S P E C I A L I S S U E O N C A P I T A L I S T R E A L I S M - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

EDICIÓN ESPECIAL SOBRE C A P I T A L I S T R E A L I S M

INTRODUCTION TO
SPECIAL ISSUE

JaimeY hamilton faris

This special issue is devoted to Capitalist Realism—a term coined
in West Germany in May 1963 by artists Gerhard Richter, Konrad
Lueg, Sigmar Polke, and Manfred Kuttner, and also, independientemente,
less than a year later by Japanese artist Akasegawa Genpei in a mani-
festo entitled “‘Shihon-shugi riarizumu’ ron” (Thesis on “Capitalist
Realism”). In both the German and Japanese contexts, the artists
leveraged the term’s connotative association with Socialist Realism—
the prescriptive aesthetic fi rst introduced in the Soviet Union in
the early 1930s—to make an implicit analogy between communist
and capitalist representational systems. If Socialist Realist murals and
statues feature joyful communal harvests and heroic factory workers,
might a comparable Capitalist Realism show advertisements featuring
new consumer products and satisfi ed costumers? To bring this ques-
tion into focus, the artists placed exaggerated emphasis on certain
aspects of commodifi cation and consumerism: in West Germany,
Polke made paintings of advertisements that were oddly cropped
and splotched, and Richter and Lueg used over one hundred model
furniture displays at a Düsseldorf department store in a single
evening for their event Leben mit Pop—Eine Demonstration für
den kapitalistischen Realismus. In Japan, Akasegawa created prints
of the 1,000-yen note and then drew a tatami-sized ink reproduction

doi:10.1162/ARTM_a_00120

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of the currency.1 At the same time, he began exhibiting household
objects such as chairs, rugs, and fans, wrapped in brown paper
packaging, a technique the artist would develop to great effect later.
The separate-yet-related emergence of Capitalist Realism in the
Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and in Japan joined a growing
international interest in critical “realisms” that were variously formu-
lated by artists associated with Neo-Dada, Pop, Nouveau Réalisme,
Fluxus, Situationism, happenings, and Anti-Art at the height of the
Cold War. En ese tiempo, artists began to subversively appropriate and
imitate advertising images, consumer goods, dinero, shopping dis-
plays, and more—all in pursuit of making visible the mechanisms by
which capitalism represents, and thus appears to create, its own reality.
Capitalist Realism emerged in Germany as a pointed commentary
on the proliferation of neo-avant-garde movements that were vying for
international visibility at the time. For the press release of a May 1963
group show of paintings and events mounted in a vacant butcher’s shop
at Kaiserstrasse 31A in Düsseldorf, Richter, Lueg, Polke, and Kuttner
described their work as “Pop-Art, Junk-Culture, imperialistischer and
kapitalistischer Realismus, neue Gegenständlichkeit, and Naturalismus.”
The invitation to the show featured the words imperialistischer
Realismus within a matrix of even more terms, taken from a list that
appeared on the opening page of critic Barbara Rose’s article “Dada
Then and Now,” included in the January 1963 issue of Art International:
The New Realists, Neo-Dada, Le nouveau réalisme, Pop Art, El nuevo
Vulgarians, Common Object Paining, Know-Nothing Genre. En el
artículo, Rose described a new generation of American artists as having
an overarching fascination with “the American Dream they see com-
mercialized, exploited, and fading before their very eyes.”2 Rose alludes
to the possibility that the emerging interest in commercial America
came after “a depression, a world war, and the subsequent polarization
of East and West.”3

Lueg had a copy of the Art International issue and, as Richter later

recounted, the artists’ neologism kapitalistischer Realismus derived from

2
3

Tatami mats, used to cover the floors in Japanese homes, were considered standard units
of measurement for interior household space. Akasegawa used the standard size of the
tatami then used in Tokyo as the measurement of his enlarged yen note reproduction:
apenas 90 cm × 180 cm.
Barbara Rose, “Dada Then and Now,” Art International (Enero 1963): 25.
Rose, 23.

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Opening pages of Barbara Rose, “Dada Then and Now,” Art International 7, No. 1 (Enero 1963): 22–23. © Barbara Rose.

Rose’s remark.4 Not only did Richter, Lueg, Polke, and Kuttner grasp
the Cold War implications of Rose’s argument, they also directed these
implications back at the commercialization of art itself, and at the
atmosphere of cultural imperialism in which galleries and critics from
New York to London and Paris were coining new monikers that could
easily be translated and adjusted for audiences across national borders.

In his review of the 2014 exhibition Leben mit Pop: Eine
Reproduktion des kapitalistischen Realismus (shown at Kunsthalle
Düsseldorf and Artists Space New York) for this special issue of
ARTMargins, Andrew Weiner views the moves made by Richter, Lueg,
Polke, and Kuttner as ambivalently entrepreneurial—at once strategic
deflections of the power of branding and sincere efforts to participate
in the commercial success of Neo-Dada, Nouveau Réalisme, and Pop.
Capitalist Realism grew from the artists’ (especially Lueg’s) capacious
knowledge of the goings-on in the international avant-garde circa 1963.
Not only did they mine news coming from elsewhere, as with the

Gerhard Richter, interview with Benjamin Buchloh (1986), included in The Daily Practice
of Painting: Writings and Interviews, 1962–1993, ed. Hans Ulrich Obrist (Cambridge, MAMÁ:
CON prensa, 1995), 132–65. See also Stephan Strsembski, “Know-Nothing-Genre,” in Elodie
Evers, Magdalena Holzhey, Gregor Jansen, editores., Leben mit Pop. Eine Reproduktion des kapi-
talistischen Realismus (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2013), 132.

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Enero 1963 Art International issue, they also avidly attended events
in the Düsseldorf art scene, from happenings and Fluxus concerts to
openings for new galleries.5

It is evident from Richter’s, Polke’s, and Kuttner’s paintings and
actions of 1962–64 that their fascination with the “capitalist” language
of lifestyle marketing ran deeper than a promotional ploy. Their work
at the time was informed by the education that they had received in the
German Democratic Republic (GDR) before meeting in Düsseldorf.
Richter’s training in Socialist Realist painting at the Dresden academy,
por ejemplo, most likely entailed using photographs as the basis for
archetypal images of the proletariat and its politics.6 Therefore, it is not
impossible that Richter, once in the West, perceived its consumerism-
driven mass media as a parallel propagandistic effort to create arche-
typal images of the bourgeoisie.

Richter and Lueg used the term Capitalist Realism to describe their

event at the Berges department store in October 1962, when they liter-
alized ads and showroom displays that modeled daily domestic living
patrones, such as watching television, making beds, and looking in the
refrigerator. The event highlighted the “capitalist” angle of West
Germany’s “economic miracle” and did not mention the May invita-
tion’s use of “imperialist realism.” This elegantly and strategically
emphasized symmetrical deconstructions of cultural promotion on
both sides of the Berlin Wall—as Richter retrospectively noted, “it
made Socialist Realism appear ridiculous, and it did the same to the
possibility of Capitalist Realism as well.”7

As was the case in Düsseldorf circa 1963, in Tokyo, the neo-avant-

garde thrived under conditions of international artistic exchange. A
number of key artists, critics, and curators were traveling between

The artists had a famously coquettish relationship with their gallerists during this
tiempo. In March 1963, por ejemplo, they went to Paris to introduce themselves to Ileana
Sonnabend as German Pop artists and then almost immediately sought to distinguish
and distance themselves from Pop. En 1964, Berlin gallerist René Block sought to repre-
sent the artists as “Capitalist Realists” (which he capitalized and turned into a bona fide
“movement” by writing a manifesto). Gerhard Richter, despite having reservations
about being labeled in this way, continued to show with Block. Richter, quoted in
Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting (chicago: University of Chicago
Prensa, 2009), 77.
Eckhart Gillen, “Is Capitalist Realism in Fact a Socialist Realism?” in Evers et al., Leben
mit Pop, 142.
Coosje van Bruggen, “Gerhard Richter: Painting as a Moral Act,” Artforum, No. 23 (Puede
1985): 84.

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the United States, Europa, y japon; and contemporary European
and American avant-garde movements were regularly featured in inter-
national and local magazines circulating among the Japanese artists.8
In the early 60s, the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo had become a hub
for the international avant-garde, hosting John Cage and Robert
Rauschen berg, along with a number of Fluxus events and concerts
that featured Japanese artists among its international roster. Though
Tokyo lacked commercial galleries for avant-garde art, artists could
show their work in two major “independent,” unjuried exhibitions.
The Nihon Indepen dent tended to feature a Socialist Realist–inspired
vein of “reportage painting” (ruporuta¯gu kaiga) focusing on the
effects of the atomic bomb and social instability after World War II.
Mientras tanto, the Yomiuri Inde pen dent had become the stronghold of
the Anti-Art movement, which was informed by new approaches to the
Duchampian readymade and the Surrealist objet.9 Despite these stylis-
tic differences, both Indepen dents exhibited strong leftist sensibilities
informed by the Japanese Communist Party. The work featured in their
shows often critically addressed aspects of Japanese society as it transi-
tioned from a war-torn and defeated imperialist nation to a democratic
consumer state.10

It was in this context that artist Akasegawa Genpei developed his

“Thesis on ‘Capitalist Realism.’”11 Akasegawa had been trained in
realist painting techniques, then influenced by the Nihon Independent.
But after leaving art school and becoming more involved in the Anti-
Art movement, his interest moved toward understanding everyday

The international connections between Japan, Europa, and the United States have
recently been explored in the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) show Tokyo
1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde (2013); in MoMA’s online Post series on Tokyo–New York
Fluxus connections, http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/199-fluxus-nexus-fluxus-in-
new-york-and-japan; and in the Walker Art Center’s International Pop exhibition catalog.
For a thorough account of the Anti-Art movement, see Charles Merewether and Rika
Iezumi Hiro, editores., Art Anti-art Non-art: Experiments in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan
1950–1970 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007). See also Doryun Chong,
Michio Hayashi, Fumihiko Sumitomo, and Kenji Kajiya, editores., Postwar to Postmodern, Arte
in Japan 1945–1989: Primary Documents (Nueva York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012),
44–69.

10 Chong et al., Postwar to Postmodern, 44–69.
11 Art historian Reiko Tomii has briefly noted the almost simultaneous coinages of

Akasegawa’s and the German artists’ “Capitalist Realisms” in “‘International Con-
temporaneity’ in the 1960s: Discoursing on Art in Japan and Beyond,” Japan Review,
No. 21 (2009): 123–47. She also spoke on Japanese Pop during the Tate Britain Global
Pop symposium in 2012.

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objects as representations of capitalist reality. He began thinking
about the yen note as a surface image printed on paper, a representa-
tion like any other picture. Yet he was fascinated with the difference
between currency and other pictures, in that it also held a certain
value and could be exchanged for commodities. Upon further scrutiny,
Akasegawa also realized that the currency’s officially authorized status
depended on masking the fact that it was only a representation that
podría, tal como, be copied. He developed single-sided, monochromatic
“model” 1,000-yen notes, along with the proposal to produce so many
of them that they would disrupt the authority of the state’s “real”
copies. Al mismo tiempo, Akasegawa also became interested in furni-
ture and household objects that he saw as representations of a consum-
er’s status, y eso, like currency, both depended on and disguised
their nature as objects of mass production.12 To complement the
model yen notes, Akasegawa began to wrap these household objects,
and he proposed to also wrap all such objects, so as to demonstrate
their ubiquity.

In their capacity as commodities, currencies such as the yen and
“real” furniture and household objects constitute part of the system
of representation and reproduction that undergirds capitalism. Como
Akasegawa put it summarily in his essay on Capitalist Realism: “Real
things are not absolute things. Real things are the embodiments of
a dictatorial system of coercion which maintains that they are real.”13
The artist then described his objects as “models”: eso es, conceptual
propositions that could potentially be replicated by others so as to dis-
turb the system of “real things.”

Akasegawa’s “Thesis on ‘Capitalist Realism,’” as much as his
model yen notes and model wrapped furniture, form parts of the art-
ist’s decades-long critique of capitalism and communism as parallel
systems requiring immense state bureaucratic control. Both ideologies
needed reinforcement through the state’s legal, housing, and industry
departments, its mints and banks, and much more. Running parallel

Jean Baudrillard called this aspect of representation the domestic object’s “symbolic
value” in Le Système des objets [System of Objects] [1968], trans. James Benedict (Nuevo
york: Verso, 1996).

13 Akasegawa Genpei, “‘Shihon-shugi riarizumu’ ron,” in Akasegawa Genpei, Obuje o motta

musansha: Akasegawa Genpei no bunsho¯ (Tokio: Gendai Shicho¯sha, 1970), 32. The essay
originally appeared in Nihon dokusho shimbun (Febrero 24, 1964) and was reprinted in
translation as “Capitalist Realism” in Concerned Theater Japan 1, No. 3 (Otoño 1970):
32–35. This translation is by Mayumi Kamata from Obuje o motta musansha.

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to the experimental proto-conceptual scores, juegos, instructions, y
demonstrations that were emerging at the time in Neo-Dada, Pop,
Nouveau Réalisme, happenings, and Fluxus, his wrapped furnishings
and yen notes responded to the Japanese government’s sponsorship
of a “consumer republic.” And as was the case with the Düsseldorf
artists who witnessed the economic miracle in their native Germany,
Akasegawa’s first-hand experience of Japan’s own miracle resulted in
similar circumspection regarding capitalism’s promotion of consump-
tion as a democratic ideal.

Pedro Erber’s introduction and translation in this special issue of

a slightly later essay by Akasegawa, su 1967 “The Objet after Stalin,"
further explores the artist’s perspective. Erber analyzes the legal con-
sequences of both the “Thesis on ‘Capitalist Realism’” and “The Objet
after Stalin,” whereby the artist was accused of “imitating” state
currency by making the model 1,000-yen notes. He also positions
Akasegawa’s critical concept of the objet within the cosmopolitan his-
tory of Tokyo’s avant-garde community. These arguments, Sucesivamente,
help illuminate Akasegawa’s inventive ways of articulating capitalism
through its purported communist mirror, equal to Gerhard Richter’s
statements regarding the false binarisms of the Cold War.

In both its German and Japanese incarnations, Capitalist Realism
represented an effort to tackle the problems of “realism” and “reality”
using the neo-avant-gardist vocabulary of the era. Throughout the
interwar and into the postwar era, realism had been largely identified
with Socialist Realism, both within the Communist Bloc and in affili-
ated Japanese and European art circles.14 Critics on the left meanwhile
advocated other types or modes of (revolucionario) realism, ranging
from photographic mimesis to stylized and idealized figures and
escenas. Efforts to reconceive realism from within Marxism were
initiated as early as 1938 by Georg Lukács, who wrote “Realism in the

14 Multiple art and culture contexts figure here, including the ongoing popularity of
Socialist Realism in Japan and across Europe in the postwar era. For a discussion
of Socialist Realism in Japan, see Asato Ikeda, Aya Louisa Mcdonald, and Ming
Tiampo, editores., Art and War in Japan and Its Empire: 1931–1960 (Bostón: Rodaballo, 2013). En
Europa, each national context was different. Italian Neorealist cinema’s critiques of
the political and social landscape could factor in as part of the “new realisms” of the era.
The history of the French Communist Party’s support of Socialist Realism is related by
Sophie Cras in “Nouveau réalisme: From Socialist Realism to Capitalist Realism,” Own
Reality 6 (Abril 2013), http://www.perspectivia.net/content/publikationen/ownreality/6/
cras-en/view.

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Balance (1938),” and followed it up with The Meaning of Contemporary
Realism in 1955.15 Eschewing both the avant-gardist abstraction of the
early revolutionary period and the idealism found in more doctrinaire
Socialist Realist art, Lukács supported a notion of “critical” realism that
returned to realist formulations from the mid-19th century (especially
Balzac). Responding to debates in Marxist aesthetics in Western circles
(via the Frankfurt school), as well as in the Soviet Union (via Mikhail
Livshitz), Lukács argued that art should present a totality of “objective”
meaning so as to press consciousness toward the exposure of capital-
ism’s processes of reification.

In France, the opposition between realism and avant-gardist
modes of abstraction, collage, and found-object art was not as strong.
Philosopher Henri Lefèbvre was key to bridging Marxism with
renewed artistic interest in using everyday objects. Informed by his
participation in the Surrealist circle during his early years as a scholar,
Lefèbvre kept close ties with the art world throughout his career. In his
Critique of Everyday Life (1958), he argues that the “potential way ahead
for realism” is in paying more attention to those trivial habits of life
under capitalism that make it appear natural.16 Lefèbvre ultimately
points to the Surrealist use of the objet as a medium for demystifying
modern life.17 His thinking had a substantial impact on a generation of
philosophers and artists (including Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord),
who put forth new Marxist interpretations of capitalism’s systemic
efforts to sustain the illusion of its own reality by way of the mass
media and object consumption.18

From a staunchly de Gaullist and anti-Marxist standpoint,
French art critic Pierre Restany tried to establish what he considered
a more “objective” realism based on sociological description. He appro-
priated the moniker of his Nouveau Réalisme movement from French
Communist Party circles, who had been using it to defend alternative

15 Georg Lukács, Essays on Realism, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MAMÁ: CON prensa,

1981). For an overview of the history of realism in literature and visual art, see Matthew
Beaumont, Adventures in Realism (Nueva York: wiley, 2007).

16 Henri Lefèbvre, Critique of Everyday Life, trans. John Moore (Nueva York: Verso, 1991), 6.
Ibídem., 12–14 and 107–74. Guy Debord’s 1967 Society of the Spectacle popularized the
17
notion of the spectacle as “the heart of the unrealism of the real society.” Guy Debord,
The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Nueva York: Zone, 1995): 6.
Jean Baudrillard studied under Lefèbvre for a brief period while writing System of Objects
(1968). Debord’s close and intense friendship with the philosopher for a brief period
greatly influenced the development of the Situationist International.

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realisms within Socialist Realist orthodoxies.19 Tracing the lineage of
Nouveau Réalisme back to Cubism, Restany claimed that his new
movement was connected to Fernand Léger’s incorporation of new
technology and commercial materials into art.

In New York, the gallerist Sidney Janis quickly responded to
Restany’s efforts to promote the (seemingly) ideologically neutral work
of his Parisian-based artists, asking Restany to collaborate on a show
called The New Realists that would put the Parisians side by side with
American Neo-Dada artists. Just before the show opened in October
1962, Janis discovered the work of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, y
James Rosenquist, and used Restany’s framework to describe the work
of these US artists. Incensed, Restany published an indictment of the
exhibition in the January issue of Art International—the very same
issue of the magazine used by the Düsseldorf artists to formulate their
notion of kapitalistischer Realismus.

The basis for all these evolving claims to realism was a pervasive
concern that any “realistic” rendering of commodity objects (si
Nouveau Réaliste, Neo-Dada, or Pop) had to contend with capitalism’s
methods of mass-production and mass-mediation.20 While Restany
adamantly defended Nouveau Réaliste “objectivity,” and while Janis
generalized Pop as a “factualism” in which vernacular objects had not
been embellished with “artistic pretension,” most artists and critics
acknowledged the need for some sort of artistic intervention that would
foster critical awareness of the consumer object’s status as the end
product of a process of production.21

Por ejemplo, Ellen Johnson’s extensive essay on Claes Oldenburg

in the January 1963 issue of Art International described the artist’s
work as “extreme realism” in which sloppy, fake plaster objects called
attention to the fact that “everyday objects are created.”22 Indeed,
Oldenburg’s “stores” for the sale of sloppy plaster pies—along with

19 Cras, “Nouveau réalisme,” n.p.
20 Ver, En particular, the early writings on Pop by Lawrence Alloway, Barbara Rose,
Harold Rosenberg, Leo Steinberg, and Roland Barthes, anthologized in Pop Art:
The Critical Dialogue, ed. Carol Anne Runyon Mahsun (ann-arbor: UMI Research
Prensa, 1989). See also Steven Madoff, Pop Art: A Critical History (berkeley: Universidad
of California, 1997).
Sidney Janis, “On the Theme of the Exhibition,” in New Realists (Nueva York: Sidney Janis
Gallery, 1962), exhibition catalog.

22 Ellen Johnson, “The Living Object,” Art International 7, No. 1 (Enero 1963): 42–45.

Emphasis in original.

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Jasper Johns’s cast bronze beer cans, Andy Warhol’s wooden renditions
of cardboard Brillo boxes made in a foil-lined “factory,” and Arman’s
window “vitrine” displays—rather than being typical trompe l’oeil
affairs, functioned as doubles of real consumer commodities that
flaunted their own artificiality and constructedness. Tal como, estos
objects evoked the uneasy realization that manmade objects were
everywhere, even if there seemed to be no original or source for them.23
And as much as Warhol’s or Arman’s objects may have parti cipated in
an emerging atmosphere of dematerialized spectacle, there was always
a resistant concreteness and palpability to them—“object strategies” of
excessive repetition, dripped paint, and so forth—that put the spotlight
on the difference between the artists’ productions and those of indus-
trial manufacturing and marketing or mass-media.24

Swedish artist Öyvind Fahlström, whose work is analyzed by
Maibritt Borgen, is a case in point. Fahlström’s work of the early
60s synthesized an enormous amount of information, que van desde
the latest semiotic theories to far-reaching accounts critical of US
capitalist imperialism. Fahlström is best known for his early- to mid-
60s paintings and installations inspired by games and comic books,
which were included in the New Realists show at Janis Gallery and the
Venice Biennale in 1964. The artist retrospectively discussed his
games as “realistic models (not descriptions) of a lifespan, of the Cold
War balance, of the double-code mechanism to push the bomb but-
ton”—an apt characterization for all of his work, including his
experiments in multimedia as part of the Experiments in Art and
Technology’s 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, de 1966.25 Borgen
analyzes Fahlström’s work for this festival, Kisses Sweeter than Wine,
as a complex reformulation of the “double-code” mechanisms at play
in media streams and other forms of global communication. Ella
makes the argument that the intricately mediated sequences of Kisses,
including the happening Mao-Hope March (recently shown in the
Walker Art Center’s International Pop exhibition), were part of the
artist’s considerable effort to develop an avant-gardist semiotics in

23 On the theme of the double, see Roland Barthes, “That Old Thing, Arte,” in Runyon

Mahsun, Pop Art: The Critical Dialogue.
Julia Robinson, New Realisms, 1957–1962: Object Strategies between Readymade and
Spectacle (Cambridge, MAMÁ: CON prensa, 2010).

25 Öyvind Fahlström, “Take Care of the World,” in Manifestos (Nueva York: Great Bear

Pamphlet, Something Else Press, Cª, 1966).

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which image-signs were seen as a materiality that could be “kneaded”
into radicalized disruptive forms.

Fahlström exemplifies the period’s engagement with realism
through intensified appropriation, not only of common objects, pero también
through new forms of media and image culture. Though he is most
often discussed as a European Pop artist, Fahlström’s interest in con-
crete poetry and the Lettrist avant-garde, as well as his close ties with
Neo-Dada and “happeners” in New York, hint at the complex circula-
tion of ideas among these neo-avant-garde movements during the early
60s. The fluidity with which the artists associated with these trends
engaged with the internationalization of mass media and consump-
ción, as well as their wide range of artistic approaches—from painting
to found-object sculpture, to new conceptual modes and happenings—
challenged more limited, traditional understandings of Pop, a term
that eventually superseded all others, including Capitalist Realism
sí mismo, as the umbrella descriptor of the moment. New histories of
Capitalist Realism emphasize the multiple connections and relays,
based on a shared engagement with the commercial and popular cul-
tures of their respective regions, between artists not only from Britain,
the United States, and Europe, but also from Japan, Brasil, Argentina,
Colombia, and Eastern Europe.26

The heterogeneous practices that have been united under the ban-

ner of Pop appropriated both the “real” content and the equally “real”
procedures of commercial business—its bureaucratic and manufactur-
ing methods of reproduction, advertising, packaging, and distribution.
A este respecto, the projects of Akasegawa, Richter, Lueg, and Polke and
their engagement with the commercial world of mass production must
be considered an essential part of this trend. ellos podrían, En realidad, abierto
up further avenues of exploration into such Pop icons as Andy Warhol,
who had early on called his art “Commonism,” another verbal play that,
like Capitalist Realism, positioned itself between communism and the
capitalist mass-market.27 With only indirect knowledge of the battle

26 For examples, see the Tate Modern Global Pop Symposium: http://www.tate.org.uk/

whats-on/tate-modern/conference/global-pop-symposium. The Tate’s exhibition The
World Goes Pop runs from September 2015 to January 2016. Asimismo, the Walker Art
Center mounted the International Pop exhibition in 2015 and published a catalog: Darsie
Alexander and Bartholomew Ryan, editores., International Pop (Mineápolis: Walker Art
Center, 2015).

27 Caroline A. jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist

(chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 204–5.

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waging between Nouveau Réalisme and Pop in 1963, and just before
Pop came to dominate artistic discourse, the Germans and Akasegawa
focused on imitating the procedures as much as the “content” of capi-
talism, eso es, on the very means by which capitalism replicates and
reproduces its material infrastructure on a worldwide scale.

If Capitalist Realism emerged during the Cold War as a means of
creating visibility for capitalism’s emphasis on advertising, marketing,
and stimulating consumption, what is its legacy for, or in, contempo-
rary art? The question was taken up by the writers in the Leben mit Pop
exhibition catalog, who see the continuation of the German Capitalist
Realist project in paintings by Kai Althoff and Neo Rauch.28 But if
Capitalist Realism is not necessarily bound by Germany’s postwar
art history, and is to be understood as part of an international artistic
response to capitalist expansion during the Cold War, entonces quizás
we need to see its continuation in contemporary art projects that
expose global capitalism’s new frontiers and its innovative mechanisms
for representation and reproduction.

The historical path from the Capitalist Realism of the 1960s to
contemporary artists and projects that address the present-day convolu-
tions of neoliberal capitalism traveled by way of Soviet Sots Art of the
1980s (Erik Bulatov, Alexander Kosolapov, Komar and Melamid) y
Chinese Political Pop from the 1990s and 2000s. In the first case, el
(seemingly affirmative) quotation of propaganda imagery from Soviet
everyday reality created an equivalent to the flaunting of consumer cul-
ture by Capitalist Realist and Pop artists in the West. En el caso de
Porcelana, artists during the 90s began to appropriate images of Mao in
the context of the country’s embrace of state-sponsored capitalism.
More recently, Ai Weiwei and others have addressed the production of
global art commodities in Chinese cities such as Jingdezhen. Desde
2006, a collective named The Propeller Group, based in Ho Chi Minh
City and Los Angeles, has made a number of projects addressing the
complex ideological climate in Southeast Asia, where communist
bureaucracies held over from previous regimes now coexist with neo-
liberal policies that cater to the region’s media and global tourist indus-
intentos. For their recent TV Commercial for Communism (2012), el grupo
commissioned a Vietnamese ad company to rebrand communism. Este

28 Gregor Jansen, “For Example: The World is Beautiful . . .” in Evers et al., Leben mit Pop,

271–84.

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strategy of hiring capitalists to imagine and promote communal life
resulted in a strangely compelling advertisement.

In this special issue, we also present the work of Stephanie Syjuco

as a way of connecting the Cold War moment of Capitalist Realism to
neoliberalism’s battle with countless invisible enemies. Syjuco offers
a speculative proposal featuring the new media technology of Google
SketchUp to render a variety of capitalist objects—from Ikea bookcases
to Philippine jeepneys to modernist homes—all wrapped in the dazzle
camouflage patterns originally used on World War I ships. Her con-
flation of older camouflage war technology with potentially mass-
producible objects and architectures speaks to the conditions of
global capitalism as it operates in a diffuse field in which the promo-
tion of war and consumerism merge.

As if formulated in some black-market design lab, Syjuco’s model

objects exhibit a confusing, overdetermined semiotics designed to
appeal to a wide array of global clients. Her work is aligned with a
cohort of artists dealing with stranger-than-fiction elements in capital-
ism’s globalization. This includes not only the Propeller Group and
Ai Weiwei, but also Thomas Hirschhorn, Minerva Cuevas, Omer Fast,
and Goldin+Senneby. The camouflage signifiers in Syjuco’s project can
be related, Por ejemplo, to Thomas Hirschhorn’s Utopia Utopia (2005)
installation, in which the artist speculates that the introduction of mili-
tary street wear throughout the global fashion market will lead to an
army of khaki-wearing consumers with no one to fight. This in turn
is a fantastic update on Akasegawa’s proposal to flood the world with
model yen notes, or Warhol’s tongue-in-cheek “commonist” proposals
that everyone should be a machine or that Coca-Cola is a democratiz-
ing product because everyone from the president to the “bum on the
corner” drinks it.29 The efficacy of Syjuco’s project and these others
depends on a certain level of semiotic exaggeration and distortion also
found in the “extreme” realisms of the 60s.

Artists today may not be living the same capitalism as the

“Capitalist Realists” of the 60s, but they are still motivated to create or
open up tensions within its now even-more-extensive system. At times,
their provocations may appear too circumscribed by the neoliberal
ideologies of “freedom of expression” and “entrepreneurial innovation.”

29 Andy Warhol, Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (Nueva York:

Harcourt, 1975), 100.

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De hecho, this is the argument made by Mark Fisher in his 2009 libro
Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?30 With only a brief nod to its
origin in the 60s art context, Fisher uses the term capitalist realism to
describe what he sees as a post-1989, post-postmodernist ideological
formation whereby art and the imagination have been subsumed by
capitalism’s presentation of itself as the most viable and “realistic”
system that “seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable.”31 But
as this special issue’s historical revision of the concept attests, fue
the very same pretense—of capitalism as the most comprehensive
and realistic (in short: the inevitable) system—that provoked simulta-
neous responses by artists from distant places around the globe already
in the 1960s.

Fisher’s criticism that contemporary art cannot withstand capital-
ist appropriation is not new and has long been part of the criticism lev-
eled at the 60s neo-avant-garde.32 While the debate is ongoing, un
extensive look at Capitalist Realism reveals the fissures within capital-
ism’s very own modes of (self-)representación. The subtlety of Capitalist
Realist mimesis is what makes it such a relevant notion even for today’s
practicing artists. In this context, the excessive production of commodi-
ties continues to be rich artistic material with which to show not only,
as Richter had it, the “ridiculousness” of capitalism’s efforts to secure
its own reality, but the often tragicomic conundrum caused by our own
position within that system.

30 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, Reino Unido: Zero Books,

2009). Another element of this strain would be the current critiques of accelerationism,
which hold that any move to escape capitalism’s velocity by “speeding-up” or accentuating
its processes only feeds the system. See Steven Shaviro, “Accelerationist Aesthetics:
Necessary Inefficiency in Times of Real Subsumption,” e-flux Journal, No. 46 (2013),
www.e-flux.com/journal/accelerationist-aesthetics-necessary-inefficiency-in-times-of-
real-subsumption/. Fisher’s thesis has sparked a new interest in Capitalist Realism. Ver
Leigh Claire La Berge and Alison Shonkwiler, editores., Reading Capitalist Realism (Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 2014). This new volume in literary studies uses Fisher’s thesis
as a launching point.
Pescador, Capitalist Realism, 8.

31
32 This criticism was already part of the first reviews, including those in the 1963 Enero

Art International issue. See also the critiques of Pop in Runyon Mahsun, Pop Art: El
Critical Dialogue, and Madoff, Pop Art: A Critical History. Benjamin Buchloh’s critiques
of neo-avant-garde artists’ pervasive ambivalence have also been influential. See Buchloh,
Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1965 a
1975 (Cambridge, MAMÁ: CON prensa, 2003).