Avant-garde art is condemned to a political function whether or not it has any interest in politics. As conspicuous examples you might remember Nixon's use of a flag painting of Jasper Johns in his office. And more recently there was the advertisement in Artforum, about five years ago, I think, for Brilliant, which was a show of young British work at the Walker Art Gallery, in Minneapolis, which reproduced an image of the devastation following one of the last IRA bomb blasts in London with the artists' names superimposed on it.

So you had this image of the aftermath of the explosion, and on these empty offices and rooms, you had the artists' names who were in the exhibition. And there was a link that was not being directly made, but a link between the radicalism of these artists' work, and the political radicalism of the IRA, which was really spurious.

These are a function, these sort of things are a function of an economy which has found a way to make art's connection to radical politics valuable. Attempts by the avant-garde to fight this dependency, say by retreat into non-commodifiability (like Fluxus) or by directly attacking this very process (as in feminist art), have been easily turned into extensions of that economy.

Mary Kelly, who was a very important early feminist conceptual artist, who is now, I think, head of art at UCLA, would be one example of that. UCLA would be using her, her past as a radical feminist artist, to further their own agenda as an important cutting-edge university. In this way the marketplace has been part of the avant-garde since its beginnings. It's equally hard to make a case for all the commentaries that exist on the avant-garde, whether they are pro- or anti- the avant-garde; they're also inside the marketplace, for all critical writing contributes to the marketability of the art and of the writer. Of course for radical art and commentary to be marketable they have often have to appear to reject marketability.

My own career, the art and the writing that I do, even my entitlement to stand here speaking to you today about the avant-garde, are due to the reputation I've developed as a supposedly objective independent thinker and an unmarketable producer in this milieu. Although you couldn't see it, the first piece I was showing you, video, was a long project, sort of me being a DJ, where I'm playing my collection of bad records, all the records that are the very worst that I have, and I'm talking about them to a camera. It's called Bad Music Seminar, and it's also a pretty bad seminar about music. . . .

So my own work. I promised you a few slides. The Iraqi posters [slide 5, 6: Memorial to the Iraqi Dead, 1991], which protested the first Gulf war in '91, and were posted anonymously around New York. Here's another one. The disintegrating paperworks that I make [slide 7: Axe; 1992; slide 8: untitled, 1994]. That's about nine feet tall, by the way. That's very small, a few inches tall.

And work like this, which is a critique of a critique of conceptual art [slide 9: Joseph Kosuth, Reference 'One and Three Chairs (Etymological)' 1965, 1998; slide 10: (detail) Dead Kennedys, 1998], where the Dead Kennedys' record Holiday in Cambodia is juxtaposed with an image, a photograph of Joseph Kosuth's One and Three Chairs.

Or, this is a still from a video [slide 11: The Guitarist], the anti-music videos that I have made. They include both politically engaged and disengaged work.

They make a point of unmarketability, which of course they're not at all. They've been in major shows, and in the case of the Iraqi posters, which were begun anonymously—a state I tried to retain—that got me talking on the radio before I could get out of it. That's a longer story, but speak about being co-opted by the media . . .

At this stage, too, your university is sponsoring me on the basis of this kind of work. My marketable unmarketability has led me to being expected to question the institution that is paying me (but it would be the same in any university). I am taking their money—your money, in fact—to suggest to you that the education you're getting, including what I'm giving you in my classes, may not be all it should, but furthermore that there'd be something wrong if we did know what it should be, because then it would be static, complacent, and conservative; all conditions which the avant-garde has stood against, of course. This extreme indeterminacy, where the rules are reinvented as we go along, is the logical outcome of the complicity of the avant-garde and institution. And I think it must be hard sometimes for students to manage in this kind of flux.