50 Ways To Leave Your Lover

Or, let’s find a completely new art criticism

Seul Bi and the "troop soup" (pude chige)

For most of the twentieth century, art was judged with respect to the previously existing state of the medium. What mattered was the kind of rupture it made, the unexpected formal or semiotic elements that it brought into play, the way it displaced the conventions of the genre or the tradition. The prize at the end of the evaluative process was a different sense of what art could be, a new realm of possibility for the aesthetic. Let’s take it as axiomatic that all that has changed, definitively.

The backdrop against which art stands out now is a particular state of society. What an installation, a performance, a concept or a mediated representation can do with its formal, affective and semiotic means is to mark out a possible or effective shift with respect to the laws, the customs, the measures, the mores, the technical and organizational devices that define how we must behave and how we can relate to each other at a given time and in a given place. What you look for in art is a different way to live, a fresh chance at coexistence. Anything less is just the seduction of novelty - the hedonism of insignificance.

If that’s the case (if the axiom really holds), then a number of fascinating questions arise - for the artist, of course, but also for the critic. Where the critic is concerned, one good question is this: How do you address yourself to artists or publics or potential peers across the dividing lines that separate entire societies? How do you evaluate what counts as a positive or at least a promising change in the existing balance of a foreign culture?

I’m sure you immediately see how difficult this is. Already in the past, it was hard enough to say that a particular aesthetic tradition and a particular state of the medium defined the leading edge, the point at which a rupture became interesting. Yet still there were times when all the painters seemed to flock to Rome, then later to Paris, then later to New York City; and so through the sheer aggregation of techniques and styles, the fiction of a leading edge could be maintained, at least by some. But in the face of a simultaneous splintering and decline of what used to be called “the West,” and a correlative rise of some of “the Rest,” who could seriously say that a certain set of local, national or regional laws, customs, measures, mores and technical or organizational devices are really the most interesting ones to transgress or even break into pieces, in hopes of a better way of being? Or to be even cruder about it, and closer to the actual state of things: Who can seriously claim that the Euro-American forms of society are the benchmark against which change must be measured - even if those societies are still the most opulent and most developed and most heavily armed with all the nastiest of technological weapons?

Let’s face it, the task of a transnational critique for the new arts of living within, against and beyond the existing states of the world’s societies is daunting to say the least. However, I think all is not lost in this domain, for three connected reasons. The first is that over the last, say, fifty years, and particularly over the last fifteen, we have seen the still very superficial but nonetheless real emergence of something like a world society. To put it another way, there is now some kind of connective tissue (call it the transnational economy, the transportation system and global English) that does bind our possibilities of life together, though without in any way reducing them to being identical. The second is that the vast proliferation of readily accessible archives (libraries, web pages, video banks, record collections, museums) offers at least some chance to rapidly sample all sorts of information and impressions about what kind of shape a particular society is in, and even what kinds of steps are being made to try and change it. And third, given the above and maybe a good translator too, what you can do is actually try to stage a dialogue with the people you are meeting, and hope that some of them respond, give you pointers, correct your mistakes, calm down your unconscious arrogance and add their own reflections and aesthetic productions into the mix - not only to obtain a better and more useful critique of their society, but also of yours. Which last, I might add, is something essential and desperately needed, particularly if you are a European or an American.

The above is a theoretical program, but also just a reflection on some experiences as a critic and activist out in the wide world. The most recent of these experiences was particularly interesting: I was invited to participate in and to evaluate a project of artistic remembrance and envisioning, focused on the American military bases that are now (maybe) in the process of closing and moving out of the South Korean city of Dongducheon, and indeed of a range of sites around the DMZ, even as a new megabase is prepared further to the south in a place called Pyeongtaek. This was an incredible chance to get a first-hand look at what I think is the scourge of American and Western democracy, namely what Chalmers Johnson calls the “empire of bases.” (And I happen to think that the first-hand look, however fleeting and superficial, is of tremendous importance whenever you really want to learn anything). As it turned out though, this was also an incredible chance to start getting to know a unique spot on the earth, South Korea, which for the worst of reasons has been particularly close to the U.S. over the last six decades, despite the fact that many many Koreans would really rather close that never-ending chapter called the Cold War on the Korean Peninsula.

The trip was too short, but still amazing, and it got me to do some new things in criticism (maybe dubious ones), like using a pop song for starters rather than a quote from Foucault, and approaching street demonstrations via Korean feminists rather than Toni Negri. In the end I had to conclude that the old French saying, “Celui qui aime a toujours raison” (those who love something are always right), is in fact wrong, since we humans are capable of awful loves, and not only in aesthetics. That said, we’re also uniquely capable of starting all over again, as y’all probably know in your intimate experience. And so let’s ask the question: What would tomorrow look like without 750+ American military bases scattered across the planet? With a little help from my new friends, I tried to go further with that line of inquiry, as you can see right here:

http://sunsetproject.wordpress.com

And now the dialogue is open for whoever has inspiration.

Some Reflections on Global Mapping

click the image for that deep understanding

an old net-friend “dr. woooo” wrote this to me:

re: Sovereign Wealth Funds and the current global restructure, I’m struggling to keep up with it all, things move so quick now it seems, it is nearly impossible to develop a ‘map’

Indeed, is there any point to it?

My idea over the last 5 years has been that the incessant transforms of global capital are in our nervous systems, like it or not, and that it could be more interesting to see them on the outside, right there big as life, like a skyscraper or a cement factory or a stock exchange. It could be useful and meaningful to map out the restructuring in ways both theoretical and aesthetic, rather than just taking each new jolt through the headlines, the fashions, the clashes in the street, the new management “tools,” the labor movements, the glimpsed oppression at the borders. Since I was flexible (after all) and could ride the cultural air-ticket to a wide variety of destinations, I decided to Just Do It. By going to Edge Europe, to Argentina, to China, to the Midwest and the Middle East, I hoped to meet people who would open up their nervous systems, so that we could not only compare jolts, but better, explore other lengths and depths of time, share different kinds of aspirations, dreams and satirical ironies, replacing headlines with lifelines. I wanted to ask: How has your existence changed since this whirligig of electrocapital came around? And I wanted to feel out what might have come before, not paradise, but historical experience on the intimate level, the kind that shapes a body and the tone of a voice, or the way families and lovers relate, the way people protest or laugh it off or complain or try to escape.

FURTHER:

The Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor in the Recent Past and the Distant Futures

the drift as seen by Claire Pentecost; more here

The Glass Bead Game, a novel by Herman Hesse, envisaged a utopian epoch of society in which highly cultivated spiritual aristocrats would play an extraordinary game of aesthetic contemplation, using glass beads that condensed the quintessence of a period, a style or an entire civilization. That was then: the distant future. The bead you see now is actually a piece of garbage, just an average bit of industrial refuse — or rather it’s a resource, since it was “harvested” at the Creative Reuse Warehouse on 135th Street where the City of Chicago runs aground on factory ruins, incipient farmland and the nature/culture chaos of the Calumet River. The dystopian future is already here. Today, no-one can claim to condense the quintessence of anything, let alone play games with it. In fact we don’t know what to do with all the garbage that industrial civilization has accumulated over the past two centuries. Rather than expertly rearranging the existing map of cultural crystals, around a dozen of us decided to try consciously refracting some scattered pieces of the territory, while talking about what it might be with whoever we might happen to meet. The result was the Continental Drift through the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor.

How to get to know the place where you’re living? One of the answers is to settle in deeply, to sink roots, to become part of the landscape or the urban beat. But a “place” in contemporary times is always also a “space,” crisscrossed by a warp and weft of flows that end up weaving almost everything you see, the solid seams. What we wanted to do was to filter through the regional neighborhood, to  check out the nearby distances, at a time when Champaign sounds closer to Paris than to Urbana — except to those who move constantly between them. What if there was radical culture right here in the Midwest and we were not seeing it? Or being it? The idea was to let slip an open secret: the existence of latent cultural corridors that you alone can bring to life, just by circulating within them.

The Midwest Radical Culture Corridor

A CALL TO FARMS!

CONTINENTAL DRIFT is an invitation to look at our collective existence on all the relevant scales: the intimate, the local, the national, the continental, and the global. Continental Drift is a mobile assemblage of people presenting their projects, observations, experiments, discoveries and questions, and producing value through social exchange. Continental Drift through the MRCC is a self-educating tour through our concrete world and its abstract representations, discovering distant lives in familiar situations, and embracing the interdependency that links what is usually treated as separate. Continental Drift is intended for anyone seeking to locate global forces in daily life and to reorient aesthetic invention in response to an ethics of equality.

Join us June 4-14, 2008 in the Radical Midwest!

For updates sees: http://radicalmidwest.blogspot.com

Calendar of Events (tentative) - see below:

GSA Security Days in Vienna

Frank Beauregard spoke by teleconference at the GSA Security Days in Munich

Brian Holmes picks up the slack for the Viennese Days:

“Security Aesthetic = Systems Panic”

This isn’t the first time I’ve participated in the events of the Global Security Alliance. Previously I spoke under the fictional name of Frank Beauregard, director of the Paris-based “Risk A” division, with some slick European ideas on “security aesthetics” for cultural peacekeeping. The chic aesthetic future of security tried to look good in the face of an explicit critique of warlike, ineffective Anglo-American practices used in Iraq and Afghanistan. But what I want to talk about today, in case anybody missed it, is the implicit angle of Beauregard’s critique, and the target of GSA operations in general. None other than the deep paranoia and drive toward total paranoid control that’s now being expressed in even the “fuzziest” realms of security society, namely culture.

Let’s approach this whole thing philosophically. Where does security end, and insecurity begin? Systems analysts recognize this as a classic boundary question. Its answer determines the precise deployment of any security system. But as we shall see, this particular boundary question cannot be answered under present conditions, except through the definition of a second system, a specifically interrogatory one. Drawing on the special definition of an American art critic of the 1960s, I’ll call this second kind of bounded entity an “aesthetic system.”

Recapturing Subversion

Introduction to the forthcoming book:

ESCAPE THE OVERCODE

Creative Art in the Control Society

Let’s go straight to the point. How does art become subversive of the social order? How does it undermine normal, legitimate, accepted patterns of behavior, and how does it open up possibilities for transformations of everyday life? What can subversive art accomplish in the political arena? And what are its limits, its unrealized potentials?

To answer those questions you have to describe a specific kind of society, and the subjectivities who act within it. In this book I’m going to deal first of all with world society, which exists in the lives of millions and perhaps billions of people, even if it is still very strange and new. Beginning in the 1970s, changes in the organization of production, distribution, communication and finance made possible an integrated world market. With the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989, the integrated world market became a reality, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, not only in the “core” regions of North America, Western Europe and Japan, but across an immense tapestry of intensively connected urban hubs and more-or-less saturated suburban and rural hinterlands. That’s globalization. Of course you also have no-go zones, pockets of insurrection, shooting wars and countries that threaten secession or fall entirely off the map of connectivity. Capitalism is defined by permanent crisis. The worldwide extension of a readiness to respond to permanent crisis, and to profit off it, is what defines the globalization of capitalist subjectivity.

Hunger for Change: France / Argentina

click for a close-up

An exchange on the Empyre list and the current exhibition of Etcetera in Paris got me thinking of a million things….

Maybe the reason I felt so close to Etcetera and the Grupo de Arte Callejero when we finally met in 2004, is because we went through similar relations to the inflated art scenes of the 90s. Guattari describes it perfectly in Chaosmosis, when he says that art “can move in a direction parallel to uniformization, or play the role of an operator in the bifuraction of subjectivity.” That was exactly the story of cultural consumption in the decades of Mitterand and his culture minister, Jack Lang. The “landscape of French art” became so uniform in those years, with its pseudo-diversity of minor differences always trying to find a way into the institutional market. Meanwhile you knew that the whole world was changing, new divides were opening up in society, new possibilities too. The question was how to break out of this slick, sophisticated conformism, to touch something real in this life? In the mid-1990s I was struggling with the economics of globalization and demonstrating with artists out in the streets. To be an activist then was not fashionable in any way, it was considered totally retrograde in artistic circles. I think that must have been even more intensely the case in Buenos Aires, when HIJOS started to form in 1996.

An egalitarian culture…

…by participatory means, for whoever wants to start right now

“We put our bodies on the line, you put your face in the picture” — Grupo Etcetera

Sometimes you have to face the facts, the ones you do not choose. I’m called an art critic. I produce an apparently endless stream of descriptions, analyses and reflections on certain kinds of objects, images and practices. There is so much to be seen, to be known, to be experienced. But sometimes it seems that all this activity begs the basic questions. For me, they are these: What is art today? How is its critique carried out? For whom can it be useful?

The answers I aim to give are quite personal. They stem from a specific desire, a specific curiosity. But they are also the product of a history, with all its overwhelming force. What we do not choose is what we can most easily share, or what we can’t avoid sharing. So the answers to the most basic questions always end up in some undecidable place, between the singular and the inevitable.

Brits in Hock

or, Atlas Shrugged Again

the world-famous penny pyramid

Hey y’all, I just read an amazingly interesting piece of news trivia. It’s an article with one of those lurid yellow-press byline titles: “Debt-Gorged British Start to Worry That the Party is Ending.” New York Times no less. All the puzzle-pieces finally fall into place.

Some backgrounders: Reading a book called “China’s New Consumers”–where you find out that by comparison to the West, there really aren’t any–I was totally intrigued to discover that not only the Americans, but also the Australians and yes, the Brits, fulfill the role of “consumers of last resort” on the world market, eagerly ingurgitating the floods of goods pouring out of Guangzhou Province and seemingly everywhere else on the Chinese seabord. Naive and incorrigible culturalist that I am, I just thought “Hmmm, no doubt those rich Anglophone countries are particularly exposed to the fantastic publicity machines built up during the Fordist period to make national populations consume their own production, and so now they are pursuing that role in the world society.” Never for a moment did I make the slightest inquiry into where the money comes from.

Activist Research

Geopolitics to Geopoetics

Seminar at 16 Beaver St., NYC (2006)

How does a world come together? How does a world fall apart? Neoliberalism made these questions into one — and September 11 showed that there can be no perfect synthesis. In the twenty-first century the continents have gone adrift. Here is where the maps of a new “great game” unfold, for activists and also for researchers. Locating yourself against the immense horizons of disaster, then finding the modes and scales of concrete intervention into lived experience, are the pathways for grassroots intellectual action in the contemporary world-system.

Wafaa Bilal: Speech in a Democracy

“Virtual Jihadi”

Wafaa Bilal is currently an artist-in-residence at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the city of Troy, New York. Shortly after his arrival on March 5, his exhibition in the gallery of the Arts department was closed to the public by order of the university’s president. Today there is no certainty that the exhibition will be reopened. What I want to show is that every aspect of Wafaa Bilal’s visit to RPI points back to one fundamental issue: the value of free speech in a democracy.

YEAR ZERO

AMSTERDAM CREATIVE CITY

The “Fool’s Façade” in Amsterdam

Merijn Oudenampsen, who gave such a great talk on the Creative City back at the my-CI conference in Amsterdam in November 06, has now published a new version of his ideas in Variant magazine:

www.variant.randomstate.org//pdfs/issue31/31CreativeCity.pdf

The article is excellent, with many sharp insights and lots of valuable resources in terms of bibliography. And above all, if anyone actually wanted to start critiquing the creative city — rather than just oozing with it on the way up to illusory middle-class complacency and blindness — then they could take his article as an inspiration. I mean, as an inspiration to leave the whole Creative Industries discourse behind and focus on reality again.

Book Materials

ESCAPE THE OVERCODE

Continental Drift through the Creative Economy

Lemmy Caution

–An hour ago, you were interrogated by one of the 14 million nerve centers that make up Alpha 60. Your replies were hard to codify, sometimes impossible. We deduce an intelligence above the average. But here’s the thing: in some cases we have mortal need of superior intellects; in other cases, we no less mortally distrust them.

–So, what are you going to do with me?

–For the moment, we’re ordered to show you Alpha 60.

Jean-Luc Godard, Alphaville

To live the life of embodied mind is to make maps and create models, to trace paths, to flesh out ideas, to build up visions and lose them in reality. When you’re done, tomorrow’s face is different. But today, what’s called “the creative economy” has turned into an endless game of mapping and modeling, testing and experimenting, sketching out horizons in real time: there are algorithms to twist your mind, retrace your dreams, record your appetites and coax you into the balm of the norm. The result is a paradox, for artists in particular. How to invent a desire without a need? A truth without a squad of police? A map without a destiny?

This book is about maps of power in the social and psychic spheres. It’s about models and their scales of application, at a time when continental blocs have become the guarded parks of a chaotic world-system. We leave on the trip without a compass: because yesterday’s concepts were snubbed by the corporate future. But we’ll cut some lenses along the way, just to see the reefs when we hit ‘em. Get ready for a visit to the super-market-state, a drift through the scripted labyrinths of the global casino. Dysfunctional keys open the most interesting doors: whether deeply in or completely out, no one knows. Take care in the aisles and off the road. Don’t eat the white berries. Escape the overcode.

(table of contents follows)

Facework and Embedded Fears

The Confidence Game

(for the Transmediale panel on Embedding Fear)

There are some blogs that every dedicated Internet conspiracy theorist has to read – like Global Guerillas by defense consultant John Robb, an expert on so-called “4th generation warfare.” What kind of expertise is he selling? Here’s a statement from his book Brave New War: “The threshold necessary for small groups to conduct warfare has finally been reached, and we are only starting to feel its effects. Over time, perhaps in as little as twenty years, and as the leverage provided by technology increases, this threshold will finally reach its culmination – with the ability of one man to declare war on the world and win.”

John Robb is a merchant of fear. But his product sells for a reason. In the face of his absurd statement, I’d suggest that the illusions of individual omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence, offered to each of us by abstract, impersonal information systems, have now found their perfect mirror: the all powerful terrorist. This marriage of heaven and hell could last a long long time. Our hyperindividualized world is all too well reflected in the mediated mirror of terrorism.

DIFFERENTIAL GEOGRAPHY

Research and Rhythm in Artistic Representation

The rhythmanalyst will not be obliged to leap from the inside to the outside of the bodies he observes; he should be able to succeed in listening to them together and allying them, by taking his own rhythms as a reference: by integrating the inside to the outside and vice-versa.

Henri Lefebvre, “Previsionary Portrait of the Rhythmanalyst”1

In an astonishing sequence from the video installation Corridor X, the scene shifts abruptly from a Eurovision control monitor to a make-up session under the eye of the cameras, then to a room full of TV reporters, then to a computer screen where someone is playing solitaire. We are in the official media center of the European Summit of Thessaloniki in June 2003. Outside, a huge demonstration has gathered in opposition to the European Union, to the war, to globalization. Inside, everything is ordered, ranked, segmented: politicians deliver speeches, translators pipe them into headphones, reporters clip out news bites for their stations. Security passes dangle from color-coded straps around each person’s neck, distinguishing name, access level, function. The gaze returns insistently to the control monitor, connected to four video feeds transmitted directly by cameramen outside. Feed number 4, which is going live on the air, shows the police in pursuit of black-clad anarchists; but an instant later we ourselves are thrust into the surging crowd of demonstrators, we feel their movement in our bodies, we are carried off in their flight.