Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

The eradication of craft skills and of economically productive family activity has lessened
people’s chances to gain a sense of accomplishment and worth and has increased our vulnerability
to the blandishments of advertising, the most potent educational institution in our culture.
As the opportunities for personal power on a human level diminish for all but a relatively small
part of the population, self-confidence, trust, and pleasure conceived in straightforward terms
are poisoned, and we are increasingly beguiled by an accordionlike succession of mediations
between ourselves and the natural and social world, mediations in the form of commodities.
We are each promised personal power and fulfillment through consumption; we are as nothing
unless clothed in a culture that is conceived of as a congeries of packages, each of which presents
us with a bill. In pursuit of meaning and satisfaction we are led to grant the aura of life to
things and to drain it from people: we personify objects and objectify persons. We experience
alienation from ourselves as well as from others. We best comprehend ourselves as social entities
in looking at photos of ourselves, assuming the voyeur’s role with respect to our own images; we
best know ourselves from within in looking through the viewfinder at other people and things.
The culture of corporate capitalism has metamorphosed architecture: each of us is the
row to be hoed, the field to be sowed. The upward-aspiring bourgeoisie and upper ranks of the
working class are led to develop superfluous skills, such as gourmet cooking or small-boat
navigation, whose real significance is extravagant, well-rationalized consumerism and the cultivation
of the self but which, in seeking legitimation, mimic skills once necessary to life; skills
which, moreover, were tied to a form of social organization that we think of as less alienated and
more familiar than our own. In pursuit of meaning, also, we are led to see meaning where there
is only emptiness and sham, strength where there is only violence or money, knowledge where
there is only illusion, honesty where there is only a convincing manner, status where there is
only a price tag, satisfaction where there is only a cattle prod, limitless freedom where there
is only a feed lot. Our entire outlook is conditioned by the love and the terror of consumption.
Commodity fetishism, the giving over of self to the thing, is not a universal trope of the
human psyche; it is not even a quirk of character. It is both the inescapable companion and
the serviceable pipe dream of capitalist social organization; it is Our Way of Life. It is built
into the structure of society, originating in the production process and the social relations it
engenders, in which one’s very ability to make or to do something is transformed into a commodity
of sorts in itself, salable to the boss in exchange for “wages.”
How does one address these banally profound issues of everyday life? It seems to me
appropriate to use the medium of television, which in its most familiar form is one of the
primary conduits of ideology—through both its ostensive subject matter and its overtly commercial
messages. I am trying to enlist “video,” a different form of television, in the attempt to
martha rosler to argue for a video ofrepresentation. to argue for a video against the mythology ofeveryday life 367