Graphite 4

G R

A P

H I T E

Graphiteers Emily Anne Kuriyama Editor-in-Chief

Martin Isenberg Head Editor, Critical Essays

Dan Oprea Editor, Critical Essays

Jessica Cook Editor, Critical Essays

Lydia Glenn-Murray Head Editor, Art

Elena Yu Editor, Art

Hana Cohn Head Editor, Multimedia

Gray Tolhurst Editor, Multimedia

Kiley Hudson Evan Moffitt Development

Lauren Graycar Head, Design

Michelle Lin Mindy Seu Design

Issue No. 4 Š 2013, Los Angeles, California Printed by Typecraft Inc. Wood & Jones

GRAPHITE Interdisciplinary Journal of the Arts Created through the Hammer Museum and the Hammer Student Association of UCLA.

graphitejournal@gmail.com www.graphitejournal.com All rights reserved. May not be reproduced.

Content does not reflect the opinions of GRAPHITE editorial staff.

Editor’s Note

To think of movement is to acknowledge the vibrating dynamism of the world around us. In phonetic terms, the utterance of the word itself draws out a doubling of, perhaps, the simplest of sounds—the bilabial nasal m. Lips work in unison, closed tightly as air is released through the nose: movement. Speech, that fundamentally human form of communication, proclaims the sign through the vigor of these intricately choreographed forces pressing against each other.

The fourth edition of GRAPHITE Interdisciplinary Journal of the Arts approaches ideations of movement as if dipping into Heraclitean river, refusing to place parameters around that which is defined by its fluidity.

These are meditations on motion—the micro- and macrocosmic movements that govern our individual and collective bodies, the vacillation of modern sight between increasingly diversified modes of visuality, the shifting and fusing of discursive systems. As you flip through these pages, we hope that you feel empowered by your palpable role in the poetic flow of these contemplative gestures.

Emily Anne Kuriyama

ESSAYS Jessica Cook

Revolutionizing Perception: Arakawa and Gins

Lauren Steinberg

On Playing and Parking

Brittany Newell

Part I of the Privatized Rebel— An Environment of Surrender: Laying Bare the Bonds of Western Modernity

Hana Cohn

All Movement is Just Movement: Interview with Brennan Gerard

Mike Kramer

Brilliance in Relief: David Foster Wallace as a Model for Belief

Lydia Glenn-Murray

You’re Not in Trouble: Interview with Miranda July

Jane Cavalier

Flatter than Superflat: Chiho Aoshima and the Flattening of Partial Identities

Evan Moffitt

Squatters Under Siege: Berlin and the Flight of the “Temporary Autonomous Zone”

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35

53

67 75 85

ARTWORK Chris Engman, Erin Morrison, Peter Linden Jesse Stecklow, Connor Creagan Phillipe de Sablet, Dan Oprea, Yulia Markman, Iris Yirei Hu, Jake Eisenmann Navid Sinbad, Lucas Lind, Jody Lu landd. (Lindsay August-Salazar and Devin Kenny)

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JESSICA COOK

Revolutionizing Perception: Arakawa and Gins

Artist-philosopher-architect duo Arakawa and Madeline Gins radically proclaim that their art empowers humans to defy death itself, boldly asserting, “We have decided 1

not to die.” Within their work and writings, Arakawa and Gins argue for a poststructuralist understanding of the volatility of meaning, asserting the inability of a single sign system to provide an individual with a way to gain meaning. They 2

contend that the average person mistakenly assumes that her physical act of 3

sensation, or “observation by the senses, actual seeing or hearing,” is synonymous with perceiving, or “the act of the mind by which it refers sensations to external 4

objects” (meaning interpretation of sensory information). This view, which is promoted by society itself, represses individuals by deterring them from questioning the fundamental knowledge they accept as fact. Furthermore, because the body and mind symbiotically influence each other, this habitual acceptance of knowledge concurrently destroys the plasticity of the physical brain, which eventually leads to death via aging.

Arakawa and Gins assert that the seemingly inevitable process of aging can be reversed by utilizing art as a means to make the viewer self-aware of her own physicality, thereby attuning her to the process of perception and eventually destroying her former passive acceptance of sensory information as meaningful. This revelation empowers her to create meaning by continually combining and reordering sensory input from a plethora of biological sign systems, the body’s sensory systems that become theoretical sign systems. The unlimited nature of these sign systems becomes physically embodied in the neuronal connections that are constantly generated and reordered in the brain, in response to the individual’s relentless examination of ideals.

Thus, the viewer can escape the supposed impossibility of acquiring meaning from a single sign system by using a boundless number of sign systems in constantly

3

shifting methods. Once she harnesses this power, the physical body itself becomes the entity at the center of the poststructuralist void—by utilizing a myriad of sign systems, the body becomes empowered to construct meaning. The body, as the creator of meaning, takes on the volatility previously ascribed to meaning: the aging process is no longer inevitable, but is subject to the dictates of the body itself.

Arakawa and Gins contend that society’s endorsement of passive perception, in which individuals unconditionally accept information, dupes people into believing that the bodily acts of sensing and perceiving are identical. This passive perception functions as a Marxian ideology, repressing the masses by propagating the notion that the

1 Arakawa and Madeline Gins, comp. Michael Govan.

Reversible Destiny: We Have Decided Not to Die. (New York, N.Y.: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1997).

4 “perception, n.”. OED Online.

December 2012. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/ Entry/140560?redirectedFrom=perc eption (accessed March 04, 2013).

2 In this essay, I will use gendered female pronouns to refer to the viewer, to keep with the original intent of Arakawa and Gins, who use feminine pronouns in their writings.

3 “sensation, n.”. OED Online.

December 2012. Oxford University Press. http://www. oed.com/view/Entry/175940 ?redirectedFrom=sensation (accessed March 04, 2013).

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information people gain from their senses can bring them meaning. According to Arakawa and Gins, this attitude of unquestioning acceptance of sensory perception translates into a lifelong inflexibility of mind. Because people unquestioningly accept information exactly as their senses perceive it, without accounting for the mind’s interpretational acts, they wrongly believe that they see the world exactly as it is.

The subject’s newly transpired awareness of the existence of her body’s intrapersonal information exchange mechanisms leads her to realize that information morphs as it is transferred. The entirety of Arakawa and Gins’ works resist the oppressive nature of passive perception, from the earlier panels in The Mechanism of Meaning, to later three-dimensional architectural structures such as Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa).

Furthermore, Arakawa and Gins maintain that the information attained via perception does not contain inherent meaning, as meaning is essentially volatile in nature and cannot be found through any single sign system, including static sensory systems that inform human perception. Because meaning does not intrinsically exist within any entity or structure, it cannot be found at a specific locus. It is not that meaning does not exist; rather, meaning exists but cannot be absolutely known because of 6

its constantly shifting nature. More specifically, because a structure can never be closed, a specific structure, such as an individual bodily sensory system, is not a viable option by which to gain meaning. The fact that individuals think information that is always sensed and then perceived in the same manner can lead them to meaning does not make this situation achievable. Thus, the culturally promoted assumption that sensation and perception are synonymous processes by which individuals gain meaning leads people to incorrectly believe they have already found the means by which meaning can be gained, when in reality they have been duped by ideology.

Moreover, Arakawa and Gins argue that this lack of motivation to question the means by which information is gained directly controls the physical aging of the body.

Refuting Cartesian dualism, which suggests that mind and body are two separate entities, they contend that mind is not simply embodied in a physical entity, but that the two are inextricably linked: the physical actions of the body are governed by and 7

yet influence the intellectual thoughts of the mind. This partnership is most clearly exemplified in the intertwined nature of physiological feedback mechanisms in the body. In response to an environmental stimulus, a peripheral receptor in a muscle sends a signal to an afferent sensory neuron (a brain cell that takes information from

6 Mitchem Huehls, “Poststructuralism,” English 121: Critical Theory and Aesthetics (class lecture, UCLA, Jan. 17, 2013).

7 Howard Robinson, “Dualism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (Winter 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), last modified Nov. 2011, http://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/win2012/entries/ dualism/ (accessed March 04, 2013).

5 For more information on Marx’s conception of ideology, see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, German Ideology (New York: Prometheus Books, 1976). For Karl Marx, ideology is composed of the “ruling ideas”, or the “ideal expression of the dominant material relationships” which collectively oppress the masses by obscuring the truth of their material conditions.

the body periphery and sends it to the central nervous system). This afferent neuron synapses with an interneuron (a cell within the central nervous system), where the brain integrates the raw data from the peripheral receptor cell and decides upon a course of action. This interneuron then sends a command to an efferent motor neuron (a cell that carries information from the central nervous system back to the target organ), which tells the muscle to move in a specific way, in response to the original stimuli. Crucial to this process is the physiological concept of integration, in which multiple types of sensory information (consisting of conscious information, such as smells, sounds, or hormones, and unconscious information, such as blood pressure or temperature readings) are processed to produce outputs (which include both voluntary commands to skeletal muscle and autonomic commands that control factors such as heart rate and sweating).

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Clearly, humans do not function solely according to a “mind over matter” philosophy, but instead exist in a situation in which the body holds a symbiotic relationship with the mind. The body’s functions are controlled to an extent by the conscious workings of the mind, but the body also sends vital information back to the brain, which modifies the brain’s instructions. Recognizing the high degree of interconnectedness that sustains this partnership, Arakawa and Gins argue that intellectual inflexibility, as shown by a refusal to recognize or question the body’s integration process, translates into physical stiffness and deterioration of neural tissue itself. By remaining completely dependent on a passively learned, static integrative pathway, individuals literally entrench certain neural pathways into the physical tissue. Eventually, they become so mired within these existing conduits that they completely lose the ability to forge new paths. By unquestioningly adhering to a passive intellectual practice, individuals effectively constrain themselves to a set amount of neural pathways and allow those areas previously uncultivated to remain fallow. Through a continuous act of passive perception, individuals thereby become complicit in the process of physical aging.

However, the duo contend that art can be utilized to make an individual aware of the physicality of her own body and thus of the complex integration processes behind perception. In doing so, art has the potential to overturn the viewer’s existing methods of thought, setting into motion new intellectual practices that can ultimately destroy the haze of ideology that separates individuals from true reality. Stripping art of its 9

Benjaminian aura, Arakawa and Gins assert that once the aesthetic considerations of art are disregarded, art can be utilized to stop death itself, creating a Reversible

8 David E. Sadava, “The Nervous System.” in Life: The Science of Biology, 9th ed, (Sunderland, MA.: Sinauer Associates, 2011), Fig. 47.1.

9 Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), German literary theorist and philosopher who suggested that art, once separated from its “aura,” has the potential to be appropriated for political ends. Benjamin conceives of aura as that entity intrinsic to an artwork which stems from its uniqueness and singularity, and is fundamentally connected to ritual, which is “the location of its original use value.” For more information, see Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).

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Destiny for all who become enlightened through it. Because their art is not produced so that viewers can appreciate the aesthetic beauty contained within it, the works themselves become highly interventional, heightening the viewer’s self-awareness of her own physicality to alert her to the means by which sensory information is compressed to form a single, homogenous view of the world. These works function in the same manner as Arakawa’s early non-collaborative paintings, which “do not exist for the purpose of stimulating purely plastic sensations or of expressing emotion” but instead “function as reflectors: they direct the complex, mysterious act of perception— the process of making sense of our sense impressions, back onto itself.”

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This

fundamental distinction in the function of Arakawa and Gins’ art forces the viewer to abandon her passive acceptance of the work as an object with an absolute degree of inherent beauty. Instead, the work’s importance lies in its ability to catalyze the viewer’s awareness of the process of physiological integration. By inviting the viewer to remotely perceive her own process of perception, the work becomes an exercise rather than an artistic commodity. The work is not consumed by the viewer, but rather becomes a medium by which the viewer frees herself from the ideology of passive perception. In making the viewer aware of the disconnect between sensation and perception, art becomes the libratory catalyst by which the viewer realizes that socially constructed systems cannot be used to gain meaning.

Following this revelation, the viewer can begin a process of reconfiguring the “mind-brain,” or “cognitive apparatus,” with the ultimate goal of discovering “meaning as invention through self-invention.”

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Arakawa and Gins’ paintings galvanize this process by urging the

viewer to become self-aware of the ways in which her body responds to different forms of stimuli. Their works function as “exercises,” which “invite us to split, disjoin, or iterate meanings and thereby to open up new possibilities of awareness.”

12

In their seminal

work The Mechanism of Meaning, sixteen panels form a “series of arguments”

13

whose objectives hierarchically build. While the first pieces attempt to “neutralize accepted or received modes of interaction with the world,” thereby merely displaying the existence of the ideological forces at work, subsequent pieces “invite conceptual and perceptual reconfiguration.”

14

These later pieces become tangible aides-de-camp,

prompting the viewer to actively construct new integration pathways.

For example, one panel orders the reader to “SAY one THINK two,” that is, “of course, impossible.”

16

15

a command

While an individual accomplishes a version of this

sentiment when she knowingly lies, here “it is impossible to follow a command to do

11 F. L. Rush, “To Think, To Invent, To Be Inverted,” in Reversible Destiny: We Have Decided Not to Die, comp. Michael Govan (New York, N.Y.: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1997), 45–47.

10 Charles W. Haxthausen, “The Road to Critical Resemblances Houses,” in 12 Ibid., 49.

Reversible Destiny: We Have 14 Ibid., 47. Decided Not to Die, comp.

13 Ibid., 45.

Michael Govan (New York, 15 Arakawa and Madeline Gins, N.Y.: Guggenheim Museum The Mechanism of Meaning, Publications, 1997), 28.

7. Splitting of Meaning (panel 3), 1971, Reversible Destiny: We Have Decided Not to Die, comp.

Michael Govan (New York, 16 F. L. Rush, “To Think, To Invent, N.Y.: Guggenheim Museum To Be Inverted,” 49.

Publications, 1997). 49.

both at the same time.” to ‘do’ the exercise,”

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17

Thus, “cognitive dissonance [is] created by the attempt

and therefore the “exercise is completed . . . in the experience

of the distension of meaning that following the instructions brings upon us.”

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While the exercise is impossible in the sense that the tasks asked of the viewer cannot be physically accomplished, it becomes achievable when the true objective is discovered: the tasks are not meant to be performed but are instead prompts to guide the viewer’s foray into perceptual awareness. The word “experience” becomes key—the work itself is merely the tangible catalyst for the viewer’s ensuing intellectual transformation. By ordering an action that distinguishes the brain’s command from the body’s physical action, Arakawa and Gins consciously craft procedural discrepancies, and “as a result of the ensuing tension [the viewers] gain a heightened awareness of [their] own bodies, of [their bodies] as the locus of perception” itself.

20

This dissimilarity becomes the essential factor that transforms

the work from an object into an active mechanism (specifically, into a “mechanism of meaning,” as the title of the series suggests) that allows the viewer to ultimately recognize the repression of the ideological forces at work.

Arakawa and Gins refer to this procedure of splitting sensation and passive perception as “cleaving,” using the word in its auto-antonym sense, defining “cleave” as “to separate or sever by dividing or splitting”

21

and “to adhere or cling to.”

22

By utilizing paradoxical definitions of the word, Arakawa and Gins refer to the two-fold process of reconfiguring the mind-brain, by which the individual actively rejects established conduits of perception, allowing her to forge new integrative pathways.

23

Here, the entity being cleaved is “the blank,” which is “that which

precedes and underlies all thought, action and perception,” thereby becoming “that

7

which precedes and energizes signification, which is formed out of blank and thereby differentiates blank as blank by leaving it blank.”

24

The existence of the blank as

the entity preceding yet informing the division of structures becomes the necessary link between the absence at the center of the poststructuralist void and the body’s ability to create meaning when it becomes located at that center. The individual’s experience of cleaving the blank allows her to become “the observer of her own observing, the percipient of her own perceiving.”

25

This role switch is made possible

by the individual’s cleaving of the blank into sign systems while concurrently leaving it blank. The blank cannot be explained by these newly constructed sign systems, however, because the blank precedes the generation of those structures, and thus does not fit neatly in a single designation.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

24 Ibid., 26.

21 “cleave, v.1”. OED Online. December 2012. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entr y/34105?rskey=8mxlhp&result=3 (accessed March 05, 2013).

23 Haxthausen, “The Road to Critical Resemblances Houses,” 23.

19 Ibid.

20 Haxthausen, “The Road to Critical Resemblances Houses,” 20.

22 “cleave, v.2”. OED Online. December 2012. Oxford University Press. http:// www.oed.com/view/Entry/34106?rske y=8mxlhp&result=4&isAdvanced=false 25 Ibid. (accessed March 05, 2013).

However, when an observer performs this cleaving action, she comes into contact with the blank itself, and thus her act of severing the blank into sign systems while also adhering it together by leaving it blank becomes an act by which she creates meaning.

This cleaving allows the viewer to generate a multiplicity of new sign systems by which to view the world, which directly correlates with the emergence of new physical integrative pathways in the brain. Because there is now not one single pathway by which the process of integration must occur, the viewer gains the mental flexibility to construct an infinite number of pathways, continuously shaping and reshaping these conduits in innovative ways. The individual’s act of perception becomes constituted by a plurality of ever-changing information conduits, rather than a single view characterized by the combination of sensory information in a conventional manner.

By going beyond static, singular sign systems and interacting directly with the blank, the individual gains the ability to create meaning by constantly reconfiguring a plethora of flexible neural integrative pathways.

The architectural work of Arakawa and Gins moves beyond the goals of their paintings, immersing the participant and urging her to constantly generate new perceptive pathways in order to maximize mental, and therefore physical, plasticity. By concurrently activating a number of sensory systems, their architectural structures further the goals of The Mechanism of Meaning, attempting to make the viewer aware of the multitude of integrative pathways that result from the interconnections between sensory systems, as well as those that occur when any single system is activated.

Their architecture attempts to achieve these ends by “combining the modes of sensing”—an aim more easily achieved in a three-dimensional medium.

26

Bioscleave

House (Lifespan Extending Villa) in East Hampton, New York, is designed to concurrently activate multiple senses and constantly shift the body’s equilibrium, facilitating continuous reorganization of the mind-brain. The name of the house, “Bioscleave,” makes these aims explicit: “bios” is a “growth-promoting substance,”

27

while “cleave” is used here in both previously described manners. The physical house itself is designed to promote the individual’s cleaving of the blank, and ultimately to empower the individual to extend her own life. This incredible impact of the architecture itself completely shifts the idea of a house from that of a simple dwelling to an entity firmly connected to human destiny. The structure “does not house the

26

27 “bios, n.”. OED Online. December 2012. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/ Entry/19250?redirectedFrom=bios (accessed March 05, 2013).

Ibid., 29.

embodied individual, nor does it house the individual’s body.”

28

Rather, through the

body’s interactions with the space, “bodily movement itself provides the possibility of reversible destiny.”

29

The interactions between the individual and the architecture

become paramount to her ability to gain full control over her own mental plasticity and physical age.

Arakawa and Gins argue that these relations create a hybrid entity known as an “architectural body,” which they define as “the body inextricably linked with architectural surrounds that are activated by it and that activate it.”

30

The interactions

between the body proper and the architecture surrounding it are identified as a series of “landing sites,” or “any discerning that is to any degree locatable.”

31

Here, “any

discerning” refers to any act of sensation that the human body performs in relation to the external world. Examples would include “direct visual, tactile, aural, olfactory, kinesthetic, and proprioception” sensory feedback.

32

These acts of sensation, when

geographically situated (“locatable”), become landing sites, as places in which the human interacts with a specific environment.

Arakawa and Gins assert that for the architectural body to create meaning, it must embrace the volatility of these newly created perceptive pathways. Their architecture is designed to constantly shift the equilibrium of the landing sites, forcing the architectural body to remain flexible in order to perceive the environment. In Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa), for example, “bumpy flooring rises . . . in undulating waves”

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and “threatens to send the un-sure-footed hurtling into the sunken kitchen at

the center of the house.”

34

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The instability of the flooring destroys the participant’s ability

to perfunctorily walk from one room to another: Arakawa and Gins admit “it could take several hours to go from the living room to the kitchen.”

35

Because the treacherous

nature of the floor demands absolute attention from the participant, the way in which the body interacts with the ground as a landing space becomes revolutionized. The participant’s habit of passively wandering from one room to another during the course of

29 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

31 Haxthausen, “The Road to Critical Resemblances Houses,” 29.

33 Molly Edmonds, “How the Bioscleave House Works.” HowStuffWorks. http://home.howstuffworks.com/ bioscleave-house.htm (accessed March 5, 2013).

34 Fred Bernstein, “A House Not for Mere Mortals,” New York Times, April 3, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008104/03/ garden/03destiny.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (accessed March 5, 2013).

28 Andrew Benjamin, “Judging Landing Sites,” in Reversible Destiny: We Have Decided Not to Die, comp. Michael Govan (New York, N.Y.: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1997), 142.

30 Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Architectural Surround/Ubiquitous Site Study, 1985-97, Reversible Destiny: We Have Decided Not to Die, comp. Michael Govan (New York, N.Y.: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1997) 169.

35 Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Proposal Board for Critical Resemblances House, 1985, Reversible Destiny: We Have Decided Not to Die, comp. Michael Govan (New York, N.Y.: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1997) 258.

the day must be succeeded by a constant, highly active mental examination of the space the body wishes to interact with. Arakawa and Gins perform the same stimulation tactics in the visual and tactile systems as well; the house is painted with roughly forty different shades of color, “with names like pink popsicle, tricycle red and traffic light green,”

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while “oddly angled light switches and outlets” add even more elements of distortion.

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Windows are placed at varying heights, combating any attempts by the participant to gain steady equilibrium by affixing on the horizon.

All of these activations work together, amplifying the bodily self-awareness that results from the individual’s critical examination of the mechanisms of a single perceptive pathway. The interactions of integration between separate systems exponentially compound, thwarting the participant’s attempts to passively perceive the space by immersing her in an environment geared toward revelation. By changing the nature of the interactions between the environment and the individual via architectural intervention, Arakawa and Gins force the participant to dismantle preconceived notions of how the body interacts with architectural space and more aptly galvanize the process of creating constantly shifting conduits of perception.

As this environment challenges the architectural body, causing it to constantly form new landing sites in reaction to the shifting requirements of the space, Arakawa and Gins argue that physical body has the potential to become radically transformed.

They contend that continuous mental transformation, caused by frequent perceptional pathway shifts, rejuvenates the body proper, allowing it to literally reverse, not simply slow down, the aging process. Thus, the symbiotic relationship between the body and mind becomes paramount to human destiny: the architectural body’s interactions determine the mental plasticity of the brain, and this flexibility of ideas translates to enhanced agility in the physical tissue. Through interactions with the constantly shifting equilibrium of the architectural body, individuals gain the ability to create their own destinies. At the hands of reversible destiny architecture, death itself, the fundamental restrictor of human choice, is obliterated, and the individual becomes the ultimate creator of her own mental and physical human experience.

Arakawa and Gins’ works over the course of their careers exist sequentially; their architectural works function as more involved modifications of their earlier paintings and texts. Pieces such as The Mechanism of Meaning act primarily to make the viewer

36 Edmonds, HowStuffWorks.

37 Bernstein, “A House Not for Mere Mortals.”

aware of the difference between sensation and perception, alerting her to the dangers of ideological passive perception. In doing so, these paintings are important not for their tangible aesthetics, but for their ability to catalyze the viewer’s act of cleaving the blank. By analyzing the difference between sensed information and perceived information, the viewer can move beyond any single sign system (including those socially prescribed to her) and create meaning through her interactions with the blank.

The individual’s interaction with the blank situates her at the center of the poststructuralist void, allowing her to create meaning through her intentional variance of perceptive pathways. This intellectual flexibility causes greater physical plasticity of the individual’s neural tissue, as exemplified by her novel ability continually forge new integrative pathways. The resulting bodily and intellectual flexibility ultimately allows an individual to determine her destiny; aging becomes a personal choice, dependent only on the individual’s extent of revelation and degree of interactions with the blank.

Later works such as Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa) more forcefully further this goal by creating a fully encompassing architectural environment that concurrently activates multiple sensory systems, allowing the viewer to interact more fully with the blank by constantly experiencing new architectural body interactions with volatile landing sites. Arakawa and Gins revolutionize the function of art, transforming it from a passive object of perception to a mechanism that galvanizes individuals to recognize the reversibility of their destinies and ultimately to defeat death itself.

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Jessica Cook is a senior at UCLA. She is currently pursuing a BS in physiological sciences and integrative biology, as well as a BA in English. Jessica is an editor for GRAPHITE, as well as a contributor to the publication’s blog. In addition, she is a Student Educator at the Hammer Museum, where she researches exhibitions and gives tours to patrons. She would like to thank all of the journal’s readers for their support and hopes that they enjoy this year’s issue.

Revolutionizing Perception: Arakawa and Gins

Photographs by Jake Shillan.

Photographs by Jake Shillan.

LAUREN STEINBERG

On Playing And Parking

Supervision comes to mind when I consider the bleak fantasyland that artist Sam Shoemaker (CalArts, 2014) exhibited at the Institute last spring. Aerial images and children’s playgrounds are the points of departure for Shoemaker and my vision is heightened when the scenes pointed to in the surveillance shots are re-imagined in the space where I am standing. There is an uneasy duality at play: watching and being watched.

Consider the playground, that idyllic setting for children to move about freely and develop social skills on their own terms. Glorified hamster cages! Then again, playgrounds, with their geometric climbers and painted hopscotch patterns, are a version of the super-structured organization of parking lots with their predetermination of bodies in space. This overt tension between utopian and utilitarian is the crux of Shoemaker’s exhibition wherein one body of work rigorously reduces the playground the moment a second body of work expands it.

Shoemaker’s exhibition opens with a hanging clipboard, displaying a stack of Google Earth images. I flipped through these documents as if I were privy to some government X-file. Aerial surveillance shots have a way of manifesting this sort of sensation, a feeling augmented in light of tragic school shootings in the United States.

Shoemaker’s surveillance images reveal school playgrounds constructed over what were once parking lots, a convenient albeit oppressive utilization of outdoor parking lots as site for child’s play.

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Tacked up around the perimeter of the room are line drawings that flatten the bird’seye views of parking lot and playground features into geometric abstractions. The

images are lightly rendered on cream-colored construction paper and colored-in with

white pencil. The materials may be childish, but the results are ultra-exact: an oblique line within a perfect circle within a perfect rectangle, each line so light and precise it almost disappears. Anxiety and space division become entangled and persist in these controlled architectural abstractions. But when parking lot features are reduced to forms on paper, they become something else too. They are abstract designs calling to mind Piet Mondrian’s Composition paintings circa 1940. Mondrian sought to express utopian ideals of harmony and order by way of reduction to the essentials of form and color. His iconic grid-based paintings were plans for a more perfect society.

1

If Shoemaker’s drawings erase traces of the playground, his sculptures re-create it. His combination of ready-made and handmade objects articulate playground architecture

1

Hilton Kramer, “Abstraction and Utopia,” The New Criterion 16, Sept. 1997, http://www.newcriterion.com/articles. cfm/Abstraction---utopia-3288.

as geometrical forms as much as they refer to a relationship with the human body.

I imagine myself inside the tarnished plastic bubble in the corner of the gallery. The artist has told me that it is a discarded McDonald’s PlayPlace. The roughly ‘3 by 3’ yellow crawlspace is complete with a viewing window; a factory-made tube for a child playing hide and seek or for my adult body to fold into and peer out.

A full-size steel monkey bars forms an arch near the back wall of the gallery. Its imperfect, varied surface is a reminder that it has been welded by the artist. It is a beautiful and severe-looking thing. Walking around the arch I can admire its cold skeletal spine, but under the gallery’s white walls, low ceiling, and sterile lighting, I cannot fulfill its destiny to be climbed upon. I am stuck analyzing the conditions for the bars existence.

The Google Earth images point me to a situation in which playgrounds, urban design, and surveillance coalesce. Yet, the work stemming from these images lingers as two separate bodies of work on two separate trajectories. One re-creates playground architecture; the other reduces urban design. There is a deadpan quality about Shoemaker’s sculptures. His drawings are as light as air. And so, perhaps as one comprehensive body of work, the unique effect of each is muddied or simply subdued.

Then again, this clashing mirrors the tension that the maps reveal.

In 2008 artist Peter Friedl produced a book called Playgrounds, a photo essay of public playgrounds around the world, which he produced and catalogued over a ten2

year period. I stumbled on the mammoth of a book a few years ago as a shopkeeper at an art and architecture bookstore in Los Angeles. I kept it on display at the store for months at a time, flipping through it, indulging in the formal composition of each detailed portrait. It was an uneasy intrigue complicated, of course, by the possibility of the images’ perverse subtext. I found it strange that a grown man would devote himself so wholeheartedly to an anthropological pursuit of this sort. Freud might 3

approach the photographs with ideas of fetishism. There is a parallel in which Friedl and Shoemaker utilize playground sites as a model, incorporating histories of urban planning, architecture, and design.

In Playgrounds, Friedl photographs and archives these specialized areas and presents them as catalog (or gallery exhibition). Shoemaker’s recontextualization is more nebulous, taking the form of an installation in which each piece informs the next,

2

Peter Friedl, Playgrounds (Göttingen: Steidl, 2008), 1–256.

3

Tim Dant, “Fetishism and the Social Value of Objects,” Sociological Review 44, no. 3, August 1996, 495–519, http://eprints.lancs. ac.uk/33407/1/Fetishism_eprint.pdf.

ultimately transforming the perception of the gallery space itself. The gallery in this case, Stevenson Blanche Gallery, lends itself to a site-specific relationship with the work. An interior office foyer on the CalArts campus, Stevenson Blanche Gallery as makeshift exhibition space is sterilely lit, linoleum floored, and lined with five office doors. As a gallery it certainly drags around its own institutional context. Whether an intentional choice by Shoemaker or simply the sole available exhibition space (as is often the case), Shoemaker’s suggestion of childhood recreation in such a setting is uncomfortable and therefore appropriate within the context of his investigation.

Shoemaker shared fragments of his research-based process with me over coffee breaks on campus and more recently via email between Los Angeles and Glasgow (where he is studying for the spring semester), citing a particular post–World War II lot of architects, artists, urban planners, and child psychologists as his influences.

High on his list is Aldo Van Eyck, the Dutch architect responsible for the design of hundreds of playgrounds in and around Amsterdam in the post-war era. Van Eyck’s structuralist projects involved a holistic form of urban planning, one that incorporated 4

the broad needs of the community into each site. His architecture resisted overcomplicated structures and avoided artificial boundaries between playground and city, aiming to provide children with a more open play experience. Grainy black and white documentary photographs of Van Eyck’s works are nostalgic, often composed with energetic children playing on austere metal and concrete forms that have been weaved into the urban landscape. The forms on his playgrounds readily double as

15

minimal sculpture. This possibility of Van Eyck’s architecture as sculpture is realized with Shoemaker’s streamline monkey bars in the gallery.

Shoemaker also pointed me to a fitting introduction by cultural theorist Norman 5

Klein in Friedl’s retrospective catalog. Playgrounds were erected to promote order, to condemn a Lord of the Flies style of anarchy. Shoemaker’s appropriation of the prefabricated fast food play piece is like an unfolding of Klein’s sentiment “ . . . the feeling in playgrounds was never all that natural, or free. More likely, it was savagely unnatural.”

6

Ideas and inquiries synthesize in Shoemaker’s work, forming an exhibition that moves fluidly in modes of critique and possibilities of narrative. His blueprint-like drawings and use of the ready-made frames the installation as a stage in which the function of familiar forms inches toward a revelation of their hidden psychology. The gallery

4

5 6

Ibid., 288.

Merijn Oudenampsen, “Aldo Van Eyck and the City as Playground,” Flexmens. org, October 10, 2009, http://www. flexmens.org/drupal/?q=Aldo_van_Eyck_ and_the_City_as_Playground.

Norman M. Klein, “Grounding Play: Imaginary Children in an Era of Global Paranoia,” Viralnet.net, originally in Peter Friedl: Work 1964–2006 (Barcelona: Actar / Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2007) http://viralnet.net/2006/2006_klein.html.

is a wordless space, an exhibition without a name, individual work titles or written didactics to inform them. Rather, Shoemaker’s scripting is a make-believe venture set around objects and illustrations and imposed on his visitors. Returning to Norman Klein’s anxiety: “Play itself has become a scripted experience, where one is provided the illusion of free will, of being unsupervised. It has always been a kind of theater.

Now it is particularly the artifice more than the natural—how artfully it entertains us (or should I say manipulates us?) . . . Cybernetic, ergonomic, structured play feels homey. Thus we become tourists at home, even in our own bodies.”

7

In Shoemaker’s exhibition the gallery emerges as a playground suggesting possibilities of freedom within a controlled structure. I am highly aware of my body in this space of indetermination and play.

Sam Shoemaker, Untitled (jungle gym) and Untitled (drawings), 2012. Installation view, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia.

7

Lauren Steinberg was born in Los Angeles, where she is now pursuing an MFA in art from California Institute of the Arts. Last fall she cofounded Terrible Times, an exhibition in the Angeles National Forest that will live on as a series of annual happenings.

Ibid.

Chris Engman Equivalence 2009 48 x 38 in.

Pigment print

Chris Engman Dust to Dust 2010 80 x 33 in.

Pigment print

Chris Engman Senescence 2010 80 x 33 in.

Pigment print

Erin Morrison Untitled (Marks the Spot) 2012 36 x 48 in.

Flashe, acrylic polymer, oil and ink on canvas over panel

Erin Morrison Untitled (Adagietto) 2012 36 x 48 in.

Flashe, acrylic polymer, oil and ink on canvas over panel

Peter Linden Installation view image

Peter Linden Door Floor 2012 Door stopper, oak, dry wall

Peter Linden Moving Still 2012 96 x 45 x 7 in.

Wood, masonite, paint

Peter Linden No Adhesive 2012 7 x 2 in.

Magnet, steel fork

17

BRITTANY NEWELL

PART I of The Privatized Rebel— An Environment of Surrender: Laying Bare the Bonds of Western Modernity

We are a society fantastically duped.

For all of Western Civilization’s aggrandized claims of democracy, the truth is that today and for the past fifty years, we have lived with invisible bonds affecting not outwardly the body but incessantly the eye, and from the eye, the mind. The subjugating forces that act on the individual are subtle and interconnected. Today’s dilemma lies within the individual, and the individual lies within his own isolated sphere, as if in a glass box that allows for the steady influx of images, noise, and persuasions all designed to appeal to his nascent sense of “rightness.” Yet he is blocked off from the warmth so eloquently promised by this buzzing deluge and left alienated, bored, disconnected, apathetic, lonesome, addicted, and/or plagued by the sense that there is “something missing.” Where do these common symptoms link, and how exactly is it that they dominate us? This is the tortuous inquiry that falls to the 1

rebel, or as Albert Camus would put it, the cultural guide: the dissenter who breaks away from “the system” in the name of authenticity and passion, and who reveals the true perverted nature of everyday life by pointedly defying it. The forces that the contemporary rebel, must contend with as well as every person in ownership of a computer or otherwise mowing his or her neat slice of the grid, can be boiled down to four overarching and interrelated patterns.

The first theme is the prevalence of virtual realities, initially technological but eventually personal, while the second is the capital-based social phenomenon known as the spectacle. First defined by Parisian insurrectionist and philosopher Guy

19

Debord, the spectacle is that glittering shape-shifter by which all images are judged and social roles disseminated with inhuman precision, whose sole goal is to provoke the individual into such a state of anxiety that he chooses to consign himself to the

gregarious machine. The humanized fusion of the two aforementioned causes results in the third force, the “psychic distance” or imperceptible gulf between our true selves and the diluted, malleable “semi-selves” we project into the physical world of hype and action. This breach results in an emotional delay as information struggles to worm past the projection and into the germ of selfhood, where intrapersonal knowledge blooms and interpersonal connections take root. Finally, in our stilted state of selfhood we must deal with the convoluted handling of sex in contemporary culture, as exemplified by the jubilant contradiction between the societal spectacle’s no-holds-barred exploitation of sex and the lingering taboo that freezes off (and furtively dramatizes) anything trademarked as “sacred.” In short, the rebel must retaliate against virtual

1

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967).

realities, against society’s imagistic and capitalistic spectacle. He experiences an unshakable sense of alienation, a psychic distance due to the contradictory ways in which we are expected to perceive and enact intimacy. In this essay I will be examining the first three forces and the ways they engage to form and perpetuate the fourth bond of sexual detachment and crossed signals. We are a society constantly on display, proclaiming individualism and limitlessness—yet we seem to continually come away from this grand show with empty hands, justifying them as better than dirty ones.

I. DUNGEONS, DRAGONS & DOMAINS: A SCORE FOR VIRTUAL REALITY

The first force that slyly restricts us, especially in the information age, is the technological abundance of virtual realities that breed within us distaste for the “real” world. The more intricate the virtual reality, the more we tend to lean in favor of a faux experience that brilliantly mirrors the static and therefore controllable aspects of actual life.

“On the computer, one can create a self-contained fantasy world of exact logic, predictable parameters, and selected data points . . . this world laps over into one of the computer’s most impressive technical capacities: simulation. The graphic precision and commanding clarity with which a simulation unfolds on the video screen may lead to a serious confusion . . . the model—a neat, predictable private universe—may begin to look like a better ‘reality.’ . . . it may tempt its user’s attention away from the messy, frustrating angularities of imperfect daily life.”

2

The virtual landscape that began as the reflection of reality decomposes until it bears no relation to any reality at all, and thus becomes a pure substitute for its seed, a simulation so comprehensive and seductive that it usurps a life of its own from both 3

the factual reality and the unsuspecting viewer. The painstakingly produced virtual reality of computers and other imagistic technologies like TVs and iPhones weakens our ability to make decisions based solely on introspection or lived experience, as well as our ability to process complex human emotions in the outside world of our design.

In this way, technology stunts the development of a tough skin, which is a fitting metaphor for the sedentary out-of-body lifestyle the techie age has birthed: we are literally isolated from the material world and dependent upon visual or audio symbols for triggers. We’ve learned the suggestiveness of a semicolon winky-face. Difficult confessions are relayed via heartfelt texts or links to applicable YouTube videos.

2

Theodore Roszak, “The Cult of Information,” Robert Boyers, “The Consciousness Industry,” Salmagundi, no. 118/119 (SpringSummer 1998): 99–105.

3

Mark Dery, “Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs,” Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, 1993.

Online pornography has briefed us in the sleek, aggressive world beneath those briefs, while we absorb the tragicomedy of relationships from the endless archives of TV. We know instantly that the spinning beach ball means impatience, frustration, panic, trouble. In short, a hyper-reality has become our preferred mode of contact and expression.

4

There are three stages by which a child becomes habituated to this form of technological expression. The first is a philosophical stage, in which the computer serves as a mental playground, equally as new, compelling, and dispensable as a book or friend at that excitable age. The second stage is that of competition, in which 5

“mastery takes on a privileged role and . . . becomes key to autonomy.” Children gravitate toward the areas in which they can excel—in life as well as in the seemingly endless facets of the Internet. This steady progression toward mastery transforms the computer, that chosen arena of expression, into a safe respite. According to the extensive research of the Digital Youth Project, “youth engage in peer-based, selfdirected learning online. In both friendship-driven and interest-driven online activity, youth create and navigate new forms of expression and rules for social behavior.”

6

In a healthy society, the child/pre-teen would feel contented with his or her mastery of the computer’s social/educational aspects and move on, or rather, accept their utility and refer to them only in context (i.e. texting when the need to communicate a thought arises, uploading photos to Facebook after an important and memorable event).

21

The third stage is thus an exaggeration of the second: it is the point in which the

“safe space” augments into a universe in which you, as expert, become the imaginary monarch. But the monarch is dependent on his kingdom for sheer existence and

affirmation of his title. This virtual reality thus creates a planned and predicted identity with the delete key always at hand, alongside a second-rate world in which actions or even interactions are relayed via symbols, pictures, and clicks. In this state of overcontrol, natural growth is forfeited. For the first time in the well-documented history of adolescence, the formation of self need not be a hands-on experience confined to solitude. The addiction to a virtual reality is indeed a solitary one, but the nicotine of the screen is to be found in the flashiness of this essential solitude. Like so many premature widows, youth are momentarily sated by the companionship of ghosts (avatars, online role-play, instant messages, fan fiction, talking ads, video diaries, identically candid Tumblrs, celebrity tabloids, multi-player games, and anonymous forums just to name a few of the chatty living-dead). Intimacy with other people is

4

5

Ibid., 3.

Sherry Turkle, “Life on The Screen,” in Robert Boyers, “The Consciousness Industry,” Salmagundi, no. 118/119 (Spring-Summer 1998, 99–105).

6

Mitzuko Ito and Heather Horst, Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from Digital Youth Project.

MacArthur Foundation. http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu.

7

viewed as unpredictable to the point of being intolerable. “The world of safe things becomes severely limited, because those things tend to be things and not people.”

8

In the real world, sex and intimacy are commonly known to be so thorny and intimidating because they lie, by existential definition, out of an individual’s control.

On the other hand, this input from an entirely separate person is what makes sex and relationships so enticing and, when seen through to the end, enriching. The anxious wondering and fine line of communication are an unavoidable first step toward intimacy. However, for emotionally stunted youth whose identities have been based exclusively around the symbols they’ve manipulated to a point of isolated supremacy, this initial stage is paralyzing and just plain unfathomable. The digital religion, that of simulation, knows no physical boundaries and has never been bound to the laws that intermittently seize and urge reality. There is no fine line: only a chasm between the pajama-clad body and the entirely virtual world of electric representation, only the difference between the limited now and the intangible “there” forever preserved by its lack of a concrete definition.

The twenty-first century identity is as spectral and transient as a profile picture; these traits seem beneficial when one is caught up in a virtual world where setting and morality are anything but fixed and fluidity of identity appears to be synonymous with open-mindedness. Should anything start to feel weird, however, as you peruse the seemingly endless labyrinths of online sex forums or engage in a philosophic battle in the comments section under a YouTube video, all it takes is one click and you’re safe and sound in the grassy valley of your desktop background. If any conversation should get awkward or sketchy, all you need to do is type “g2g” and, in fact, go nowhere, but rather adjust your gaze to a refreshed and vindicated window. Self-proclaimed risk on the Internet is nullified by the pivotal anonymity of even the most frank and colorful “Internet personality”: in being removed from your “god-given” body and expressing yourself in a suspension of real-time with all pauses, grimaces, lulls, and blips left unseen, you are detaching yourself from the knotty human experience in imperceptible, mounting intervals. This drawn-out departure, as you are unconsciously aware, can only land you in a negative of spontaneous, blunt, and volatile reality: into a streamlined, white-walled void. “Everywhere the fabricated, the inauthentic and the theatrical have gradually driven out the natural . . . until there is no distinction between real life and stagecraft. We can no longer do anything without wanting to see it immediately on video . . . there is never any longer an event or a person who acts

7

Turkle, “Life on The Screen,” 274.

8

Ibid.

9

for himself, in himself. Today the referent disappears.” In this way, the virtual reality made possible by modern technologies has given rise to a virtual reality of contact and action in the real, material world, as well as a dominion of symbols without which we feel naked or incomplete. The computer produces a preference for deflection, for the protective lapse in transit of emotions, ideas, and gestures from one person to another via some plastic, buzzing piece.

When the child finds the strength (or is forced by fed-up parents) to reengage with the world away from his or her imaginary realm, they encounter the same sort of stagecraft, this time not facilitated by a computer but rather via social roles propagated by the spectacle. The buyable and mass-produced sense of self in question is “an identity so fluid and multiple that it strains the limits of the notion.”

10

This leads

us to our second and third forces: social roles promulgated by the spectacle, and the persistent sense of alienation that they foster.

II. ABSURDITY AS COMMODITY: THE SPECTACLE AND THE GULF

The spectacle was first named and defined by philosopher and insurrectionist Guy Debord, born in Paris in 1931 and founder of Situationist International. In his groundbreaking manifesto, The Society of the Spectacle (1968), Debord asserts: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by image . . . It is the very heart of society’s real unreality . . . it is a negation of life that has invented a visual form for itself.”

11

23

This form can most

clearly be understood in the unshakable currency of social roles and never-ending

stream of consumer goods that stem from the religiosity of said roles. Skyscrapers, billboards, websites, slang terms, trends, newscasts, celebrities, chain stores,

artists, students, politicians, gurus, gangstas, hipsters, squares, queers, femmes, freaks; all spectacular manifestations of a grand capitalist scheme that pivots on the susceptibility of the dazed and mystified citizen to artificial personas taken on by both the animate and inanimate. “As the advanced economic sector which directly shapes a growing multitude of image-objects, the spectacle is the main production of presentday society.”

12

These well-assimilated and unnatural roles, when removed from human practice, are nothing more than goods with a guaranteed profit; their aims speak to the underdevelopment of a steadfast identity. As previously discussed, this

9

Dery, “Culture Jamming”, 5–6.

10 Ibid.

11

12

Ibid., 7.

Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 5–6.

underdevelopment has been worsened in today’s age by the advent of, popularity of, and dependence upon technology. When bought into, the spectacle alienates its victim from his/her soul, and thereafter fuels alienation of the person, then that person’s network of friends and employees, then society at large. “Social practice . . . is the real totality to which the spectacle is subordinate.”

13

The spectacle, which is pure

bluster with no lasting substance, thrives in an environment of unreality. “It is the sun that never sets on the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire globe, basking in the perpetual warmth of its own glory.”

14

The spectacle is a bodiless, ubiquitous

dictator, and we welcome its glitzy infiltration in a state of flaccid ambition. Too numb and too bored to know what we want due to the blitzkrieg of information and the aforementioned separation from self that this overload instills, we passively accept the mute tyranny of appearance. In a society overrun by advertisements, guilt trips, clichés, social conventions, gender roles, and collective expectations for which there is always something to be bought, “real life” and the spectacle become interchangeable, hence the distinction of the physical body, for which such poses and accommodations are possible, from the illusory soul with its own set of guidelines— which is to say, the eventual triumph of the visible.

There is a reason we are drawn to the spectacle. It is an obvious way of categorizing and simplifying the thorny, hazy world, of which more than half is invisible to us. It replaces the frustration, the not being able to know, with not caring enough to find out. “It is the opposite of dialogue”:it is clear-cut, specified, measured, blunt, and wondrously decisive.

15

However, in the philosophification of reality,

16

the spectacle

erases all certitude and relishes instead the mindless vacillation between authenticity and simulation, instinct and mimicry: it submits the passive player to an endless maze of worry and doubt but never suspicion, never allowing enough time or space for information to sink in past the stunned and replicable front and settle in the soul. Such is the all-consuming power of the spectacle: it becomes unseemly and even unholy to defy the spectacle’s fallacious dogma, deepening the entrapment of the individual within a game that appeals to the personal in order to score for and preserve the economic. McCarthyism, gay-bashing, and slut-shaming are all examples of the masses lashing out against any outlier that could potentially damage the cohesion of the spectacle or prompt the citizens to doubt the validity of their roles. The flow of the spectacular society pivots entirely on the congruity of our roles; these personas bred to buy in times of uncertainty, work only according to schedule, and aim their nightly prayers a little lower than the sky (how about at that bulky, dreamy Caucasian on

13

Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 6.

14 Ibid., 7.

15

Ibid.

16 Ibid.

a billboard or mega screen?). Under the spectacle’s reign, the goal of “being” degrades to “having” and then on to “appearing to have.”

17

When surfaces are all you are offered

and have come to expect, what depth remains to probe and contradict? Thus, the corrosive and fraudulent spectacle of society goes unacknowledged.

Quips cultural essayist Thomas Frank, “Everybody watches TV, but no one really likes it.”

18

And yet, the TV screen continues its informational reign unchallenged, popping

up in cars, elevators, cribs, and gas stations. There can be no denying that we instinctively feel guilty or disgusted at the thought of selling our tumultuous soul short and rotting before a screen hallowed since the moment of its inception, but even the youth, who openly and colorfully criticize the media, still feel unmotivated to change their ways, much less society’s. How can we all be so lethargic, and what’s more, transparent? In succumbing to any of the myriad forms of the spectacle, individual truths are scrapped in favor of “tangible figments which are the efficient motor of trancelike behavior.”

19

The trance thus becomes comforting, as it absolves all apparent

individual responsibility or choice with an avowal to the persona that best suits the vaguest sense of self. “This is the most fundamental of all contradictions of the mind industry: in order to obtain consent, you have to grant a choice, no matter how marginal and deceptive . . . whether we like it or not, it enlists our participation in the system as a whole.”

20

This fact denotes the basis of contemporary Western subjugation: the

non-physical bonds listed above entice us into accepting, inviting, and often embracing that which keeps us from being free. When looking at the nutritional information on a

25

packaged snack, we choose to believe in its vitamins and fiber rather than its chain of chemicals with no expiration date. It is remarkable how readily we forget that the one and only place in which we are truly free is in our mind.

For the spectacle, passivity is both the means and the end of social control. “The spectacle is the bad dream of modern society in chains, expressing nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep.”

21

The spectacle

of capitalist abundance tricks consumers into a bracketed democracy with a predetermined result. The false diversity offered by the copious shapes, patterns, and titles given to the latent spectacle “evolves into a contest among phantom qualities meant to elicit devotion to quantitative triviality.”

22

In selecting the role we are to

embody and direct our consumption towards, in gravitating toward our guide and all-purpose excuse, we come to defend this select manifestation of the spectacle as though it were our own creation. It is only when justifying the proponent and source

19 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle.

18 Boyers, “The Consciousness Industry.” Salmagundi, no. 118/119 (Spring-Summer 1998): 99–105.

20 Hans Magnus Enzenberger, “The Industrialization of the Mind,” in Robert Boyers, “The Consciousness Industry,” Salmagundi, no. 118/119 (SpringSummer 1998), 99–105 (my italics).

17

Ibid.

21

22 Ibid.

Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 8.

of our passivity that we display a lover-like aggression. It is at this stage of automatic deference that absurdity becomes a commodity: we cannot connect below the surface with other creatures due to a perpetual misalignment of intention and action (lacking that parallel backbone), but we can connect on the surface level with stuff, thus developing an affection for and history with inanimate objects. Think of the wannabe Sex Pistol with his mangy leather jacket, the fifties-era housewife with her lickety-split appliances, the portly executive with his/her Bluetooth, or the pubescent stud with his Old Spice. “Demoralized by their strangeness to themselves and by their lack of control over their relations with others,” Writer Harold Rosenbur said, “members of every class surrender themselves to artificially constructed mass egos that promise to restore their links with the past and future.”

23

Ever since the rise of the city and the tantalizing outflow of mass media that such a concentrated environment provides, so-called “small-town quirks” and the inevitable whimsy of the individual have diminished, or rather the tolerance of such quirkiness has declined in the face of the propagandized patriot and “ideal” persona of exemplary gender and status. In tight-knit nuclear communities that still retained ties to the earth and thus the undeniably physical world, the focus placed on an individual’s image, no matter how eccentric the person, was held in check by the smallness and transparency of any such “old-world” community where people knew each other, be it due to neighborly gossip or town-square interactions, and thus did not have to rely purely on image to stipulate titles or opinions. The modern metropolis in which capital industry thrives, on the other hand, deepens the aforementioned schism. The city, with all its hubbub and close quarters, is the absolute and symbol: a bustling abstraction freely promising speedy transportation, a pharmacy on every corner, a playground for the kids, dollar menus, irresistible thighs in just two weeks, the best man in the business, a night you won’t forget—all without the flattered and overstimulated citizen actually witnessing or taking part in the production of any of these goods. Attention-grabbing appearance trumps process in every sector of urban life, so it is only natural that this separation from a self-sufficient spark should seep into the most private of spheres.

“At this point [the spectacle’s] essential poverty, the natural outcome of the poverty of its production, stands revealed.”

24

Behind closed doors, the spectacle runs

dry, proven to be loyal only to the system rather than to the consumers. The daily manifestations of the spectacle are meant to dry up, so that they might be replaced with that sudden savage scorn for all past fads or patronizing nostalgia in the face of

23 Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).

24 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 20.

something better. This is because the spectacle, though dogmatic by design, cannot abide by a dogma of its own.

25

It is godless and therefore transient. It lies to gain

appeal and shortly thereafter exposes its vacuum, thus degrading its consumer to the extreme low of confusion and hopelessness. Betrayed by the initial spectacle, we cling desperately, like battered wives bounced between abusers, to the next equally ephemeral vow. Entertainment value aside, what we beg, first and foremost, from our spectacles is security. Urbanism has been described by Debord as “blackmail by utility” in that people are reluctant to retaliate against the stifling architecture and corrupt infrastructure of cities because they know they need a roof over their head and a functioning source of electricity. “The whole of urban planning can be understood as . . . the organization of participating in something in which it is impossible to partake.”

26

The fact of our loneliness and subjugation to unnamed forces demonstrates a unity, however perverse, among every member of the Western world, particularly those clumped together in big cities. So why is this unity almost never recognized and used to combat the dehumanization of the spectacle? It is because the alienation, so commonly complained of—but never traced back to its roots—results from our modern tendency to shun reality for detached stability and sacrifice soulful quality for sham.

In order to make change or rebel, you must first forge your own truths, as opposed to blindly accepting the snug and neat tenets of the already existing system—for how else can you be expected to understand yourself, your singular and perennial core? When you are not in touch with your core, there develops a psychic distance between your

27

actual self and the outside world. Real messages are transmitted toward each person as per routine, but instead of penetrating the unruly and eternally private soul, they hit instead the toned-down and buffed-up projection of that person’s most generic

self, thus creating an interval or gulf between the soul, in all its glittering potential for authenticity and originality, and the modern world with all its time-saving equations

and skin-tight social roles that all sensations are weakened by crossing. In this way, the digital generation has grown accustomed to being constantly bombarded with motion, color, and noise while simultaneously existing in a state of unutterable isolation. Says Debord: “The reigning economic system is founded on isolation; at the same time it is a circular process designed to produce isolation . . . the origin of the spectacle lies in the world’s loss of unity . . . the spectacle divides the world into two parts, one of which is held up as a self-representation and is superior to the world.”

27

This representation

is the holographic semi-self into which the gaudy data of the world are absorbed, and which bypasses the fine details (of a lingering look, of a dying star) altogether.

25 Ibid.

26 Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century.

27 Ibid.

The spectator’s alienation from and submission to the contemplated object (which is the outcome of his unthinking activity, i.e. his fair-weather identity) works like this: the more readily he recognizes his own needs in the images of need proposed by the dominant system, the less he understands his own existence and desires. The individual’s own gestures are no longer his own, but rather those of someone else who represents them to him. The spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is everywhere.

28

By quarantining the soul to the murkiest recesses of the body, one creates an artificial need and multiplies intrinsic want due to spiritual starvation. Capitalist techniques have snatched up a person’s one and only constant in life, that is, mental presence and spiritual essence, and now force the person to imitate the intangible by dressing and primping a projected image. The spectacle, being a short-lived facade dependent on a vicious cycle of disembodied longing, cannot recognize what the system did not create. Thus, the rebel accepts loneliness just as the stupefied citizen unconsciously signs off for it. The latter’s loneliness, when unpaid by installments of communication and affection, racks up a debt that eventually leads to this epidemic alienation, a foreclosure on the moment.

Celebrity culture serves as a prime example of the equivocal renditions of reality that lead to spiritual disassociation. Writes New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd: “The celebrity culture has become a mass psychosis. It has broken out of its former confines in the entertainment industry and overrun institutions of authority . . . All that the celebrity culture teaches is a counterfeit empathy which mistakes voyeurism for a genuine human identification. Living vicariously is not the same thing as living imaginatively . . . pornography is the natural conclusion of a culture of voyeurism.”

29

This disconnect from actually-lived reality defines our generational difficulties with being both truly intimate and spiritual: the holographic self wants only to imitate, not create; to reflect, not absorb.

This secret gulf even distances us from the present “now.” The axiom that one should carpe diem falls on ears conditioned by a lag in stimulation. We live in a constant limbo of desire: this want is sovereign and more eloquent than our instincts, as it is a pernicious product of the spectacular system and therefore obligated to no human limitations of time, conscience, or history. We live in a “prolonged now,” much like a permanent audience sitting before a TV, “emotionally gripped rather than mentally

28 Ibid (my italics).

29 Maureen Dowd, “Death & The Maiden,” The New York Times, Sept. 3, 1997, in Robert Boyers, “The Consciousness Industry,” Salmagundi, no. 118/119 (Spring-Summer 1998), 99–105.

stimulated . . . The ultimate effect of a flood of brief images is to wash out the sense of past and future and to induce an overwhelming present orientation.”

30

Debord calls

this distension of the moment spatial alienation, as suffered by the producers of an “estranged present.” He moves on to say that we fictionalize the past to coincide with the present. “Our faith in material progress, combined with a reluctance to confirm the unsolved issues of the past, makes it hard to remember historical events accurately . . . what it does is to make them impossible to recall them except through a ‘soft, golden haze.’ Once history comes under the sway of fashion, the past can be revived only in the form of nostalgia . . . Once the past has been mummified in this way, however, it no longer has any living connection with our own experience . . . formerly it took decades to achieve the bittersweet mood that defines our predominant disposition toward the past. Now we achieve it overnight.”

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We are constantly looking out of our momentary frame into the future, toward designated reprieves that are inevitably incapable of satisfying us. We no longer live according to the time it takes for snow to reach the ground or a cup of coffee to work its way into the bowels; we live instead under the lure of one more Friday, one more three-day weekend, the lunchtime bell, the happy hour, the primetime show, the beddy-bye. The medium of all commodities is time, and, in the Marxian sense, the confiscation of a worker’s time was the key to overtaking his humanity.

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In a post-Industrial age, the consumption of time takes on a spectacular image. How

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we choose to spend our time, our leisure moments, becomes a marketable query. In

the spectacular society, leisure almost invariably resolves itself in entertainment. The chosen act of watching, be it figures on a screen, numbers on a board, or people

on a stage, is the clearest outcome of alienation. Distance is desirable (think back

to the security of the Internet that, no matter how lifelike its functions or human its role, is still intangibly contained). Escapism morphs into education as you soak it in, responsibility-free, all the color and motion just out of your reach. “People pay to see others believe in themselves,” says Sonic Youth musician Kim Gordon.

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Warner

Communications (ironically) puts it best: “Entertainment has become a necessity . . .

The pace of the world industrialization that has steadily accelerated since the 19th century is widely believed to have effected a severe challenge to individual identity: an increasingly efficient and standardized world jeopardizes personal freedom, importance and opportunity, with a consequent disenfranchisement of self.”

34

30 Boyers, “The Consciousness Industry,” 99–105.

31

Christopher Lasch, “Counting by Tens,” in Robert Boyers, “The Consciousness Industry,” Salmagundi, no. 118/119 (Spring-Summer 1998), 99–105.

32 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle.

33 Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century.

34 Ibid.

A 1968 article by Douglas Heath called “The Cool Ones” (published one year after Guy Debord’s theses) describes the “student generation” in chillingly relevant terms: “They are less willing . . . to commit or devote themselves to some large ideal, philosophy or God. They’ve been called the uncommitted generation.”

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This tallies with the gulf

between our true selves—teeming with objections, opinions, ideas, desire, and shame— and the outside realm of lived experience in which our interactions with other people and society occur. If intimacy with the person standing right in front of you is laborious due to the time it takes for his or her messages to penetrate your projected semi-self, then how can you ever come to trust a theoretical deity somewhere beyond the sky?

More simply, if you are incapable of introspection, how can you commit to a creed or an all-knowing God? Your master and commander is instead the public ego, the vapid but awe-inspiring response that “cool” governs. Without passionate beliefs you cannot rebel sincerely or lastingly, just as you cannot commit to any one political system or creed.

Heath contends: “The freshman of the mid-sixties is more inhibited, over controlled, detached, denying or suppressing the expression of his feelings . . . Students talk of being alienated, of not being able to trust others. No wonder the philosophy of existentialism, which emphasizes man’s basic separateness from others as well as his need for relatedness, has been so popular on college campuses.”

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The generation

in question is rigidly self-aware, toiling not under circumstance so much as personal angst and mounting social pressures due to the meteoric rise of city centers and the infinitely quicker dissemination of images, such as those of the hyper-intellectual “cool-cat,” in the past thirty years. In the sixties, mass media techniques were still relatively new and reeling from their recent and present usage in wartime propagandist campaigns and consumer-spawning post-war “return-to-normalcy” stints. “Much of life has become a game played without real self-abandonment and commitment. The cool kid in his intellectualized pursuit of self-control is isolating himself from much of what is warm and tender about himself. He becomes compulsively dependent upon external sources of excitement.”

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The avoidance of tenderness speaks of a desire to sever

oneself from oneself in its genuine messy form by religious adherence to the wellknown social role of “hip,” one that is dry, exacting, and structured. In the pursuit of that eternal cool, one accepts a self-imposed suspension of liberties.

It should be noted how greatly this uptight 1960s intellectual differs from the fabled images of the free-love flower children of the era, whose spectacularized memory

35 Douglas H. Heath, “The Cool Ones,” The Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 7, No. 2 (April 1968), 116.

37 Ibid, 114.

36 Ibid, 118.

(enshrined in perfumes, paisley drug paraphernalia, and sexy spinoff photo-shoots) is a hot item today. Recalls John Cale, member of The Velvet Underground, “Hippies were into being beautiful . . . it was like some kind of airy-fairy Puritanism that was based on the suppression of all adult feelings about what was out there in the world.

They were being evangelical about it, but they didn’t really care.”

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When viewed

without the very marketable sheen of nostalgia, the hippie subculture reveals itself to be a momentarily rebellious thought consumed by the magnetism of its image. Just like their steely too-cool-for-school contemporaries, the hippies collectively suffered from a disconnect; while the illusion they tended was more whimsical (blessed be the LSD), they too forged a character with which to promote it and a religion by which to preserve it. Undone by their beauty and lack of planning, they ultimately experienced no more liberation from the spectacle than did the college-bound cool cats. While the spectacle didn’t create the hippies like it created the dead-set cool ones, it reinstated order by “selling them out” with the sheer force of their image.

It is striking how relevant this almost-fifty-year-old article’s description of the youth generation still is today. It simultaneously brings to mind the nihilistic bible-burning punks of 1970s England who sought to negate the very sterility of cool and yet fulfilled their Nietzschean prophecies with drugs and apathy; the affluent, zombielike protagonists just entering the techie age in the seminal novel and portrait of Los Angeles Less Than Zero; the perpetual stream of cookie-cutter club-heading “pre-professionals” gliding through those ivied gates toward security and wealth but

31

debatably toward warmth; the contemporary Facebook-narcissists tweaking their

online personas 24/7; or the binge-drinking depressives of the “wired age,” hooked up to or else digesting some external form of distraction, who can still remember

the death of the cassette and the birth of the iPod. All groups complain of an elusive “something” missing; all that differs from generation to generation or group to group is the manner in which they struggle to voice this gnomon and track down the secret ingredient to fulfillment.

However, this journey through the astutely mirrored “desert of the real”

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is doomed

when you are so discouraged and estranged that you cannot even navigate your own mind. A circumnavigation of your bedroom becomes a wild-goose chase, and thus the journey toward rightness and rebellion is aborted before the generation in question can even come up with a name for that future creed. In the matters of the bedroom, Heath goes on: “Many share a pervading fear that . . . to express openly to another

38 Dave Thompson, Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell (Milwaukee: Back beat books, 2009), 34.

39 Dery, “Culture Jamming”, 6.

their needs to love and be loved, will result in their being misunderstood, rejected, or thought queer.” The intense and natural fear of vulnerability is overblown, by spectacular ratios, into the fear of being made an outcast who is deemed improper by the powers that be. This fear leads us to the final frontier in the quest to understand our subjugation: The Wet & Wild West, that is, the obfuscation of the spectacle with and the expansion of the gulf into the already-tricky world of sex and general intimacy with another person.

Only in identifying the forces that oppress us can we find, amid the rubble and denial, a genuine chance for freedom. The only way that we can reclaim our identities and take charge of our destinies is to confront our subjugators, be they intangible, popular, lovely, or worse, ingrained in our everyday lives. In breaking down the grand-scale deceptions that we as a society have come to trust, every individual has the ability to orient his or herself toward personal deliverance. From this realization and eventual empowerment, the cultural guides will hopefully emerge. By rebelling against the convenient anonymity of virtual realities, the big-talking lure of the spectacle and the restrictive social roles it sells, the shifty distance between an individual and the world, and the commodification of the sacredness of sex, the dissenter frees his or herself from any rules other than those of his or her own making. This is not to say that he becomes the infallible Übermensch but rather, more simply, a true individual in tune with the natural laws of the universe rather than trussed to the relentless, extraneous ones of society. He acts because the action makes sense to him. She does not cure herself with a new prescription or the blind escape of entertainment. He seeks to make change. In her sudden enlightenment there lies a whole new slew of temptations with the spectacle studying her every move, but should she misstep or fall prey to the system, at least she knows just who to rely upon for guidance. He listens not to the spectacle or the masses, but to the singular song of himself that he has finally come to know.

Ratty St. John (or Brittany Newell) is a barely-legal navel-gazer hailing from SF Bay. She is a recipient of the 2012 Norman Mailer Prize for High School Fiction and most recently her short story Fetish was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In 2011, she was named the winner of the Int’l Virginia B. Ball Creative Writing Contest & Scholarship and whisked off to Northern Michigan to attend Interlochen Arts Academy for her final year of high school. Other highlights of her cramped and clandestine career include: being named a 2012 YoungArts Winner in Short Story; receiving 3 Scholastic Gold Keys in Humor, Flash Fiction, & Senior Portfolio for the Midwest-at-large in 2012; serving as a judge for 2 years for the Brave New Voices Slam Poetry Festival; and volunteering over the summer at the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur. Publishing credentials include Sparkle + Blink, Metazen, Out of Our, and a five-time spree in Polyphony HS. She is currently a freshman at Stanford University, where she continues to haunt the SF Bay in pursuit of a concrete definition of “hyphy”.

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Jesse Stecklow Untitled (Aquafresh I) 2012 24 x 30 in.

Archival pigment print

Connor Creagan Gunny Dog 2012 24 x 24 in.

Acrylic on canvas

Connor Creagan Comet 2012 24 x 30 in.

Acrylic and graphite on canvas

Connor Creagan Fall 2012 30 x 40 in.

Acrylic, colored pencil, graphite, and oil on canvas

Jesse Stecklow Untitled (Aquafresh II) 2012 24 x 30 in.

Archival pigment print

HANA COHN

All Movement is Just Movement: Interview with Brennan Gerard

The work of Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly lies somewhere between the written scores, improvisational dance, directive choreography, and disparate drawings that comprise their practice. Gerard and Kelly strive to dissolve and expose dominant social and cultural structures as they relate to the body and to time. And amid their contemporary art-dance practice, Kelly and Gerard are also navigating their own close personal relationship of over a decade.

In this interview, Gerard explains the origins and process of their current project, and discusses overturning binary dualities, as well as the overlap between choreographer, dancer and spectator. The formal fluidity of the duo’s artistic practice is exemplified by their admittedly shifting ideas about movement and dance’s role in life. Although Kelly was coincidentally absent from this particular exchange, it allowed an opportunity to (in retrospect) position the conversation in concert with the multiplicity of perspective and experience that Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly explore in their work. And, in what feels like the daunting face of constant partiality, Gerard suggests coolly, that perhaps “the questions are more important than coming up with the finished product.”

IT ALL BEGAN WITH [TINO SEHGAL’S] KISS

Brennan Gerard

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This piece by Tino Sehgal, The Kiss, and it was at the Guggenheim Museum in 2010.

1

We saw the work, and we knew that we were really

struck by it and we didn’t know why. We went back over a series of

visits and decided to make a score of the work. Originally, there was no score, it was actually just two people on a continuous loop performing this embrace.

Hana Cohn BG

And it was strictly choreographed— And we discovered by going back, that they were doing the same movement, and that actually there was a twelve-minute dance.

1

The Berlin-based artist Tino Sehgal (b. 1976) conceived his work The Kiss in 2002. The performance was later staged on the ground floor of the atrium of New York City’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum from January 29 to March 10, 2010. The work consisted of a finely choreographed series of slow-motion reenactments of amorous scenes from Western art historical canon. Sehgal’s practice gained particular notoriety because his work refuses any mode of production of physical objects (including instructions, acquisition paperwork, subsequent documentation).

HC

You discovered that on your own exploration?

BG

Yes, there’s no information—

HC

Because there’s nothing, no written documentation.

BG

Right, there’s no documentation. And there’s no documentation that is permitted by the spectators—you can’t take pictures of it. So we recorded it [the performance] by pretending to talk on our cell phones, and recording in our memo devices an audio transcription of the movements, which then became the score. We have that score of Ryan’s voice [listening to the recording on Brennan’s computer] . . . and it goes on for twelve minutes.

We had the score, and wondered what to do with it. Our first actions were responses to the fact that the couples were only male-female.

So we performed it with male couples, and female couples, and homosexuality. We were dissatisfied with it in two ways: one, I thought it was too direct of a response to re-perform the actual The Kiss. To follow those movements that we recorded in that slow-motion twelveminute performance in Sehgal’s system, sure it was appropriation, sure it makes sense given the history of art, but it wasn’t satisfying.

The other aspect, which was replacing one order with another . . . the problem with this work, like with so many things at the level of representation, is that the codes of representation aren’t being addressed and aren’t being examined. So our solution to that was: let’s still use the score, but what if it was performed by a solo dancer to occupy both the male and female roles of the score and enacted on their own body; performing literalizations of the movements, not trying to kiss this actual other, but using it as choreography, not using it to represent anything. And we thought this is how we get to the constructed nature of heterosexuality, of a kind of heterosexuality, the kind of romantic coupling. So it went from being a critique and response of Sehgal, to being a critique of representation throughout time of coupling and of romanticism.

Also trying to assert the materiality of that performance [Sehgal’s The Kiss], or of any performance . . . there is materiality, even if it is ephemeral, because there is a body executing series of tasks in space and time. And you are borrowing, in this piece, from a history of task-based and score-based performance from Minimalism, especially in dance, but also Conceptual art too. Thinking about sitespecificity, not in an architectural sense, but in [site-specific] terms of our performance. With this in mind, we created a more elaborate score for our performance that would last seventy-five minutes, that would involve a group of dancers . . . four dancers. That score begins with a performer who listens to our [voices speaking the] score in

headphones—that can’t be heard by the audience. They’re listening to it, and then re-speak it, and that re-speaking register slips and slurs and mistakes in their own voice.

HC

And that re-speaking, did it come naturally along the lines of the recorded memos? Or did that it happen in an accidental fashion?

BG

It was a series of thinking that we wanted to hear the score and see the movements, both at the same time. We wanted see the relationship between a series of instructions and the enactment of instruction. But then it felt very weird to have dancers perform according to our voices.

Then we thought, what if we had the score in their voices—I mean they were already enacting both roles on their own, so it creates this other sense of self-consciousness maybe because it’s really tense to hear your own voice. But also a different feedback loop, because now you’re performing to the sound of your own voice. So it becomes—

HC BG

So you’re commanding yourself?

Right, you’re commanding yourself. It almost becomes an internal monologue, but the internal monologue was recorded prior, right?

Because you’re not speaking it now. So, it’s not what you’re really

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thinking now—it was what you were thinking then. That lag is what we’re interested in. I hope that we were able to capture that by

creating the conditions for the actual subjectivity of the performance to emerge; meaning not a kind of representation or kind of an identity of performance, but to have, through the slips and slurs or through their relationship to their own voice, something about who they are and their irreducibility as performers, as people, as subjects—not just executing the actions of a director.

HC BG

Performing in a different nature.

Performing what we could never choreograph. That is what Ryan and I want to get out of these performers, but it is tricky. A lot of times you say that you want that, but a lot of times people just end up confessing and performing themselves—but maybe it is about performing one’s relationship to one’s self, and that is the way of allowing subjectivity and the irreducibility of these performing subjects to come through.

What that means in terms of sexuality is also important to us, because sexuality is something that at the same time as it is historically constructed and culturally ingrained . . . it is ineffable.

There is also something that escapes that definition of sexuality, it is very irreducible, and very specific to that subject. We didn’t want to have to choose one [definition of sexuality] or the other; we wanted to expose the constructed nature of sexuality and deconstruct the score of heteronormativity. And through these series of procedures show

the constructed nature of heteronormativity, and not deny the fact that everybody lies outside of those deconstructive operations. Maybe that they even lie outside of history or society. And that is sexuality, it is irreducible, and you can see it and feel it. It is very powerful, but you can’t fuck with it, right? It has an enduring power. So we wanted to have both.

And the re-speaking in this piece: one performer will re-speak our score and that is recorded. Then they [the first speaker] will perform that score to their own voice, while another performer performs the first operation—it’s a kind of accumulation. That happens three times with three performers. The fourth performer watches this trio of simultaneous solos, whom they might have contact with but that contact is purely incidental within the space, and makes the new score by observing the movements of the other three.

HC

And the score dictates what the fourth performer witnesses, then elaborates?

BG

Exactly. Then that score [the description of the trio of dancers] is spoken by the fourth [performer who was observing the trio] and is recorded and played back in the space. Then we start reforming duets— this is the first time that we have duets. There are two dancers and they are performing the score that describes three. They are negotiating the roles, live and in real time, of not just he-and-he, or he-and-she, but also subject and object. So, “he puts his hand on lower back . . .”

If I was doing that in the solo, I would put my hand here on my lower back. But among the three dancers that is under constant negotiation.

HC BG

Between the duet of the three performers?

We have four performers now—one duet of two, and then the other two dancers. Now, what’s happening during the duets, the two performers who are not performing the duet are describing the duet. They are both creating another score, so this is a third generation score that is created in the course of the performance. That score is recorded, then played back in the headphones of all the dancers. Now we’re back to solos, but they’re listening to the score of description of the duet, as they perform that score as a solo simultaneously, all listening to it on headphones. That’s the first time in the performance that there is silence—no speaking or recording.

HC

What is the relationship between you and the performers? Because it seems that the work is intimately tied with the people who are speaking, recording the score—your score—and then re-speaking and then having to perform. What is that process like for you and Ryan?

BG

Well, I think that it is definitely carry-over of how we have worked in the past. In New York we were working mostly in dance and theatre.

We had, as you know, a company of people that we always worked with.

That has changed in our work because now we don’t always work with the same people.

But we did put out a casting announcement for dancers who would want to perform this piece. In that initial casting announcement, we called for “four dancers who identified as men,” or “a long and masculine specimen,” so we said. That was important to us in that iteration. I think now the score can be performed by women or whomever, but that was just the one stipulation that we had [at that time]. Then we had an audition and started working with them. And there is some rehearsal because it is not a complete improvisation. They [the dancers] are not familiar with the score—we would use dummy scores—and they have to learn this modality of responding to a directive in the moment, and literalizing them.

There is some kind of studio work that happens, but the actual performance is made in the performance, not beforehand. The choreography, even the position of the moving walls, the space that the dancers will be in, is all determined in the performance. Even the audio—there are sixteen amplifiers in the space and they are separated up into four quadrants. So the voice travels, and the performer will have to follow the sound of their own voice. And there are three

39

simultaneous voices, so they have to find their voice and stick in the

quadrant where it is. Sometimes that voice will move, so that impacts the choreography.

Our relationship is that they have to be good dancers, good improvisers.

We wanted to have a diversity of dance training . . . ballet, contemporary, modern. I think because of the process, we become friends with them over time. And it takes a special kind of performer to improvise, but also to be comfortable with that [improvisational] aspect of their subjectivity coming through, and feel comfortable enough that they can perform that [subjectivity]. We try to create a very supportive space, repeatable—which is important—structure for that to happen, so there’s not exposure. I do believe it’s not just anyone, well, anyone can do it, but it’s not—there is still a boundary maintained between the performer and the spectator in the work, and we think that that’s very important.

SUBJECT TO MOVEMENT: DANCER, SPECTATOR, CHOREOGRAPHER

HC BG

That leads me to my next topic: you don’t usually perform, correct?

Right. Sometimes Ryan does. I usually don’t, but now in this new piece I do.

HC

Aside from this newer work that you plan to do, I’m wondering what it’s like for you to watch the multiple generations of scores that have been

produced from your original score. I’m sure that it’s very different for Ryan since he has performed the scores.

BG

Well, that’s a very interesting question because it is a question of choreography—

HC

What is that experience like for you? Are you looking for particular things in each performance? Are you letting it wash over you?

BG

Actually, I’m not looking for particular things. I am looking for something that I would never be able to come up with on my own. I am looking for something that is going to surprise me. So I’m not actually looking for anything specific. I love it when accidents really can happen, and I can be watching someone who’s fully embodied with the task, but also is aware of their performance. So it’s this duality that takes place . . . that’s what I’m looking for.

I like watching people perform tasks, and I like giving myself tasks in my own work and in my own life. I give myself tasks with a delimited time, and I think it’s a way of coping with this condition that we are always performing. I really want to create a place that is safe for people to do that, but a structure that is also solid enough—like you have enough to do, that it’s not overwhelming but it’s occupying . . . you aren’t going to get bored with it. But there’s also some interpretive interaction that is permitted.

HC

Has there ever been a performance that you watched and you felt that you had seen an issue with it in some way?

BG

[Shakes head]

HC

So that never happens.

BG

[Nods] I think it doesn’t happen because there is enough of a limitation.

I think because the performance is made live, and there’s this kind of technical apparatus that is in place during the performances . . . I think it would be very weird if people followed the score or followed the operations where there could be a performance that wasn’t all-direct.

HC

‘All-direct’ is a really interesting phrase to use because usually you’re on the set spectrum from success to failure, and so in my mind I think it’s reassuring to hear that in a work that by being performed becomes successful.

BG

Yeah, I think that what we were trying to do with this piece is to make failure a part of it. If the technical apparatus doesn’t work, then the performance doesn’t really happen, right? But that’s okay.

HC

I think that there even has to be excitement with that.

BG

I think that openness to chance comes from a huge love and huge impact of [John] Cage and [Merce] Cunningham, and what they were 2

doing; that openness to chance and contingency; the fact that there is no “wrong” performance . . . it [performance] has failure, the failure of it is constitutive.

HC BG

And did making that type of work at first make you anxious at all?

No, actually it was a huge relief, because I have made work with Ryan where everything was very choreographed, and that was much more anxiety producing. To make a score that is sturdy enough to withstand multiple iterations from different interpretations, part of it was letting go of a lot of control. Including the control of the spectator’s movement, because the spectator is also free to move around. At the performances, some spectators only stand on one side and miss everything—that’s fine, if that’s the experience that they wanted. I also think that there is a lot left to think about in giving up the things that you really can’t control anyway.

HC

With the division of space in your performances, does it always divide up into a four-quadrant formation? Because I noticed that the movable walls have an ability to hide, and to reveal, and make the spectator

41

work a bit. It forces them to move—to follow the sound, and to follow

the dancers, forcing the spectators to dance in their own way. So what is that process like when you enter a new installation space whether you’re performing in it or installing video work?

BG

I think that’s where choreography becomes very important. And what I have learned from a different type of choreography.

HC BG

Which it definitely is.

It is, and I think it’s about the kind of choreography that is the coordination of the body in space and time. And a spectator’s body is a huge part of that and you know what’s interesting about working in our context is that exhibitions are entirely about choreography.

2

John Cage (1912–1992) was an American writer, composer, music theorist, and writer known for his score-based performances and aleatoric compositions. Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) was an innovative dancer and choreographer who was a pioneer of avant-garde dance. Both men collaborated a number of times over their careers and were known for their emphasis and embrace of chance operations in their work.

HC

The movement of people is choreographed by sequence—

BG

By moving where the walls are, by—

HC

Everything.

BG

Everything. And choreography and training in choreography, wakes me up to that fact. And part of the strategy of installing these movable walls, was to also bring that awareness to the spectator, that there is a pre-existing architecture that is structuring my spectatorship, but also that is influencing how I relate to the performance, to the performer, and maybe even to each other. We’ve had some audience members— and I think this is great—who feel the liberty to talk to each other during the performance.

HC

While some prefer a silent experience. They’re probably giving the talkers dirty looks.

BG

Right, but the performance authorizes both of those experiences. We accept the notion of multiplicity, even in the design of the spectatorship, which is reflected in the multiplicity that I think is being represented by the different kinds of bodies, or the different relationships, different worlds—there is a condition of multiplicity, instead of a condition of duality.

HC

What I feel you’re getting at here is that divisive binary relationship of most socially constructed things.

BG

Yes, and how that plays out in an arts context situation. I think all of these are strategies to multiply. There is precedent with Cunningham and Cage and their events . . . but the difference is that they weren’t necessarily working with the content that Ryan and I are working with now, which is coming from outside of art. Our relationship to a kind of queer movement or our relationship to oppositional politics. Those discourses are informing our formal choices, but our formal choices are also informed by a lengthy history of art.

THE SPACE BETWEEN

HC

I know that you’ll be speaking at the Dancing with the Art World conference at the Hammer Museum about the interconnectedness or the space in between “the work” and “the play” in dance, as well as the more recent rise in popularity of modern dance’s incorporation in art history, and I wonder if that affects your point of view of your own work.

BG

Part of the motivation behind organizing the conference is to create and reflect on a context for our work. I’m very aware—I think the structure even affected my decision to come to art school. I wasn’t even aware of

it at the time, but I think part of that decision is reflective of this larger interplay. No, that’s not the word—the interface between dance and art is motivating the choices for me to go to graduate school. I don’t necessarily think that it is motivating the choices of the work, but it is definitely motivating choices in terms of the context of the work.

HC

So what do you feel that context is? I know the context isn’t entirely clear but—

BG

I think that there’s—

HC

Your opinion on your context of your work. Of course, it isn’t meant as a generalization.

BG

I think I want to have the freedom to be in both contexts. There is something specific about the dance and arts contexts, which are great, but I wish there was more dialogue between those worlds.

HC

I do too. Why does it feel like there’s such a vast—

BG

Divide?

HC

A divide between them.

BG

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I’m not sure, and I think it has to do—it’s actually a good question.

That’s probably why we are bringing people together to talk about this.

Because there are a number of historians and critics trying to address this: why was there a gap? What is the current obsession?

HC

Because it almost seems that we always get a little dash of Judson at school and then that’s really it. Once in a while maybe you come across scholarship that is new and in depth and is confronting all of these ideas.

BG

I think there is definitely a lack of scholarship in the art world on dance . . . definitely. But there are also many things going on—the awareness of what’s happening in these fields is a part of my practice, I don’t think that it is separate. It’s definitely like there is the work and the performance, and then the real work, and then the conference.

But, it’s a new way of doing institutional critique. To bring reflection and awareness of the various motivations—economic, historical, psychological, social—is performing what I think is institutional critique.

It is in line with that: it’s not an artwork at all, for me it is a little bit more interesting . . . in itself it is a kind of criticism and reflection.

HC

I think that it is very interesting, and I’m really excited for that.

Especially as an undergraduate, it feels like something very daunting to tackle on your own. But I feel that there’s a lot of potential in it to discuss everything from dancerly dance, I guess you could call it, to

[Trisha Brown’s] Accumulation-type situations. The extent and the range of movement so vast and so wide, and it goes from a wiggle of a finger to whatever fanciful thing people can do. So, is this newer work more about these more benign and rudimentary movements, or are you still sort of working in a dancerly manner?

BG

I think that’s a really good question, and I don’t know. I mean, in a way it’s not—in the new work, there is . . .

HC

I mean, does it not matter? Is all movement, just movement?

BG

Yeah . . . these are really big questions. I think that the movement quality is different in the new work then it was in Reusable Parts/Endless Love—there is choreography. When we performed Clock, we have these choreographed twelve movements of the hour, and another twelve movements for every five minutes. So we have choreography, we execute a response, but then there’s other stuff that is kind of contingent on the space.

HC

The drawings—the work with the charcoal?

BG

Right, and we create a kind of circle in the space.

HC

I guess I see what you mean in that movement is movement. That drawing and moving—drawing a circle and doing a pirouette are not different really.

BG

You’re right, they are all put at the level of task, and there is no hierarchy among tasks. But I think there is also motivation, and in that work we have it motivated, first, by the very superficial level by the score, which dictates the task to you. But there is another motivation: we are investigating the idea of a couple, and our personal experiences of collaboration, and of partnership, and trying to process that in the midst of performance.

HC

And is the beginning of that investigation Recto/Verso?

BG

Yeah, and that’s still the current project.

CONTINUED HERE . . .

[Gerard sharing documentation photographs of Recto/Verso] BG

This is from the earliest iteration of the score. It begins without a circle, and one of us [Ryan or I] will go in a place within the crowd, and will start executing the Clock. What does that mean? The clock has twelve movements corresponding to the hours of day, and it begins in silence.

Everyone is talking, and no one really knows that the performance has begun. Then one of us makes a circle on the floor—and these roles are interchangeable. To make that circle, you use your body as the compass, and

I start performing my own version of the clock’s movements, so we have different versions of the same machine.

HC

That interchangeability is so interesting to me. I think that’s what makes—yeah, it increases the multiplicity, but I feel then it becomes infinitely interesting because of all its different possible versions.

BG

Yes, exactly, and that is very important for us, and I don’t think Ryan and I realized it. It seemed to be taken from Minimalism. There is this thing that can be fabricated in a different way, or executed in a number of different ways.

HC BG

That connection to Minimalism is really fascinating as well.

So we draw the circles to perform the Clock, and Ryan will draw a circle too and there will be two circles for two clocks. By this time, we are beginning to speak with our movements: “twelve, one, two, three . . .” and trying to stay in sync with each other—and that’s very hard to do.

HC

And that is dictated by the score as well?

BG

Yeah.

HC

Try to sync up with one another?

BG

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Right, then we fall in and out of sync, and then when one of us stops, the other stops. And then we draw two circles in the air back to back—not

overlapping, but touching. We continue to perform the movements of the clock, but add [movements for] minutes as well. And because we are back to back, we kind of intersect with each other and hit each other. We’re just accumulating the clock and there are moments when the contact is totally by happenstance.

Then there is another part of the score, which we performed on Wednesday [January 16, 2013, at LACE Gallery in Los Angeles]. The first part is what we called Clock; the second part is called Timeline, where we make a circle standing shoulder to shoulder walking in space, and the audience at this point is everywhere.

HC

Corralled or not.

BG

They might even be enclosed by only one circle we’ve set up. Then we speak a timeline that starts at now and goes back in time and includes events that are personal or social, historical or totally autobiographical. And when we falter, we have to say “stop.” It is an improvisation that begins, “Now. Now in front of last night. Last night in front of going to a movie. Going to the movie in front of—”

HC

Eating dinner or something. So on and so forth.

BG

Right, and so we’re performing that in a circle, trying to keep even pace. And if one of us messes up or falters, then one of us has to stop as the other continues, until he comes back around and possibly messes up, then the other person continues. So that goes on until we try to go way back in time—like prehistory, like stars, protons, and nothing. So we try to go back as far as we can. And that concludes the second section.

The third section is where we draw these overlapping circles and then one of us will read from our calendar, while the other one performs the clock that corresponds to the appointments in the calendar, many of which are shared. We feel free to choose a point at random, like last Tuesday. And we’ll kind of work up to the time of the performance.

HC

How long have you and Ryan known each other?

BG

Eleven years.

HC

What happens when your two timelines diverge? And what is that like?

Because I assume that there is a certain unison and pace between major events for you and Ryan up until a point.

BG

Events that have structured both of our lives—I mean, I think you learn something new in the performances.

HC

Is this a personal moment of reflection for you? Does it allow you to pull back, or do you become sort of lost in it?

BG

I don’t think you can really get lost in it. I think that you’re constantly aware that you’re trying to complete a task. Those moments of “Oh, I didn’t know that was an important event to Ryan,” becomes a point of interest, but you learn to keep going. You learn things about each other and what it does is necessitates the practice of listening in the performance. The performance is not just about—

HC

Deep listening.

BG

Yeah, you have to really listen to what the other person is doing and saying. Because they could say something and stop at any moment or I could pick up an event that has already been said.

HC

And it could possibly spark a whole other timeline for yourself, political or personal.

BG

I also have to keep aware of where is Ryan is in time because there is a goal of synchronicity and to keep going back.

HC

Why the clock? What drew you to that? Because it seems that when

I think of “the Kiss,” I think of Klimt or Rodin’s The Kiss, and other iconography that has a firm hold in art. I guess it’s sociology that is really getting to me, but in the same way it seems that you’re tackling these huge social structures.

BG

I think time and the clock was for us like time being the technical support of performance, of choreography, but also being the technical support of a relationship. A relationship really is structured by time; that’s what we’re interested in also. The Clock was this way of marking that time in our own bodies, because I feel that bodies are greatly impacted by time. To have a bodily awareness of time is not so easy—it’s hard. There is a part of this project that is about a kind of phenomenology of time, and how a body experiences time and that impact on memory.

HC

Definitely, the aspect of memory, attempting to stay accurate, and to stay in the present—keeping your thoughts very present. Not only because you are performing choreography and you have to pay attention, but it seems that your performances always move backward in the same way that your Clock does; moving backward in time, on top of itself over and over again.

BG

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It is about trying to create a condition where the past can flood into

the present moment. And how do you do that really as a performance?

Because I think it is impossible to be fully in the present.

HC

I agree. I don’t care how many yogis you speak to, it’s not going to happen.

BG

Right, and I think we learn that from psychoanalysis. I think psychoanalysis kind of gives us a theory for how the past continuously reasserts itself in the present. A reading of this work might be a way of working through some kind of trauma. I’m not sure what that trauma is—

HC BG

The trauma of being alive.

It could also be the trauma of being so close in a relationship, maybe even the trauma of time . . . I don’t know.

HC

When you started talking about it, I thought that this was an experience that everybody has—you go away from your home, and you come back to find that time has moved on very much without you. That’s the feeling that I got, that moment where you trip up, that moment of stoppage and the realization that time still continues without your permission, and continues without you. It’s sort of a morbid thought, but I enjoy it as a momento mori, in that line of thinking. I guess.

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BG

And I think that it relates to a work from Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

HC

Yes, I thought of that too—with the two clocks, and the fraction of a second that eventually accumulates to become a vast difference in time, like a leap year.

BG

Right, right—the dream of being totally in the same time as someone else, but that doesn’t exist.

HC BG

You would have to be the same person.

Right, so I think that’s interesting. I didn’t think about that. And that’s where we are right now. It’s definitely new territory for us not only because I’m performing, but I don’t know where this is leading to, but the work is about a way of—in the enactment of the work and in the exhibition and the performance of the work is a way of trying to understand the work. To understand what it is. To ask what is motivating us in the work? What are these questions?

HC

So do you feel that making and performing these works are generative for yourself? Or—

BG

Oh yeah, performance, I think especially for me—the reason why I am attracted to it, is that sense of learning.

HC

Building a bond.

BG

The performances are a really really constructive experience, and it has always been. And we just performed this [Recto/Verso] at LACE, and a bunch of new things came up. We are always learning from it, and maybe that learning curve starts to go down when the project is done, or we’ll launch another series of projects. But I think that’s also the nature of making project-based work, which is why I think I’m here working in the studio, working with Mary Kelly, because the questions are more important than coming up with the finished product.

3

Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996) was an American, Cuban-born artist known for his minimal installations like stacks of paper, piles of hard candy and clocks.

The particular work Gerard references is GonzalezTorres’s 1991 work “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers).

HC

So, speaking of the written part of it—the literature. Can we talk about the board outside? [We walk outside the projection room, into the front of Gerard and Kelly’s studio space.]

So is this is how you do it?

BG

This is a way of communicating with each other, in one way.

HC

Is it because you two don’t see each other?

BG

In a certain way . . . these thought boards . . . this is where we try to materialize certain ideas. So you’re right, [reading from a note on the board] “time is a technical support of the choreography and love.”

HC BG

Do you write about your own work? Does Ryan ever write about the work?

Sometimes we will write reflections on what we have done, which helps us to articulate the questions of the project. I think that for both of us, writing is a part of our practice, but it often happens at the beginning when the scores are written.

HC BG

Of course.

HC

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But a certain analyzing of the work does not happen as much. I leave other people to do that.

What’s it like getting from the idea board—or do you even start with

these things to get to your scores? Is this where you derive them from?

BG

From here, these are very much ideas and early research. There’s a lot of reading by Alain Badiou about love; thinking about Marina Abramovic and Ulay and their performances together; thinking about Sol LeWitt and the wall drawings; and other ideas . . . all coming together on this board. And parallel to this is a studio practice, which takes place both at the dance studio, where we might improvise and develop things, and that can be alone as well as together with the practice of drawings or installations, and then the score comes after that. The score will connect us with the performance. In general, I think it moves in that direction, and these same ideas sort of coalesce themselves into the work.

HC

So from here you move directly into experimenting and improvisation.

And the movement usually comes before the written score?

BG

Yes.

HC

And do you see the movement as in conversation with, or in reaction to your research, findings, and experiments?

BG

These ideas—yes. The score is only planning these future movements, but there is this interchange between the thinking process and the moving process.

HC

It’s like conversing with your head, and then conversing with your body.

BG

Right, then trying to bring those two together.

HC

Which I think is also really interesting. Because I think that we only cognize certain things, like what we say to people, and frequently not about our body language. And I think that alignment of thought to movement, somehow conflating and equating the two are also related. I think that in itself is probably a challenge.

BG

Yeah, it’s a challenge but—

HC

But as dancing that’s sort of—

BG

I often feel that dancers don’t think when they move. I think that you’re actually kind of taught not to think.

HC

Muscle memory?

BG

Yes, and part of the great thing about working with Simone Forti is the integration of speaking, moving, and thinking—that is her practice.

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Bringing speaking, moving, and thinking back together.

HC

It’s so funny because that sounds like how people should live, right?

You think, you move and you speak, and all of those things should happen in a neatly choreographed package.

BG

Right, or with some degree of elegance or reflection.

HC

You know, recently I’ve been tripping myself up on things like film and dance, because I catch myself in a little circle. I think of them as art-as-life and life-as-art and art-as-life and life-as-art; the circle just

4

Simone Forti (b. 1935) is an American postmodern choreographer whose work is largely concentrated on benign, everyday movements and the incorporation of improvisation.

keeps going around and around. And your work keeps doing that for me, especially this newer work. The aspect of art-as-life and life-as-art, but also the conflation of the hierarchy of movement is exciting, at least it is in my thinking.

BG

That’s really perceptive, I think it’s exactly the kind of thrill of the new work is bringing in, and it’s another kind of leveling. We’re reaching a sort of leveling with Reusable Parts but just kind of taking it further.

HC

I feel the same way and—

BG

Between life and art and—

HC

And that toggling between those two. Talking about institutional critique has me thinking a little bit more about these formalized genres of dance.

And the fact that Ryan was trained in ballet, I just see—not a betrayal, because I don’t want to call it that, but a conscious disobedience.

BG

It’s totally true.

HC

It’s brave to dive into asynchronicity, because you can’t control that.

BG

Right.

HC

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I hate to talk about entropy, but it does have that way about it where it can just sort of slither away and out of your control.

Hana Cohn is currently pursuing a BA in fine art and art history at UCLA. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

MIKE KRAMER

Brilliance in Relief: David Foster Wallace as a Model for Belief

“Well, don’t you know that it’s a fool who plays it cool by making his world a little colder.”

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Following the death of David Foster Wallace, in an appraisal of the author’s voice in The New York Times, later reprinted in part on the jacket of Both Flesh and Not, A. O Scott wrote, “Hyperarticulate, plaintive, self-mocking, diffident, overbearing, needy, ironical, almost pathologically self-aware . . . it was something you instantly recognized even hearing it for the first time. It was—is—the voice in your own head.”

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I can, with no hesitation, say that this evaluation of DFW serves as far better an introduction than whatever high-flown analysis or adulatory remarks I can muster.

Seeing that it was a quote worthy of occupying cover space, i.e., befitting enough to advertise the contents of this recent volume of DFW’s once-uncollected-in-book-form nonfiction to those who assumedly have no prior experience of reading DFW; hopefully it teases you along enough to perhaps see what I might add of my own understanding.

Beyond that quote acting as a bromidic gesture of a hook line, however, I restate it because it highlights my agenda, my intent, my plan of action as it were: the concerns of style, diction, and purpose that underscore, ramify, and consolidate DFW’s work are so ostensibly (and, I like to feel, innately) bound up with my goals as a writer that I cannot help feeling like his voice truly is the voice that loops through my head, the voice that I can never escape.

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DFW was a writer renowned for pliability in delivery, kinetic fluency through use of idiomatic voice and subject matter taken to genius extent, demonstrating the lithe

grace of linguistic form, phraseological versatility, and authorial mutability analogous to the otherworldly finesse of tennis superstars he was enamored with. Employing

some choice terms like “pulchritudinous,” “lordotic,” “carminative,” and “autotelic”—to provide an infinitesimal sample—while peppering the text with “like” and beginning sentences with “and but so,” here was an intellect of lexical precision and fundamental consideration. While the wish to demonstrate one’s capacities as a writer can conflict 5

with readers’ expectations, w/r/t vocabulary, simple phrasing and clauses, direct transmission of information of arguments to prevent any sense of wasted time, DFW’s understanding of the process of writing was essentially as an act of communication, not self-expression. The flux of knowledge and beauty in circumscribing the

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John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Hey Jude, The Beatles, © 1968

by Apple.

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Hereafter referred to either by surname or abbreviated as “DFW.”

3 4

As much as I’d hate coming off as just another clueless neophyte with only lionizing sentiments and ambitions for mimesis, I have to say what I can and want to say, either hoping or not giving two shits that you’ll reproach or repudiate me for it. I have a tendency to ask for leverage or beg forgiveness of my reader should I disappoint; may those wishes on my behalf be known here on out.

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A. O. Scott, “The Best Mind of His Generation,” New York Times, September 20, 2008.

“With respect to” or “with regard to.”

nothingness that occupies the blank page and mind, in pulling the words from thin air and saying, “See this? You’ve been staring right at it your whole life and never thought it significant enough to say anything; well I’ve been noticing it too, so it’s my job to open your eyes.” To move and awaken within the reader a somnolent potential for wonder, outrage, brilliance, and, quite simply, humanity.

Before weaseling around further with what-may-appear-to-be-masturbatory stylistic ploys and imaginative leaps in analytic rumination, I should establish some biographical groundwork for DFW’s life. Born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962 to an 6

ethico-moral philosopher and an English Comp professor/inveterate SNOOT /militant 7

grammarian (his father and mother, respectively), the family settled in Champaign, Illinois, where he spent the bulk of his formative years. An average/above-average student for his K-12 years, he bore a distinct penchant for competitive tennis—being regionally ranked around ages thirteen to fifteen, plateauing once puberty set in and falling from his “near-great” status, though smitten with it for his whole life and playing fairly regularly—expounded in pieces like “Derivative Sport in Thunder Alley,” “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness,” and “Federer Both Flesh and Not,”

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as well as being a central narrative locus in

Infinite Jest (a great many of the principles are situated at the fictional Enfield Tennis Academy in Boston).

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Appearing in Infinite Jest under the guise of character Avril Incandenza, whose activism in response to the appalling state of English usage contemporaneous with the book’s narrative leads to what are called the MIT language riots.

(Quick aside for further color: DFW’s mother actually made use of a kind of terroristic joke with her children [DFW and his sister, Amy] where, if the children uttered a solecistic or catachrestic boner, she would feign a coughing fit until her children realized the mistake they’d made and corrected it. DFW went on to apply this same tactic with students he taught in his college courses).

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From DFW’s mammoth piece out of Consider the Lobster, “Authority and American Usage”: SNOOT (n) (highly colloq) is this reviewer’s [DFW’s] nuclear family’s nickname à clef for a really extreme usage fanatic, the sort of person whose idea of Sunday fun is to hunt for mistakes in the very prose of Safire’s column. This reviewer’s family is roughly 70 percent SNOOT, which term itself derives from an acronym, with the big historical family joke being that whether S.N.O.O.T. stood for ‘Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance” or “Syntax Nudniks Of Our Time” depended on whether or not you were one.

In other words, SNOOT would be a dysphemism for what most people would know as a Grammar Nazi, Usage Nerd, or Syntax Snob.

Both found in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (New York: Back Bay Books, 1997), 3-20 & 213-255, respectively.

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Found in Both Flesh and Not (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2012), 5-36.

A BIG GREEN SQUARE AND FUZZY YELLOW BALLS

It would be pertinent to illustrate this integral link in the kismet chain of my personal relationship to DFW. I am the grandson of Jack Kramer, Wimbledon and U.S. Open tennis champion and world-ranked #1 player for a number of years during the mid- to late forties, who pioneered the serve-and-volley stratagem for competitive play and whose name is borne by the Wilson Jack Kramer Autograph, possibly the most popular racquet of all time (sold for thirty-five years and mentioned by DFW in his article on Roger Federer). Tennis is my genetic heritage, in my blood and form, and there’s a local curiosity that comes with that inheritance. It may be totally irrelevant to you if you’ve never given much thought to the subject, but it was a system and dynamic that enthralled DFW, leading him to draw metaphysical and philosophical conclusions from the game itself.

Athletes are practically deified in American culture, ascending to celebrity status and Olympian reverence by the preternatural grace, power, and passion of their dedication; they are practically modern saints, austere in expression and ascetic in path. They entertain through agonistic battle—symbolizing the patterns of nature in dominance/ submission, cooperation/isolation, ebb/flow. In “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,”

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DFW laments the preponderate incapacity of world-class athletes to have any intricacy of verbal delivery beyond insipid platitudes (Tracy Austin’s autobiography epitomizing this limpness); being so utterly rooted to the mechanical and visceral experience of

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otherworldly physical capability, and the incessant training that comes with it, stunts

or arrests the possibility for developing routine subjective insight or articulation—my grandfather was a man of few words, in my knowing him (though not necessarily cold or distant, perhaps more reserved and measured; when propriety called for

socializing he’d meet the task, otherwise brevity prevailed). DFW approached Michael Joyce or Federer or Agassi or Tracy Austin with an almost religious awe, saying that these players embody the union of heaven and earth, of starlight made clay. “Great athletes seem to catalyze our awareness of how glorious it is to touch and perceive, move through space, interact with matter. Granted, what great athletes can do with their bodies are things that the rest of us can only dream of. But these dreams are important—they make up for a lot.”

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Once DFW finished high school, college ambitions and anticipations were called for (the examination and matriculation procedures causing a great deal of anxious

10 In Consider the Lobster (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2005), 141-155.

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David Foster Wallace, “Federer Both Flesh and Not,” 8.

vomiting for the young DFW—the one-on-one interviews specifically) and he decided on his father’s alma mater of Amherst College. During his time there he kept a tightknit circle of friends, typically spending most of his time with peer Mark Costello, who inspired DFW (by Costello’s own performance in doing the same) to take on and complete a double thesis, in philosophy and English (creative writing), producing an essay in modal logic and fatalistic semantics and what would become his first novel, The Broom of the System. DFW read “voraciously,”

12

spending nearly every free moment in

the library, even going so far as demonstrating his titanic intellect and cocksureness, as one anecdote has it, by eviscerating one professor in argument to the point of inciting the professor to flee the classroom.

13

However, despite his extraordinary academic

record and implacable drive for intellectual dominance, Wallace encountered his first bouts with depression during his years at Amherst, forcing two semesters’ leave (noncontiguous), in ’81-’82 and ’83. The warring camps in DFW’s mind between the innate affinity for philosophy and the substantive/consuming joy in writing fiction rose to the forefront of his concerns.

PHILOSOPHICAL CONCENTRATIONS

In contemporary philosophy, as with most disciplines, there exist two “rival” traditions of thought: that of the analytic, Anglo-American persuasion; and that of the Continental, mainland European persuasion.

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“Analytic” can be a deceptive moniker: isn’t philosophy,

as a whole, an analytic enterprise? Here the term is used more as a distinguishing mark, with emphasis on rhetorical lucidity, clarity of argumentation, and accessibility in terms of logical universality. The slant is toward science and its ability to explain the way the world actually works, the integrity and internal coherence of logic in its application to reality, and a sense of timelessness that comes with universal administration.

15

Continental thought, on the other hand, while just as rigorous and concerned with virtually the same core issues of philosophical discourse, comprises (as originally understood when this schism took place) anything that does not fall within the purview of

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As Stephen J. Burn puts it in his Infinite Jest Reader’s Guide: Second Edition (New York: Continuum, 2012).

Gleaned from D. T. Max’s biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (New York: Viking Penguin, 2012).

This digression will become relevant momentarily.

Id est, any particular deductive proof will be valid in all instances of it being derived regardless of who performs it at any time or place, given the same conventions and syntax.

the former.

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This often tends toward a rejection of fanatical scientism, an embracing

of historicist diachroneity, and a general predilection for metaphilosophy.

The reason for this Dummy’s Guide to Philosophical Divisiveness:

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DFW, while

focusing on analytic fare in the course of his studies, demonstrates an avid concern for Continental methods and issues (the man once insisted that any English major worth his/her salt should temper his-/herself in Derrida and Gadamer—if only). The plangent self-awareness and hypercritical delineation of the contents of subjective experience, virtually omnipresent in DFW, echoes all-too-intimately what day-to-day life feels like—a characteristic attributable in large part to Continental thinkers whose systems of subjectivity take the question of qualia (what-is-it-like-to-be-something) quite seriously.

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Literary theory was an academic subtheme of DFW’s development—

analytic thought is to science what Continental thought is to literature—culminating (in print) with “Greatly Exaggerated,”

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an article devoted to reviewing H. L. Hix’s

thesis on Barthes’ declaration of the death of the author and subsequent attempts at “resuscitation,” or whether Authority was even dead at all. The Continental current of his work, fiction or not, is unavoidable and refreshing in ways only an unrequited philosophy major could understand (my native UCLA program being decidedly analytic and very much indifferent to Continental modes of discourse, for the most part).

Wallace eventually graduated double summa in ’85, matching his best friend and roommate Costello as the second person in forty years to do so. He went on to cut his

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fictive teeth at the University of Arizona (to the chagrin of his philosophy advisor at

Amherst), earning his MFA under a regime of neo-realists and Carverite minimalists— practically diametrically opposed to DFW’s approach of metafictional maximalism.

Pynchon, Barth, and Gaddis were passé, taking the convolution and meta-awareness to unsurpassable degrees; a new form is called for, though clever wordplay and

philosophical heft plagued Wallace, arguably, until the end of his life. The Broom of the System is released to generally positive critical reception; despite this, he took

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Keeping in mind, however, that the critical difference between these branches pertains to methodological style and presumption; the problems themselves are typically homomorphic, if not isomorphic at the very least.

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Analytics tend toward reduction, material/ physical precedence/superiority, and general dismissal of the issue out of hand. It’s tough to be a minded being when all evidence and interpretation points to automatism and mechanistic functioning.

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Which, it would be fair to point out, is so far from comprehensive or even vaguely representative of the attitudes and positions of live philosophers that I would not be surprised if more than a few of the readers familiar with such things let out a belly-deep scoff at this cursory adumbration—one can only take a tangent so far, when attempting to focus on a completely different matter.

Found in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, 138-145.

steps toward distancing himself from it, saying it seemed like something written by an extremely precocious fourteen-year-old.

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During his time in Arizona he started writing

and compiling Girl with Curious Hair, which concludes with his novella, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” bearing heavy influence from Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse,” and signifying (to DFW) the death of his metafictional pyrotechnics.

A creative and emotional depression followed: DFW was spent. Finally, after relocating to Boston with the initial intention of attending graduate school at Harvard for philosophy and dropping out after two semesters, he began working on Infinite Jest— a novel worthy of reshaping literature in the time of the zombified author.

AMUSING OURSELVES TO CATATONIA

Okay, having come this far with the guise of biographical scaffolding as my guiding principle for organization, I’d like to break away and excavate the honest-to-goodness conceptual significance of DFW’s work and life, and one of the prime reasons why I polish such a veiny hard-on for the man.

Our generation (and by “our” I am referring to virtually everyone born since the mid-seventies, after TV’s pervasive integration into the after-school lives of American children) is blighted by apathy, irony, and cynicism. This is a fairly grandiose claim, I’ll admit, but it is this taint of indifference and hipster-trendsetter conformity set his sights on as a terminal disease eating out the core of sincere

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Perhaps his most renowned piece of non-fiction, “E Unibus Pluram,”

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that DFW

human value.

23 24

specifically

targets televisual media and the processes by which unabated individualism and product fetishism seep into the subconscious of the malleable and vulnerable minds of hapless viewers—amplified by the incessant drive of advertising to capture the imagination of wandering eyeballs. By catching on to trends that spread memetically through colloquial interactions and situations,

25

the ad industry—inextricable from the

culture-generating engines of television, popular music, big-budget film, mainstream and commercial art, electronic innovations, and the Internet—reinforces the splintered consciousness of a pluralist paradigm in human civilization. Human beings aren’t so much alienated (while a great deal of us certainly have that feeling) as they are fragmented, a thesis held by Fredric Jameson in his study of late twentieth-century capitalism

26

and recurring throughout DFW’s work.

While there is practically no bastion of television free from some tacit advertising agenda, this quote from “E Unibus Pluram” seems apt: “It’s widely recognized that television, with its horn-rimmed battery of statisticians and pollsters, is awfully good at discerning patterns in the flux of popular ideologies, absorbing these patterns, processing them, and then re-presenting them as persuasions to watch and to buy.”

27

Far from being some inert and overt appliance, television shapes minds explicitly and tacitly. We of the ADHD youth culture can’t help but be enamored with and inculcated by the flagrant immersiveness of multimedia ad campaigns, and, beyond that, we actually draw power from this very fact. “We have an innate predilection for visual stimulation,” writes Wallace, “colored movement, a frenetic variety, a beat you can dance to. It may be that, through hyper- and atrophy, our mental capacities themselves are different: the breadth of our attentions greater as attention spans themselves shorten. Raised on an activity at least partly passive [as television is], we experience

20 Broom, by the way, follows Lenore Beadsman on a search for her eponymous grandmother, who vanished from her convalescent home without a trace or reason, and is embedded with philosophical elbow jabs—a lot of Wittgenstein, metafictional devices, and ends midsentence— setting up a tendency for a lack of closure that his life and work stand as testament to.

21

Yes, this is oxymoronic.

22 Key word here: sincerity. How often do you come across people who really care anymore?

Passed off as passé naïveté by blasé aesthetes and ersatz sycophants.* A key passage from Infinite Jest about saying something and actually meaning it, involving the deformed and simple-minded eighteen-year-old Mario Incandenza (arguably the only genuine character in the book): The older Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the fact that everyone at E.T.A. [the setting of one of the novel’s narratives] . . . finds stuff that’s really real uncomfortable and they get embarrassed. It’s like there’s some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn’t happy.

(Infinite Jest [New York: Back Bay Books, 2006], 592) A brief anecdote is recounted about a fellow student telling a joke about setting up a “Diala-Prayer telephone service for atheists in which the atheist dials the number and the line just rings and rings and no one answers.” Mario gets the joke but “what was unpleasant was that Mario was the only one at the big table whose laugh was a happy laugh; everybody else sort of looked down like they were laughing at somebody with a disability,” the death of God reflecting the crippled souls of the students shunning authenticity. * Not like I’m any exception . . . A regular Mr. Sinisterra á la Gaddis, ‘cept without the redeeming quality of being the protagonist in the “ur-text of postwar fiction” (Jonathan Franzen, “Mr. Difficult . . . ,” New Yorker, September 30, 2002).

23 Found in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, 21-82.

24 From which many later developments in DFW’s corpus can be traced, particularly the prototype for Infinite Jest’s entertainment networking and information interfacing console with the borrowed name of “teleputer” from “media futurologist” George Gilder (“InterLace-designed R.I.S.C.-grade High Def-screen Pcs with mimeticresolution cartridge-view motherboard,” [DFW 1996, 417]).

Considering Infinite Jest was written primarily from ’91 to ’93, before personal computers securely anchored themselves in parasitic and symbiotic fashion onto the desks, fingertips, and minds of average American consumers, it’s striking to see the degree of prescience demonstrated by Wallace’s conspicuous study of technodependent/-addicted, media savvy characters. But then again, what is a laptop but the more bilaterally interactive offspring of a television and a typewriter?

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25 Which in turn feed on whatever interesting data the persons involved happen to come across in the course of their mediasaturated schedules, creating this absurdly convoluted feedback loop of ad–culture– lived-experience that has been gaining momentum since something like the late ’60s/early ’70s and is epitomized in DFW’s example of a Pepsi commercial that co-opts postmodern sensibility as a way of both obscuring its own “lame” product status while coming off as cool by the fact of its own self-awareness.

26 Q.V. Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990).

27 Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram,” 54.

a degree of manipulation as neutral, a fact of life. However, wooed artfully as we are for not just our loyalty but our very attention, we reserve for that attention the status of a commodity, a measure of power; and our choices to bestow or withhold it carry for us great weight.”

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We become petite kings with remote (or mouse) in hand,

swaying the world to what we believe is our advantage.

Yet one is left with an insatiable appetite for distraction and instant gratification, expedited by immediate accessibility to the hivemind info-brain and data-hub that is the World Wide Web. I’ve often seen DFW in interviews saying that he can’t trust himself with a TV in his home—one can only imagine how he’d feel having a laptop with a high-speed cable connection. We’re wired for engaging activity, as a side effect of the physiological programming that six-plus average hours of TV viewing (or Internet browsing) will cause: Pavlov’s dogs can’t help drooling every time that cyber-bell rings.

All the quasi-conspiracy theorizing aside (which Wallace hoped to avoid in the course of “E Unibus Pluram,” as he says assuming a ludditic anti-TV/technology posture would be as pernicious as seeing TV merely as a “toaster with pictures”), being a writer (an artist), working in this environment, requires a break from form distinct from just about any literary tradition to date—except perhaps for metafiction and postmodernism, whose extensive use of irony prior to TV’s diaspora into the homes of Americans managed to dismantle or expose rather than habituate. Wallace rails against the “Image-Fiction” Gastroenterologist

30

29

of somebody like Mark Leyner, whose My Cousin, My

reads something like flipping through 546 cable/satellite channels

with about five seconds of attention given to each one you pass, for opting out of pushing the limits of fiction to extents that TV can’t compete with by fact of medium and instead appropriating the methods of TV itself. Entertaining as it may be, it doesn’t quite cut the mustard, and so Wallace strives to break from TV’s threat. “Think, for instance, about the way prolonged exposure to broadcast drama makes each one of us at once more self-conscious and less reflective,”

31

Wallace writes in “Fictional

Futures of the Conspicuously Young,” and, indeed, further absorption into the insidious medium of television (or the Internet) requires forging a new form capable of articulating an entirely different message.

Lee Konstantinou, co-editor of The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, in his article “No Bull: David Foster Wallace and Postironic Belief” captures Wallace’s expressed motto when it came to the act and purpose of writing, that “creating postironic belief

28 Wallace, “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” in Both Flesh and Not, 46.

29 Also called “Hyperrealism.”

Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram,” 50.

30 Mark Leyner, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (New York: Vintage, 1995).

31

Wallace, “Fictional Futures,” 49.

was the goal of literary communication.”

32

Going a step past what Wallace had

taken as his mission statement for his work as a writer, which was the pure element of communication involved in a person opening their experience to the immediate fervency of felt emotion or thought from/to another person, one had to plant seeds for the blossoming of welcome shifts in thought. Why? Because vulnerable facets of the modern human being require historically unheard of degrees of tendance before anything can be done about the pernicious influence such repressed-yet-expressive tendencies (viz. irony and cynicism) can have.

“Wallace writes out of a conviction,” says Konstantinou, “that we live in a society and culture of indefinable but ubiquitous sadness—crippled by a complex of solipsism, anhedonia, cynicism, snark, and toxic irony, a culture whose aimless meandering can be traced back, in one way or another, to the consumerist End of History.”

33

The “End

of History” referred to is a coinage of political economist Francis Fukuyama, claiming that global affairs have reached their terminus with the advent of liberalist capitalism as manifested by American culture. Like Tyler Durden’s dictum in Palahniuk’s Fight Club, “We don’t have a great war in our generation, a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit . . . The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.”

34

Konstantinou quotes Toby Young and Tom Vinderbilt from an issue of

Modern Review, echoing the sentiment: “It’s difficult to imagine what a post-ironic sensibility would be like. It’s a bit like finding yourself at the end of history. You’re bored because you’re not participating in any historic events,”

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but it’s not like you

can simply check out to champion a cause in a “less evolved society”

36

you’d be

denying or ignoring the exigent historical conditions which spawned you.

It is the artist’s (or writer’s) place to either observe and report, or go a step

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further and offer suggestions as to what could remedy the fashionable nihilism of reductionistic scientism or fetishistic consumer culture. Wallace—in a decidedly modernist fashion despite the evaluation incessantly branded upon him as being 37

postmodern —doesn’t care much for the writers who buckle under (typified by a literary Brat Pack personality like Bret Easton Ellis) and take the “join ’em” path, throwing their lot in with hopelessness, and notes that “what’s frustrating for me about the whiners [like Ellis] is that precisely the state of general affairs that explains a nihilistic artistic outlook makes it imperative that art not be nihilistic.”

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Must we resign ourselves in aesthetic

conformity to the psychological condition of the status quo that inspires the impulse to write or create in the first place? Ought we toil in order to merely express or replicate

34 Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (New York: Owl Books, 1997), 141.

32 Lee Konstantinou, “No Bull . . . ” in The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, eds.

Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 85.

37 If anything, DFW is a postmodern stylist with modernist objectives, using the language of the contemporary zeitgeist to offer solid morals that might underpin our meaning-deprived reality and identities.

33 Ibid.

35 Konstantinou, “No Bull,” 84.

36 Ibid.

38 Wallace, “Fictional Futures,” 67.

the dissociation we found in the world, or can’t there be some solution striven for even if we admit that the final end will never be reached? How would you rather look at it?

SO WHAT?

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”

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Where does that leave us? Between a rock and a diamond, it seems. We exist on the cutting-edge of technological culture and every tweet or reblog or status update further solidifies the vacuity rotting away at the core of human meaning. We are escapists, seeking distraction, gratifying every impulse, sacrificing what’s difficult or whatever presents the least bit of resistance.

40

Some people are disturbed by this fact,

trying to find socially accepted methods of dealing with existential distress (academic hyper-achieving and mind-numbing toil for capital gain being condoned; the “game” of carnal satisfaction/domination; and psychochemical manipulation ad nauseum being generally tolerated). DFW covers all of these coping mechanisms.

The Broom of the System expresses the ingratiating revelry of a clever student looking to show off his moves to some approving audience; Infinite Jest stylistically continues this trend, but layers in the weight and crippling temptation of dependency, dysfunction, and the weakness of the soul in the face of mechanized reductionism or any attempt to establish an even quasi-codified sincerity or genuineness or meaning; and The Pale King confronts the antithesis to indulgence in the excruciating minutiae and tedium of bureaucratic “streamlining” that our society presumably requires in order to function (no matter the collateral damage incurred on personal or social humanity).

41

Each a whirlwind amalgam of fractured pieces of the scope of social

and psychological reality, each going toward infinity and oblivion at the same time.

Far from being a catholic exercise of thematic unpacking, this screed of mine is more akin to literary/moral titration or variolation—low dose exposure to the concerns of an author widely held in high esteem. Three currents are indisputable: addiction and pathological dependence; the repercussions to conceiving of oneself as a machine or being doomed to indifferent fate;

42

and the unceasing attempt at salvaging salvation,

or achieving significance.

This cannot help but beg the question: what ought one believe? Can we attain whatever it is we seem to lack and, if so, how? If you’re like me, or DFW, or any other person

39 Wallace, Infinite Jest, 389.

41

Without going into too much depth about the short stories of DFW’s oeuvre, each collection possesses a story related to any one of these prenominate pathological outlets for a member of Western society. Standouts are (not comprehensive): “Little Expressionless Animals” and “Westward . . . ” from Girl with Curious Hair; “The Depressed Person” from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men; and “Good Old Neon,” “The Soul is Not a Smithy,” and “The Suffering Channel” from Oblivion.

40 Not universally and without limitation, of course, but I am speaking hyperbolically.

42 Stephen Burn’s Reader’s Guide fantastically attesting to the former (mechanized determinism) re Infinite Jest, Wallace’s philosophy thesis refuting Richard Taylor’s proof for fatalism concerning the latter (quietistic inevitability).

thrown to the gears of a relativistic postmodern morality, you don’t really know and can’t simply defer the answer to someone else. You maintain a vague idea of what you should or shouldn’t do for yourself, which just sort of cements itself into a rigid carapace of assumption and kneejerk emotional reflex given enough time. Bruce Wilshire, a philosopher deeply suspicious about the pernicious influence of the ideology expounded in analytic cenacles,

43

reports on the view of Nietzsche—another,

like DFW, with a head that throbbed heart-like—that as creatures who crave meaning and purpose, “We would rather have the void as our purpose than be void of purpose.

If there is nothing worth dying for, we tend to will the void, to will destruction.

Nihilism. For this gives us, surreptitiously, something to believe in: ‘There is no belief.

There is no reliable knowledge of reality. There is no reliable fullness of being.’”

44

I simply cannot abide that, however much it may be abetted. All the self-referential dross I’ve supplied—my passion for the man, his life, his thought and its relevance to my own situation—stems from ulterior ideological motive. My tentative solution to the existential vacuum: a mystical substrate for all existence, which you and I and DFW and everyone else share in. In recognizing resonance between my situation and another’s, I come to see that our sense of disconnection is more illusory than substantive. Einstein said so himself, “[Man] experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical illusion of consciousness,”

45

and I have to agree with that, and I feel DFW would at least admit

it as a possibility. This conception of blurred boundaries isn’t meant to be heeded as

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blind dogma, nor is it meant to advocate shirking one’s responsibility of respecting the dignity of your fellow creatures, but it can help when nothing remains (much like the

God of Don Gately and Boston AA from Infinite Jest—doesn’t matter if you think you’re howling at the wind, just get down on your knees and pray).

What it really comes down to is being-with-others; writing as communication and the realization that no one is alone. As Konstantinou points out, the titular “Infinite Jest” film cartridge from the novel, which is so captivating that anyone who watches for more than a few moments becomes so hooked that vital functions are ignored and death inevitable, was created by the father of protagonist Hal Incandenza so they “could simply converse,” trying “to induce him to open his mouth” and “reverse thrust on a young self’s fall into the womb of solipsism, anhedonia, death in life.”

46

“Fiction,”

states DFW, “is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties—all these chase away

44 Bruce Wilshire, quoting Nietzsche, “Nihilistic Consequences of Analytic Philosophy,” in Fashionable Nihilism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 6.

45 Albert Einstein, letter to Robert S. Marcus, 1950.

43 These groups being intellectual cliques that take the layman as both muse and consumer, informing the general populace somewhere down the line—so long as we admit that impassioned conceptual activity cannot help but trickle down to popular consciousness. Natural philosophy, as the progenitor of science, was once an academic curiosity long before everyone ended up with an iPhone in his/her pocket.

46 Wallace, Infinte Jest, 838–839.

loneliness by making me forget [that] I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate . . . Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and . . . religion— these are the places . . . where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”

47

For fear of rambling on for too long or mounting a soapbox,

48

I’ll wrap this

up. Apathy and routine blinds, strangles, numbs, and dangerously stultifies, becoming nihilistic solipsism. Focusing on the frenetic, symbolic stimuli of the external world, as a writer can’t help but do—taking in all the astonishing and sublime and horrifying facets of “reality”—typically leaves one wondering how a single individual could fit into the cosmic scheme of ostensible indifference while working to cultivate a kernel of faith that there is something tying it all together. “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle,” according to Plato/Philo/Ian MacLaren/Anonymous, or whoever uttered it.

Having spent the last few years of his life working on The Pale King, David Foster Wallace, beset with clinical depression since his days at Amherst and after deciding to cease his use of antidepressant medication, hung himself on September 12, 2008.

Ruminating on this fact while alone consistently brings me to tears, though I never met the man and know only his work. His work is, to me, a testament to staggering genius; “what hope do I have, then?”—but this thought is fleeting. A final quote, engraved in my mind, that might strike some as out of place but for me is very much apposite, from the HBO miniseries John Adams, spoken by Tom Wilkinson portraying Benjamin Franklin: “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

47 A quote I’ve had no luck in tracking the source of but will assume came from an interview.

48 Too late.

Mike Kramer, born in 1991, has lived his entire life in Los Angeles and is currently attending UCLA as a third-year philosophy major.

His intellectual interests include, but are not limited to, psychedelic studies, consciousness studies, phenomenology, mystical and esoteric philosophy, continental/analytic politics, critical theory, literary theory, feminist theory, cosmology, philosophical implications of theoretical physics, alienation of the modern subject and its impact on personal identity, and amassing lexical oddities for magniloquent purposes.

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Philippe de Sablet Formerly Whatever It Takes 2012 48 x 60 x 12 in.

Wood, enamel, concrete, asphalt, latex, plaster, sand, plywood, steel, particle board, self-drilling screws, footing tar, FrogtapeÂŽ

The installation, based on plywood material dynamics, is an exploration in aggregate systems that form variable organisms with respect to direction, scale, and shape. A primitive unit, made of three square shaped plywood sheets that connect at the corners, is used as a starting point in Dan Oprea Cumulative Coherence 2012 24 x 24 in.

Wood veneer, spray paint, plastic people

the aggregation through tab connections to produce a complex tectonic assembly. The logical code used in aggregation creates complex variations in interstitial spaces, resulting in continuity at the macro level that implies material dynamics movement across the overall system.

Yulia Markman Untitled (from “Anonymous encounters”) 2009 24 x 16 in.

Inkjet print Israel

Yulia Markman Untitled (from “Anonymous encounters”) 2012 19 x 16 in.

Inkjet print Israel

Yulia Markman Untitled (from “Anonymous encounters”) 2012 24 x 16 in.

Inkjet print Israel

Mapping Home in two movements

By Iris Yirei Hu first movement 22, 24, and 26 on Kaifeng Street, Section 2. Kai is open, and feng is close. The land was allotted to my family by the Guoming zhengfu, and ours temporarily. They would go back, to Dalu, which was still Zhonghua mingguo when they left.

Wait until after the war is over. This is our home now. They came with nothing, except for the clothes on their bodies, and their one-year old son. The only one born in the mainland, the motherland.

There was another man in need. He, too, came with nothing, and he came to Agong for help. Agong agreed to let the man live in 26, while my family lived in 22, and 24 was still being built. When you are in a new place, rely on connections. Especially in a place of such disaster.

1946. One year after the end of the Japanese occupation in Taiwan one year after the grand finale of the Second World War three years before the emergence of the People’s Republic of China. Taiwan was in the hands of a quake of uncertainty. We will go back. We belong there. But for now, we will live in 22, 26 will be for blank xiangsheng and his family, and we will build 24. They need a place, too. We are helping him; we are helping to fill in the cracks of this land.

Two wars were going on. Both over land. They were doing horrible things to the land; raping women and children, stabbing their vaginas with bayonets and leaving them with two legs spread open. Ready to be entered into. Thousands of them, a complete bloodbath of punctured, slit, cut women. Bodies static and scattered all over dirt; their last movements caught in the stasis of their dead corpses.

Then he took our land. Changed it to his name. Now that is his.

This all culminated from taonan flee The story of All these things Beginning wherever you wish To begin to speak.

To begin to talk about.

To begin to tell.

To begin the oral history of.

To begin to write.

To begin To emerge To them: we are always emerging To us: we have always been

1946. 22. A Japanese-style home, in which my mother, aunts, and uncles were raised. Later—destroyed, on the decision of my grandfather. No longer did they want to live in a Japanese style home, confined by Japanese architecture, ideology, and civili-coloni-zation. We fled from them and now we’re living in their homes? We must still be prisoners of war and patriots of the enemy if we continue living under this roof. Gone were my mother’s, aunts’ and uncles’ youthful days, crushed, demolished, destroyed by the man behind the bulldozer and his construction crew.

Soon, it became a plot of land again. Rich with dark soil, humidity, and the heat of the sun. It was left like that for decades while the family lived in 24.

A short building, quite confined was six floors, as I remember it: sixth was always the most domestic—my grandparents’ bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen where family life assumed; fifth became storage though my mother and Third Uncle slept there growing up; fourth became my Second Aunt’s dental practice, which she gave up to take care of my aging and at the time, sickly, grandparents; third and second were lent to my First Uncle, head of his afternoon English program; and first was a doorway opening sixth floors of lives and histories closed to the public. 24 is our building.

Cluttered with family memorabilia and heirlooms, antique wood furniture, a taxidermied family cat—a family’s history in their belongings. Until four years ago, I stayed with my grandmother, First Aunt, and Second Aunt in the lived history of 24 whenever I went back to Taiwan.

Developers had noticed the anonymous, unused, but fertile land next to 24 that once situated 22. They pounced on it; hungry for virgin soil. Consultation. Negotiation. Registration. Papers. They were to develop a 12 storey apartment building, in which a deal came about stating that we would own half the building and the other half would be owned by them. Sign here. The swift of a pen. Handshake.

22 is two times the height of 24, but they are only two feet apart from each other. With private negotiation, the contractors carved a secret doorway on the sixth floor of 22 in the wall adjacent to 24 and another secret doorway on the sixth floor of 24, connecting the two buildings that are only two feet apart. My grandmother could go from her old world into the new with just one step, a floating passageway on adjacent sixth floors unbeknownst to anyone but us.

At night, she still rests, dreams, and hopes in the old world of 24. Her fears, her feats, her fantasies still linger in the tatami floors, her memories rustling between the sheets. Unable to abandon the life she lived for seventy some odd years. In the daytime, she crosses over to 22, where we watch the World News together on the large plasma. And each night, she crosses over to rest in the spirits of the past.

But one day, the Japanese lai le. We needed to leave, so we pao chu lai. Tao chu lai. The three of us tao and pao together from Burma. We hid in the back of a jeep to Dianmian gonglu, but not too long after, the jeep broke down.

Maybe it was a trap. But it doesn’t matter now. It was so dark and so dusty. I remember everything grey; all our faces grey, our bodies grey, looked like we were a moving picture. But there were no pictures of those days, too poor; I have only words for you. And so we walked, on our feet, on our empty stomachs, on our defeated souls, for thousands of li, for days and days to Kunming. And when we got there, we slept in an abandoned field for refugees and we were fed nanming fan. And we slept.

In ’4 6 you stepped foot on this land. Here. And we had Dayi. The first born in Taiwan.

second movement Four years ago, when I was in Taiwan, my family’s home was undergoing renovation, and my grandmother was complaining about having no place to rest.

“I don’t know if I’ll live to see the end of this. But I do know that there will be a home for you when you come back.”

Iris Yirei Hu View from My Grandmother’s Home in Taipei 2012 144 x 180 in. (estimated) Acrylic, Flashe, oil pastel, color pencil, wood planks, ink, tape, charcoal on paper

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ABSOLUTE SECURE 1991

ou wha t to " I hate telling y te listeni just a s I ha ng – a t c s poorlyas I can be." days w h e n I a

SUPERIOR MIRAGE

LYDIA GLENN-MURRAY

You’re Not in Trouble: An Interview with Miranda July

Miranda July is a prolific artist, writer, and filmmaker. She is also the mother of a one-year-old, so our interview was scheduled between nap times. I have interned with Miranda since May, 2011. We are currently focused on the launch of the Joanie 4 Jackie web archive which can be found at www.joanie4jackie.com. Joanie 4 Jackie, formerly Big Miss Moviola, is a project that Miranda began in the mid-1990’s and moved to Bard College in 2003.

Lydia

Joanie 4 Jackie is such an interesting and powerful project. It has to do

Glenn-Murray

with a social movement as well as physical movement of objects across the country and you across the country. If you wouldn’t mind, maybe we can begin with you telling me about the project in your own words.

Miranda July

I started it in 1995 right after I dropped out of college and it was sort of inspired by the do-it-yourself Riot Grrrl-esque spirit of the Northwest at that time, which was totally music-centric. I wasn’t a musician, but all my friends were. I didn’t actually think too much about that when I typed up this pamphlet and Xeroxed it and gave it to bands like Bikini Kill to hand out on tour. The pamphlet basically said, if you’re a girl and you’ve made a movie and you send it to me, I’ll send you back a tape with your movie and nine other movies on it so that we can see each others’ work . . . which sounds really archaic now, but this was just before the Internet. I remember I knew someone that had a digital video

67

camera, or maybe it wasn’t digital but a video camera, that I could

borrow, but uploading and all of that wasn’t happening yet. So, yes, I did that project and made what I called chain letter tapes. I made, I

think, thirteen chain letter tapes with ten movies on each of them over the next nine years.

LGM

You bring up the dawn of the Internet, and I’ve been thinking about your character Sophie in your 2011 film The Future who is watching her coworkers’ videos on Youtube and how that is something that any woman who has a video camera and Internet access can do now. Do you think that there still is a need for that type of prompt?

MJ

You know what’s funny—I forgot about this—when I was writing the script for The Future I knew my character was a dancer and that she’d be looking at these videos online, and so I was looking at the videos online and the thing that really struck me was wow, girls are making movies now. They’re making them in their bedrooms just like I had hoped. Except, they’re dancing in all of them. That’s how it seemed to me in that moment, you know? That something had sort of gone awry.

Not that there aren’t other kinds of movies that women are making, but if you talk about the mainstream of girls, you know, young girls, teenage girls across America, mostly it is dancing—or some form of body showoff. I don’t knock that. I think that desire to show off is often the starting place of art. I’m in my work, so I don’t think it’s problematic. I just think there probably does need to be a next step. So yeah, part of making the archive is not to re-launch the project—I’m not doing that—

but to kind of point at this thing that existed then and maybe ask the question, now that we can actually do this . . . are we going to?

LGM

Do you feel that within Hollywood or the “art world” there is a kind of sisterhood?

MJ

Well, it has gotten a little better since I made my first feature. When I went to Sundance in 2005 with Me and You and Everyone We Know, mine was one of two movies in competition made by women. It was me and one other woman. And her movie never saw the light of day. And that is different now. I guess I think of it on a few different levels, and the level that we’re talking about of Joanie 4 Jackie or girls making movies on the Internet is not about a career, it’s not about film festivals, Hollywood, or even school necessarily. It’s something more intimate and more immediate and between women. You may not even want to call it filmmaking. Maybe there needs to be a new word for it. But that thing was what I was trying to place a value on—this sort of sharing and connecting and being honest using film as a woman, not only to get famous or create a job for yourself. I think that spirit is coming out more now. I mean, it’s hard not to point to things like Girls, you know, Lena Dunham. Who’s your age, right?

LGM MJ

Yeah, she’s just a few years older than me.

It’s curious to me, does having always had that technology create a different brain or a different, more porous way of using it? I’m just throwing out more questions to your questions . . .

LGM

You mention that your work on Joanie 4 Jackie was not about promoting your own career, but about creating a space for women. I have heard you describe in interviews a desire to create a community of women filmmakers. That project was specifically by and for women, but a lot of your work, whether performance or your web project with Harrell Fletcher, Learning To Love You More or even your sculptures, Eleven Heavy Things, all invite participation and create a platform for other people to share and interact with the work. In perhaps a really specific way or perhaps a really loose way, these projects all seem to create some sense of community. I wonder where that began for you. Is that totally conscious and intentional? Is it a specific thing that was informed by your parents or experiences when you were younger or can it not be traced back to any specific source?

MJ

Yeah, I guess I am—right now at least—thinking less in terms of community and more about connecting in a moment with one other person. You could use my sculptures alone or go to a performance alone and feel something. As far as that porousness, creating work that has holes in it—literally, sometimes—I think, well it’s two things. It is a little bit from my background. Somehow, I was raised with an idea that

you should be of service. In some sense, your passion should connect with something helpful. And so maybe when I feel like it’s helping me, because it definitely does, I feel like it’s all kinds of therapy for me, I try and figure out . . . how could I give that feeling? How could I create that somewhat for someone else? Even if it’s a sort of an uncomfortable feeling, because it is sometimes. And, secondly, I’m very internal—not shy but not a social butterfly exactly—and I easily get lost in my own world, and so I think to some degree I am always creating situations where I’m forced to interact with people and where I’m forced to engage and make use of reality because I could just go on and on alone, and end up very alone. And that’s already a feeling I’m fighting.

LGM

People ask me all the time, “What are you going to do after graduation?

Where will you go with this art degree?” and so I have been looking critically at the art world and whether I might fit into it or not. As someone whose work is more similar to yours and has to do with space and time specificity and connections between people, rather than a painter, or a photographer, or someone whose work can be easily commodified, I don’t know that my work fits in with the mainstream art world as it is, and I don’t know that I want it to. That doesn’t seem like a space that is very supportive of much of the type of work that I am interested in, but more like a marketplace. I guess I wonder what

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your view is of that kind of art world—here in Los Angeles we are

surrounded by LACMA, MOCA, millions of galleries, collectors, and big art scene names. It seems like you have been able to work within that and without it. Can you describe your relationship to that art world?

MJ

I mean, you, just by virtue of being in art school, know more about the art world than I ever have. And so it’s probably more of a presence that you are pushing in relation to than it was for me. But that was, conscious or not, a decision that I made. I think it began with school itself, dropping out of school, never even having a major or anything like that, was kind of saying, okay, I can’t handle institutions. I don’t want to be a part of something. I want to make my own thing and then hopefully invite people into it. It’s funny, now that I have a little more understanding of myself I can see that a lot of that came from really not knowing how to deal with other people or charismatic situations.

I easily get enmeshed and totally pulled in and I lose myself and I don’t know what I’m doing, and I think I instinctively knew that about myself.

And so I was like, okay, I am not going to move to New York because I don’t know if I’m tough enough to keep being me in the context of any sort of narcissism.

I knew I’d get pulled into it and be like, wow, let me just think about you all the time instead of me. And I still have that feeling. I remember getting a story published in The New Yorker, and when you do that they offer you a free subscription. And I remember, even though I’d always wanted to subscribe to The New Yorker, I didn’t take it, because

I thought, I don’t want to be that conscious of this world. I don’t want it coming into my house every week. And so I just buy it occasionally.

That’s just a little example, but that pretty much plays out across the board. I keep my distance. It doesn’t mean that I don’t flip through Artforum and think, wow, I wanna do that! I wanna be in there! But I think my way of grappling with that feeling, that really strong, even motivating feeling is just, okay, well I’m going to make my work and I’ll make it really good. And then when I have something to show for myself, I’ll go knock on a few doors. I did that when I was really young, and I still do that. Granted it’s easier now, but I still don’t have a gallery or anything . . . it’s all very piecemeal. I keep it pretty loose. You know, half the stuff comes through my website.

LGM

Well, I thought it was very cool that with Joanie 4 Jackie you performed and screened the movies in churches, punk clubs, and high schools.

It must have drawn a different audience. I think sometimes a gallery can be a bit isolating. People have different connotations of that and may or may not feel interested or welcome there. When it’s in an “alternative space,” it seems like there might be more room for people to figure out what this thing is for themselves rather than feeling like they should “get it” because a curator chose to put it there.

MJ

Right. Yeah, I was always trying to get to people who wouldn’t automatically find me. Though I have to say now, the Web does such a better job of that than I could ever do physically—and that’s gratifying.

Sometimes on Twitter, I’ll click on someone who is following me and just be like, wow, I just can’t even fathom how that person got here.

I’ve never been to that part of the world . . . I remember performing at a public high school in Vancouver and that was about as far out of things, a public high school, as I could get.

LGM

What does it feel like, going back and archiving the project? Do you feel like you’ve had any new realizations or is there a certain comfort in returning to this early project at all?

MJ

It’s funny, I always had a really manic energy when I worked on it. When I started it and through all those years that I was doing it, I would be working on it and hours would go by and I wouldn’t even notice. And it’s like that again now. I barely have time to work on it but when I do, you’ll probably get, you know, nine emails from me suddenly.

I’ll be in my weird Joanie 4 Jackie trance state. I don’t know why it’s so consuming . . . maybe because it’s not my work. Kicking it into the future, which happens to be now, and being like, what do you think of this? We come from the past! What do you think of us? So, yeah, as you know we are about to get to the phase where we ask all of the participants, the several hundred women who sent their movies in, to look at the website and to think about the project and write their thoughts about it. We have a little email survey that they can fill in and that makes me really

nervous. In fact, I just told Yuri, the web designer, let’s not put too much work into the part of the website that those surveys are going to go into because what if no one does them. I’m at that moment where it’s like, what if no one comes to the party that you throw?

LGM

I’m sure that won’t happen! I see a lot of the themes of your work existing already in Joanie 4 Jackie, participation and so on. It seems like the project was really inspiring and satisfying for you as you were working on it. Do you think that after this early project you wanted to continue seeking out that type of stimulation or do you think those interests were pre-existing and this project was just one of many iterations of those tendencies?

MJ

Well, I think they were pre-existing. The director side of me was able to come out in the project even though I hadn’t actually directed a movie yet when I started it. It was the first manifestation of a bunch of things that I would continue to do, probably for the rest of my life.

Before that, yeah, I did some things . . . I wrote some plays and stuff, but I think part of it was that I hadn’t really met other women who were into feminism and who were into being super ambitious and dreaming big and pretending that you felt powerful even when you didn’t, just to get up in the morning. And then, bam, I was suddenly surrounded by

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women like that. It wasn’t perfect, you know, we all hated each other after a few years, but I was filled with that momentum and I think that did light a spark that I went with for a long time and then it kind of evolved into

being an adult and having some actual confidence, not just all bluffing.

LGM

I love the clip you made for one of the chain letters where you walk into the post office and the woman behind the counter greets you and yells out, “There’s so much mail here for you!” when in reality you said you were getting a package every couple of weeks at that point. It is very motivating. You also bring up feminism . . . and I know that this is a really massive question, but what does feminism mean to you?

MJ

I always try and skip these questions! I guess just for me recently, it’s actually surprising the little ways that it comes up on a day-to-day basis.

I still sell myself short in ways that I think are societal, in ways that my totally great husband doesn’t do, and in ways that I can see other really capable women that I know doing. And so I think—right this second— when I think about feminism, I think about going to therapy every other week, which I do, and trying to root out, why do I do this? Why am I not located in me always? Why is the story always what’s happening in someone else’s head? So, I could give a million answers to that question, but that’s probably the most personal one.

LGM

And what about being a new mom? Motherhood is such an important feminist issue. Has that changed your ideas about feminism? And how has that affected your work?

MJ

Yeah, I mean, I was so afraid of it, and put it off. Even though I knew that I wanted to have a child, I was like, well, let me make this movie first, let me get as established as I possibly can be, because what if it all slips away. Well, part of what I see is like, oh yeah, that actually was really lucky that I got to where I did, because I can do both really easily—relatively easily—because it’s already established. I don’t need to invent something, I just need to continue with the discipline aspect of my work. I think I see economic issues with women a little more clearly, like I see what money can buy you as a mom, which is essentially time, like child care. I didn’t think as much about money before and now I have to make a certain amount. As for my love of my son . . . I won’t get into that. I could speak about him all day.

LGM

I know you’ve been really disciplined about going into work at certain hours. Do you think that you value that time differently now because these moments are suddenly made precious? Does it feel different?

MJ

Yeah, now when I’m writing, I’m paying someone for those hours. So it’s very clear-cut, and I don’t mess around much. I’d say the hard things—the things that go out the window, so far for me—are having lunch with a friend or going to yoga or any of the things that aren’t work or the baby. I can manage those two things. I’m just not that good at anything beyond that. But I have to say, if you’re kind of into discipline a little bit it’s sort of like the Olympics of that, and you’re like, wow, look at this! Look at what I’m doing! I’m spinning twelve plates! And you think that maybe it’s making everything better. I don’t know if that’s an illusion or not, but I definitely don’t feel like my work is suffering or like my creativity is. There’s just a lot less time where I have freak-outs or think about my own thoughts. Like that thing that I often used to do on Sundays, where I was just like, oh my god, I feel weird! And I’m just gonna go into that for like the next five hours! And maybe cry! And then pull myself out. That is just gone. Which actually doesn’t seem unhealthy. It turns out that may have been just extra and not necessary.

LGM

I know you have some really interesting child-parent or child-guardian relationships in your stories, including with the cat Paw Paw in The Future, and I really liked something that you said to me when Hopper was born—you told me his name and you said that he could be a politician or a high school dropout with that name, and I really liked that openness. Do you think that there are certain things that you would want to instill in him? Or do you hope that your work in general might leave a certain legacy?

MJ

I will say, one thing about Hopper is that my work has nothing to do with him. Like, there’s a person on Earth who never needs to see anything I do as far as I’m concerned. I just have no investment in that at least at the moment. I think the main thing that I want to give to him is that he feels free. And that, in terms of me, that he feels like he doesn’t have

to be anything to get my love—that just who he is, that just being a person—that’s it, you know, he’s already done enough. Which isn’t exactly how I feel. I feel like I have to do quite a lot every second to be good enough. And so, saying it out loud, I think maybe, yeah, that’s probably in my work too. I’m trying to make that space for other people for a long time. Even, if you’re uncomfortable or unsure or have doubt, that’s fine! That doesn’t mean that you’re doing anything wrong. You’re not in trouble. In fact you’re probably doing the perfect thing when you feel that.

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Lydia Glenn-Murray lives, studies and works in Los Angeles.

Navid Sinaki Towelhead (1–6, series of 20) 2012 Video and digital print 16 x 20 in.

In response to the forces of water, light and bodies, the modernist grid of the tiled pool dematerializes into a complex and dynamic network of infinite variety. Rather than treat the Manhattan block as the traditional island, the project attempts to integrate circulation with the existing flows of the area, dissolving the form into mat while

Lucas Lind NATATORIUM 2012 Physical Model

simultaneously introducing new spatial and experiential conditions into the area. During the summer, the large, semioutdoor pool fills the void left by the lack of recreational beaches in Harlem. During the winter, the smaller exterior pool creates an urban hot springs typology. Both pools leak through perforations into the subterranean grotto, where two additional pools under the public routes of circulation form spaces that capture the dynamic interaction between moving bodies and filtered, reflected and refracted light.

Bodies are understood of as complex entities and investigated according to speed, directionality, actions and relationships within and among a field of pedestrians.

The complex interactions between bodies, patterning, light penetration and water leakage create a new condition of occupation and a new sensorial experience. Surface grain articulation challenges the legibility of the object in the round, while the boundaries between bodies and surfaces dissolve under the influence of the potent forces of light, water and movement. The complexity and mass customization made possible by post-Fordist construction techniques is used to challenge the stability and wholeness of the fetishized sculpturalism the very same fabrication methods have made so ubiquitous. The kiss of the network onto a sculptural form is likened to the decorated shed, which Venturi described as the application of an ornamental or representational surface onto a modernist structure. The effects obscure a formal-sculptural reading in favor of the more varied and dynamic experience of dematerialization.

Lucas Lind NATATORIUM 2012 Interior Rendering

Jody Lu 97% 2013 3.5 x 7 in.

Helianthus annus (sunflower), glass jar, isopropyl alcohol, 3% water

Jody Lu 70% 2013 3.5 x 7 in.

Gypsophila (baby’s breath), glass jar, isopropyl alcohol, 20% water

Jody Lu 43% 2013 3.5 x 7 in.

Antirrhinum (snap dragon), glass jar, isopropyl alcohol, 10% water

Jody Lu 90% 2013 3.5 x 7 in.

Enchinacea (purple coneflower), glass jar, isopropyl alcohol, 10% water

JANE CAVALIER

Flatter than Superflat: Chiho Aoshima and the Flattening of Partial Identities

Chiho Aoshima, contemporary Japanese artist and member of Takashi Murakami’s Kaikai Kiki Co., speaks a language of paradox. She utilizes the style of Tokyo Pop— a movement that synthesizes traditional Japanese practices with the visual culture of American pop art—in order to critique the movement from within, objectifying her female subjects to humanize them and destroying nature to bring the viewer closer to it. Aoshima compresses the fractals of her figures’ identities into glossy, lustrous worlds of self-discovery, for the onlookers and looked-upon subjects of her oeuvre.

Expressing these divergent experiences within the framework of Tokyo Pop, Aoshima adopts the movement’s formal and thematic customs in her analysis of imposing 1

and eroticized representations of women in Japanese art, both high and low. She embraces pop art’s highly saturated colors and iconic graphic quality while blending Japan’s artistic and mundane commodity cultures, drawing upon Rimpa School painting, ukiyo-e scroll painting, manga (animation), kawaii (cute culture), otaku (geek subculture), and the “brazen libidinousness” of Japan’s prolific hentai (hard-core manga) industry.

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Murakami developed Superflat theory to explain the movement’s stylistic and contextual significance through a tripartite process of flattening. He argues that Tokyo Pop reduces the disparity between high and low culture, saturates contemporary work with Japanese art historical references, and appropriates the fantastical realms of manga and anime, which otaku and other subcultures produced in order to compress and escape from the memories of World War II.

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Aoshima works within Superflat’s three levels of meaning to justify her uniquely fourth

level of flattening, in which she expands the identities of her female subjects as a critique of Tokyo Pop and its kawaii, or cute visual practices’ reductive and one-dimensional approach to female identity. She created three series of lithographs of increasing complexity that explore the ways Tokyo Pop artists have used kawaii to render their

eroticized female subjects mute and dehumanized. In Japanese Apricot (1999), a print from her first series, Aoshima flattens high and low commodity culture in both technique and style, enabling her work to stand at the intersection of manga and Edo period painting. Her use of Adobe Illustrator flattens the high culture technique of painting into a low culture craft: an automated process of repeating data to create colors and shapes (as manifested in her heavy repetition of apricot blossoms and twinkling stars). This animated quality refers to contemporary manga and its abstracting kawaii practices, while also drawing upon the heavy outlines of ukiyo-e woodblock prints, thereby synthesizing high and low visual culture.

1

2

Ibid., 128.

Gennifer Weisenfeld, “Reinscribing Tradition in a Transnational Art World,” qtd. in Melissa Chiu and Benjamin Genocchio, Asian Art Now (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2010), 128.

Furthermore, she merges past and future into a single image by setting her scene in an ambiguous realm of time and place. The environments she creates inhabit a space between hazy daylight and starry nocturnal skies, set upon mystically floating islands that are flatly juxtaposed with jagged mountains in the background. Here, Aoshima composes a scene infused with the uncertainty of ambiguous time, a common trope of contemporary anime and manga, which she, as a Tokyo Pop artist, incorporates in order to reach beyond the sphere of high art.

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This synthesis of high and low art underlies Murakami’s second level of Superflat flattening, which describes Tokyo Pop’s fusion of ancient and contemporary art.

Murakami suggests that the two-dimensional, graphic quality of Tokyo Pop perpetuates the surface qualities of ukiyo-e woodblock prints, which were renowned in Japan’s Edo period for their entertainment value as mass-produced representations of Tokyo’s promiscuous nightlife.

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The disparate compositional elements of Aoshima’s Japanese Apricot, such as the divulging tree branches and mountainous plane in the background, attempt to draw the viewer’s eye from one end of an image to the other and thereby reinforce the print’s flatness. This heightened two dimensionality recalls the painter Ogata Korin (1658–1716), of the Rimpa School of painting, which is characterized by distortion and flattening of forms in simple and refined compositions, even to a point of abstraction.

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The moss on the apricot tree in Japanese Apricot references Korin’s Red and White Plum Trees, which depicts two moss-covered plum trees, one red and one white, separated by a stream. With Adobe Illustrator, Aoshima further flattens the art of Rimpa School painting by mechanizing its signature brushstroke, tarashikomi, in which a second layer of paint is applied while the first layer is still wet, dissipating paint precisely in the shape of a patch of moss.

Aoshima increasingly condenses art history in Japanese Apricot by referring to Korin’s Matsushima, which depicts a very famous view of the sea. Aoshima appropriates Korin’s characteristic tone of paradisiacal serenity for her own representation of similarly verdant floating islands. Japanese Apricot exemplifies Superflat’s compression of Japanese art history as Aoshima deliberately references the heavily linear quality of ukiyo-e woodblock prints, in addition to the renowned brushstroke and subject matter of Rimpa School painting.

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4

Chiu, Genocchio, Asian Art Now, 123.

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Susan Lubowsky Talbott, “Posthuman: Monsters and Cyborgs,” in My Reality: Contemporary Art and the Culture of Japanese Animation (Des Moines, IA: Des Moines Art Center, 2001), 53.

Yuzo Yamane, Masato Naito, and Timothy Clark, Rimpa Art: From the Idemitsu Collection, Tokyo (London: British Museum Press, 1998), 50.

While Aoshima incorporates a multitude of Japan’s past stylistic traditions into this single image, her work, in its reference to otaku, manga, and kogyaru (obsession with high school-age girls), speaks to Japan’s flattening and repressing of the memory of 6

World War II into fantasy. According to Murakami, manga “gave the otaku a dream to follow, and provided a sort of psychological escape zone for defeated spirits 7

by equating the new types [i.e. animated sub-realities] with postwar Japan.” As Murakami and many cultural scholars have suggested, manga and anime emerged as venues for reflecting upon post-atomic realities in a fantastically removed and unthreatening realm. Naturally, themes of sex and consumption evolved in printed and cinematic material as ways of thinking through submissiveness as a forced psychological effect following defeat in the Second World War.

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Otaku seeks to possess their love objects, and by placing them within fictive kawaii contexts, they render their objects “mute” and easily consumable.

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In Japanese

Apricot, Aoshima’s wafer-thin, adolescent girl bound to a tree recalls the otaku erotic preference for animated pubescent females and gives form to the powerlessness that kawaii inflicts upon its silenced female subjects. Here, she also emphasizes the girl’s powerlessness by juxtaposing her with a bird in flight. The trace of kawaii and its associations with childishness and play in Japanese Apricot illustrate how the work fulfills Superflat’s third level of flattening. Kawaii is a “survival mechanism”

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for

contemporary Japanese audiences, representing suppressed dreams for life beyond the atomic bomb and the diplomatic “infantilism” that followed America’s rewriting of Japan’s constitution with a stipulation of military passivity.

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The work’s fantastical

realm, set upon an isolated floating island, offers yet another vehicle for escapism.

Aoshima paradoxically appeals to Superflat’s three levels of flattening in order to

critique Tokyo Pop’s objectifying and fractured representations of its female subjects.

Drawing upon the philosophy that “art is a criticism of the media it depends 6

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12

Tamaki Saito, “The Asymmetry of Masculine/ Feminine Otaku Sexuality” in Ayelet Zohar, ed., PostGender: Gender, Sexuality, and Performativity in Japanese Culture (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 157.

Takashi Murakami, “Impotence Culture— Anime,” in My Reality: Contemporary Art and the Culture of Japanese Animation, (Des Moines, IA: Des Moines Art Center, 2001), 66.

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10 Lloyd, “Strategic Interventions,” 17.

Rachel Pick, “Pop Psychosis: the Influence of the Bomb on Superflat Art,” in Post Bubble Culture: Research on Contemporary Japan, http://postbubbleculture.blogs.wm.edu/2010/ 04/19/pop-psychosis-the-influence-of-the-bombon-superflat-art/, accessed January 1, 2013.

Ibid., 66.

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11

Fran Lloyd, “Strategic Interventions in Contemporary Japanese Art” in Consuming Bodies: Sex and Contemporary Japanese Art (London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2002), 69.

Jeff Fleming, “My Reality, Your Reality” in My Reality: Contemporary Art and the Culture of Japanese Animation (Des Moines, IA: Des Moines Art Center, 2001), 36.

upon,” Aoshima extends Murakami’s Superflat theory to offer a fourth component, a flattening of identity.

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She embraces the contradiction of her own inclusion in the

Tokyo Pop movement as a means of exposing polarities in her subjects’ identities and environments, offering a feminist, individualist, and, at times, environmentalist critique of Japanese culture and visual practices. Aoshima constructs her work around a series of dichotomies—innocence vs. eroticism, the apocalyptic vs. the paradisiacal, humanized vs. otherworldly subjects, man vs. nature, reality vs. fantasy, personal erotic desire vs. culturally imposed erotic desire, and past vs. future. She embraces these points of collision, combining and compressing them, to create flattened hyperrealities “as provocative as incongruity itself.”

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Aoshima’s three Japanese Apricot series, as well as a more recent illustration, We Are Battered by Nature, We Are Loved by Nature, exemplify the artist’s process of working within the framework of Superflat to expose Japan’s historically contradictory approach to female identity in both high and low art. She uses the movement’s visual lexicon as a set of tools for flattening and giving form to divergent imposed and experienced identities, motivated by the tension between her perspective as a contemporary Japanese female artist and that of the male-dominated visual culture in which she works. Of course, the greatest contradiction of Aoshima’s work lies in its seductive beauty. Her use of highly saturated colors, glossy paper, and grand scale compels the viewer’s attention, while the content of her work and its dichotomous tropes subvert the sexuality of her nude figures, enabling each piece to paradoxically encompass and yet transcend the polarities of attraction.

In Japanese Apricot 2 (2004), Aoshima subverts her references to otaku erotica and kawaii illustration by conveying how they dictate the portrayal of women around the male gaze. For instance, the composition’s focal point is an anonymous female nude bound to an apricot tree, but the scene is notably absent of men, which is how Aoshima leaves space for the authoritarian male gaze to linger. However, the figure pulls away from the viewer, and her face conveys discomfort and hesitance, as she appears to unhappily enact another person’s fantasies. She appears to be unhappily enacting another person’s fantasies.

Aoshima also acts upon our expectations for harmless and uncomplicated pleasure when confronted with kawaii imagery. In the woman’s demure, innocent, and (most poignantly) anonymous appearance, she becomes a vessel for holding the viewer’s

13

Dana Friis­-Hansen, “Japan Today: Empire of Goods, Young Japanese Artists and the Commodity Culture,” in Flash Art, March-April 1992, 77.

14 Ariel Swartley, “Art/Architecture; For the Pop Culturati, Patterns That Say Tokyo Cool,” The New York Times, April 22, 2001 (http:// www.nytimes.com/2001/04/22/ arts/art-architecture-for-the-popculturati-patterns-that-say-tokyo-cool. html?pagewanted=all&src=pm).

emotions. “Considered within its larger context, ‘cute’ takes on a certain introspective valence. Cuteness, though ostensibly devoid of irony, does not negate darkness, and can in fact be a means to accessing darkness, as characters become loci of emotion and identification.”

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Aoshima uses the work’s cute facade to encourage the viewer

to impregnate the female figure with his or her own feelings and memories. With this emotional attachment and subversion of the viewer’s expectations for “innocence”, the cruelty behind her bondage becomes even more apparent.

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Aoshima flattens the

dichotomy between the viewer’s expectations and his or her experience of the image to critique the visual culture that represents women as anonymous objects before a penetrating male gaze.

While the figure’s anonymity forces the outwardly directed gaze of the viewer to become introspective, Aoshima’s refusal to give the female any distinguishing characteristics also counters her appeal to otaku desire. Surveys of male otaku reveal that they often assign their arousal (moe) to the defining characteristics and accessories of their favorite characters.

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This is because the female manga

protagonists often lack “in-depth traumatic structure” and authors must compensate for it with external adornment.

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Thus, Aoshima resists the distinctive decorative

motifs of sexualized manga characters, and she excludes their enormous eyes and breasts, as well as any individualizing martial arts capability. Rather, her slender figures have more naturalistic features and, bound to the tree, are completely powerless.

19

Aoshima’s Japanese Apricot 2 represents the contradictory function of

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anonymity, which simultaneously objectifies the female and rejects externally driven male arousal by encouraging introspection as a niche for emotional identification.

Aoshima embraces sexuality and the nature of consumption as a means of expressing the difficulties of her own position as a woman within society.

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In Japanese Apricot 3 – A Pink Dream (2007), Aoshima flattens space, time, and place to reveal the dual role of her figures’ sexuality as both a humanizing and dehumanizing force. She represents seven nude females bound to an enormous apricot tree, along with two floating orbs in the background, one with a baby tree and a single nude tied to it, and a second, larger apricot tree with four suspended female figures. From the foremost apricot tree, girls hang in a multitude of erotic poses above a ground consumed by skulls, roots, and highly saturated levels of colored earth. Aoshima flattens time through the use of continuous narrative, in which a globe grows over three stages, developing along with its apricot tree and crowd of bound figures.

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18 Ibid.

Ivan Vartanian, Drop Dead Cute: The New Generation of Women Artists in Japan, (San Francisco: Chronicle Books LLC, 2005), 11.

16 Ibid.

17

Saito, “Asymmetry,” 160.

19 Vartanian, “Drop Dead Cute,” 8.

20 Lloyd, “Strategic Interventions,” 71.

While combining the past and future is a common theme in anime and manga, Aoshima does so to remove the scene from reality and its modes of decorum.

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She also

dissects the foremost orb, revealing its exterior and interior layers, and presses it against the picture plane, thereby obliterating any semblance of dimensionality. This fantastic spatial and futuristic quality deliberately removes the nude women from reality and thus dehumanizes them, though they already lack any distinguishing characteristics beyond their hair color. They appear ghostlike and extraterrestrial, and our conception of their role vacillates between their human bodies and the otherworldly setting. In this “posthuman” reality, sex may be “the only real thing left.”

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The compressed time and otherworldly space of the scene confound the viewer’s ability to empathize with the bound females, so that their sexuality paradoxically becomes their most humanizing quality because it grounds them in the viewer’s reality.

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The dichotomous role of the girls’ sexuality, simultaneously an appeal for

sympathy and the root of their objectification emerges from the ambiguous hyperreality of time and space that Aoshima structures.

Japanese Apricot 3 – A Pink Dream represents Aoshima’s own fantasy, which she promotes in order to negate that of the viewer. She explains, “My work feels like strands of my thoughts that have flown around the universe before coming back to materialize.”

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By imprinting her own fantasy on the work, she seizes control of the

world she has constructed and again paradoxically fills the space for a viewer’s opposing sexual fantasy with her own. In this sense, her exhibitionist figures, which gaze beyond the picture plane to address the viewer, gain “self-aware femininity,” animated by Aoshima’s own introspection.

25

Yet Aoshima’s fantasy also has a morose, ghoulish quality to its arrangement of interwoven skulls and lithe, ghost-like figures; however, despite these grim realities, her work lacks “shock value,” because it is undercut by her highly saturated pink color scheme and use of sexual motifs, which the viewer positively associates with otaku erotica. The female creatures represent the “living dead,” and as such, convey “a horror of the human self,” serving to remind the viewer of his or her own liveliness.

26

The nightmarish scenes are not truly frightening, but they provoke the

viewer to become increasingly aware of his or her own liveliness by contrasting the

21

Talbott, “Posthuman,” 53.

22

23 Talbott, “Posthuman,” 50.

24 Dan Goddard, “Spirited Skyline: Japanese Artist Gives S.A.’s Downtown Buildings a Personality of Their Own,” San Antonio Express-News, December 6, 2006 (ProQuest).

25 Tom Eccles, “Murakami’s Manhattan Project,” in Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture, ed. Takashi Murakami, (New York: Japan 26 Vartanian, “Drop Dead Cute,” 33.

Society, 2005), 266.

Geri Wittig, “The Body, Post Humans and Cyborgs: The Influence of Politics of Identity and Emerging Digital and BioTechnologies on Human Representation in Late 20th Century Art,” Switch 2, no 2. (1996): http:// switch.sjsu.edu/switch/ narrative/posthuman/ posthuman.html

viewer’s vivacity with macabre imagery of death. Aoshima’s imposed fantasy, which represents death to encourage vitality, embraces binaries to remind the viewer not only of his or her own humanity, but also the humanity of her nude figures.

In her lithograph, We Are Battered by Nature, We Are Loved by Nature (2007), Aoshima constructs an environment “at once paradisiacal and apocalyptic,” in which her collapsing of paradoxes reaches its zenith, as the title itself exemplifies.

27

The great scope and swirls of color, carried in tornadoes, smoke clouds, budding flowers, and swampy landscape, lend a psychedelic, fantastical character to the work. Aoshima represents a tumultuous landscape filled with natural disasters, yet juxtaposes the scenes of fire and destruction against details of verdant growth, such as moss, flowers, and grass. In this work as well, she captures time in continuous narrative, moving from left to right, from dawn to dusk. She presents two constructions of nature: one literal through the tumultuous landscape, another allegorical through the enormous, poignantly white reclining nude that dominates the scene. This figure personifies nature and thus becomes a suspect for the destruction of the landscape as well as the act of piercing each of the smaller nude girls with the branches of the large apricot tree. Within this ambiguous narrative, the figure epitomizes the dichotomy between innocence and guilt, vulnerability and intentionality.

This allegorical understanding of woman as inherently connected to nature and the material world functions as an important component of Cyborg Feminism,

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a contemporary theory that advocates for “lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.”

28

Aoshima collapses

the boundaries of her figures’ identities between their environmental, organic, allegorical, and mythological existences. She refers to Cyborg Feminism not only to connect her figures to the natural world, but also to empower their fractured identities, as they remain caught within a network of polarizing perspectives. It is this combination and compression of partial identities that comes to full fruition in We Are Battered by Nature, We Are Loved by Nature. This lithograph speaks to the potential for destruction, as well as harmony, that lies in flattening imposed and experienced conceptions of her figures, her viewers, and herself.

28 Midori Matsui, “Beyond the Pleasure Room to a Chaotic Street: Transformations of Cute Subculture in the Art of the Japanese,” in Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture, ed. Takashi Murakami (New York: Japan Society, 2005), 231.

27 Eccles, “Murakami’s Manhattan Project,” 266.

Aoshima’s oeuvre exemplifies Murakami’s Superflat theory and its practice of converging disparate, often contradictory elements of culture, yet she expands the theory to offer a fourth level of flattening, one that touches upon her own position as a contemporary female artist and questions the mechanisms by which time and space define reality for the viewer. While associated with Tokyo Pop, Aoshima appropriates the movement’s stylistic synthesis of high and low culture and compression of Japanese art history, whether Rimpa School painting or contemporary anime, to critique the movement’s portrayal of women according to an imposing and hypersexual male gaze. Kawaii, manga, and hentai grew in popularity following World War II as escapist mechanisms for repressing memories of wartime trauma, but Aoshima’s work demonstrates how these mediums, which inspired the third level of Superflat flattening in Tokyo Pop, evolved into spaces where authors encourage sex as an act of consumption. Her ambiguous narratives confuse the viewer’s desire to render mute and dehumanized the female objects of his or her affection by simultaneously encouraging introspection and emotional identification with the bare and homogeneous women. Her method is paradoxical, but it reinforces her assertion that the nature of her subjects’ experienced personas and those imposed upon them by their audiences are antithetical to one another.

Aoshima compresses the fragments of identity as the viewer experiences and observes them in order release the space between disparate elements. She invites the viewer to linger within this emergent space, from which she constructs images with as much potential for violence, destruction, and seductiveness as any lived experience of externally imposed identity today. While Aoshima continues to develop as a young member of Kaikai Kiki Co., she potentially surpasses Murakami’s Superflat, redirecting Tokyo Pop’s focus away from Japan’s wartime trauma toward a future filled with national introspection and emotional complexity.

Jane Cavalier is a junior at Dartmouth College, where she is a Frank Fellow and James O. Freedman Presidential Scholar. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she is an art history major and co-editorin-chief of Dartmouth’s annual Collegiate Journal of Art. She also currently works as a senior curatorial intern assisting the director of the Hood Museum of Art. She is delighted to publish with this journal, and invites its readers to engage with another essay she published in the fall 2012 edition of the Northwestern Art Review, titled “Sight and Representation: A Process for Visual Discovery in 17th Century Netherlands.”

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Flatter than Superflat: Chiho Aoshima and the Flattening of Partial Identities

Japanese Apricot, 2006. Offset lithograph. 61.5 x 81.3 cm. (24 1/5 x 32 in.) Š2013 Chiho Aoshima/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved

Japanese Apricot 3 - A Pink Dream, 2007. Digital chromogenic print, diasec mounted. 141.6 x 169.8 cm (55 3/4 x 66 7/8 in) Š2013 Chiho Aoshima/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved

EVAN MOFFITT

Squatters Under Siege: Berlin and the Flight of the “Temporary Autonomous Zone”

What began as a light patter of raindrops grew quickly into a torrential downpour. As lightning illuminated the Berliner Dom’s golden cupola, I ran through the streets of Mitte looking for shelter. For one of Berlin’s only remaining neighborhoods still a chaotic tangle of medieval cobblestoned streets, Mitte was eerily empty. Flaneurs like myself had already found warmth in dimly lit bars along the River Spree. Thoroughly soaked, I ducked under the relative shade of a condemned building on Oranienstrasse.

Down the street, the Fernsehturm (TV Tower) glowed dully, the monumental relic of a socialist Germany now faded away. It was my first of many nights in the city, and feeling dispirited by the wet weather (I had arrived from arid Los Angeles), I began to plan my commute home when a voice spoke to me from the shadows.

A portly woman had emerged from the doorway behind me, clutching a half-smoked cigarette in her right hand. She invited me in, toward a wash of turquoise light and the opening bars of “Blue Monday.” I looked more carefully at the building, its crumbling stone exterior pasted with countless concert bills, colorful posters, and spray-painted scrawl. Above the door a rubber gorilla and a penguin held a dripping banner that read, “Where shall we go now?”

The woman led me into a gallery, art tacked to the walls from floor to ceiling. Slogans stenciled on cardboard hung forty feet above us, near a splintering ladder that led to an attic loft. Flyers and zines lay scattered on folding tables. A few people sat at a makeshift bar, drinking beer and passing around vinyl records. I was informed that

85

I had arrived at Tacheles, a center of countercultural activity and illegal squat. The

building had been repurposed in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when vacant, derelict buildings were used as exhibition spaces and dance halls by jubilant East

Germans who were finally free from state oppression. But now, she told me, it was all over. Tacheles would be closed in only a month’s time; the property owner had

finally made eviction orders, and the Berlin police intended to act on them. She led me through another door, once an entrance to a beer garden and tent village that covered the muddied ground behind the former department store. It had been barricaded with scrap metal, old junkyard items like discarded dishwashers and car parts, made intractable by police intervention. “They want to stop us from getting in,” she lamented. “This is our workplace . . . our home.”

It was the last time I would go inside Tacheles. Several weeks later, the squatted building lay empty and shuttered, its entrances blocked by more debris. The last of many squats in Berlin, Tacheles was formed out of the creative ambitions of a few artists who used the vacant structure for studio and gallery space after the Wall fell.

Like many other squats in Berlin and northern Europe, its inception was motivated by political and social interests and not by a need for housing. “Protest squats,” along with communal squats like Christiania in Copenhagen, functioned as experiments in alternative social and political organization. While I had never before seen squatting used as a protest tactic, I learned upon further investigation that a prolific squatters’ movement in northern Europe had been doing so for decades, transforming “dead” urban spaces into vibrant community centers.

A partially destroyed Jewish department store cum squatter’s art center, Tacheles was one of many squatted structures occupied by its activist residents not out of economic need, but out of political and artistic solidarity. Squatting has a significant place in the history of proletariat uprisings in northern Europe, giving a wide variety of activist groups, from anarchist cells to architectural preservationist clubs, a platform from which to broadcast a political message while exercising their fundamental right 1

to housing. These communes have saved historic landmarks from demolition while obtaining legitimacy as centers of community action through municipal “buy-outs” or self-imposed renovation programs. Although there exists a shocking disparity of critical research on such groups’ collective action against state control and corporate land ownership, I believe they constitute what ontological anarchist Hakim Bey calls a “Temporary Autonomous Zone” or TAZ, a temporal community that excises itself from the state and declares its existential independence from systems of external control, unified in purpose by its members’ shared convictions.

2

I. THE SIEGE OF KREUZBERG: BEGINNINGS OF THE SQUATTERS’ MOVEMENT IN BERLIN

The German word for squatting, besetzung, translates to English as “besieging.”

An extremely active word, “besieging” conjures up military campaigns and violent revolutions. In describing the unlawful occupation of buildings, besetzung implies decisive, purpose-driven action. Squatting, in the German mind, seems to begin as a public statement, made manifest by the active takeover of an unused, private structure. Far from the images of homeless vagrants in condemned tenements that the

1

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 as the first global declaration of rights inherently held by all human beings. For more information, see Article 25.1, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

2

Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1985).

word “squatting” may conjure in the mind of an urban-dwelling English speaker, the word besetzung pulses with political energy. This understanding of the act as a “siege” of the established order made the German-speaking world a fertile ground for the squatters’ movement, whose primary objective was political change rather than an end to homelessness.

The housing crisis of the late 1970s and ’80s was another factor that made Berlin a perfect home for the most vocal factions of the squatters’ movement when it first emerged. West Berlin in the late 1970s was still busy rebuilding from the ravages of the Second World War. Far more advanced in its reconstruction efforts than its eastern half, West Berlin was nevertheless plagued by inflated real estate prices and a shortage of affordable apartments, despite the profusion of empty flats. A 1978 study by the Berlin Senate reported that some 80,000 people were registered as 3

seeking apartments, yet 27,000 apartments remained uninhabited. This manufactured housing shortage was a result of the prevailing ethic of redevelopment in the city: “House owners and housing associations deliberately allowed houses to become derelict with the expectation that they would be able to demolish and re-build or fundamentally modernize them using government funding, and eventually charge 4

correspondingly higher rents.” At the same time, a growing alternative movement in Berlin organized in bars, cafés, and bike shops. Their opposition to heavy-handed police tactics, government victimization of political radicals, and the state-approved “yellow press” of Axel Springer led the radical leftist and student movements to protest

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in a variety of forms, none more appropriate than besetzung. As a visible and locally significant act of resistance, squatting emerged as the perfect expression of leftists’

frustration with West Germany’s suppression of civil liberties and manipulative housing practices. “Its intervention in urban restructuring, preoccupation with the problems

posed by apartments standing empty, the housing shortage, property speculation and displacement—all these issues constituted an opportunity for the movement to go 5

beyond . . . personal concerns.” This new form of resistance synthesized disparate political platforms within the alternative movement by appealing to a common concern: the housing crisis.

Surrounded by the enemy East German state, West Berlin was an unattractive destination for many West Germans, and the Berlin Senate declared all university education free and all its male citizens exempt from military draft. In the 1970s, dozens

3

4

Ibid.

5

Ibid.

Andrej Holm and Armin Kuhn. “Squatting and Urban Renewal: The Interaction of Squatter Movements and Strategies of Urban Restructuring in Berlin,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (October 2010), 1–10.

of nineteenth-century tenement complexes (Mietkaserne, or “rent-barracks”) lay empty in Kreuzberg, a neighborhood once shadowed by the heavily fortified Wall that proved an undesirable living space for Berliners of economic means. Young men eager to capitalize on free education and draft exemption found derelict flats free for the taking, along with a diverse neighborhood of politically active and creative transients— a crucible of radicalism on the Cold War’s primary battleground.

Four days after the December 4, 1971 police shooting of Georg von Rauch, a militant leftist and resident of the Wieland commune in Berlin-Charlottenberg, members of the Berlin punk rock band Ton Steine Scherben (known in English as The Shards) led a large audience of students from the Technical University (TU-Berlin) in the siege of Bethanien, a nineteenth-century Deaconess hospital just steps from the Berlin Wall. Von Rauch, who earlier that year fled trial for assaulting a journalist, had been walking in the neighborhood of Schöneberg, Berlin’s traditional home of artists and intellectuals, when he was caught by a plainclothes policeman. Accounts about the ensuing firefight vary, but it left the young radical mortally wounded. “Rauch” is the German word for smokehouse, and Von Rauch’s death inspired Ton Steine Scherben’s takeover of the hospital complex’s smokehouse, which became a base of operations for punks, vagabonds, and radical leftists. Their squat lasted until April 19, 1972, when the police raided the premises; until then, Ton Steine Scherben and their young Kreuzberg following made a successful (and widely publicized) stand against police brutality and state oppression. Although the squatters were removed from the complex on Mariannenplatz, the gothic brick hospital survived as a center for countercultural activity. In 1973 the Berlin Senate purchased the property from its owner and established Künstlerhaus Bethanien, an art initiative that today hosts twenty-five social and cultural institutions.

The defeat of the Social Democratic Party in West Berlin’s senatorial election of 1981 led to a radicalization of the prominent alternative movement in the city, in what urban 6

sociologists Andrej Holm and Armin Kuhn call “Revolt 81.” Already in February 1979, the Kreuzberg citizens’ initiative SO36 had organized the first “rehab squats,” which took over crumbling apartments and refurbished them for public use. Revolt 81 saw a surge in squatted houses throughout Kreuzberg and its western neighbor, Schöneberg. The new besetzer’s “practice of occupying houses and immediately starting to renovate them was meant, on the one hand, to point out the long-standing

6

Holm and Kuhn, “Squatting and Urban Renewal,” 3.

deterioration and emptiness of the apartments and, on the other hand, to create acceptance of this method of civil disobedience.”

7

The growing popularity of squatting as a means of resistance fractured the alternative movement, already a patchwork assembly of diverse perspectives and political programs. Some squats were forcibly evicted by the West Berlin police, while others were negotiated with landlords. The lucky few, like Bethanien, were legalized by government decree and survived as cultural centers in the community. West Berlin’s transitional mayor during Revolt 81, Hans-Jochen Vogel, said in February 1981 that he wished to turn squats “into legally ordered conditions that are also in complete 8

harmony with civil law.” Factions of “negotiators” and “non-negotiators” emerged within the broader movement, pushing the more radical “all or nothing” squatters deeper into the trenches of resistance. Those willing to compromise with property owners were, in certain instances, allowed to remain in the apartment rent-free upon the completion of their refurbishment project, or granted temporary, discounted leases.

The non-negotiators, on the other hand, refused to give in until all demands were met, political prisoners released, and a permanent solution to the housing crisis found.

They “began to differentiate themselves from the alternative movement by referring to themselves as ‘autonomists’ (Autonomen) and accused negotiators of giving up the political struggle and of resorting to the mere preservation of their own spaces.”

9

The militant Autonomen gave a famous face to the squats, often dressing in ski masks,

89

heavy black clothing, and helmets and causing the German press to dub them der schwarze Block, or “the black block.” Building barricades and throwing stones or

Molotov cocktails, they successfully defended squats on Hafenstrasse in Hamburg, and protected many other squats in West Berlin. The German Autonome movement, tied to Marxist autonomism, rejected the imposition of state control. Some Autonomen declared their complete independence from authority, and defended it aggressively in buildings they squatted as “part of an extended and differentiated alternative subculture that centered on the inner-city districts of Kreuzberg and Schoneberg.”

10

Their resistance pushed squatting to the end of its political tether, using occupied buildings to declare autonomy from state control. All squats, in rejecting the authority of land ownership and legal order, exercised their independence from the governing status quo, many operating as self-sufficient communes. The most vocal participants in Germany’s early squatting movement, the Autonomen defended the guiding principle

7 Ibid., 3.

8 Hans-Jochen Vogel.

Government declaration, February 12, 1981.

9

Holm and Kuhn, “Squatting and Urban Renewal,” 4.

10 Ibid., 9.

behind besetzung as a method of resistance: a wholehearted rejection of authority.

II. SQUATS AND THE TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE The autonomy of squats encouraged the development of communal societies in buildings wrenched from private ownership and municipal control. Such communes live and work as bands, functioning as what Hakim Bey calls a “Temporary Autonomous Zone” (TAZ).

In the Paleolithic Period, much of human society ordered itself in bands, each consisting of roughly sixty members, who survived together as a nomadic hunting collective. Bey argues that the band, often the seedling of larger tribes or clans, operates as a basic social unit reemerging to replace the crumbling nuclear family, a product of the Neolithic agricultural revolution that has (according to twentyfirst-century critics) fallen prey to divorce and sexual libertinism. As nomadic tribes worldwide began to form stationary agricultural settlements between 10,000 and 5,000 BCE, the nuclear family formed to support rapidly growing communities that required more laborers to till the earth and secure city walls. However, Bey argues that in our post-industrial age, such a system “closed . . . by the hierarchic totality of agricultural/ industrial society” must be replaced by a social unit open to anyone sharing similar life convictions. The modern-day band, a hodge-podge of coworkers, lovers, social media networks, and the like, seems to shatter the secure reclusiveness of the family unit; “the nuclear family becomes more and more a trap, a cultural sinkhole . . . and the obvious counter-strategy emerges spontaneously in the almost unconscious rediscovery of the more archaic and yet more post-industrial possibility of the band.”

11

This possibility has taken root in our post-industrial, postmodern society, the modernist notion of “truth” now fractured into a multiplicity of equally valid viewpoints. This postmodernism, “in some ways a de-centering of the entire ‘European’ project” and in some ways a reflection of Nietzsche’s proclamation a century earlier that God is dead, “was attained at the expense of inhabiting an epoch where speed and ‘commodity fetishism’ have created a tyrannical false unity which tends to blur all cultural diversity and individuality.”

12

Bey continues, “this paradox creates ‘gypsies,’ psychic travelers

driven by desire or curiosity, wanderers with shallow loyalties (in fact disloyal to the ‘European Project,’ which has lost all its charm and vitality), not tied down to any particular time and place, in search of diversity and adventure.”

13

12 Ibid.

11 Bey, T.A.Z., 105.

13 Ibid.

Bey’s vitriol is coupled with optimism for what the global transience of divergent postmodern identities can create in a new age without one God and one accepted system of authority. His list of “psychic travelers” seems to describe the colorful milieu of Berlin’s squatting communities well; any visitor to the squatted art-house Tacheles, even in its twilight days, was likely to meet Heinrich, the bald-headed bluegoateed gallerist, or DB, the Rastafarian house DJ from Antwerp. The transients there relocated to Berlin from the far corners of Germany and the world beyond, forming bands of their own, tied together by mutual interest. Tacheles’ inception as a center for wayward artists in the once-depressed East Berlin neighborhood of Mitte fostered the growth of a vibrant artistic community for over twenty years, housing work by hundreds of street and performance artists and sculptors, while also hosting dance, music, and theater performances.

Known as the art department store, Tacheles “focused on creating spaces that would primarily help squatters achieve self-realization. [Its] function as a place of residence was merely secondary.”

14

Other temporal squatting groups, like the group of senior

citizens that besieged a community center in the East Berlin neighborhood of Pankow during the summer of 2012, united under a political cause. For the seventy-and eighty-year-old squatters at Stille Strasse 10, the cause for solidarity was resistance against the destruction of community resources and cuts in social welfare benefits.

Their resistance, along with the appropriation of the derelict Tacheles complex, constitutes what Stephen Pearl Andrews calls in his preamble to the constitution of the

91

International Workers of the World “the seed of the new society taking shape within the shell of the old,”

15

a TAZ for the modern era. It is precisely this “seed” of freedom

from the state that flowered in the crumbling shell of the pre-Nazi department store on Oranienstrasse, where the Gestapo had once imprisoned political dissidents.

The largest and most successful of northern European squats is unquestionably Christiania, a “Freetown” nestled against the harbor of central Copenhagen. A series of seventeenth-century military barracks and surrounding ramparts in the workingclass neighborhood of Christianshavn, Christiania thrives in the shadow of the Danish government, which convenes less than a kilometer away in Slotsholmen Palace. The Free State of Christiania, which assumes complete autonomy from the Danish state, has its own flag, customs, economy, and system of governance. It was formed on

14 Holm and Kuhn, 8.

15 Stephen Pearl Andrews.

Preamble, Constitution of the International Workers of the World, 1910.

September 26, 1971, just a few months before the Bethanien uprising of the Berlin squatters’ movement, when a group of staffers from the alternative Copenhagen newspaper Hovedbladet took over the complex and established their own TAZ.

16

As Jacob Ludvigsen, a founding squatter, wrote in Christiania’s mission statement, “the objective of Christiania is to create a self-governing society whereby each and every individual holds themselves responsible over the wellbeing of the entire community.”

17

This declaration of autonomy, emphasizing personal and

civic responsibility as a code of “rebel ethics” for the squat’s residents, led the Danish government to sanction Christiania as a “social experiment.”

18

At this time,

frustration with failed neoliberal housing policies in Denmark was coupled with “distaste for the emphasis on privacy and personal attachment to material possessions attributed to the conventional Western nuclear family and home.”

19

Providing a band-

like alternative to the nuclear family, Christiania brought squatters and their families together under the umbrella of collective resistance to state authority, economic imperialism, and traditional social values.

The very notion that an experiment in urban planning, self-governance, and nonmarket-based economic practices could be conducted in the heart of a western European capital guaranteed Christiania’s survival for a decade following its establishment. In 1989, the Christiania Act, a parliamentary procedure of the Danish legislature, formally recognized Christiania residents’ collective use of the land, thereby legalizing the squat. Nevertheless, the citizens of Freetown continue to subvert Danish law by fostering a highly permissive environment for illegal trade.

International visitors to Christiania are quick to notice the many hash vendors that sell marijuana from small carts in the neighborhood’s unpaved streets, accompanied by free-roaming dairy cows and wild dogs, as well as the unrestricted building practices that encourage residents to construct fairy-tale dwellings resembling pirate ships or tree houses. Furthermore, Christiania’s organization (or disorganization) as a labyrinthin, pedestrian complex hidden behind a colorful, graffiti-clad fence subjects it to a “wild and whimsical seclusion.”

20

This fence, aside from providing a functional

defense of the long-standing squat (patrolled by hustlers who benefit from the hash trade), also transforms the space within into a “liminal (vibrant, transformatory) state.”

“Wilderness and whismy,” observes English sociologist Helen Jarvis, “are also apparent in the absence of lighting and signage . . . to follow directions to a particular home in Den Blå Karamel (the Blue Candy), for instance, is like reciting a poem or a fairytale;

17 Jacob Ludvigsen.

Mission Statement for Christiania, 1971.

19 Helen Jarvis, “Alternative Visions of Home and Family Life in Christiania: Lessons for the Mainstream,” in Space for Urban Alternatives? Christiania 1971–2011, ed. Håkan Thörn, Cathrin Wasshede, and Tomas Nilson (Vilnius: Balto, 2011), 158.

18 Ibid.

20 Ibid., 171.

16 Håkan Thörn, Cathrin Wasshede, and Tomas Nilson. “Introduction: From ‘Social Experiment’ to ‘Urban Alternative’—40 Years of Research on the Freetown,” in Space for Urban Alternatives? Christiania 1971–2011 (Vilnius: Balto, 2011), 7–9.

right at the thicket of willow, up by the rope swing, look for a pirate ship. Those who require a standardized system of footpath signage and house number sequence should venture no further!”

21

The colorful chaos of Christiania’s alternative urbanity is the very thing that makes it an indispensable and authentic cultural artifact in Copenhagen. This liminal space has endured largely due to its autonomy from a rapidly gentrifying Copenhagen. While dilapidated shipping complexes in the Christianshavn harbor were demolished and sold to private developers for luxury condos and high-end real estate projects, Christianites just blocks away were painting 400-year-old barns in bright summer colors and installing rudimentary plumbing systems on long-abandoned turf. Christiania emerged as a central offense against neoliberal strategies of urban redevelopment, and “a conscious antidote to the ‘place marketing’ witnessed in commercial gentrification.”

22

The hodgepodge, whimsical DIY aesthetic of Christiania districts

like Den Blå Karamel, then, expresses “a post-material interpretation of reclaimed, reused, home-made authenticity.”

23

Although its forty-year tenure qualifies Christiania

as anything but temporary, the squat—formed by a spontaneous expression of antiauthoritarianism—functions as a model TAZ. Christiania still proudly flies its flag, despite recent threats of state-sanctioned dissolution. “We can all get along fine,” the Christianites seem to say, “if you just let us be.”

III. LEGALIZATION AND GENTRIFICATION: THE END OF THE REBEL SQUATS

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The election of the right-wing Danish People’s Party, in the wake of September 11, 2001, signaled trouble for Christiania. Calling for “law and order” and using Christianite

hash pushers as stump speech victims, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen demanded the complete “normalization” of Christiania—its private sale and integration with the surrounding neighborhood. For the new right-wing government, Christiania “presented a perfect opportunity to illustrate what was profoundly wrong with the Social Democratic welfare state, as they painted an image of the Freetown as an embodiment of urban decay, populated by scroungers, parasiting on the decent working people’s tax money.”

24

A redevelopment plan for the large squat was released

by the government in 2004, but a large group of leading Danish architects and urban planners refused to endorse it. Although the plan was abandoned following the Danish People’s Party loss in the 2011 parliamentary elections, police raids have proceeded

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid.

24 “Governing Freedom—Debating the Freetown in the Danish Parliament,” in Space for Urban Alternatives?

Christiania 1971–2011, ed. Håkan Thörn, Cathrin Wasshede, and Tomas Nilson (Vilnius: Balto, 2011), 85.

with fervor, part of the state’s effort to “clean up” Copenhagen and make it attractive for investment.

25

As Copenhagen opens its port to international tourism and finance,

Christiania’s autonomy is threatened.

As early as the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien initiative in 1973, Berlin authorities began brokering deals between landowners and occupiers. “Negotiators” who accepted the property owner’s terms would be subject to immediate eviction if they failed to comply fully. Often, this meant restoring and refurbishing the dilapidated building on the occupier’s dime. In other cases, the state sponsored a partial—or complete— purchase of the property, transforming the private building into a cultural center for the surrounding community. While such solutions were the positive counterpoints to the Autonomen’s bloody street fights, state-sponsored adoption effectively nullified the structure’s status as a temporary autonomous zone, no longer free from external control. In a text on the motivations and experiences of 1980s squatters in Amsterdam published by the pseudonymic Foundation for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge (ADILKNO), squatters are identified as artists whose anti-state efforts were sometimes thwarted by incorporation: “In some cases, autonomous zones that squatters initially secured by stealth and audacity, and defended with violence, were officially conquered by state administered tolerance. Through negotiation with municipal authorities squatted buildings were sometimes legalized; their inhabitants, many on the dole, now considered mere troublesome wards of the state, found themselves to be another tourist attraction.”

26

Ironically, TAZs like Bethanien were destroyed through their legitimization, because the city government, eager to assuage community dissidents, brokered a tenuous peace between occupiers and landlords. In Bethanien’s case, a community arts center was allowed to grow under municipal auspices until the landlord eventually chose to redevelop the property. Although they endured tentatively as public resources, these “legitimized” squats suddenly contradicted their foundational purpose, “the auto-formation of social space through a process imbued with amusement, pleasure, and irreverence.”

27

Robbed of their authenticity and spontaneity, such squatters’

TAZs—once anarchist projects of state disassociation—were suddenly corrupted by the economy of cultural tourism. Killed by its own fame, the barricaded structure that was once Tacheles is slated to become a luxury hotel that will capitalize on the former center’s name.

27 Ibid., 8.

26 The Foundation for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge (ADILKNO), Cracking the Movement: Squatting Beyond the Media, trans. Laura Martz (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1994), 8–9.

25 René Karpantschof, “Bargaining and Barricades—the Political Struggle over the Freetown Christiania, 1971–2011,” in Space for Urban Alternatives? Christiania 1971–2011, ed. Håkan Thörn, Cathrin Wasshede, and Tomas Nilson (Vilnius: Balto, 2011), 57–65.

Since the early 1990s, large German firms like Daimler-Benz and Allianz, abetted by heavy government discounts on property rates, have quickly raised monumental corporate towers in urban centers once sundered by the mine-ridden Todesschreife (“Death Strip”) that ran along the Berlin Wall. Potsdamer Platz, the liveliest metropolitan intersection in Europe during the 1920s (and home to the Continent’s first electric stoplight), was razed entirely by the Soviets before being rebuilt, in less than ten years, as a stylistically disparate and commercial collection of high-rise buildings.

A miracle of Berlin’s resurgence from the trauma of war and division, this rapid redevelopment has nevertheless slowly encroached upon the thriving creative culture of post-industrial East Berlin, where a significant community of international artists had enjoyed exceptionally low rents on apartments and studios since the 1990 fall of the German Democratic Republic and its reunification with the West.

The German capital’s relocation from Bonn “led to the expectation that influential national and international companies would relocate their headquarters or European operations in Berlin,” states a 2003 report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. While this expectation has remained unfulfilled, the report concludes that “intensive building activity” resulted in “the over-expansion of office space . . . with a high level of vacancies in spite of the move of most administrations and government agencies from Bonn.”

28

Despite this failed expectation, German

faith in Berlin’s eventual return to its pre-war national prominence has promoted an increase in real estate investment and rent prices, creating a drought in affordable

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housing. Rent increases, as occurred during the housing crisis in the late 1970s,

encouraged artists and radicals to squat in recently reopened East Berlin. Inner-city

areas “consisting of old housing that had been ideologically devalued as the legacy of

capitalist urban development, were neglected in town planning and were showing signs of structural decay. The outcome of this real-socialist practice of disinvestment was . . . a vacancy rate of up to 20%.”

29

One such abandoned building, the once-resplendent and fashionable department store in Berlin-Mitte known as Tacheles, was operated by squatting artists as an illegal studio, gallery and performance space until September 2012. Now the site of massive government-funded redevelopment projects, including the critical reconstruction of Berlin’s sixteenth-century baroque Prussian palace, the Stadtschloss, the neighborhood of Mitte is overrun by luxury hotels and ateliers, and the squats that

28 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Urban Renaissance Berlin: Towards an Integrated Strategy for Social Cohesion and Economic Development (Paris: OECD Publications, 2003), 20.

29 Holm and Kuhn, “Squatting and Urban Renewal,” 6.

once made it a countercultural center in the 1990s are long gone. On September 4, 2012, NHS Nordbank, the legal owner of Tacheles, ordered the final eviction of the squat’s remaining artist-residents, intending to construct another luxury hotel on the property. Tacheles was the last surviving TAZ squat in the city center, and its passage into history signals the end of a fight to restructure postwar Berlin.

While astoundingly rapid development has changed Berlin’s urban fabric over the past decade, its wealth continues to be overshadowed by that of Munich and Frankfurt in the German economy. When West Berlin was an intractable island in socialist territory, banking fled to Frankfurt while manufacturing fled to Munich and Stuttgart. These cities developed industrial infrastructure that the cultural capital of Berlin today remains without, its only major industries tourism and nightlife. In an attempt to save the economy of “poor” Berlin, German economists have identified it as a favorable future home for large media corporations. The Media Spree investment project, for instance, is a mostly incomplete collaboration of dozens of investors that aims to build extensive corporate centers along 3.7 kilometers of the Spree River, which bisects the city of Berlin and serves as a geographic line of defense for Eastern squatting communities. Squatters repeatedly threatened by police raids, as if in preparation for the wrecking ball of commercial gentrification, have painted visible “Fuck Media Spree” signs on their occupied buildings for riverboat tourists to photograph.

Most recently, a luxury apartment complex under construction in East Berlin began to dismantle sections of the Berlin Wall to make way for a private drive for the development’s future residents. Running along a stretch of the Spree River, the length of wall is the longest surviving span of what Berliners were once so eager to tear down. It was decorated by hundreds of artists in the 1990s and is today one of Berlin’s most beloved tourist attractions, known as the East Side Gallery. The planned removal of 22 meters of muraled wall was halted by thousands of peaceful protesters on Friday, March 1, 2013. Many of them carried signs reading “History can never become a luxury,” Der Spiegel reported.

30

When approximately six thousand demonstrators

returned the following Sunday, the developer agreed to halt construction until a compromise was reached. Berliners have managed to stave off the destruction of a once-hated, now-beloved wall, a traumatic symbol the German historical ethos insists on remembering by its preservation. The powerful response in protest of the Wall’s removal indicates that urban identity can be a heavy counterweight to corporate urban planning.

30 “Luxury Project Suspended: Protests in Berlin Save the Wall for Now,” Der Spiegel, March 5, 2013.

Berlin’s state of constant redevelopment and its international atmosphere have recently attracted a large arrival of young entrepreneurs. In particular, devastating financial crises in Spain and Greece continue to draw jobless southern Europeans to the German capital. A wave of tech start-ups appeared there as the Euro wavered on the brink of collapse, signaling Berlin’s transformation into the entrepreneurial test tube of Europe. Nowhere articulates that development better than St. Oberholz Café, a colorful coffee shop in the East Berlin neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg. Through a pair of graffiti-covered doors, washed in electric light and the sound of deep house music, computer programmers and website designers meet with prospective clients over lattes. If business gets serious, seedling web companies can rent office space upstairs. St. Oberholz rents the converted apartments overhead very cheaply to new technology start-ups, supporting the early development of Internet successes like the audio-sharing website SoundCloud.

31

More than meets the eye, St. Oberholz is proof

of East Berlin’s economic ascendancy. In the center of the former socialist capitol, the graffiti-clad café is evidence of Berlin’s return to international economic prominence, media wealth displayed behind streetside windows like donuts in a pastry case. It is this very capital that drives the Media Spree initiative forward, to the chagrin of many Berliners.

In the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis, it would be inappropriate to define gentrification purely as a destructive force, a great evil of urbanity. Urban development is unquestionably the primary vehicle of economic growth that starving cities need. Yet

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overzealous development strategies were, in large part, the cause of the crisis. Spread

out over a vast geographic territory, Berlin is a city capable of considerable expansion; it was formed, like Los Angeles, by the accumulation of adjacent municipalities or dorfs, and is unusually multicentric for a European capital. In such a climate,

development often proceeds at reckless rates, fueled by the devaluing of land as a resource. Hyperactive real estate development in the first decade of the twenty-first century led to the dramatic bursting of housing bubbles in Berlin, Los Angeles, Dubai, and many other geographically open cities—a collapse that has left utopian housing developments empty ghost towns, further emphasizing the need for caution and cultural sensitivity in urban planning.

Countless cranes purvey Berlin’s rapid redevelopment, their steel-latticed necks rising high above the city’s skyline. The ubiquitous reconstruction effort tears apart an

31 “European Entrepreneurs: Les Misérables,” The Economist, July 28, 2012.

existing urban framework even as it rejoins it, molding a city once divided by politics into one now unified by them. This process, driven by the government abetment of corporate redevelopment strategies, has consistently raised property values and increased per capita income. Nevertheless, gentrification has a destructive effect on Berlin’s alternative spirit or Geist, a creative culture even Nazi eugenics programs failed to eradicate. As the centerpiece of the city’s alternative movement, squats have been the first to go. Their disappearance has led many to claim that Berlin’s status as a countercultural capitol will expire within the decade. By forcing squats to make room for redevelopment, gentrification threatens to wipe out the city’s last remaining temporary autonomous zones, enduring experiments in the alternative post-industrial economics of collectivization.

Evan Moffitt is pursuing his BA in Art History with a minor in Philosophy at UCLA. He works as a docent at the Hammer Museum, and recently completed studies in urban planning at the Free University of Berlin. In his spare time Evan enjoys playing concert violin, solving syllogisms, and exploring his hometown of Los Angeles.

landd. Mulholland Derives Video Script VIDEO AUDIO (ESTABLISHING SHOT) (WS) Black Toyota Prius on cliffside.

Left side of frame, part of an electric pole is visible, tree-lined mountain ranges are visible.

(WS) Devin stands behind the vehicle and gestures in a come-hither manner with his hand for the car to come toward him.

Black Prius backs up and then slowly backs up to the left Devin gestures with a “stop” hand motion Devin gestures to go forward and to the left Black Prius goes forward Devin gestures with a “stop” hand motion Devin gestures with a come-hither hand motion Black Prius goes backward Devin gestures with a “stop” hand motion Devin gestures with a winding motion to the right with both arms Black Prius turns slightly and proceeds to the right Devin gestures with a “stop” hand motion Devin gestures with a come-hither hand motion Black Prius reverses a few feet, then goes forward a few feet Devin gestures with a thumbs-up motion Cut.

Dramatic Film/Video Script FADE-IN EXT. MULHOLLAND DRIVE CLIFFSIDE VISTA ESTABLISHING SHOT BLACK PRIUS AND DEVIN KENNY EXTRA-WIDE SHOT—DUSK (1) WIDE SHOT—MULHOLLAND DRIVE DEVIN, age 25, stands behind the vehicle on Mulholland Dr. and gestures in a come-hither motion with his hand for the car to come toward him. (2) DEVIN (3) (gestures with a “stop” hand motion) (4) DEVIN (gestures to go forward and to the left) BLACK PRIUS (goes forward) DEVIN (gestures with a “stop” hand motion) DEVIN (gestures with a come-hither hand motion) BLACK PRIUS (goes backward) DEVIN (gestures with a “stop” hand motion) DEVIN (gestures with a winding motion to the right with both arms) BLACK PRIUS (turns slightly and proceeds to the right) DEVIN (gestures with a “stop” hand motion) DEVIN (gestures with a come-hither hand motion) BLACK PRIUS (reverses a few feet, then goes forward a few feet) DEVIN (gestures with a thumbs-up motion) CUT (1) Scene settings and camera angles start at left margin and are in all caps.

(2) For scene descriptions set left margin at 20 and set right margin at 70 (3) For character name set left margin at 40 and put in all caps.

(4) For parenthetical descriptions use left margin of 35 and right margin of 50.

For dialogue use left margin of 30 and right margin of 65. It begins directly under the character’s name.

The page number at the top right of the page should be about six lines from the top of the page and extend to the right margin (75).

Scripts are done in pica type without right margin justification. Triple space for a new scene setting. In episodic television, the acts—generally three or (more recently) four—are numbered. In screenplays the acts are not indicated.

Sample Commercial Script

Sample News Script .xxxx News - 0x/0x/2012 Writer: D. Kenny Studio - CAC/Warner - Kenny VO - server video: landd.m4v Server - video+ audio (file: landd.m4v) Studio - CAC/Warner LA Road Concerts: Mulholland Derives- page 1 of 1 (17) no narration SERVER SEGMENT: 1:12 ((In cue: “...)) ((Out cue: _...”)) ((END)) In the Mulholland Dérives Choreography, landd. worked with what was originally conceived as a performance to take place on Sunset Boulevard, where it intersects with Cesar E. Chavez Avenue. When it was revealed that this year L.A. Road Concerts , an outdoor performance art festival organized by Stephen Van Dyck, was to occur on Mulholland Drive, we had to reorient. Lindsay August-Salazar did online reconnaissance, surveying different locations along Mulholland Dr. (there were performances scheduled up and down the meandering stretch of asphalt), and dropped a pin near the Charles & Lotte Melhorn Overlook. Whereas in the original choreography, competing cars, traffic, and the amorous desire for temporary automobile lodging, as well as pedestrians and bicyclists, influenced the movement and duration of those movements, in the performance that actually transpired these factors had a different effect. The everyday activity we would transform into the domain of dance was the act of parallel parking.

As the choreographer, I was concerned with not only the placement of the vehicle, but also how parallel it was from the threshold where the asphalt of Mulholland Drive met the dirt Lindsay parked in. The area chosen was a dip between two curves in the road, so I had a responsibility to prevent other cars from crashing into her, but also ensuring that the aesthetic element of the car’s movement had a transparent beauty because there was no curb to measure against, or other parked cars to gauge distances. As we notated the first iteration of the three-part performance we were greeted by bicycle enthusiasts, art aficionados, who knew there was something going on, as well as by neighbors who were interested in the recent swell in activity. The flux of viewers had an impact on my positioning as well as the urgency of my gestures. Later on, a car parked in the area directly behind the spot where Lindsay had parked, providing another guideline for the event.

As the executer, I had a visceral experience. My task was to parallel park on the edge of a cliff, which was not the most comfortable situation in a car that has bad blind spots and without visual landmarks to help guide me. Naturally, I had the tendency to move the car and myself closer to the road (my left). I noticed Devin redirecting me toward the cliff’s edge (my right) at a certain point, I had to stop and put my faith in him that he wasn’t going to let me drive off the cliff.

In the process of notating the action from a video, we created new symbols and organizational principles to mark out not only the humans in the scene, but the vehicle itself as a performer , as well as the camera. Though not in the line of sight of the performers, the camera had an impact on the audience watching from across the way. In addition, the knowledge that we would be notating from a video document gave additional credence to the larger idea of the project: it created a set of instructions for movement in 3D and 4D from a document that was a video. This gave us the ability to rewind, scrub through, and look at the details with a higher degree of rigor than would be possible otherwise. It also opened up a bit of interpretative space because of the flattening function of the lens. Determining the degree of certain movements, how spread out they were, and how much power was behind the gesture were all questions, and sometimes these questions prompted a redo in a non-mediated venue for ourselves to clarify the action.

landd., Muholland Derives, 2013. Muholland Drive, Los Angeles.

Mulholland Derives- 001-1:10 VIDEO AUDIO BLACK TOYOTA PRIUS ON CLIFFSIDE. LEFT SIDE OF FRAME, PART OF AN ELECTRIC POLE IS VISIBLE, TREE-LINED MOUNTAIN RANGES ARE VISIBLE. DEVIN STANDS BEHIND THE VEHICLE AND GESTURES IN A COME-HITHER WAY WITH HIS HAND FOR THE CAR TO COME TOWARD HIM BLACK PRIUS BACKS UP AND THEN SLOWLY REVERSES TO THE LEFT DEVIN GESTURES WITH HIS HAND TOWARD THE CAR’S REAR TO STOP DEVIN GESTURES TO GO FORWARD AND TO THE LEFT BLACK PRIUS GOES FORWARD DEVIN GESTURES WITH HIS HAND IN FRONT OF HIM INDICATING “STOP” DEVIN GESTURES WITH A COME-HITHER HAND MOTION BLACK PRIUS DRIVES BACKWARD DEVIN GESTURES WITH A “STOP” HAND MOTION DEVIN GESTURES WITH A WINDING MOTION TO THE RIGHT WITH BOTH ARMS AND HANDS BLACK PRIUS TURNS SLIGHTLY AND PROCEEDS TO THE RIGHT DEVIN GESTURES WITH A “STOP” HAND MOTION DEVIN GESTURES WITH A COME-HITHER HAND MOTION BLACK PRIUS REVERSES A FEW FEET, THEN GOES FORWARD A FEW FEET DEVIN GESTURES WITH A THUMBS-UP MOTION CUT 1:10

landd., Muholland Derives, performance score, 2013.

landd., Mulholland Derives, performance score, 2013.

This is a specific form of notation, called Labanotation. It is a common notation system designed for recording human movement, most often used in choreography.

Starting at the double lines, the two rectangle shapes with a solid dot indicate that the grounding support (the feet) both engaged using the middle space.

The next two right-angled rectangles indicate the right foot taking the weight of the body moving in middle space to a right diagonal; once rooted, the left foot takes the weight moving in the same direction to the right diagonal; once rooted again, the right foot then moves straight forward as shown by the “L” with the solid dot shape in middle space; once grounded, the left foot meets the right and both feet take equal weight. The right foot takes the weight as it is placed again on a forward right diagonal. This series of motions is done with a relatively wide stance, moving a large distance, with extension of the supporting body. This is indicated by the bracket around the full sequence with the backward “N” that has solid dots on both the top and the bottom. What is depicted here is the first series of notations , where Devin is walking back and forth as performed in the opening of his choreographic relationship with the Toyota Prius.­

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CE

Chris Engman is an artist who lives and

are a selection from Creagan’s more

works in Los Angeles. He received a BFA

recent work.

in photography from the University of Washington in 2003 and an MFA from the University of Southern California in 2013. His work has been exhibited in group

PS

Philippe de Sablet was born in Los

Angeles in 1988. The summer of his entire life was spent in Culver City. He momentarily

shows and solo exhibitions at galleries and

lived in the suburbs of Paris around the age

museums in Seattle, Los Angeles, London,

of 2. Philippe attended the UCLA Broad

Milan, and Munich. He is represented by

Art Center with an emphasis in painting,

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

sculpture and failure between the Fall of 2010 and the Winter of 2013. Philippe

EM

continues to live with his parents and

Erin Morrison was born in Little Rock,

grandmother in Culver City while working

Arkansas, and expects to graduate from

as an artist assistant in Angelino Heights.

UCLA’s MFA painting program in 2014.

Finally, Philippe’s current interests include

Over the past decade she has lived in

working, love, DJing, painting, studio

five major cities, New York and Seattle

hunting, being tired, cinder blocks, thinking

being the most recent. Her work currently

about healthyerbamatte, white hipsters

addresses issues of material hierarchy,

in the ghetto, running, conceptual art,

androgyny, the nomadic, and the

relational aesthetics, and sleeping in.

performance of illusion in painting.

PL

Peter Linden, born in Oakland, California, in 1989, received a BFA from Pratt Institute

DO

Dan Oprea is an artist/designer in multiple fields and mediums, ranging from

architecture and installations to graphic

in 2012. He was a 2011 fellow at Ox-Bow

design and painting. He graduated magna

in Saugatuck, Michigan, and in 2012 was

cum laude with a BS in architecture from

the fifth resident with the Still House Group

University of Illinois at Chicago, and is

in Brooklyn, New York. He recently moved

currently a graduate architecture student

from Brooklyn to Brownsville, Oregon.

at UCLA. Over the past few years, Dan has worked at cityLAB, where he was involved

JS

in research related to infrastructure, urban

Jesse Stecklow is an artist and graphic

design, and urban sensing; at Hammer

designer based out of Los Angeles.

Museum as a graphic designer; and at

Currently he attends the Design and Media

MC&A as an interior designer, all of which

Arts program at UCLA. He is a member of

provided a broad set of experiences that

Jogging and is the co-founder of the design

engaged multiple disciplines. Dan resides

studio Content is Relative.

in Los Angeles and is the principal and founder of Somatics (www.somatics.cc),

CC

an interdisciplinary experimental studio

Connor Creagan is an artist who makes

that blends architecture and other design

paintings and lives in Chicago. Creagan

mediums to create new conditions within

will be graduating with a BFA from the

various disciplinary discourses.

School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Spring of 2013 and has exhibited in Chicago as well as Prague, and has been a part of projects in Toronto, London, and Barcelona. The represented paintings

YM

Yulia Markman was born in Estonia (USSR) in 1985 and immigrated to Israel at the age of 6.Yulia studied Photography

and Education in the Neri Bloomfield

with a Photography & Imaging minor at Art

Academy in Israel and received her B.Ed.Des

Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA.

in 2009. Currently, Yulia is a 2014 MA candidate at the Royal College of Art, London.

Her work examines aspects of identity and belonging through the observation of social

L

landd. is a collaborative duo formed by Devin Kenny and Lindsay August-Salazar.

and cultural structures and has been exhibited

Within it, they create a bridge between

in Israel, Angola and New York.

their respective practices. Mr. Kenny’s work is built upon a research-based

IH

multidisciplinary model, and Ms. Salazar’s

Iris Yirei Hu is an artist living and working

work stems from her foundation in dance

in Los Angeles. She received a BA in art

and painting. Both artists are interested

from UCLA.

in the links and gaps between theory and practice within the arts, and how those

JE NS

Jake Eisenmann

explorations can push human agency to create room for larger cultural collective progress.

Navid Sinaki was born in Tehran. He

received his BA in Art History and Film

Lindsay August-Salazar is a Los Angeles-

Studies in UC Berkeley, and is currently

based interdisciplinary artist. She works

completing his Masters degree at UCLA in

with specific mediums to trigger reactions

Film and Video Art. His work has been

as well as exchanges relevant to a paralleled

presented in various locations, including the

socio-economic, cultural experience. She

British Film Institute, MIX:NYC, and Artists

as receiveds multiple grants including the

Television Access, as well as film/art spaces

Medici and the Sylvia Easton Scholar and

in Japan, France, Swtizerland, and Prague.

was a DADD and a Fulbright nominee. She

Currently, Navid lives in Los Angeles in a

earned a BA in art at UCLA, then continued

house with four walls and no minarets, even

her work in the arts at the Solomon R.

though some still imagine them there.

Guggenheim Museum as a Sackler educator and is currently a MFA candidate for 2013

LL

at UC Irvine.

Lucas Lind is an MFA candidate in

architecture at Columbia University

Devin Kenny is an interdisciplinary artist

Graduate School of Architecture, Planning

residing in Los Angeles. Hailing from the

and Preservation. He received a BA in

south side of Chicago, he relocated to New

architectural studies from UCLA Department

York to begin his studies at Cooper Union.

of Architecture and Urban Design in 2012.

He has since continued his practice through the Bruce High Quality Foundation

JL

Jody Lu was born in Houston, TX. She

University, Skowhegan artist residency, and collaborations with DADDY, pooool, Studio

attended the High School for the Performing

Workout, Comotroovay-sa, Wild Isle, and

and Visual Arts in Houston. In 2010, she

various art and music venues in New York

was awarded the Marian and Speros Martel

City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere

Award of the Contemporary Arts Museum

including: Recess, Het Roode Bioscoop, St.

of Houston (CAMH) and held a two-person

Cecilia’s Convent, Freak City, and Santos

show. Currently living in Los Angeles, CA,

Party House. He is a MFA candidate for 2013

she is now persuing her BFA in Fine Arts

in the New Genres department at UCLA.

The GRAPHITE editorial staff would like to extend their sincere gratitude to Sue Bell Yank, Assistant Director of Academic Programs at the Hammer Museum. Her constant support, guidance, and interest in this project has helped us grow and challenge ourselves with each edition.