On Hypercompliance

An installation shot of General Intellect at Morningside Academy in October 2015. Courtesy of Aktionsart

There's a fascinating ongoing discussion about the art project General Intellect on the Aktionsart blog, and it hinges on a term I'm only starting to understand: hypercompliance.

General Intellect is a work of art that uses the ethically ambiguous rules of an online Amazon workforce called Mechanical Turk in order to expose that ethical ambiguity. The art—videos by the workers themselves, paid for by the artist, who hired them on mTurk—was first shown in Seattle at a crumbling old school about to be torn down to make way for yet more gentrifying Amazon-related construction in South Lake Union.

General Intellect was quietly poking Amazon in the eye. The videos were playing in the windows of the school, where the highly paid white-collar workers of Amazon might walk by and be confronted by their shadow force.

A month later came the announcement that General Intellect would be the first work of new-media art available on Amazon's own Art site. If General Intellect sold, Amazon would take a cut twice, first from the mTurk workers hired by the artist to make the original videos, and second from the sale of the art on Amazon Art. Actually, Amazon would take a cut three times. The artist who made General Intellect, James Coupe, set it up so that it is not an object, it's a system. When you buy it, you receive a subscription that adds videos to the feed by paying more workers to make more videos—cut number three for Amazon.

To artist and writer Susan Surface writing on the Aktionsart blog, the decision to offer General Intellect on Amazon Art "strike[s] me as hypercompliance—or an aggressive and intentional compliance with the market forces addressed in the work. What else could possibly be done with this material? It does feel right."

I don't know much about the term "hypercompliance." (As best I can tell, it's borrowed from psychology.)

Maybe in the good old days, fucking with a system by using its own rules against it and then turning around and becoming a purchasable product on that system might just have been referred to as selling out.

But "hypercompliance," as Surface used it, is not just a euphemism. It's trying to capture the larger picture that whatever eye-poking the art does, it also exists within a power structure that limits and defines it.

Hypercompliance is the opposite of belligerent transgression. It is intentional capitulation. By becoming hypercompliant, an artist relinquishes the usual claims to critical distance, to standing separately and critiquing something the art or artist is not part of.

"I'd like to see more artists moving away from creating safe distances/thrones from which to critique, and more into these complex spaces of hypercompliance (love that term, Susan)," wrote Aktionsart founder Julia Fryett on her blog. Fryett curated General Intellect at the old school in South Lake Union and also worked with Amazon Art to put the work up for sale there.

To hear Coupe talk, selling General Intellect anywhere other than Amazon Art would be his version of selling out.

Other post-Internet artists share similar tensions but resolve them by returning the art to the art-market system, such as Amalia Ulman, he said. Ulman's creation is an Instagram persona, but her work appears at museums such as the Tate Modern as merely standalone large-scale photography on the walls.

"That would be, for me, a compromise too far," Coupe told me by phone. "That would strip away the tensions that exist in the work, and put it back into a market where the difficult hierarchical relationships between the audience and the work and the workers would disappear altogether."

When I wrote about General Intellect going up for sale on Amazon Art, I described it as a dodgy move. Coupe wrote on the blog that my discomfort amounted to "conventional expectations of what art is for and where it should be sited and sold." In our phone conversation yesterday, he explained that he thought I'd be more comfortable if General Intellect were in a traditional gallery or museum.

Not at all. My discomfort is the discomfort flowing through the veins of this project. I find the logic of selling it on Amazon Art sound, but the ethics of making, looking at, and selling it at all remain dodgy. It's precisely the dodginess that saves it from sitting on a throne and offering its critique from a safe distance.