12.18.07

#006 Re: MAGAZINE / UNDECISIVE CONTEXTS
An E-mail Conversation with Mark Edward Grimm – – -

The net establishes its significance as artistic medium no longer in specialized communities but has become dispersed more and more into contexts commonly assigned to the “classical” art business. As a logical consequence the coherence of these structures is broken up and infiltrated. Traditional processes have been running along the line: Production of an object – contextualisation as artwork – selling of it (eventually). For a few years now, however, the question has been raised if the “fetish object” as an artist’s product is still acceptable. A basic principle of artistic analysis is the inclusion of a reality which does not necessarily mean descriptive realism but intellectual examination. Thus, can the examination of realities by means of an object be more than mere decoration? As a role model for a discursive medium, doesn’t ‘the net’ need to replace the “progress” (meaning a linear progress of an operating process resulting in the manifestation with an object )?

In his works Mark E. Grimm covers different contexts which — evaluated by conventional criterias — could be considered as undecisive. The collaborative work in – and outside the net, the study of the working processes and the transfer of net – related working methods into real life are all practices deliberately dealt with as artistic statements but rarely leave material – related marks. Perhaps we observe here the reversal of the 90′ s Californian Ideology and its “Second Life”: the reality is not subordinated to the net but the net turns with its constant use into a part of the reality.
The following Interview was conducted by Carlos Katastrofsky for CONT3XT.NET.

CK: Mark, your collaborations with socialmediagroup.org, your solo works and your texts show very heterogeneous approaches to artistic expression. Having works in mind like “wars grind things to a halt” (1) – a more conceptual piece of media art, collaborative works like “Excavate: cohabit 02″ (2) or your partly very personal but nonetheless substantiated writings (3) i always feel there is some connecting path between them. How would you personally contextualize your works?

MEG: Yes that is a very interesting question. First I think a little background history is appropriate.

My upbringing was a product of a very blue-collar, working class environment in central New York State. Artistic expression, cultural creation, intellectualism etc. was never really taken seriously throughout my education ‘ always dominated by the practice of ‘business’ and sports. I had always done art as a child and as an adolescent I just never realized that it was ‘art’ as the artistic community (especially the international artistic community) see might recognize it now. Before being trained in the university as a formalist (painter/printmaker) I was an insistent ‘dabbler’ in almost anything. Any idea of ‘focus’ eluded me.

Tools were really an essential part of this early education. My father was a carpenter and so was my grandfather before him as well as a mechanic. My German ancestors that immigrated to the U.S.A. were also laypersons. Somehow generations of tools accumulated in my house (no one ever threw anything away or got rid of anything because to materialists ‘things are a valuable resource). We also had an old barn that was literally ‘full’ of tools, car parts, car paint (acrylic enamel from the heyday of 1960′s muscle cars) and pretty much anything you can think of. Also my grandfathers house (on my mother side) was very similar in content and material storage.

I spent my weekends as a kid experimenting and building with these materials, making weird shit, learning to use tools, building projects ‘ basically whatever I could make. I never really realized I was making ‘art’ per se but now tat I look back these experiments really taught me about material which later translated into virtual material when I started learning and experimenting with computers at about age 15 or 16. One example might be the building of ‘bicycles’. In the neighborhood of Rochester, NY (which is basically an old industrial town economically built form the Eastman Kodak business) there would be ‘trash day’ every Wednesday in which people would put their trash on the curbside. We (either me and neighborhood kids or my grandfather and I) use to cruise around looking for old junk that we could make things out of. Our favorite was old bicycle parts in order to make these weird ‘monster bikes’. They were totally hideous, always painted different colors and made of parts that seemed to be just forced together. We once made an 3-wheel bicycle that we named the ‘Cow 900′ that we outfitted with an old lawnmower engine. It was painted bright yellow and had these really long banana bars for steering. We had to put a 100 pound steel plate on the front because there was one speed either on OR off and when you started it there was such a strong torque that the bicycle would do a wheelie. Without the steel the thing would have just flipped over!

When I started really getting into making art I still wanted to retain what I always loved about art making ‘ uninhibited experimentation. The problem I had in art school was that the institution was always trying to fit artists in little boxes almost as a ‘marketing’ strategy of sorts. This artist paints little pictures of birds; this artist paints abstract imagery etc. ‘ totally modernist crap. It took me a while after I left art school to regain a sense of childhood ‘play’ that I always enjoyed in art ‘ obviously though, I now became aware what I was doing was more serious than just ‘fucking around’.

To now answer your question, I just have these ideas in my head that I just cant resist. I basically use my personality (mark edward grimm and megrim.net) as an ‘online’ portfolio site to highlight any work I’m currently doing or completed. Unfortunately it is partially gear toward academia because I am currently (and sometimes desperately) looking for employment but I guess that is one of the regrettable consequences of being an artist ‘ we are always looking for funding! And what is interesting is that this is also part of the artwork ‘ if we consider these sort of ‘life-practices’ as culturally significant and as artwork.

‘Socialmediagroup’ (see http://socialmediagroup.org), on the other hand, materialized as a need for working as an artist collective with my wife Amy Cheatle (see http://happyhousewife.org/) and others who wanted to be involved ‘ friends, collaborators, family etc. We were looking to create a self-funded, autonomous system of art where we could run a multimedia business as ‘socialmediagroup’ (see http://socialmediagroup.com) in order to fund our artistic endeavors. Many of the ideas come from Amy’s research into ecology and environmental systems. ‘socialmediagroup’ has really become the prime method for us for create large scale installations. Because there is a ton of work involved in these projects (especially CoHabit where we had to enlist people to disassemble an old fruit barn) we really needed a way to get many interested collaborators involved and socialmediagroup was a good semi-anonymous way to do this.

The writing I’m doing lately has been just another method for art creation. There are visual works that we can see as in a gallery but also written works that can have just as much of a cultural impact. In this area I was really influenced by the surrealist writer Andre Breton, the Situationist Guy Debord and of course the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. They showed me how writing can be just as much of an art form as anything else and just as legitimate as an artistic ‘piece’. It really took me a very long time to learn to write and it was something that I think I will always struggle with ‘ especially to be actually coherent! I think visual thinkers tend to think in a very ‘non-linear’ manner; writing is such a linear process ‘ there is always a ‘beginning’ and an ‘end’ at least in a traditional sense and not including recent literary endeavors that are taking place on the internet with hypertext.

To finish answering you question ‘ yes, I do feel that there is something that ties everything I do together, even loosely. The computer has the potential to create a real gap between artists ‘ those that work traditionally and those that work electronically. This is a real shame ‘ contemporary art (cutting edge art) seems to be relying more and more on electronic environments. What I have always understood is the similarities between these materials that are looked at as very different ‘ physical material and electronic materials. When I teach, I try to teach artists that have been grounded in traditional materials that there is really nothing but similarities! The computer (code, images, video, graphics) is just another material that can be manipulated in the same ways as physical materials can be manipulated. You have to know what you are looking to do, you have to know the tools you need to do what you want to do, and then you just have to do it! 1) It always has to start with a concept ‘ no matter how simple that concept might be. 2) There is always an experimental aspect of realizing that concept where one discovers something that they did not know before through the intimate processes of working with something new (or old for that matter). 3) There is that act of completing these processes ‘ at least in the idea that one takes a work as far as they are willing to take it. 4) And then those ideas that are learned and the created ‘piece’ that is generated emerges into new concepts and ideas that must be tackled.

Writing for me is a very similar process. What is seldom understood right away is how time-consuming it all is!

CK: So, to put your work in a tiny, little box again: would you say this aproach could be subsumed under the term ‘hacking’ ? And if so, is hacking an essential modus operandi for artists nowadays?

MEG: Yes. I do rather like the term ‘hacking’. I enjoy the ambiguity attached to it. Artists understand it in a positive light – to take what is available and ‘make it ones own’. BUT we cannot forget the subversive qualities attached to the term either! The term is twofold: it is at once the practice of alterations ‘ to hack code, to hack education, to hack a material, to hack a social organization AND the knowledge that those alterations can have a potential cumulative effect that specifically targets the dominant organizational methods of top-down homogeny in favor of more heterogeneous elements.

I think artists really have the potential to interject using creative methods (hacks) in many other places and areas traditionally not associated with the ‘art world’, per se. This is a new quality of the contemporary artist because we are not as bound to the ‘image’ as we once were. Artist interjections OR ‘hacks’ become the artworks themselves and can now be documented via the digital image and text, subsequently displayed on the Internet. The gallery is pretty useless in this regard because it only give some final ‘results’ at an end-stage and seldom documents the processes that were involved (mental, physical) and the struggles that ensued (economics, social pressure, networks of collaborators etc) ‘ which are all very important.

One of my recent works conceptually addresses this. It’s rather long title tentatively is: ‘For Demonstrating the Automated Targeting of Any Individual That Poses a Threat to the Security of Those With Authority OR For Use in Deceptive Action Against Security Forces Using Gunfire Simulations Based on Motion Tracking’. It is basically a small program patch written in PD (puredata) that tracks movement from a web-cam and simulates the firing of an AK-47 when any movement is detected. I imagined that it could have multiple uses such as any technology always does. Hypothetically I imagined it being used as a security demonstration at some security conference in Las Vegas: ‘Target the Intruder To Your Estate Before They Target You!’ ‘ a sort of pre-emptive weapons system for private property where parameter guns would be automated and would not distinguish friend from foe.

It could also be used by ‘insurgents’ OR criminals, subversives etc. as a real-world simulation. All they would need is a computer, web-cam and some speakers. When the police or military enters the property the motion detection would trigger the AK-47 gunfire. The police, marines etc. might think they were being fired upon and would give some time to the people in the house to make their escape OR just create an overall simulated illusion as a distraction/smoke-screen with computer synthesis.

Computer hacks are great. Taking a piece of code and altering to fit ones needs. BUT this teaches a lot about reality hacks too and how computers can enter into the picture. It’s fascinating to me that people/institutions discard all this old technology that they deem ‘useless’ and replace it with the ‘newest’ without really understanding the potential of what they just discarded. Artists have an interesting opportunity here because computers are being discarded at a very high rate and replaced with ‘the new’. Artists can take these old materials and do really amazing things with them other than create just ‘trendy’ visuals or sounds. They can replicate military technologies! OR become scientists and record environmental data! We all must now strive to hack ‘the real’ using the methods/pedagogy that we learned from hacking ‘the virtual’ ‘ a call for a pedagogy of the hack. McKenzie Wark’s book ‘A Hacker Manifesto’ is a good resource in this regard. It’s a kind of (to paraphrase in his words) a ‘Communist Manifesto 2.0′ for the hacker practice, theory and aesthetic.

To finish your question – yes I do think that hacking is an ‘essential modus operandi for artists today’. I would love to teach a class on ‘Artist as Hacker’ in the university but I’m not sure how well that would really fly locally. The larger the organization the longer it takes to change and in the area that i live, art, unfortunately, is still considered in a traditional sense as something that is ‘made and displayed’ rather than the often complicated processes involved in even the most modest of alterations OR ‘hacks’.

I just wanted to add that I just saw the brilliant film by Martin Scorsese, ‘The Departed’. Pop-Hollywood sometimes produces great things. What was interesting about it is that it had no perspective as far as its characters were concerned. The characters were sort of neutral ‘ they were neither good nor bad. Many times such films try to ‘demonize the other’, this film on the other hand was about the relationship between two contrasting views ‘ the ‘state’ represented by the police organization and the ‘autonomous zone’ represented by the criminal organization. Both are fighting for the right to exist, both are corrupt, both are viral in that decisions transcend individuality, and both strive for their own peace.

‘Hacking’ is similar in that it comes with all this negativity ‘ hacking mainframes, hacking into government organizations etc. but it is also a change in organization which is really threatening to those who are use to being in control of the hierarchy. The police organization is a top-down system that is dictated by the ‘chief’ OR ‘captain’ or whatever. ‘The mob’, al-Queida, hippy-communes, artist collectives are much more viral and in this sense posse a threat to more establish organizational systems. ‘The Departed’ shows what happens when opposing organizational methods refuse to recognize ‘the others’ right to exist ‘ huge shifts in perspectives begin to occur, wars ensue etc. We are in one of these massive organizational shifts right now brought on particularly by the side-effects of the technology of the computer. New forms of organization are occurring and beginning to emerge ‘ established systems are not so happy about this.

As artists we must be participants in this new organization but also be educators in creating a new pedagogy that addresses these changes so that transitions from one organizational method to another doesn’t have such a dramatically frightful effect as it has been having on world populations as they are trying to cope with these swift changes. A pedagogy of the ‘art hack’, as an institutional method, is important in educating new artists (those that use the institution as a primary access point for learning) in the significance of everyday activity as artist methods for ‘life hacks’ and how cumulative effort can inject a new organizational shift into local, national and international systems that for the most part have historically privileged the wealthy and powerful.

CK: In this context I would like to quote from an essay by Mirko Schaefer(4): “A community, which we consider functioning as collective intelligence (Pierre L’vy), can be much more productive and innovative than a company’s research and development department” (5) Speaking of institutional methods – can there ever be something like a “hacking class”? Isn’t the structure of an institution completely different to the methodical organization of “hacking”?

MEG: Yes. I agree with you that there are particular problems associated with the juxtaposition of seemingly conflicting organizational methods such as ‘the institution’ OR ‘hacking’ in the same location/territory. Let me just clarify really quick that there are many variations of institutional organization. Educational institutions vary greatly as well as governmental organizations, corporate organizations and even community organizations: all have desirable as well as undesirable traits associated with how they function within the larger assemblage. Here I’m assuming we are really talking about education institutions of higher education.

When we talk about ‘hacking’ in terms of under or within these institutional structures we are really talking about emergent organizational methods at the micro level that have the inherent ability to modify top-down structures, even at very subtle intensities,
from the bottom-up ‘ sort of like bubbles emerging from the bottom of carbonated beverages. This doesn’t mean that these ‘hacking’ methods don’t exist or shouldn’t exist within more traditional institutional structures such as ‘higher-education’, it just means that these emergent methods have been historically repressed in favor of a top-down structure for the last century or so.

We can already witness forms of ‘hacking’ that are – and have been available in education that are often overlooked. An example of ‘hacking’ classes that are already in existence, even at the primary and secondary levels, although obviously not defined as such, might be found in high schools across America. ‘Shop’ classes OR even ‘Home EC’ usually fit in this category. There have been some teachers of ‘shop’ for instance that are teaching students how to run diesel vehicles off of alternative fuels. This is definitely an engine ‘hack’ because it takes something that is available, something that was commercially produced, and creates something new from it ‘ a car that can run off of alternative fuels that it was not specifically designed to run from. Through these processes of manipulations, students begin to learn acts of modification as well as the properties of energy and energy consumption ‘ for me the ‘modification’ part being the most interesting. In ‘Home Ec’, for another example, students are taught how to create and cook food. They are learning properties of creation rather than those of consumption and they are also learning about energy transference ‘ energy for creation, energy for consumption and energy renewal. These methods for learning are strategic in learning about micro-levels and the ability to retain autonomy over other areas of learning which prepare an individual for the larger ‘economy of scale’.

For the most part these subjects (or even anti-subjects) are looked down upon and are usually considered downright laughable comparatively to more ‘serious’ subjects and disciplines such as the math and sciences (cold war mentality still in existence?).
Obviously, there is the prevalence of memorization and regurgitation that these subjects so often really upon in their educational methods. They are dominant as legitimate forms of how one is educated. These methods are for the specific purpose of insertion within the larger assemblage that is for the most part hierarchically formed around economic interests.

I think art is also in a predicament that is indicated by this same problem. It may be a broad generalization but I always have this image, probably from my own experience in high school, of the high-school art teacher as some ‘foo-foo’, big hair with bad glasses and kinetic earrings that gets his/her students so play with paint and clay ‘ it always feels like some joke to me and other students and teachers treat it as such. ‘Art’ is a joke subject ‘ there is just no extended economic interest involved in its pursuit, at least as an interest for the ‘masses’. And I really have no hope at all for their to be a drastic methodological change in curriculum or legitimacy. That’s why a lot of these ‘new media’ departments that are popping up in colleges across America are so diverse in pedagogy.
Many are not associated with ‘studio art’ but are often grounded in Information Technology, Photography, Film, and Communications -very often placing the same constraints that their traditional counterparts did. The institution, as far as higher-education is concerned, is very slow in response to external technological and theoretical change.

I think what I’m trying to say is that there is and there should be a place for ‘hacking’ classes in the institution (there always has been and there always will be) but we can not have a specific hope that there will be some quick and drastic change in organization because of the slow response time that is inherent within these organizations. Any class in ‘hacking’ as such will always have to be called something else. I’m pretty prone to say that an ‘Art 101′ for non-art majors can be an interesting experiment because there is no ‘preconception’ in the student to what art OR ‘hacking’ actually is! BUT even within other subject there is opportunities to learning from the ‘hacking’ community. Hacking is experiments and experimental processes in creating something new out of something that is already in
existence. Right? Lets maybe make slow changes in how student can create and evolve materials and code through experimental processes rather than just simply studying what has already be learned and taking a test on it. Students need to be able to take something, a material (biological, chemical) OR a piece of code and change it just a little ‘ alter it and make it their own. It think this approach has the ability to alter top-down hierarchical structures such as ‘the institution’ from within and from the bottom-up ‘ through emergent processes at the micro-level and NOT through he economic interest of external sources.

Other than at institutional levels I think that you are right with your Levy quote in that ‘communities’ themselves have a lot of fluidity and ability for self-organizational and self-education. Obviously we cannot rule these out but we also have to make sure that the community and institution can have a proper relationship and that the artist can create interjections that allow these formations to evolve and new organizations and relationships between organizations to emerge.

CK: The concepts you are talking about seem to mix the ideas of 90ies relational aesthetics (Nicolas Bourriaud) and a post – millenium diy approach. What do they mean to your current development as an artist especially under the influence of the economic pressure emerging artists (and not only they) have to bear?

MEG: Yes – and we could also say that this is also a flash back to the 1960′s also. Hippy commune culture, craft movements, punk-rock – these can all be traced as historical lines of flight that diverge and converge in various ways forming the exoskeleton of, as you say, the new “post-millenium DIY” aesthetic, hacker culture, etc. Yet there is a distinct difference I think in what this ‘neo-diy’ attempts to ‘do’ (and I stress ‘do’ as in Gilbert Ryles difference between ‘knowing that’ and ‘doing that’ (6))… it is much more material now comparatively to ‘the ’60′s’ which was for the most part very ideologically driven, at least in this country, with its ‘drop out’ cultural aesthetic and experimentation with individuality (LSD, psychedelics, etc.) rather than understanding social ecologies in terms of ‘assemblages’ such as Deleuze & Guitarri understand it (7) and more recently Manuel Delanda (see ‘A New Philosophy of Society) (8).

Punk moments had similarities in that they still retained a sense of ideology that was really grounded in cultural aesthetics (rock music, images, t-shirts, graffiti) but also brought in the political function of ‘anarchism’ rather than the politics of ‘autonomatism’ found in the ”60′s”. This was a kind of forceful action that had the properties of ‘bleeding’ into general populations (in a different way than ’60′s’ ‘counter cultural’ trends) through a kind of ‘viral’ infection that was forced from the inside to the outside through radical acts – volume, violence, DIY, ripped jeans, whatever…. obviously I’m lacking complete detail here but we should have a ‘vibe’ of history before we can analyze the present…. to any extent.

What has emerged recently (post millenium? 9/11 is a pretty good political and social event reference point.) in philosophical and artistic thought that I think is new and very different than past movements ‘ and I mean different in a sense that past movements were not ‘failures’ ‘ but we have definitely learnd what works and what does not. Artworks do not necessarily have to be bound to any form of visual or cultural aesthetics (clothing, music) nor do they have to be territorial (clubs, galleries, public-markets) but instead can function at a distance, through distance in the form of networks ‘ either temporary and short in duration to very long term. The teaching of children can be a long-term artwork for example ‘ especially if the children are your own! Children are extensions of our-selfs and must learn to create through everything that they do rather than conform or submit to any type of pre-conceived ‘societal’ standard. Is the teaching of our children not a great artwork? Children will grow and ideas will eventually replicate themselves through new networks of social relationships. There are long term consequences – meaning an artwork continues to evolve through a system many years into the future ‘ an artwork that is never completed but is continually in development. My question is -how is this (education) legitimized as an artwork? Does it need to be? How can we utilize research methods in order to document this form of art and create legitimacy for it? Does it really even need to be legitimized under some sort of institutional/academic pretense?

Actions can have aesthetic properties ‘ although the aesthetics are projections (projectiles) that do not result in ‘an image’ necessarily – for example. What we must do as artists is shed the ideological constraints of some hidden ‘essence’ of an image OR ‘aura’ and begin to replace it with the aesthetics of material manipulations and processes. This does not necessarily mean the manipulation of just art materials as in an ‘installation’ OR ‘video’ BUT the manipulation of the materials of social bodies, the materials of nation-states, the materials of networks, the materials of culture, the material of electricity and energy, the materials of biology, genetics.

I think there is a lot more going on here than just ‘mapping’ (visually) these movements of materials OR even a traditional understanding of DIY because I think there is much more to it. Rather we are trying now to understand (conceptualize) the artist as having the ability to manipulate these materials in direct/indirect, conscious/unconscious ways that may or may-not have direct and immediate outcomes resulting in some ‘final moment’ ‘ a painting on a wall, an installation.

I think economically the arts must sustain themselves but can do this by moving beyond the ‘institutionalized’ professions of art to explore the infinite amount of materials out there. Can an artist become a biologist? Can an artist become an economist? Can an artist infiltrate a foreign system (even slightly) from the outside to the inside? Can artists be politicians? Lawyers? Mercenaries (lets not pretend all artists are ‘good’)? Can artists become ‘the other’ as Nietzsche (9) might say? What keeps an artist in the discipline of ‘art’? Comfort? Friends? Common interests? Does border crossings from one discipline to the next make one any less of an artist?

Right now I am working in ‘Theater’ with lights and sound. I have never done this before nor have I really had any exposure in theater other than going to see a bad Broadway musical once! I have had to learn a whole new language, aesthetics, collaboration, etc. in relatively a short amount of time. Granted I’m still in ‘the arts’ ‘ but even comparatively to ‘fine arts’ this experience is very foreign to me. What now can my role be in this new field? Can I bring something new to the discourse indirectly and directly through my presence? What can I learn that might be utilized in another discipline and under different conditions?

I have also been studying mycology and would love to take a few classes in genetic engineering, micro-biology etc. ‘ but I could only do this if I had a University job that allowed me to take classes for free obviously.

I think economically the ‘institution’ of art is too established, specific, and at times very impenetrable. For me, artists need to look for alternative economic systems to grasp onto, infiltrate and consequently redefine and alter. This may be a disciplinary change! ‘ but I really mean that there are other systems for us to involve ourselves in and other mechanisms to creation and material manipulations that can eventually emerge to have extraordinary impacts ‘ viral impacts that are much different I think than just the idea of ‘drop-out’ autonomy OR punk and/or ’90′s DIY.

About Mark E. Grimm
Mark E. Grimm is an artist that works in and between New York City and Rochester, NY in the U.S. His work is primarily focused on new media art (interactive installations, video art and internet art) and conceptual works. In 2000 he became co-founder of the Social Media Group (http://socialmediagroup.org, http://socialmediagroup.com), recent works have become increasingly concerned with the intersection between the human, the ecological, and the technological. Heavily influenced by current philosophical theory such as post-modern and post-structural theory he uses environmental and social issues as hidden text veiled in a minimalist garb.
His professional experiences include teachings at Oswego State University of New York (NY), Kean University (NJ) and Teachers College at Columbia University (NY). Currently he is working on his PhD.

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(1) http://warsgrindthingstoahalt.megrimm.net/
(2) http://socialmediagroup.org/projects/entry_excavate_cohabit_02.php
(3) http://megrimm.net/writing.php
(4) http://mtschaefer.net/
(5) http://art.runme.org/1107805077-9249-0/schaefer.pdf , p.68
(6) Ryle, G. (1949) The Concept of Mind. Chicago. The University of Chicago Press
(7) Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
(8) Delanda, M. (2006). A New Philosophy of Society. London: Continuum.
(9) Nietzsche, F. (1956) The Birth of Tragedy & The Geneology of Morals. Anchor Books.__

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magazine: http://re.cont3xt.net
interview: http://re.cont3xt.net/pdf/Re_006.pdf
exhibition: http://del.icio.us/TAGallery/EXHIBITION_me.grimm

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10.01.07
Part two of an essay series based on the theatrical production of ‘Nine Parts of Desire’ by Heather Raffo.

Nine Parts of Nine Parts: Part II Mullaya

By
Mark Edward Grimm

Part II: Mullaya

In a scene form ‘Nine Parts of Desire’ we see Mullaya, and old Iraqi woman standing on the banks of a river in Bagdad.

BAGDAD ‘ ‘Without the river there would be no here, there would be no beginning.’

Is it the beginning that we long for? Isn’t there always the desire to return to the womb, to return back to the point of orgin? If we follow the ‘lines of flight’ back to the past, in our collective memories, navigating the machinic phylum and understanding its emergent properties then we find the intensity of our earliest memories are that of ‘eden’.

The river is the river of life, the root of civilization. ‘Qurna, Eridu, Ur. The garden of Eden was here’ – the Garden of Eden was Baghdad. The Garden of Eden is Iraq (Babylon)’ the dawn of civilization is the garden of civilization.

Lets quickly look then at the garden. What does it mean to be a garden? A garden bears many things. A garden bears fruits and vegetables and anything else that we can domesticate as a food source OR anything that naturally occurs as a source of food. A garden is also a place where plants, bushes and trees grow. It creates a shade on the earth. A garden is also a place where things rot ‘ they die and then they are returned back to the soil later to be resurrected in the rejuvenation of new growth. A garden is also a place of ‘pests’ ‘ at least a pest to us and to the garden ‘ a place where external entities from outside penetrate the wealth of the garden because the garden is a living organism ‘ a living ecology.

The pest, I think, is the most interesting aspect of this garden ecology because if we as humans are trying to tend to the garden and what the garden produces and offers us then we are always trying to get rid of these pests that are coming from the outside of our ‘perfect’ ecological systems in order to feed off our self-created system as a host. It is amazing that it is as if reality itself is trying to burst into our nice little harmonious systems in order to disrupt our ‘utopia’ and create chaos. If there were no such thing as a ‘garden’ would the ‘pest’ exist?

It would be kind of like saying that if an apartment OR house didn’t exist for us to live in would there be such thing as ‘dust’? We are always trying to push this thing called ‘dust’ out of the house only for it to eventually creep back in ‘ on our pants on our shoes etc. This is like the void again ‘ the void is always trying to push itself back into a place that is constantly trying to eradicate it. Rats in the sewers, roots and ‘weeds’ pushing themselves out of the concrete and pavement of the roads ‘ parking lots. Is as if we are only interested in building an illusion of the world as our own perfect ‘garden’ ‘ always trying to re-create this perfection of what we keep remembering in our collective memory. In America this is called ‘Disney World’ but in Baghdad this is called ‘The Garden of Eden’.

The ‘Garden of Eden’ stretches back in our collective conscience to when we were apes ‘ when we evolved. BUT the more modern version ‘ in ancient history ‘ is the ‘Hanging Gardens of Babylon’ which was once in present day Al-Hillah in Iraq. As described by he Greek Historian Diodorus:

The Garden was 100 feet long by 100 wide and built up in tiers so that it resembled a theater. Vaults had been constructed under the ascending terraces which carried the entire weight of the planted garden; the uppermost vault, which was seventy-five feet high, was the highest part of the garden, which, at this point, was on the same level as the city walls. The roofs of the vaults which supported the garden were constructed of stone beams some sixteen feet long, and over these were laid first a layer of reeds set in thick tar, then two courses of baked brick bonded by cement, and finally a covering of lead to prevent the moisture in the soil penetrating the roof. On top of this roof enough topsoil was heaped to allow the biggest trees to take root. The earth was leveled off and thickly panted with every kind of tree. And since the galleries projected one beyond the other, where they were sunlit, they contained conduits for the water which was raised by pumps in great abundance from the river, though no one outside could see it being done. (Wellard, 1972, pp. 156)

Like all present day gardens this was a controlled garden ‘ a fabricated garden, a constructed garden. And like all present day constructions ‘ especially constructions that have reached utopic proportions ‘ it invited the pests at the outskirts of the city walls looking to feed on that same ‘utopic’ vision yet ‘destroying’ that vision in the process allowing a morphogenetic process to occur that was not in the initial intent. The naked, thus, must put on clothes again to shield the intrusions of the outside created through the specific conditions of the inside.

But unlike an invading force of populations, viruses or pests – the very earth that it rested on ‘ through an earthquake it was destroyed in the first century B.C transforming this ‘garden’.

And again the ‘imaginary’ was rebuilt in a new form, the area of present day Al-Hillah emerged as the center of learning, education and technology in the Islamic world. A new garden of illusion created but also at the same time ‘ again ‘ creating its own vulnerabilities through our own concepts of perfection. From the outside ‘ a sweeping void the ‘nothing’ again consumed in the form of the ‘nomadic method’.

As Mullaya said:
‘When the son of Genghis khan burned all the books in Baghdad the river ran black with ink’.

In 1256 a ‘black death’ of ‘nomadic’ forces swept in and the Mongol empire ‘ having no regard for the structure of the city. This was not a ‘misunderstanding of the city’ as many would argue (Deleuze & Guatarri 1987) but instead it is, on the contrary a misunderstanding of nomadic external forces and the power of a decentralized ‘war machine’ on a structured state.

The problem is that the exteriority of the war machine in relation to the State apparatus is everywhere apparent but remains difficult to conceptualize. It is not enough to affirm that the war machine is external to the apparatus. It is necessary to reach the point of conceiving the war machine as itself a pure form of exteriority we habitually take as a model, or according to which we are in the habit of thinking. (Ibid p. 354)

Because there are always going to be cracks in the milieu, especially a very homogenous plane – because it is much easier for something external (culture, social organization) to be ‘the other’ – that it sets the soil for easy penetration and replication. Once there are drastic homogenous conditions it is much easier for the potential of the reverse to emerge or transcend upon that same consistent plane. The radical shift from the ‘State’ to the ‘nomadic machine’ is even more extreme and to that end the ‘nomadic machine’, once it has transformed a space from an intensive ‘minor’ organizational schematic to an intensive ‘major’ system must then recondition this severe anxiety of the ‘conquered’ state into a new anxiety ‘ a new void as a the return of a linear aristocracy.

The conquering of the Maya became an example of this extreme external, foreign force descending upon them. This was a ‘super void’ in the sense that the two cultures ‘ Mayan & European ecologies, biology’s etc. had been completely separated for thousands of years ‘ since the initial embarking on separate journeys from the ‘garden of eden’. While the European populations had exposure to intense civilization (dense urban environments, market economies), the Maya, being relatively new from emerging out of nomadic populations relatively, did not. This created a condition of sterilization that had openings for all these different external relations to exploit, develop and emerge as a dominant ‘majority’. Disease, religion, external substance (alcohol) easily found a vulnerable host to develop within. As McNeill (McNeil 1976, Delanda 1997) says of the Europeans, they contained within their own biology a ‘biological weapon urban conditions of life [had] implanted into the bloodstreams of civilized peoples.’ (p.62, p. 131) So in a way, all they had to do was to show up ‘ and biology took its course.

From then on it was all too easy ‘ history could be wiped like a computer hard-drive. The bishop Diego de Landa ‘in one of histories worst acts of cultural vandalism, ‘ burned all Maya manuscripts that he could locate in his effort to eliminate ‘paganism.’ (Diamond p. 159) This was an easy result from, as Delanda (1997) says, ‘cultural material [that] flowed together with genes and biomass (not all human) across the Atlantic [creating] a whole complex mixture that triumphed’ (p.133) over the Mayan populations. A ‘blank slate’ had been created and in this way an entire continent was ‘transformed into a supply region for all three spheres of the European economy: material life, markets, and anti-markets ‘ (Ibid).

Is the present day ‘ 2007 ‘ Iraq this same promise of a ‘blank slate’? Except here there is no ‘virgin’ ground for a new emergent becoming ‘ this ground is too old, ancient. It is as though we are trying to get back to the garden that we left yet the garden is different ‘ it has changed, mutated and morphed in unexpected ways. It is as Mullah says, the ‘great dark sea of desire’.

The variations in possibilities have been expended in a multitude of ways prior to even our slightest conception of the space, topologies and histories involved. In this sense the major (the nomadic) is too strong and the sedentary army cannot proceed against the smooth planed that has settled in, as Mullah says, ‘This land between two rivers’.

Obviously the old techniques were tried to an extent. When the American army invaded it protected the economic interests of the oil fields yet allowed the museum to be vandalized. Another erasure of history – is there a word for this? To control a society, to dominate a people we know for certain – their history must be erased. Yet as we also know ‘ total recall is inevitable. Memories always resurge, bubbling and brewing from underneath the concrete, the parking lot that has tried so hard in vain to hold back the earth from doing what it wants to do ‘ what it desires most to do ‘ grow.

American slavery has shown this because out of this cultural elimination there is still a culture that is retained ‘ the blues, jazz emerged from this great cultural repression ‘ it could never leave, it was always there. By repression, homogenization – we breed super-culture. Like with the virus ‘ by eliminating viruses we give rise and opportunities to super viruses. And ‘terrorism’ ‘ whatever our subjective understanding subscribe the definition to be – the more we try to eradicate ‘terrorism’ we help to build new forms ‘ super-terrorism.

‘The Garden’ is this great illusion and also paradox. The more we build and create this garden as an image of something that we think we lack ‘ some vision of ‘good’ and ‘utopia’ ‘ the more we are inviting what we don’t want from the outside ‘ inside. When we try to build this garden anew ‘ a creation of a new location ‘ our garden will both spread and thrive OR the tenders of ‘the other’ garden, viewing our garden as an invading weed such as in an aesthetic war between greening states, will stop it.

So to return to the beginning, the question for me is not – why do we need the garden? The question instead is why does the garden need us? What do we do to this garden that it cannot do on its own? The difficulty is that our memories of this garden have all slowly changed through and within populations to the point that we do not know or recognize this ‘Garden of Eden’ when we see it anymore ‘ too much time has past since parting ways long ago in the cradle of human evolution. The garden has ceased to need us because we have become so reliant on NOT needing the garden ‘ precisely because we are looking for something that either already IS or a garden we can re-create (Disney World) in our own fantastic illusion of perfection ‘ and the garden is bored of disingenuous relationships which means we are not necessary anymore to its survival.

Delanda, M. (1997) A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History. New York: Zone Books

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Diamond, J. (2005) Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. London: Penguin

McNeil, W. (1976) Plagues and Peoples. Garden City, NJ: Anchor/Doubleday.

Wellard, James. 1972. Babylon. New York, NY. Saturday Review Press.

_

07.11.07
Part one of an essay series based on the theatrical production of ‘Nine Parts of Desire’ by Heather Raffo.

Nine Parts of Nine Parts: Part I Layal

By
Amy C. Cheatle
Mark Edward Grimm

This essay is in nine parts. It is based loosely from the play ‘Nine Parts of Desire’.

Nine Parts of Desire is a work so compassionate, so heartbreaking, so soul-shatteringly human, that it promises to change forever the way you’ll think about the women (indeed, the people) of the Mideast.

A portrait of the extraordinary ‘ and ordinary ‘ lives of a whole cross-section of Iraqi women, this solo work lifts the veil on exactly what it means to be a woman in the age-old war zone that is Iraq.

Each part of this writing is based on ideas presented by each of the nine women that the play represents. We do not wish to state a narrative or ‘review’ of any sort but to convey ideas that we feel necessary to address, ideas that need unpacking and contemplation in order to be properly grounded in new ideas that may spring forth.

Part I: Layal

‘God Created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men.’
Ali ibn Abi Taleb, husband of Muhammad’s daughter Fatima and fourth Caliph of the Islamic World after Muhammad. Revered as the first Leader of the Shi’a sect of Islam, his shrine is in Najaf, Iraq and is a major place of Shi’a pilgrimage.

And Layal states:

That is me. My phlosophy!
These stories are living inside of me
Each women I meet her or I hear about her and I cannot separate myself from them
I am so compassionate to them, so attached ‘ la, la, it’s the opposite
Maybe I am separate, so separate from the women here
I am always trying to be part of them.
I feel I could have been anybody if I looked different.

We are all inseparable from each other yet also contain and retain our individualistic capacities. It is easier to feel pain that is close than to feel pain that is distant. We, across the Atlantic, are removed from direct contact with the territorial geography that is defined as ‘Iraq’.

To not only acknowledge the suffering of others, but to refuse to become subjugated by it.

To deny the voyeuristic nature (Sontag 2003) of consuming images of pain.

To deliver it to the rest of the world perhaps with the hope that by experiencing, for a moment, some portion of another’s suffering we might become transformed into creatures that actively oppose those who will instigate pain in others.

Some who experience these removed accounts of pain, loss, suffering, will become students of this conceptual pain, comrades of distant martyrs who were once just people like we are just people, involved with our day-to-day lives – understanding how art can have a greater effect on psyche than the photo documentation of a war’ or just acknowledging or bearing witness to another’s pain- you did live, you did die.

You did interact with your environment and your surroundings and your environment and your surrounding interacted with you.

Traveling with families in tow, dinner digesting, passing intact shopping districts with lights blazing into the night and buyer-friendly pre-selected music played for its soothing effects on the equilibrium of an individual’s addiction to consumption and accumulation, into the theater where the simulation of another reality is before us – one of bombed out buildings, annihilated infrastructure, children, husbands dead and gone, torture and rape, deliberate environmental contamination, the purposeful destruction of shared cultural artifacts and history- and yet still the strength to live- is this hope or determination?

Thus, this is a transformation from one reality to the next, a movement from the theater of everyday life to the theater of a projected reality ‘ an assemblage of desire, nine parts from variations in space/time assembled as a singular instance. Assembling the’

‘individuals that have compassions developed by seeing, if not experiencing, the suffering of others.

And as the theater lights die and return – ‘A Call to Prayer’ is heard 5 times a day: at dawn, at midday, in the afternoon, at sunset, and finally when the sky becomes dark and daytime is over. ‘The Call’ is like eating. It is like breathing. It is exercise. It is thought.

Earliest television memories were of coming face to face with children our own age, on the other side of the world, suffering from famine. Looking into faces we felt a strong sense that here was another form of us. If we had been born to another family that might be us’ years later on TV George Bush ‘the first’ announcing a war with Iraq and our crying- at 14′ then ash covered witnesses of the fall of the World Trade Center who would, a few hours after seeing them on TV, be walking, still in shock, under our Manhattan apartment window’ Hurricane Katrina and crying men and women begging for relief as family members were dying of heat stroke, lack of medication, lack of water’ a baby in her mother’s arms that would not wake up’

We hear the ‘call to prayer’. It is within a theater. The theater is within a theater. The theater is within the theater of the spectacle. Theaters are always within other theaters ‘ theaters are part of assemblages. They re-enact histories and create new desires. They create new concepts within their walls. They highlight instances of external theaters and create new instances of them ‘ a re-appropriation of spectacle. A theater creates a spectacle within a spectacle – though through its re-appropriation an art form is assembled and maintained extending throughout a given time duration.

That the suffering of others, the deaths of their loved-ones, will not go unnoticed by the rest of the world. We may very well belong to a society that is oversaturated with images and accounts of pain, suffering, destruction, and it may desensitize some and activate others, while others still may become media-recluses, dropping out of the media game by putting an end to newspaper subscriptions, to internet news, to television. As a citizen of the United States is it our responsibility to bare witness to what evils our elected government enacts upon others, and in our name? Can accounts of suffering reach a critical mass that will demand an end to its cause?

A critical threshold is often reached that tips the balance of social bodies and organization. Theater is not a ‘television’. It is not a ‘machinic enslavement’ insofar as the ‘television viewers are no longer consumers or users, nor even subjects who supposedly ‘make’ it, but intrinsic component pieces, ‘input’ and ‘output’, feedback or recurrences that are no longer connected to the machine in such a way as to produce or use it.’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987 p.458) The theater breathes ‘ it takes breaths. It assembles briefly and then disassembles after a certain amount of designated time only to reassemble again in a new altered form.

Unlike electronic media that is reproducible bit-for-bit and culturally replicated as perfect clones of itself for the mass component parts, the theater operates within the theater of mass cultural replication but is a temporary autonomous zone within the larger assemblage where variation is its strength. Each day the assemblage comes together a variation on the machine take place. The machine is the theater itself but it never runs the same way twice.

A performance is a re-enactment of jumbled bits of information re-assembled in a new form, a synthesis of externals. It is not pre-recorded but still alive as an ecology that grows as time extends its duration to the end.

Have we as a civilization become accustomed to images of war and suffering – become desensitized to imagery of complete destruction? To have the voices, to hear the stories of a part of a population rendered all but silent, to cry with them and experience their suffering – to raise our fists in solidarity from the comforts of our own warm living-rooms, or the mediated environment of the theater, empowers or awakens us and- is a powerful reminder that we are all still human.

A theater within a theater: nine parts is a theater within the ‘theater of militaris.’ (Virilio p. 108)

Iraq is at the center but its projections are global. It plays out in variation over and over again. Iraq is its own theater ‘ Bagdad is its stage. The television is a simulation of unreal events ‘ the television is the American social assemblages ‘portal’ into that external theatrical event called ‘Iraq’: it is the viral extension of the external. Iraq is a theater of variation ‘ each breath of life and death are different than the previous. We have created a theater of our own to give theatrics to the external theater of Iraq ‘ a different theater where the stage is everywhere and the patrons are collaborators in its production. This is the invasiveness of territory.

The stage is open to narrative ‘ there is always a story to internalize and leave with. A memory is pasted down through subsequent generations and triggered by externals and internals in relation to the body in question. The body in question is a becoming ‘ one that becomes its surroundings’

‘and those who have become women can become other things as well ‘ artists, painters, creators.

Layal, the Iraqi artist and painter, is alive on stage and breathing the breath of herself through the actress that she is represented by – who in turn is representing Layla al-attar, the artist and creator of the ‘Bush is Criminal’ mosaic at the Rashid hotel. The narrative does not necessarily have to be historically correct because the documentation of facts do not directly correspond with the narrative of the theatrics yet we do not necessarily mind because the flow of memory and reproducibility through the system of the Iraq social network is intact. The singularity of mind becomes a by-product as art. And art materializes as a physical demonstration of that singularity:

The mosaic, an unflattering portrait of Bush [The First] with his teeth bared in a scowl, was installed later in 1993 right in the Al-Rashid’s doorway complete with a caption in Arabic and English: “Bush is criminal.

In Arab culture, putting the soles of the feet to ones face is a grave insult. Patrons that walked into the hotel walked over the commissioned 1993 mosaic and wiped their feet on it. The notion of Iraqi feet trudging over George Herbert Walker Bush’s face was thus particularly appealing after the 1991 Iraq invasion. The hotel had been heavily trafficked by foreign guests and the base of journalism operation during the 1991 Gulf War.

The face ‘ the bust: portraiture is not a face anymore than it is a pipe. Yet the memory of reaction, action and experience is long. An occurrence of visualization (the dream) has a forceful power to create new building blocks for intensities. The intensity becomes field for new intensities to be sown. Image power is intensified greatly when it becomes participatory and interactive. Dead images hang on walls. Living images are those that we touch, smell, hear, see and walk upon. This image has a breath in its ability to create vibrations and oscillations through populations. Its power is in the nature of its physical projections as much as in its mental projections giving no preference to either one or the other.

Some notables who have purportedly walked over the floor mosaic at the Rashid Hotel:

- U.N. Special Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi on the upper lip.
- Russian nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky on the Adam’s apple.
- Former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter made a point of sidestepping.
- U.N. weapons inspector Hoans Blix over the shoulder.
- International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohammed El Baradei over the shoulder.

Under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Rick Schwarts
Thursday night, April 10th, 2003, U.S. soldiers, wielding hammers and chisels dug out the mosaic replacing it with a portrait of Saddam Hussein ‘ no photographs are available.

We know the power of removing a central feature of a system in order to disrupt the over-all ecology that is present. A desert ecology, for example, is very fragile. Biotic and abiotic factors interact supporting a diverse community of plant and animal life that has ‘evolved resistance to and methods of circumventing the extreme temperature and arid conditions’ Plant, animal, and bacterial population interact with latitude and longitude, soil and climate. As in any ecology, the system can be highly disrupted by removing an integral part of the over-all assemblage OR by introducing a new part.

Social organization acts also as an ecology or assemblage and when one part of that social organization is disrupted consequences can not only be devastating to that ecological formation but also create a new less-than desirable aftermath containing within its genetic makeup the possibilities for regional, national and even global ramifications.

An occupation is a territorial one; it is an infestation that is highly invasive.

To occupy ones territory one must first erase ones cultural history, replacing the offensive imagery with ones own. That is how territory is marked and remade in the conquerors image.

We have imported a breeding population. We arrive. We survive. We thrive. The ecosystem in question has now suffered a disturbance; this disturbance changes the fundamental nature of the ecosystem (Byers 2002). Cultural histories have been thrown in disarray.

‘and around the same time, the Baghdad museum of art was looted.

As Layal states:
‘My sister wants me to come to London’ If all the artists leave, who will inspire the people?’

The loss of culture is the first step in domination. To destroy ones history first is to destroy the retention of memories (Diamond, J. 2005). A place open up, there is a hole just waiting to be filled by an invading species, and invading culture ‘ the ground become fertile for this invasive species to take root.

The real Layal, Layla al-Attar, was killed on June 27, 1993 by a missile attack on Baghdad ordered by US President Bill Clinton.

And Layla states:
‘Why would they bomb a painter?’

Our own theater is distant and removed to the point that the invasion cannot be controlled or contained from a distance. There cannot be any distant projection to pull itself back because the weight of the invasive species is too strong to stop itself from trying to root. In it’s trying to survive though, native species develop other ways to retain their territory. The performance in this theater is immediate because pre-planning has no barring on performance art other than a ‘rough sketch’ of possibilities – but nothing as machine-like as our own theatrical needs.

‘the suffering of others is not amplified by distance so it must be amplified in some other way. Theatrical means, artistic means can create singular instances that have breeding potentialities ‘ a reproducibility that can replicate itself quickly throughout a small system. An invasive species always folds back upon itself because it facilitates the destruction of the ecology that allowed it to survive in the first place.

References

Byers, J. E. (2002) Impact of non-indigenous species on natives enhanced by anthropogenic alteration of selection regimes. Oikos 97 (3): 449-458.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Diamond, J. (2005) Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed. New York: Penguin Books.

Sontag, S. (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Virilio, P. (2006). City of Panic. Berg Publishrs.

_

04.17.07
An essay devoted to the work of Carlos Katastrofsky by conceptualizing his work through ideas of centrality and maritime networks.

For the past decade or so, artists have been increasingly relying on the Internet for communications and collaborations. Email, website, forums and mailing lists have all contributed to these new and emerging communicational methods. For me, as an emerging artist in the late 1990′s, communication and collaborations between artists was a product of late night drunken and drug induced squabblings in a comfortable home environment eventually emerging as some sort of theoretical epiphany that might or might not be forgot the following day. As unproductive as these ‘sessions’ would sometimes be, those were the good days!

Unfortunately (and fortunately for ones health!) as artists have a greater and greater need of expending their palette across localized and territorialized borders, the Internet develops for them into a finer and more accessible medium for artistic communication. Rather than linkages to specific artistic parties formed through common expressive relationships based on personal and physical interactions, artistic collaborations through internet technologies have created a type of nodal mesh that is much more reminiscent of a maritime network than a centralized territorial state ‘capital’. As Manuel Delanda (2006) explains in the case of maritime networks ‘it was not the increased differentiation of one and the same regional culture that expressed a dominant position but the gathering of expressions from all over the world.’ (p. 110)

Artistic cultural expressions were once, for the most part, homogenous as far as cities and city centers were concerned. This is because cultural creators tending to have fixed relationships with other cultural creators that were localized as far as territory goes which allowed creation of singular cultural entities to be amplified in their unique qualities giving ‘cities’ their cultural significance and legitimacy in relationship to the rest of the world. As Delanda (Ibid) remarks on these localized relationships:
The largest central places, often playing the role of political capitals, attracted talented people from the lower-ranked towns: people who brought with them linguistic and nonlinguistic elements of their own local culture. Over time, these capitals gathered, elaborated and synthesized these elements into a more or less homogenous product which was then re-exported back to the smaller [centers]. The higher prestige of the more differentiated culture at the top acted as a magnet for the short-distance migratory patterns of cultural producers and gave the synthesized cultural product the means to propagate throughout the region. (p. 111)

New York and Paris dominated the global art scene in the 20th century in fact because the finest artists and cultural producers of the world centralized in these specific areas: this is where the industry for cultural communications between like-minded individuals took place. In the first half of this century, the dominant capital for artistic production shifted from Paris to New York and in the case of Marcel Duchamp, for example, as Paul Virilio (2005) amply points out, this was who the ‘much vaunted NY ‘art scene’ centered around’ (p. 48). As a reason and as a byproduct of this centralization the artistic and cultural global significance was averted in their gaze ‘from the Medusa of the twentieth century, deserting the fields of horror of totalitarianism’ (Ibid)

At this point I would like to introduce the work of Carlos Katastrofsky (see http://katastrofsky.cont3xt.net/) who I have been communicating with in artistic and conceptual collaboration and communication over the past year. Based in Vienna, Austria, our relationship has evolved over distances rather than proximity because of the ‘speed’ of new communications technologies. What I have observed is a relationship that is more closely related to a ‘maritime network’ that a centralized cultural ‘center’. Also, what is interesting, is that this sort of collaborative expression and idea exchange does not divert the gaze from world situations in the same way as a central ‘art scene’ very often can do. Locality contains a certain amount of unique information that can be ‘exchanged’ with other specific localities thereby increasing the potentialities for new concepts and ideas to emerge. Rather than centralized exchanges that amplify one specific concept and create rather homogeneous variations as an ‘art-scene’ can do, global communication methods between heterogeneous artistic elements can produce very interesting and unique results that all contain capacities for new and unique variation. This is the nature of recent discoveries in artistic practice and collaborations often deemed as ‘net.art’, ‘generative art’, ‘emergent art’ etc.

In this essay I would like to focus on two works by Katastrofsky that have both a conceptual impact and a material one: works that express themselves via networks and that create a communicative structure with other artists and collaborators to vitiate upon and elicit a response. One work is called ‘internet art for poor people (2006)’ (http://katastrofsky.cont3xt.net/poor.html) and the other is called ‘russian roulette (2006)’ (http://roulette.cont3xt.net/)

First let us look at the work ‘internet art for poor people’. I am forced to imagine for a second that I am without connection to the outside world. There is simplicity in its execution that is almost laughable in that it is just a reoccurrence OR replication of what we, as internet users, have seen on occasion ‘ though a lot less frequently lately: ’404 Not Found. The requested URL was not found anywhere’. Because information can also have an ecological crisis associated with its creation, appropriation and dispersal, ‘access’ to this information has become detrimental in establishing previously hard-to-make connections that have historically been reserved for ‘the elite’ and ‘powerful’ that have all the means of procuring any information available. Those with the least access to information historically have been those most subjected to the will of ‘the informationally informed’: the poor and lower-classes.

Electronic information creates no less of a circumstance and those that do not have access are continually on the ‘catch-up’ as new forms of information and information dispersal (technologies) emerge. But rather than engage in a lengthy discourse on ‘information freedom’, some neo-Marxist ‘net Theory’ analysis, or any other prevailing theoretical thought on ‘net culture’ ‘ let go back and take a look at this idea of the ‘maritime network’ and ‘centralized territory’. On a computer network the ’404 Not Found’ error creates an immediate grounding to a persons centralized and fixed territorial locality. It is an error whereby the computer browser is looping back upon itself. There are no distances and speed is only approximated by the computational power of ones own CPU. The ’404 Not Found’ error is a textual loop as an image loop that, as Virilio (Ibid) states ‘has become the signature of contemporary disasters’ (p.85)

If hurricane Katrina exposed a population of poverty that was masked from the outside world (as many urban, centralized American city populations are) than ’404 Not found’ exposes the lack of interconnected communications between heterogeneous populations. If hurricane Katrina exposed a ‘looping’ or continuous ‘folding back’ of special parameters towards its center then ’404 Not Found’ exposes the ‘folding back’ OR looping of the poverty effect ‘ one that is barley escapable. Lets make a note that the city of New Orleans ‘imploded’ from its edges inward rendering it ‘inescapable’ also!

The ‘net effect’ of continuous looping due to lack of proper network connectedness can be a fatal one. ’404 Not Found’ is an example patch of a singular number sequence that has nowhere to go and affects nothing thereby rendering useless the machine (or software in this instance) it is run on. Emergent wholes have the potential to ‘react back on their components’ (Delanda 2006 p.118) to either enable them or to constrain them. Cities, populations, and even cultural creations can exhibit these phenomenon and can choose, though way of connections, maritime or centralized properties. Yet others can not ‘choose’ which system OR assemblage to become apart of but are subjected to the constraint and freedoms that they emerge within.

Let us now look at a work of Katastrofsky’s that exhibits another spectrum of conceptual properties – ‘Russian Roulette’. This work highlights the nature of ‘maritime networks’, which also are not immune to disastrous results. Interconnectivity, speed and the ease of communication technologies do not necessarily mean a more democratic or ‘equal’ system. What I am interested in through this work, is the difference in the relationships that are exhibited comparatively to the previously discussed work ‘ ‘internet for poor people’.

‘Russian Roulette’ is a ‘download’ button that will download to your computer a random file. As the work points out:
the file you can download below by pressing the button is randomly chosen. but be aware! it could be pornographic, a virus that crashes your entire system, a britney spears – song or other bad data. but it also could be some really great stuff… who knows? (Katastrofsky 2006)

We do not know what we are downloading to our computer. By pressing the button ‘the void’ becomes known ‘ it materializes on our desktop and/or becomes apart of our computer system. What we are doing when we press this button is allowing an external world, one which is not of local origin, to access our desks ‘ to become apart of our system and to create a synthesis between two historically unconnected locals.

The maritime networks of Europe engaged in a similar exchange. As ships traveled from Venice to Antwerp to Genoa to Amsterdam (Delanda 2006) to deliver goods and merchandise, and to make exchanges, these ships also brought with them this same unknown ‘ ecological ‘voids’, pieces of information from previous localities. Sometimes these pieces of information were in the form of viruses that would mutate and take hold on a population as these networks developed and became denser. The viral holocaust of the Native-Americans in the Americas was one such result of these new and emerging networks of trade and organization. Ecological exchanges were also present in genetic ‘plant’ information such as herbs and spice plants from Asia and other exotics and invasive species. Animal life (domesticated) also found the speed of ‘breeding’ as different versions of the same species were much more easily breed due to breed exchanges from different parts of the world.

Warfare is another exchange that became quicker as networks became faster and more accessible. Weapons and war machinery could be remote, dictated from over-seas such as the British war in the Americas was. And wasn’t September 11th 2001 initiated by a ‘network’ from a distance both in time and space?

The ‘download’ button is always a gamble because we do not know what might be received from the other end ‘ we do not know its immediate or its eventual consequences. Choosing to become apart of this network or ‘maritime’ role is choosing to take risks with outside materials and information’s that are not always apparent as ‘this is this’ or ‘this is that’ from the start. There is always an accident waiting to happen because as in ‘Russian Roulette’ ones chances will eventually run out.

The ‘download’ button is metaphorical (ecologically, materialistically) but it is also practical because we can see and directly observe the results electronically on the computer. It is not though, a simulation or simply ‘virtuality’ as we might hope. The computer plays a vital role in the exchange of information and has the ability to affect remote assemblages in unpredictable ways ‘ unpredictable in the sense that there is a cause and effect, of course, but also unpredictable in that the creation and dissemination of information always has the repercussions of eventually folding back upon oneself. This can have positive of negative consequences such as in the case of 9/11 or the New York ‘blackouts’ of 2002 where the capacities to provide (energy) could not meet the capacities to consume ‘ what came in externally could not meet the demand for what a population increasingly became reliant upon internally. The energy networks crashed as a result of there own empowerment ‘ the inevitable accident on a grand scale which was the result of a complex gamble of reliance on an imperfect assemblage.

The ‘download’ button is also an ‘upload’ button. Ones consumption of information does end on the computer but is consumed and ‘uploaded’ the local assemblage through persona, physical and electronic information exchanges. The ‘download’ button, the virus, comes form ‘outside’ to affect the ‘inside’ ‘ it is destabilizing mechanism for the greater assemblage whole. This deterritorializing affect creates and information explosion ‘ an ‘information bomb’ wherever it might land. Like the centrality and homogeny of a system that accepts nothing form the outside has the potential accident of imploding, a ‘maritime’ allows for the potentialities to exist for ‘exploding’ (population explosions, viral explosions, ecological explosions).

The ‘download’ button means ‘I want too know’ NOT ‘I do NOT want to know’. This comes will all the weight associated with it, a window to the world is not always the best of choices! Katastrofsky could just as easily be Catastrophe! As Virilio (2006) stated, ‘Perhaps this is what they mean when they talk about an ‘open society’ ‘ like the city offering itself without resistance to its invaders?’ (p.110)

In this essay I tried to create a novel approach to critiquing art (internet art) based on the work of Carlos Katastrofsky. Rather than simply view and critique the internet works ‘internet for poor people’ and ‘Russian roulette’ I tried to make connections and synthesize a new way for critique that looks at artwork though a contemporary theoretical lens. This was done by combining Manuel Delanda’s concept of ‘maritime networks’ and ‘centralize territories’, and Paul Virilios style of writing as well as examples from ‘City of Panic’. My attempt was to draw connections between the three entities and to understand Katastrofsky work through theory while creating my own language for art critique.

References

Delanda, M. (2006) A New Philosophy of Society. London: Continuum.

Katastrofsky, C. (2006) Russian Roulete. Internet Artwork residing at http://roulette.cont3xt.net/

Virilio, P. (2005) City of Panic. New York. Berg.

02.28.07

An essay about a painter friend of mine.

It would be easy to write about Jacob Roesch’s paintings in a traditional sense. One could talk about color, form, materials, imagery, structure etc. There is no denying that there is a modernist aspect to his work: it draws on rich traditions in art history and can be judged and compared as such to those histories. In this essay I do not wish to regurgitate the same tired language used to describe and critique such work but instead I am interested in approaching the work in a novel way. By creating my own twists and turns to synthesize an argument that shows the various external sources that combine and converge allowing these paintings and imagery to emerge and ‘become’. I will thus describe the conditions that gave rise to this work rather that try to undertake a study of the ‘work’ itself.

In relationship to Jacob Roesch, I am in a unique position to write about his work. I have been very close to Jacob in friendship for several years and have had the opportunity to know the intricate and intimate details association with his paintings evolution. Writing on his work is a task I undertook, not simply and a gesture of friendship, but with the preconception that artists should be writing about artists: artists they know personally, artists that they collaborate with, or artists that they respect.

Part of the idea in writing ‘essays by artists on artists’ is to ‘bypass’ the ‘expertise’ of the critic/historian. The idea is that an artist, to paraphrase Deleuze (1995), can take another artist from behind in essay form and produce a mutant child that could or could not resemble its parent’s original conception. ‘The essay’ becomes the writer as much as it is a product of the relationship between artists. The work under focus becomes a part of the jurisdiction of the artist/writers own work/theory therefore making the given artists work part of their own. With this precondition, artistic work does not exhibit negative OR positive qualities but instead exhibits qualities of its own accords in the historical, theoretical, political, sociological etc. frame in which the artist/essay-writer responds to it. The work is then not criticized in the sense that the historical tradition of ‘critique’ dictates, but instead becomes a product of is own processes that gave rise to that work AND the processes that gave rise to the essay that was written based on that work. I believe this to be a valid way (artists writing about artists) that artists can begin to balance art-world power by helping to facilitate the disintegration of established 20th century art world relationships (artist/critic/historian/academic) and the classification of those disciplines in favor of more heterogeny and fluidity.

To use this concept as a starting point I will begin with my own experience and observations that I see extremely apparent in Roesch’s painted works and make observations on how his painted works materialized based on recent philosophical discourses in assemblage theory. To briefly define, assemblage theory as outlined by Manual Delanda (2006) crosses the nature-cultural divide by treating wholes as entities derived from the convergences of historical processes once composed of heterogeneous parts. To quote, ‘Entities ranging from atoms and molecules to biological organisms, species and ecosystems may be usefully treated as assemblages’ (Ibid p. 3) To begin to understand the painted works of Roesch as assemblages it is essential that one first understand the territory that they surround, a territory that ‘is made of decoded fragments of all kinds’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 504). In the painted works of Roesch I am interested in these fragments of information (social, material) that create the territory for the paintings to emerge as an assembly of his various social processes.

Roesch’s works resemble something less than any artistic ‘drive’ to paint or ‘express’ but rather are the result of a lingering memory that must emerge and materialize as a rehabilitation mechanism for a genuine desire to turn what is perceived as chaotic into a lasting sense of order. These ‘memories’ are both psychological (embedded in the neural-net of the brain) and technological, derived from direct observation resulting in the taking of a digital photograph. ‘Memories always have a reterritorialization function’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987 p. 294) and Roesch’s are no exception, territorializing and assembling to form a painted image. His painting process currently is a result of a combination/convergence of ‘memories’ of specific people and places and digital photographs in which a photo is responded to through the calling of a certain memory associated with it in order to assemble a paintings aesthetics; color, form, feel etc.

Memories have a way of creating their own assemblages. Bits of information often converge to form singular ideas. It is in the growth of the child and adolescent that has the lasting impact, an impact that must be articulated as a form of ‘rebirth’ in order to make some sense from the various complex sources of data-bits that have accumulated over time. Childhood can be a complex endeavor and as Guattari (1996) states ‘a wide spread anxiety accompanies every incident in [its] development’ (p. 68). This anxiety is a source of memory because it has the impact of sustaining the memory and creating a vivid representation of itself: stored and locked internally. The child is always a center of others because s/he lacks the proper mechanisms to consciously extend by intensities her/his territory past her/his immediate vicinity becoming a ‘person’ only by ‘emerging from the assembly of subpersonal components (impressions, ideas, propositional attitudes, habits, skills)’ (Delanda 2006 p. 52) that have been territorialized by the surrounding social networks, environments and architectures that surround. Under this condition ‘the entire society finds itself infantilized, puerilized, under the ‘panoptic’ regime described by Michel Foucault’ (Guattari 1996 P. 69). Territorialization is the process OR processes that ‘define or sharpen the special boundaries of actual territories’ (Delanda 2006 p. 13) which can also mean that the homogeneity of a surrounding system (this being the parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents etc) has a direct effect on the internal homogeneity of the child.

Having a direct personal relation to Jacob I am well aware of the complex social histories that surrounded his upbringing. I would not be a friend if I were to divulge personal details that might prove embarrassing yet I can say for honesty that there is nothing ‘darker’ in his past than most tight, family oriented social assemblages contain. There are some unique qualities of his circumstances that I will also not take the liberty to disclose. What I can say is that there has always been a struggle for a personal autonomy that meets the expectations of both him and those surrounding him. This very crucial point is one of the main driving forces and influences in his image creations and assemblages: he draws from vital memories and impacting moments and feelings in order to rebuild a vague idea of what circumstances that might or might not have been beyond his control. This is the materialization of memory that was lost in the transition and struggle for individualism. As a child we are all under the eye of the social order we are subjected to.

There then becomes a singular point where a critical threshold can be met, granted the conditions, where the child/social-actors extended territory become greater that the territory that others in the social networks place upon him/her. With this extended territory OR deterritorialization of the body into larger social assemblages comes ‘a powerful desire for autonomy in every area; emotional, sexual, financial, intellectual, etc.’ (Guarttari 1996 p. 65) To quickly define: ‘any process which either destabilizes spatial boundaries or increases internal heterogeneity is considered deterritorialization’ (Delanda 2006 p 13). Such deterritorializing can have a dramatic effect because of the added weight of social responsibility that accompanies the transition. This is ‘because entry into semiotic life mean[s] having a job, entering production, the production of models, the production of subjectivity. During the whole of adolescence, there is considerable anxiety concerning the coming of ‘normal adulthood.’ (Ibid P. 67) The more complex the child’s place within the social assemblage, the more difficult it is to make sense of the processes of deterritorializing. Painting, for Roesch, has become a method for reterritorialization as a personal process to create an order from a complex childhood and transition to ‘adulthood’ under the watchful eye of the social assemblage that he emerged from.

Much of this is present as memory residue in his painted work. There are images of children, parents and grandparents: all seemingly trapped in nostalgic time. Sometimes the images of ‘persons’ are genderless where time-period and style (fashion) converge. At other points in his work there is the confusion of genetics where the parent could be confused for the child or the child could be confused as the parent creating a non-linear relationship between subject and desire. There often emerge relationships to environments and architecture (machines) that set the ‘place’ but also create a foreground that the images of the person/subject dissolve.

Painting has always been there for Jacob. It is a method of meditation where thoughts can material into imagery and seemingly random bits of collected information can be manipulated in a process of reflections on interpersonal networks. He has also been a product of institutional organization making a transition from social networks to larger institutional ones, which have also influenced the processes, and imagery that is assembled. In his paintings, there are these collections of nostalgic like memories that are juxtaposed together, converging with the formal education of an arts training that teaches traditions and materials. The transition to ‘artist’ is one of massive deterritory because the formalism of the institution must be bypassed at some point in order for new ideas and concepts to emerge.

Becoming an artist is never an easy decision. ‘Artists are stagemakers’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987 p. 316) that territorialize what has been fragmented. It is a decision of social organization that one must choose, as Paul Virilio stated, ‘To dwell as a poet or as an assassin?’ (Ibid p. 345): to assemble or contribute to destruction. As a method it is how Roesch has dealt with ‘insertion into family, social, sexual, athletic, military, etc., situations’ (Guarttari 1996 P. 67) that has become his art form, materializing into painted images. He has carefully chosen his memories, something that strikes him, something that has developed internally and through various expressive interactions. The pre-recording of a digital image sets the stage and in turn begins the painted image assembling processes that reverberate on the canvases. In one painting, a man (boy?) on a pink bicycle with his head cropped at the top of the canvas is either Jacob Roesch or his father OR both. Genetics have memories too and they assemble and converge at various stages in histories to form ‘individuals’. The image emerging from the digital photograph does not necessarily have to be derived only from that particular photograph but has a direct memory of its own from previous and past interactions in his histories.

To describe some of the works, several paintings are of sky shots: pieces of buildings, fences and power-lines. Pictures of daily activities of nomadic, nostalgic wanderings build the canvases. In these works, ‘painting recreates the silhouettes and postures of materiality’ (Deleuze & Guarttari 1987 p. 301), memory images and the technology of the digital image converge and assemble: the assembly of accumulated visual information slowly pollinates the canvas. Such as bees assemble a ‘hive’ by bring together various bits of materials and memories – so do canvases emerge in a very similar way.

These works have contained the image of a personal social network and its associations. Family photos are more represented, often depicting the subjects slightly humorously in style, aesthetics, and presentation. Colors are somewhat muted and the edges between subjects and background is often blurred: the lines are not tight and crisp. Besides the evidence of an education in art and art history, Roesch’s paintings depict much more about his own internal and external relations: internalizations through territorialization and deterritorialization as well as processes of combining memory with technology.

There are noticeable wounds present where the drastic drama of transitioning between states of need and autonomy create some uncomfortable silences in the imagery as one looks retrospectively at his body of work. The push and pull is between a desired life and a life under the gaze of others whether it be the organization of the institution or prior to his institutional insertion. The properties of the paint, the properties of the brushes and canvases/stretches have all recently congregated in his Brooklyn studio with his memories and digital imagery intact waiting to be assembled into a singular instance or idea. His paintings are a presentation of informal and external stimulations. Painting is a therapeutic mechanism in the sense that it makes sense through visual creation the personal relationships to external and internal social mechanisms at play within the social networks that he is involved. By reterritorializing what has been so drastically deterritorialized he is able to retain that bit of autonomy that he has always so desired: through painting.

References

Delanda, M. (2006) A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Continuum.
Deleuze, G. (1995) Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Guattari, F. (1996) Soft Subversions. New York; Semiotext(e)

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01.28.07

An essay I wrote about my wife and artistic collaborator Amy Cheatle as a personal reaction to her recent work.

Neo-minimalism, Generative Art and the Work of Amy Cheatle
by
mark edward grimm

In October of last year I posted a question to the ‘Eugene’ generative arts mailing list with the question: ‘Could wine and beer making be considered a ‘generative art’ practice?’

My question was initiated to gather collective information on a topic that both Amy Cheatle and myself have been involved with, beginning with the ‘ORG’ show at Macy Gallery under the arts collaborative name ‘socialmediagroup’, for the past several years. Just recently my artist/partner Amy Cheatle gained part-time employment as an apprentice winemaker in the small, canal-town village of Fairport in upstate western New York. As an artist she had moved rapidly from more traditional approaches to art making such as painting and drawing to more experimental varieties: working in an experimental artist collective that focuses on systems theory, critical theory and environmentalist practices. Work in this area has been expanding within the art discipline over the past few decades, beginning, but not limited to, the land artists of the 1960′s and 1970′s.

At the same time as our installations were occurring, we as artists began experimenting with new forms of art creation that could not specifically be located or displayed in the context of the gallery setting. These ‘artworks’ were instead, a sort of ‘life practice’: they were experiments in living where, as the Situationist Raoul Vanetgem (2003) stated, ‘tiny adjustment[s] in what is essential has much greater import than a hundred incidental improvements.’ (p. 17)

These ‘small improvements’ or simple actions could not be documented to the same degree that a gallery show might eventually materialize into some glorious singular event. In contrast to a gallery ‘show’ of sorts, which in our case only came into being about once a year, the simple changing and manipulation of daily action and activity could potentially be performed several to many dozen times daily. Clothing the body, weeding the garden and even loading the dishwasher could become new artistic mechanisms in which to express and critique oneself as an artist, leading to the eventual emergence of new processes in which to conduct those very same activities. The adjustments are minimal, but the accumulations of minimal processes that evolve over time are, to us, substantial. As Deleuze (1995) tells us, these processes or ‘capacities’ for new conceptual emergences ‘invent new possibilities of life. Existing not as subject but as a work of art ‘[presenting] thought as artistry.’ (p.95)

Obviously through these processes there is going to be interactions with philosophical concepts and scientific ones that can be monitored, producing variations to create new ‘activities’ and forms. To cite Deleuze & Guattari (1994):
The three thoughts intersect and intertwine but without synthesis or identification. With its concepts, philosophy brings forth events. Art erects monuments with its sensations. Science constructs states of affairs with its functions. (p.199)
And so the problem for us in dealing with the art making process has always been the history of separating the arts from other disciplines, including the activities of the everyday. I must first admit that I take a narrow view of art-making in this essay by classifying and generalizing trends. It would be fair too say that such thoughts and generalizations have formed the basis of our work ‘ we react to what we personally feel and observe. To us, art-making and the scientific and philosophical processes involved in art-making have been slowly replaced by the aesthetics of image making which is immaterial comparatively to the physics of physical processes which our art now partakes. To us, pure image creation contributes to the spectacle where populations can no longer produce but instead are restricted to mere consumption. In this sense the idea of the ‘gallery’ as exhibition space is nothing but a symbol of separation: white, laboratory conditions that isolate a cultural practice from the general population of the outside world.

Obviously, the gallery world has been criticized and critiqued, starting with Marcel Duchamp, by artists since the early 20th century, but rather than a historical perspective I think it is essential as a critical starting point to understand Amy Cheatle’s recent work. It is from this perspective that she has viewed the art world and especially the ‘art market’. Subjectively, the elitism of art as a specialized field always places the working person (blue collar, those in poverty) outside of the specialized processes of art making that have become institutionalized to the degree where image makers have power over image consumers.

This brings us to the question of production. Who controls production? Who produces and who consumes? Recently we have been looking at our family history. Both of our family heritage is rich in English and German immigrants who were material workers, meaning they were a part of micro-economic systems that could be considered relatively autonomous, at least comparatively, to contemporary mega-markets. We discovered our heritage was full of closed-loop communities where production took place under micro-conditions: tailors, beer-makers, food producers and all were gardeners. ‘The garden’ above all, has struck Cheatle’s artistic interest.

Why is ‘the garden’ such a revolutionary idea? As Hakim Bey (1999) stated, ‘Growing a garden has become – at least potentially – an act of resistance. But it’s not simply an act of refusal. It’s a positive act. Its praxis.’ (p.10) It is simple production methods that all can perform, and it is Cheatle’s contention that not only is this a revolutionary act of praxis that exchanges acts of pure consumption for acts of micro-production but it is also an act of art and cultural creation. From these self-processes of material manipulations there is the potentialities for new processes and variations in processes to emerge: each micro-system has potentialities embedded within them for diversity to develop.

We can see this when we look at ‘seed savers’ OR heirloom varieties. It is truly unfortunate that the ‘beef-steak’ tomato is what all tomatoes are judged upon. It is often overlooked that each area, each geography and topography has developed its own variety of tomato. These tomatoes are not the products of one singular genetic manipulation in the lab but have emerged over hundreds of years in backyard gardens and community seed exchanges. Such varieties have almost been virtually eliminated by large industrial agro-business, which favor quantity over quality/diversity on all accounts. In light of this, Cheatle’s question has been, how does this affect art and art making practices and processes? Obviously she sees similarities in the trends. ‘The garden’ is not only a symbolic example but also a functional example. As an example, ‘the garden’ could not only be used metaphorically and theoretically but also practically as a cultural tool for education: an artist tool where all could participate in its actions without necessarily having to be specialized in one area or another.

Obviously the garden was one such tool that Cheatle and myself as artists could use ‘ all could participate in its production (adults, children ‘ garden creation transcends all boundaries) and this was not contingent upon any academic, cultural terminology ect. OR otherwise such as the questions ‘Is it art?’ or some equally uninteresting ‘IS’ questions. Whatever it ‘IS’, the one thing we know to be true is that it just ‘DOES’. Something happens and we can think about what happens, why it happens, why it does not happen, or we don’t necessarily have to think anything at all: an opposite to the ‘art establishment’ where everything has to be legitimized in some form, again, generally and subjectively speaking.

And so Amy Cheatle began the experimental endeavor of wine production as art creation. Nothing to be legitimized or rationalized in its aesthetic, cultural or practical effects: it was the processes of ‘DOING’ and how things could be made that formed the basis of the artistic creations. It is through processes that, as the philosopher Gilbert Ryle suggested, ‘learning how’ rather than ‘learning that’ takes place which in turn gives the creator the possibilities to diverge, to branch off in new directions that may not have been visualized prior to the initial creations. Deleuze & Guattari (1987) called this ‘lines of flight’ where a singular instance (the fermenting of wine) has the possibilities for multiple dimensions (multiplicities) and forms to materialize from the same point of reference ‘ no two batches of wine could ever be exactly the same no matter how stringent the system and ingredients used.

It is essential to understand the generative processes involved in the creation of a ‘wine’. We can begin with the term ‘terroir’ which means that local influences (geography, weather patterns, soil quality) are transmitted into the character of the given plant ‘ this being a particular variety of grape vine. Even if the grape vine is genetically identical, depending on where or how the grape is grown, vines growing in separate geographical location can produce a grape with unique properties. It is said that some wine-tasters can tell what side of the road grapes might have been grown even if those grapes are the same genetic breed and are in the same relative location ‘ one side of the road might get different light or have different water run-off for example.

Add variations in grape varieties, genetic makeup, and different ‘strains’ and just out of the diversity of the ‘grape’ many variations in ‘juice’ can result. We not only find this in ‘grapes’ but also in other types of food products, materials such as wood and fiber and any other type of material utilized as a resource. Coffee beans differ compared to the ‘terrior’ that they are grown. It is said that the Normandy cow produces milk that is churned into the best tasting butter on the planet because of the perfect conditions for the growing of the grasses that it eats.

In contrast, industrial agriculture in the United States for instance, does not use the natural ‘terroir’ of a region to allow a diversity of product to emerge based on local systems. Instead it relies on ‘imposing’ its will on a geography in order to produce a homogenous product which stays relatively the same across geographic locations. The soil is manipulated or ‘forced’ to be something that it is not through specific fertilization processes. Where in Native America we once had a very diverse native corn supply filled with special ‘spiritual’ varieties of species and strains, we have yielded to the homogeny of ‘yellow corn’, which we all see now in the grocery store. In addition, genetic manipulation and bio-technology have contributed greatly to this lack of genetic diversity in our food supplies.

Wine, on the other hand, is in the unique position of retaining some of these special properties because the quality of the wine is based on the unique environment in which the grapes are grown and the wine is fermented. It is unique because as an educational and artistic tool it is not hard for a general public to understand that quality is not attached to quantity but instead is directly connected to the factor of diversity and variation as its defining characteristic. It is an exploratory material in which contains in its possibilities, the opportunity for uniqueness to emerge. It is a minimal art form that contains the information for alternatives to potentially exist. It is a ‘generative art’ form, one in which, as Philip Galanter suggested:
[an] art practice where the artist uses a system, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other procedural invention, which is set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art.
But this of course is being contingent upon if one can consider ‘wine making’ art at all.

Once the grapes are grown and harvested, which are processes of their own generative identification, the grapes, to simplify, are turned into ‘juice’. Each juice will have its own characteristics and therefore will give rise to a wine containing its own characteristics. The fermentation and manipulation of the ‘juice’ is its own personal process that each ‘wine maker’ decides upon. Each winemaker has their own set of rules and processes to create their own unique blend, even if the ingredients are the same a wine maker can manipulate the processes involved to where the final result is completely different. Through morphogenetic processes, the ‘phase space’ of results is full of possibilities. The philosopher Manuel Delanda (2002) might define a ‘phase space’ as a ‘space of possibilities’ (p.10)and ‘morphogenetic as the dynamic and divergent processes that gave rise to those possibilities. In wine, these generative processes ‘evolve’ the wine beginning with the winemakers choices.

In addition to wine additives that can give a ‘wine’ specific properties (such as adding ‘oak’ or other flavor manipulatives), ‘yeast’ is the ‘spark’ that ignites the fermentation and synthesis giving wine a resulting uniqueness. Yeast is a heterogeneous element in itself. Traditionally, wild yeast could be colleted in the air and used in an assortment of food creations from bread making to beer making and of course wine fermentation. Populations soon realized that different yeast could be used in different ways and that the type of yeast strain used in the production of alcoholic beverages would drastically change the resulting liquid. In contemporary wine making practices, wine makers are not restricted anymore to local yeasts although some vintages stay as local as possible to create a truly ‘local’ terroir wine. Many winemakers, including ‘home winemaking’ winemakers such as Amy Cheatle, can choose from any yeast variety that they might find compatible with there wine. Again there is no ‘right’ answer and many variations are possible.

This can be a complicated process but once the yeast is added to the wine the generative capacities take hold and the fermentation process begins, the artists hand initiate the process but once the process has been initiated is then beyond there control (other that slight tweaking that are possible here and there). The wine becomes and autonomous entity, a living organism. The yeast is a single cellular organism. Its only job is to eat sugars. There are many sugars in the provided juice and as the yeast eats the sugar its byproduct OR excrement is alcohol. All different yeasts consume and process the sugars into alcohol differently contributing to the diversity of taste as an outcome of different yeasts. The yeast will consume and consume until there is no sugar left and the yeast die in there own excrement/alcohol OR the winemaker kills the yeast and stops the process.

There are several processes that can be done before bottling such as filtration, secondary fermentation etc. that I will not cover here. After bottling, the wine continues to complexify and change ‘ its stays ‘alive’ and slowly evolves over-time, sometimes even becoming something that it had not started as. It becomes a ‘line of becoming’ that has no end point but continues on its life cycle until the wine is either drank Or the wine ‘goes bad’ in the bottle and becomes undrinkable as ‘vinegar’ both of which are continuations of processes.
A line of becoming is not defined by points that it connects, or by points that compose it; on the contrary, it passes between points, it comes up through the middle’a line of becoming is neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin nor destination’ A line of becoming has only a middle. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987 ,p.293)

Wine rests in this ‘middle’. Art rests in this ‘middle’. Culture rests in this ‘middle’. Wine, such as art and culture, are always in a state of ‘becoming’. There is no real ‘end’ or ‘end product’. Wine can not end even after it is drank by participants because it always will become something else: thoughts as a byproduct of inebriation, morning sickness, appetite, love, physical sensations etc. There is no real ‘end’ or ‘end product’ in art. It is easy to pretend that the final ‘piece’ ends on the wall but it is only a middle stage in its life ‘ the processes in its creation are just as OR even more relevant than its display. And wine, as in art, will always have an end-cycle where they will die, ceasing to be what they were in their original form but instead taking on new forms and giving new possibilities for becomings to emerge. (Ibid)

This is why I think Amy Cheatle’s work is so important and relevant, not just and an exercise in generative process, but also as an artwork. Wine processes posses possibilities in becoming something else: becoming thoughts, becoming addiction, becoming culture. It is neo-minimalist work at its middle, choosing to use activity as a material to create and allow variants on processes to develop. Small adjustments have much larger consequences. Art, in Amy Cheatle’s sense, becomes micro forces contributing to greater wholes rather than end products of individuals.

Bibliography

Bey, H. (1999). Avante-Gardening: Ecological Struggle In the City and the World. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia

Delanda, M. (2002). Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy. London: Continuum

Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari F. (1987). A Thousand Plateus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press

Deleuze, G. & Guattari F. (1994). What is Philosophy?. New York: Columbia University Press.

Galanter, P. (2003). What is Generative Art? Complexity Theory as a Context for Art Theory from http://www.philipgalanter.com/academics/index.htm accessed 23-5-05.

Ryle, G. (1984). The Concept of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Vanetgem, R. (2003). The Revolution of Everyday Life. London: Rebel Press.

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12.20.06

An essay I wrote about my good friend Frank Shifreen in reaction to criticism I over heard on his painting art show at Macy Gallery at Teachers College at Columbia University.

Frank Shifreen and the Materialism of Shamanistic Painterly Visions

Frank Shifreen himself can explain in much greater detail than I can the content of his art: the shamanic inspirations and the like that gave rise to his body of imaginative work. It is always unfair for a writer to try to understand what was ‘meant’ by or what some image might ‘represent’ compared to the way the artist himself might describe it. As a good friend of Frank’s, I would hate to try and explain the intricacies and complexities in the content of the images and get it wrong!

Contemporary painting (at least through my observations of contemporary art magazines, gallery and internet imagery, as well as being involved in the field for over a decade) has become increasingly reliant upon cleverness in the manipulation of the image. There is a kind of pop perfection that increases salability and commercial value’paintings to be seen on the walls of wealthy patrons or corporate offices, lending cultural power and prestige’a failure of art as the aggravator of cultural transformations. To quote Paul Virilio (2005),
‘They have masked the failure or the accident with commercial success
‘the pride of contemporary art has masked its failure and its weakness.
You have the inflation of the dealers, the immense wealth of the galleries
and the artists, the delirious prices of contemporary painters, but at the
same time it’s a fa’ade, and it’s going to fall. (p. 64)’

Contemporary painting serves as a propaganda tool, using its creator in unsuspecting ways to realize the imagery of the capital classes. It is hung as a sign of power on the walls of an office, a private home, etc., in order to draw an onlooker into the ‘behind-the-scenes’ of who or what that institution is in support of. This is so whether the images presented are for ‘charitable’ means (e.g., children’s art) or blatant prestige (as in, ‘Have you seen my Picasso?’). There is always going to be a certain amount of exploitation of the image maker involved. Images become advertisements, marketing ploys for whatever particular public or private establishment hangs them, as Raymond Williams (1980) might say.

Materialistically, contemporary painting is an art that produces `against the grain.’ Natural image flows are deemed uninteresting. Materials must be pushed to their limits, breaking their bonds; they are made to act one way as opposed to letting the material properties of the paint, for instance speak for themselves. Letting materials flow with their given properties is uninteresting to the average population that has been conditioned by electronic technologies such as the television and film to expect some ‘special effect’ from the materials involved. It is not a question of pushing the material and making it do what one chooses but, instead, as Gilles Deleuze (1987) writes, ‘it is a question of surrendering to the [material], then following where it leads by connection operations to a materiality instead of imposing a form upon matter. (p. 408)’

Peace is uninteresting. War breaks the boredom. Sanding against the grain dominates the ecologies of the wood. Contemporary painting dominates the eyes of its observers.

Frank Shifreen’s work has never been a work of domination. He acts intuitively in reaction to the materials that he is given; he paints with the grain. He goes with the flows, like a seasoned craftsman, though not at all with the same aesthetic of refinement.

As a practicing artist in New York City from the late 1960′s until today, Frank has a very compelling personal historical knowledge of contemporary artistic practice. He’s been around; he knows the scene and is acquainted personally with many of the recognizable names involved in the art world over the past four decades. But no matter how the trends and fads have fluctuated, Frank has always remained on the edge of fame, not stepping into or receding but always experimenting with the ‘new’ ‘ and always staying true to
himself.

Though new materials for artists to work with are always emerging, Frank has never been one to be afraid to experiment and incorporate new technologies into his work: film, regular and then digital video, and other types of digital manipulation. All these he has
employed to express himself naturally with various forms.

Frank’s work is much less interested in clever trickery than in informing spectators on the processes involved in their own personal creative processes. Paint sometimes randomly splatters on the edges and across the surfaces. His canvases look ancient and dusty as if they were just pulled from an attic or museum. His palette can be bright but often recedes into grays, a product of the mixing of contrasting colors. Intense expressive actions are often embedded in the surfaces.

His recent show at Macy Gallery was a testament to these processes in improvisation. This work presents itself less as a recent body of work and more as a recently created retrospective. Ideas build on each other and layers of information erupt from the canvas
surfaces. Whether the surface is physically large or small the same emotional energy prevails in each.

This work, like many of Frank’s other works, has one odd inherent property ‘ the massive body of work itself resists being edited down and insists on retaining its cluttered character ‘ and I do not mean this in a bad way. Instead this body of work calls viewers into Frank’s own world, as his work always does.

Frank’s work becomes more of an ongoing performance piece that has no beginning and no end ‘ as Deleuze (1987) might say ‘always in a state of becoming (p. 408).’ And many times this performance is the wonderful nature of Frank himself! Unfortunately this performance aspect is very seldom noticed, typically being discarded as nothing more that a disturbance. But perhaps the greatest art is the disturbance itself! In every regard, Frank has gotten this completely right.

There is a constant fluctuation in Frank’s body of work’his painting, sculpture, and his performance of concepts and ideas’by virtue of their convergences that interweave in a complex mesh of notions and intensities. Sometimes those intensities are very high and even reach their zenith, a point of no return. At other times they are reserved and
intellectually driven. It is this interesting balance and juxtaposition of intensities that I find most interesting in Frank’s work.

The work is not modernist, as one might think or want it to be. It is not always pretty or well executed in style. It is not like a well-designed, oiled machine that will always run reliably the same. The painted works do not have what one might call a ‘minimalist’
aesthetic that is sometimes looked for in ‘high’ art nor an expressionist one that one might assume from the artist’s rich artistic history. There are simply too many oddities and peculiarities involved for his work to be defined or categorized easily. This might be a
problem for the traditionalist or formalist onlooker who has been institutionally educated in the ways and means of idealized ‘artistic’ languages’which often conform to the properties of the economy. Unconventional and dissenting ideas often don’t come out of established and conventional functions.

As a result, this work is not always going to sit pretty in a gallery as we might think it should. It could be said to be a period of intense action laid out as a presentation of a history that happened to take place’a history of movement and motion, of intensities and trauma that played out over a given amount of time. This production time has been a time of weaving processes and bifurcations.

One cannot edit ‘the real,’ or real-time, as it happens; only afterwards can the
manipulations (such as digital ones) take place. You cannot edit a burst of energy nor can you edit a burst of creativity or improvisation as it is taking place. Imagine Miles Davis and John Coltrane being edited down from a 50+ minute piece to a 3.5 minute radio
version for the consumer’what a tragedy that would be! This is work that is not about the hit radio station. It is meant to be experienced in the real-time in which the work was produced, as Frank Shifreen himself should be experienced in real-time’closer to a do-it-yourself aesthetic or total punk rock than some L.A. glam band. It is anarchistic art of the highest caliber.

Frank is not interested in the creation of pop-cultural manipulations. He is not interested in ‘edits’ of reality that have the potential to deceive the viewer and manipulate the image for political goals or commercial appeal. The work is much closer to the Situationist practice of drifting, of losing oneself, abandoning all conventional purposes and
rationalized coordinates to seek out radically distinctive orientations in experience, but on an unpredicted global scale as though you could wander across entire regions, spanning the gaps between worlds or spiraling weightlessly through civilizations (Attali, 1985).

In his Macy Gallery show, the intensity of the experience of the specific actions in painting was laid out as a bare bones system’a historical process revealed, a demonstration of real-time let-go, without holding back or letting up. This reflects an experience of painting as process not as product, a continuation that is always continuing
despite the appearance of static moments.

Arguably, Frank’s work is that of an outcast on the fringe of the institution. An outcast sees society in a particularly political light, as opposed to, say, the art historian, who reflects society’s deepest values. But in some ways, the work, like Frank himself, has gained the acceptance of both the outside and the inside – the practitioner and the
institution. He is, as Jacques Attali (1985) states, “simultaneously excluded (relegated to a place near the bottom of the social hierarchy) and superhuman (the genius, the adored and deified star). Simultaneously a separator and an integrator.”(p. 12)

The paintings presented in the gallery were a burst of temporary energy, hung for approval or non-approval. But no matter how one might feel, all onlookers had to admit that this show was brutally honest on all accounts. The work told us we are all dreaming that we can regain a certain intellectual and artistic dignity.

References:
Attali, J. (1985). Noise: The Political Economy of Music. University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. University of Minnesota Press.

Virilio, Paul. (2005). The Accident of Art. Semiotext(e). New York: Columbia University

Williams, Raymond. (1980). Culture and Materialism. London: Verso. (See Chapter 4, Advertising: The Magic System)

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05.19.06
Script for a Performace: Academic Lectures, Video and Poetry

This Project is a performance based lecture that uses a video as a large scale backdrop to expressive, academic spoken word. It is the first in a series of expected performaces to be based around weaponry, war and violence. This lecture was inspired by a statement by Gilles Deleuze in the book ‘Negotiations’ where he proposes that ‘lectures should be like rock concerts’. These, therfore, are experiments with what would be traditional academic presentations.

Marshal Mcluhan once stated in Understanding Media – “if the arrow is an extension of the hand and arm then the rifle is an extension of the eye and teeth.” If this is so, then what extension or human appendage is that of the handgun or pistol? Neither a bow nor a rifle the handgun is both an extension of the eye and the hand simultaneously for it can either be pointed in the direction of someone or somewhere else – this I will refer to for the rest of this presentation as ‘sighting-in’ – OR the handgun can just as easily be pointed at ones own-self as in suicide or self-destruction. This point makes the handgun particularly interesting for study for it can either be a long range weapon in relation to the immediate distance of the body – or a short range weapon, one that can just as easily be turned against oneself in an act of self-destruction.

Unlike the rifle and bow – both of which must be stabilized by the body ‘ for example the rifle is stabilized against the shoulder and the bow is stabilized by the position of a ‘locked arm’ – the handgun has free range and motion, a larger possible phase-space of capabilities in relationship to the human torso. These possibilities are as diverse as the combination of body, shoulder, elbow, and wrist movements can be ‘ as many positions as the arm in combination with the body can move, the handgun can follow ‘ a much larger scale of variables of possibilities of motion ‘ an accumulation or multiplication of all the potential movements of the joints.

Again – on the one hand – when firing forward OR ‘sighting-in’ – the arm stabilizes the weapon and the eye looks down the barrel – the handgun is pointed in a direction of “somewhere” else. On the other hand the wrist and hand play the important pivot point where the end of the barrel has the potential possibility of being pointed toward oneself.

The handgun, in its uniqueness, allows for three main stages to be illustrated effectively under the scope of the visual ‘ stages that effectively show its material versatility ‘ a versatility that can be used in order to make many analogies to sociological and political systems outside the immediate realm of the micro-space that is the body. I have illustrated in my visual artistic studies of the handgun 3 distinct stages that are as follows: 1) Deterrence 2) Self-destruction and 3) ‘Sighting-IN’

Stage 1: Deterrence
The first stage ‘ deterrence (illustrated on the screen) ‘ is one of an effective defensive and/or aggressive strategy that’s underlying action is to demonstrate to an outside force that any attempt to trespass in action or physicality on ones personal space can result in dire consequence. It is an act of preventing or controlling actions or behavior through fear of punishment or retribution.

The handgun ‘ hidden and out-of-site ‘ restricted from being seen ‘ in one’s own house ‘ under the bed ‘ in ones apartment ‘ in the glove box ‘ in ones pocket ‘ in a bag ‘ a lunchbox ‘ a bookbag – under ones clothing.

We do not know it is there ‘ we do not see it ‘ it is there but it is not ‘ it is hidden in the shadows ‘ in the basement ‘ and documented with the immateriality of the photograph ‘ present on the television ‘ on the Internet. This is how we know that they exist ‘ yet we do not know where they exist.

We shall not come to close to one another because we do not know what ‘the others’ actions might be ‘ we do not know what is hidden ‘ we do not see ‘the void’ because we can not see ‘the void’ ‘ we do not want to understand ‘the void’ ‘ so we just stay away.

Because what may eventually protrude with force is a bullet ‘ a dished heel base bullet ‘ a jacketed bearing surface bullet ‘ a round nose flat based bullet ‘ a full metal jacketed bullet ‘ a round nose cup based bullet ‘ a truncated cone exposed tip bullet ‘ a hollow based wad-cutter bullet ‘ a full jacketed hollow point bullet ‘ a semi wad-cutter cup based bullet ‘ a jacketed soft point bullet ‘ a semi wad-cutter gas check bullet ‘ an exposed tip hollow point bullet ‘ a semi wad-cutter half-jacket bullet ‘ a semi wad-cutter full jacket bullet’

We do not wish for our bodies to meet any of these nasty metallic creatures that our neighbor has the potentiality to deliver onto us.

Deterrence ‘ a last ideological rampart against a kind of global destruction ‘ a global suicide ‘ a deterrent in the fact that we could all disappear. Which leads to the current escape, the escape of nuclear war, of deterrence.

From the NRA Handbook:
‘A major factor in determining the ‘best’ method of carry is the mechanical design of the handgun in question, particularly the firing pin. Here are considered, in order, semi-automatic pistols, revolvers, single-shot pistols and derringers.’

The handgun is cocked and ready to fire, hiding in the shadows.

Stage 2: Self-Destruction
Self-destructive (implosive) ‘ Paul Virilio’s ‘the suicide state’, – Pol Pot in Cambodia – deregulatory territory, environmental self-destruction – our own intentional initiation of the apocalypse ‘ a suicide machine . Death as weapon ‘ death as pure war. The war on terror ‘ the war against ourselves. The war against our own state authorized terror. Destruction of the mirror image. The silent genocide. It is easy to see the crimes that are committed by others, but it is much harder to see the destruction against one-self.

How do we kill the ultimate self-destructive weapon? How do we get rid of it? – Especially when we have no real time for reflection ‘ when speed is essential and the day is endless. When work and labor replace pleasure. When sweat and long hours replace family and relaxation. When complexities replace simplicities. When technologies that are supposed to make our lives easier do nothing but make our lives harder. This is an endless positive feedback loop of self-annihilation. A struggle for survival ‘ a new social Darwinism that leaves us all deprived of life.

War has been turned against ourselves. War begins organized – but somehow always escapes. War has self-replicated many times in places that are not expected ‘ internally. In the bunkered fortified ghettos where ‘form does not follow function as much as it does fear’ , in prisons, in the streets, in the institutions, under our skin. War against the self is a viral infection. Culture has become super-homogenized to the point where only the extreme as ‘the other’ can exist. A super-viral infection. HIV and bird flu terror. Often it points back to the one that started it – a backlash of sorts – a conscious suicide of the self.

We are now in a stage of ‘terminal art’ of suicidal art. The abuse of television ‘ ‘producing various morbid phenomena such as obesity or anorexia nervosa, poor cerebral performance, language problems, special disorientation, aggressiveness, alcoholism and drug abuse.’ A television pathology particularly affecting children and underprivileged communities ‘ a suicidal-genocidal machine.

And do we not filter our industrial byproduct toxins through the bodies of our population? Would it not cost more to bury them OR to dispose of them than to reuse them? Or is it easier to recycle our waste in our food supply. Let the body process what we do not want. Cancer as a population reduction method. A slow death. A stealth death. A death we know is there – yet we cannot see because of our blindness to our own self-destructive tendencies. A self-initiated genocide. A war on the environment – an environment that has a direct effect on a population. A war on ourselves.

What we often call ‘natural materials’, according to the an-architect Lebbeus Woods – ‘materials that involve the mining of the earth and the felling of forests [result] in the disruption of plant and animal life, the pollution of rivers and air, and the degradation of human existence ‘ produce buildings that begin to decay even as they are built. The effects of this decay, which continues regardless of all maintenance, contribute to the spiral of human life, indeed of the whole environment, downward toward an ultimate heat death.’ A death that is self-initiated.

And our safety rules do not help!
The 10 Rules of the Handgun Cited in the NRA Firearms Handbook.
1. Always point the muzzle in a safe direction.
2. Keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot.
3. Keep the action open and gun unloaded until ready to use it
4. Know how the gun operates
5. Be sure your gun and ammunition are compatible.
6. Carry only one gauge/caliber of ammunition when shooting.
7. Be sure of your target’and what is beyond
8. Wear eye and ear protection as appropriate
9. Don’t mix alcohol or drugs with shooting
10. Be aware that circumstances may require additional rules unique to a particular situation.
‘ and again
10. Be aware that circumstances may require additional rules unique to a particular situation.
‘ and I ask the question ‘ do these rules apply when one is pointing the gun at ones own self?

Stage 3: Sighting-In – Externalizing Direction
How A Fire Arm Fires””’Cartridge in chamber”’Firing pin strikes and ignites primer which in turn ignites powder”’Gas from burning powder expands in case””Gas pushes bullet out with force””’speeding bullet out through barrel.

Aggression and defense (both of which deal with externals) ‘ to point a finger at the ‘axis of evil’ ‘ you are wrong and I am right ‘ I am good and you are bad ‘ both the language of ‘aggression’ and both the language of ‘defensive’ ‘ both are ‘sighting-in’. Putting ‘the other’ in my sights and firing because I am good and you are evil. I am right and you are wrong.

You attack me so I must defend myself. You have something that I want so I must attack you. You have something that I need so I must attack you. You do not really need what you have so I must attack you. I am just defending myself from your attack before you attack so I must attack you. I have a gun and you do not so I must attack you. You have a gun and so do I so I must defend myself. You are ‘mere things ‘ whose lives are of no value’ . ‘So therefore we can proceed with this with complete equanimity, and total impunity, and only praise for the achievements.’

Let us now bring our great European art into the hands of a ‘good number of filthy rich American industrialists who [want] to build collections or foundations.’ So they can also have the weapon of the image. So art can be controlled. So we can be made great and made righteous for producing what the ‘others’ cannot.

And since Merleau-Ponty stated ‘Since the same words ‘ idea, freedom, knowledge ‘ cannot have the same meaning in different places unless we have a single witness reducing them to some common denominator’ ‘ we are the witness and as the victor we and we alone have the right to define these words and use them to tell ‘others’ where they are wrong.

An extension of the arm ‘ the reaching out of a helping hand? ‘ with a handgun at its end. Becomes a ‘murderous humanitarianism’

Lets not forget the gun was, as stated by Lewis Mumford, ‘the starting point of a new type of power machine: it was mechanically speaking, a one cylinder internal combustion engine: the first form of gasoline engine” [and] because of the accuracy and effectiveness of the new projectiles, these machines had still another result: they were responsible for the development of the art of heavy fortification, with elaborate outworks, moats and salients, the latter so arranged that any one bastion could come to the aid of another by means of cross-fire. The business of defense became complicated in proportion as the tactics of offence became more deadly’

The art of the handgun is a new stage of warfare. It is one that deterritorializes, decentralizes, and non-linearizes ‘the other’, the invisible army of defense and attacks. It is one that ‘sights-in’ away from oneself and just as easily toward one-self. A true deterrent of real contact and understanding with each other.

Rule number 3: Keep the action open and gun unloaded until ready to use it

Quote – ‘What, in the case of closed action handguns, does ‘ready to use’ mean? Obviously defensive pistols should be ‘ready to use’ when holstered or [deterrently] pocketed by legally entitled servicemen, police, or civilians, but then should they be fully or only partially loaded?’ – Endquote From the NRA Handbook

‘ and then this assumes that legally entitled servicemen, police, or civilians only take a defensive stance. And does this insinuate that non-legal handgun carriers are typically aggressors?

We defend ourselves from ‘the other’ ‘ ‘the other’ is the only aggressor. We are the good and strong ‘ they terror.

End Stage
The visual portion of this project has dealt with the small-arm as a design that has evolve in relationship to the body over the last few centuries to form a seamless and comfortable extension of the human arm. Handguns in particular, small and compact, are designs that have been bred (in terms of moving along a line of flight in what Deleuze called the ‘machinic phylum’) throughout history to fit the particular desires of a group or individual. What once started with relatively few design variations, handgun designs have emerged to be as diverse as the human populations they serve to empower or at least give the illusion of empowerment. The materiality of the handgun thus becomes one of power – a personal power ‘ one of deterrence, self-destruction or sighting-in – attributed to the comfort-ability of the design that the user makes in connection with the design of the handgun and its handle.

This seamlessness OR the singular point where flesh turns metallic must be a point of analysis in order to better understand the mechanisms involved with handgun design, manufacturing and utilization – be it against oneself (suicide) or against another (nature, human beings, static targets etc). In doing so we can better be prepared to educate on the aesthetic and material effects of the handgun and how feelings of power and comfort are attributed to the effects of design OR the question ‘What exactly IS a handgun?’ – the tactile nature and physicality of the mechanisms involved exemplified by the hand gripping the handle. This visually constructed project and research is about understanding the materiality of the handgun and its relationship to the human hand though my own personal interactions with handguns and their visual documentation. Through the past few years I have been studying the anatomy of the handgun though artistic video and photography ‘ assembling, disassembling, loading, pointing and firing. In the networked systems of guerrilla combat, ‘terror’, gang violence, ecological violence, and American hegemony and military domination, it has become important that the mechanics – the visualizations and the interactions of small firearms – be explored in this sort of graphic visual detail. The visual portion of this work has given a brief aesthetically oriented understanding of the mechanics and internal and external working of handgun designs and the spoken portion has been a personal reflection on the handguns mechanical significance in a contemporary networked society.

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