<< 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.

“When the world is sick / can’t no one be well / but I dreamt we was all beautiful and strong”
- A Silver Mt. Zion, “God Bless Our Dead Marines”

“In our sick society everyone is sick. A human being averages 4,000 orgasms per lifetime. Do not turn off this pulsating motor of joy and life energy. The bioelectric charge and discharge produced by the genital embrace causes the orgasmic reflex - supremely pleasurable muscular contractions. Subjection to social disciplines may cause gastric ulcers, respiratory, coronary, and vascular diseases.
“Comrade lovers, for your health’s sake, fuck freely. 4,000 liberating orgasms in every woman’s and man’s life are 4,000 explosions of liberated life energy. Only by liberating both love and labor can we create a self-regulating workers’ society.
“Body tissue deprived of life energy turns cancerous. Cancer is the hysteria of cells condemned to death. Cancer and fascism are closely related. Fascism is the frenzy of sexual cripples. The swastika owes its magnetism to being a symbol of two bodies locked in genital embrace. It all stems from a longing for love.
“Comrades, make love joyously and without fear. Let the current flow sweetly up your spine. Let your hips roll and your mouth water. Saliva is good. Let us reactivate the natural vibrations within ourselves and society. Let the current stream sweetly through your muscles. Feel free to tremble and cry. Let yourself enjoy your body.
“As revolutionaries whose revolution renounces love, we feel very uncomfortable. What is happening to the revolution?”
- W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism

“Sexuality is something that we ourselves create. It is our own creation, and much more than the discovery of a secret side of our desire. We have to understand that with our desires go new forms of relationships, new forms of love, new forms of creation. Sex is not a fatality; it’s a possibility for creative life.”
- Michel Foucault

“Every pleasure which emancipates itself from the exchange-value takes on subversive features.”
- Theodor Adorno

An addendum to my post on Public Collectors…

Unfortunately, it seems as if I missed what seems to me to be the most interesting thing ever offered by that site. From December 9 until February 10, the site held an exhibition of work by artist and art historian Don Celender at their ‘Public Collectors Study Center’ in Chicago. Celender’s work focused mostly on administering surveys about art and other topics and then publishing their results. The titles and descriptions of his self-published books are the kind of thing that makes a weirdo like me go all doe-eyed and gooey inside.

A sample…

POLITICAL ART MOVEMENT, RELIGIOUS ART MOVEMENT, AFFLUENT ART MOVEMENT, ACADEMIC ART MOVEMENT, CORPORATE ART MOVEMENT, CULTURAL ART MOVEMENT, MASS MEDIA ART MOVEMENT, ORGANIZATIONAL ART MOVEMENT (1972)
For this study, Celender contacted “about twenty-five chief executive officers of major organizations” from each of the eight movements he describes at the beginning of the book. Each officer was sent an idea by Celender and invited to execute it as a means of bringing art to a wider public. The project was intended as an opportunity to disseminate art in the form of ideas and observe the officials’ attitudes toward art through their responses to these impossible proposals. Some officials replied with considerable wit, others appeared incapable of humor and playfulness, and naturally some officials did not reply at all – or had their staff handle the task of acknowledging the proposal.
Two proposals: To Michael L. Haider, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, Celender requests that they: “Change all current pipe lines to clear plastic and place them above ground on illuminated supports so that oil can be seen moving from the refineries to points of distribution. You will be creating, in effect, continuous linear forms in flux or liquid illuminated sculpture in motion.” The letter received a response that goes into lengthy and dry detail about the primary use of steel piping, closing with the note: “Even if the use of plastic pipe were technically feasible, the cost would be prohibitive.” To Gilbert H. Grosvenor of the National Geographic Society: “Skip one issue of your magazine and use the ink to fill the fissures of the 49 earthquakes in Alaska in 1969. Once the above has been accomplished, press the paper of the skipped issue into the fissures and exhibit the resulting imprints in the Mayo Clinic.” A reply mailed back to Celender from another representative states that this project did “not fall within the scope of the Society’s activities.”

MUSEUM PIECE (1975)
Celender wrote letters to museums around the world asking for photos of their loading docks or receiving areas. Many institutions complied, often taking original photos because documentation did not readily exist. The letters and photographic results are contrasted with more common postcard views of the main façade of each institution. MUSEUM PIECE reveals the least aesthetically pleasing and impressive architectural details of each institution that has a loading dock.

OPINIONS OF WORKING PEOPLE CONCERNING THE ARTS (1975)
While teaching a course called “Art of the Last Ten Years”, Celender had Macalester College students solicit written and recorded opinions from 400 working people in the Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota area. The result is a book (published for an exhibition at OK Harris Gallery in New York City) that includes the responses of maids, bus drivers, hotel clerks, bartenders, gas station attendants, security officers, roofers, cab drivers, and more. Among the questions answered are: “Do you think art is important to American life? Why?” “Should tax money be spent to assist artists in producing works of art?” “Do you go to museums?” “What do you like best at museums? What do you like least?” “Do you think artists are responsible citizens?” “Do you think artists, as a group, have a particular political position?” “Would you pay as much for a work of art as you would for your car? Your TV? A dress, or suit?”

OBSERVATIONS, PROTESTATIONS AND LAMENTATIONS OF MUSEUM GUARDS THROUGHOUT THE WORLD (1978)
This was a particularly ambitious survey. 1,200 questionnaires were mailed out to museums and many language translations were necessary. Celender’s curiosity ran high and he asked many things one would want to know including: “Have there been any thefts, or serious defacements, of works of art during your tenure?” “What are your subordinate guards most frequent complaints?” “What work, or works, do you most admire?” “Do you visit other art institutions on your day off ?” “Do you engage in painting, sculpture, or crafts?” Portrait photos accompany many of the responses. Though most answers given were short, the book offers an interesting window into an employee culture that is common to every major museum. Unsurprisingly, some museums declined participation for reasons of security.

This is the sort of thing I would have been willing to make a pilgrimage to Chicago for had I known about it in time. It says they take individual visits by appointment, so if anyone is up for making that pilgrimage with me, let me know. And if anyone knows if these books are available anywhere - in PDF or physical form - please please pretty please point me to them.

UPDATE: Marc Fischer has informed me that two of Celender’s books are available for purchase from Half-Letter Press. He also tells me that others are available through Celender’s gallery, OK Harris, although their site makes no mention of the artist, so if you’re interested, I would try contacting them directly.

I just found out that dating (and time-wasting personality quiz) website OkCupid has a blog where they take information provided to them by their users and plot it in some rather fascinating ways. They brag that their pool of survey takers is about 100 times as large as the average Gallup Poll.

If that boast is an attempt to claim a higher level of accuracy, it’s important to remember that of course it ignores a rather high level of self-selection bias, and that OkCupid being a dating site will no doubt skew the results (and the questions and answer choices themselves) significantly. Still though, some of their graphs and charts are very interesting, especially where they deal with sticky subjects like sex, politics, religion, and most especially, ethnic relations. Here’s a few of the ones I thought were the most interesting…

(click the images to see the full blog posts they were taken from)

If you knew for sure you would not get caught,
would you commit murder for any reason?

Rate Your Self-Confidence

“Happily enough, competition is not the rule either in the animal world or in mankind. It is limited among animals to exceptional periods, and natural selection finds better fields for its activity. Better conditions are created by the elimination of competition by means of mutual aid and mutual support.”
- Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

“The trick […] is to recognize what structures contain which latent behaviors, and what conditions release those behaviors — and where possible to arrange the structures and conditions to reduce the probability of destructive behaviors and to encourage the possibility of beneficial ones.”
- Donella Meadows, Thinking In Systems: A Primer

“Too many people still believe Margaret Thatcher’s TINA, There Is No Alternative, whereas we should say TATA, There Are Thousands of Alternatives”
- Susan George

“The immense destruction that a new pulse signals is both frightening and creative. The only way to approach such a period, in which uncertainty is very large and one cannot predict what the future holds, is not to predict, but to experiment and act inventively and exuberantly via diverse adventures in living.”
- C.S. “Buzz” Holling, From Complex Regions to Complex Worlds

“Against practicality we Futurists therefore disdain the example and admonition of tradition in order to invent at any cost something new which everyone considers crazy. […] Convinced that in the probable future conflagration those who are most agile, most ready for action, will win, we Futurists have injected agility into world literature with words-in-liberty and simultaneity. We have generated surprises with illogical syntheses and dramas of inanimate objects that have purged the theatre of boredom. Having enlarged sculptural possibility with anti-realism, having created geometric architectonic splendour without decorativism and made cinematography and photography abstract, we will now establish the way of eating best suited to an ever more high speed, airborne life.”
- Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Manifesto of Futurist Cooking

I think when things get kinda slow on this blog I’m going to start posting more little brain fart things like this. I have an enormous collection of quotes sitting in a folder on my desktop that I never share with anyone, so I may as well post them here.

I’ve been writing lately about Peter Lamborn Wilson aka Hakim Bey. Well here are some more tidbits of incendiary insight from the poet laureate of “ontological anarchy”…

First up, an incredible interview from 2005 where he speaks his mind about peak oil, gentrification, organic food corporatism, the sad state of the anti-war movement and more. There’s so much here I find myself agreeing with, and to hear Wilson talk plainly and lucidly about current events - a topic he doesn’t usually address but which is obviously unavoidable - is very refreshing. A taste:

“I went to a Peace March yesterday – it was the anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq. I swear it was like being back in the 60s again: same clothes, same slogans […] We’ve been saying this for 40 years and we still haven’t realized that symbolic action and symbolic discourse is NOT Action! And this is even better: there was a counter-demonstration, and the anti-demonstrators were yelling at us that we were communists! This is like a civil war reenactment; it’s like people in medieval costumes pretending to be knights and ladies. Totally bizarre. […] And this is it! You go, you have a march, you say: ‘Not in my name!’ And then you go home and watch TV. You don’t then go out and start an alternative institution: a church, a farm, a commune…”

Having just spent part of my weekend in Woodstock, NY, I can wholly sympathize with that sentiment. Secluded in the woods of upstate New York, swamped with peace poles, aging folk musicians, and overpriced Bob Dylan t-shirts, it’s hard to imagine these people actually think that their endless chants of “peace peace peace” are actually accomplishing anything. Just as Bey’s experience with peace marches felt to him like a civil war re-enactment, I couldn’t help feeling as if the entire town of Woodstock was part of some new kind of Renaissance Fair or living museum - a Colonial Williamsburg for the 20th century; historical interpreters acting out the summer of love in miniature for all eternity, now surrounded by camera-clad tourists and yuppies in their country homes. (Coincidentally, Momus wrote a blog entry about a very similar phenomenon of cultural time warp just last week.)

Moving on… this essay by Bey, originally published in The Fifth Estate, was such a mindfuck the first time I read it that many of its ideas have now formed (in part) the basis for a film I’m currently working on. The essay’s main thesis posits the invention of money as “humanity’s one really totally successful experiment in magic”:

“In the form of money, the exterior soul, shattered into fragments, so to speak, can be put into circulation ([exchanged for desire, passed on to heirs like an immortal virus, or, rather like a dead thing that magically contains life and “begets” itself endlessly in usury]) but also stolen, monopolized, guarded by dragons, so that some unlucky humans can be stripped of all soul, while others gorge or hoard up soul-bits of ancestors and victims in their goulish caves or ‘banks,’ etc.”

In exploring this idea, he touches upon Proudhon, Midas, cargo cults, Mauss’ gift economy, and Jack and the Beanstalk. Also intimately related is this lecture on the history of money he gave less than a year ago. I haven’t been able to find any transcriptions or recordings of it, so the summary given on that blog will have to do.

And if you’re looking for more, I’d hope you’d ignore the god-awful web design and take a look at deoxy, leftbank.org, and gyw.com where a ton of his writings are available for free. Icing on the cake: it seems like that last one is hidden within the website of some Finnish chemical processing risk assessment firm - how subversive!

<< 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)

A post I made in February reported how industrial designer Thomas Thwaites was attempting to build an electric toaster from scratch, “beginning by mining the raw materials and ending with a product that Argos sells for only £3.99.”

Well, he had another show last month documenting his progress:

He also has video documentation on Vimeo and you can follow his progress on his site. There are plans for a book.

Recently, I’ve found myself re-connecting with my childhood obsessions and fantasies. Through camp counseling, home videos, late night conversations about pre-teen weirdness, and a box full of old school journals and comics, I’m finding inspiration everywhere. At times, I’m perplexed - words and drawings that I once created now seem impenetrable to me; another language; hieroglyphics. I attempt to imbue them with my own meanings, and perhaps they are more interesting now that I am the outsider, but they’re not the same. Other times, I am transported back - my mind is able to re-connect with a way of thinking that I had thought for sure was lost forever, fading rapidly sometime shortly after hitting puberty. I make plans… for zines collecting the strangest of my childhood writing and drawings, inviting others to contribute their own; for a television show capturing the somewhat dark, overtly weird atmosphere of late elementary and early middle school experience, its plots mined from the collected stories of each of my friends - a mix between Twin Peaks and Degrassi; for films; for essays. My art, my ideas, and the way I look at the world takes on a big, healthy dose of child-like wonder.

I’m thrilled, then, to stumble upon this website…

The Play Generated Map and Documents Archive (PlaGMaDA) is an organization whose “mission is to preserve, present, and interpret play generated cultural artifacts, namely manuscripts and drawings created to communicate a shared imaginative space.” In other words: they collect and exhibit home-made RPG maps, art, and other documents. Tim H, who runs the site, outlines in this blog post his belief that such artifacts qualify as folk art, and I most certainly would agree with him. If I was a rich man, I’d give him the money to start a museum (or at the very least, publish a book).

I was very big into making games and RPGs as a kid, and produced a TON of this kind of stuff. Sadly, I think most of it was thrown out by me when I decided to stop “wasting my time” and start focusing on more “serious” artistic endeavors when I was about 14 or so. What a pity.

Also of interest: The Hand Drawn Map Association.

Because this post will be very long, I’ll split it up into two three many parts.

I’ve been on an Adam Curtis fix of late. Curtis makes television documentaries such as 2002’s The Century of the Self and 2004’s The Power of Nightmares. His films focus not only on the direct connections between people and groups (some of which can be astonishing and unexpected), but on the way in which ideas often have implications far beyond what might initially be perceived. They often give off the frightening tone of a conspiracy theory, suggesting an undiscovered history of hidden connections and sinister plots, and yet they completely undermine the very notion that a successful conspiracy is even possible.

“Where people do set out to have conspiracies, they don’t ever end up like they’re supposed to,” Curtis stated in an interview with Errol Morris, “History is a series of unintended consequences resulting from confused actions, some of which are committed by people who may think they’re taking part in a conspiracy, but it never works out the way they intended.” Curtis’ series take this idea of unintended consequences as their starting points, demonstrating how often radical, liberatory ideas such as those of Wilhelm Reich, R.D. Laing, and the Human Potential Movement were used by powerful elites to form the basis of new methods of social control. I cannot overstate the importance of these films: the fact that they don’t show them in every American high school is almost criminal.

Way back in 2007, Momus posted a blog entry titled “Bourriaud x Curtis” in which he presented a series of notes drawing parallels between Curtis’ The Trap and Nicolas Bourriaud’s book Relational Aesthetics. Having both just begun watching The Trap and reading Relational Aesthetics, I find it fitting to expand upon Momus’ notes. I also wish, however, to incorporate additional points of reference. Firstly, R.D. Laing, who’s The Politics of Experience I’m also currently reading, and who plays a large role in The Trap. Secondly, Hakim Bey, who’s collection of utopian essay-poems, T.A.Z., I’ve been periodically dipping into for the past sixth months.

(links to watch The Trap and The Century of the Self online can be found here)

For those of you familiar with the thinkers and works I’m writing about, I hope I provide new ways of thinking about them. For those of you who are unfamiliar, I hope I pique your interest enough so that you might seek them out on your own. All of them are well worth reading/watching, and seeing as how this post will barely scratch the surface of all these things, I highly recommend that you do so.

The Trap traces the trajectory of game theory (a mathematical model of predicting human behavior developed by a right wing think tank during the Cold War) in influencing contemporary psychiatry, politics, and military policy. “[H]ow a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today’s idea of freedom.” Curtis argues that game theory presents an inaccurate and dangerous conception of human nature in which human beings are selfish, suspicious, and incapable of altruism or empathy. John Nash, who had a large influence in the development of the theory, was a paranoid schizophrenic who would later attribute much of his theorizing to his paranoia.

From here, Curtis moves on to introduce R.D. Laing, a radical British psychiatrist of the 1960s. During that time, schizophrenic patients were typically treated as less than human. Restraint against their will, forced medication (of powerful psychotropic drugs in high doses), and shock therapy were the norm. Laing was one of the first psychiatrists to actually talk to his schizophrenic patients, and found that amazingly, all of them became well enough to leave the institution in short time. Within a year, however, all of them had returned. This led him to study the families of his patients - the home situations to which they were returning. His conclusion was that where a patient was “disturbed, their families were often very disturbing.”

From here, he would go on to study not merely the families of schizophrenics, but the families of “normal,” clinically healthy individuals. The method he used to examine the interactions between family members would find inspiration its in game theory. The results of these studies was a radical treatise on familial and group psycho-dynamics (Sanity, Madness, and the Family), in which he claimed that in all group dynamics, but in families most especially, psychological manipulation of the other group members for ones own benefit was pervasive (placing conditions on one’s love, for instance, or making a loved one feel guilty, in order to get them to act a certain way).

Here is where I disagree with Curtis’ interpretation of Laing. In The Trap, Curtis makes the accusation that it was Laing’s use of game theory-inspired methods that led to his conclusions, and that these conclusions further perpetuate the paranoid, robotic model of human behavior put forth by Nash. But this is simply not true. The beginning of The Politics of Experience finds Laing highly critical of game theory, listing it alongside behaviorism and object relations theory as models of human psychology that he finds “dehumanizing” and a “mystification” of human nature. These forms of psychiatry, he said, merely reproduced in their own theory the symptoms they hoped to treat.

Anyone who’s ever felt hurt or pressured by their parents, anyone who’s ever been in a romantic relationship, anyone who remembers trying desperately to fit in as a kid, can attest to the fact that the manipulations Laing describes take place frequently. Most of us would admit that we have perpetrated them on numerous occasions - whether knowingly or not. But unlike Nash, Laing does not propose these cruel “games” as the total array of human possibility. He sees them as regrettable aspects of our nature, but ones that, if we are aware of them, can be overcome or at least minimized.

Laing and Curtis are essentially arguing the same thing: that the propagation of false conceptions of human nature such as game theory have had an ultimately dehumanizing effect on society. In order to counteract that effect, a new, fuller, more human conception is necesarry.

Laing would go on to establish the Philadelphia Association at Kingsley Hall, an experimental treatment center for schizophrenics that completely did away with coercion, encouraged creative expression, and placed patients and psychiatrists on equal footing. He also challenged the validity of psychiatric labeling. He saw psychiatry as a highly political practice, and rejected the idea that it was the psychiatrist’s job to make his patient “normal.” Rather, he saw normalcy itself as mentally and socially unhealthy. “The perfectly adjusted bomber pilot may be a greater threat to species survival than the hospitalized schizophrenic deluded that the Bomb is inside him,” he wrote, “Our society may itself have become biologically dysfunctional, and some forms of schizophrenic alienation from the alienation of society may have a sociobiological function that we have not recognized.”

Is society as a whole dysfunctional? Is it possible to be of sound mental health in a dysfunctional society? John Nash mathematically calculated that if everyone acted solely in their own self-interest, a stable society would result. But what good is stability when you cannot connect with another human being? When you are constantly suspicious of everyone you are close to? What good is stability when love is impossible?

NEXT TIME, IN PART 2: how the ideas of Bourriaud, Bey, and others constitute a potential “treatment plan” to match the grim diagnosis of society offered by Curtis and Laing.

>> Curtis x Laing x Bourriaud x Bey x more (Part 2: Remedy?)
>> Curtis x Laing x Bourriaud x Bey x more (Part 3.1: Critique)