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.