If the 1990s were an era of post-historical melancholy and the 2000s an era of retromania in which the ghosts of styles from former decades were frantically revived and mobilized, the signature aesthetic of the 2010s was flat design. The term originates in interface design, and specifically Apple’s iOS7 in 2013, which stripped out shadows and other skeuomorphic features to define a more simplified user experience. As Apple chief designer Jony Ive remarked at the time: “There was an incredible liberty in not having to reference the physical world so literally. We were trying to create an environment that was less specific.”
This mission was the maxim of the epoch. Flat Design wasn’t limited to digital interfaces but expanded through interfaces to “matriculate” contemporary life. One could speak of an invasion of synthetic flatline construct forms. In his seminal work Meltdown, Nick Land describes an act of planetary capture by technocapital singularity. The globalization of software platforms globalized a cybernetic social structure. The vibe was aspirational-generic. Visual expressions included London luxury apartments sold off-plan in Singapore or Kuala Lumpur, the sparse interiors of third wave coffee shops, and the international seriality of flatpack furniture.
Transactions, including psychological transactions, became electronically mediated, qualitative sensitivity decreased, and reality became more abstract and synthetic. Irony lost legibility, spontaneity diminished, and code replaced it. New network identities and scripts proliferated. Subcultures disappeared or were assimilated. All this proceeded from the flat design matrix.
Flat design (flat cybernetics) reshaped existence, and therefore transformed experience by creating a new planetary information layer and mobilizing it through phones. This new layer was experienced unconsciously as an aesthetic metaphysics silently reticulating individual and group relations.
None of this was simply regressive or bad. Georges Bataille wrote that he couldn’t understand a myth unless he believed it himself. Understanding flat design requires recognizing its utopian dimension. This dimension is visible in the early twentieth century avant-garde, and especially in the work of Kandinsky, whose paintings presented what his nephew, philosopher, and French bureaucrat Kojéve described as a “uni-totality that exists in the same way as do trees, animals, rocks, men, States [or] clouds.”
Kandinsky framed his work as an attempt to channel spiritual forces beyond the paradigm of mimetic replication. He wrote that “color is a means of exerting direct influence on the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings.” Instead of representing a naturalistic reality, his paintings interface directly with the viewer, synesthetically, as a musical machine, or synthesizer. For Kojéve, Kandinsky’s paintings formed a preview of the universal and homogenous state awaiting mankind at the end of history: an “abandonment of individuality, that is in fact of humanity.”
Human beings become “living bodies with human form, but emptied of spirit… who construct their edifices and works of art as birds build their nests and spiders spin their webs, perform musical concerts in the manner of frogs and cicadas, play like young animals, and indulge in love like adult beasts.” At the end of history interiority has been totally externalized as species-being. The illustration style Corporate Memphis, or what design critic Eli Schiff called humans of flat design depicts the realization of this world. Facebook adopted the style in 2017 before it colonized other networks and apps including Airbnb, Uber, and Hinge.
Kandinsky’s symphonic abstractions became mutant humanoids engaged in arcane interactions. Corporate Memphis displayed the user from the perspective of a Skinner box, an operant conditioning chamber, following an individualized program. From the perspective of the platform, effects could be adjusted to incentivize desirable behaviour. Dreamworlds can be generated and imploded. Icons can be dangled. Statements, individuals, and narratives could be silenced, or triangulated or amplified to code agendas and finesse engagement by knowing what to show, to whom, and when.
The global platform proposed a new idea and form of social information space where information was produced with every action and mined to incite more. Competition is inherent in the system, vulnerabilities can be exploited, but incentives can be changed. Because everybody now was using the same platforms, social life became more uniform and claustrophobic. At the same time culture virtualized and became disposable, a carousel of current things and a conveyor belt of takes. The signature form was the stream: content without form. Privacy liquefied into voyeuristic experience. Media blurred into content.
Flat design both expressed and imposed this reality. It is possible to speak about a total art of flat design following theorist Boris Groys’ famous analysis of socialist realism as a Gesamtkunstwerk devoted to transforming the USSR into a work of art. Flat design was globalist realism which updated aesthetic totality for rhizomatic production. Despite their verisimilitude, the protagonists of Socialist Realism were not human beings but “the earthly incarnation of the demiurge” representing the mythological substructure of Soviet society. The humans of flat design were emissaries of global plasticity. “They almost seem to be in the employ of some extraterrestrial bureau planning a trip to Earth,” Groys writes, “they want to make their envoys as anthropomorphic as possible, but they cannot keep the otherworldly void from gaping through all the cracks in the mask.”
Beyond Flatland
Socialist Realism was never repudiated in the Soviet Union, but slowly lost its monopoly. With Khrushchev’s thaw, Warsaw Pact art books and magazines began appearing in Moscow. By the early seventies Russian art circles were absorbing ideas from the West, including American pop art, and pre-war Russian avant-garde influences conserved by some private collectors.
The result was the emergence of Moscow Conceptualism, or what Boris Groys originally called, in his 1979 article for the magazine A-Ya, Moscow Romantic Conceptualism. Figures linked with the scene are today internationally recognized: mixed-media postmodernists Komar and Melamid, the painter Erik Bulatov, the installation artist Ilya Kabakov, the poet Dmitri Prigov and Groys himself, its spokesmen.
Because it morphologically followed the total art of Stalinist Socialist Realism, Moscow Conceptualism suggests a speculative blueprint for an aesthetic that now could follow flat design. The situation of the Moscow artists parallels in some respects the situation of non-conformist intellectuals and artists today: tolerated, but not supported, adrift and alienated in a crumbling utopia. For Groys, Moscow Conceptualism was romantic because it emphasised personal experience against the impersonality of the Soviet state. The figure of a visionary outsider genius slash lunatic recurs throughout their work. Soviet experience was a key theme. Asked about his influences from the early twentieth century Russian avant-garde, Kabakov answered: “The things you are talking about were visible to all the civilized world, but my friends and I saw Maria Ivanova in the communal kitchen frying meat patties.” But Kabakov was also influenced by the children’s books he illustrated, by the painter Kazimir Malevich, and Western authors Dante, Kafka, and Cervantes to detach an individuality from the Soviet totality.
These thematic resources (or kinds of resources) are still available. But the contemporary situation is more complex than the Soviet experience. The West is both politically decaying, and experiencing a rapid technonomic transformation. The implications of this shift remain systematically undertheorized also because there is no longer a social organ to develop and mediate concepts. Art no longer seems to play this role. Culture has imploded, lost legitimacy, and lost autonomy; it is now regarded with a mixture of suspicion and indifference.
In his unfinished manuscript Crypto-Current, Nick Land analyzed the historical conjuncture as the culmination of the Enlightenment utopia of public reason, which reached its definitive expression in Kant, and its final sentinel in Jürgen Habermas. The shift is the symbolic shift from Habermas to Palantir and Alex Karp. Critique is superseded by a cryptographic metaphysics which routes around trusted third parties. Software becomes the paradigm of creative critique. The intellectual is replaced by the influencer, identity is replaced by performance, and the nation is replaced by the network. Art works become “proofs of stake”—cryptographic hash or blocks inside a planetary computational machinery. From this perspective, calls for patronage for art take on a cadence of nostalgia. Capital, reconceived as intelligence, is now the only game in town; artists lose their legibility to become wandering mercenaries, alchemists, madmen, or priests.
The Moscow artists instituted an informal artistic research circle or kruzhok as a delimited public for exchanging and developing ideas. Work was presented in private apartments and the significance of making objects was deprioritized in favor of discussion and experiments. In 1915 Roman Jakobson had convened the Moscow Linguistics Circle; Western avant-garde movements were also circles which orchestrated groups of artists as an audience for each other, and performers for the general public. What the formation created was distance, and interiority, pregnant with meaning: in the centre was a matador or void.
Kabakov’s most important innovation was the “total installation”—an aesthetic space a viewer enters and inhabits as if an astronaut on the surface of an alien moon. Soviet propaganda supplied a shared visual language, and a field of inquiry. Komar and Melamid’s “Sots-Art” reframed Soviet mass visual culture in the same way as Pop art reframed comics and advertising. The implication was that Western pop culture and official Soviet culture were not essentially different, and only angled differently: the one pursuing freedom, and the other organization, but both concluding in a democratized, and centralized humanity.
The signal event in the history of Moscow Conceptualism was the Bulldozer Exhibition, an unofficial, and therefore illegal, wildcat group show staged in the Belyayevo urban forest in September 1974, which was broken up by police forces using bulldozers and water cannons. Event organizer Oscar Rabin, who had proceeded through the exhibition clinging to a bulldozer as it destroyed artworks, was arrested and eventually forced to leave Russia. The contemporary equivalent was the activist campaign organized against the post-internet art gallery LD50 in London in February 2017. The Bulldozer Exhibition had been intended as a provocation to test the resolve of the authorities. LD50 did not have this intention: they had organized a conference about neoreaction and an exhibition of outsider artists as a research project. But their program provoked outraged denunciations months after it finished in the paroxysm which followed Trump’s inauguration.
The event marked the entrance of a new structure of power which defined the years of hysteria before Trump’s return to office. An activist network mobilized through Tumblr and Facebook which demanded that the gallery be shut down. This message was repeated across different platforms and amplified by global media. Hyperbolic claims proliferated. Critics were swarmed, and silenced. Local politicians, art institutions, and the global art press supported the campaign. Following a February demonstration against the gallery, curator Lucia Diego organized a final show—Corporeality—a “total installation” organised around an imaginary social media platform called Kwaly, which invited the attendees to destroy printed copies of offending material by feeding it through a shredder. Then she disappeared.
The campaign against LD50 established a schism in art—one was either with the activists, or against them—and thus reestablished a simulacrum of urgency. The official art system supported the activists mainly due to fear. For non-conformists, what had happened was a real enigma, but it was both too early to address it, and too late.
Art now was subject to swarm policing. Creative space was subordinate to activist cyberspace, private space was now a province of the network. The same sequence repeated in response to an exhibition titled “People of Colour” at the gallery Mercy Pictures in Auckland, New Zealand in 2020. The show consisted of an installation of four hundred miniature paintings of flags from across the political spectrum. On the opening night the gallery was vandalized and Mercy Pictures’ Instagram account was flooded with threats and abuse. The objections to cultural appropriation for including Maori flags, and by “platforming fascist ideology” by featuring fascist flags. Other incidents could also be mentioned. Victims ended up silenced and burned, or on social media as anons. Anon culture was a theoretically free intellectual and political space, but the price of entry to that space was internal exile from the world. For a brief moment, it offered a Neo-Dadaist carnival of frenetic collage and iconoclasm. Later, it came to orbit around outsized and cartoonish figures, and it is now in decaying orbit, selling podcasts and running third rate salons.
LD50 had exhibited outsider artists formed on the internet who fragmented as soon as the gallery closed. No one yet has followed in its footsteps. What was blocked, and remains blocked, was not a different ideology, but a whole spectrum of realities: by the sinews of the culture war, the pandemic, and the oblivion of the pandemic. Nonconformist discourse was splintered and failed to develop. A fashion designer is said to have directed her models for a show to think of “a Bermuda Triangle in the desert.” The line captures perfectly where we are.