Christian Marclay’s "The Clock" and James Richards’s "Active Negative Programme"

Media As Mimetic Storyworld

Proposed to the conference:

Storyworlds across Media Mediality – Multimodality – Transmediality

June 30th – July 2nd, 2011 at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz

Christian Marclay’s The Clock and James Richards’s Active Negative Programme both mash-up mainstream audiovisual material from film/television and organize it across time and glance— respectively—for their cohesion. What happens when images are lifted from their storyworlds and fit into plain mimesis with the movements and rhythm of lived experience? A parallel media-world begins to open up. The otherwise isolated storyworlds unlock from their authors and turn to face one another, and in so doing they become plain semiotic signs, historical facts, and part of a virtual narrative that depends on the real narrative of living to complete its circuit.

Consider Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze:

The cut image is in stasis. Detached from author, narrative and intent, it is a semiotic sign available for arrangement with other signs. The crisis of authorship is thus deflected onto source points diverse enough to represent an omniscient view, although this ‘omniscience’ is medially confined. The audiovisual archive takes on the same fluidity described for language in “The Death of the Author,” where [film] exists and is merely ‘held together’ by the subject who enunciates it.

Using the audiovisual as a source recasts its stories as objects outside the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. A lens of archeological authenticity is activated where facts about a story become more knowable and stable by repetition. A snippet plumbed from the mine of time is thus received by the compilationist as a historically material fact.

The central structure of a film is a pair of mutually dependent images— a real and a virtual— as with flashbacks and perspectives. When this correspondence is cut the image is locked in the virtual and seeks a real to reflect. It telescopes across media, memory and into lived experience to consummate its pairing with the real.

Re: Where Art Belongs

Collective Response to Chris Kraus: Where Art Belongs

Printed as a zine by FluxSpace, Philadelphia, Pa

Jean Baudrillard is in rare form; he has donned his gold lamé jacket to properly figurehead Chris Kraus’s 1996 event in the casino littered desert. Across time he catches drifts of her reading You Are Invited to be the Last Tiny Creature at Cooper Union on September 28, 2010. What would he think? Would he feel slighted that she traded in her tremendous sense of cultural irony to eulogize a few of its epitomic misfits?

When Shitty Hippie (a work of true stoner-art in florescent marker and speed driven lines) went up in the lecture hall it did not inspire unanimous agreement that the post-punk artists’ collective called Tiny Creatures had really done something avant-garde. The discussion felt out of whack. Rather than rehash the romance of self-expression it was and is a ripe moment to acknowledge the roles of cultural mediation and spectacle that befall the task. Instead of weaving lineage from Dada to Fluxus to Alvarado Drive, we should consider the difference.

Or lack of difference, in this case, between counter and popular culture. “A collapse of the two traditional poles into each other: implosion.”[1] These are the fingercuffs of the contemporary artist that claims authenticity of the ‘real’ by using culture as raw material; there is relevance and heat in culture but the altruistic endeavor to package with “beauty, love, pain, and all that we can feel as humans”[2] is out of sync, subsumed by the language of commodity.

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[1] Simulacra and Simulation, 31.

[2] Tiny Creatures Manifesto

Recovering from Nostagia with Simulation: The Unpresentable in Visual Culture

Presented to the Panel "Terror and the Cinematic Sublime"
organized by Dr. Todd Comer

Midwest Modern Language Association, Nov 4, 2010

In a world where theory and market consciousness have exerted a double strangle hold on naïve poetries it is important to develop a discourse that works to re-identify where and how lucid encounters with meaning can occur, within popular culture rather than in opposition to it. Lyotard’s proclamation that Grand Narratives are no longer adequate or relevant has prompted this inquiry into three particularly post-modern films that subvert narrative, investigating where these modes come from in culture and what they have the capacity to signify. Specifically, the documentary film Babies (2009) is organized by image without plot, The Coen’s Burn After Reading (2008) is ‘realism’ as inseparable from ‘the fake,’ and Charlie Kauffman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008) is an imaginary that envelops the issue of lost referentials as part of its structure. The distinct methods of these films are opportunities to investigate what is meant or what could be meant by Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, using Baudrillard’s text as a picture of what logically comes after Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition. While Baudrillard offers a method for thinking of film as a facet of self-referential culture, Gilles Deleuze offers a method for thinking of film as enactments of philosophical thought. It is hoped that by positioning the dystopian tone of simulacra against the expansive language Deleuzian philosophy that the fright of post-modern culture can be relocated to find the use of a consciousness that is adjusted to it; specifically, that the same themes historically conceptualized through myth— such as birth, death and God— are not lost or closed by the disruption of narrative simplicity but simply exist ‘realistically’ within the fabric of construction.

Joseph Bueys and Howard Hughes

I recently saw Leonardo Dicaprio as Howard Hughes in The Aviator. The decimation of Hughes’ life and psyche after his accident caused me to wonder if there are some catastrophes of such magnitude that life becomes inappropriate for the victim. By escaping death in impossibly narrow terms, the survivor is thrown into a rift between what should be and what actually is. The survivor was conscious for their own physical deconstruction, and must go through a period of psychological fissure during which rituals are performed that constitute “rebirth.”

The circumstances of near death and ritualistic rebirth that Hughes underwent are strikingly similar to the story of Joseph Bueys. Both suffered a single-man plane crash. Both burned. Both survived only by the heroic intervention of another. Oddly, both accidents were in the mid-1940's. And afterwards, both were pretty crazy; but there were distinct methods to their madness. Bueys’ obsession with the felt-and-fat agents of his salvation is comparable in purpose to Hughes’ OCD quarantine regiment. Hughes patted around naked in a locked room for several months with a looping plane crash reel and fastidiously consumed nothing but glass bottled milk that he then used to organize his own urine. By covering themselves in rituals that in some way signified their death, both men sought a fetal state and a cleansing. The difference between them is mainly contextual. Bueys’ semi-psychological break ran its course in the name of Art while Hughes declined from (business) competency in shameful secret. The fact is that had Hughes chosen to inflict his quarantine in a glass box instead, his symbology would be a ripe performance vocabulary to go along with that of his kindred contemporary.




for nice anecdotes on Hughes:
http://www.solarnavigator.net/inventors/howard_hughes.htm
scroll down to the Time mag cover

Ben Jones at Deitch Projects

A context for Ben Jones’s media room snaps into focus strolling through Times Square on any night of the year. Reality filling digital planes are a hyper-reality in the urban epicenter, behaving with the tacit normalcy of a brazen heterotopia— a city built not from concrete but a rapacious pixel takeover. Screens are in the air and in the seams, blending and dominating from silent totemic towers. In the frigid months Jones gives us a much warmer telematic embrace. The body heat helped with that. The blinking helped as well. And the tangling with projections streams to navigate the room. But above all it was the whirrr of holy noise in white that tinged the consumption with pleasure. If Times Square could emanate holy holds on the upper end of a key board in the same way then we would probably all blank out like incinerable moths. Concentric patterns in op-art colors with moving projections laid over top! Ancient mystics wish they could have gotten hold of such a trick. But without the mystical ‘path of the warrior’ to precipitate the mind altered moment, does sensation have any meaning? Of course not, unless we invest it with meaning. The Gumby Buddha of Jones’s shrine has parallel characters in Times Square that give us a shift to consider about meaning. I nominate Bruce Springsteen. After his utterly embarrassing ax-swinging Boss antics for the Super Bowl half-time show, the current Rolling Stone cover and his giant likeness on 42nd and 5th, it is apparent that our emblematic exaltations are a purely malleable rouse, although sadly not always so easy to render with a nostalgic vector. Gumby is one ounce more meaningless than Bruce Springsteen as a banal mascot of the telematic sensory (and the puffy dalliance of sensory with its cousin the spiritual). Gumby is drained of corporate interest and so his banality bears the strength of an orphaned blank slate, created and perpetuated by the entertainment-media mechanism that alone wields the strength to culturally glue us, but whose likeness is now free to be appropriated as a means of identification alone. And so Ben Jones gives us a generation’s plasticine identity index coupled with the quickest route to affects of a mystical vision, or the warm hug that someone should call Roy Ascott about so he can come a little closer to telematic coitus.

Joseph Smolinski at Mixed Greens

Joseph Smolinski’s cleverly titled exhibition After the Fall that is currently on display at Mixed Greens steps in at a socially responsible moment to imagine how solar panels and tree-shaped wind turbines could be seamlessly integrated with the natural landscape. This happens to come on the heels of Mayor Bloomberg’s August proposal for more renewable energy in New York City that emphasized developing a wind farm infrastructure. Lackadaisical consideration of wind energy has persisted for generations with obvious appeal for even the most neophyte environmentalists, usually tempered by grumblings about a compromised skyline. Instead of being outraged by the social set that could turn a blind eye to the commonplace aesthetic lack of America’s urban planning while refusing to consider the turbine field as a source of hypnotic solice, Joseph Smolinski graciously approaches the issue as an opportunity to create beauty. Who says that turbines have to look the way they always have? In urban settings, why not design windmills that are integrated into buildings or, even better, that function as joyous displays of design? Taking the cue from this exhibition’s reminder that artists often best imagine the solutions that invigorate political and scientific efforts, I imagine a glorious team of industrial designers and 70's-style land artists commissioned to create a spectacle of wind-harnesses worth traveling to.
The best part of the exhibition is discovering on the way out that Joseph's tree has actually been realized. Thanks to funding from Mixed Greens and MASS MoCA you can view a video of the tree in operation as well as stills of its construction.

Play Versus Power

The cartoonish “Grotesques” of the Uffizi Gallery ceiling countlessly configure super-beasts with person-beasts and joyous quatrefoil fill-in-the-blanks. After a waltz through the Illuminations exhibition in the basement level it is easy to see the connection between this decorative style and the even earlier monastic book illustrations, where there is freedom to ‘doodle’ within the regulating logic of symmetry. Following the fire of 1762 the West Wing corridor was restored according to the tastes of that moment, which suggest that the shift from playful explorations of a bestial self to moralized representations of specific elite historical figures was synchronous by degrees with the entrenchment of illusionistic devices, while the mythological motifs that continued with the most vigor did so as appropriated vehicles of state virility. As a result of the fact that play did not benefit from the support of the state and was at worst usurped by it, the generational enrichment of a mythic self was largely abandoned in comparison to the resounding climax that emblems of power such as the story of David did reach.
Perhaps it is this dropping off point that explains the contemporary interest in gothic awkwardness. The project of inventing a history that ‘continued’ to metaphorically reorganize the human form invigorates the production of mythologies that were not stunted by and do not bear the weight of religious or political epochs and are thereby free to simply play.