Canon Fodder, Pt. 2: Farewell to an Idea?

David Maljkovic - Retired Form,  2008-2010

As far as the possibility of a condition of art being lately preoccupied with its own past, Dieter Roelstraete made the stronger case back in 2009, with his e-flux essay "The Way of the Shovel: On the Archeological Imaginary in Art":

"In the present moment … it appears that a number of artists seek to define art first and foremost in the thickness of its relationship to history. More and more frequently, art finds itself looking back, both at its own past ...[A growing number of artists] either make artworks that want to remember, or at least to turn back the tide of forgetfulness, or they make art about remembering and forgetting: we can call this the 'meta-historical mode'" [...]

Elaborating later:

"In their cultivation of the retrospective and/or historiographic mode, many contemporary art practices inevitably also seek to secure the blessing (in disguise) of History proper ...Time, literally rendered as the subject of the art in question, easily proves to be a much more trustworthy arbiter of quality than mere taste or success. Hence the pervasive interest of so many younger artists and curators in the very notion of anachronism or obsolescence and related 'technologies of time' ...meant to convey a sense of the naturalization of history, or of time proper."

Unlike Cotter, Roelstraete provides specifics, citing a number of projects that illustrate the argument. What’s more, he theorizes that this condition might be indicative of "the current crisis of history both as an intellectual discipline and as an academic field of enquiry." As such, he describes the retrospective tendency as being melancholic in character, adding the caveat that it might be "potentially reactionary," as well.

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A similar argument emerges in Claire Bishop's "Digital Divide" Artforum article from autumn of last year, overlapping particularly on what Roelstraete describes as the "technologies of time." Bishop writes:

"The fascination with analogue media is an obvious starting point for contemporary art's repressed relation to the digital. ...Today, no exhibition is complete without some form of bulky, obsolete technology -- the gently clunking carousel of a slide projector or the whirring of an 8-mm or 16-mm film reel."

By Bishop's reckoning, this deference of the present amounts -- in some respects -- to an an abdication of responsibility, a failure to fully engage in contemporary cultural modes of social relations. But as far as this matter or interventionary agency and cultural imperatives is concerned, there might just as likely be someone lurking in the wings ready to issue the counter-thesis: Art is not a gadget.¹

* * * *

Tacita Dean, from the series The Russian Ending

Amid all this talk of returns and regressions, I find myself experiencing a sense of déjà-vu, like I’ve heard all this discussed and diagnosed somewhere else at some early point. Sure enough, Bishop mentions in passing one of the texts I have in mind – Hal Foster’s 2004 essay “An Archival Impulse.” In that essay, Foster examines the work of artists Tacita Dean, Sam Durant and Thomas Hirschhorn, and how the work of these artists often coalesce around a similar theme; how they “share a notion of artistic practice as an idiosyncratic probing into particular figures, objects, and events in modern art, philosophy, and history.” Artists working this vein are “drawn to unfulfilled beginnings or incomplete projects – in art and in history alike – that might offer points of departure again.” In this way, such work points to lapsed, overlooked, or abandoned histories – failed or unrealized futurisms, endeavors left in limbo. Or obscure artifacts and objects which, in the case of Tactica Dean’s film about the sound mirrors of Dungeness, “serve as found arks of lost moments in which the here-and-now of the work functions as a possible portal between an unfinished past and a reopened future.”

Much of this, by Foster’s account, takes the form of projects that strive (in Hirschhorn’s words) to “connect what cannot be connected.” However “tendentious” or “preposterous” such an undertaking might seem, Foster sums up the character of the exercise thusly:

"This not a will to totalize so much as a will to relate – to probe a misplaced past, to collate its different signs (sometimes pragmatically, sometimes parodistically), to ascertain what might remain for the present. ...By the same token,...the art at issue here does not project a lack of logic or affect. On the contrary, it assumes anomic fragmentation as a condition not only to represent but to work through, and proposes new orders of affective association, however partial and provisional, to this end, even as it also registers the difficulty, at times the absurdity, of doing so."

Gabriel Orozco, Island Within an Island, 1993

But perhaps the more incisive text to refer to in this instance would be another Foster essay, written several years later, "This Funeral is for the Wrong Corpse".²  At this point, Foster expands on the thesis of "An Archival Impulse," steering its focus away from various wayside microhistories, and toward the legacies of modernism and art itself, as they've been addressed in the work of recent artists. To this end he discussed the versions of an "end of art" scenario as declared in the past half-century by various parties (e.g., pluralistic, post-structuralist, Marxist), arguing that these accounts – out of "triumphalism, desperation, or melancholy" – perhaps "concede(d) too much too quickly." And that if we see a backward-gazing trend in some strains of contemporary art practice, it might be the result of different attempts at reclamation for a critical enterprise that had not fully run its course before being issued its last rites.³

What then comes after death, after all these alleged ends, when certain forms and legacies and discursive modes continue to linger in a supposed "posthistorical" limbo? Foster lists a variety of practices that constitute a type of "living on" or "coming after," which he categorizes into four designations, each serving as a type of "mnemonic strategy." These strategies Foster delineates as: the traumatic, the spectral, the nonsynchronous, and the incongruous – each engaging the past via practices involving methods of recovery and re-engagement, "ghostly" shadowing, juxtaposition, or hybridized "dislocation and dispersal" or the highlighting of temporospatial disjuncture.

It is in the third of these strategies – the nonsynchronous – that we find the use of outmoded technology (a la Bishop) come into play. To some degree, Foster allows that the use of such things (film, say) might be intended merely as a material riposte to "the presentist totality of design culture." Otherwise, he considers it a practice more in keeping with Surrealist tactic of utilizing "displaced forms." Making his argument by way of Walter Benjamin’s writings, Foster offers:

"Such a weird array of things is not the stuff of a renewed medium; on the contrary, it is part of the Surrealist project to 'explode' conventional categories of cultural objects. ...There is the further dilemma that 'the outmoded' might now be outmoded too, recuperated as a device in the very process that it once seemed to question – the heightened obsolescence of fashion and other commodity lines. Yet one aspect of the outmoded is still valid…and Surrealism is still a touchstone. 'Balzac was the first to speak of the ruins of the bourgeoisie,' Benjamin writes... 'But only Surrealism exposed them to view. The development of the forces of production reduced the wish symbols of the previous century to rubble even before the monuments representing them had crumbled.' The 'wish symbols' here are the capitalist wonders of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie at the height of its confidence, such as 'the arcades and interiors, the exhibitions and panoramas.' These structures fascinated the Surrealists nearly a century later – when further capitalist development had turned them into 'residues of a dream world,' ...According to Benjamin, for the Surrealists to haunt these outmoded spaces was to tap 'the revolutionary energies' that were trapped there. But it may have been more accurate (and less utopian) to say the Surrealists registered the mnemonic signals encrypted in these structures – signals that might not otherwise have reached the present. This deployment of the nonsynchronous pressures the totalist assumptions of capitalist culture, and questions its claim to timeless; it also challenges the culture with its own wish symbols, and asks it to recall its own forfeited dreams."

In contemporary work that engages the nonsynchonous, Foster asserts that the use of outmoded form and tech serve as a reminder that "'form' is often nothing more than 'content’ that has become historically sedimented."⁴

Whenever I hear the word 'Culture,' I first check the Terms of Service agreement...

Despite the fact that the topic of Disney is in no way part of any recent research I'm doing, it seems to keep turning up randomly without my looking for it. So, one last item in this thematic thread, one that I came across the other day...

That being the recent UK premier of Philip Glass's latest opera, The Perfect American, which takes the legacy of Walt Disney as its subject matter. Glass composed the music and helped develop the premise. The libretto was supplied by Rudy Wurlitzer, based on the 2001 novel of the same name by Peter Stephan Jungk.

Reviews of the opera have been mixed, Citizen Kane comparisons have been a staple throughout, and there's been no shortage of discussion about the production's unflattering portrayal of the figure of Walt Disney. Glass himself has admitted that it was a project born of deep ambivalence, the decision to do it originating when he was given a copy of Jungk's book some 5 years ago by then-director of the New York City Opera Gerard Mortier, who requested that the composer develop it into a stage production. "Of course it's not a hatchet job," he recently stated by way of anticipating criticism, "Why would I spend so much time making fun of someone I don't like?...Disney was a man of his time, both in his shortcomings and what was powerful about him."

By the varying descriptions, the show sports a couple of intriguing scenes. One involving a crew of technicians wrangling to properly wire the animatronic Abraham Lincloln for the Disneyland park, with the robot coming to life to draw Disney into a debate about race relations and social equality in America. Another involves Andy Warhol appearing as Disney lay in his deathbed, the former paying tribute by telling Disney that he’d been a role model for the pop artist, proclaiming that he was "born the same year as Mickey Mouse” and that he also “has a huge army of helpers."

This last bit naturally has me thinking back to the remarks of Pierre Huyghe, which I cited in my prior post on this topic; Huyghe’s observation that “ [Warhol’s] Factory was a place where Warhol could embody the capitalist system,” in relation to how artists like Huyghe and Mathias Poledna have adopted the medium of film production in recent years. Film being a collaborative art form, and its methods – of course – mirror those of industrialized manufacturing; with its departmentalized, assembly-line systems of production. And it’s a model that’s lingered on well after the decline of the manufacturing sector and its diminuation by an emergent post-Fordist economy. In the context of The Perfect American, Glass chalks the Disney-Warhol analogy up to the persistence of the Atelier System in the artworld, the hierarchical system by which an established artist pursuing large or ambitious projects does so by overseeing a crew of assistants and apprentices in a workshop setting. Warhol probably had other sources of inspiration than Disney when setting up his Factory, but it could be argued that Koons adopted it from Warhol, with Hirst taking it from Koons. Historically, it’s not that uncommon of a practice, and it’s been around for centuries.

But enough about Disney, already. My interest in all of this has to do with broader issues concerning art's engagement with pop culture, and the critical strategies it devises or employs in doing so. Older, supposedly critically interventionist tactics look toothless and inadequate in hindsight. Say, for example, postmodernism's prior 1980s fixation for appropriation from the pop-culture (and art historical) canons. All those supposed deconstructive siphonings from the domains of advertising and entertainment amounting to little more than shadowing the visual rhetoric of the dominant culture, while at the same time perhaps capitulating to the the alleged "end of art" verdict (i.e., art's previous societal role having been subsumed by the hegemony of "mass culture" throughout the course of the 20th century). Likewise with other varied strains of "neo-pop" or "pop conceptualist" practices that soon followed in the 1990s, where all pretenses at semiotic inversion were jettisoned for a type of jaded resignation (if not outright Baudrillardian "nihilism," by some critics' reckoning).

Quoting or borrowing from the public domain purported to serve some subversive critical purpose at the time, but in the end -- no matter how playfully done -- it seems a bit feeble in many respects. As dead-end tactics go, one might be tempted to recall the words of Martin Heidegger, who, in Being and Time (and admittedly speaking of something else entirely) wrote: "Appropriation [merely] appropriates. Saying this, we say the Same in terms of the Same about the Same. To all appearances, all this says nothing."

Plus, it was so much an easier thing to do once-upon-a, back when it was less difficult to pinch and abscond with and détourn without having to lawyer-up first. Y'know, before that the borders of that "common culture" were so thoroughly and rigidly policed. Before the corporate entities that distributed and administered such stuff began claiming ever-increasing restrictive rights to exclusive ownership, rendering all free and "creative" engagement therewith likely to a cease-and-desist notice, liability to prosecution, and the threat of litigation.

* * * *

In some areas, however, pop culture isn't what it used to be; at least not in terms of it having any claim to be a "common culture" that serves as a mutually, broadly shared cache of reference points. It often seems like a quaintly anachronistic idea in the era of media atomization -- of profilerating channels, echo-chambers, sub-niches and sub-subgenres, and increasing degree of nanocasting that break down to the point of individually-tailored/-filtered content.

Film (in the form of mega-budget blockbusters, anyway) might be the only remaining form of media that still -- as Huyghe described it -- provides any remaining remnant of providing a "public space; any social or civic or communal grounds for discussion. The same can't be said of any form of pop music anymore, certainly. And if you read the recent interview with filmmaker Adam Curtis in FACT mag, you run smack into a "twas it ever thus" assessment along those same lines. In speaking of his recent live-event collab with Massive Attack, Everything is Going According to Plan, recently staged at the Manchester International Festival. In the interview, Curtis raises the topic of regurgitative retrophilic tendencies in recent music; of pop music's incessant mining of the styles and gestures -- so radical, allegedly, in their original in situ context -- of prior zeitgeists:

"Pop music might not be the radical thing we think it is. It might be very good and very exciting and I can dance to it and mope to it, but actually it just keeps on reworking the past. ...If you continually go back into the past then by definition you can never ever imagine a world that has not existed before. I think true radicalism...comes from the idea of saying this is a world that has never existed before, come with me to it.

...[But] music may actually be dying at the very moment it is everywhere. There comes a moment in any culture where something becomes so ubiquitous and part of everything that it loses its identity. It will remain here to be useful but it won’t take us anywhere or tell us any stories. It won’t die in the sense of not being here but in the sense of not having a meaning beyond itself. It will just be entertainment. What will happen is that something else we haven’t imagined yet will come in from the margins that tell us a story that unites us."

If that weren't bleak and dystopic enough, Curtis sets it up by flatly stating earlier in the interview:

"My argument is that we live in a non-progressive world where increasingly we have a culture of management, not just in politics, but everywhere. Modern culture is very much part of this progress. What it’s saying is: 'stay in the past and listen to the music of the past'."

Or as Simon recently put it, was the idea of pop music ever being anything akin to a socially transformative phenomenon little more than a myth rooted in Boomer "generational over-estimation"?

Full interview with Adam Curtis here.

Production Values

It occurred to me in the course of writing the prior post on Mathias Poledna’s Imitation of Life that Disney’s Snow White has turned up in the work of another significant artist in recent years. That being in a pair of pieces by artist Pierre Huyghe; starting with his Snow White Lucie of 1997. The piece focuses on Lucie Dolène, the chantuese who had provided the voice for the character of Snow White in the dubbed French version of the film, and who decades later sued Disney studios for unpaid royalties. In Huyghe's piece, Dolène is seen sitting in an empty soundstage studio singing “Someday My Prince Will Come” while the story of her lawsuit appears at the bottom of the screen in subtitles.

Like Poledna’s piece, Snow White Lucie deals with the realities that reside behind the curtain of the entertainment industry’s machinations of artifice and make-believe. At the same time, it deals with another theme that occurs repeatedly throughout Huyghe’s work – that of ownership, copyright, and how it pertains to the common culture. This theme echoes throughout Huyghe’s sprawling 2006 installation Celebration Park, in which Snow White (along with other cultural entities) would again be invoked, although this time in name-only form, as one of a number of neon disclaimers...

One of Huyghe’s best-known works is the 2000 split-screen video installation The Third Memory. The work is based on the famous 1972 incident in which John Wojtowicz attempted to rob a Chase Manhattan branch in Brooklyn, which resulted in a hostage situation and a 14-hour standoff with police. The incident, of course, inspired the 1975 Sidney Lumet movie Dog Day Afternoon, which started Al Pacino in the role of Wojtowicz.

For The Third Memory, Huyghe has Wojtowicz himself revisit the sequence of events of that August day in 1972, offering a matter-of-fact walkthrough of the drama as he remembers them. The staging of this reenactment is done with the aid of a mock-up set of the bank, extras standing in as hostages and the like, and various props. Scenes from Lumet’s dramatization sometimes appear on one of the flanking screens, paralleling Wojtowicz’s own narrative by way of comparison and contrast.

With The Third Memory, Huyghe conflates Wojtowicz’s own lived experiences with that of a theatrical, adapted narrative; in the process allowing Wojtowicz the opportunity to “reclaim” his story from the realm of the mediated spectacle. It’s likely that Huyghe had originally developed the idea for the work from the fact that Wojtowicz had complained to the New York Times about how his story had been represented by Hollywood, and had requested that the paper offer him the chance to set the record straight. An arts editor from the Times responded:

"I'm very sorry to say no to this after all of our correspondence, but this article just won't work for us. The problem is that I just don't believe you have profoundly come to grips with the motives for your crime, and the complex relationship between art and reality in this instance."

There is also the matter of how Huyghe’s presents and stages the reenactment, particularly in how it follows the format set by late-‘90s TV shows like America’s Most Wanted. The chief difference being that Huyghe allows the perpetrator to present an alternate narrative to the “based on a true story”/”ripped from the headlines” premise.

Also worth underscoring the way that The Third Memory riffs off of its cinematic precursor, by way of a double-edged pun on the idea of a "captive audience." In Dog Day Afternoon, director Lumet buttressed the pathos of the story by portraying Wojtowicz as a conflicted yet sympathetic character. His rapport with his hostages (as Lumet chose to tell the story) leads to a "Stockholm Syndrome" scenario; which is extended to the TV viewers and members of the surrounding Brooklyn community, many of whom come to regard Wojtowicz as something of a folk-heroic figure as the drama unfolds. As critic David Joselit has pointed out, the story had already – via print and broadcast sources – gone through numerous layers of mediated reframing before Lumet adapted it to film.

Secondary Action

A curious something not worth filing away in the "hauntology" drawer, but definitely engaging a set of heavily retro-/throwback aesthetics and technology…

A couple of weeks ago I couldn't help but notice a flurry of hubbub coming from the coverage of the 55th Venice Biennale, particularly that surrounding a particular work – Mathias Poledna’s installation, entitled Imitation of Life. Poledna originally hails from Vienna, and – despite the fact that he's been apparently living and working in Los Angeles for many years now – was chosen by his home country to be their primary representative artist at the Biennale's Austrian national pavilion this time around.

Upon its debut, Poledna’s work immediately became one of the more gossiped-about items at the expo. A reviewer at Art Info offers a breezy description:

"At just over three minutes long, 'Imitation of Life' should feel like a slap in the face to the hulking structure in which it sits (both literally and figuratively). But the single animated scene, which reproduces to exacting detail the process used by film studios in the late 1930s and early 1940s, is a joy. It’s simple, light (at least on the surface), heartwarming even, and then it ends leaving one wishing for more.

Content-wise, a dog [donkey] in a sailor costume trots back and forth across the screen singing a tune by Arthur Freed from the ’30s. The hook, 'I got a feelin’ you’re foolin' ...foolin’ with me,' points at both the absurdity of the Disney-esque display — production on this was run by Tony Bancroft, whose animation credits include Aladdin, The Lion King, and Beauty and the Beast among others — and the trompe l’oeil of the medium itself. Around 30 hand-drawn and colored sketches flick past the screen each second on their 35mm spool, which along with the full orchestra commissioned to record the score, made this a massive undertaking in hours of work alone."

The screening room for Poledna's short film is housed in a temporary extension to the pavilion, designed by the Kuehn Malvezzi architecture firm. The accompanying song, “I’ve Got a Feelin’ You’re Fooling,” was a widely popular and often-covered tune from the 1930s; attributed to a pair of noted songwriters who frequently worked with MGM Studios. For the project, Poledna had the song rerecorded, making a new version that closely adhered the style of the original. The artist also created a series of original drawings and sketches for the project, which he then had developed into the requisite series of hand-drawn cels by a crew of veteran animators.

None of which comes cheap these days; considering that certain old modes of production have become so rarefied, rapidly dwindling to a specialty that involves a shrinking pool of skills, expertise and know-how. Which is why the Poledna's in Austria had to (reportedly) summon together a generous sum to fund Imitation of Life. The money involved being part of what has fueled the baffled reception of the project. The other part being that all that funding only amounts to – by all appearances – a cartoon that runs roughly three minutes. Befuddlement ensues, with one critic finding it delightful while another one waxes incredulous. Must be some "conceptual" thing – something having to do with all that money being funneled into getting swallowed up by a few moment's worth of fluffy, gen-audiences escapist entertainment; and thus some ironic comment on the "culture industry" and all that it involves. Or something along those lines.

* * * *

Poledna’s had an interesting number of projects over the past fifteen years or so. Interesting, in that these projects reveal an evolution in the artist's working methods. First there’s the preference for analog technology – especially in his habit of eschewing video in favor of working with 16 and 35mm film. Secondly, there’s his fascination with pop culture and his choices of artifacts from the realm of entertainment, which he then uses to explore themes relating to the nature of artifice, escapism, and concept of “authenticity.” And thirdly, there’s his working methods, which involved deeper levels of cultural research with each successive project; the resulting work alluding to esoteric cultural/historical parallels or connections.

For instance, a few of his projects from recent years:

The revivalists, triumphant

"It is the building that always catches and holds the sun in the grey centre of the city: its regime-orange reflective glass mirroring the setting sun perfectly, as it moves from panel to panel along its chequered surface, drawing you in to notice it on your way up the Unter den Linden to Alexanderplaz. For a time, when Berlin was still new to me, it was just another abandoned building of the former East, that beguiled me despite its apparent ugliness, tricking and teasing the light and flattering the sensible and solid nineteenth century cathedral opposite with its reflections. Only later did I learn that it was the Palast der Republik and former government building of the GDR, a contentious place that concealed its history in the opacity of its surface, but had now been run-down, stripped of its trimmings and was awaiting the verdict on its future.

It was built on the site of a grand baroque palace that was demolished in 1950. The revivalists want the palace back; they want to rebuild it in its wedding cake finery and pretend it was never not there. They want to re-imagine history and erase the Palast der Republik, so that we, in the future, can no longer guess at a past.

And then there are those who are fighting to keep the Palast standing, who believe to level such a building is to level memory, and that a city needs to keep its scars within the fabric of its architecture in order to preserve what our finite human memory will soon forget. Berlin needs to keep evidence of that other place: that country, and its corrupt mismanagement of a Utopia, that has now been crossed out as a mistake in the reckoning of history.

And then there are others, like me, who are attracted to the Palast for aesthetic reasons: the totalitarian aesthetic. We, who have no inkling of what the building meant when it had meaning, had no reason to look upon it and know the monster it contained – when the copper-tinted mirrored glass was not about catching reflections and deflecting the sun, but about looking in one direction only; about being observed without leave to observe.

When the Palast der Republik was first opened in 1976, it was clad in white marble with 180 metres of windowed façade, triumphant in its transparent splendor and so-named 'the house of a thousand windows'. There is now no trace of the white marble; the structure is raw wood and the windows are tarnished like dirty metal. It is as if the state is letting time make up its mind – letting entropy do the job and make the decision it is loath to make. But the sore in the centre of the city is too public, and so a month ago, the wedding cake won and the Palast der Republik was condemned. The revivalists were triumphant. Soon Museum Island will be homogenized into stone white fakery and will no longer twinkle with a thousand setting suns."

- Tacita Dean, text accompanying the film 'Palast,' 2004

The Half-life of Ephemera

Or: That which we have now, having never been (Slight return)


Something that used to happen to me fairly often, but hasn't in a long while...

Acquiring a book from either a library or a second-hand bookstore, books that had passed through other hands. A photograph found between the pages, or falling out from someplace therein. A photographs no doubt having been haplessly placed there as a bookmark many years or decades previously, before the reader had returned the volume to the library or sold it off to whomever.

One of these I can remember quite well. A black & white snapshot, with the blank white frame of a border. A man and a woman leaning against the side of a broad and bulky car. Behind them, beyond the car, a few homes marking the point where a short stretch of residential block gives way to an open vista, the road receding to the horizon over a terrain of rolling hills. The model of the vehicle and the man and woman's hair and clothes suggest that the photo was taken no later than 1952. The landscape and the sky have me thinking the location might be the outskirts of San Francisco or possibly Seattle -- some place like that, someplace coastal and right off the water, in California or the Pacific northwest, back when large portions of that region were still thinly and spottily populated, when many of the roads had only recently been laid down.

 Despite the fact that someone had them stand against the car -- to stop just here for a moment, so that someone could capture an image of the occasion -- they position themselves toward the camera quite loosely, but can't really be bothered to fully, formally face the camera. Their posture is relaxed and casual. The man grins, the woman appears to be on the verge of laughter. The way they are interacting suggests that they are something other than lovers or man and wife. Perhaps instead an old dear friend or sibling was visiting from elsewhere, making the rare trek across a large expanse of the country, for a few days of catching-up and spread over several days. With the photo having been taken in that last hour before the visiting party had to say goodbye, departing homeward.

At one point a had a small collection of these photos, amounting to only a few. Don't know at what point -- in which move or purging -- I lost them, but I had them for a while. I kept them as I had encountered them, as physical objects; as flotsam from other people's lives that had been unintentionally (one assumes) set into indeterminate circulation. The sort of photos you look at and deduce what you can from the information they contain. The sort of photos you look at and wonder: Who are -- or were -- these people? What did this moment mean to them? Where are they now?



* * * * *

Some Last Words on 'Collage Culture'

Not mine, but someone else's. Uncannily paralleling some ideas from the Aaron Rose essay I was talking about earlier...

Q: How long did this new sonic aesthetic take to come together? And was there a particular trigger that inspired the shift?

JF: I was drinking a V-SMOOTHIE, in West Hollywood, at this place called Earth Bar. The ambience was like cold, moist air-conditioned Eco-space, digital ringtones tweeting off, smoothie blenders, laptops. And then a blue-haired man walked up to the counter in his five-finger shoes, texting on his Blackberry. The space felt so online. I was in a diverse online rain forest of $60 eco-smoothies and flat screen TV menus. I just wanted to make music that sounded like this, something these people could blast on their iPods. The ideas got deeper then this later, but this was the initial starting point.

Q: So how much of an inspiration has the internet and the digital world been on [the Far Side Virtual album]?

JF: The Internet is dispatching everything in our globalised mega-city. People are essentially wearing the Internet, eating it, hearing it, talking about it all the time, because everything is like a symptom of an Internet driven society. It's really obvious, though it's not the main attraction in FSV's story. FSV is a still life. Everybody's music sounds like the Internet right now, from Top 40 to underground. Fashion looks like the Internet. It's this weird impressionism that everything embodies. I think there will be more and more artwork resembling this. Digital clarity has given us another perspective on humanism.

Q: Do you think it's possible to avoid making art that doesn't reflect the intenseness of the internet's involvement in modern society?

JF: If by chance somebody does achieve this they are truly avant garde.

James Ferraro, interview in The Quietus, Dec., 2011.

Ballet mécanique

In which synesthesia and reflexive creative subjectivity get cyberized...

"What I’ve built to consider these questions is an interactive robotic painting machine that uses artificial intelligence to paint its own body of work and to make its own decisions. While doing so, it listens to its environment and considers what it hears as input into the painting process. In the absence of someone or something else making sound in its presence, the machine, like many artists, listens to itself. But when it does hear others, it changes what it does just as we subtly (or not so subtly) are influenced by what others tell us."

Not that this sort of thing is without precedence (for instance, A and B), but the audio-responsive element is an interesting twist -- especially considering that a majority of the time the thing is driven by the sounds of its own activity, thereby creating its own feedback loop. Alvin Lucier and Frank Stella and Humberto Maturana are sitting in a room...

This part I expect many can relate to:

"Lately I’ve taken to critiquing the machine as it paints, giving it audio input that is a direct response to what it just did. I’ll tell it what I think of each gesture it paints: if I liked it or didn’t, if I think it should have done something different, or how I see the latest mark fitting into the overall composition of the work. I’ve found that I tend to dislike these paintings more than others it makes, suggesting that listening to a constant critique of one’s creative process may not be productive."

All too human, in the end.

The quasi-Ab Ex look of the work is a bit surprising -- because what was more "postmodern" than the ironic, feigned gesture? But mostly it just comes down to a "gee-whiz" factor, because -- as such things go -- it falls well short of stacking up to the most culturally relevant art installation of the 'Noughties.

Trümmertanz

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