-smartphone world. But it is too late to get caught between incompatible modes of seeing, as our millennial is carefully dressed and in full makeup, the exhibition is a hunting arena, and they are after selfies to shoot. They are more a behavior than a person, but they have to be pushed into stereotypes for the implications to crystallize. Some of these implications have to do with art's reproducibility (Walter Benjamin's aura, André Malraux's imaginary museum), yet unlike older reproductions, which took shape after the shooting and away from it, smartphones are instantaneous, practically a third eye. And unlike older reproductions, which integrated the world on terms not so dissimilar to those of the reproduced artworks (both material objects disposed to offline forms of circulation), smartphones are connected: a picture today is instantly backed up, edited, analyzed by pattern recognition, and made shareable with virtually anyone anywhere. The shooting moment becomes a threshold between the offline and the online, and artworks are already experienced as potential online content. These implications then have also to do with art's and the spectator's online (after) lives (Hito Steyerl's poor images, Legacy Russell's glitch), yet I am more interested in the traditional exhibition space, which I see as a particularly challenging locus of the online-offline thresholds, one in which a nascent "prosthetic" mode of seeing is irreversibly transforming older habits of encountering art. This essay is, then, neither about offline reproduction nor online postproduction, but about sculpture, installation, painting, and the crepuscular forms taken by our capacity to contemplate these older media when they come into contact, via smartphones, with an online reality for which they were not prepared. To examine what (if anything) is left of the once-offline experience of art is to raise the question of why we still visit galleries and museums—and how. At the recent Charles Ray exhibition at Pompidou, nothing stood out as much as the labels' anxiousness to assure everyone that the statues really are three-dimensional objects in space: "between the spectator's space and that of the sculpture, a shared zone takes shape"; "as the viewer approaches the mannequin becomes larger or the viewer becomes smaller"; "I wanted this sculpture to be about the space inside the bottle. "1 Such sensations are as old as sculpture, even if Minimalists were probably the first to invest them away from figurative implications and to make a statement of them (Robert Morris's 1966 essay "Notes on Sculpture" is practically an artist's how-to manual on positioning spectators via manipulations of scale and form). That, however, presupposes a direct subject-object confrontation, which is no longer granted. When spotting the exhibition's centerpiece, Fall '91 (1992), a hyperrealistic overscaled woman in a red suit, some spectators bypass the statue as a dismissible joke, while others (mostly men) cheekily grin at the mannequin and then immediately have their photo taken with her, a freak-show behavior in which the creature's menacing redefinition of their bodies in space is tamed by collapsing space altogether into an image. If Hal Foster was right about Ray's triple involvement "with popular culture, a high modernist syntax of form, and a postmodernist articulation of space, "2 then, as our receptivity to the three-dimensional is becoming irreparably broken, only "popular culture" remains, which may explain why, phenomenologically speaking, Ray's statue doesn't function much differently from a McDonald's clown. Ray's combination of minimalist gains and Pop (ulist) sensationalism (pace Philip Glass), once noticeable to those who soaked in earlier minimalism, is rendered inoperative not so much due to the spectator's unversed gaze as to the very mode of perception that conditions that gaze, the near-biological event of growing a Midasian organ: whatever I touch with my smartphone turns to a thumbnail. In a 2020 installation, Simultanément, travaux in situ et en movement (Simultaneously, Works in Situ and in Motion), Daniel Buren and Philippe Parreno clad the interior of a highbrow Parisian gallery with mirrors laid with white vertical stripes. 3 Translucid CMY lids mechanically slid up and down, filtering sunlight and transforming the space into a big kaleidoscope. Enter a group of millennials, noticeably overdressed, who took tens of mirror selfie videos and then left. One review reported that a Tiktok influencer had visited the installation, resulting in daily waves of teenage followers (not quite the demographic for the place!). The incident is unlikely to make it into official art historical accounts since, as the usual discourses on Buren's work would have it, Simultanément was supposed to highlight the interior structure of the gallery and our place in it. But any space bathed in colors and mirrors today is an invitation to selfies. Instead of framing the art institution, Buren's stripes become backdrops to endless self-stagings, just like his Palais Royal columns are now pedestals for tourists posing for cameras and breaking the space into discontinuous self-centered poles instead of unifying it as initially intended. 4 But art cannot be judged based on intentions. An artwork is worth the function it ends up performing at a given historical moment, disrupting regimes of visuality or yielding to them like Fall '91 and Simultanément yield to our compulsions of thumbnailing and narcissism. Statements betting on minimalism or institutional critique age overnight and, as Theodor Adorno has predicted for art that counts on education (thus class privilege) rather than form to sublimate its kitsch component: "fun is art's punishment for this. "5Buren's impersonal stripes were typical of 1960's questioning of style, originality, and authorship. Why then cannot Simultanément be seen as updating them? An empty stage to be activated and fragmented like a Félix Gonzáles-Torres candy mountain, the selfies are the artwork's final form, the spectators its co-authors grounding its unstable space around their online personas, with the stripes critically framing the institution, this time the online attention economy. The TikTok incident might then contain its own negation, but something is lacking for this happy ending to actualize. In terms of experience and the final function of the selfie, the millennials' photoshoot might as well have happened in any mirror hall anywhere—the art and stripes make no difference. A hint to that lacking ingredient came to me one day at Tate Britain. During the fraction of a second needed to spot David Hockney's A Bigger Splash (1967), my hand was instinctively reaching for my smartphone. I took a picture isolating the splash. An unrecognizable abstract painting emerged, which I started cropping into smaller compositions. As my gaze flickered between the screen and the painting, I was overcome by the sensation of having realized something big: that Bigger Splash is the cohabitation of two mutually negating paintings: a figurative pop one in which an abstract expressionist one erupts. This finally explained the invisible jumper's electrifying eroticism: his body tore the art-historical continuum as he jumped. It was actually my smartphone that tore the painting, reactivating a process that Hockney had certainly considered, albeit probably in different terms. Smartphones' instantaneousness and the fact that it was I who made the photos brought to its peak the sensation of the painting inside the painting, instead of just knowing it. It is easy to oppose such experience with the sheer horror of coming across the Mona Lisa room in the Louvre, with spectators raising high their smartphones to snatch a proof of having been in the presence of something they can no longer take in, where queuing for a share of Christ's body is not a medieval remnant but is art's dawning future. It is less easy to recognize how both situations build on the same impulses: instantaneousness urges us to appropriate the encounter with the artwork as it happens while connectivity is already making that encounter shareable—that is, social—which, as far as sociability goes, can be enriching, toxic, or meaningless. What is lacking, then, has little to do with smartphones' technical specificities and only anecdotally with my "informed" gaze at Hockney. It has to do with agency. Every visual artwork ever made has been created in view of an implied usage, a mode of seeing that has to do with the time, place, dos and don'ts from which interpretation later emerges. With the secularization of Western art, praying in front of certain images became contemplation, an observation of formal details combined with a certain agency over the duration and order in which the artwork generated meaning (Marcel Proust's hero negotiating his way through every detail of Esther's painting or Rainer Maria Rilke meditating on life through Quattrocento landscapes). With cinema it was distraction, as Benjamin called it, in which the movie-goer no longer actively used the image to map their thoughts but became part of a mass subjected to the temporality, zooming, and ordering controlled by the artist. The agencies mobilized by these two—interpenetrating—modes didn't automatically mean emancipation (contemplation can give way to mystification; distraction to propaganda) but were nevertheless necessary for art to happen. Today, the spectator's agency is reduced to whether or not to take a picture, while the artist's is reduced to whether or not the work catches attention. Millennial spectators are too loose to form a mass synchronized by montage, but too bound together by the ever-same behaviors to form contemplative individuals. If the logic of contemplation was that of the window, of distraction that of the dream, then the new mode of seeing is swiping, and its logic is that of endless online items to which we say yes (swiping right, liking, buying) or no (swiping left, ghosting, deleting). The millennial scrolls through the exhibition wall, takes pictures, shares them online so they may appear on someone else's screen through which they in turn may scroll, swipe, and share until the cycle dies out and others are born. Art becomes "content, " and "in the world of content, genre, medium, and format are secondary concerns"—only circulation matters. 6Swiping is indifferent, autotelic; its repetition (even after a match!) overwhelms the processing of thoughts and emotions; its yes/no binary is the agency we have after a ten-hour workday. Art adapts itself: in Wolfgang Tillmans's layouts, the qualitative banality of most snaps is compensated by their quantitative spread; the gallery wall becomes a Facebook wall as we scroll through the artist's daily feed. Swiping is also quick; it "kills time. " While moving images adapt themselves with ever-faster montages to match our shrinking attention span, the tragic sort of fixed objects forsaken by their destined mode of seeing is captured in Louise Lawler's two recent photo series of blurred museum masterpieces emblematic of contemplation: Vir Heroicus Sublimis and Abraham (swiped) (2022) and Three Flags (swiped and taken) (2022). Unable to move as fast as swiping, they evaporate. Swiping, finally, is about capital. Our millennial gaze can hardly bear to behold an object without entering into some relation of possession and exchange with it, and "taken" pictures can be valorized through likes, even monetized through views. That the growing affinity between the museum and the supermarket was already obvious to Andy Warhol or Jean Baudrillard suggests, again, that smartphones are not its cause but merely the Trojan horse through which consumerism takes over the exhibition space. If swiping is only the symptom, then a diagnosis is to be formulated at that junction of the mode of seeing and the mode of production for which we already have an adjective. "Instagrammable" supposedly describes that which is worthy of being "right-swiped, " but like its predecessors, the picturesque (a landscape worthy of being painted) and the photogenic (a face worthy of being photographed/filmed), it is not a mere checklist of formal criteria but rather describes the aesthetic predisposition of certain parts of reality to become images only insofar as these images could later feed into circuits of consumption (British middle-class tourism, the Hollywood star system, and, in our case, the user-generated content economy). Yet while the categories of the picturesque and the photogenic still implied a certain aesthetic self-sufficiency or some kind of lag between the image and its commodification, in which other experiences remained plausible, the end destination of the Instagrammable is fatalistically prescribed. Instagrammable art is that in which the annexation of other modes of seeing by swiping is most resistless: Yayoi Kusama's immersive rooms realize abstraction's nightmare of becoming wallpaper, all while conserving the feelings of privilege accompanying the paying and hours queuing to have one's self-image sublimated by Art, which in an unmemorable contemplative past meant taste, luxury, and some vague intellectuality. If art has often been funded by the same dominant socioeconomic structure that prescribed its mode of seeing, today's blue-chip art is precisely that which lends itself best to digital capitalism's mode of seeing. A political definition of Instagrammable art would then be art that is predisposed to the swiping cycle from which its sponsors derived their wealth in the first place, art in which the mode of seeing and the mode of production dovetail, clogging the critical airway between the socioeconomic base and the cultural superstructure in which art breathes. In the recently opened Pinault Collection in Paris, for example, the classical eighteenth-century rotunda was rehabilitated by Tadao Ando with a gray floor and gray concrete slabs on the sides, the nineteenth-century mural restored to grayish tones, while Urs Fischer's statue (equally gray) stands in the middle, merging with its surroundings against all figure/ground principles. Here everything is ground; the rotunda is a real-life Instagram filter whose only figure is the visitor taking selfies. Even the posters advertising the collection's opening showed no artworks, only photogenic individuals dreamingly posing in the empty rotunda, and as the collection's owner François Pinault derived his nearly 30 billion fortune from a luxury industry increasingly based on plat-Fordism, 7 swiping, and the Cinderella-esque promise of making us classier, his museum becomes indistinguishable from his brands, both destined to the same mode of seeing. In 1923, Georg Lukács described workers on the assembly line scrolling and swiping fragments of objects whose totality remained unintelligible to them. This numb attitude devoid of agency over the machine was a symptom of reification, he wrote, and was extending even to spheres, like journalism or bureaucracy, where no actual commodity production takes place. Indeed, Lukács's description of the worker could now apply to art viewers: "he no longer appears as the authentic master of the process; on the contrary, he is a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system. "8 But as reification increases, so does the claim on art to promise something else. It is perhaps because we believe in this promise that we try to squeeze it dry the only way taught to us by commodity relations, thus cancelling it. Art's use value, the encounter with otherness, vanishes the moment it is exchanged within a cycle that levels everything to sameness. Visiting an art space might still be worth it when it encourages an interplay of agencies between artists and spectators, if not outside structures of commodity relations, then in spite of them. One solution is to resist swiping at organ-level: books and videos, tiny objects and long texts, dark spaces and some under- or over-composed paintings, immaterial and sound pieces, all tend to be un-Instagrammable. Documenta 15's almost iconoclastic tendencies were cries of distress in that direction; they were avant-garde in sensing that the struggle of millennial art will be one over agency but reactionary in throwing out baby-aesthetics with the bathwater of Instagrammability. Their breakthrough toward an art based on horizontal sociability and global redistribution of agencies must be carried through technology and form rather than the comfortable illusion of a premodern, pre-aesthetic innocence. If reclaiming agency doesn't start at the level of the spectator/artwork encounter, decolonial, ecologist, and queer agencies will remain externally applied labels on an already-reified artwork. A more radical solution (also at the level of form, never that of leaflets) is to clutch onto the old Marxist lesson of how certain maturing cultural practices can work against the oppressive structures that made them possible to create new ones, or at least to imagine their form. To ascribe swiping to relations of production, instead of smartphones themselves, is then to shift my initial question of detangling the offline into that of wresting the online/offline hybrid from corporate structures: only by dereifying the online will the offline be saved and vice-versa (online-to-offline mobilizations like the Arab Spring and Occupy are a radiant prove). This is why ignoring and banning smartphones, or educating us into older forms of contemplation miss the point, namely that we are already mechanized, as Lukács said, and agency cannot be restored through ethical normativity but only through a new configuration between us and the mechanization process9 or, as Franco "Bifo" Berardi put it, through an inscription of human (instead of market) interests in the automation process, something that requires new alliances between artists and techno-innovators. 10 Immediateness and connectivity, smartphones' (medium? ) specificity, are the key to reprogramming us into new habits of spectatorship that would be truly prosthetic in the sense of a machine deployed by human agency instead of the opposite. Alterazioni Video's Night Talk of the Forbidden City (2007–09) included a series of colorfully framed, embroidered QR codes that work as a Boetti-inspired coded surface that can both be contemplated and, when scanned, link to online pages denouncing the Chinese regime's censorship. Uli Ap's Alien AI (2021) included faraway spectators taking pictures of their body parts and feeding them into a real-time AI algorithm that synthesized them into collective "bodyMonsters" that defy borders and genders. Randa Mirza and Lara Tabet's ongoing project (begun in 2018) Jeanne et Moreau chronicles a long-distance relationship between two women photographers by means of their everyday photo exchange, staged in installations such as Will you be angry at me if I keep falling each time? (2022), a bedchamber with a left-behind smartphone on which visitors can swipe through the images, reconstructing the couple's diasporic intimacy. One could also mention Christian Marclay's work on Snapchat's user data (Talk to Me/Sing to Me, 2018) or Hito Steyerl's experimentation with AR applications (Power Plants, 2019). In attempt to seize the new means of seeing, these works squat the dark margins of swiping, where they find older repressed modes of seeing and strategically bond with them. However, an archaeology of offline selfhood retrieving what contemplation felt like is already becoming the privilege of connoisseurs of the kind that can still recognize dactylic hexameters or follow through a sonata form. To risk the logical conclusion that, once contemplation has entirely decayed, paintings, sculptures, and installations will be treated by the majority as relics, decoration, or "content, " is to affirm that radical art will only be possible within a prosthetic threshold between the offline and the online, where instantaneousness can intensify the encounter with art and connectivity can generate new sociabilities that shatter barriers between art and politics, north and south, and lonely millennials roaming the gallery space.