Essay by Peter Osborne from Verksted #7: Art of Welfare. The book reflects the seminar organized by OCA in tandem with Elmgreen & Dragset's exhibition, The Welfare Show, — initially produced by Bergen Kunsthall, — at the Serpentine Gallery in London in January 2006. This article cannot be reproduced without permission of OCA and the author.

Elmgreen and Dragset's The Welfare Show: A Historical Perspective

This essay approaches Elmgreen and Dragset's The Welfare Show from the standpoint of the politics of an art of welfare in the UK. When one looks for such an art, one finds it, I think, primarily in the 1970's. In returning to that time, in the first part of what follows, I offer a context of reception for The Welfare Show in London, as a historical backdrop to its criticism. To bring The Welfare Show to the UK is unavoidably, to summon up the ghosts of welfare past. In a certain sense, as a state-form in Britain, "welfare" is already past. Yet, paradoxically, it is precisely this pastness that produces a critical and political meaning for The Welfare Show in London, within the present, which is recognizably distinct from that produced in Norway.

What follows is oriented by two questions: what is the politics of The Welfare Show?; and, more broadly, what does The Welfare Show tell us about the place of, and possibilities for, politics in contemporary art in established institutional spaces? I thus intend to treat The Welfare Show as a kind of case study or exemplary instance of institutionally-validated contemporary art, in relation to which certain general critical questions can be explored.

Memory Lane: An Art of Welfare in Britain in th e1970s

"The welfare show", "an art of welfare" — these phrases take us back to what now seems in many ways another era: another time politically, and another time artistically, the time of the 1970s. That is to say, since the temporality of decades is one of slight deferral, they take us back to the chronological period that runs from about 1974 (a year, in Britain, marked by two elections and a miners' strike) up to 1984 (a year, in Britain, marked by another miners' strike — this time a decisive defeat not only for the miners, but for the labour movement as a whole.) Fought on the back of a second successive electoral victory for the Conservative Party (1979, 1983), and the surreal national-populist euphoria of the Falklands War, the miners' strike of (1984/5) was a watershed in British politics. In Britain, the Seventies ends in 1984, just as the Sixties runs into the early 1970s. The Seventies — this Seventies, the Seventies in Britain — was above all else the time of the crisis of welfare. It was a time of welfare made newly visible by its crisis. This was also a time of politics — of political conflict unseen since the 1930s — since in Britain (as elsewhere in Northern Europe), after 1945, welfare had been very much a matter of the state, the so-called "welfare state": in the British case, a belated product of social liberalism, born of the exigencies of war, as a pre-emptive state-imposed settlement between classes.

The Seventies crisis of welfare was thus primarily a crisis of a particular state-form: a crisis of the welfare state. More broadly, it was a crisis of the residual, compromise form of social democracy that was constructed in Western Europe after 1945, for which "welfare" became the privileged signifier. In this context, "welfare" was thus at least in significant part a sign of inclusion; rather than, as in the USA (as it is, increasingly, in Britain today), of marginalization, social exclusion, and a distinct, almost abject economic sub-culture. "Welfare" denoted an area of overlap between the state and society — an incursion of the state into society, into everyday life (health, education, social security, transport, and also, in an extended sense, strategic industries too) based in part on an incursion of society into the state (via the role of the trade unions in the Labour Party). Its crisis was, first, a fiscal crisis (a fiscal crisis of the state); then a political crisis (for Labour, the party of government and at that time still, ideologically, of social inclusion); and finally a legitimation crisis (an ideological crisis of state-form). And as it developed, this crisis of welfare, which manifested itself socially as a failure of provision, it made people angry. In fact, being angry about it was more or less the criteria of belonging to "the people", indeed, of having a life. These were, after all, not coincidentally, the years of punk (1976–1979). And so, "we" (we, the people) were all angry.

Bollocks We're All Angry is the title of a work from Gilbert & George's 1977 series, Dirty Words Pictures. As a whole, this series summons up the depressed social vibrancy of the dilapidating public space of that time in London (as in other major urban areas) pretty well. Others of Gilbert & George's dirty words of public life back then were, predictably, words like "Fuck" and "Queer", but also, less predictably, "Communism". Eastern European communism and Western European welfare states were, of course, intimately historically connected, both as conflicting political visions and as different versions of the same basic principle (social equality). And their crises were connected too. If one (welfare) could be considered, for a while at least, as the cost of avoiding the other (communism) — a kind of inoculation of the state by the social — then, as the promise of the communist alternative lapsed, so European capitalism's ideological need for social welfare as a concession to workers' demands, or an instrument of political compromise, weakened. Or so one argument has it. At this point, support for welfare in its fiscal and political crises became ideologically coded by the Western European Right as equivalent to support for an outdated, historically redundant communism. Anti-labour-movement politics could resurface once again as a politics of "smash the reds" — more of Gilbert & George's Dirty Words (Smash the Reds, 1977) — if not exactly with a white wedge, then at least with the help of the police, the Special Branch and the Security Services. (David Peace's extraordinary novel about the miners' strike — GB84 — is the literary testament to the intensity of that fact.) For back then, ideologically, the extra-parliamentary Left was still a turbulent but productive mix of Marxism and libertarianism (the red and the black of the Dirty Words Pictures), rather than the more politically diffuse blend of left libertarianism and pressure group politics that it is today.

I've referred to Gilbert & George's Dirty Words Pictures because, at a stretch, they could be imagined as part of a Welfare Show of their day (1977). Not just because of their depicted social content (the dilapidating public space of a welfare state in crisis — considerably more "dirty" than the disarmingly pristine hospital corridor in The Welfare Show at the Serpentine), but also because of certain general, contextual features of their form. Gilbert & George are, of course, a double-act — like Elmgreen & Dragset — and like all good double-acts, there is more than a pinch of the music hall about their work, more than a hint of putting on a "show" in the theatrical sense (contemporary art doesn't come much more theatrical than The Welfare Show) and of "showing off" too. (Jake and Dinos Chapman are Gilbert & George's most direct descendents there.) Above all, their work is "popular" in the music hall sense; as Elmgreen & Dragset's is popular in a televisual sense. Gilbert & George's work is crude and it is funny and it is repetitive in a compulsive, ritualistic way, and it is transgressive (sexually at least), but in a well-contained, compensatory, carnivalesque way. In this respect, it is very English — fag-end of the era of "national" art — while Elmgreen & Dragset's appears to strive for a generically European, and thereby more hygienic, feel. Gilbert & George's work is also (like Elmgreen & Dragset's) formally highly controlled. Some might say slick, or even facile — the notorious danger facing any art based primarily on design and technique. But then, in this instance (as indeed in The Welfare Show itself, even more so), that is part of its point. Gilbert & George use slickness as a part of their work, in an instrumental, and by implication, conceptual way. Indeed, Dirty Word Pictures are not all that far from being a populist version of what, the year before (1976), Victor Burgin had called "socialist formalism", in an article of the same name in the journal Studio International.

Socialist formalism was imagined by Burgin as "a consolidation of conceptualist practices along socialist lines" in the spirit of an updated renewal of the tradition of Soviet Constructivism. And if the photography in Dirty Words Pictures isn't exactly constructivist, the principles behind its use are nonetheless, crudely, so. Furthermore, the pictures maintain a link — albeit of a general and ironical kind — to the linguistically-based conceptual art of the late 1960s and early 1970s through their use of words.

The juxtaposition of photography and text (in this case, the photographed public text of graffiti), the so-called photo-text, was of course the medium of Burgin's own distinctive contribution to the British art of the 1970s. It was associated then, as it had been in the 1920s and 1930s, with a distinctive political pedagogy. The use of photography as the socially dominant form of the image, especially in its journalistic and advertising modes, was taken as the means for connecting art to mass-popular experience, while text functioned as a de-familiarizing, quasi-Brechtian reflective tool. Burgin's best-known work here is the poster installation in Newcastle, Possession, 1976. But a closer, albeit far more "wordy" parallel to Dirty Words Pictures would be the pedagogic series of eleven photo-text panels, UK76. It moves between the ideological mystifications of the labour process [ Fig. 2 ] and the circulation of commodities via advertising [ Fig. 3 ] to present an explicitly Marxian view of everyday life in welfare capitalist states. [ Fig. 4 + 5 ]

This is not an art of welfare as such — its political focus is much wider — but in its critique of capitalist economy it presupposes an alternative principle of distribution of goods to the exchange relation, and as such is certainly an art in solidarity with the basic principle of the classical welfare state (social equality), the realization of which would necessarily exceed its capitalistic form. However, for all the "conceptualism" of its textualism, and its overall dialectical conception, this art — Burgin's photo-texts as well as Gilbert & George's — nonetheless functions primarily at the level of the image. (It is notable that Burgin subsequently dropped the text and embraced the travelogue form in his next series USA77.) And while the photo-text may "consolidate" one basic conceptual strategy (an element — but only an element — of "reading not looking", moving forwards and backwards between reading and looking), it does not by any means draw on the full formal and critical range of possibilities of the conceptual tradition. It is largely pictorial; as indeed are the built/installed elements of The Welfare Show. The pictorial logic of The Welfare Show is photographic.

More determinedly conceptual variants of a socialist art of the welfare state in Britain in the 1970s can be found in the work of the Artists Placement Group (APG) set up by John Latham and Barbara Steveni and including artists such as Ian Breakwell, and also, slightly later (separately from APG), that of Stephen Willats. This body of work can be considered "conceptual" in so far as it is premised on two ideas, set out in the retrospective, 1990 APG Statement, "Art as Social Strategy in Institutions and Organizations": (I) that "the concept of the art object ... [has been] subsumed by that of an event"; and (II) that "principles of structure, within any complex event" become clear only where art and language meet. (Peter Osborne, Conceptual Art, Phaidon, London, 2002, p. 249.) That is to say, this is a communicational conception of art practice as a process or a structured series of events of communication, which is both semiotic and social in form, but it cannot be reduced to language (which is generally communicationally reduced, here, to verbal information). It follows from this conception that art is a material communicational form of practical intervention within social institutions. To be most practically effective (to truly be what the APG called "an art of implementation"), it was thought, art practice is best relocated outside art institutions (which have the structural effect of reducing events to objects — reification) and situated internally to the most practically significant social organizations, namely, those of the economy and the state. This is what the APG attempted to facilitate, through negotiations with various industrial and administrative bodies. Between 1968 and 1971, they managed to place artists within the institutional structures of various nationalized industries (British Steel, British Airways, British Rail, the National Bus Company) and private corporations (ICI, Esso, Hille International). In 1972, they entered into a Memorandum of Agreement with the British Civil Service to second artists to government Departments to become "catalytic" parts of various planning processes. The project was then extended to Germany, the results of which were exhibited in the Kunst als Soziale Strategie [Art as Social Strategy] show in Bonn in 1977–78.

Retrospectively, two things in particular seem important about this practice. First, it prefigures, in a restricted manner, the more recent incorporation of complex institutional negotiations, as a matter of course, into the project-like character of much large-scale contemporary art practice. The difference, of course, is that nowadays the artist generally (although not necessarily) acts externally to these organizations (as the representative of "art" as a distinct cultural-economic form), rather than from within them. Contemporary art now has a far greater social instrumentality (and hence bargaining power) of its own, related to tourism, the culture-industries, local and regional development strategies, and the like. Second, while the APG statement insists that "the proper contribution of art to society is art" (i.e. their practice was not intended as a use of art as an instrument to non-art ends, but as an exploration of the potential social instrumentality of art itself), nonetheless, it failed to question the ontological dimension of the relationship between what one might call art's "free communicative practices" and the social spaces of their instantiation. "Art", in other words, was effectively reduced to "what artists do" (as it was also, ultimately, by Joseph Kosuth). The notion of the artist carries the ontological burden here, rather than the critical dimension of the social spaces of "art", or, better, the mode of functioning of objects/practices in those spaces. Furthermore, the artist thus appears here as a present-day equivalent to Hegel's philosophical idea of a state bureaucracy, or Karl Mannheim's "free-floating" intellectual, that is, as a representative of universality "having no sectional interest to serve" (APG Statement). This confuses art's aspiration to universality — which is grounded communicationally in the anonymity of its projected addressees — with the laughably dubious supposition of a lack of partisanship on the part of artists. Whereas, one might suggest, it is only through partisanship that any kind of universality is achieved. It is interesting, in this respect, to compare the APG's conception of art as social strategy with Stephen Willats's conception of art as "an instigator of changes in social cognition and behaviour". (I refer here to his 1973 text The Artist as an Instigator of Changes in Social Cognition and Behaviour, Gallery House Press).

Willats also has a communications-based model of art practice, as one can see most starkly in the, "Prescriptions for Task-Oriented Methodologies in Constructing Operational Models of Art Practices"; with its diagrammatic models of the artwork's behavioural relation to its audience [ Fig. 6 ] and of the relationship between the artist's intention and the formation of a strategy [ Fig. 7 ]. (The sweet misspelling "stratergy" here is a reminder of just what a bear-trap language was for makers of conceptual art.) It is important to recognize that there was no reflexive irony in this use of a formalized social scientific methodology, no reflection upon its relationship to the instrumentality of administrative reason. In this respect, Willats exemplifies Benjamin Buchloh's argument about conceptual art as an aesthetic of administration better than most. Since 1973, Willats has located his art on housing estates in London, using his relationship to his chosen "audience" (the residents) as a productive device. [ Fig. 8 ] His chosen form for the final product is a more constructive semiotic variant of the photo-text, as in, for example, his 1978 work, Sorting Out Other People's Lives, made on the Ocean Estate, between Mile End and Whitechapel.[ Fig. 9 ] This is closer to Agit Prop than the APG's institutionalism, and it is grounded in a kind of phenomenology of public housing. If there is a specifically British "art of welfare", Willats is probably its main practitioner. But Willats's is also essentially a community art, of restricted scope and ambitions. Its social space is the space of the local library and community centre; not the media dominated public spaces of the city, or the internationalized art spaces of major art institutions.

So, what light is thrown on Elmgreen & Dragset's The Welfare Show by this trip down memory lane, back to the art of welfare of a British post-conceptual socialist formalism of the 1970s? A number of things about the show stand out immediately in the light of the contrast.

1. The slickness and theatricality of its material means
2. The presumption of art-institutional space and the quasi-cinematic completeness of its appropriation of this space
3. The pictorial directness and crudeness of the allegorical address of its various mise en scenes
4. The apparent contrast between the Pop visuality of the gallery staging and the retro conceptualism of the catalogue, which appears to re-stage the stage-sets themselves in terms of some more serious intellectual intent [ Fig. 10 + 11 ]

Let me say a little more about each of these things in turn, and the latter two in particular.

The slickness and theatricality of material means

Each element of the installation of The Welfare Show exhibits the clean lines, shiny industrial surfaces and uncluttered spaces that characterize the post-Pop, post-minimalist mainstream of the more commercial side of contemporary art (spectres of Damien Hirst). The theatricality of the settings are emphasized by both the TV studio set in which The Welfare Show sign itself appears in this installation, and the row of seated Guards. This is a media production, as much as a conventional gallery show. And the corridor that dictates the movement of viewers, and hence the order of viewing of the scenes, adds to the sense of directorial control. (Someone has been reading Post-Production.) This is summed up in ...

The completeness of the appropriation and restructuring of the gallery space

For me, this was one of the most successful aspects of the work at the Serpentine. In its exclusion of the outside, it established a self-consciously illusorily self-sufficient, quasi-cinematic theatrical space. However, I am more interested in ...

The crudeness of the allegorical address of the various mise en scenes

This is most marked in the disintegrating staircase up to the double doors (labelled "Administration" in the Bergen version) and accompanied in London by the temporality-destroying repetitive cycle of the baggage-carousel. (But why the everyday image of air travel?) In its combination with the slickness and theatricality of the installation, this is the most risky aspect of the work. It appears simplistic and heavy-handed, clichéd, in the manner of popular stereotypes of the Kafkaesque. Yet it is this very crudeness, I think, that holds out the slim hope of the dialectical recovery of a political dimension to a work that is highly self-conscious of its own status as a spectacle.

Crudeness in art signifies "politics", it signifies "message", it signifies "non-art". Here, it acts as one of those elements of non-art that (in Adorno's conception) the work of art now needs to incorporate in order to function critically as autonomous art, that is, in order to mark a self-consciousness of the illusion of autonomy. In part, what, in its Kafkaesque abstraction, this allegorical crudeness manages to signify about politics, via the space of allegory itself, is that it is empty. The space of politics in The Welfare Show is as empty — as vacated — as the administrative spaces it depicts. The Welfare Show is a show, a presentation of emptiness, in which the presence of the Guards serves only to highlight the emptiness of the space — an administrative space emptied of the social. However, this emptiness is not that which some take to be the emptiness of the semiotic space of politics itself (according to the dubious semiotic theory of politics of Ernest Laclau, for which, because the social totality is an "impossible object", it can only be represented by signifiers that are empty). Rather, it is the space of politics in art that appears here as empty. This is not a statement about art in general. It is a statement about the current historical condition of the relationship between art and a particular politics, the politics of welfare: it is the space of a politics of welfare in contemporary art that is an empty space.

This is my (second-level) allegorical reading of the crudeness and abstraction of the allegories of The Welfare Show. And it leads to the question: why? Why is the space of a politics of welfare in contemporary art an empty space? It is in the production of this question — which is a question about both politics and art — that, in my view, the critical aspect of The Welfare Show resides. It is summed up in the increasing emptiness of the signifier "welfare" itself.

In the 1970s, "welfare" was what Laclau calls a "floating signifier" — a signifier which is not politically fixed within some determinate chain of signifiers, but is rather the site of contestation between antagonistic political discourses, each of which attempt to give it a different meaning by articulating it to a different chain of signifiers, bound together by a different set of relations of equivalence. However, in the wake of the ideological hegemony of the neo-liberalism of the 1990s, "welfare" has become disconnected from the associative chains of the 1970s, and, as such, emptied out of the contested richness of its differential meanings. It has become what (in a sense quite different from Laclau's) we might call a genuinely "empty" — rather than a floating — signifier. At the same time, however, "welfare" retains a memory trace of its previous significations (all linked to social equality). It is because of this — because it was once "floating" and therefore political, but is now increasingly empty — that it is able to stand-in here as a signifier of "politics" in contemporary art, as a signifier of what has happened, historically, to politics in contemporary art: its space has been vacated. In this respect, we might say, "welfare" has become a Dirty Word. To say "welfare" in art today is to raise the question of politics as art's empty domain.

What licenses such a reading of so spectacular a show? This leads me to my final point.

The apparent contrast between the Pop visuality of the gallery staging and the retro conceptualism of the catalogue

It is the catalogue that licenses a reading of The Welfare Show as "serious" art. The catalogue takes the form of an alphabetically ordered lever-arch file, in which a diversity of types of both written and visual material are arranged under general headings loosely related to the institutional structure of a welfare state. It is also used to fold images of the artists' previous work into the fabric of The Welfare Show itself, securing the essentially synthetic structure of the work, which is marked elsewhere by both the identity of work and exhibition, and its syncretic blend of multiple current artistic trends. It is here that explicitly political discourses of various kinds, written and visual, from an eclectic range of sources across Europe are to be found. [ Fig. 12 + 13 ]It is the catalogue that defines The Welfare Show both as a work of "pan-European" aspirations and a work of apparently serious intellectual intent. Furthermore, by referring back to the early days of Conceptual Art (the 1969 Bern Kunsthalle catalogue for When Attitudes Become Form comes most immediately to mind), it does so, simultaneously, as an act of historical pastiche. As such, it draws attention to the suppressed Pop visuality of the typographic motifs of conceptual art itself (famously remarked upon in Jeff Walls' interpretation of Kosuth). At the same time, however, this historicist gesture produces an internal distance from the intellectualism it evokes. As if intellectual seriousness (which includes "politics" of course) is something of an embarrassment (at best, a hostage to fortune) that needs to be presented under the covers of history, under the cover of pastiche. The format of the dictionary itself facilitates this kind of internal distancing, as, ever since Flaubert — deliberately or not — every dictionary courts the danger of being a dictionary of received ideas. Here, of course, it is precisely by virtue of being "received" that the ideas derive their representative status, and the catalogue derives a further potentially reflexive edge.

Peter Osborne

Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, London and editor of the journal Radical Philosophy. Books include The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (1995), Philosophy in Cultural Theory (2000), Conceptual Art (2002) and Marx (Granta, 2005). He is the editor of the 3-volume Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory (2005).