FA-weblog
7-11-13
Steve's objects
24 (Fox Network, 2002-2010)
Last week Steve showed a clip form the U.S. TV series 24. In this show the protagonists have access to, or are denied access to, a code. This code will allow our hero (Jack Bauer) to disarm an atomic bomb or neutralize a flesh-eating virus (or any number of 'clear and present dangers'). The plot always centers on Jack getting the code through some clever trick, and finally through torture. The body in 24 might be understood as an encumbrance to the free flow of information, an imperfect medium for information exchange. In the show the body is often disposed of once the information has been imparted. The body is reduced to an informatics.
See: The Internet Effect, A.R Galloway, Polity, 2012
The Holy Mountain, Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1973
There are some significant differences and similarities to the way the body is treated in The Holy Mountain. Here the ‘thief’ undergoes a process of purification – an array of ‘technologies of self’ - before setting off to find the Holy Mountain. We are introduced to the nine ‘thieves’ who accompany him on his journey. These include an arms manufacturer who makes weapons for hippies and various types of religious armaments; a toy manufacturer who trains and conditions children to hate. Aversion and electro-shock therapy is used to fashion the development of the children’s psychological life. Jodorowsky presents us with a society in which production and consumption is regulated by a huge computer. The economy is ‘vertically integrated’ to produce and condition citizens to continue the cycle of production and destruction. The film was made in the year of the CIA instigated coup in Chile. Allende, the elected socialist president, was deposed. A ‘free market’ economic system was instituted. Resistance was violently repressed by the Pinochet regime.
At the time Stafford Beer (on the request of Allende) was developing a computer system (cybersyn) design to regulate the Chilean economy and facilitate economic and democratic transparency. Pinochet abruptly discontinued this program on gaining power, preferring a ‘free market’, Chicago School economic system, mixed with ‘psyops’ techniques of repression imported from the United States' secret service. For Steve, The Holy Mountain demonstrates the protean nature of cybernetic ideas (control and communication - feedback systems &c). These ideas were active across the divides of left and right – they were simultaneously called into the services of liberation and oppression. These ideas live on in shows such as 24 where the body is, in the final event, a carrier of code (knowledge, DNA &c). The subject is understood as an information machine, exchanging information with other information machines.
See: Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile, E. Medina, MIT, 2011; The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein, Penguin, 2007, N. Wiener, Cybernetics, or The Control and Communication in Animal and Machine, MIT, 1965; M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality (see chapter, care of the self), Penguin, 197?;
Link. Artist Susanna Kriemann interviews Steve about cybernetic ideas in contemporary culture:
http://www.roddickinson.net/pages/pre_reviews/SignalNoise-Bulletin.pdf
X's objects
Alice Mendelowitz
Sister Carrie, 1900 by Theodore Dreiser
Which deals with a young american county girls realisation of the american dream in the big city, primarily through her use of sex or sexuality and being a bit of a sauce.
Alice suggested that in it there is a general tendency towards things or ideas or stories being vague and open to our knowledge of their occupying a wider world and that this book exists as a template for novels of the american dream, bukowski, etc. As a novel which doesn't take a particular moral stance Alice is interested perhaps in its potential for telling and romanticising a story which not long prior would perhaps have been subject to stylisation as scandalous or a fall or a moral tale for social education.
It also seems to its readership about themselves in a particularly live way, as turn of the (20th) century americans it inhabits the spaces that the nascent nation did.
Media
The American Friend - Wim Wenders - 1977
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06hIZ76Zlds
one of many adaptations of many Ripleys novels (Patricia Highsmith). The American friend, played by Dennis Hopper, is an auction house price gamer, he is involved in an artwork forgery ring and appears at auction houses in order to bid on forged paintings to push up the price. The key protagonist though is a hitman with an unspecified (probably) terminal illness who performs hits in order to accumulate money for his soon to be widow. He is commissioned by Hopper to murder first a rival art gangster and then a second man after Hopper character fakes his medical report to suggest his illness is more immediately terminal than it is.
Alice was particularly interested in Wenders particular stylisation of the novel and of Hamburg, the location. He shoots light in a particular (painterly?) way which fictionalises Hamburg as a beautiful location, which She (Alice) doesn't understand to be the case with actual Hamburg, as it exists.
Artwork
Drive in by Stuart Croft. 2007
Again this deals with spaces and modes for telling a story, in this case a story is essentially told in the form of a long looping joke, by an american woman to a silent man. The man drives a car at night and the woman is the passenger, there isn't any real indication of the nature of their relationship, but the weight of particular parts of the story and the glances he throws back perhaps suggest that it could stand as an allegory for them.
Within the story a man is caught in a storm at sea, he washes up on a beautiful desert island, alone and without provision. after a while of starving and getting hairy he discovers that a beautiful woman was also washed up, but she is AWESOME. she has a house which she possibly built, livestock, a shower, all sorts and she paints and carves amazing, weird sexy art.
they hook up, he writes a trashy novel, she doesn't like it, he has an affair, nothings the same, he leaves on his raft and hey presto, caught in a storm, washes up on an island, and repeats the story. We weren't 100%confident about it being a single unit loop or if the story is told twice as the loop repeats the double telling.
The camera work is very stylised, very slick, tight shots of the man and woman with rainy windows and out of focus lights from the street and city at night.
Alice feels that something about the piece is perfectly contemporary, or is the best example she has seen lately of how to tell a story as a short film in a contemporary way.
Throughout these there is a kernel which interests Alice about the stylisation of a saga, and about the slickness of an American approach and presentation, and possibly how that can co-opt or reorientate a story or location which is outside the mainstream american lineage. Though she doesn't feel like the saga (as distinct from the story somehow?) exists explicitly in her own practise, its something which bothers her in other work, and perhaps something which she is interested in bringing into her output, working out how to manipulate the particulars and stylisations of her aggregatory/collage based painting to incorporate the toning of a narrative.
Sol Archer (by Alice Mendelowitz)
Text = (http://www.vurdalak.com/tunguska/witness/witnesses.htm)
Sol was looking at eye witness Statements of the Tunaska Events in 1908, when it is thought that an airbust of small asteroid caused an explosion in Russia. These are primary sources, where the statements are very subjective and personal as opposed to being scientific.
Media = (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztrU90Ub4Uw)
The media that Sol was interested was a conglomerate of footage of a meteor shower in present day Russia. Grainy film shot on a combination of car dashboard cameras, security cameras, and newsreel. Art piece = (http://theactofkilling.com/trailer/)
“The Act of Killing” is a stylized documentary about “gangsters” in North Sumatra, who in the wake of a failed coup in the 1960’s went from selling black market movie theater tickets to leading the most notorious death squad. These “gangsters” re-enact some of their killings for the film, doing so in the style of their favourite movie genres.
How does the medium the story is told with add to the tale ? Sol chose historical events in a combination of primary and secondary source material. Looking at the embodiement of stories, and how they can be told both objectively and subjectively.
Sriwhana's objects
Last week Sriwhana talked about the working process of the Russian dancer and choreographer Vaslav Najinksy. She read a part of his letter with the title “Letter to mankind”. Najinksy, was perhaps going through a schizophrenic state, that aloud him to use the language as a code of illustration.
He wrote some letters that are untranslatable in another written language; he was mainly interested in the sound of words or animals such as cat sounds or pigeon. Perhaps it could be translated to another language as dance; he used sound of animals and words in order to illustrate dance movements.
Sriwhana showed us a video Rite of Spring, 1913/you tube. With this choreography he reestablished the catholic concept on movement in classical ballet dancing by reversing the balletic tradition, turning the basic movement from outside to inside.
She also talked about the idea of unlearning as a creative process. By undoing what you learned invent, create and in this case dance movements that would examine the limits of the movement of the body.
The second art piece she was interested in the book of Djuna Barnes particularly a sentence … “time crawling” broke into uncontrollable laugther, and thought this occurrence troubled him the rest of his lif he was never able tp explain it to himself.”… as a respond to something that she didn’t know but she was drown to it.
Anna
Anna began her presentation by showing the class a clip from the 1966 film Daisies, a Czechoslovak comedy-drama written and directed by Věra Chytilová. Banned upon release for it’s radical portrayal of female subjects, the film follows two young pranksters who, tired of their dreary lives, embark on a quirky, destructive journey. Along with conversations of female subjectivity, Anna is interested in the analog materiality of the film, as actual cutting and re-assemblage of the physical film itself create visual tricks for the viewer. http://vimeo.com/63689570
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Anna then showed a video produced by the Tate about the work of artist Lucie Mackenzie who participated in the group show (held at the Tate) A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance in 2012-2013. In the video, Mackenzie discusses the importance of her place as a woman painter within the historical framework of classical, specifically decorative, painting. Anna is interested in Mackenzie’s methodologies and choice of training—her artisan leanings combined with contemporary awareness force her work into a fascinating limbo between the innovative and the traditional. http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/tateshots-lucy-mckenzie-bigger-splash
Sighle BC
Text
http://clockwatching.net/~jimmy/eng101/articles/goffman_intro.pdf
'The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life' is a text written by American sociologist Erving Goffman in 1959. He uses a dramaturgical approach to analyse human interaction. By describing the individual as an actor, he highlights the heightened awareness and performance of everyday behaviour. The individual will try and control or manipulate a social situation by both conscious and subconscious actions.
Video clips
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbWBrlT1NBA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89d4jnbfzi4
This clip shows a 13 year old contestant being eliminated from the American 'X-Factor'. Her reaction is that of a bitterly disappointed child. She cries loudly and falls to the floor. I am interested in how for a moment the scripted 'reality' that is presented in gladatorial manner to a live studio audience as well as millions of viewers is for a moment disturbed. The host and judges slightly panic as they seem to be more aware of how the incident could be reported in the media than any genuine concern for the child. She quickly regains some amount of composure by the end of the clip, thanking her fans and exclaiming that without them she is nothing.
A work
In 'Die Familie Schneider' Gregor Schneider produced a disturbing experience by installing actors into neighbouring terraced houses and creating in detail physical surroundings that are uncannily familiar. The audience can only access the work by collecting keys from the ArtAngel office in pairs. They have ten minutes to go around the house individually, then they swap keys and enter the neighbouring house. Each house appears identical. A woman washes the dishes, a child sits in the corner of a bedroom with a bin bag over his head, a man masturbates in the shower. The viewer is always ignored by the actors (who are identical twins). The viewer becomes acutely aware of their presence in the house as a voyeur to this depressingly mudane and painful repeated domestic scene.
Vasiliki's Objects
A collection of mushrooms
Vasiliki passed around a collection of mushrooms in various states of dehydration and decay. All of these mushrooms had been grown in her studio on a log bought at the market. Vasiliki is interested in their material properties, and observing the way that these funguses find form.
A postcard of Gabriel Orozco’s photograph ‘Sleeping Dog’ 1990
Vasiliki found this postcard in a museum bookshop and has had it taped to her studio wall because it is a peaceful image to look at every morning and she is drawn to its simplicity.
The opening of Charles Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities and some lines about process philosophy
‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…’
Vasiliki sees these lines as imparting an understanding about the everyday where nothing is stable or fixed, but in constant flux between different states.
''Thus contemporary process philosophy not only holds out the promise of an integrated metaphysics that can join our common sense and scientific images of the world. It is also of interest as a platform upon which to build an intercultural philosophy and to facilitate interdisciplinary research on global knowledge representation
Philosophers analyze becoming and what is occurring as well as ways of occurring.''
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/
Process creates different relationships and associations between various entities both material and immaterial, at both a macro and micro level. Process philosophy is about observing these relationships.
Steve mentioned morphogenesis, which carries with it the idea that entities are always in a state of becoming, rather than in a state of being, where forces are emergent rather than imposed as ‘laws’ (Royal Science).
Manuel De Landa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_De_Landa
Susanna Browne
Susanna began her presentation with a 3-odd minute video retrieved from Youtube that shows a baby responding to its mother singing a Rod Stewart torch song. The footage is shot from the mother's point of view, thus the baby appears to be looking directly at the viewer for the duration of the video. The emotional response of the child is uncannily adult - as it appears to well up with joyful tears at its mothers performance, which is indeed quite powerful. Susanna's interest in this viral video reflects both her interest in popular culture and the economy of emotion. She has keenly observed the contemporary phenomenon of emotion becoming commodity, across platforms such as reality television and amateur video. Susanna is also interested in the position and power of authentic emotion in contrast with its virtual veneer, in particular the moments when she herself is deeply 'moved'. This video is exemplary of such a moment. Susanna is interested in the collective learning of emotion and how as a larger community deciphering when that emotion is authentic and examining the when it is unclear whether it is real or performed.
The work that Susanna shared with the group was the album Plantasia conceived and composed by Mort Garson in 1976. The material written by Garson is about plants, for plants - which Susanna expressed as romantic. It is performed form the Moog synthesizer, which was typical of the period from which this album emerged, although Garson is considered a pioneer and master of the style and medium. Susanna recommended the music for study and reflection in the studio. This second article of Susanna's interest made a great segue for her final item, the text The Language of Flowers or Flora Symbolica by John Henry Ingram.
The Language of Flowers is an index to the symbolic meaning of flowers. Published in 1887, the comprehensive listing associates - in alphabetical order - botanical specimens directly to what they signify in the act of exchange. This text relates to Susanna's interest in romance and its history, in this example reflecting upon the 'slow' romance of the 19th century provides interesting contrast with the pace of todays emotional economy.