PUBLIC 48: The End by PUBLIC Journal: Art Culture Ideas

Edited by CHRISTINE DAVIS and SCOTT MACKENZIE

CONTENTS

PROJECTS Christine Davis and Scott Lyall

COLOUR

Vlad Lunin

THE END

Christine Davis and Scott MacKenzie

INTRODUCTION

Michel Serres

BETRAYAL: THE THANATOCRACY (1974)

Slavoj Žižek

THE END OF THE WORLD (AS WE KNOW IT)

Susan Howe

SILENCE WAGER STORIES (1993)

Toby Miller

THE END OF THE HUMANITIES

Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerståhl Stenport

ALL THAT’S FROZEN MELTS INTO AIR Arctic Cinemas at the End of the World

Lars von Trier

A BEAUTIFUL MOVIE ABOUT THE END OF THE WORLD Director’s Statement

Brenda Longfellow

OFFSHORE Extreme Oil and the Disappearing Future

105

Matthew Flisfeder

COMMUNISM AND THE END OF THE WORLD

117

Arthur and Marilouise Kroker ALGORITHMS FOR THE EXTINCTION EVENT with Jackson 2bears

123

Catherine Malabou

SEPARATION, DEATH, THE THING, FREUD, LACAN, AND THE MISSED ENCOUNTER

141

Alan Zweig

SELECTED SONGS FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

COLUMN 150

Ian Balfour

This is the End窶年ot Or, Enough with the Messiah Already

EXHIBITION REVIEWS 154

Jill Glessing

Ori Gersht: History Repeating Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

158

Friederike Schﾃ､fer

Venezia To Be or Not: The 2013 Venice Biennale

BOOK REVIEWS 163

Christine Korte

Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship by Claire Bishop

165

Anne K. Yoder

What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation by Tom Finkelpearl

168

Michael DiRisio

Living As Form edited by Nato Thompson

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CONTRIBUTORS

INTRODUCTION

AND THAT’S ALL, FOLKS… C H R I S T I N E D AV I S A N D S C O T T M A C K E N Z I E

WHILE THE CONCEPT OF END TIMES stretches back to the start of recorded history, this issue foregrounds not only the contemporary political and environmental disasters that are taking place around us, apparent to all who wish to see, but also offers entry points to engage with the pervasive idea of an upcoming end, and to imagine a future that is not an endpoint. But to do so, one must first firmly place oneself in the present, without naïve nostalgia for the past, or abject resignation about the future. For if there is to be a future, our contributors, in different ways and from different philosophical and critical points of view, argue for a citizenship fully engaged in the present. In an age in which environmental destruction, the erosion of the public sphere, resource extraction, the decimation of higher education, and the concomitant fascination with fantasizing about end times are everprevalent, this is the sole way to avoid the simplistic and cynical refrain of “what will be, will be.” The impetus to explore these issues led to a symposium—Until the End of the World—(organized by Christine Davis, Scott MacKenzie, and Janine Marchessault) held in Toronto’s Council Chambers at City Hall during Toronto’s Nuit Blanche exhibition in 2012. Occupying this space, where the illusion of public debate so often takes place, was meant to signal not only the spirit of reclaiming the public sphere, but to engage artists, intellectuals, and the public with a variety of accounts of what the end times mean in our present-day context of ongoing crisis. Some of the papers collected in this issue of PUBLIC were first presented during that all-night conference and were broadcast live from the futuristic towers of Toronto’s civic square over the course of the evening. Slavoj Žižek, who was the keynote speaker, offers a set of contemporary paradoxes regarding the crises the world presently faces. Dismissing the notion that change can’t happen, Žižek argues forcefully that change is happening, no matter how much we ignore it. What will come of these changes can in no way be re-determined, but the first step to re-imagining the world is the recognition that seismic shifts are happening that even the elusive powers-that-be do not, and cannot understand. Moving from this macro perspective, the end postulated by Toby Miller offers a new beginning for humanistic education in the face of the dire threats facing academia. Building on his recent book Blow Up the Humanities, Miller argues that the humanities (which, pace Matthew Arnold, was once thought to be the bastion of civilization) have bifurcated in the US into two distinct entities, which he calls Humanities One and Humanities Two. H1 is the traditional, text-based critical analysis

MICHEL SERRES

BETRAYAL: THE THANATOCRACY

1,2

Translated by Randolph Burks

I THINK, I WANT, I HOPE I have forgotten, for the sake of my fleeting happiness and my distraught life, that singular kind of terror that passes through the body in what are discreetly called psychiatric hospitals. Sealed-off places, as it has been said, where reptilian anxiety and lethal rigidity spread. I had never understood, since the advent of this horror, the fascination these places exerted on the observers of right reason. Robin Clarke makes this fantastical alliance clear, an alliance that’s too subtle for a lover of life. Outside the walls, you all think you’ve been delivered, with a free hand, complete liberty and alert, serene, objective reason. You think that madness has been confined. That the madness that lies in wait for you depends on your mother and father, on the breast you didn’t get. On erased scenes from your earliest childhood, etc. That is true, perhaps, but under the microscope. Another madness lies in wait for you, giant-sized, so gigantic, immense, that you need a telescope to see it. All your ideas hide it from you, like clouds. It lies in wait for you; it takes aim at you from the heights of space and from the sea trenches. The open world is prey to the most hallucinatory of manias. The planet has entered, all round, the middle of Ward #6. Into the sound and fury of the irrational, not the irrational of Dionysus, but that of Ares. And right reason has entered with it. This evident fact is like every evident fact that possesses the strength of the sun: impossible to look directly at it, at the height of noon. The sun and death. Read La course à la mort, and you will not reawaken wise. No, you will sleep no longer. Insomniac and schizophrenic. With Robin Clarke, as everywhere else, the question is posed: what would happen if some dangerous madman, come to power, decided, at that time, to trigger nuclear apocalypse during an attack of psychotic mania? The answer is without dilemma: the end of the world and the human species. The available stock of armaments, according to the most restrictive balance sheets, by far outstrips the possibility of attaining that goal. But the question is very poorly posed. It’s only one for those who accept the contemporary nightmare as constituting normal conditions. In fact, there isn’t even any question, there is only an evident fact: the dangerous madmen are already in power, since they constructed that possibility, installed the stocks, since they shrewdly prepared the total

S L AV O J Ž I Ž E K

THE END OF THE WORLD (AS WE KNOW IT)

This public lecture by Slavoj Žižek was delivered in Toronto’s City Hall Council Chambers on 29 September 2012 as part of the Until the End of the World symposium (co-organized by Christine Davis, Scott MacKenzie, and Janine Marchessault on behalf of the Public Access Collective), as part of the site-specific Nuit Blanche exhibition The Museum for the End of the World. The contributions of Arthur Kroker, Brenda Longfellow, and Alan Zweig in this issue are also derived from this symposium. This Žižek lecture was transcribed by Matthew Flisfeder.

I WANT TO PRESENT HERE some of the signs of this dimension of the end of the world in the sense that we are approaching—there is on the horizon—a certain zero level where things reach a limit. So let me begin with a film that I’ve known about already for four or five years because the director, who is my friend, was kind enough to send me a copy. The premiere of the film was, I think, shown a month ago here at the Toronto [International Film] Festival, if some of you were lucky enough to see it; if not, please go and see it. It’s maybe one of the most morally depressing films that I’ve seen. It’s called The Act of Killing (2012), made by the Danish documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer. It was shot in the last few years in Indonesia. But they needed years to make it possible to show it in public, because lives were threatened; you will immediately see why. This film shot in Medan, Indonesia, in 2007 reports on a case of obscenity, which reaches to the extreme. There is in Indonesia—all of this is real, it’s a documentary—a group of murderers, gang members and members of the military: Anwar Congo and some of his friends. He’s an Indonesia politician now, a military officer, who in the middle of 1966—you remember there was a civil war, first they attempted a communist coup d’état, then the anti-communist Suharto regime did strike back; and the idea is that around two and a half million people, mostly Chinese, allegedly communists were slaughtered. This group, Anwar Congo and his friends, organized at that time, in 1966, a murderous gang. They were serially raping, torturing, and killing thousands of people. They were not only ready but they even paid Oppenheimer—they didn’t know what he would do with it—to do a film

SUSAN HOWE

SILENCE WAGER STORIES

When I come to view about steadfastness Espousal is as ever Evil never unravels Memory was and will be yet mercy flows Mercies to me and mine Night rainy my family in private and family

I know I know short conviction have losses then let me see why To what distance and by what path I thought you would come away

1 Battered out of Isaiah Prophets stand gazing Formed from earth In sure and certain What can be thought Who go down to hell alive is the theme of this work

TOBY MILLER

THE END OF THE HUMANITIES

THERE ARE SO MANY ENDINGS that aren’t. Frank Sinatra retires but returns. Michael Jordan finishes his career then restarts it. Bill Clinton is the Comeback Kid. A failed candidate for the California governorship says “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” in what is billed as his last press conference. Six years later, he wins the Presidency. In Australian football, commentators refer to players recovered from injury or defeat as making “The greatest comeback since Lazarus.” Don Cherry opposes the Canadian government over the 2003 invasion of Iraq then announces “this could be the end” of Coach’s Corner because he is, actually, a rather dull, predictable civil servant. Sadly, of course, it wasn’t. The worlds of entertainment, sports, and politics are littered with endings that are not, from “The End” followed by “But James Bond will return in…” to wee Matthew Broderick quizzing the crowd as to why they’ve stayed after the credits in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (John Hugues, 1986), finding a way to broker Brechtian distantiation with John Hughes humour (“It’s over. Go home”). How right Godard was to say “A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.” “The End of the Humanities” is clearly a silly title. It risks mockery for several reasons, the most obvious one being that it is easily disproved by history. Tomorrow you’ll wake up and there’ll still be a humanities. And there may be many tomorrows. But I actually think the end is coming, at least in the United States. The US version of the humanities is dying, if not rhetorically (it’s hard to shut them up) then numerically. Here’s why. I draw on data presented in Blow Up the Humanities1 to make my case. To spare you endless citations, support for my nutty claims is contained there. But this is not just a crib, reiteration, or free version of that book. It’s also a response to reactions to my ideas, notably in the Los Angeles Review of Books2 and various venues where I’ve presented the argument over the last year or so, such as Westminster University, the School of Oriental and African Studies, King’s College London, the US National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education, the Cultural Studies Association (US), and the European Consortium of Humanities Research Institutes and Centres. I have also looked at

S C O T T M A C K E N Z I E A N D A N N A W E S T E R S TÅ H L S T E N P O RT

ALL THAT’S FROZEN MELTS INTO AIR Arctic Cinemas at the End of the World 1

The Arctic is not so much a region as a dream: the dream of a unique, unattainable and compellingly attractive world. It is the last imaginary place.… To most southerners the Arctic remains what it was to their counterparts centuries and perhaps even millennia ago: the ultimate otherworld. —Robert McGhee, The Last Imaginary Place SINCE THE TRAVELS OF PYTHEAS who, in 325 BC, journeyed to its edge, the Arctic has been construed as the end of the world. This image of the Arctic as an “ultimate otherworld,” a “dream” and the endpoint of exploration, ecology, and existence has been furthered and perpetuated in moving images throughout the twentieth century. Yet, in contrast to the considerable scholarship devoted to textual Arctic imaginaries, filmic Arctic imaginaries have attracted little attention. These moving images, however, have been profoundly influential: transcending national and linguistic borders, they have helped generate and challenge some of the most pervasive and troublesome tropes of the Arctic as a space, place, and site of the end of the world. The nineteenth century myths of the Arctic that McGhee delineates foreshadow those that the cinema calls forth in the twentieth century. What is cinema—and other nineteenth century popular visual culture precursors such as the panorama—if not attempts to project onto an empty screen a compelling, uncanny otherworld, eerie yet consistently compelling? Just as the end of a film grants apparent and imaginary closure, the Arctic so often has been conceived as the end of the known and habitable planet, offering a similarly facile and illusory sense of closure to Western assumptions of epistemology and existence. In this manner, cinema shares with the Arctic a constitutive oscillation between the spectacle and the sublime. Like current visualizations of the Arctic sublime that codify impending environmental destruction in the wake of anthropogenic climate change, the spectacle of the Arctic is, pace Guy Debord, about the naturalizing of power relations. As Debord, who theorized the spectacle most thoroughly in Society of the Spectacle, notes: “The spectacle is the ruling order’s nonstop discourse about itself, its never-ending monologue of self-praise, its self-portrait at the stage of totalitarian domination of all aspects of life. The fetishistic appearance of pure objectivity in spectacular relations conceals their true character as relations between people and between 71

LARS VON TRIER

A BEAUTIFUL MOVIE ABOUT THE END OF THE WORLD Director’s Statement

The statement below by Lars von Trier on his end of the world film Melancholia (2011) is one of a long line of manifestos, statements, and proclamations von Trier has issued before the release of each of his films. While proclaiming that he wanted to embrace German Romanticism, von Trier’s main character Justine (Kirsten Dunst) is far more enveloped by a sense of ennui about the world ending.

IT WAS LIKE WAKING FROM A DREAM: my producer showed me a suggestion for a poster. “What is that?” I ask. “It’s a film you’ve made!” she replies. “I hope not,” I stammer. Trailers are shown… stills… it looks like shit. I’m shaken. Don’t get me wrong… I’ve worked on the film for two years. With great pleasure. But perhaps I’ve deceived myself. Let myself be tempted. Not that anyone has done anything wrong… on the contrary, everybody has worked loyally and with talent toward the goal defined by me alone. But when my producer presents me with the cold facts, a shiver runs down my spine. This is cream on cream. A woman’s film! I feel ready to reject the film like a wrongly transplanted organ. But what was it I wanted? With a state of mind as my starting point, I desired to dive headlong into the abyss of German romanticism. Wagner in spades. That much I know. But is that not just another way of expressing defeat? Defeat to the lowest of cinematic common denominators? Romance is abused in all sorts of endlessly dull ways in mainstream products. And then, I must admit, I have had happy love relationships with romantic cinema… to name the obvious: Visconti! German romance that leaves you breathless. But in Visconti, there was always something to elevate matters beyond the trivial… elevate it to masterpieces! I am confused now and feel guilty. What have I done? Is it “exit Trier?” I cling to the hope that there may be a bone splinter amid all the cream that may, after all, crack a fragile tooth… I close my eyes and hope! Copenhagen, 13 April 2011 83

BRENDA LONGFELLOW

OFFSHORE Extreme Oil and the Disappearing Future

30 August 2012. The news was not good. I had a terse email from the cinematographer that my partner Glen Richards and I had worked with last year in Louisiana. “Buras, Boothville, Cocodrie, Port Fourchon, Chauvin, all under water.” These were small towns on the coast of South Louisiana where we had interviewed fisherwomen, shrimpers and oyster men, clean up crew, and community activists who all had their lives devastated by the Deepwater Horizon disaster.1 Now Hurricane Isaac had flooded large stretches of South Louisiana. Our friends’ boats and houses were once again hit with a ferocious storm surge and inundated, an aqueous reminder of the horror of Katrina, and proving, as if by some twisted cosmic joke, that ill fate runs in three. But the surge also carried more recent incarnations of disaster, churning up tar mats and tar balls all along the coast of Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi, a dark and viscous return of the repressed, rebutting the inane optimism of state and federal authorities, not to mention the slick 150 million dollar advertising campaign launched by BP which claimed that “the Gulf was back,” the seafood safe, and the oil dispersed. These oily remainders, indelible and indestructible, seem to me to perfectly mark the accumulating detritus of our petromodernity, and stand as harbingers of a certain kind of future, where the returns on this detritus recur in the catastrophic form of climate change, environmental devastation, and species extinction. Indeed, these perilous developments led to our project OFFSHORE.2 OFFSHORE is an interactive web documentary about the next chapter of oil exploration: “Extreme Oil” some call it, or “Cowboy Drilling”—hundreds of miles offshore, thousands of feet beneath the ocean floor, in dangerous and risky conditions where the hazards are immense but the profits are bigger, and where the consequences of something going wrong are catastrophic. Three years after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, tar balls and mats are still drifting up on the shores of Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi: matter returns, as an abject lesson in the Law of the Conservation of Energy. For despite the two million gallons of Corexit that BP sprayed into the Gulf in an effort to disperse both the material evidence of the spill and international outrage, the residues of disaster remain and not only in tar balls but in the bloodstreams and lungs of clean up crew and coastal residents, in the gills of shrimp, and in the carcasses of dead oysters—all of which will persist into the very long future as a public health catastrophe. 95

M AT T H E W F L I S F E D E R

COMMUNISM AND THE END OF THE WORLD

A CONSERVATIVE READING OF THE TITLE to the present article might respond in the following way: Communism and the end of the world—are we not, here, speaking about the same phenomenon? There is a certain truth to this response. Both signal an “end” to the current state of things. In each case, we are dealing with the end of our current way of life, whether that is as a result of the transition in the mode of production, or that which results from the complete annihilation of all life on Earth. My argument in what follows is that popular representations of Communism and the end of the world (particularly in film and television) are the front and back of the same ideological fantasy that tries to reassert the utopianism of the present state of things. While the fantasy of the “end times” works by dissuading us from imagining life after capitalism, the fantasy of the communist threat does the opposite: it makes us even more fearful of that which can come after capitalism than the actual end of the world. The latter, though, comes with a catch: while “Communism” is named as the ultimate threat to the existing order, I argue in the end, mirroring arguments made by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, that “Communism” is also the name given by the ruling order, and appropriated by the forces of its destruction, to the real movement of its own historical demise. The point, then, is to move from the equation of Communism and the end of the world, towards a dichotomy of Communism or the end of the world, so that the former can be seen as the only actual salvation from the latter. Nevertheless, it is only by realistically confronting (rather than merely fantasizing about) the latter, that we can begin to take seriously the former.

“Nostalgia for the Present” There is something quite peculiar about the dominance of finance capital, particularly as it comes to stage the setting for the imaginary of postmodern subjectivity. At the level of immediate experience, finance has the apparent effect of “obliterating” the future—a feature that helps to explain the postmodern “spatialization” of time, and its overlap with the digital and the culture of “instant access.” Is it not the case that finance constantly forces us into an experience of a “perpetual present”?1 One

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A RT H U R A N D M A R I L O U I S E K R O K E R

ALGORITHMS FOR THE EXTINCTION EVENT

Sunrise of the Prosthetics When the final extinction event has taken place and that lonely morning finally comes when the sun rises on a planet of the dead and dying and cities of the vanquished and disappeared, the only visible motion will likely be purely prosthetic—the aimless flapping of wings by vulture robots still circling in the sky on an indefinite hovering cycle, the only nighttime movement the furtive flights of virtual bats with their beautiful memory shaped alloys and miniaturized specs of artificial intelligence, and the only sounds those of the remaining virtual hornets or swarms of robotic bees or perhaps, by that time, spectral flights of dragons fashioned in some long forgotten and now abandoned Stanford robotic research. The bones of the last of the humans may have gone to their burial sites, but their residues remain in the form of a lingering mechanics of clones and drones and androids and virtual zombies. And on that day, we wonder what the real survivors of the extinction event—bats and rats and beetles and cockroaches and eagles and vultures and hornets—will have to say? When a turkey vulture looks a virtual vulture in the eye will it feel technological envy at its prosthetic finery, or only a sense of shame that it has to share the daytime sky with robotic pretenders on a terminal doomsday flight to a final cybernetic spasm when the virtual vulture crashes to earth for lack of power? And what will real swarms of truly angry hornets make of their simulacra? Will they turn on them in predatory fashion, mocking their sudden defenselessness, or simply swarm on by in hornet-like indifference? What stories would Japanese samurais have to tell about their virtual descendants in the form of the Lockheed Samurai MAV drone? And what memories biblical will crack open the earth over the graves of the dead when they hear that war-machine robots called Old Testament names like the “Reaper” or the “Predator” circle the earth in one last search for the Messiah that never comes? Once the human shield of technology has been removed, I wonder how long a microbat will last, a virtual worm will squirm, a turkey vulture will hover, an army of simulated ants will continue to dig, or a human clone, for that matter, will drone?

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C AT H E R I N E M A L A B O U

SEPARATION, DEATH, THE THING, FREUD, LACAN, AND THE MISSED ENCOUNTER 1 Translated by Steven Miller

How could it be! An X-ray was made of my head. I, a living being, have seen my cranium—is that not something new? Come on! —Guillaume Apollinaire, The New Spirit and the Poets2 The frightening unknown on the other side of the line is that which in man we call the unconscious, that is to say the memory of those things he forgets… those things in connection with which everything is arranged so that he doesn’t think about them, i.e. stench and corruption that always yawn like an abyss. —Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

1. Methodological Clarification If it still remains possible to constitute cerebrality as a specific regime of events, if it remains possible to show that trauma—as unexpected accident or unforeseen catastrophe—possesses a determining and not merely a triggering power within the psyche, this possibility could only be elaborated at the heart of Freud’s thinking of danger, destruction, and the annihilation of the psyche. It would thus be necessary to enter as deeply as possible into this thinking and to show the precise way in which the place of cerebrality opens up within the powerful economy of the death drive. Once again, the confrontation that I am staging here is not simple. As my argument advances, it becomes even clearer that it is impossible to naively oppose the neurological discourse on the psychic impact of brain lesions to the theory of neurotic predisposition. Freud, we have shown, accords a fundamental role to the factor of surprise, fright, and the psyche’s lack of preparation for the external accident or danger. The cloven structure of sexuality, the “screen” of the “libido theory” (according to which sexuality is also—and perhaps before all—encompasses the other of the sexual or the otherness of sexuality to itself) enlarges the signification of sexual etiology. Indeed, by virtue of this structure, sexual

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ALAN ZWEIG

SELECTED SONGS FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

It’s almost nostalgic to listen to these songs, which are like a list of all the things people once thought would destroy the world. Some of them almost seem quaint; the lazy bees will probably bring our demise before we get our nuclear war. Most of my life, when I wasn’t filled with rage, I just thought “I’ll probably be dead, what do I care?” which, I’m embarrassed to admit, worked just fine until I had a child. When our days have known their number When in death we sweetly slumber When the Kingdom mends the spirit to be free There’ll be no more stormy weather We’ll live peacefully together When they ring them golden bells for you and me from ALFRED KARNES – When they Ring the Golden Bells ANDREW BIRD – Tables and Chairs APHRODITE’S CHILD – End of the World BALLBOY – Above the Clouds the Sun is Always Rising BARRY MCGUIRE – Eve of Destruction BILL FAY – Time of the Last Persecution Reflex in the sky warn you you’re gonna die Storm coming, you’d better hide from the atomic tide Flashes in the sky, turns houses into sties Turns people into clay, radiation minds decay. from BLACK SABBATH – Electric Funeral

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VIEWS & REVIEWS

COLUMN: IAN BALFOUR York University This Is The End—Not Or Enough With The Messiah Already

One of the good guys in Guillermo del Toro’s 2013 megapic Pacific Rim, near the end of the film in which our heroes are fighting monsters taller than most office towers, announces defiantly: “we are cancelling the apocalypse.” The line apparently meant a lot to the director, who required the actor charged with speaking it to do “about a million takes.” In principle, the apocalypse should be hard, indeed impossible to cancel. If some things are beyond the control of human agency, the apocalypse would be way up on that list. If the Biblical text is true to its word, the effect of the apocalypse varies according to how one has lived one’s life: the Book of Revelation indicates the righteous will ascend to heaven. Still, the apocalypse is not necessarily something most people want to experience. One doesn’t relish the thought of the moon turning to blood, the sun falling from the sky and all the attendant horrors—all of which the pyrotechnics of CGI can now render with literal precision. Hollywood, it should go without saying, couldn’t dream of cancelling the apocalypse: it can’t do without it. And it’s not alone: the Bible remains very concerned about it, as is right-wing talk radio (“Armageddon”!), and any number of blogs and DIY publishing efforts, from the lunatic fringe to the rather mainstream. The Book of Revelation is adamant about not tampering with its integrity. Its next-to-last verse reads: “And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his

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THE END

COLUMN

part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book” (KJV 22:19). (The editors of the abridged version of the Book of Revelation for Reader’s Digest either didn’t notice this verse or weren’t unduly worried by the threat: they chose to omit just that verse about not removing any verses.) It’s all or nothing. But, really, all. The summer of 2013 saw a rash of apocalyptic or “apocalyptish” movies, some of them deadly serious (Pacific Rim, World War Z), some (as if to send up the current and recent spate of serious end-times films) unexpectedly comic, such as This is the End and The World’s End. Of the roster of films that take on the Apocalypse the one that addresses it most head on is the unlikely dark comedy This is the End (dir. Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen), a Seth Rogen romp featuring James Franco and a bunch of Rogen’s co-conspirators who, all playing themselves, are hanging out at Franco’s overwrought Hollywood mansion at a teeming party when “The Big One” hits, an earthquake of epic proportions. The Big One has been predicted for a long time but this one is not just huge, it seems pretty precisely the earthquake forecast in the Book of Revelation a little more than two millennia ago by a mystic named John (of Patmos) living off the coast of Turkey and worrying, according to Elaine Pagels and others, that the new ga-ga proto-Christians were losing their essential ties to Judaism. There was a lot to worry about and the vision produced is very

EXHIBITION REVIEW: JILL GLESSING, Ryerson University ORI GERSHT: HISTORY REPEATING CURATED BY AL MINER, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON 28 AUGUST 2012-6 JANUARY 2013 Ori Gersht is a great artist. This descriptor, abandoned since postmodern critiques of all things great and grand, seems possible here. The artist’s richly allusive, visually seductive, and deeply affective work grapples with the metaphysics of life, death, spirit, struggle, violence, beauty, time, and history. Traversing across centuries, Gersht engages with art and cultural history—ancient Grecian currency, seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury still life painting, German Romanticism, and twentieth-century horrors of the holocaust, Hiroshima, Palestine, Sarajevo, and Galician oil spills. Through advanced optical technologies

and a modern dialectical perspective, he lavishly and lovingly explores their oppositional rhythms and tensions. The British, Israeli-born artist’s first survey exhibition, Ori Gersht: Repeating History, presented 26 films and photographs. A trilogy of slow motion HD films on LCD monitors was most striking. Each modelled after a variation of the still life genre, and then shot at high speed and slowed for presentation, the static natures mortes come to modern life, then flamboyant death, in ravishing displays of creation and destruction. Pomegranate (2006) faithfully reproduces Juan Sánchez Cotán’s bodegone, Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber (ca. 1602), in its Caravaggesque light and shade, spatial ambiguity, thick wooden frame and, but for the pomegranate replacing the hanging quince, its composition. All is still, but comes to startling life when a bullet suddenly swooshes toward the pomegranate. With their explosive meeting, fragments of red pulp and juice shower throughout the frame. Transfixed by its beauty, viewers are equally aware of its metaphoric weight.

Ori Gersht, Pomegranate (2006), still from HD digital video, 3:52 min. Photo: Courtesy CRG Gallery, New York.

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REVIEWS

Ori Gersht, Falling Bird (2008), still from HD film framed for LCD, 5:53 min. Photo: Courtesy CRG Gallery, New York.

Gersht often uses natural elements to express bodies and psyches. Layers of personal and cultural connotations deepen this work even further: the pomegranate’s ancient Middle Eastern symbolism of fecundity is overlaid by the artist’s fearful childhood in bomb-threatened Tel Aviv; the pomegranate and the grenade, because they share visual resemblance, also share the same Hebrew name. Histories of art and optical technologies resonate within the piece: the speeding bullet explicitly references Harold Edgerton’s stroboscopic, high-speed photograph .30 Bullet Piercing an Apple (1964). David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge (2003), a film that explores Renaissance artists’ use of optics to produce realism, shares the referential field here. Hockney sets up this

same Cotan still life and views it through a camera obscura. When the hanging cabbage accidently starts to spin, Hockney thrills at the recognition of this stunning illusion as an “early movie.” These mixed allusions express Gersht’s engagement with the lineage of western perspectival systems, Baroque spectacle and sensation, and modern technologies for visual control and destruction. Big Bang (2006) references Jan van Huysum’s Dutch still life, Hollyhocks and Other Flowers in a Vase (1702-1720). Gazing upon the potent beauty of Gersht’s remake, a siren sound emerges, and soft mist begins seeping amongst the flowers. Suddenly the nature morte explodes into a tableau vivant, sending delicate, shrapnel-sharp shards of

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BOOK REVIEW: CHRISTINE KORTE, York University

CLAIRE BISHOP Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 382 pages In her 2004 October essay “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” Claire Bishop inaugurated a now infamous debate about 1990s art in which she takes apart French curator Nicholas Bourriaud’s claim that relational art is an inherently emancipatory form—one that has replaced the grand modernist teleology of political utopias with humbler “microtopian” encounters. Bishop’s charge is that rather than changing the stakes for art, these “feel good” relational practices tend to be lauded by curators and critics on the basis of their social-ameliorative aims. With Artificial Hells, the art historian broadens her focus to the field of participatory art, which includes post-studio practices that use human beings as their primary material and artworks that seek to activate or engage the public.

Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship arrests the prospective reader with its title (taken from André Breton’s postmortem for a “failed” Dadaist excursion) and cover image of a mounted policeman directing a crowd of gallery spectators (a still of Tania Bruguera’s Tatlin’s Whisper #5).1 This image recalls the difficult experience of witnessing as well as assessing the everyday situations, happenings, events, and projects that constitute the field of participatory art. Bishop suggests that part of the challenge of evaluating these artworks is its practitioners tend to value what is invisible to the spectator or nonparticipant, whether a process, group dynamic, or shift in consciousness. For her, this does not excuse the artist from attending to the aesthetic component of the work or highlighting the inherent social contradiction of political art that inhabits the art system. Bishop’s main contention is that participatory art currently exists in a vacuum where it is neither capable of achieving concrete social change nor is it amenable to evaluation as art. According to Bishop, if critics were to refrain from using concepts particular to sociological discourses and stick with an art historical framework, these works would be less likely to be co-opted by neoliberal agendas. In this way, Bishop’s argument reinvigorates the appeal for art’s autonomy. In the book’s first chapter, Bishop introduces the tensions that have plagued the participatory form from the historical avant-garde to the present: “quality and equality, singular and collective authorship, and the ongoing struggle to find artistic equivalents for political positions” (3). Bishop’s analysis focuses on three key dates: 1917, 1968, and post-1989. At these moments, the stakes around a utopian vision for society become heightened, which manifests in the vigorous appearance of participatory practices. In the following chapters, Bishop provides case studies spanning more than a century of participatory art, including: early twentieth century experiments by the Futurists, Bolsheviks, and

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BOOK REVIEW: MICHAEL DIRISIO, Toronto

NATO THOMPSON, Ed. Living As Form: Socially Engaged Art From 1991–2011 (New York: Creative Time Books, 2012), 264 pages The edited collection Living As Form seeks to contribute to the recent coverage of socially engaged art, focusing primarily upon projects that are related to broader social justice movements and activist-oriented practices. The first half of the book features a series of essays on socially engaged art by critics and curators Nato Thompson, Claire Bishop, Maria Lind, Teddy Cruz, Carol Becker, Brian Holmes, and Shannon Jackson, while the latter half is dedicated to a survey of some of the most significant socially engaged projects of the last two decades. In the preface, Creative Time Director Anne Pasternak describes an early encounter with socially engaged art that sets the tone for much of the book. The project was initiated by artist Peggy Diggs in 1992, who worked in conjunction with

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Tuscan Dairy Farms to print over one million milk cartons bearing the question “When you argue at home, does it always get out of hand?” along with a domestic abuse hotline number.1 Pasternak called the hotline number out of concern for a friend, unaware at the time it was a social art project. In recalling this participation with the project she states that it did not matter whether this project was art or not, but that the project’s importance lay in its ability to provoke people to consider and act on the issue of domestic abuse. The contributing writers generally share this focus on function over form, with the book’s editor Nato Thompson stating that the question of whether it is art or not is a dated debate in the visual arts. This rejection of the “is it art” question stems from Thompson’s criticism of discipline-specific histories of socially engaged art. Though it is easy, and certainly common enough, to trace the development of socially engaged art from precursors such as Constructivism, Happenings, and Dadaism, through the more recent “social sculpture” of Joseph Beuys, Thompson argues that one should also take into account the many social movements and cultural practices that simultaneously influence current forms of socially engaged art. This broader account will be more attuned to the concerns of these socially engaged artists. Many of the projects within the latter half of Living As Form, such as Fallen Fruit’s Public Fruit Jam (2006–present) or Barefoot Artists’ The Rwanda Healing Project (2004–present) could not be properly understood without a significant discussion of the social and political issues they address. A discipline-specific discussion would misconstrue the very impetus for these projects. While the majority of the projects included in Living As Form are amongst the most empowering, striking examples of socially engaged art today, there are a few entries—such as one entitled “Election Night: Harlem New York, 2008,” which describes the celebrations that took place following Barack Obama’s first Presidential election—that appear out of place. Certainly the

CONTRIBUTORS

JACKSON 2BEARS is a Kanien'kehaka (Mohawk) multimedia artist. He currently holds the Audain Professorship in Contemporary Art Practice of the Pacific Northwest in the Department of Visual Arts, University of Victoria. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across Canada and internationally. He holds a Ph.D. in interdisciplinary studies from the University of Victoria. CHRISTINE DAVIS is an artist and founding editor of PUBLIC. Her work, through a cosmological impulse and experimental process, engages the historical relation between science, sentience, and language. She has worked with morpho butterflies, genetic sequences, planetarium shows, feathers, and iPhones; and employed slide dissolves, glass blowing, 35mm film, video, and etched words onto contact lenses using laser technology developed for the Canadarm. Amongst other venues she has exhibited at Frankfurter Kunstverein, The Power Plant, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Kunsthalle Munich, Haus am Waldsee, Seoul Museum of Art, The New Museum, National Gallery of Canada, and Le Confort Moderne. MATTHEW FLISFEDER is the author of The Symbolic, The Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and co-editor of Žižek and Media Studies: A Reader (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). He has taught courses on film, media, and cultural theory at OCAD University, Ryerson University, Trent University, and Wilfrid Laurier University.

SUSAN HOWE is an American poet, scholar, essayist, and critic. She is the recipient of the 2011 Bollingen Prize in American Poetry. Her recent books include That This (New Directions Books, 2010) and Sorting Facts, or Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker (New Directions Poetry Pamphlets, 2013). ARTHUR and MARILOUISE KROKER are writers and lecturers in the areas of technology and contemporary culture. Together they edit the electronic journal CTheory. Arthur is Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture and Theory, Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture at the University of Victoria. His recent publications include The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism: Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Marx (University of Toronto Press, 2004) and Body Drift: Butler, Hayes, Haraway (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). Marilouise is Senior Research Scholar at the University of Victoria. She is the co-author of Hacking the Future (New World Perspectives, 1996) and has co-edited and introduced numerous anthologies, including Digital Delirium (St. Martin’s Press, 1997). She has performed and written texts for a series of videos by Jackson 2bears, including Code Drift, Life by Computer, Slow Suicide, and, most recently with Arthur Kroker, After the Drones. www.krokers.net. BRENDA LONGFELLOW teaches in the Department of Film at York University. She is an awardwinning filmmaker and writer whose most recent book, The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson (co-edited with Thomas Waugh and Scott MacKenzie), was just released by McGill-Queen’s University Press.

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VLAD LUNIN was born in Chervonograd and currently lives in Toronto. He is an interdisciplinary artist working with still and moving imagery. Guided by observation and constant documentation his ideas are drawn from an interest in the built environment as well as ideas of change and progress. He has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Toronto in Visual Arts and American Studies. SCOTT LYALL is an artist who lives and works in Toronto and New York. He has been a member of the Public Access Collective for the past four years. SCOTT MACKENZIE teaches film and media at Queen’s University. His books include Screening Québec: Québécois Moving Images, National Identity and the Public Sphere (Manchester University Press, 2004), Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures (University of California Press, 2014), Guy Debord: French Filmmakers Series (Manchester University Press, forthcoming). He is a co-editor of The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson (McGillQueen’s University Press, 2013), Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming), and When Worlds Collide: Ecologies of Arctic Imaginaries (forthcoming). CATHERINE MALABOU is a French philosopher. She is Professor in the Philosophy Department at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University, UK. Her most recent book is Self and Emotional Life: Merging Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience (Columbia University Press, 2013). TOBY MILLER the author and editor of over 30 books and hundreds of chapters and articles. He is Professor of Cultural Industries in the Centre for Cultural Policy and Management at the City University of London. You can follow his adventures at tobymiller.org.

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CONTRIBUTORS

MICHEL SERRES is a French philosopher and Professor Emeritus of French at Stanford University and one of the 40 immortels of the Académie Française. He is a prize-winning author of essays and books, including The Five Senses (Bloomsbury, 2009), and Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury, 2013). ANNA WESTERSTÅHL STENPORT is Director of Scandinavian Studies and Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Her forthcoming coedited books on critical Arctic studies include Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic (Edinburgh University Press) and When Worlds Collide: Ecologies of Arctic Imaginaries. She is the author of Lukas Moodysson and ‘Show Me Love’: Nordic Film Classics (University of Washington Press, 2012) and Locating August Strindberg’s Prose: Modernism, Transnationalism, Setting (University of Toronto Press, 2010) and editor of The International Strindberg: New Critical Essays (Northwestern University Press, 2012). LARS VON TRIER is a Danish filmmaker and cofounder of Dogme ’95. His many films include Epidemic (1987), Europa (1991), Breaking the Waves (1996), The Idiots (1998), Dancer in the Dark (2000), Dogville (2003), The Five Obstructions (with Jørgen Leth, 2003), The Boss of it All (2006), The Anti-Christ (2009), and Melancholia (2011). SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a Visiting Professor at a number of American Universities (Columbia, Princeton, New School for Social Research, New York University, University of Michigan). Recent books include The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (Verso, 2012) and Demanding the Impossible (Polity, 2013). ALAN ZWEIG is a Toronto documentary filmmaker known for often using film to explore his own life. His films include Vinyl (2000), I, Curmudgeon (2004), Lovable (2007), and A Hard Name (2009).

EDITORIAL Editors for PUBLIC 48: Christine Davis and Scott MacKenzie Managing Editor: Aleksandra Kaminska Book Reviews Editor: Erika Biddle-Stavrakos Art Reviews Editors: Dan Adler, Jim Drobnick Copy Editor: Jessica Marion Barr Design: Associés Libres Printing: JB Deschamps, Canada PUBLIC ACCESS COLLECTIVE Dan Adler, York University Kenneth R. Allan, University of Lethbridge Chloë Brushwood Rose, York University Christine Davis, Toronto Jim Drobnick, OCAD University Caitlin Fisher, York University (on leave) Sylvie Fortin, Montreal Saara Liinamaa, NSCAD University Susan Lord, Queen’s University Scott Lyall, Toronto Janine Marchessault, York University EDITORIAL BOARD Ariella Azoulay, Bar Ilan University Ian Balfour, York University Bruce Barber, NSCAD University Vikki Bell, Goldsmiths, University of London Simon Critchley, The New School Sean Cubitt, Goldsmiths, London Michael Darroch, University of Windsor Maria Fusco, Goldsmiths, University of London Monika Kin Gagnon, Concordia University Peggy Gale, Toronto John Greyson, York University Gareth James, University of British Columbia Michelle Kasprzak, Amsterdam Nina Möntmann, The Royal Institute of Art Kirsty Robertson, University of Western Ontario Nikos Papastergiadis, University of Melbourne Karyn Sandlos, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago Johanne Sloan, Concordia University Imre Szeman, University of Alberta Dot Tuer, OCAD University ADVISORY BOARD Ron Burnett, Emily Carr University of Art + Design Dick Hebdige, University of California, Santa Barbara Arthur Kroker, University of Victoria Chip Lord, University of California, Santa Cruz Dannys Montes de Oca Moreda, Havana Kaja Silverman, University of Pennsylvania Michael Snow, Toronto Aneta Szylak, Wyspa Institute of Art Peter Weibel, ZKM Akram Zaatari, Beirut

PUBLIC 303 Goldfarb Centre for Fine Arts York University, 4700 Keele St Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada public@yorku.ca www.publicjournal.ca Fall 2013 / Volume 24 Issue 48 Print ISSN 0845-4450 Online ISSN: 2048-6928 Also available as ISBN: 978-0-921344-53-7 Electronic edition: www.intellectjournals.co.uk INDIVIDUAL SUBSCRIPTIONS 1 year (2 issues): $35 2 years (4 issues): $65 Please subscribe at www.publicjournal.ca/subscribe. Back issues are available for $15; complete list available online. INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTIONS PUBLIC is available in both print and electronic formats through Turpin Distribution: +1 860 350 0031 (North America) +44 (0) 1767 604 951 (UK and ROW) custserv@turpin-distribution.com DISTRIBUTION PUBLIC is distributed by Magazines Canada, by Ubiquity Distributors in the US, and Central Books in Europe. Content © 2013 Public Access and the authors and artists. Content may not be reproduced without the authorization of Public Access, with the exception of brief passages for scholarly or review purposes. Any opinions suggested or expressed in the images and texts are those of their respective authors. PUBLIC is a biannual magazine published by Public Access, a registered Canadian charity (# 13667 9743 RR0001), in association with Intellect Ltd. It is funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and York University. Cover image: Christine Davis, Scott Lyall, and Vlad Lunin, Colour, 2013.