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

http://vimeo.com/35912892

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 of their relationship. 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.