A letter to Binna Choi from Marina Vishmidt, August 19, 2009
Marina Vishmidt’s letter, in response to Biinna Choi’s request, offers advice and guidance for the long-term project Grand Domestic Revolution. This collaborative project, developed by Casco — Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht, The Netherlands, was carried out from 2009-2012. The project was developed in the shadow of the 2007–2008 global financial crisis, primarily attributed to encouraging home ownership through substantial mortgages in the USA. Grand Domestic Revolution involved multiple collaborators and sites, including the public space of Casco and its core team and a private apartment rented for the project's duration and its various occupants. Vishmidt’s letter served as a touchstone for the project throughout its development.
Dear Binna,
It so happens that I am in Amsterdam next week (Tues-Sun) staying with Metahaven and finishing the book we are editing together. If you are around, perhaps I could arrange to get away one afternoon and come meet you in Utrecht to discuss further?
For now, I can just say that I find your proposal, as I already said in my initial reaction, extremely compelling. The home as a space of politics seen and unseen, the division between public and private which makes the separation of the political from the economic possible, the very status of the "private" as a threshold beyond which politics and public debate cannot reach (from the home to "private" schools, "private" prisons, "private" healthcare), "private" as that which is not open to question - this seems to be the cornerstone of the social consensus in such a fundamental way (the way "private" is articulated with "individual" which is articulated with "freedom"). You have a kind of notion of "privacy" as the last refuge of the human when everything else has been lost - autonomy, solidarity, an idea of a future we can intervene in shaping ... there is also the etymological but also affective link between "privacy" and "privation", being deprived, which also connects to the Greek notion of "oekonomia" as the home, which has no political siginificance - following that whole thread is a lifetime's work in itself (just one more point in this direction - there's also the argument Marx makes about the "market" as the sphere of equality, and "the hidden abode of production", the workplace, where the exploitation happens that makes the market possible - for the feminist movement,it would have of course been the "hidden abode of reproduction").
Additionally, I'm thinking of the anxiety of many public art institutions, i.e., most art institutions in Europe, though not in the rest of the world, seem to revolve around evoking, cajoling, or projecting this idea of a "public", of becoming a substitute site for some kind of collective dimension which is supposedly gone from everyday social experience, and the differences between utopia and management, between situation and spectacle, get increasingly blurred, especially in managerial concepts like "participation". It's a laboratory where social relations are tried out, but it's also a depressing little room where nothing happens, even if it's the size of the Tate Modern. This is why I think the idea of a domestic site is so great - not only is it turning that notion of the art space as "public" upside down and taking it seriously by moving into a private space and seeing how it can be "opened" through practice, it's putting forward an actual home as a site of production of subjectivity, it is literal, not trying to create a domestic atmosphere in a gallery space in order to ask questions which have already been asked for generations, even in the art world ... of course there's the whole history of the home as the site for experimenting with ways of living that then are supposed to extend into the way social life is organized more broadly, so the politicizing of the family unit, of gender roles, of domestic economies - and then how those attempts are influenced by the degree of social movement or stasis happening in that society (we can think of the experiments in communal life in early revolutionary Russia turning into squalid "communal apartments" or communal living in the West in the 50s-70s turning into cramped flatshares in skyrocketing capitalist housing markets today). To me, it seems the home is the prime political site, it's where politics are born or where they are buried. And the home as a site of contestation for the women's movement is totally crucial, you're right, and we also see the refusal of housework turning 20, 30 years later into the commodification of housework, as domestic servant jobs performed by migrant women are increasingly acceptable again. So this is another way that the home becomes the barometer of political change - the contradictions of a women's movement that didn't manage to change capitalism very much is perfectly exemplified there. Or, rather, the contradictions of the fight.
And then the specific Dutch situation is interesting as well, because on the one hand you do have a kind of very introverted culture, but one that, until recently, had a mass consensus of the public good embodied in welfare state ideals and an ideology of "tolerance" that it is now busy distancing itself from with a new xenophobic "common sense". I think everywhere we are witnessing this "shutting down", especially with the economic collapse, and the home is the first place we have to look for how to get rid of both the economy and politics and start inventing. Anyway, I'll just keep babbling, so maybe we could meet when I'm in the Netherlands next week, and also speak practically about what form my involvement could take?
All the best,
Marina
Published in Grand Domestic Revolution Handbook, published by Casco — Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht and Valiz Amsteram, (2014).
BIOGRAPHY
Marina Vishmidt (1976-2024) was a writer, editor, critic, and educator. She taught at the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London in the MA program Culture Industry; Art Theory in the MA Art Praxis at the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem; and in 2023, began as Professor for Art Theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her research mainly concerned the relationship between art, value, and labour. In 2013, she completed her PhD entitled Speculation as a Mode of Production in Art and Capital at the Queen Mary University of London.