“The whole point of viewing something critically is the shock of recognition that comes from the intersubjectity of two unique sensibilities — the critic’s (or, ideally, every reader’s) and the artist’s. If the reader is merely a supplicant before the art, he’s doing neither himself nor the artist any favors. If he respects the artist and himself, the reader (the critic!) brings his own worldview, his own philosophical orientation to bear on the art and, in the event, perfection and idolatry ought rightly to be looked on with some suspicion. Heretical as this sounds, appreciation could be made even more pungent and challenging when there’s some friction between the reader’s perceptions and the artist’s expression.”

 - Gary Groth, “A Bill of Goods (or ‘Why The Death of Criticism Couldn’t Have Come At a Worse Time’)”

“Lots of first-rate literary criticism has been written by people who are monolingual, or who read lots of novels but almost no poems, or who have no political concerns, or who are philosophically illiterate, or who have little sense of what happened in history. Good criticism is a matter of bouncing some of the books you have read off the rest of the books you have read. The greater number of books you have read, and the more various they are, the likelier it is that the criticism you write will be of interest. But there is no natural order of priority, nor is there any set of methodological precepts, that should guide your decisions about which books to read first. All you can do is follow your nose.”

 - Richard Rorty, “Looking Back at Literary Theory”

As a filmmaker who often works in the science-fiction and fantasy genres and who often incorporates radical themes into my work, the topic of the intersection between speculative fiction and politics is something I spend a hell of a lot of time thinking about. Recently I encountered two authors’ takes on the subject: Michael Morcock’s 1977 essay “Starship Stormtroopers,” and an article recounting a Q&A session with China Miéville at the San Diego Public Library.

Both authors speak of genre conventions that they find politically repulsive. Miéville attacks the trope of “the Chosen One,” a cliche he finds to be “fascist” and which he has attempted to avoid or else subvert in his own writing.

Moorcock, on the other hand, has a bone to pick with a far less obvious and far more insidious convention. He refutes the common interpretation of writers such as Robert A. Heinlein as “radical” or “libertarian,” pointing out that their “rugged individualism” is in fact a childish and simplistic rebelliousness which almost always goes hand in hand with conservative paternalism.

“The bandit hero — the underdog rebel — so frequently becomes the political tyrant; and we are perpetually astonished! Such figures appeal to our infantile selves — what is harmful about them in real life is that they are usually immature, without self-discipline, frequently surviving on their ‘charm’. Fiction lets them stay, like Zorro or Robin Hood, perpetually charming. In reality they become petulant, childish, relying on a mixture of threats and self-pitying pleading, like any baby.”

“Rugged individualism also goes hand in hand with a strong faith in paternalism — albeit a tolerant and somewhat distant paternalism — and many otherwise sharp-witted libertarians seem to see nothing in the morality of a John Wayne Western to conflict with their views. Heinlein’s paternalism is at heart the same as Wayne’s. […] To be an anarchist, surely, is to reject authority but to accept self-discipline and community responsibility. To be a rugged individualist a la Heinlein and others is to be forever a child who must obey, charm and cajole to be tolerated by some benign, omniscient father: Rooster Coburn [sic] shuffling his feet in front of a judge he respects for his office (but not necessarily himself) in True Grit.

“An anarchist is not a wild child, but a mature, realistic adult imposing laws upon the self and modifying them according to an experience of life, an interpretation of the world. A ‘rebel’, certainly, he or she does not assume ‘rebellious charm’ in order to placate authority (which is what the rebel heroes of all these genre stories do). There always comes the depressing point where Robin Hood doffs a respectful cap to King Richard, having clobbered the rival king.”

Morcock’s distinction between the childish rebel and the responsible anarchist is spot on. Not only is it something well worth keeping in mind for anyone hoping to write liberatory fiction, but it has far reaching resonance “in the real world” as well. For one, it offers insight into the differing roles “individualism” takes in rightist and leftist thought. Perhaps more importantly though, it should serve as a reminder for many of those on the left of that old adage, “with great freedom comes great responsibility.” I’m thinking specifically of some young punks who too often confuse “fuck you, mom and dad!” rebelliousness with “anarchy.”

The definition of an anarchist Morcock provides (”rejecting authority but accepting self-discipline and community responsibility”) is worthwhile in that it represents a mature political ideal - that is, one which can be enacted not only by the individual espousing it, but by everyone, and still result in a functioning society. Any political ideal which can’t meet that criteria isn’t really an ideal at all… it’s an infantile impulse.

(Thanks to Magpie of Birds Before the Storm for tipping me off to the Miéville article)

bolo’bolo is a utopian novel written in 1983 by the anonymous Swiss author and activist p.m. (a name taken from the most common initials in the Swiss phonebook). One amazon reviewer describes the book as having “No tedious sermons on recycling, condom use, or literacy. Instead, the Magus of Zurich talks about a possible world of duels, sprouting micro-religions, bizarre local cuisines, the transformation of bland existing buildings into bohemian funhouses, dramatic suicides, wild barter economics, and Tarkovskyesque railway systems.”

Central to the brief novel is an invented auxillary language. By simply inventing new terms, p.m. is able to group together concepts in simple, succinct ways. “Pili,” for instance, means “communication, education, language, media,” whereas “vudo” means “city, county, trading area, bioregion.” Each word has a corresponding abstract glyph, and the language has an interesting and elegant grammar system.

p.m. himself speaks of his motivation for creating a new language:

“The original idea for creating this weird secret language came up because the European left-wing terminology was no longer viable. Nowadays when people talk about communism, that’s gulag, no one wants to hear about it. Or if people talk about socialism, then they are speaking of Schröder’s politics - retirement cuts - and no one wants that, either. And all of the other standard left-wing expressions such as ’solidarity,’ ‘community,’ they’re all contaminated and no longer useful. But the things that they stand for are actually quite good. I don’t want to suffer because of terminology for which I am not to blame; instead, I’d rather create my own. It would probably take longer to explain that the communism that I am talking about is not the one that I saw. It is easier to simply say I am for bolo’bolo, and then everyone starts to think of the things all over again, to re-think them. […] I want to emphasize that there is not one single idea in this book that is new. Everything in it is something that I found.”

I’ve written on this blog before about the relationship between the nature of the internet and obsessive-compulsive tendencies (as well as narcissistic and attention deficit ones). In a Wall Street Journal article from December 2008 on “The New Examined Life,” one reporter describes a growing trend of people who “boil down everything [they do] into charts, graphs, maps and lists,” a trend he says is a natural extension of web 2.0’s culture of information sharing.

There may be existential dangers of distilling all aspects of living into numbers and figures. Such “quotidian aggregation” could be viewed as the absurd apotheosis of what Max Weber called the “rationalization” of social life - a historical process which many critical theorists have linked with dehumanization. The article mentions 19th century statistician Francis Galton, who “carried a homemade object called a ‘registrator’ to, among other things, measure people’s yawns and fidgets during his talks” but whose “preoccupation with data, specifically with human hereditary traits, also yielded an unsavory by-product — eugenics.”

Weber, however, was describing the early stages of the modernization of the Western World, and the criticism of rationalization laid out by Adorno, Habermas, et all has primarily been on the grounds that it has served some centralized, bureaucratic authority. What does it mean when such rationalization becomes decentralized and voluntary? Can this negate or minimize its dehumanizing effects? Some practitioners of “personal informatics” even see the activity of cataloging one’s life as liberating - a way to “seize data back from the statisticians and the scientists and incorporate it into our daily lives.”

Designer and programmer (with a PhD in computational neuroscience!) Christian Swinehart has made some truly incredible infographics - both lucid in their distillation of complex data into straightforward, digestible forms, as well as beautiful in their own right if viewed as purely aesthetic objects. Like those mentioned in the WSJ article, some of his projects - such as timelines tracking the most important “proper nouns” in the past 15 years of his life, or analyzing what time periods of music his mixtapes have emphasized over the past five years - are highly personal. One blog post reads, “trying to integrate my compilation discography into the relationship timeline.”

But even though it draws on his own childhood nostalgia, his most recent project recalls for me not that WSJ article, but rather another fascination of mine: the “new modes of storytelling” discussed in this post I made a year ago. In what may be his most ambitious undertaking to date (13 months and 11,000 lines of code), Swinehart has broken apart and meticulously reconstructed in dazzling, vivid, logical illustration the thousands of pages that make up twelve installments in the “children’s metafiction” of the Choose Your Own Adventure novels.

The full extent of Swinehart’s extrapolation is truly mind-boggling. Not only does he break down each book into color-coded blocks representing “branching decision page[s],” “illustration or choiceless story page[s],” and “great,” “favorable,” “mediocre,” “disappointing,” and “catastrophic” endings; not only does he group these colored sections together in sequence to illustrate their comparative probabilities in each book; not only does he arrange these sequenced groupings in order of publication date to demonstrate a “progression toward linearity” in the series’ publishing history; not only does he create elaborate, branching decision trees to show all the possible paths a reader could take; not only does he create even more elaborate re-visualizations of these decision trees, mapping them in arcs connecting the various pages in their original sequences, thereby “offer[ing] a peek into the construction process the authors went through as they folded their nonlinear stories into a sequential medium;” he then goes even further, creating elegant animations that show each book’s hundreds of possible unique story paths being drawn in arc formation from page to page, as well as a “playable” version of Zork: The Cavern of Doom, where your path is illustrated in real time animation as you make decisions.

What really elevates Swinehart’s endeavor from merely excellent illustration to a work of art is the intelligent and caring way in which he draws meaning out of his data and the insights he imparts onto it - insights that extend well beyond the scope of childhood nostalgia and novelty literature. Reflecting on his infatuation with the Choose Your Own Adventure books as a kid and how this relates to his future tastes in fiction, he’s able to distill the kernel of an entire theory of literature, writing, “a narrative was all well and good, but more interesting to me were the books that laid out a set of places and situations that could outlive their attendant plots — stories that provided scaffolding for my own imagining.

“In practice this meant a lot of genre fiction, books where the author spends as much time explaining the rules of the form’s world (be it film noir, sci-fi, etc.) as documenting the characters’ progress through it. Neuromancer’s writing was not what made it memorable. It was the fact that after reading it you understood the logic of Gibson’s world. And that logic was portable to any new scenario you could dream up.”

Fiction, especially children’s fiction, is often described in contrast to film - whereas in the latter, images and sounds are handed to us fully formed, in the former, we are only given descriptions, and the creation of those sensations in our minds is “left to our imaginations.” Thus, so the story goes, reading a book is a better exercise in imagining than watching a film. But Swinehart’s concept of “imaginal scaffolding” (okay, I made up that term, but I like it!) takes that idea even further. Gamebooks, genre fiction, and mythopoeia may serve as better impetuses for further imagining precisely because they don’t merely ask us to imagine for ourselves the people, places, things, and events laid out in the narrative, but actually encourage the imagining of people, places, things, events, and even whole narratives beyond what’s written on the page. Such works, in a sense, are founts of possibility.

Despite using statistics as his primary method of exploration, it seems clear that this is Swinehart’s ultimate interest, and his characterization of the books provides a humanizing counterpoint to the fire and brimstone statisticophobia described in the first part of this post. But neither does the designer present a positivist mindset as being without limits or shortcomings. After paragraphs of mathematical explanation, he ends his “essay” by describing one CYOA book, Inside UFO 54-40, which puts these ideas of possibility and imagination to a refreshing and somewhat radical application:

“In the story, your concord flight is interrupted when you are beamed aboard a nearby spacecraft trolling the universe for intelligent life. Once aboard you discover your new captors, the U-TY, are interested in keeping you around only to the extent that you can help them find Ultima, the ‘planet of paradise’. The planet’s location is cloaked in mystery and you are only told that it’s a place that cannot be reached ‘by making a choice or following directions’. However this is all foreshadowing for when the reader finally becomes frustrated in the apparently impossible quest and begins flipping through the book hunting for that ending. In fact not choosing is the only way to reach Ultima.

“The branch diagram for UFO 54-40 is unique in that it has one ending – the Ultima ending – which is completely disconnected from the rest of the story. It exists as an island, unreachable through choices but discoverable thanks to the random access nature of the book.

“This ending was not just an easter egg for the obsessive reader who didn’t mind skimming every page looking for telltale words. Instead it’s hard to miss in even a casual riffling. A two-page illustration showing what could only be paradise (or perhaps a theme park) leaps out as the only spread in the book without any text. Flipping to the page before brings you to 101, where you discover that your curiosity has been rewarded. You have found the planet, not by following the constraints of the system, but by going outside of them – a fitting moral to the story and an encouraging reminder that any game should be a starting point for the imagination, not the end.”

<< Curtis x Laing x Bourriaud x Bey x more (Part 1: Diagnosis)
<< Curtis x Laing x Bourriaud x Bey x more (Part 2: Remedy?)

This post has been a very very very long time coming. It’s a little embarrassing. Nine and a half months since I posted Part 2 and one year exactly since I posted Part 1.

Largely, the reason for that is that it’s spiraled out of control. The core ideas of what began a year ago as an attempt to briefly sketch some corollaries between a film I’d recently watched and three books I’d recently read quickly grew to become an anchor point for my own personal philosophy of art and social change, and to which much of what I thought about on a daily basis could be related back to.

Initially I had intended for this “third and final part” to describe contemporary tendencies similar to those described in Part 2. Giving anything close to a comprehensive survey, however, would be impossible.

And so rather than delaying this posting any further by attempting to make it “complete” (and winding up producing something so long that it wouldn’t be read by anyone anyway) I’ve decided instead to treat it as a series of notes, and to break it up into smaller, more digestible chunks, which I’ll be posting periodically.

If you recall, this entire series was kicked off by my reading a post by blogger Momus, in which he offered a series of notes drawing parallels between Adam Curtis’ condemnations of game theory in The Trap and Nicolas Bourriaud’s acclamations of socially-based art in Relational Aesthetics. In the conversation that followed Momus’ post, he cited one art critic’s criticism of the relational art trend: “Relational aesthetics, once probing and complex, is becoming a cul-de-sac of fun effects, momentary experiences, and comfy playhouses.” It sounds like a convincing condemnation. But one commenter offers an even more convincing rebuttal: “And the problem is… what, exactly? That people are drawing inspiration from the immediate pleasures of being alive rather than floating around in arid abstractions that yield even more sickly offspring? ‘Probing’ and ‘complex’ my foot–those with an allegiance to life’s joys are the ones I trust first; the rest have to make their case, no matter how clever. Get your empty sleeves out of my pho, you gaggle of ghosts!”

This dialog offers a demonstration of three of the primary obstacles preventing contemporary art from being a productive, utopian force:

1) its fixation on content and concept to the detriment of considering more tangible effects on the world at large (I’ll get to that later),

2) the inevitability of its commodification (as Bourriaud himself writes, “wherever art proposes ‘life possibilities,’ [’Integrated World Capitalism’] presents us with the bill” (RA p95).),

and 3) its obsession with originality. Granted utmost importance in the art world, this obsession becomes extremely harmful when it comes to effecting anything outside of it. If it’s a good idea, what’s wrong with doing it again? If it can make the world a better place, why ignore it simply because it’s been done before?

And that’s not the only reason RA won’t save the world. The Radical Culture Research Collective presents a far more biting critique of Relational Aesthetics than those commonly made from within the art world:

“Precisely formulated, relational aesthetics represents the liberalization of the avant-garde project of radical transformation. […] While we would defend relational art from its conservative and reactionary critics, we would also insist that it not come to stand in for the radical project it falls short of – and indeed refuses. Undoubtedly, the avant-garde tradition continues to be transformed by its own process of self-critique. But it does not give up the radical, macro-historical aim of a real world beyond capitalist relations. And it doesn’t settle for the experience of gallery simulations.

“It’s not that experiments in forms and models of sociability are not needed today – they certainly are. But to be politically relevant and effective, such experiments need to be grounded in (or at least actively linked to) social movements and struggles. (And there is no social progress without contestation and struggle: this for us is a basic materialist truth that makes any blanket refusal of “conflict” problematic.) As a gallery-based game, relational practices are cut off by an institutional divide from those who could use them. Who are the consumers of relational art? The cultural élite of the dominant classes, primarily, supplemented by the socially ambitious layers of a de-classed general public* […] In general, this audience does not tend to overlap with the people actively attempting to generate pressure for deep social change. There are exceptions, we know. But this is how the disruptive utopian energies that do exist in relational art are managed and kept within tolerable limits: the social separations, stratifications and (self-)selections of the art system enact a liberalization – that is, a de-radicalization – of social desire.”

*The subject of why galleries and museums tend to be so class-specific is worthy of an entirely separate post. Two footnotes worth briefly mentioning here, however: 1. The phenomena of “free days” at museums - most notably, MOMA - is neither ahistorical nor simply a generous gesture. In 1969, the Art Workers Coalition was successful in pressuring MOMA and several other museums to implement such free days in an attempt to broaden access (race and class were chief concerns of the group, both in terms of access and representation). Some museums have since rolled back this policy. MOMA is today able to continue operating “free Fridays” only under the sponsorship of Target. 2. Similarly, when Bourriaud co-founded the Palais de Tokyo museum in Paris, he insisted that the operating hours be noon to midnight. The reason for this, of course, was to broaden access to working people whose hours likely conflicted with those of most museums, which tend to close in the early evening or late afternoon.

In the next part of this post, before moving on, I’ll stop for a moment to define the “the avant-garde tradition” and “project of radical transformation” referred to in The RCRC’s critique - the antecedents to Relational Aesthetics that may help to point toward current manifestations and future trajectories of social art.

Every once in a while, between all the promos for tacky clubs and bad stand-up comedy, FreeNYC lists something that sounds really cool. I can’t go to this ’cause I’m at work, but I’ll probably be listening to the free live stream available on their website…

Location: The Change You Want to See, 84 Havemeyer Street, Williamsburg
Date: Mon, Mar 29th
Time: 7:30pm
Cost: Free

“Story telling is an ancient and powerful form of human expression. Today, however the power of story is mainly used by advertisers, PR flacks and political propagandists. In order to make change, social movements must tell new stories that challenge assumptions and shape new possibilities for action and change.

“How can activist and artists use story-based strategies to design “image events”: actions, images or stories that simultaneously destroy and construct new meaning? How can we either replace existing sets of symbols or re-define their meaning? Can we connect organizing struggles with the ethereal world of culture, media and narrative?

“The story-based strategy approach is grounded in a narrative analysis of power––the recognition that humans understand the world and their role in it through stories and thus all power relations have a narrative component. Every issue already has a web of existing stories and cultural assumptions that frame public understanding. Story-based strategy provides a process to understand the current story around an issue and identify opportunities to change that story with the right framing, messages, messengers and creative interventions.”

(more here)

Before finding out about this event, I had never heard of this space before. It seems really cool, and I’m very excited to see that the proliferation of this type of alternative space is becoming more and more common, both in this city and elsewhere (more on that topic soon). From the blurb on the side panel of their website:

“The Change You Want to See Gallery and Convergence Stage is home to Williamsburg Coworking and a project of Not An Alternative, a non-profit organization whose mission aims to integrate art, activism and theory in order to affect popular understandings of events, symbols and history. The multi-purpose venue hosts free and low-cost lectures, screenings, panel discussions, workshops and artist presentations. The space also houses a production workshop, filming studio and video editing suite for Not An Alternative’s Communication Department. During the day it is a collaborative office space (aka coworking) for like minded cultural producers.”

I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on what events they’ll be offering in the future.

Another similar space I only just recently found out about: 16 Beaver Group. Thanks to Marc Fischer of Public Collectors, Temporary Services, Half-Letter Press, and Art and Work for tipping me off to that one.

I found this website forever ago, but for some strange reason never really looked into it too much. Public Collectors, founded by artist Marc Fischer, aims to make private collections (of just about anything) public via the internet. Some collections exist on the site only in the form of lists, with contact information for the visitor to arrange an in-person meeting with the collector to view the desired material. Other collections have been scanned and are viewable in digital form on the site.

A lot of what I said about the Museum Syndicate a year ago could also be said about Public Collectors. Like that site, Fischer seems to accept just about anything, and consequently, the collections hosted are astoundingly varied in both content and size (ranging from the 150 or so artifacts that comprise the collection of the Vanilla Ice Museum, to the over 1000 movies on over 400 VHS tapes that comprise the world’s largest collection of home-recorded movies from TV, to collections of 28 stolen hotel room Bibles or 4 fake parking tickets).

Here are some of my favorites:

- Photos, Postcards and Ephemera From the Home of John Rininger, Chicago, IL

- Documentation of Syllabi - Collected by Philip von Zweck

- Documentation of Joe Flasch’s Hats and Costumes

- Documentation of Food Songs Collected by Matt Bua

The “Documentation of Complete Publications in PDF form” section is also a goldmine of printed obscuro, with PDFs of a wide array or weird and wonderful books available for download. Again, the scope is astonishing, ranging from this…

Robert Chenoweth, Latina Cotidiana, 1940?, unique publication, 42 pages, handwritten with various collaged elements, cover: 8 1/2″ X 10 1/2″. interior pages: 7 1/2″ X 9 1/2″.
This publication is clearly an ambitious student’s homework assignment - one of four different assignments that I acquired by the same author at a flea market in Chicago. Its subject is ancient Roman culture and Latin. What makes this brad-bound piece particularly enjoyable is the use of many collaged elements from various books and newspapers. The numerous clippings, some of which date from 1940, either show examples of Roman history and historical figures, or are used to note examples of Latin, or English words derived from Latin. A variety of popular sources of images and text are employed, ranging from comic strip panels to newspaper ads.

to this…

The Unforgettable Fire - Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors, Edited by Japan Broadcasting Corporation, 1981, Pantheon Books, New York, 116 pages, offset, perfect bound.
From the back cover: “The art in this book was a response to a request broadcast on a morning television program in Japan for drawings from atomic bomb survivors. The results were immediate. The television station was inundated with drawings. So powerful were the survivors’ desires to share their memories that they turned to whatever materials were at hand – pencils, crayons, watercolors, Magic Markers, colored pencils, India ink – and drew on the backs of calendars, advertisements, bills, or even the paper used to cover Japanese sliding doors. Some drew on the backs of children’s scribbled papers, probably those of their grandchildren.”

…and plenty more.

The site also provides links to a number of additional online collections and recommends The Museum of Online Museums for further browsing. Temporary Services, the artist/research group of which Public Collectors founder Marc Fischer is a founding member, also has a wealth of great material on their own site: self-published booklets, documentation of prisoners’ inventions, an archive of ‘reading material,’ and resource archives on mobile structures and ‘public phenomena.’

If you’re not sufficiently overwhelmed yet and interested in more of this sort of thing, I’ve posted about a few great online collections in the past, including the aforementioned Museum Syndicate, as well as the Play Generated Map and Documents Archive, the Google Earth ‘Prado Museum layer,’ and two extensive zine collections. I link to a few more in the ‘links’ sidebar on the right hand side: links to free culture, Steal This Wiki, UbuWeb, Surreal Moviez, The Subversive Nub, eFukt (NSFW), TED talks, BibliOdyssey, Radical Software, textfiles.com, The Audio Kitchen, The Daily Script, Top Secret Recipes, zinelibrary.info, The Anarchist Library.

Collecting is something I have a love-hate relationship with. I feel like I have a natural tendency to obsessively hoard, collect, categorize, and share. But combined with my penchant for thriftiness and simple living and an aversion to placing monetary value on cultural material, this often results in most of my collections being digital ones. This, of course, presents a whole new set of issues, and I’ve written before on this blog about the internet’s demystification of underground culture, and about how the overwhelming scope and immediacy of the internet can amplify and heighten our worst obsessive compulsive tendencies (see #3).

I’ve attempted to do a bit of collection sharing myself, gradually sharing my ever expanding image collection on my other blog, Blog, sharing my favorite videos and articles via my Wikipedia and YouTube/etc. Roundups, and hosting or linking to a number of obscure/out of print texts: the writing of Henry Flynt and Stewart Home, T.A.Z. by Hakim Bey, 100 Ways to Disappear and Live Free (direct link), Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies cards, Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema, Penny Rimbaud’s “The Last of the Hippies” (direct link), the Lacanian trading card game Kid A in Alphabet Land, The Manual (How to Have a Number One The Easy Way) by the KLF, and the shooting script of Un Chien Andalou. I’ve built up a pretty extensive collection of PDFs on my harddrive, and as soon as I get it fixed, I’ll probably make a separate little page on this blog to house all that stuff.

If you know of any other interesting online collections or just cool bits of cultural detritus you want to share, go ahead and post them in the comments.

And photographed me! And I ate a panini!

She’s starting a little series on her blog of short, 1 or 2 question interviews with friends. I had the pleasure of being the first one. She asked me about the really embarrassing short stories I wrote in my early teens and how they relate to my filmmaking now. You can read my answer here.

You should also take a look around the rest of Dea’s blog (and her other one). She writes about being an activist in the coal mines of West Virginia, but also about poetry, and zines, and diners, and punk rock, and other things.

<< Curtis x Laing x Bourriaud x Bey x more (Part 1: Diagnosis)

I apologize for taking so long to post this second part. You may want to refresh your memory of Part 1, as I pretty much jump right in. I’ve also realized that this post is still going to be too long, even in two parts, and so there will be a third part additional parts forthcoming.

Raoul Vaneigem’s book The Revolution of Everyday Life is split into two parts: “Part one: Power’s perspective” and “Part Two: Reversal of Perspective.” Similarly, in Part 1 of this post I set up Adam Curtis and R.D. Laing’s near-dystopian interpretation of history and society. In this second part, I will outline a few strains of thought which offer tools for combating/transforming this dystopia - tools for reversing the perspective of power they’ve described.

Art critic Nicolas Bourriaud’s book Relational Aesthetics begins with the line, “Artistic practice is a game.” Yet whereas John Nash’s game theory imagined all human interaction to be a competitive game, where the most rational way to “play” (exist) was to be constantly plotting against everyone around you, the art that Bourriaud champions embodies a radically different type of game playing, one that emphasizes the exact opposite values from those of Nash.

In the book, Bourriaud defines relational aesthetics as “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.” Although the term is used to cover a diverse range of artists, all with widely divergent politics and practices, many of them have in common a desire to create democratic spaces of conviviality, dialog, and play.

Some examples…

Rirkrit Tiravanija is most famous for his (mostly untitled) mid-’90s installations in which he created makeshift kitchens and dining rooms within gallery spaces and served free Pad Thai, Vegetable Curry, and other meals to visitors. In his 2002 piece Apartment 21 he constructed a replica of his apartment (complete with working bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, living room and outside area) in a gallery and lived inside, keeping it open 24 hours a day and encouraging visitors “to drop in for tea and a chat.” As part of the 2003 Venice Biennale, in collaboration with curators Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Molly Nesbit, he created Utopia Station, a hub for a number of projects “striv[ing] to orient individuals of varying perspectives toward collective action” - “a scene of both organized and spontaneous performances, lectures, panel discussions, workshops, and film screenings” and “at different times, a space for discussion, argumentation, relaxation, refreshment, meditation, and celebration.” [reference]

Between October 2006 and April 2007, Carsten Höller placed gigantic, metallic slides (up to 5-stories tall) inside the Tate Modern and allowed visitors to slide down them (Test Site).

In Gillian Wearing’s 1992-3 work Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say, she stopped random individuals on the street and asked them to spontaneously write something on a piece of paper. Photographs of them holding their “signs” were displayed in the gallery not as the work itself, but as documentation.

Jeremy Deller’s work Risk Assessment for the Folkstone Trienale consisted of, in his words, “a series of slapstick interventions performed unannounced around the town” by local actors - real world homages to Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, like getting caught in a beach chair or tripping over themselves. This past year, in a project called It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq, he brought together “a revolving cast of participants including veterans, journalists, scholars, and Iraqi nationals who have expertise in a particular aspect of the region and/or first-hand experience of Iraq” and had them “take up residence in the New Museum’s gallery space with the express purpose of encouraging discussion with visitors to the Museum.” Also present in the gallery was the remnants of a car destroyed in Iraq. Later, he brought along several of the participants (and the wrecked car) on a cross-country tour, occupying galleries and museums and engaging in conversations with visitors.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the now deceased artist to whom Bourriaud devotes an entire chapter of Relational Aesthetics to, was most well known for his (again, mostly untitled) installations in which he placed large piles of wrapped candies in the corners of galleries and invited visitors to take them. Similar works replaced the candies with stacks of posters, often political in nature (such as this one, documenting the 464 people who died gun-related deaths during one week in the United States). In a brilliant 1995 interview with critic Robert Storr, he spoke about his interactions with the security guards in the institutions displaying his work: “In my recent show at the Hirshhorn, which is one of the best experiences I have had in a long time, the guards were really in it. Because I talked to them, I dealt with them. They’re going to be here eight hours with this stuff. And I never see guards as guards, I see guards as the public. […] In Washington people asked me, ‘Did I train the guards, did I give them a lecture?’ I said, ‘No, I just talk to them when I’m doing the work.’ They said, ‘You know we have never been to an exhibit where the guards go up to the viewers and tell them what to do, and where to go, what to look at, what it means.’ But again, that division of labor, that division of function is always there in place to serve someone’s agenda.”

Mirroring Laing’s opposition to schools of psychiatry which focus on the individual psyche as if in isolation, Relational Aesthetics shifts the focus of art away from solitary contemplation and introspection and toward the consideration of the group. Bourriaud even references anti-psychiatrist David Cooper, whose views closely resemble Laing’s: “According to Cooper, madness is not ‘inside’ a person, but in the system of relationships of which that person is involved. People don’t become ‘mad’ all on their own, because we never think all on our own” (RA p81). Relational aesthetics posits that art, likewise, should be considered within a social context.

But the way in which that social context is conceived is directly oppositional to the social contextualization of game theory. Play doesn’t fit into the game theory model. Nor does eating free pad Thai with strangers in a gallery. RA aims to create spaces where suspiciousness, selfishness, and social climbing can be set aside; where alternatives exist to the model of homo economicus. Bourriaud is abundantly clear in what he considers the ‘goal’ of this art: “The enemy we have to fight first and foremost is embodied in a social form: it is the spread of the supplier/client relations to every level of human life, from work to dwelling-place by way of all the tacit contracts which define our private life” (RA p83). This ‘enemy’ is as good a description of the game theory mindset as any.

According to Bourriaud, contemporary art rejects the idea of “sense” or “meaning” inherent in human activity (RA p53) - the cold rationality of game theory - in favor of a much more complex idea of human nature. It instead champions the imagination and the irrational (an approach inherited from Dada, etc?). Again channeling Cooper and Laing: “reality is what I talk about with a third party. It can only be defined as a product of negotiation. Escaping from reality is ‘mad.’ Somebody sees an orange rabbit on my shoulder, but I can’t see it. So discussion weakens and shrinks. To find a negotiating space, I must pretend to see this orange rabbit on my shoulder. Imagination seems like a prosthesis affixed to the real so as to produce more intercourse between interlocutors. So the goal of art is to reduce the mechanical share in us. Its aim is to destroy any a priori agreement about what is perceived” (RA p80).

“So art is opening up fluid social relations at precisely the time wider society is closing them down,” Momus summarizes, “Relational Aesthetics is what we do when machines take over. ‘The general mechanization of social processes gradually reduces the relational space.’ So art has to increase it again.”

Since writing Relational Aesthetics, Bourriaud has coined a new term - “Altermodernism.” According to him, the utopian goals of modernism aren’t dead, but must be revised and approached differently in light of the failures of the 20th century. Instead of a grand plan for societal change, there are small experiments; instead of tearing down the old world and starting from scratch, we have to work with transforming and improving what we already have; and since there is no remaining undiscovered territory, these experiments and transformations must be temporary and dispersed - “interstices” or “islets of resistance.”

Terms such as these should sound familiar to anyone who’s read the work of Hakim Bey. Although Bourriaud has never once mentioned Bey in his writings, the similarities between the two are so uncanny that I’d hesitate to believe he had not read him. Bourriaud’s essay “‘Islets’ and Utopia…” in particular - a brief summation of his idea of the utopian interstice - has overt parallels to Bey’s work, right down to his referencing of the free party and rave movements.

Bey’s most well known work, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, is about exactly what Bourriaud is describing when he speaks of “islets of resistance.” Using the historical and fabled example of the ‘pirate utopia‘ - “whole mini-societies living consciously outside the law and determined to keep it up, if only for a short but merry life” - as his template, he conceives of temporary spaces of total autonomy hidden within the existing world.

The concept of the T.A.Z. has many of the same roots and starting points as relational aesthetics and Bourriaud’s “interstices.” Like Bourriaud, Bey also writes of “the closure of the map”: “The last bit of Earth unclaimed by any nation-state was eaten up in 1899. Ours is the first century without terra incognita, without a frontier. […] Not one square inch of Earth goes unpoliced or untaxed… in theory.” And just as Bourriaud looks to revise the goals of modernism by looking at its failures, so too does Bey ground his theory of T.A.Z. in the shortcomings of the revolutionary project: “revolution has never yet resulted in achieving [the anarchist] dream. The vision comes to life in the moment of uprising - but as soon as ‘the Revolution’ triumphs and the State returns, the dream and the ideal are already betrayed.” And it’s not only Bourriaud’s theory that shares an intellectual heritage with Bey - the actions of the artists he describes do as well. Tiravanija’s artist colony/”micro utopia” The Land is a clear inheritor to the dreams of utopian socialists such as Robert Owen and Charles Fourier (an enormous influence on Bey’s ideas), yet is far more open than the communities they created or inspired.

The concrete definition of a T.A.Z. is left largely ambiguous, and we are left to fill in ourselves what such a space would look like. In fact, the term does not merely point to future possibilities, but can be used as a description for spaces existing in the past or present. It might be a squat. It might be a website or application used to bypass regional or national censorship laws (the “counter-Net” as Bey describes it) such as Wikileaks or Freenet. It might be a counter-cultural festival or temporary intentional community (like Burning Man or a Rainbow Gathering). Micronations might be T.A.Z.s. Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War most certainly was. In a nation with a highly oppressive state, a T.A.Z. might be a safehouse, used to provide shelter for dissidents or refuges. In a democratic, capitalist nation like the U.S. or France, it might be a space in which capitalism is excluded entirely, and systems of generosity form a hyper-localized alternate economy - a really really free market or a skillshare, for instance… or a Rirkrit Tiravanija or Felix Gonzalez-Torres work.

The T.A.Z. or “islet of resistance” could also potentially be conceived of as a place free from paranoid, dysfunctional normalcy or a place of psychic healing. This is the etymology of “psychiatry” - “a healing of the soul/mind” - which David Cooper aimed to recoup by labeling traditional psychiatry “anti-psychiatric.” Likewise, R.D. Laing wished to recoup the term “asylum” as a name for his Kingsley Hall experiment. Instead of its modern usage describing essentially a prison for the mad, it would once again revert to its original meaning: Greek for “refuge,” from the roots meaning “without right of seizure.” In other words, an autonomous zone.

Summarizing Guattari, Bourriaud writes: “Psychoanalysis and art? Two sorts of subjectivity production, interconnected, two operational systems, two preferred tool systems, which are joined together in the possible solution to the ‘Malaise of Civilization’” (RA p88).

But can art really accomplish all that Bourriaud seems to imply it can?

In the third and final part additional installments of this post, I will present a number of critiques of Bourriaud’s ideas, and drawing upon the antecedents, successors, and relatives of relational aesthetics, describe a broad range of projects with similar and perhaps more tenable utopian potential.

>> Curtis x Laing x Bourriaud x Bey x more (Part 3.1: Critique)

Bumped into this “tribe” while searching for something else…

“Utopian Flash Fiction Tribe: for the creation of flash fiction stories to create little open doorways into possible solutions to social problems in concise, entertaining narratives.

“I envision this group as a furtherance of my once and future project, to find visionaries who will take part in writing a series of flash fiction utopian pieces around an imaginary federation of diverse villages each working out their methods of community life. We can create little dramatic impacts imparting information about how the people of the community involved solve their social problems.

“A fictional project allows for social activist imaginings outside of the currently ‘possible’ to promote ideas in an easily digestible and enjoyable form, each person involved adding their bits to the overall project. It would be wonderful eventually to publish these stories into an inspirational book, but I am mostly interested to see what kinds of ideas for possible social structures result. I am hoping eventually to see a whole world of ideas created through these short bursts of fiction, little vignettes or as one person suggested, peeks into open doors. There is no set format to fit. What each participant writes would be helping to create the structure itself.”

Haven’t read any of them, so I don’t know if they’re any good, but it’s cool to know that stuff this specific and cool actually has people contributing to it.

Related: I’ve been getting really into science fiction all over again recently (both film & lit), and for the past few weeks I’ve been reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. It’s absolutely incredible - surpassing my expectations in every possible way. I’ll be sure to post a review here once I’m finished, which shouldn’t be long.