.
There were a number of responses to my text For Art And The World:
http://www.valeveil.se/en/pdfs/vv_polemics_wren.pdf
I thought I would share just a few of them here.
Liv Sommerfelt wrote:
I will share this. This is a subject thar keeps nagging me. What is the sense in the fact that the time of a norwegian worker is so much more valuable than that of a congolese. First-worlders use this to exploit resources that should be shared. We abuse the globe because we can pay for it.
Yes, this is a subject for art.
Rosemary Heather wrote:
robert kennedy saw 'enjoy poverty' at TIFF and told me: "holy shit!" wish i could see it. maybe it will show up here again. it also reminded me about something elke said when she came back from burkina fasso (which is basically the world's most impoverished country). she thought the NGOs where just there to provide "jobs for Germans."
David Jhave Johnston wrote:
enjoyed yr polemic
resonated of course with "a simple truth:
that the first world achieves its wealth and comfort by ripping it violently off the backs of people in the
third world. And that our compassion for the malnourished in far away lands serves to mask the fact that
we are the ones economically benefi ting from their misery, which is in fact just a disguised form of slavery"
but
the first half of your statement is a truth i've often pondered
& i think most folks at some time (briefly, fleetingly) recognize it's validity
but it's like staring at the sun
hummans are not physiologically capable of calibrating each mouthful as a morsel of another's pain
(metabolic 'limits of empathy' meets the prevalence of carnivore activists)
while the second half of yr statement is challengable: compassion does not necessarily in and of itself 'mask the fact'
compassion may even occasionally, in rare instances of authentic altruism, be motivated by it
and since polemics are designed to provoke
yr final sentence works well: "Ignoring it should not be an option."
it provoked me to disagree: ignoring it (the complicit misery) is more than an option, it's an inevitable fact,
consciousness is disparate, diffused, multi-faceted, easily distracted and resolutely malleable
i for one find myself thinking about a lot of other stuff
i don't ignore it, i'm just incapable of always thinking about it
and compounding issue
i think distribution of wealth conforms to mathematical models of dynamic systems
it may have less to do with a failure of human empathy and political malevolence
than it is simply a structural feature of this bizarre existential field we inhabit
To which I responded:
Yes, it's true that at times compassion can lead to authentic acts altruism. However, I feel that when I see a photo of starving Africans, the compassion I feel has somehow become unlinked, disengaged, with the concrete reality of the situation. What I feel is: poor Africans, I want to help them. However, a more concrete response would be: capitalism is an untenably savage system, how can we think about starting to change it. This sympathy I feel serves to distract me from my role in the system that creates such injustices. It gives me a sense of emotional altruism which is in fact very much unearned.
However, maybe this way of putting things is overly influenced by the book I just finished reading; Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. Fisher uses the term Capitalist Realism to refer to the idea that capitalism is the only possible system and that there is no way to change it. When I see images of third world suffering I think capitalism - which I am complicit with on the level of my life and of my desire - must change, but of course have no idea how to open up this possibility even for myself.
Maybe I should have written 'completely ignoring it is not an option.' Of course if I think about these questions all the time I will drive myself insane. But at the same time I feel there must be ways to think about them.
All right, tomorrow I fly to Geneva (damaging the environment in the process, etc.) In one way, I feel all of this is just empty talk. But in this empty talk there is also a sincere desire to re-open questions which, in my daily life, seem far to closed and impermeable.
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January 14, 2010
January 12, 2010
Anger can only be a matter of venting, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there is no possibility of communality.
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The closest that most of us come to direct experience of the centrelessness of capitalism is an encounter with the call centre. As a consumer in late capitalism, you increasingly exist in two, distinct realities: the one in which the services are provided without hitch, and another reality entirely, the crazed Kafkaesque labyrinth of call centres, a world without memory, where cause and effect connect together in mysterious, unfathomable ways, where it is a miracle that anything ever happens, and you lose hope of ever passing back over to the other side, where things seem to function smoothly. What exemplifies the failure of the neoliberal world to live up to its own PR better than the call centre? Even so, the universality of bad experiences with call centres does nothing to unsettle the operating assumption that capitalism is inherently efficient, as if the problems with call centres weren’t the systematic consequences of a logic of Capital which means organizations are so fixated on making profits that they can’t actually sell you anything.
The call centre experience distils the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since – as is very quickly clear to the caller – there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could. Anger can only be a matter of venting; it is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there is no possibility of communality. Just as the anger has no proper object, it will have no effect. In this experience of a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centreless, abstract and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself.
- Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism
.
The closest that most of us come to direct experience of the centrelessness of capitalism is an encounter with the call centre. As a consumer in late capitalism, you increasingly exist in two, distinct realities: the one in which the services are provided without hitch, and another reality entirely, the crazed Kafkaesque labyrinth of call centres, a world without memory, where cause and effect connect together in mysterious, unfathomable ways, where it is a miracle that anything ever happens, and you lose hope of ever passing back over to the other side, where things seem to function smoothly. What exemplifies the failure of the neoliberal world to live up to its own PR better than the call centre? Even so, the universality of bad experiences with call centres does nothing to unsettle the operating assumption that capitalism is inherently efficient, as if the problems with call centres weren’t the systematic consequences of a logic of Capital which means organizations are so fixated on making profits that they can’t actually sell you anything.
The call centre experience distils the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since – as is very quickly clear to the caller – there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could. Anger can only be a matter of venting; it is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there is no possibility of communality. Just as the anger has no proper object, it will have no effect. In this experience of a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centreless, abstract and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself.
- Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism
.
January 11, 2010
Mark Fisher quote
.
The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its de-politicization. Considering mental illness as an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital’s drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRIs). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.
- Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism
.
The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its de-politicization. Considering mental illness as an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital’s drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRIs). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.
- Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism
.
January 10, 2010
Mark Fisher on the fight against Capitalist Realism
.
At one level, to be sure, it might look as if Green issues are very far from being ‘unrepresentable voids’ for capitalist culture. Climate change and the threat of resource-depletion are not being repressed so much as incorporated into advertising and marketing. What this treatment of environmental catastrophe illustrates is the fantasy structure on which capitalist realism depends: a presupposition that resources are infinite, that the earth itself is merely a husk which capital can at a certain point slough off like a used skin, and that any problem can be solved by the market. […] Yet environmental catastrophe features in late capitalist culture only as a kind of simulacra, its real implications for capitalism too traumatic to be assimilated into the system. The significance of Green critiques is that they suggest that, far from being they only viable political-economic system, capitalism is in fact primed to destroy the entire human environment. The relationship between capitalism and eco-disaster is neither coincidental nor accidental: capital’s ‘need of a constantly expanding market,’ its ‘growth fetish’, means that capitalism is by its very nature opposed to any notion of sustainability.
But Green issues are already a contested zone, already a site where politicization is being fought for. In what follows, I want to stress two other aporias in capitalist realism, which are not yet politicized to anything like the same degree. The first is mental health. Mental health, in fact, is a paradigm case of how capitalist realism operates. Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect.) In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most treated by the NHS. In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with James claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many young people are ill? The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.
The other phenomenon I want to highlight is bureaucracy. In making their case against socialism, neoliberal ideologues often excoriated the top-down bureaucracy which supposedly led to institutional sclerosis and inefficiency in command economies. With the triumph of neoliberalism, bureaucracy was supposed to have been made obsolete; a relic of an unlamented Stalinist past. Yet this is at odds with the experiences of most people working and living in late capitalism, for whom bureaucracy remains very much a part of everyday life. Instead of disappearing, bureaucracy had changed its form; and this new, decentralized, form has allowed it to proliferate. The persistence of bureaucracy in late capitalism does not in itself indicate that capitalism does not work – rather, what it suggests is that the way in which capitalism does actually work is very different from the picture presented by capitalist realism.
- Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism
.
At one level, to be sure, it might look as if Green issues are very far from being ‘unrepresentable voids’ for capitalist culture. Climate change and the threat of resource-depletion are not being repressed so much as incorporated into advertising and marketing. What this treatment of environmental catastrophe illustrates is the fantasy structure on which capitalist realism depends: a presupposition that resources are infinite, that the earth itself is merely a husk which capital can at a certain point slough off like a used skin, and that any problem can be solved by the market. […] Yet environmental catastrophe features in late capitalist culture only as a kind of simulacra, its real implications for capitalism too traumatic to be assimilated into the system. The significance of Green critiques is that they suggest that, far from being they only viable political-economic system, capitalism is in fact primed to destroy the entire human environment. The relationship between capitalism and eco-disaster is neither coincidental nor accidental: capital’s ‘need of a constantly expanding market,’ its ‘growth fetish’, means that capitalism is by its very nature opposed to any notion of sustainability.
But Green issues are already a contested zone, already a site where politicization is being fought for. In what follows, I want to stress two other aporias in capitalist realism, which are not yet politicized to anything like the same degree. The first is mental health. Mental health, in fact, is a paradigm case of how capitalist realism operates. Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect.) In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most treated by the NHS. In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with James claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many young people are ill? The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.
The other phenomenon I want to highlight is bureaucracy. In making their case against socialism, neoliberal ideologues often excoriated the top-down bureaucracy which supposedly led to institutional sclerosis and inefficiency in command economies. With the triumph of neoliberalism, bureaucracy was supposed to have been made obsolete; a relic of an unlamented Stalinist past. Yet this is at odds with the experiences of most people working and living in late capitalism, for whom bureaucracy remains very much a part of everyday life. Instead of disappearing, bureaucracy had changed its form; and this new, decentralized, form has allowed it to proliferate. The persistence of bureaucracy in late capitalism does not in itself indicate that capitalism does not work – rather, what it suggests is that the way in which capitalism does actually work is very different from the picture presented by capitalist realism.
- Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism
.
January 9, 2010
What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation.
.
To reclaim real political agency means first of all accepting our insertion at the level of desire in the remorseless meat-grinder of Capital. What is being disavowed in the abjection of evil and ignorance onto the fantasmatic Others is our own complicity in planetary networks of oppression. What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation. The most Gothic description of Capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us. There is a sense in which it simply is the case that the political elite are our servants; the miserable service they provide from us is to launder our libidos, to obligingly re-present for us our disavowed desires as if they had nothing to do with us.
- Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism
.
To reclaim real political agency means first of all accepting our insertion at the level of desire in the remorseless meat-grinder of Capital. What is being disavowed in the abjection of evil and ignorance onto the fantasmatic Others is our own complicity in planetary networks of oppression. What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation. The most Gothic description of Capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us. There is a sense in which it simply is the case that the political elite are our servants; the miserable service they provide from us is to launder our libidos, to obligingly re-present for us our disavowed desires as if they had nothing to do with us.
- Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism
.
January 3, 2010
For Art and the World
.
Download my text 'For Art and the World' here. It's part of the Valeveil polemics project:
http://new.cdn.valeveil.se/2010/12/vv_polemics_wren.pdf
(You can also find the other polemics here: http://www.valeveil.se/project/polemics)
.
Download my text 'For Art and the World' here. It's part of the Valeveil polemics project:
http://new.cdn.valeveil.se/2010/12/vv_polemics_wren.pdf
(You can also find the other polemics here: http://www.valeveil.se/project/polemics)
.
January 1, 2010
Glad The CIA Is Immoral
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[This text was originally published in C Magazine #99.]
Lene Berg’s artist book arrives in the mail in a zip lock bag. On the front of the bag is a large green sticker with a text in white letters. The heading reads INSTRUCTION MANUAL and it begins as follows:
The ‘aspects’ in question, which were never mentioned in any issue of Encounter but are documented extensively in it’s re-printing as Gentlemen & Arseholes (2006), concern the fact that the Congress for Cultural Freedom – which also organized international conferences, artist residencies and publications in other languages – was secretly funded by the CIA with the objective of turning the European intelligentsia away from Communism and Socialism and of ameliorating the image of the United States. For a long time these aspects have no longer been secret, and in fact now anyone can read about them on the CIA website.
The re-printed first issue of Encounter features beautiful literary texts and essays from Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, Christopher Isherwood, the Japanese writer Dazai Osama and many others, all of whom apparently knew nothing about the CIA agenda of the publication (though as the years rolled on there would certainly be rumors.) Neither did editors such as Stephen Spender or ‘Honorary Chairmen’ such as Karl Jaspers and Bertrand Russell.
But one man definitely did know. In a sense Gentlemen & Arseholes is the story of Michael Josselson, founder and head of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Many of the inserts in Gentlemen & Arseholes tell the story of Josselson and the charm and persuasiveness with which he led his double life as both the head of a prestigious cultural foundation and a CIA agent. In Lene Berg’s accompanying video The Man In The Background (2006) his widow Diana Josselson is interviewed at length about their life together:
Later she goes on to defend him quite bluntly (and yet I also found this moment strangely touching):
Berg focuses on Michael Josselson not only because he was in charge but also, more importantly, because when in May 1967 Thomas W. Braden (in fact one of the very bosses mentioned above) published the article I’m glad the CIA is ‘immoral’ in The Saturday Evening Post, an article which confirmed the link between the CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Josselson almost exclusively took the fall. All of the other writers and thinkers associated with Encounter emerged from the scandal relatively unscathed, claiming they didn’t know a thing, continuing their prestigious careers in the arts and academy. But Josselson’s life was completely ruined. Braden’s article was apparently the CIA’s way to get rid of an organization that had become a burden. By 1967 speculations about the CIA link had grown pervasive, focusing on the fact that there had been no mention of Vietnam in any issue of Encounter. (What better way to ‘ameliorate the image of the United States’ than to act as if the Vietnam war simply didn’t exist.)
Thomas W. Braden – who was head of CIA’s international Organizations Division (IOD) from 1950-1954 – makes other appearances in the inserts of Gentlemen & Arseholes, including this quote from the Granada television program World in Action: The Rise and Fall of the CIA (1975):
This notion of the CIA as the first multinational strikes me as extremely resonant. For many years now I have often found myself thinking that the world we live in is so utterly influenced by CIA thinking, strategies and money. The more I learn about the extent of CIA activities since the end of World War Two the more I feel that other, more subtle, explanations for our current predicament – the startling rise of the right and concurrent decline of the left, the war on terrorism, the unfettered expansion of capital, etc. – are relatively unnecessary. The CIA of course cannot be held responsible for all of the world’s ills, but they worked really hard and did a lot. Definitely more than most people realize. And yet at the same time I am extremely careful who I say such things around. To be branded a ‘conspiracy theorist’ is a further marginalization I don’t exactly feel like I need in my already marginalized cultural existence. (Ironically, who else but the CIA could dream up a strategy as simple and effective as branding someone a conspiracy theorist.) So it is likely that before I had even opened the zip lock bag, Lene Berg had already found a true fan. But this work then went on to earn my love, speaking to my interests with an eloquence, perceptiveness and conceptual rigor that for me are the very essence of art.
There is no evidence that the CIA ever censored Encounter, or in any way told the editors or writers what they should write, think, or say. Judging by all available facts, the whole thing was based on a tacit agreement between what the people associated with Encounter wanted to do, and what the CIA wanted to fund.
Because Gentlemen & Arseholes is not only about the possibly CIA-influenced world in which we currently live. It is also, like all of Lene Berg’s work, about a more basic relationship between art and politics. The secret nature of the CIA funding makes it a particularly insidious example, but we can certainly find parallels for this ambiguous dynamic in all historical periods in which artists have received support, whether it be from the church, the king, the bourgeoisie, the state or the market. Artists always need money and, fiercely dedicated to artistic concerns, it might even seem natural not to question too much where the money comes from or why. Why not simply be grateful that it is possible to continue producing artistic works in (what are always for artists) difficult times?
It seems clear to me that Josselson believed he was doing the right thing and genuinely believed that he was taking government money and putting it towards a good cause. Of course he also believed in the fight against communism. Much like the fight against terrorism today, such battles are an excellent pretext for the re-distribution of priorities and the re-distribution of wealth. Give the money to artists and writers who are not communist, raise their profiles, build their careers and reputations. The writers and artists who are communist will take the hit indirectly, falling ever so slightly behind, with only unfounded suspicions as to the real reasons why. In The Man in the Background Berg questions the long-term effects of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, wondering if perhaps it is one of the reasons that today 90% of all cultural products in Europe are produced in America. Of course there is no way we can find out what the world would be like if Michael Josselson and the Congress for Cultural Freedom had never existed. But there is plenty of room to speculate.
There is much art today that gives lip service to being ‘political’ but it is rare for an artwork to ask difficult, compelling, real-world political questions in a manner that at the same time resonates so effortlessly with the dilemmas of artistic praxis. Such battles are political but they are also, on so many levels, deeply romantic: concerning the real questions of what we believe in, how much we believe in it, and whether or not we are willing to fight. It is rare I get to write about art that makes me think and feel as much as the work of Lene Berg. And therefore I would like to end with something that, like all romantic battles, goes a bit too far: far enough to take on the violence of the very rigged historical battle between the CIA and the left, to match Michael Josselson’s perhaps inevitable, yet somehow still tragic, fall from grace. But all I have come up with is this (and I write it here because it is true): Lene Berg is the artist I have been waiting for all of my life.
.
[This text was originally published in C Magazine #99.]
Lene Berg’s artist book arrives in the mail in a zip lock bag. On the front of the bag is a large green sticker with a text in white letters. The heading reads INSTRUCTION MANUAL and it begins as follows:
Gentlemen & Arseholes consists of the first issue of the cultural journal Encounter from 1953, along with a series of supplementary materials that are inserted between the original pages. The inserts were collected over a long period, from books, newspapers, private albums, conversations, and so on, and thus vary in their character and form. What they all have in common is that they describe aspects of that which, for various reasons, was never mentioned in Encounter, nor in connection with any of the other undertakings of the sponsor and publisher, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (1950-1967).
The ‘aspects’ in question, which were never mentioned in any issue of Encounter but are documented extensively in it’s re-printing as Gentlemen & Arseholes (2006), concern the fact that the Congress for Cultural Freedom – which also organized international conferences, artist residencies and publications in other languages – was secretly funded by the CIA with the objective of turning the European intelligentsia away from Communism and Socialism and of ameliorating the image of the United States. For a long time these aspects have no longer been secret, and in fact now anyone can read about them on the CIA website.
The re-printed first issue of Encounter features beautiful literary texts and essays from Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, Christopher Isherwood, the Japanese writer Dazai Osama and many others, all of whom apparently knew nothing about the CIA agenda of the publication (though as the years rolled on there would certainly be rumors.) Neither did editors such as Stephen Spender or ‘Honorary Chairmen’ such as Karl Jaspers and Bertrand Russell.
But one man definitely did know. In a sense Gentlemen & Arseholes is the story of Michael Josselson, founder and head of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Many of the inserts in Gentlemen & Arseholes tell the story of Josselson and the charm and persuasiveness with which he led his double life as both the head of a prestigious cultural foundation and a CIA agent. In Lene Berg’s accompanying video The Man In The Background (2006) his widow Diana Josselson is interviewed at length about their life together:
It was life pervasive. […] You couldn’t talk freely to anybody that was not a co-CIA person. And as I said: it comes at every turn. This was easy, because Michael was a charmer and he did it naturally. I followed as well as I could.
Later she goes on to defend him quite bluntly (and yet I also found this moment strangely touching):
It wasn’t a question of what these people in the books say, that he was a stooger for the CIA. He was an independent thinker and actor, and part of his problem was to keep the boss happy, and mostly he did that.
Berg focuses on Michael Josselson not only because he was in charge but also, more importantly, because when in May 1967 Thomas W. Braden (in fact one of the very bosses mentioned above) published the article I’m glad the CIA is ‘immoral’ in The Saturday Evening Post, an article which confirmed the link between the CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Josselson almost exclusively took the fall. All of the other writers and thinkers associated with Encounter emerged from the scandal relatively unscathed, claiming they didn’t know a thing, continuing their prestigious careers in the arts and academy. But Josselson’s life was completely ruined. Braden’s article was apparently the CIA’s way to get rid of an organization that had become a burden. By 1967 speculations about the CIA link had grown pervasive, focusing on the fact that there had been no mention of Vietnam in any issue of Encounter. (What better way to ‘ameliorate the image of the United States’ than to act as if the Vietnam war simply didn’t exist.)
Thomas W. Braden – who was head of CIA’s international Organizations Division (IOD) from 1950-1954 – makes other appearances in the inserts of Gentlemen & Arseholes, including this quote from the Granada television program World in Action: The Rise and Fall of the CIA (1975):
It [CIA] never had to account for the money it spent except to the President… the funds were not only unaccountable, they were unvouchered, so there was really no means of checking them – ‘unvouchered funds’ meaning expenditures that don’t have to be accounted for… […] Since it was unaccountable, it could hire as many people as it wanted. It never had to say to any committee – no committee said to it – ‘You can only have so many men.’ It could do exactly as it pleased. It made preparations therefore for every contingency. It could hire armies; it could buy banks. There was simply no limit to the money it could spend and no limit to the people it could hire and no limit to the activities it could decide were necessary to conduct the war – the secret war… It was a multinational. Maybe it was one of the first.
This notion of the CIA as the first multinational strikes me as extremely resonant. For many years now I have often found myself thinking that the world we live in is so utterly influenced by CIA thinking, strategies and money. The more I learn about the extent of CIA activities since the end of World War Two the more I feel that other, more subtle, explanations for our current predicament – the startling rise of the right and concurrent decline of the left, the war on terrorism, the unfettered expansion of capital, etc. – are relatively unnecessary. The CIA of course cannot be held responsible for all of the world’s ills, but they worked really hard and did a lot. Definitely more than most people realize. And yet at the same time I am extremely careful who I say such things around. To be branded a ‘conspiracy theorist’ is a further marginalization I don’t exactly feel like I need in my already marginalized cultural existence. (Ironically, who else but the CIA could dream up a strategy as simple and effective as branding someone a conspiracy theorist.) So it is likely that before I had even opened the zip lock bag, Lene Berg had already found a true fan. But this work then went on to earn my love, speaking to my interests with an eloquence, perceptiveness and conceptual rigor that for me are the very essence of art.
There is no evidence that the CIA ever censored Encounter, or in any way told the editors or writers what they should write, think, or say. Judging by all available facts, the whole thing was based on a tacit agreement between what the people associated with Encounter wanted to do, and what the CIA wanted to fund.
Because Gentlemen & Arseholes is not only about the possibly CIA-influenced world in which we currently live. It is also, like all of Lene Berg’s work, about a more basic relationship between art and politics. The secret nature of the CIA funding makes it a particularly insidious example, but we can certainly find parallels for this ambiguous dynamic in all historical periods in which artists have received support, whether it be from the church, the king, the bourgeoisie, the state or the market. Artists always need money and, fiercely dedicated to artistic concerns, it might even seem natural not to question too much where the money comes from or why. Why not simply be grateful that it is possible to continue producing artistic works in (what are always for artists) difficult times?
It seems clear to me that Josselson believed he was doing the right thing and genuinely believed that he was taking government money and putting it towards a good cause. Of course he also believed in the fight against communism. Much like the fight against terrorism today, such battles are an excellent pretext for the re-distribution of priorities and the re-distribution of wealth. Give the money to artists and writers who are not communist, raise their profiles, build their careers and reputations. The writers and artists who are communist will take the hit indirectly, falling ever so slightly behind, with only unfounded suspicions as to the real reasons why. In The Man in the Background Berg questions the long-term effects of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, wondering if perhaps it is one of the reasons that today 90% of all cultural products in Europe are produced in America. Of course there is no way we can find out what the world would be like if Michael Josselson and the Congress for Cultural Freedom had never existed. But there is plenty of room to speculate.
There is much art today that gives lip service to being ‘political’ but it is rare for an artwork to ask difficult, compelling, real-world political questions in a manner that at the same time resonates so effortlessly with the dilemmas of artistic praxis. Such battles are political but they are also, on so many levels, deeply romantic: concerning the real questions of what we believe in, how much we believe in it, and whether or not we are willing to fight. It is rare I get to write about art that makes me think and feel as much as the work of Lene Berg. And therefore I would like to end with something that, like all romantic battles, goes a bit too far: far enough to take on the violence of the very rigged historical battle between the CIA and the left, to match Michael Josselson’s perhaps inevitable, yet somehow still tragic, fall from grace. But all I have come up with is this (and I write it here because it is true): Lene Berg is the artist I have been waiting for all of my life.
.
December 26, 2009
Oil That Glitters Is Not Gold
.
Sometime in 1939, on the eve of the opening of the new building of the Museum of Modern Art on New York’s 53rd Street, an impressively intrepid museum employee decided to play a practical joke on her bosses. Her name was Frances Collins. And as the Museum’s director of publications, she and a friend had concocted an invitation, to be sent to seven thousand distinguished persons, to the opening of what was declared their “Museum of Standard Oil.” Their invitation card, printed in fancy script, came from “The Empress of Blandings” (a character in the form of an overly fat pig drawn from English satirist P. G. Wodenhouse’s novels) and would, so it announced, admit “Two persons or one person and two dogs.” Within the invitation packet was a small card that read “Oil That Glitters Is Not Gold” alongside a letterpress engraving of a crown. The overt allusion to then-MoMA president Nelson Rockefeller’s entrenchment in the world of oil – his father John D. Rockefeller, having founded the modern oil industry as we know it – did not roundly amuse everyone. Collins promptly lost her job. The MoMA, as we know, went ahead and opened as planned.
- From the Bidoun article on the project Cultural Diplomacy: The Art We Neglect by artist Alessandro Yazbeck and art historian Media Farzin
.
Sometime in 1939, on the eve of the opening of the new building of the Museum of Modern Art on New York’s 53rd Street, an impressively intrepid museum employee decided to play a practical joke on her bosses. Her name was Frances Collins. And as the Museum’s director of publications, she and a friend had concocted an invitation, to be sent to seven thousand distinguished persons, to the opening of what was declared their “Museum of Standard Oil.” Their invitation card, printed in fancy script, came from “The Empress of Blandings” (a character in the form of an overly fat pig drawn from English satirist P. G. Wodenhouse’s novels) and would, so it announced, admit “Two persons or one person and two dogs.” Within the invitation packet was a small card that read “Oil That Glitters Is Not Gold” alongside a letterpress engraving of a crown. The overt allusion to then-MoMA president Nelson Rockefeller’s entrenchment in the world of oil – his father John D. Rockefeller, having founded the modern oil industry as we know it – did not roundly amuse everyone. Collins promptly lost her job. The MoMA, as we know, went ahead and opened as planned.
- From the Bidoun article on the project Cultural Diplomacy: The Art We Neglect by artist Alessandro Yazbeck and art historian Media Farzin
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December 22, 2009
The Romantic and the Entrepreneur
.
[This text was originally published in C Magazine #92.]
In David Markson’s 1996 experimental novel Reader’s Block, sparse, isolated sentences about a protagonist referred to only as ‘Reader’ are interspersed among a much larger number of equally sparse, isolated biographical fragments from the lives of well-known painters, writers, philosophers, composers, etc. These fragments are rarely flattering. For example:
In the universe of Reader’s Block, so many artists were anti-semites, so many more suicides. Their struggles with poverty and isolation, and in fact with life itself, more often than not got the better of them.
This vision of the artist as someone destroyed by his or her vocation seems somehow outdated, a relic from the past. Certainly enough contemporary artists are poor and/or drunk. But I suspect a more entrepreneurial model now holds sway over our idea of what an artist might represent in the world. No longer encapsulated by an individual’s solitary engagement with his or her own genius, a more social and relational set of images now comes to mind when we think of artists today.
This change, perhaps a demotion within the realm of symbolic value, is part and parcel of an art context where anything can be art, a context in which, as the critic Sven Lütticken writes “the objects nowadays exhibited as art no longer derive their legitimacy from a tradition or an artistic medium, but from the fact that their artistic status is initially dubious”, a context in which it is often remarkably unclear just exactly what ‘special quality’ the artist actually brings to the work.
However, it is important to remember that this situation is only made possible because the contemporary work of art is in fact set in stark relief against an art-historical backdrop. An empty cardboard box sitting in the middle of a room in a museum would simply not mean anything to us if museums weren’t also places where paintings by Rembrandt once hung (and of course still do.) The radical break obtains meaning and resonance only in relation to a history from which one wishes to escape.
This might seem like an obvious enough point and of course many contemporary works of art are based explicitly on art historical precedents while many catalog essays work overtime to contextualize contemporary work within a historical framework. Nonetheless, the paradoxical complexity of the dynamic between contemporary art and art history is difficult to overstate. While the original movements of the avant-garde derived their power and energy from the incredible strength of will it took to break with the hegemony of convention and tradition, in the contemporary world tradition no longer rules society to anywhere near the degree it once did and to break away from such a weak master is not an especially impressive feat.
I certainly have no desire to argue for a return to tradition. I simply believe further consideration can be given to the degree to which any seemingly radical gesture (most of which we no longer find especially radical) would not be possible without a series of conventions for it to be radical in relation to. While the previous, more romantic, conception of the artist hinged on the artist’s will to push forward and break with tradition; the current more entrepreneurial conception of the artist hinges on our understanding that these traditions have now been demolished and therefore the artist is free to run wild amongst the wreckage: for profit, pleasure or in the name of some multi-faceted ideal that, for lack of a better term, we continue to refer to using the word ‘art.’ While, for the historical romantic artist, a forced break with tradition had the potential to be a brave and meaningful action – or at the very least had the potential to be a metaphor for a brave and meaningful action – for the contemporary artist, continuing to run wild long after all traditional boundaries have disappeared, it is more likely to seem a bit aimless, perhaps even becoming a metaphor for how aimless and powerless we often feel living in the contemporary world.
In a sense, one of the things that is so remarkable about the contemporary artistic project is how often this potential aimlessness continues to accrue meaning in relation to the entire history of art and how often this essential relationship, without which so many contemporary artistic gestures might seem only aimless, is taken for granted. The fact that it is taken for granted, pushed into the background (where it must remain silent in order not to draw undue attention towards itself) in part serves to mask the essential weakness of the dynamic between contemporary practice and art history, serves to create a certain aura of mystery around some of the most basic reasons why contemporary art still continues to be thought of as ‘art’. But it is also possible that many artists working today simply aren’t aware of the degree to which the core values of their practice are derived from a) how fully the romantic ideal of art and of the artist continues to hold sway over our imagination and b) how powerful the modernist ideal of a break with tradition continues to be.
At any rate, to whatever degree any artist may or may not be aware of this reality, there is no question that in certain fundamental ways our current, more entrepreneurial, cliché of the role a contemporary artist fulfils is (perhaps unconsciously) built upon the historical foundation of an older, more romantic, position and would not be possible without the aura of this previous conception. And for artists who are insightfully aware of this slightly paradoxical situation – that for their work to be effectively contemporary it must continuously break with an art-historical tradition that at the same time it’s very status as a work of art also depends upon – one of the more positive side effects is that it allows them an enormous degree of play, both with their own individual persona as an artist and with the seemingly old-fashioned romantic idea of being an artist in the first place. There are far too many examples of this type of playfulness to mention here but as a particularly complex and reified example I will focus on the 1991 work Heavy Burschi (Heavy Guy) by Martin Kippenberger.
As an artist, Kippenberger was particularly aware of his public persona, always perversely engaged in an almost confrontational process of negotiation between the creation of his own persona and the creation of his art. For Heavy Burschi, Kippenberger asked his assistant to make a series of paintings based on images from the entirety of Kippenberger’s previous work. However, upon seeing the finished paintings he was extremely unsatisfied with them. He ordered all fifty-one paintings to be destroyed, but first had each one photographed, reprinted to its original size, and framed, exhibiting the reproductions in a single installation along with the remnants of the original paintings which he now placed in a giant dumpster in the middle of the gallery.
This multilayered, hyper-ironic approach to a certain kind of power dynamic implicit within the romantic idea of the ‘great artist’ is of course, on one level, an extremely cynical ploy, embodying the very abuses of power that it also serves to draw attention to. Thematically, it is also rich and complex. Among many other possible readings, this gesture of destroying fifty-one paintings, paintings filled with motifs from his entire oeuvre, and then displaying the destroyed remnants along with reproductions of the originals, originals that were in fact somehow copies of his own work to begin with, evokes a relationship between Kippenberger’s very entrepreneurial and contemporary artistic persona and a more romantic idea of artistic integrity that we associate with the past.
Great artists of the past, depending on the period we are referring to, often had assistants as well. The names of their assistants have generally disappeared into the ether of history while the names of the artists are continually being renewed and further established. To be a bit pithy about it, history is written by the victors. Kippenberger makes this relationship explicit within his work, at the same time toying with his own persona as a cynical artist, as someone who doesn’t actually have to make the work himself, doesn’t have to suffer in his pursuit of it, and yet in some ironic sense ‘suffers’ anyway when he finds himself unhappy with the results of the work he has commissioned from his assistant. Heavy Burschi is a work by an artist who clearly isn’t trying to make you think he’s a nice guy. To the contrary, it openly explores the out-dated notion of the artist as someone who can get away with behavior that would, in other circumstances, be unacceptable, get away with such behavior in the name of the higher calling of art. Kippenberger updates this notion and brings it into the self-referential present, at the same time undermining the romantic idealism previously associated with it. The ethically problematic behavior at Heavy Burschi’s core resonates with a history of artist biographies that are equally problematic. It also gives one a feeling that Kippenberger is almost the last of a dying breed, that artist’s are no longer really like that, that we now like to believe that things have changed.
Of course, Heavy Burschi was made at the beginning of the nineties when such an emphasis on irony most likely seemed more fresh and relevant. But the manner in which Kippenberger thematizes his role as a contemporary artist, in dialog with a romantic ideal that is both past and yet remains deeply instilled within us, continues to feel consequent. Kippenberger is simultaneously an old fashioned romantic artist and a contemporary parody of that role and in embodying this double condition he tells us quite a lot about what it’s like to be an artist today.
The old fashioned romantic model (which evokes obsession and suffering) may very well contrast with the more contemporary entrepreneurial model (which involves travel and networking) in many ways, but there is never any question that the relationship between them is essentially a symbiotic one. The present needs the past as a tradition that covertly continues to validate its status as actual art. And the past needs the present in order to maintain it’s vaulted position as historically sanctioned great art. While much contemporary art downplays this ever-present dynamic, in doing so it creates a potential misunderstanding about what we are actually looking at when we look at contemporary art.
.
[This text was originally published in C Magazine #92.]
In David Markson’s 1996 experimental novel Reader’s Block, sparse, isolated sentences about a protagonist referred to only as ‘Reader’ are interspersed among a much larger number of equally sparse, isolated biographical fragments from the lives of well-known painters, writers, philosophers, composers, etc. These fragments are rarely flattering. For example:
Emily Dickinson became so extravagantly reclusive in the second half of her life that for the last ten years she did not once leave her house.Or:
When Rembrandt’s possessions were sold at bankruptcy in 1656, they included paintings by Raphael, Giorgione, and van Eyck. And seventy-five Rembrants.Or:
And did not bring in enough to discharge the bankruptcy.
Fighting with his wife, drunk, Paul Verlaine once threw their three-month-old son against a wall.
In the universe of Reader’s Block, so many artists were anti-semites, so many more suicides. Their struggles with poverty and isolation, and in fact with life itself, more often than not got the better of them.
This vision of the artist as someone destroyed by his or her vocation seems somehow outdated, a relic from the past. Certainly enough contemporary artists are poor and/or drunk. But I suspect a more entrepreneurial model now holds sway over our idea of what an artist might represent in the world. No longer encapsulated by an individual’s solitary engagement with his or her own genius, a more social and relational set of images now comes to mind when we think of artists today.
This change, perhaps a demotion within the realm of symbolic value, is part and parcel of an art context where anything can be art, a context in which, as the critic Sven Lütticken writes “the objects nowadays exhibited as art no longer derive their legitimacy from a tradition or an artistic medium, but from the fact that their artistic status is initially dubious”, a context in which it is often remarkably unclear just exactly what ‘special quality’ the artist actually brings to the work.
However, it is important to remember that this situation is only made possible because the contemporary work of art is in fact set in stark relief against an art-historical backdrop. An empty cardboard box sitting in the middle of a room in a museum would simply not mean anything to us if museums weren’t also places where paintings by Rembrandt once hung (and of course still do.) The radical break obtains meaning and resonance only in relation to a history from which one wishes to escape.
This might seem like an obvious enough point and of course many contemporary works of art are based explicitly on art historical precedents while many catalog essays work overtime to contextualize contemporary work within a historical framework. Nonetheless, the paradoxical complexity of the dynamic between contemporary art and art history is difficult to overstate. While the original movements of the avant-garde derived their power and energy from the incredible strength of will it took to break with the hegemony of convention and tradition, in the contemporary world tradition no longer rules society to anywhere near the degree it once did and to break away from such a weak master is not an especially impressive feat.
I certainly have no desire to argue for a return to tradition. I simply believe further consideration can be given to the degree to which any seemingly radical gesture (most of which we no longer find especially radical) would not be possible without a series of conventions for it to be radical in relation to. While the previous, more romantic, conception of the artist hinged on the artist’s will to push forward and break with tradition; the current more entrepreneurial conception of the artist hinges on our understanding that these traditions have now been demolished and therefore the artist is free to run wild amongst the wreckage: for profit, pleasure or in the name of some multi-faceted ideal that, for lack of a better term, we continue to refer to using the word ‘art.’ While, for the historical romantic artist, a forced break with tradition had the potential to be a brave and meaningful action – or at the very least had the potential to be a metaphor for a brave and meaningful action – for the contemporary artist, continuing to run wild long after all traditional boundaries have disappeared, it is more likely to seem a bit aimless, perhaps even becoming a metaphor for how aimless and powerless we often feel living in the contemporary world.
In a sense, one of the things that is so remarkable about the contemporary artistic project is how often this potential aimlessness continues to accrue meaning in relation to the entire history of art and how often this essential relationship, without which so many contemporary artistic gestures might seem only aimless, is taken for granted. The fact that it is taken for granted, pushed into the background (where it must remain silent in order not to draw undue attention towards itself) in part serves to mask the essential weakness of the dynamic between contemporary practice and art history, serves to create a certain aura of mystery around some of the most basic reasons why contemporary art still continues to be thought of as ‘art’. But it is also possible that many artists working today simply aren’t aware of the degree to which the core values of their practice are derived from a) how fully the romantic ideal of art and of the artist continues to hold sway over our imagination and b) how powerful the modernist ideal of a break with tradition continues to be.
At any rate, to whatever degree any artist may or may not be aware of this reality, there is no question that in certain fundamental ways our current, more entrepreneurial, cliché of the role a contemporary artist fulfils is (perhaps unconsciously) built upon the historical foundation of an older, more romantic, position and would not be possible without the aura of this previous conception. And for artists who are insightfully aware of this slightly paradoxical situation – that for their work to be effectively contemporary it must continuously break with an art-historical tradition that at the same time it’s very status as a work of art also depends upon – one of the more positive side effects is that it allows them an enormous degree of play, both with their own individual persona as an artist and with the seemingly old-fashioned romantic idea of being an artist in the first place. There are far too many examples of this type of playfulness to mention here but as a particularly complex and reified example I will focus on the 1991 work Heavy Burschi (Heavy Guy) by Martin Kippenberger.
As an artist, Kippenberger was particularly aware of his public persona, always perversely engaged in an almost confrontational process of negotiation between the creation of his own persona and the creation of his art. For Heavy Burschi, Kippenberger asked his assistant to make a series of paintings based on images from the entirety of Kippenberger’s previous work. However, upon seeing the finished paintings he was extremely unsatisfied with them. He ordered all fifty-one paintings to be destroyed, but first had each one photographed, reprinted to its original size, and framed, exhibiting the reproductions in a single installation along with the remnants of the original paintings which he now placed in a giant dumpster in the middle of the gallery.
This multilayered, hyper-ironic approach to a certain kind of power dynamic implicit within the romantic idea of the ‘great artist’ is of course, on one level, an extremely cynical ploy, embodying the very abuses of power that it also serves to draw attention to. Thematically, it is also rich and complex. Among many other possible readings, this gesture of destroying fifty-one paintings, paintings filled with motifs from his entire oeuvre, and then displaying the destroyed remnants along with reproductions of the originals, originals that were in fact somehow copies of his own work to begin with, evokes a relationship between Kippenberger’s very entrepreneurial and contemporary artistic persona and a more romantic idea of artistic integrity that we associate with the past.
Great artists of the past, depending on the period we are referring to, often had assistants as well. The names of their assistants have generally disappeared into the ether of history while the names of the artists are continually being renewed and further established. To be a bit pithy about it, history is written by the victors. Kippenberger makes this relationship explicit within his work, at the same time toying with his own persona as a cynical artist, as someone who doesn’t actually have to make the work himself, doesn’t have to suffer in his pursuit of it, and yet in some ironic sense ‘suffers’ anyway when he finds himself unhappy with the results of the work he has commissioned from his assistant. Heavy Burschi is a work by an artist who clearly isn’t trying to make you think he’s a nice guy. To the contrary, it openly explores the out-dated notion of the artist as someone who can get away with behavior that would, in other circumstances, be unacceptable, get away with such behavior in the name of the higher calling of art. Kippenberger updates this notion and brings it into the self-referential present, at the same time undermining the romantic idealism previously associated with it. The ethically problematic behavior at Heavy Burschi’s core resonates with a history of artist biographies that are equally problematic. It also gives one a feeling that Kippenberger is almost the last of a dying breed, that artist’s are no longer really like that, that we now like to believe that things have changed.
Of course, Heavy Burschi was made at the beginning of the nineties when such an emphasis on irony most likely seemed more fresh and relevant. But the manner in which Kippenberger thematizes his role as a contemporary artist, in dialog with a romantic ideal that is both past and yet remains deeply instilled within us, continues to feel consequent. Kippenberger is simultaneously an old fashioned romantic artist and a contemporary parody of that role and in embodying this double condition he tells us quite a lot about what it’s like to be an artist today.
The old fashioned romantic model (which evokes obsession and suffering) may very well contrast with the more contemporary entrepreneurial model (which involves travel and networking) in many ways, but there is never any question that the relationship between them is essentially a symbiotic one. The present needs the past as a tradition that covertly continues to validate its status as actual art. And the past needs the present in order to maintain it’s vaulted position as historically sanctioned great art. While much contemporary art downplays this ever-present dynamic, in doing so it creates a potential misunderstanding about what we are actually looking at when we look at contemporary art.
.
December 19, 2009
Frances Stark quote
.
I remember very distinctly at the age of fourteen, a friend, who was verging on adulthood, announced to me that she was suicidal. I simply could not grasp the notion of ceasing to exist. I asked if maybe instead of killing herself she could just drastically change her identity and begin a different life… just say to yourself I’m no longer me, I’ll ‘kill’ me and just start living in some different way. It seemed to me very plausible and logical. Based on my optimistic and / or pragmatic approach to her suicidal urge, I never could have foreseen my own melancholic tendency toward listlessness, but I do have one.
So what do I do when I’m listless? I kind of am now, and what if I said I’m too sad to tell you? OK, that’s a little forced, however, ask anyone who knows me and they will tell you I tend to get depressed, and bogged down and sometimes even cry when my work is undone. That is when I start to think about following my old advice and start considering abandoning my identity. That would entail forgetting my past and all my handy anecdotes that reside there. More importantly – to abandon my identity – I would have to quit being an artist, quit doing art.
I’d have to quit my job… and my job is my life.
One hundred years ago, my favorite artist, author Robert Musil, wrote this in a letter to a friend: ‘Art’ for me is only a means of reaching a higher level of the ‘self’.
One day ago, a friend of mine wrote, in a letter to me: ‘I think I am addicted… to my identity as an artist… (which is) probably detrimental to the ideal of art making itself, I think you realize this.’ I wrote back: ‘When I think about eradicating the identity – short of killing myself, incidentally or on purpose – the artist-ego always elbows in, making it all seem like a staged burning of the paintings, only to be followed by an exhibition of their ashes.’ And Zarathustra spoke thus: “I love him who makes his virtue his addiction and his catastrophe: for his virtue’s sake he wants to live on and live no longer.”
- Frances Stark, Collected Writing 1993-2003
.
I remember very distinctly at the age of fourteen, a friend, who was verging on adulthood, announced to me that she was suicidal. I simply could not grasp the notion of ceasing to exist. I asked if maybe instead of killing herself she could just drastically change her identity and begin a different life… just say to yourself I’m no longer me, I’ll ‘kill’ me and just start living in some different way. It seemed to me very plausible and logical. Based on my optimistic and / or pragmatic approach to her suicidal urge, I never could have foreseen my own melancholic tendency toward listlessness, but I do have one.
So what do I do when I’m listless? I kind of am now, and what if I said I’m too sad to tell you? OK, that’s a little forced, however, ask anyone who knows me and they will tell you I tend to get depressed, and bogged down and sometimes even cry when my work is undone. That is when I start to think about following my old advice and start considering abandoning my identity. That would entail forgetting my past and all my handy anecdotes that reside there. More importantly – to abandon my identity – I would have to quit being an artist, quit doing art.
I’d have to quit my job… and my job is my life.
One hundred years ago, my favorite artist, author Robert Musil, wrote this in a letter to a friend: ‘Art’ for me is only a means of reaching a higher level of the ‘self’.
One day ago, a friend of mine wrote, in a letter to me: ‘I think I am addicted… to my identity as an artist… (which is) probably detrimental to the ideal of art making itself, I think you realize this.’ I wrote back: ‘When I think about eradicating the identity – short of killing myself, incidentally or on purpose – the artist-ego always elbows in, making it all seem like a staged burning of the paintings, only to be followed by an exhibition of their ashes.’ And Zarathustra spoke thus: “I love him who makes his virtue his addiction and his catastrophe: for his virtue’s sake he wants to live on and live no longer.”
- Frances Stark, Collected Writing 1993-2003
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December 18, 2009
Perversely Permissive Extroverted Superego
.
Not to go into this too awfully much, but acquiring permission is a bit weird for me. My shrink says it’s due to a ‘punitive extroverted superego’. Which is to say that there are always more reasons to not do something than to do something. When it drives me too much toward inertia I have to create for myself a counteractive force, a ‘permissive extroverted superego’, if you will. Which doesn’t always do that much good since you could imagine a seagull painter using the same excuse to make yet another dreary, bland seagull painting. So it has to be a ‘perversely permissive extroverted superego’, a kind of combination fuckedupness-barometer / permission-giver who, with one eye winking permission, has the other eye turned critically toward whatever’s goofy enough, fucked-up enough and sincere enough to be worth doing.
- Richard Hawkins
.
Not to go into this too awfully much, but acquiring permission is a bit weird for me. My shrink says it’s due to a ‘punitive extroverted superego’. Which is to say that there are always more reasons to not do something than to do something. When it drives me too much toward inertia I have to create for myself a counteractive force, a ‘permissive extroverted superego’, if you will. Which doesn’t always do that much good since you could imagine a seagull painter using the same excuse to make yet another dreary, bland seagull painting. So it has to be a ‘perversely permissive extroverted superego’, a kind of combination fuckedupness-barometer / permission-giver who, with one eye winking permission, has the other eye turned critically toward whatever’s goofy enough, fucked-up enough and sincere enough to be worth doing.
- Richard Hawkins
.
December 13, 2009
Recent Posts
.
In some ways, Facebook is the story of Narcissus in technological form. In other ways: Narcissus meets Big Brother.
On Facebook, no one can hear you scream.
Facebook is over if you want it.
.
In some ways, Facebook is the story of Narcissus in technological form. In other ways: Narcissus meets Big Brother.
On Facebook, no one can hear you scream.
Facebook is over if you want it.
.
December 12, 2009
A frenzy of dissatisfaction
.
A frenzy of dissatisfaction: in which one feels any attempts at improvement will only lead to further disappointment, yet the dissatisfaction is so intense that one must, nonetheless, continuously strive towards new frontiers. The self-aware hungry ghost.
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A frenzy of dissatisfaction: in which one feels any attempts at improvement will only lead to further disappointment, yet the dissatisfaction is so intense that one must, nonetheless, continuously strive towards new frontiers. The self-aware hungry ghost.
.
November 29, 2009
A List
.
Hospitality and Resistance
An Enemy Is Someone Whose Story You Haven’t Heard Yet
Something Might Still Change
Every Song I’ve Ever Written
Love Is Not A Game
A Manifesto For Collective Child Rearing
Experiments In Curating
There Are At Least Seven Bands With The Name Triangle
Freedom Is Always Connected To Disappointment
The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information
How Not To Be Irrelevant
.
Hospitality and Resistance
An Enemy Is Someone Whose Story You Haven’t Heard Yet
Something Might Still Change
Every Song I’ve Ever Written
Love Is Not A Game
A Manifesto For Collective Child Rearing
Experiments In Curating
There Are At Least Seven Bands With The Name Triangle
Freedom Is Always Connected To Disappointment
The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information
How Not To Be Irrelevant
.
November 26, 2009
The Heroine of this story; the She, Her, by Eline McGeorge
.
The Heroine of this story; the She, Her,
A text written for the artist book Manual which is an artist’s book by Eline McGeorge:
http://www.elinemcgeorge.org/texts/TheHeroineofthisstorytheSheHer....htm
.
The Heroine of this story; the She, Her,
A text written for the artist book Manual which is an artist’s book by Eline McGeorge:
http://www.elinemcgeorge.org/texts/TheHeroineofthisstorytheSheHer....htm
.
November 24, 2009
Magic
.
When you know exactly how the magician does every aspect of the trick, but somehow it seems like magic anyways.
.
When you know exactly how the magician does every aspect of the trick, but somehow it seems like magic anyways.
.
November 14, 2009
Movement, directional vectors, ritournelles, rhythms and refrains
.
It is obvious that we are all suspended over the same abyss, even if we use different means in order not to see it. We are all at the mercy of the same stupor that can take you by the throat and literally suffocate you. We are all like Swann, half crazy after his separation from Odette and fleeing, like the plague, any mention that could evoke, even indirectly, her existence.
That is why we each cling to our own semiotic scaffoldings in order to continue walking down the street, waking up each day, and doing what is expected of us. Otherwise everything would stop, people would bang their heads against the wall. The way to have a lust for life, to maintain commitments, to forget oneself is not simple or obvious. “What for?!” has incredible power. It is much stronger than Louis XV and his “après moi le déluge!” Is it worth trying to keep everything up, taking the heritage of generations, keeping the machine running, having kids, doing science, making literature or art? Why not break down, burst and leave it all in the lurch? That’s the question. Giving way to it is always only so far away…
The answer of course is at the same time both personal and collective. In life, one can only hold on to momentum. Subjectivity needs movement, directional vectors, ritournelles, rhythms and refrains that beat time to carry it along. The most singular and personal factors have to do with social and collective dimensions. It is stupid to imagine a psychogenesis independent of contextual dimensions, but that’s what psychologists and psychoanalysts do.
Jean Oury, who got me up on my feet when I was twenty, when I was pretty lost, provides a telling recipe. Many times, and at length, I explained my anxiety crises and attacks to him, without seeming to move him in any way. Until one day, he answered me with this zen-style response, “It comes over you at night in your bed, before you fall asleep? Which side do you sleep on? Okay, so all you have to do is try the other side.”
Analysis is sometimes like that, a little turnaround is necessary. The humility of the earliest days of the church is what’s needed, and to say to oneself, “So what. It doesn’t matter. Inch Allah…” It’s really basic. Of course one can’t just say this in any old way. One must also have the right semiotic lozenges handy; the precise little indexes that can rock significations, giving them an a-signifying bearing, and working with humor or surprise: the dope fiend with a gun in his hand who you ask for a light.
This is how the instant fuses with the world. It’s in this register that the category of poetic performance, the music of John Cage, the ruptures of Zen – it doesn’t matter what you call it – are found. But they’re never acquired. Juggling has to be learned, like playing scales. One acquires a relative mastery in certain situations, not in others, and then this can change with age, etc. One of the stupidest things about the psychoanalytic myth is to think that after you have put in your ten years on the couch, you are necessarily stronger than those who haven’t. Not at all! There is no relation between the two! Analysis should simply give you a boost of virtuosity, like a pianist, for certain difficulties. It should give you more freedom, more humor, more willingness to jump from one scale of reference to another… Therefore, I would say, in order to continue living, one should circulate in supportive orbits. Shakespeare, we know nothing about him, but we know that he had a “supportive” environment. So, go on, it’s now or never, it’s time for your last next act, right away. You’re depressed? Don’t let it get to you, they’re waiting…
- Felix Guattari, Chaosophy
.
It is obvious that we are all suspended over the same abyss, even if we use different means in order not to see it. We are all at the mercy of the same stupor that can take you by the throat and literally suffocate you. We are all like Swann, half crazy after his separation from Odette and fleeing, like the plague, any mention that could evoke, even indirectly, her existence.
That is why we each cling to our own semiotic scaffoldings in order to continue walking down the street, waking up each day, and doing what is expected of us. Otherwise everything would stop, people would bang their heads against the wall. The way to have a lust for life, to maintain commitments, to forget oneself is not simple or obvious. “What for?!” has incredible power. It is much stronger than Louis XV and his “après moi le déluge!” Is it worth trying to keep everything up, taking the heritage of generations, keeping the machine running, having kids, doing science, making literature or art? Why not break down, burst and leave it all in the lurch? That’s the question. Giving way to it is always only so far away…
The answer of course is at the same time both personal and collective. In life, one can only hold on to momentum. Subjectivity needs movement, directional vectors, ritournelles, rhythms and refrains that beat time to carry it along. The most singular and personal factors have to do with social and collective dimensions. It is stupid to imagine a psychogenesis independent of contextual dimensions, but that’s what psychologists and psychoanalysts do.
Jean Oury, who got me up on my feet when I was twenty, when I was pretty lost, provides a telling recipe. Many times, and at length, I explained my anxiety crises and attacks to him, without seeming to move him in any way. Until one day, he answered me with this zen-style response, “It comes over you at night in your bed, before you fall asleep? Which side do you sleep on? Okay, so all you have to do is try the other side.”
Analysis is sometimes like that, a little turnaround is necessary. The humility of the earliest days of the church is what’s needed, and to say to oneself, “So what. It doesn’t matter. Inch Allah…” It’s really basic. Of course one can’t just say this in any old way. One must also have the right semiotic lozenges handy; the precise little indexes that can rock significations, giving them an a-signifying bearing, and working with humor or surprise: the dope fiend with a gun in his hand who you ask for a light.
This is how the instant fuses with the world. It’s in this register that the category of poetic performance, the music of John Cage, the ruptures of Zen – it doesn’t matter what you call it – are found. But they’re never acquired. Juggling has to be learned, like playing scales. One acquires a relative mastery in certain situations, not in others, and then this can change with age, etc. One of the stupidest things about the psychoanalytic myth is to think that after you have put in your ten years on the couch, you are necessarily stronger than those who haven’t. Not at all! There is no relation between the two! Analysis should simply give you a boost of virtuosity, like a pianist, for certain difficulties. It should give you more freedom, more humor, more willingness to jump from one scale of reference to another… Therefore, I would say, in order to continue living, one should circulate in supportive orbits. Shakespeare, we know nothing about him, but we know that he had a “supportive” environment. So, go on, it’s now or never, it’s time for your last next act, right away. You’re depressed? Don’t let it get to you, they’re waiting…
- Felix Guattari, Chaosophy
.
November 7, 2009
In their way, these movements were trying to save what they could.
.
The number of casualties, the carnage and destruction, the area of irredeemable collapse – these were on an even vaster scale in the First World War than in the second, and that first Materialschlacht, the battle of technology and equipment, was unprecedented. In the surrounding disintegration of hopes and values, art, and especially modern art, emerged as a new value. We are too accustomed to see the modernist movements of the 1920’s – futurism, Dadaism, surrealism – as part of the nihilism and cultural despair engendered by the war. In their way, these movements were trying to save what they could.
- Sidney Monas
.
The number of casualties, the carnage and destruction, the area of irredeemable collapse – these were on an even vaster scale in the First World War than in the second, and that first Materialschlacht, the battle of technology and equipment, was unprecedented. In the surrounding disintegration of hopes and values, art, and especially modern art, emerged as a new value. We are too accustomed to see the modernist movements of the 1920’s – futurism, Dadaism, surrealism – as part of the nihilism and cultural despair engendered by the war. In their way, these movements were trying to save what they could.
- Sidney Monas
.
November 1, 2009
That was the last hangover
.
That was the last hangover
that rainy morning when I knew the choices
of the future would be ever more grueling
than choices past
I wanted politics but had careerism
I wanted womanizing but had the constant
fear of hurt feelings
I wanted honesty and had the honest feeling
that everything was only modulations of performance
and also that such modulations were sincere,
honest, complex
placing one word after another along
the thought: no more poems about feelings
the last hangover
or perhaps the first
.
That was the last hangover
that rainy morning when I knew the choices
of the future would be ever more grueling
than choices past
I wanted politics but had careerism
I wanted womanizing but had the constant
fear of hurt feelings
I wanted honesty and had the honest feeling
that everything was only modulations of performance
and also that such modulations were sincere,
honest, complex
placing one word after another along
the thought: no more poems about feelings
the last hangover
or perhaps the first
.
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