User:Emily/20160310

The Changing Face of Symbolically Charged Objects

Abstract

Today, the symbolically charged object is constantly in the mode of reproduction and displacement, this is the means to repurpose it and by which it updates its symbolic meaning in a network of signs.

I will consider my own recent work in relation to this question; I will examine the symbolically charged object through discussion of its use in the films of Alfred Hitchcock; I will examine the symbolically charged object in relation to particular art practices, from Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917); Duchamp’s text, The Creative Act (1957), which proposes the viewer’s central role as the author of an artwork. I will also address the question through discussion of contemporary art and media practices such as the works from Guy Ben-Ner and Oliver Laric. In the end I will situate my graduation work in the above context, and further discuss the changing face of symbolically charged objects in the flow of peer-production platforms.

Introduction

In Fernando Di Leo’s film, Milano Calibro 9 (1972), begins with a sequence of shots showing a package wrapped by newspaper handing from one person to another. The process relies on a precise plan: that we the audience, get to know how valuable this object is. The package is an example of the symbolically charged object with which this thesis concerns itself. Shot by shot in the film shows the package circulating among people, in other words, it becomes a communication device, not only among the protagonists, but also, more importantly with the audience. However the consequence is as much about the package as the relationship among those protagonists as it is reshaped by the object. Thus the function of the object gets revealed by its affects.
Such an exchange of actions might be typically described as a “MacGuffin”. The name "MacGuffin" originates in 20th-century filmmaking, popularized by Alfred Hitchcock in the 1930s. He often quoted the following story to illustrate its nature: "Two gentlemen meet on a train, and the one is struck by the extraordinary package being carried by the other. He asks his companion, 'What is in that unusual package you are carrying there?' The other man replies, 'That is a MacGuffin.' 'What is a MacGuffin?' asks the first. The second says, 'A MacGuffin is a device used for killing leopards in the Scottish highlands.' Naturally the first man says, 'But there are no leopards in the Scottish highlands.' 'Well,' says the second, 'then that's not a MacGuffin, is it?’” In Slavoj Zizek’s book The Sublime Object of Ideology, he mentioned another version of the story, which is much more to the point: It is the same as the other, with the exception of the last answer: “Well, you see how efficient it is!” - For Zizek “that’s MacGuffin, a pure nothing which is none the less efficient.”

My interest lies in MacGuffin and goes beyond simply the MacGuffin, covers symbolically charged objects in the contemporary context. Specifically within the context of this paper, the symbolically charged object is a placeholder, defined as an ephemeral result of circulation within an inter-subjective network. Especially in the contemporary culture, the object masters vast variety of methods of presentation and dissemination. Its materiality is shaped by the inter-subjective network, whereas, its value is also altered and constructed by the intersubjective network. Thus no matter in its physical form or its image representation, online or offline, it is always presented in a societal condition at large.

Chapter I

Manipulation

The use of MacGuffin, be it in cinema or in our society are addressed by Zizek, are heavily manipulated to fulfil the efficiency that is to create fluidity in cinema and drive people act upon. For Zizek, "Symbolic efficiency is about this minimum of "reification":to become operative...
In the interview from Hitchcock/Truffaut, Hitchcock told that he was looking for a MacGuffin in the film, Notorious, which was a long way and finally dropped the whole idea in favor of a simpler, but concrete and visual object: a sample of uranium concealed in a wine bottle. It was in 1944, when Hitchcock produced Notorious, one year before Hiroshima. The idea was refused by the producer, he asked Hitchcock, “What is the name of goodness is that?” Hitchcock replied, “This is uranium; it’s the thing they’re going to make an atom bomb with.” And he asked, “What atom bomb?” It was not that the producer didn’t understand the uranium for making atom bomb; it is that he didn’t understand the MacGuffin to Hitchcock. Hitchcock later pointed out “if it had not been a wartime story, we could have hinged out plot on the theft of diamonds, that the gimmick was unimportant.” Here Hitchcock exposed that “all of this goes to show is that you were wrong to attach any importance to the MacGuffin. Notorious was simply the story of a man in love with a girl…” The uranium MacGuffin got out from cinematic frame, and Hitchcock learnt that that the FBI had him under surveillance for three months. I don’t totally agree with Hitchcock who simply hinged the MacGuffin to a unimportant gimmick and the real story that happened to himself can be a good testimony. Specifically, it is not just objects that are of interest, but the complex relations and narrative potentials that develop around (and because of) those objects. Viewing objects in this way gives them different mode of attention, and gives them a new kind of force.
For Zizek, he found a most efficient MacGuffin in the real world, which dives into informative circulation. For Zizek, the “Iraqi weapons of mass destruction”, fits perfectly the status of MacGuffin. According to Zizek, “As such, they (WMD) by definition cannot ever be found, and are therefore all the more dangerous... Now that none were found, we reached the last line of the story of MacGuffin: "'Well,' said President Bush in September 2003, 'then that's not a MacGuffin, is it?’”
We can basically get the image of the symbolically charged object as a placeholder which reflect on its context. As long as it works in its time, it doesn’t matter it is a diamond or the uranium for Hitchcock; and also it doesn’t matter it is WMD or other government conspiracies for Zizek.

The variation of viewing experience becomes quite important in my works. In a series of my studio practices, I worked closely with cinematic content but generated out of my works in quite different forms. One of them is The Tenant | tnaneT ehT, a split-screen video work which was showed in the film festival, Jornadas de Reapropiacion, 2015. In this work, duplicated footages are derived from the most dramatic part of Roman Polanski's film, The Tenant. It consists of the original visual sequences at the left side of the split-screen and reversed each single shots at the right side of the split-screen. The beginning and the end of each shots are viewed at the same time and then go on playing to the end and beginning. It may sound tautological with two identical content, but it is actually the very moment that spectators cannot position themselves in their watching as the time flows continuously both forwards and backwards. The same cinematic content used also in another work of mine. It is in a form of photobook, the images and texts are extracted at moments when characters say the word "know", and then the frames and texts are reassembled into the form of book. Some of the pages are designed to be shorter than the rest, which provides the opportunity for the reader to read across pages, and at different intervals. The third one is a browser-based, interactive piece working on the same content. By scrolling the page top and down, viewers can experience a row of videos forwards and backwards. Both sound and moving images are affected by scrolling up and down, as if we scrolling the timeline. At the same time, texts from the script will also be shown and hide while scrolling, which add another level meaning to the image sequences. Text, image and audio together affect the transfer of information.
I provided visual materials in different forms in these works, in order to free audiences to some degree for gaining their own viewing experience by connecting different components. No matter if they had known the cinematic material before or not, it is quite different as watching a linear film. I was also quite enjoyed to present the changing face of similar content..

Circulation

I. Metaphor and truth
How shall we understand the symbolic charged objects nowadays? In his posthumously published fragment On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, Nietzsche argues: “What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.” Thus a “truth” is in the sense of the designated, in other words, “truth” is in a form of a placeholder for man to fill in his illusion. Nietzsche also argues “men desires the agreeable life-preserving consequences of truth, but he is indifferent to pure knowledge, which has no consequences.” The symbolic charged object, the coin here, is only identified as a coin, a metaphor to men for perusing agreeable consequences. “The venerability, reliability, and utility of truth is something which a person demonstrates for himself from the contrast with the liar, whom no one trusts and everyone excludes.” Thus, these consequences only circulate in a symbolic network, which relays on the agreeable within a community. In Nietzsche’s words, “each conceptual god be sought only within his own sphere.”

II. Symbolic network
Zizek who exemplify the symbolic network in Hitchcockian universe, demonstrates “the interplay between the subject’s own self-experience and the symbolic network that somehow determines how it is to be seen from the perspective - the “gaze” - of the Other. The two, however, are always interrelated to the extent that the subject acts/behaves in reaction to its own interpretation of the intervention of the Symbolic.” The “big Other”, qua symbolic order, is then structures configuring the fields of inter-subjective interactions. The thoughts and feelings of others are shaped, steered, and determined by socio-linguistic structure and dynamics. In my opinion, the meaning of the symbolically charged object exists only in so far as it is inter-subjectively recognized, thus implies its circulation. The symbolic is the way of interacting with other people. When the symbolically charged object is circulating, it is not its content but the linkage within the network established maters, in other words, to understand the symbolic charged object is to understand the very linkages it has made.

III. The Object of exchange
In another Hitchcock’s film, Dial M for Murder (1954), there is a key circulating among protagonists in the whole development of the story which is a tale of a bungled killing based on a hit play. The plot follows Tony plan to have his wife, Margot, murdered so he can collect on her life insurance policy. Ideally, Tony would steal the key from Margot, and hide her key outside the front door of their flat. Swann is to sneak in their flat using this key and kill Margot. After he fulfil the murder, the key should be placed back in order for Tony to put it back to Margot’s handbag. But the story doesn’t follow his murder plan, Margot manages to grab a pair of scissors and kill Swann. Tony went back moves what he thinks is Margot's key from Swann's pocket into her handbag. The next day after investigation, inspector Hubbard says Swann must have entered through the front door, but found no key on Swann, thus Margot is found guilty for killing Swann. On the day before her execution, Mark who has a affair with Margot, asks Tony to save her by claiming that he hired Swann to kill her, which is the real case but he didn’t figure out the plot of the key. At this moment, Hubbard arrives, and discreetly swaps his own key with Tony’s. After Tony leaves, he uses Tony’s key to re-enter the flat. Hubbard had already discovered that the key in Margot's handbag was Swann's latchkey, and realized that Swann had put the key back in its hiding place after unlocking the door. The key that arose the recognition/misrecognition becomes a reminder of the reality. “What matters here is precisely its presence, the material presence of a fragment of reality - it is a leftover, remnants which cannot be reduced to a network of formal relations proper to the symbolic structure, but it is paradoxically, at the same time, the positive condition for the effectuation of the formal structure.” Zizek defines this object as “an object of exchange circulating among subjects, serving as a kind of guarantee, pawn, on their symbolic relationship.”
We can understand this symbolically charged object, the key, by applying it to the letter in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Purloined Letter (1845). Exemplified by Zizek on Lacan’s seminar, there are three types of protagonists in this story. “The first which sees nothing (the King and the police); the second which sees that the first sees nothing and deludes itself as to the secrecy of what it hides (the Queen, then the Minister); the third which sees that the two first glances leave what should be hidden exposed to whomever would seize it (the Minister, and finally Dupin).” In Dial M for Murder, we can easily map them to the three types - Margo is in the first type, Tony is in the second type, and the inspector is in the third type, whereas, Mark goes from the second to the third throughout development of the story. This is exact the intersubjective community among them and the key as an object circulating among subjects is defined by Zizek as the ‘“tiny piece of real” which keeps the story in motion by finding itself “out of place”’. The very alike role of the key, as“the role of the letter is assumed by an object that circulates among the subjects and, by its very circulation, makes out of them a closed intersubjective community.” Claude Lévi-Strauss pointed out how the very fact of exchange attests a certain structural flaw, an imbalance that pertains to the Symbolic.

In my studio practice, I created a small collection of symbolically charged objects from Hitchcock’s films in a webpage: http://pzwart1.wdka.hro.nl/~yuzhen/web-guffin/guffin-1.html I accumulated those objects and extracted shots that they are depicted in films, for instance, the lighter in Stranger on a Train, the tie pin in Frenzy, the envelope in Psycho. For me, they are distillations of those films. I like the lighter quite a lot, which is another example of "the object of exchange" that works dramatically in “Strangers on a Train” as a symbol of the exchange of murders. By swapping the exclusive item, the object signals the swap of the identity of the murder and the innocent. For me, this lighter as the very distillation of that narration, is so strong that I did moulding and reproduced it in 3d printing. At that moment the digital craft becomes a symbol in memory of that cinematic relationship. It is making the mcguffin ‘real’ breaks the space between fiction and reality. It also brings what is behind the screen forward. In this situation its meaning differs from people to people. I, as the person who knew the story already would picture it as a distillation of the cinematic story; it can also be borrowed as the symbol of an identity; it is subjective and thus it is a signifier with situated meanings.

Chapter II

The readymade in the informational circuit

One of Duchamp’s best-known works is Fountain from 1917, which is a well-known story, but I will give an outline of this important piece which serves as an important argument for my paper. Duchamp is part of a jury for an exhibition called the independence exhibition in New York in 1917 and it was modeled on similar independent exhibitions that occurred in France where artists like the impressionists who were not part of the official salons could exhibit independently. This exhibition was meant to be open to anyone, who paid one-dollar entry fee and five dollars of dues. It was also meant to be democratically installed in alphabetical order. So it was completely open exhibition they thought and said. Duchamp proposed a urinal as a work of art to this jury, under a pseudonym, R Mutt (Richard Mutt, it comes from a comic strip, Mutt and Jeff). The work was basically a urinal he had bought in a plumbing supply company. What happened was that as we all know, the work was rejected. David Joselit pointed out in his lecture that “the work performances the limit of what can be considered a work of art. In other words, the work here is not so much the urinal but the category of art that is delineated by the point beyond which it cannot go.” The term readymade for Duchamp is not a thing, a commodity but actually an encounter between the artist and a thing. It is the connection that is important to him not the object. “For planning for a moment to come (on such a day, such a date, such a minute) to inscribe a readymade. The readymade can be be later looked for (with all kinds of delay). The important thing therefore is just this matter of timing, this snapshot effect, like a speech delivered on no matter what occasion but such and such an our. It is a kind of rendezvous.”(A Passage from Duchamp, Specification for Readymades 1934). The work was missing afterwards but was photographed by Alfred Stieglitz . In the second issue of The Blind Man, May 1917, an article titled “Buddha of the Bathroom” suggesting many art historians have talked about subsequently. “It is a touchstone of art how valuable it might have been.” As consequence, David Joselit argues, what happens is the object disappears but it reenters immediately into circulation as both a photograph and then instantly as a text, so it initiates a process whereby the thing is absorbed, dissolved into informational circulation. Duchamp sustained this process throughout the remainder of his life. He later on authorized others to repositioned, relocation the urinal in several places. He uses that as almost a kind of cursor moving through different situations repeating in the way that we repeat words in very different context for very different purposes. (Blueprint for 4th version in 1964)

The viewers’ value in the creative act

In the “Creative Act”, Duchamp recognises “the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” The intention of the artist is not always communicated, thus there are good works and bad works, but they are all art. The good artwork involves audience in this creative act, thus reveals the significance to a work. This is exactly the process of circulation of meaning and it is intersubjective. The artist must enjoyed all the versions of Fountain now extant.

In the video work from Guy Ben-Ner, I'd Give It To You If I Could But I Borrowed It, the artist and his kids rummage through a museum and assemble a bicycle from several readymade sculptures, set all the readymade sculpture piece back to its original shape, which the artist reversed the process of Duchamp’s. The exchange value that Duchamp and other artists provides to these readymade, are turned back to its use value in his piece. The way to make new connection, to bring new symbolic knowledge here, is to displace them, to subvert them, but for very different purpose as Duchamp were for. In this piece, Guy Ben-Ner is dealing with the surplus value that those objects acquire as readymade in a museum. For me, it is a reactivation of antidote that Dutchamp did in his time.

Chapter III

Duplication

Let’s take the Milk Drop Coronet as another example, it was once an iconic photograph taken in 1956 by Harold Edgerton. Whereas in 1988, there are two three-dimensional milk crowns produced based on this photograph. One was made by Jennifer Bolande which we can easily view on the artist’s website as a digital image; the other, was made independently only a month or two later, by an artist who showed with the same gallery. “On the dealer’s advice, the second was not shown, but became its own frozen moment, an art historical shadow to the Bolande version.” Here arose a very simple question asked by the writer and artist, Laurie Palmer in her article, “Separated at Birth”, “if one is good, why not two?” It was asked in 1997, and seems less valid if we ask it today, as I found already its industrial products in the form of clock, ashtray that might be understood as bad copying or art derivative products. However, I believe that Palmer’s argument is still valid, not in the art discipline only, but in a broader cultural context. She argues, “Each piece might then be read differently in relation to the nested contexts in which it was seen (exhibition venue, city, surrounding body of work…) Seen together, the two works could become each other’s context, and point of comparison.” Then what is the criteria to exclude the second piece or to maintain the value of the milk crown sculpture? It is said that Bolande made six Milk Crown herself, but it is impossible for a same piece from another artist, even the work itself is an appropriation piece. What I learnt later may bring more insight to this piece. Beginning in 1875, the British physicist Arthur Worthington started to untangle the complex process of fluid flow. By that time perfect symmetry made sense, his compendium of droplet images launched a branch of fluid dynamics that continued more than a century later. He made thousands of times of experiments that he had let splash mercury or milk droplets, some into liquid, others onto hard surfaces. Finally in 1894, he succeeded in stopping the droplet’s splash with a photograph. Those photographs revealed that “they bear out the drawings in may details, show greater irregularity than the drawings would have led one to expect.” At that very moment, the symmetrical drawings and the irregular shadow photographs clashed, one had go. Worthington named those photographs as “Objective Splash” and wrote “I have to confess that in looking over my original drawings I find records of many irregular or unsymmetrical figures, yet in compiling the history it has been inevitable that these should be rejected, if only because identical irregularities never recur. Thus the mind of the observer is filled with an ideal splash – an Auto-Splash – whose perfection may never be actually realized”. The favour in one and the rejection in the another therefore bears in a total subjective agreement. The symmetrical “histories” has been successes, maybe even in Bolande’s piece, look how perfect it is.
Surely I am aware that the question I asked here lies in a certain era that may differs under different time-space and different social agreement. However once they clashed, we actually make subjective choices in order to keep the ideal one going, like the symmetrical drawing, and the “objective photography”, the selected version of “Milk Crown”.

The one and the variations

Oliver Laric’s Versions (2009-2012) is a series of video artworks. The videos styled like visual essay, collage historical and contemporary multiplication of images and objects whereas the script of the voiceover is also taken from others, re-appropriated as his own. Specifically the content consists from the proliferation of cut-and-paste online memes to the shared myths of antiquity, all high culture and popular culture, as diverse as "the Photoshopping of a publicity photo of an Iranian missile launch, the reuse of character animations by Disney and Warner Bros., and the basis of classical statuary in common iconographies and a library of stock poses." For me, his work is a great testimony of the multi-worlds in collective production. In his own words, “Versions alters the perception and the content of other works. This possibly happens with all new works added to the cloud of existing works, part of a larger cloud of related works by other authors.”. The moment that we encounter with the duplication, the multiplicity, the reference to “fact” collapsed and the situation we are dealing with is indeed subjective and mediated. The reproduction, displacement, the following interpretation and reinterpretation co-exist and in a way imply more possibilities that are not visible yet.

Chapter IV

The flow of symbolically charged objects in peer production & sharing platforms

Generally speaking, symbolically charged objects is at the front line situated in constant reproduction. An interpretation invites reinterpretation, each result is permanently in a beta state, requesting its after life. It becomes more and more social-driven practices. This the reason why I want to take closer observation on peer production in sharing platforms. In this case, I work with three 3d model platforms, and examine how symbolically charged objects are flowing across these platforms.
Since “sharing is a social practice shaped by a range of variables, and sharing practices differ from community to community and from technology to technology” (Kennedy 2013), it is efficient to clarify what platforms I am researching in. The three sharing platforms are 123dapp, sketchfab, thingiverse. They are the platforms centralizing 3d models as main sharing content. They are also closely related to each others as users work cross these platforms, and the result from on platform can be the source for other platforms. So both horizontally and vertically, they are interrelated. In this collective production, almost every single result is part of a greater cycle of exchange.
To be precise, the symbolically charged objects in these platforms that I am researching on are users’ selection of iconic cultural heritage. The procedure goes from 3d scanning, post-productions, to 3d printing or other showcases. As an example, a simplified collective production could be users go into muesums scanning(photo-taking) what they like, use cloud services from these platforms generating model meshes; Then other users may take the mesh to further development, clean it to be printable model, or polishing its texture and exhibit back to the sharing platforms again.

“I've traveled around to many countries making 3D scans and most museums are ok with photography. Sometimes special exhibits don't allow photos, but they usually have a sign to let you know.” – – by CodyW, 123dapp

“hey, are your models 3d printable? if not, may I clean them up and get them ready to be downloaded and printed by users? “ – – by mireiiile, sketchfab

“I have seen some very nice Sphinx 3d models on thingiverse. This one is intended to print without support (or minimal support depending on your printer)”. – – by cerberus333, thingiverse

However the collective production is way more complex. Driven by innovative software, hardware, and browser-based exhibiting pluglins, the production becomes iterative.

“New year, new camera, new software (PhotoScan). New scan of this model (123D Catch)” – – by Thomas Flynn, sketchfab

“That's impressive. Trnio's quality is improving fast!” – – by Bart, sketchfab

There are two levels of repetition in the collective production: On one level the users dive into reproduce the same piece till what they can reach as the end. This procedure could go through several users’ hands, from raw material, production, post-production, circulation. The same object or the identical copy of the same object (a piece of code) goes from one to the other. On the other level, driven by hardware and software development, the same object can be reproduced several times by one or more users in the same working procedure.
This reiteration ends up with proliferation of symbolically charged objects in different shapes, formats and contexts. Follow the flow and the changing face of symbolically charged objects, it tells more about the collective mode of production, the platform users, and the structure constrained them.