Saturday, December 10, 2005

"Art is ethics by other means" (review)


This past Thursday, Dec. 8th I attended an event at PS1 celebrating the recent “visual issue” of The Believer. Here is a cross-section of a review I started writing:

Leading up to Matthew Ronay and Brandon Stosuy’s live “interview,” Eric Fischl extemporized on the “death of painting,” beginning with the observation: Vincent Van Gogh cut off his ear and made a self-portrait of himself afterwards and the painting was considered art; approximately a century later Chris Burden had an assistant shoot him in the arm with a rifle and this action, and not its “documents” and reliquaries, was instead considered the work of art. Throughout his presentation, Fischl proceeded largely by surveying particular sculptural and painted works and considering an evolution of painting and sculpture towards their dematerialization (or “death,” as he referred to it) and works after. Where I thought Fischl was connecting some interesting dots, he seemed careful or unwilling to draw conclusions during his talk, putting forward instead questions and conjectures that “interested” him.

Fischl concluded his presentation with some remarks about the current “state of art” (and NYC-based visual art in particular) post 9/11. His moralizing finale was both traumatic and pedestrian: artists failed to respond adequately to 9/11, to take “action” through their work, and this failure represents a "paradigmatic shift" in art’s claim to a moral and/or political efficacy. In response to Fischl’s conclusion the artist and self-proclaimed "amateur materialist” sitting beside me, Eliza Newman-Saul, conveyed a more radical conclusion, one that may go productively against the grain (and the refrains) of ongoing assessments of that “disaster”: that merely siting a “paradigmatic change” after 9/11 obviates the critical imperative to investigate the event’s historicity, and History itself as both a synchronous and diachronous procession. Or, in other words, that there is in fact no “paradigmatic change” nor necessarily an “event character” about 9/11 in its relation to “art,” but only, perhaps, what Barrett Watten calls "bad history": history traumatically cathected by the dialectical “blindspots" and "traumatic kernels" of a truth content neither arbitrarily unprecedented or absolutely discontinuous.

Where Fischl presented a moral response to art after 9/11, coincidentally Ronay / Stosuy presented what I took to be an ethical or ethological one. So much depends upon the distinction. Beginning with clips of football injuries in which one could see knees fully dislocated from their joints and legs hanging from their ligaments, Ronay proceeded mainly to address his own work after 9/11. His conclusion: artists tended to “internalize” the event and in turn responded by making work around problems of “death,” “sexuality,” and “the body”. As Ronay admitted, these are problems of “existential” concern; but they are also “ethological” ones insofar as they investigate “what a body can do” (Spinoza) and what one is capable of believing in (Deleuze’s Philosophy should give us something in which to believe qua Art should give us something to believe in). As Stosuy fed Ronay leading questions, the artist continued to ponder “love” and “hedonism” during a time of “empire”. Should not love have to account for, even provide for, “anal cupcake beads” -- the artist cunningly asked. Ronay’s work, a work I have only recently become familiar with, seems to present questions concerning the production of bodies in relation to a cultural “imagination” and a “real” both radically profaned and spiritualized. This chiasmus of the imaginary and the real may account for a work of Ronay’s in which one sees the plastic representation of a dog’s backside observing the dog’s genitals to be in the shape of a young girl’s. Ronay’s world thus seems a plastic one in which actuality has given way to the "virtual" in a material form.

If not for Fischl’s moral claims after 9/11, I could see the artist struggling to make a point similar to Ronay's in his presentation, where his constellation of 20th century works of art culminated with pics of Paul McCarthy’s own cartoonish sculptural monstrosities, and the haunting flockings of the Chapman Bros. sexualized and ambigendered children: that the flip-side of events like the torture of prisoners at Abu Gahib -- and ultimate degradation of the body torture always entails -- is an ongoing proliferation of hellish and disorganizied bodies in the "American"-Western imagination. If we can make a basic distinction between morality and ethics we might say that morality attends the “ideal” while ethics does the dyad “real” / "unreal" – the fluctuating conditions of bodies, of relations and fields of force.

The scene of Ronay / Stosuy unflinchingly encountering pornography, pedophilia and extreme bodily states presents the problem of the “real” where moral prescription a la “artists should have done something else after 9/11” will continue to fail. Never is there the moral imperative of “something else” (not even after the most despicable acts of humanity to which, I might add, 9/11 can hardly compare) but only historical consciousness always trying to keep pace with events in the world and tragically lagging behind (or retrospectively pressuposing them, as the case may also be). The final irony of Fischl’s talk may then be his devotion to the sensitivities of artists, which makes me think that it is not the individuated artist who fails, but the society of which she partakes. Art is ethics by other means insofar as the artist may present the problem of this failure and a culture may struggle to participate in this presentation and make conscious to itself what is being presented.

The final presentation of the evening was given by artist Cory Archangel. Archangel’s performance may serve as a kind of third party to Fischl and Ronay / Stosuy, where I have always found the artist to chase his timely critiques of art trends in relation to electronic culture with an endearing and effective showmanship.

My first glimpses of this crucial balancing act in Archangel’s work were taken when I knew him as a student at Oberlin College. In addition to presenting numerous videos and tape pieces with his collaborator, Paul Davis, during their junior recital in Oberlin’s music conservatory, Archangel concluded the recital with a simple yet radical lesson. Using an obsolete Apple software called Lisa, and addressing his audience thru a “real-time” video feed, Archangel revealed the software’s coding to the audience. He proceeded to explain how binary code works to encode information -- and specifically information pertaining to licensing and copying permission -- and, for his final trick, pointed to a particular moment in Lisa's code where one could turn the copy protection on or off.

The activism and didacticism lurking behind Archangel’s deceptively self-evident projects were pervasive during the period we overlapped at Oberlin (1996-1999), and especially among a group of students actively investigating questions of emerging media: Archangel, Jacob Ciocci (Paper Rad), Jen Liu, Laboratory Theater and Ray Sweeten to name just a few. I found the spirit of these investigations to be in full effect the other night as Archangel performed the not-so-simple (as we were all too learn) action of closing his Friendster account (and thus, in his words, committing online “suicide”).

What struck me again was how a relatively routine action could become an important object lesson in the pragmatics and metaphysics of electronic media in Archangel’s hands. If there is a trick to Archangel’s didactic performances it is likely the very opposite of the one used by con men in the three card monty, where the artist's conceit is not in making the card appear where it did not seem to be, but in revealing that which we imperiously keep track of but so often can not recognize in its value and significance. Artists often talk about their work as being “participatory” or “democratic”; Archangel’s art is genuinely participatory and popular where the majority of art that intends participation and democratic-populism fails. The evidence is not in the show of hands from his audience or a gratuitous Q&A, but in his audience’s frequent shouting out of instructions about how to use technologies constitutive of their common experience. It is in recognition, a recognition that goes back to an ancient "state of the art": that we use technology, but that technology also uses us; and this mutual using reflects real conditions of experience and appearance.

After countless interruptions, technical difficulties, digressions, shaggy-dog stories and witty banter the actual moment of deletion was once more prolonged by a survey requesting Archangel’s reason for deleting his account. To which he typed (not without typos and excessive exclamations marks): “the advancement of artistic performance”. Indeed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Monday, December 05, 2005

3 after Bresson*


Vicious Circles (Bresson)
with Gregg Biglieri

Love cannot exist between people
-- Jack Spicer

as the tremendous volume of the music
takes over obscured by their long hair
they seem to be mourning
-- George Oppen

1.
Children again
Do you hear children
Again
Do you sight
Like a horse
One eye sees
This good wicked throne
Too soon
To be future too
Soon to be past
Bullets fly again and
Broken blood pumps

My love whose eye is this
Don’t
Forsake me
Community
Round round
Community
For the trees with
Bright flags we go

For the darkness of love
Love
The dark forest
No justice just don’t kill
The king yet
Like a vicious carousel
The horses go round

A round a round community
With nowhere to go
A forest fossilizes
With bright flags and sharp
Tongues and lances
We go
This justice this
Justice perhaps
The trees for the forest

Camera attests
The torso simply framed
A lovely
And brute objecthood
With dark hearts we go
In love where the camera
Cares to wait

Horse whose eye is this
To risk
Don’t forsake me
Roundness the thing is
A universe
Bright camera with a mind
Of its own
Mind of the eye

Lovely a brute dark kiss
Kiss me
I battle to risk
With mind’s bright swords
Swiftly we go
Justice is
Eye’s apocalypse

Blindful injustice
The round community without
Head
Brain needs eyes like
A hole to risk
This bright lance
Love’s body
For the trees

The trees for bloody
Community
A
Bloody pile all these
Horses
All these flags go
For the headless
I am afraid eyes need brains
I am
Afraid I
Love you so

2.
Free radicals children
With a bullet graze
This grassy open
Do sheep gather to shepherd
This thought of death?

Because this time is corrupt
Because
A human community is lacking turn
The other cheek
Kill
While no one is watching
No kid too bold

None are guilty enough
None guilty
Enough to love
To hate to love them
All protect
Nothing
Sheep gather at
The end of this

Roll to our own death
Happily bundle
There is no cold so cold as this
To love to hate to love
This generous violence
A world of mud

I fling no child
Left behind
No kid too bold
Don’t kiss me
Not cruel enough to be
A real beauty
We fall dead at the end
Of any noble thought
This opening

Because they will always
Be corrupt
Because
They will always presume
Their guilt is not free enough
There is no cold so cold
As cauterizing

3.
The wind bloweth
O my breath
Our breasts the lisp of little
And wicked things
Things
Wicked in their thing-ness

The eyes of animals follow
My breath
A wicked thesis
Saintly judgement
Bullets blow
Over this hill how pastoral

Without morality without
Conscience
The wind bloweth with an inhuman will
To escape disaster
Saintly eyes follow
The gazes of other animals
And children without

Morality they
Are wicked children
The camera finds the place
From which no one looks
In the rearview
Of a bus
In the eyes the eyes
Of a blameless beast

Sing sweetly and long
For that ass
The wind bloweth where it listeth
That gaze will survive
Sheep and rape
Bottles broken over the tain

*composed spring-summer 05. Thanks to Gregg Biglieri who offered suggestions for revision.

Cruelty (an analogy)

Cruelty is to nobility

as meanness
is to

bourgeois
subjectivity and other

drudgerous levels
of "selfhood"

...where nobility = aristocracy
of the will

and drama
of intensified thinking.

Thinking

at the level

of drive?

The thots very much
of children
and
"psychotic" / imaginative
adulthoods?