ARTISTS TALKING

# 17 [27 September 2011]

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything, so apologies in advance if this is a bit rusty. I remember Mark Fisher saying that depression is a great instigator of the desire to write blogs, a theory I would tend to agree with, though he didn’t explain what urges you to stop. Are we to take his decrease in output to mean ‘good’ mental health has returned? Or just that he’s getting so many gigs these days, he doesn’t need to write for free? (and good on him, obviously, I’m not hating). Maybe being paid now and then helps lift depression as well.

Speaking of depression, the world economy is becoming a very confusing place to live in, particularly if you happen to live in a country currently at the centre (or epicentre, to use a fittingly sensationalist, seismological term) of the trouble, i.e. Greece. That status is confusing enough as it is, since Greece is normally referred to as ‘peripheral’ in terms of the EU economy, but somehow not peripheral enough to be a bit player in the imminent collapse of something, perhaps everything.

Confusion mounts as the situation fluctuates daily- one day everything is fine and the markets are soothed with a dose of rescue packages, next everything is doomed and Greece, along with the whole EURO project, is going straight to Hades (unless its on strike). One of the issues is how to make sense of the deluge of contradictory information that continuously rains down, trying to separate op-eds from ‘facts’, and the inability to have perspective of the bigger picture when drowning in all this crap.

This preamble about parsing information is partly what I had been thinking about following the Kenny Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin talk on Friday at the Whitechapel. Kenny expounded some of his usual ideas around uncreative writing and conceptual poetry, but what caught my attention was the idea of ‘filtering’, whereby, in a world gorged on info-mountains of (mostly useless) stuff, the role of the artist has shifted away from creating and towards filtering.

This is hardly new (not that there’s anything wrong with that, as I’m sure Mssrs G & D would agree) since Bourriaud has sketched a pretty similar job description for today’s artists. The term he coined is semionauts, who traverse the info-plane of corporate logos, media images, urban signs and administrative procedures which populate our everyday lives, and claims that by “making them materials from which they compose their works, artists underscore their arbitrary, conventional and ideological dimension’.

He posits this as a political project, since via this transformation of apparently solid objects/ signs into trembling, fragile constructions, ‘precariousness is introduced into the system of representations’. I wonder what Marx would think. If artists are (cod) philosophers, maybe the point is now to change the world through interpreting it?

Anyway back to Goldsmith and the notion of filtering. As he said, in a world of re-tweets, re-posts, link-sharing and so on, being able to ‘point to’ what’s hot and happening is where value lies now. And the ability to point follows from a capacity to consume and process information efficiently and effectively, as well as having something akin to taste.

Like going shopping at charity shops or TK Maxx, some people can do this better than others (I happen to be a pro at the latter); but either way, this ability to sort, filter and re-communicate efficiently is the skill worth having. As the triumph of Google would attest to, I suppose.

I am now thinking about Baldessari’s ‘Commissioned Paintings’, a response to painter Al Held’s barb: "All conceptual art is just pointing at things." So maybe its now about pointing at patterns, flows and connections, rather than concrete things and ideas. Fluidity replaces solidity, processes replace objects and verbs become nouns (and vice versa).

Steven Poole cites this interchangeability of verbs for nouns as a variant of ‘Unspeak’ in his blog (see I’m doing it too…) which brilliantly records the abuses of language in the name of ideological agendas, everything from management-speak to political speeches and fashion blogs. To quote Nina Power: ‘nouns, like material products, appear to be out of fashion’.  

# 16 [24 June 2011]

Last week I was in Folkestone, doing a collaborative micro-residency with artist and writer Sydney Hart at LOW&HIGH interdisciplinary platform. On the last day of the project (called 'Vacant Value') we presented some work in progress, showing videos and talking with plenty of interjections from the audience who helped keep things lively and conversational. I showed my video of ‘research’ while explaining some of the ideas behind it, mainly visibility and resolution as value systems and how they relate to Folkestone.

In my video, I capture men – and it was only men- wearing high-vis jackets, while wearing one myself. This alluded to our first presentation (on day one of the residency), which was delivered wearing high vis and touched on the idea of construction, especially of idealised spaces.  For example the artist residency as an idealised space for creativity; nature as an idealised space beyond commodification; and regeneration through culture as the idealised mode of urbansiation.

This last one is especially relevant to Folkestone, which appears to be attempting the Hoxton effect on speed, thanks to a local organization, the Creative Foundation, which buys out, does up and rents out spaces on the cheap for creative businesses. This foundation, keen on regenerating the town, is also behind the Triennial- opening this weekend- suggesting they have read the likes of Richard Florida, who asserts that the cities that thrive- economically, culturally and in terms of population- are the ones that can attract and keep what he terms the creative class: ‘a fast-growing, highly educated, and well-paid segment of the workforce on whose efforts corporate profits and economic growth increasingly depend’. This all gives Folkestone an air of ‘in construction’- much like an artist ‘emerging’, the town has a feeling of being almost there: full of potential (to put a positive spin on it) or else in limbo, with fully ‘established’ status tantalisingly out of reach.

Magnifying this atmosphere of anticipation was the pre-Triennial buzz, which provided plenty of hi-vis jackets for me to film as there was so much building going on: scaffolds came down; paint went on, a fountain was installed. Wearing the vest I was attempting to perform some of the anxiety around visibility, which is an issue for both artists and towns like Folkestone- how to be, and stay visible, or put differently, how to attract and retain attention. This topic has been hotly debated in recent years, especially through books like The attention economy, by Thomas H. Davenport, John C. Beck.  Put simply attention is a commodity, and one that is in scarce supply: everything is vying for your attention, but as its limited, not everyone can get it and those who get maximum attention are at the top of the hierarchy. They quote Georg Frank, writing back in 1999, who claims prominence is what all present-day elites have in common; and prominence is simply the ‘status of being a major earner of attention’. Of course the problem is that everybody's doing it; just like the high vis jackets, however bright and visible those jackets are, the individual wearers get lost, subsumed into the neon collective.

Again this relates tenuously to places like Folkestone, and its neighbour (ish) Margate (often referred to as the empty shop capital of England)- both towns are banking on culture as a tool of regeneration, with the Turner Contemporary seemingly built for (only?) this reason. If increasing numbers of cities continue to favour culture as a tool for attracting and retaining attention- of high-class tourists, creatives, as well as investors and businesses- and becoming visible on the global scene, won’t the individual cities just disappear? If everywhere has a biennale/ shiny new museum in the future, then any cachet originally conferred upon the town is diminished.

Hou Hanru (original supercurator with 20 biennales under his belt), quoted in a great article questioning the ‘point’ of biennales in the Art Newspaper, doesn’t agree. Instead of saturation leading to biennale-fatigue, he believes that as long as urbanisation continues, so will they: “There are now 300 biennales around the world and everyone is trying to find a new format or new ideas. And this is only the beginning.” You have been warned.

# 15 [25 May 2011]

 Having visited my first Literature Festival, in Norway, I’ve been thinking more about value and the different ways in which it accrues in the art and poetry worlds. One thing that struck me was the importance of delivery in poetry. Regardless of content- which I mostly couldn’t understand- it was clear that intonation, timing and projection were desirable attributes, meaning that some performances were riveting even in a foreign language. For example Paal Bjelke Andersen, rapid-firing a list of nouns taken from New Year’s speeches of Scandinavian prime ministers; and Christian Bök where the delivery was inseparable from the content, at least when reading sound poems (including one by Kurt Schwitters). His performance was exciting, funny and verging on terrifying, and as a viewer I appreciated the effort made to convey the tonal discrepancies and variations in volume and intonation.

 Perhaps it’s the question of the importance of the ‘good performance’ that differs in the art and moving-image context, where there is something almost suspect about it, suggesting too much of a desire to please, or to be ‘professional’, or to entertain the audience. While I can't find any quotes to corroborate the idea, Peter Gidal immediately came to mind; he would probably claim that it’s not the avant-garde filmmakers’ job to entertain and if the viewer wants entertainment, they have Hollywood.

I’m sure some would accuse ‘video art’ as a genre of adhering to the boring = ‘good’, engaging = ‘bad’ formula. This situation was parodied as far back as 1971 by John Baldessari with his video “I will not make any more boring art”, a self-deprecatingly knowing proposition which humorously and intentionally undermines its title. Perhaps its also associated with the idea of performance as fulfilling some sort of neo-liberal agenda- we perform well, we are flexible and adaptable, we are good for the economy. Artists like to resist this idea- or maybe that’s just me.

Another thing is the hoary old question of originality which plagues poetry, it would seem, even more so than it does art. I leafed through Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius while at the festival, and read a chapter on poet Kenneth Goldsmith, which points out that the poetry world is still catching up with aesthetic concepts- such as appropriation, cut and paste, plagiarism- formulated in the visual arts decades ago. These aesthetic concepts are championed by a new breed of conceptual poets, like Bok, Caroline Bergvall, who re-use found language, championing what Goldsmith calls ‘uncreative writing’.

Crucially he also name-checks Conceptual Art, and Sol Le Witt, in both the title of his manifesto- Paragraphs on Conceptual Writing- and in its final statement: “the idea is a machine that makes the text”. As with Le Witt’s paragraphs, ‘execution is a perfunctory affair’; and according to him, the reader need not even bother with the actual task of reading a book such as Traffic (2007), which is billed a straight transcription of traffic reports from one of New York’s ‘jam cams’.

 Its definitely boring, an attribute normally anathema to poets that Goldsmith gleefully embraces, proclaiming himself the most boring writer working today. Boring, and by his own admission, completely unoriginal. So why is his work valued in a poetry community which is still attached, not just to ‘the word, but My Word’ (as he puts it)?

Perloff argues that on closely reading his work, the ‘straight’ transcription turns out to be a little bent- either through Oulipo-like constraints or by time elisions which help create a vaguely coherent narrative. Does this show that his so-called ‘uncreativity’ nevertheless exhibits some ingeniousness, thereby making him a genius, albeit one who uses/ processes unoriginal texts, as opposed to creating ones? Or maybe what is valued is the decision to undertake a writing project like that in the first place; the sheer mind-numbing boredom, and effort, involved in its execution, which echoes durational performance art strategies.

Or maybe in a nod to Warhol, whom Goldsmith greatly admires, its ingeniousness is precisely in savouring, instead of ignoring or complaining about, the excruciatingly mundane- but unavoidable- aspects of city living. By paying it some attention, traffic and its concomitant ‘unloved’, valueless language is transformed into something worth caring about.

# 14 [10 May 2011]

I’ve added one last image and video to my video Manifesto Piece; this blog consists of a few thoughts on the project. Duncan White also mentions the video in a post about Street Art, writing that “the policing of street space combined with its commodification, has forced artists to consider more closely the increasingly mediated condition of the ‘street’ itself.”, an observation which was one of the first things I noticed when I moved to London 13 years ago. Even then, London’s street space was totally rationalized, accounted for - either for commercial or public purposes, there was sense of it being instrumentalised to produce certain types of behavior.

With Manifesto Piece,  hand-drawn posters of different texts were stuck around London in various public spaces and filmed. The texts are corporate slogans fronted with the phrase ‘we want to’, converting them into demands, promises or unfulfilled yearnings. Taking inspiration from Nietzsche’s statement ‘We want to be the poets of our lives’, and the use of the phrase ‘we want’ in political speeches, philosophical tracts, polemics and corporate verbiage I was interested in the commonality between these different discourses. Each lays out a vision of a belief in something; each tries to sum it up succinctly in a way that will resonate with the wider culture.

Zizek (and others) have pointed out how the ‘spirit’ of ’68, was embraced by the new capitalism which evolved out of this anti-hierarchical movement, “presenting itself as a successful libertarian revolt against the oppressive social organizations of corporate capitalism”. Fittingly, May ’68 revolutionary slogans like “Be realistic, ask the impossible” could be imagined as corporate taglines for a high-tech gadget; even current tracts like The Coming Insurrection contain slogans such as “Get Going” which wouldn’t be out of place advertising weight loss, a brand of trainers, or an MBA programme. These overlaps in language could simply be a consequence of the limited number of expressions at a writer’s disposal, but perhaps point to a desire to get beyond mere words, to kick off some sort of action through the use of this instructive voice.

The use of the ‘we’ also posits a collective expression, whereby the many become one; it also implies the existence of ‘them’, the ones left out, excluded in this act of inclusion. Dave Beech discusses this in relation to Ranciere's take on the politics of participation, namely that it necessarily implies division; an inclusive practice that neither can nor does include all necessitates the separation of society in to participants and non-participants, or “them” and “us”. (Include Me Out, Art Monthly (April 2008)).

  Although he is talking about the political implications of participatory art, the question of them and us applies also to the use of the collective ‘we’ by politicians and corporations. Positioned in public spaces varying from run down side streets to shiny new developments, the posters ask who the ‘we’ the text refers to is, and conversely who the ‘them’ is.

The them/ us divide of the public realm is thrown into sharper relief now that ostensibly public spaces like city centres, housing estates and shopping precincts are increasingly  being run by private companies. As private developers prefer an ABC1 clientele, a whole section of the ‘public’ is excluded, and not especially welcome: not just the poor but also photographers and political protesters. This tendency towards explicit (e.g. gates communties) or implicit sectioning off of public space to ‘undesirables’ is also reflected in virtual space. Sylvere Lotrigner spoke of plans to create a ‘gated community’ online, while rumours have been circulating for years about a new Web in which access is only free to big sites, with all smaller ones being pay-to-view.

The use of corporate slogans in what looks like illegally posted bills onto spaces normally reserved for public transport announcements or commercial adverts reflects the confusion as to where the public is positioned in relation to the corporate world. Is there any distinction between public and corporate space? And if the citizen is a consumer, then perhaps the posters are an expression of the danger of becoming so wholly integrated with commercial concerns that even a radical practice cannot ‘see’ or speak beyond it.

# 13 [4 April 2011]

I’ve been thinking more about how the costs of video production affect the way its valued, and realized my last post had a pretty obvious omission from the discussion of low budget styles of filmmaking: the No Wave cinema of 80s New York. Described by critic J. Hoberman as ‘unpolished ‘on the street verité’, made with an ‘aggressive anyone-can-do-it aesthetic’, the films had a listless, punk quality which echoes the notions of deskilling and of rejection of ‘specialist’ craft and techniques that I was thinking about in the context of Conceptual Art. Unlike earlier avant-garde film practices, like Structural film, No Wave tended towards ‘content-rich, performance-oriented narrative films’ (Hoberman again) that, explored through loosely told stories “thematics of role playing…and the exploration of power relations and sexuality often in combination”, according to Christian Höller in the Oberhausen catalogue.

This citation attests to their critical rehabilitation, and underlines the process by which ‘subversive’ cinemas (and art practices) get co-opted into a mainstream or corporate aesthetic by marketing execs looking for genuine, authentic instances of uncommodified ‘cool’ and/ or and film historians, curators and academics perhaps looking for something similar albeit not for commercial ends. Something low-cost, unspecialized and low budget nevertheless accrues value, through its aura of authenticity rather than the ‘mental labour’ involved.

This links in with my last post where I was trying to work through the relationship of cost of production to a moving image work’s ‘value’. I wondered whether funders’ desires for expensive looking productions influence the type of work that gets made - does it skew the output to certain types of film-making (which, for example, No Wave would sit uncomfortably within)? In a different context Omar EL Khairy’s article in Mute about Clio Barnard’s The Arbor gives an account of how funding bodies affect the work, arguing that the ‘issues’ presented in it- ‘delinquency, addiction and squalor’ and race were favoured for the narrative focus of the film by the funders and were integral to the packaging (distribution, publicity, contextualising) of the film. In a different way, then, funding parameters affect the style of work being made.

 Another angle on the question of value was also offered by Dave Beech’s article ‘On Ugliness’ in this month’s Art Monthly, which outlines both the ideological dimension of beauty and the potential of ugliness to create an uncomfortable rupture into the smoothness of corporate culture. He discusses philosophers like Elaine Scarry and Roger Scruton, whose aim is to reinstate beauty and, although perhaps not obviously stated, devalue ugliness- for aesthetic as well as ethical/ moral reasons. Roughly speaking, beauty and goodness correlate, and their stance could be caricatured as “why must we allow radicals and avant-gardists to take it away from us?”

An association is thus clearly drawn between reactionary practices and beauty and on the flip side, ugliness and radical, avant-gardist practices. He asks,  “does ugliness refer to a part of the aesthetic spectrum that can never be satisfactorily incorporated or instrumentalised”, suggesting that beauty occupies the other end of that spectrum. The beauty he refers to, and believes they advocate, harks back to a Victorian belief in the ‘character building’ effects of beauty, one which is all about retaining order and being obedient. Making the leap back into video, would that imply that ‘ugly’ videos have more chance of being critical and disobedient?

It obviously depends how we define ugliness- a cack-handed lack of skill, intentional or not; or a polished kind of repulsiveness. Beech puts forward artists like John Russell as examples of an ugliness that- unlike, say, Impressionism- will not ‘weather with age’ and be selling postcards 100 years from now. And his work certainly isn’t lo-fi; it’s just intentionally repellent in a hyper-saturated, digital-surreal way. Maybe ugliness isn’t about a lo-fi aesthetic but, as Beech says, about a rupture, an obstacle that can’t be ignored.

The work of Ryan Trecartin could be an example of this tendency, combining a YouTube-style, paranoid self-performance (‘cheap’) idiom with a ‘wildly stylized’, super post-produced and excessive look. The results are pretty ugly, in that a bad-taste/ confounding kind of way that both repulses and transfixes, without being cheap to produce.

# 12 [23 March 2011]

I’m going to pick up almost exactly where I left off, since, as usual, by the time I got to the end of my post I realised I had touched on something interesting (to me) but had run out of space. I was asking how we value artists’ film and video- and whether high production values are guarantors of quality, at least in the eyes of funders.

There is a question here around how images accrue worth according to their production values, a topic addressed by Hito Stereyl in her essay on poor images. She noted the hierarchy of image quality and value- a kind of pyramid with a select few hi-def, hi-res images at the top and piles of low-res, ‘poor images’ at the bottom.

A similar diagram could be drawn for videos- big-dollar Hollywood productions shot in 3D/ HD displayed on huge crystal display screens at one end, crappy mobile phone videos shared on YouTube proliferating at the other. This ‘lumpen proletariat of images’ resides beneath official culture, circulates mostly on the web, and has a potentially subversive character, which she links to Juan García Espinosa’s notion of Imperfect Cinema, in which a correlation between ‘perfect cinema’ and ‘reactionary cinema’ is made.

This recap of two previous posts relates to the subject I’m considering here- how the notion of deskilling, a well-known strategy of conceptual art, manifests itself in moving image work. Alexander Alberro, in his book Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity, discusses the turn away from the “skills, virtuosity, and privileged forms of artistic knowledge in the production of art” which became a hallmark of conceptualism, describing Lawrence Weiner’s performance “An Amount of Bleach Poured on a Rug and Allowed to Bleach”, which does exactly as the title instructs, as emblematic of this tendency.

Using easily accessible materials and non-specialist techniques, work by him and others “disavow(ed) inherited notions of artistic competence”, devalued the significance of skill, and was easily reproducible using cameras, photocopiers or directly ‘stolen’ by being ripped out of catalogues (e.g. Seth Siegalaub's “Xerox Book”, which is the main focus of Alberro’s book).

This embrace of everyday materials and techniques, plus Weiner’s proposal that the piece need not be built, challenged the corellation of ambitious art with expensive materials, or any materials at all. Of course, as is well documented, these dematerialised practices still managed to produce commodifiable objects in the form of authentification certificates. As Alberro points out, if the materials are easily accessible, and artistic competence is devalued, it is the ‘mental labour’ which creates value, reproducing both capitalism’s division of mental and physical labour and the privileging of the planning/ design (concept?) stage over construction.

Robert Barry’s question, “how do you present an art that can’t be photographs in magazines devoted to color reproductions and things like that?” (i.e. that doesn’t look like art) is an interesting one to transpose into the moving image context.

One version of it could ask “How can a work which is not interested in big budget production- or indeed specifically rejects it- get state funding?” If a work doesn’t look expensive, because it uses found footage, or explores the signification of degraded imagery (like Steryl’s ‘poor images’), or uses available technologies like webcams, mobile phones and screen capture it may be harder to justify the funding. Particularly when films involving actors, costly location shoots, props, sets and costume design obviously look expensive and therefore more value-for-money.

Does this imply that a particular type of work- that necessarily involves high expenditure- will be funded, while ‘cheaper’ styles wouldn’t be? Artists like Klara Liden and especially Kalup Linzy, come to mind, whose deliberately low-budget, home-movie aesthetic complements the technology used in its production, intentionally playing with the associations conjured up by it (e.g. non-exclusivity, narcissism, self-performance).

It would be hard to imagine this type of work getting funding (pre-fame that is): it wouldn’t be specialist enough to ‘deserve’ money- unless, as in the conceptual art model, the mental labour appeared arduous or specialist enough to compensate for the relative ease of production. Perhaps this sort of work will become more common as funding cuts start to really hit in the UK…

# 11 [10 March 2011]

Post-event despondency has set in a bit following last Friday’s InCounter. After weeks of organization and running around trying to remember a thousand and one little details, all of which are equally important for the smooth running of the night, its back to normal life and the realization that money's scarce and that all that effort was, after all, unpaid. But every email I receive of positive feedback is a reminder of why we do these things: the generosity of the people involved, and the sense of coming together to make it happen, cheesy as it sounds, makes it all worth it.

But it’s tricky. On the one hand I hate the notion that life can only be lived with an “only worth it if it makes money” mentality which reduces every transaction to an opportunity to profit financially; some things are worth doing unpaid. But my aversion to that mentality means I inadvertently fulfill exactly the criteria that neo-liberalism demands from us as workers and citizens: ‘flexible’, willing to work for nothing if we love something enough and fully cognizant that its our ‘responsibility’ to make opportunities for ourselves. Or, in other words, become part of the Big Society: if you really want to be an artist- or an end to homelessness, youth crime and poverty- volunteer!

So by working for free and not asking for funding, we set a precedent that artists don’t need it; but then applying for funding- especially as an individual artist- is an incredibly time-consuming process with slim chances of success.

Alternatively, you could decide to work a little more- especially if freelance- and self-fund your practice, since at least the money is guaranteed that way. Again, this is the ideal artist from the perspective of a government intent on cutting funding for the arts: work more in order to pay for it yourself. It’s a perfect illustration of ‘the system-compatible, neo-liberal self-exploiter’ type of artist that Dominic Eichler in Frieze writes about, the other two models being the ‘neo-bohemian’ and the ‘self-institutionalizer, dependent on public funding’, none of which are especially palatable choices, as his essay’s title- Its Complicated- suggests. However the self-exploiter does rely on having freelance income, which will be harder to depend on as jobs for artists in school projects, community arts and teaching are reduced.

There have also been articles in Art Monthly regarding the funding of artists films, which is bound to suffer under the cuts. One solution could be to give out smaller bursaries for films, with concomitantly lower production values, but to more artists. Wouldn’t this spread the available money, meaning less for each individual, but a healthier artistic community overall? Addressing the issue of how non-commercial art could continue to function is an Open Meeting at no.w.here, whose aim is to ask “What kind of non commercial art practices will there be in the future age of austerity? Where are supportive spaces where group discussion, collective thought, and critical practices can grow and disseminate if they are removed from the Universities or if they become too expensive to access?” Good questions, especially once more and more spaces like theirs start to really lose money.

 Another perspective on the funding and making of films is offered by Juan García Espinosa, of Third Cinema. The first line of his essay, For an Imperfect Cinema, written in 1969, is  “Nowadays, perfect cinema — technically and artistically masterful — is almost always reactionary cinema.”  He finishes by arguing that a film shouldn’t be judged on quality, or the camera, format and technique used to make it (a Mitchell or 8mm camera are offered as examples). Rather, the important question to ask for him was “What are you doing in order to overcome the barrier of the "cultured" elite audience which up to now has conditioned the form of your work?”

Its interesting to consider this in relation to moving image work- where do well-funded, high production values videos or 16mm films (extremely expensive and specialist in today’s world) fit, when everyone can make a video of sorts just using their mobile phone? I’ve run out of space- but will hopefully return to the question.

# 10 [24 February 2011]

Something I have been meaning to rant about for a while is the prescribed individuality that is integral to the creation of our digital identities on social media platforms. Facebook, Youtube, but also to a lesser extent art sites Artslant, re-title, not to mention dating sites, all involve at least some self-definition within parameters they set out (taste in movies, music, books, religious/ political beliefs etc).  

It’s another case of choice but within a structure where the more significant choices have already been made; for example, belonging to a social media platform is more of a necessity than a choice, and for those who do opt out, part of their identity is then defined by this choice. Last year I had been thinking about how self-definition works in personality tests and the industry of self-help/ self-actualisation that depends on classifying one’s personality- stuff like are you an optimist or a pessimist? A leader or a follower?  

There is an almost comical adherence to the notion of personality as a rigid entity rather than one that fluctuates according to surroundings and circumstances. The cult of personality is also well suited to the process of self-definition through consumerism, in which our particular personality type must find expression through our consumer choices- one of my favourite tests was the Indie test, to determine how ‘alternative’ you are, mainly based on what clothes and music choices you make. Talk about cooption of dissent!

Tying in (maybe) with some of these ideas is an essay by Janet Kraynak, which I re-read today, ostensibly about Bruce Nauman’s sculptural practice but hinging on ideas of participation as submissive and dependent. She develops this idea from the writing of Alain Touraine, who first coined the term ‘programmed society’ 40 years ago, a loaded term synonymous with the rise of post-industrial technocratic society.

Put simply the technocratic society valorizes efficiency and productivity (as opposed to ‘old’ ideals like freedom, self-determination), a ‘business-ontology’ (as Mark Fisher puts it) currently being implemented by the Con-Dems. ‘Optimum’ performance, in the mechanistic meaning of the term, becomes the desired model for subjects and institutions as well as corporations.

 Another important aspect is repression through inclusion, rather than exclusion –not enforced by the police but through comfortable conformity, through fully participating in the systems of consumption and social life, where, however, ‘opting out is not a possibility’. Closely related to inclusion is participation, which is actually the central theme of her essay: drawing on Tourlaine’s, notion of ‘dependant participation’, where the subject, although ostensibly ‘free’ to participate in society, is actually to a large extent obligated.

 She uses this framework for understanding Nauman's work within this tension of participation and control, where the viewer is both ‘beseeched and thwarted’, becoming willing yet not exactly free participants in his installations.  Joining the chorus of grumblings about relational aesthetics she also contrasts this with the supposedly benign, democratic aesthetic of inclusion which masks both the potentially problematic power relationship between artist and viewer within RA practices and the economic arrangements allowing them to thrive.

Amongst many strands that I’m trying to tease out is the relationship between programming/ rationalization and the performance of identity within contemporary culture. As she points out, programming is all about a scientific, rationalised process of information gathering which is then subjected to number-crunching in order to enable its parsing as information, and not just a jumble of facts and figures. This analysis creates a statistically accurate picture of past behaviour and can to a certain extent predict the future.

Then its just a small step to prescribing (programming) the future, as users of Facebook and Google have found- advertisers don’t just place ads in your profile based on your previous inputs for the hell of it, but because its a fair predictor of future activity, i.e. future consumption.

This is the closed-loop variation of capitalism in its networked phase, personalized ads targeting you with ever increasing precision, where any response further shades out that picture and thereby feeds back into the loop. “Free’ internet services, along with ‘free participation” are both apparently underwritten by a contract with hidden costs, one that we are seemingly quite happy to pay.

# 9 [13 February 2011]

I’m suffering post-holiday loss of bearings in relation to my work, and trying to get my head back into it by going to film screenings and talks. As part of this re-immersion drive I went to Ian Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s screening and talk at the Whitechapel, which showcased new work made for Nick Cave’s forthcoming DVD, alongside old work and videos that had influenced them, all focused on the talking head format. I don’t know their other work very well, though the event convinced me to go to the South London Gallery to rectify that, but from this selection it seemed primarily concerned with the foibles of human nature- obsessions, passions, attachments- filtered through the lens of music.

While talking heads are standard in documentaries and YouTube videoblogs, Mike Sperlinger, who was chairing the talk, pointed out that when utilised within ‘cheap’ TV clip-shows the people talking are treated as merely a means of content delivery- to say the things the progrmame editors require so that a coherent narrative can be pieced together from multiple voices. Jane pointed out how easy it is prompt certain answers, comparing this type of cynical interviewing to handing out a script- an instrumentalised mode of interview that their work is clearly in opposition to.

Their use of talking heads also differs from mainstream manifestations by rejecting name-titles, depriving the viewer of the framing device that identifies the interviewees, and thereby affords authority and prestige to them and to the interviewers, particularly when dealing with famous personalities as in the Nick Cave videos, for being able to secure such ‘big names’. Without names, everyone is leveled and hierarchy is eliminated, in a kind of gesture towards fundamental equality (unless they're so famous you recoginse their faces).

Another interesting thing Jane said concerned their editing process, which is done according to the spoken word, much like a radio edit. This type of work is seemingly much more a literary/ writerly form of art since the text has primacy over the visual content, with the visual elements almost entirely determined by the text.  One could argue that the individual speakers are similarly subordinated since their individual voices and stories are not as important as the overall narrative the artists construct from them.

My video Reality Life (2009), which featured teenage girls reading out a script written entirely from the titles of ‘unscripted’ TV programmes, attempted to foreground the potentially exploitative aspect of this practice; un-named and cut into wherever it suited the rhythm and flow of the video, the girls were simply ‘delivering’ their lines to camera for my use.

Of course the difference is that it was scripted beforehand, whereas documentaries are constructed from the (supposedly) unpredictable stuff people come out with. But- and this is something I’ve pondered a lot in relation to my own text-based work- where does carefully manipulating other people’s language leave the artist? Contrary to the positing of the work screened as oppositional, with their collaborator Nick Cave acting as a credible signifier of ‘alternative’ culture, the artists still have total authorial control and edit the content to create their own unique, individual response out of it.

It reminded me of something Steven Ball said at the curator’s talk at Banner Repeater in relation to one of my videos. He mentioned Marjorie Perloff, a theorist of conceptual poetics, who has espoused the notion of ‘unoriginal genius’, which as the name suggests, hardly destabilises the old romantic/ individualist idea of the artist as genius- albeit one who displays their virtuosity through re-using and re-ordering existing texts. She gives Benjamin’s Arcades project as a paradigmatic example but also champions the work of contemporary artists like Caroline Bergvall, who has worked with re-written found texts like lyrics and titles of pop songs, for example.

I think she is proposing this as a definitive break from the idea of ‘original genius’ in the age of the internet and simulacrum but I wonder whether using existing texts does anything to challenge the authority and control of the artist since what they formulate from them is still unique and individual - words often associated with ‘genius’, original or otherwise.

# 8 [4 February 2011]

It’s a familiar feeling to anyone who has found themselves trapped in an endless cycle internet browsing- somewhere, out there, is the article, text or information that’s going to make sense of it all and make something click, as it were. My new year’s resolution for the second year running- having finally managed to quit smoking- was to stop wasting time in this manner, along with the even more pointless activity of reading the comment boards of blogs. Amongst many others, this topic was covered during a workshop at the ICA lead by Mark Fisher and Nina Power addressing the way the internet has affected the dissemination of artworks and looking at how artists and writers have used the web, especially blogging. 

  More of an informal dialogue with comments and questions actively encouraged throughout, the talk took in themes like the continuous displaced attention typical of the web, the illusion of infinite time it conjures up and the politics behind a switched-on culture. Thankfully free of the usual tips to success, networking and branding that often characterize ‘artists and websites’ discussions, the speakers instead talked about the personal reasons behind starting a blog in the first place and the strangeness of suddenly addressing a public- even if no one is reading. Mark asserted, and Nina concurred, that for him and others of his acquaintance, starting a blog coincided with some sort of loss or otherwise difficult period, in his case depression following the ending of his PhD. It takes some guts to offer up this kind of detail to a crowd of strangers, and it set the tone for an almost intimate (in a good way) discussion.

 The tension between the printed word and on screen text was another theme, since most people prefer to read long articles in book form; on screen, with other tabs constantly attracting your attention, the pull to keep scanning and moving to the next article is too strong. This continuous displaced attention, a kind of distracted roving in which the ‘labour is the look’ and eye-balling accrues value, is apparently integral to what Jodi Dean called “communicative capitalism”. As I understand it, the utopian dream of increased quantity of and access to information does not lead to a more democratic situation, but to a state of confusion and distrust, where the endless stream of publicity, op-eds, wikipedia entries and blogs “produce searching, suspicious subjects ever clicking for more information, ever drawn to uncover the secret and find out for themselves". The excess and lack of meaning creates a kind of whirlpool intensity of information, which the subject gets swept up in, unable to decide who to trust.

 Not to mention the fact that despite the liveliness of online debate, the endless ‘Support this or that protest’ Facebook group thousands join, there is little actual, real-world activism to back it up. I started writing this before the uprising in Egypt, and I wonder how much events there disprove this theory- some have suggested that its precisely the Wikileaks episode which lead to the uprooting of the Tunisian regime, which consequently spurred on the Egyptian people into action. Mubarak’s decision to disable the internet suggests there is real fear from authoritarian regimes of protestors using it to communicate and organize; it undeniably also presents us, the online observers, with a captivating ‘breaking news’ drama to keep abreast of and endless debate to engage in.

 Mark mentioned the crucial role of debate to culture as well, since the debate- the buzz, hype, discussion around it, the participation of the viewer- is the product; that’s what is being produced (and guarantees its success). This is obviously integral to reality TV, a pseudo-participation better described as interpassive rather than interactive, and as he said, with the whole ethos of ‘inclusion’ as practiced by the government and corporate interests. I’ve seen this ‘Have Your Say’, ‘Join the debate’ culture in action in Redbridge where I live: posters saying “£3 million must be cut, have your say where from” but the decision to cut at all, is of course, closed to debate. As Mark said, if your opinion made a difference, they wouldn’t want to know it!