Culture as Capital

By following and reproducing the cultural turn, the rhetoric of the cultural mix and hybridism is disseminated today, primarily in its crossing of trade barriers. Cultures reduced to their exchange value function as capital - an accumulative, speculative and, ultimately, financial affair. In some of its media and site-(un)specific manifestations, process art - which aims to encompass both old and new media art - seems to resist this pressure, despite, nonetheless, not being protected from regulations and incorporations. In the present collection of his recent essays, Slavko Kacunko discusses the process art by crossing the disciplines of art history and comparative media-, visual- and -cultural studies.
As a first approximation, several historiographical remarks on closed-circuit video installations underline their importance as a core category of process art. In the second part, the problems of process art, seen as a threshold of art history, are further examined in another retro-analytical step, in which concepts and objects related to `mirror', `frame' and `immediacy' are analyzed as the triple delimitation of visual culture studies. In the third part, previously outlined manifestations of what is termed the `post-visual condition' are summarized and projected to the `coreless core' of the emerging art and research related to the coreless beings par excellence, the bacteria.