The work form as value form. On the fluid form of contemporary art and its digital condition (Working title)

Today we see, think and act in a way that is stimulated by information technologies even when we are not explicitly confronted with digital issues. Even less obvious is the fact that these mechanisms are themselves governed by principles that can supposedly only be located in the sphere of economics: the principles of the value form. In art, the observation of the information technologies established by neoliberalism has already attracted a great deal of attention with Conceptual Art and still raises the question of the (im)material nature of its mechanisms, which is inevitably linked to the question of its representability. Against this background, the doctoral project recognizes the desideratum of an understanding of artistic form that is able to convey itself not without, but through the immanent interrelationships of algorithmizing and commodifying modelling. For although there is discussion about the way in which artistic form correlates with the manifestations of capital on the one hand and the digital on the other, the debates often tend to abbreviate this network of relationships (one need only think here of the formula that seeks to derive continuous abstraction in the arts from the now increasing modes of abstraction of capitalism shifting to the digital). With recourse to a “critical history of technology” that Marx merely hinted at in a footnote, the aim of the project is therefore to bring together those aesthetic categories that allow the artistic work form to be thought of as a value form in the mirror of digital mechanisms.

The analysis of artistic works, such as those by Melanie Gilligan, Sung Tieu, Sam Lewitt and others, is therefore based on Marx's understanding of the value form as a social form. As for him, form is not just an aesthetic phenomenon for artists. Rather, they understand form as an expression of composite relationships, which therefore does not show itself in conscious isolation, but solely in its composition, its being made, its having become, in its broader social context.