Graphite 5 (2014)

1 Simone C. Niquille Conor Thompson Edgar Arceneaux Kathleen Ryan

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Young Arts Program at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where he

Hulk Alter You! (2012). I later became one of his studio assistants, helping him complete his project A Time to Break Silence (2013), organize a trip to São Tome, and much more. Edgar’s work is concerned with the accessibility of memory and art’s ability to enhance or reinterpret it. His searing insight into the art world and stories about growing up in Los Angeles have helped me understand my place as an artist working on the northeast side of the UCLA campus, and subsequently revisited during a car ride from 1st Street to 107th Street in downtown Los Angeles, on our way to the former site of the Watts House Project. The edits in red and blue are the work of Graphite editors; the margin comments and alterations in pen are mine and Edgar’s.

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1 image for Simone C. Niquille’s FaceValue 2 Front Loader, 2014, oil on canvas with artist’s frame, 26” x 30” 3 Father Figure, 2013, oil on panel with artist’s frame, 15” x 21” 4 Night School, 2013, oil on canvas with artist’s frame, 13” x 15” 5 Clear About It: an interview with Edgar Arceneaux 6 The Library of Black Lies, 2014 7 Tuvok, Tupac, Spock, 1997 8-9 The Agitation of Expansion, 2013 10 A Time To Break Silence, 2013 11 Double Door, 2013, glazed ceramic, steel scaffold, 154” x 45” x 4.5” 12 Double Door, detail 13 Block Wall, 2012, glazed ceramic, steel, 72” x 140” x 24”

A FaceValue Simone C. Niquille FaceValue: The (human) face’s value in a time of rapidly mutating standards and techno norms.

Recession, depression, faceless enemies, aerial views, cutbacks, bailouts, dead bulls, and raging bears: FaceValue is not traded on the stock market—yet.

FaceValue is what you and I are left with when CCTV is hooked to the Facebook databank and parents look younger than their children. FaceValue is what has a Britney look-alike earn more than Spears herself. FaceValue is what you consider when contemplating the appropriate nose for the day or while placing a new “chinplant” order at RapidAesthet3d. FaceValue is what stares back at you and me, relentlessly fading to black.

FaceValue will remain after the Internet blacks out, putting monikers and avatars to sleep. Grainy purple PhotoBooth portraits of girls.jpg #ThickEuroCamgirl #ShavedCreampie endlessly re-posted, the breadcrumbs leading to their intimate Tumblr origin long trailed off, before/after anti-aging cream miracle comparisons with two different faces as proof, pop-ups and banners twitching and smiling in RGB hues, the replica’s copy’s multiples, same faces different names same multiplying the world population—all are asleep. Imagine how quiet it will be.

“Bad breath is better than none.” @TheTweetOfGod1 1 Tweet of God, Twitter post, March 2, 2013, accessed March 12, 2014, https://twitter.com/TheTweetOfGod/

And sometime before this, I was trying to make a purchase choice: face.xxx, face.gov, face.biz, or plain and simple face.info? There were no bundle offers available.

Face.com, a facial recognition technology company, was sold to Facebook in June 2012.2 Postacquisition their technology was incorporated into Facebook’s tagging algorithm and their products were discontinued. One of their products, the mobile phone app Klik, allowed you to identify faces on-the-go. All you had to do was hold your mobile device in front of the suspect, take a photo, and the app would comb through the Facebook database for a match. A face needed to exist in both worlds, on- and promised facial recognition in the palm of your hand, like John Travolta/Nicolas Cage’s character’s identifying palmover-face gesture in 1997’s Face/Off. a gesture, proximity is certainty.

Interface A face is a dual-functioning shield presents a naked canvas with an adjustable transparency layer. As the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas put it, “the skin of the face is that which stays the most naked, most destitute… there is an essential poverty in the face; the proof of this is that one tries to mask this poverty by putting on poses, by taking on a countenance.”3 The face, as communicator and status/307918676856823808.

2 Alexia Tsotsis, TechCrunch. http://techcrunch. com/2012/06/18/facebook-scoops-up-face-com-for-100mto-bolster-its-facial-recognition-tech/, accessed March 12, 2014.

3 Emmanuel Levinas, Philippe Nemo, (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 85–86.

be read as intrinsically human: naked or overdressed, in shreds, or huddled in cloth.

A face is to the body what an interface is to the screen. As such, a face can be personalized, designed, adjusted, adapted. A face is a status indicator, a steady news feed without the ability to scroll back in time.

Instead, time piles up in layers, becoming visible through duration.

Antonio Banderas recently declined an interface update: “I have eye bags and some people have proposed to me to take them out but I said no.”4 The face is reality in constant animation: YourNameHere_Face.gif.

be made over the course of multiple sittings and could only ever be mimetic.

On January 11, 2013, the portrait painting of Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, was unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Shortly after, an array of critiques and Internet memes ensued.

Robin Simon, the editor of British Art Journal, called it “a rotten portrait.”5 Artist Paul Emsley defended his work by declaring it unphotogenic.6 It seems that Princess Diana was better off with Mario Testino’s portrait photographs.

Photography and networked optics are becoming ubiquitous as capture devices shrink in size and image storage moves to the Cloud. On June 11, 1997, the innovator Philippe Kahn,

Mining FaceValue The reproduction of faces can be found as far back as ancient Egypt, when portraiture immortalized rulers and gods through highly stylized depictions. Likeness to physicality was not of great concern; portraits were reserved for the rich and powerful, and having one was a statement in itself. In the fourteenth century, the development of oil paints and canvas in Northern Europe allowed for greater detail in portraiture. In the Netherlands, Jan van Eyck painted ultra-detailed heads and faces, but daguerreotype photograph in 1839 that facial reproduction became widely available. Photography, which relied on chemicals rather than a skilled hand, gained popularity during the 1900s.

Photographs froze and captured a face as it really was, while paintings had to 4 Chrissy Iley, “Antonio Banderas on Puss-in-Boots,” The Telegraph, December 4, 2011, accessed March starsandstories/8928127/Antonio-Banderas-on-Puss-InBoots.html.

instant camera phone picture-sharing solution for public networks, shared the birth of his daughter from his wife’s hospital bed with two thousand family members, friends, and associates. wirelessly via a cell phone.7 In 2010, Motorola sold one billion cell phones equipped with cameras—more cameras than camera makers sold.8 With the advent of photographic reproduction, the face moved from the a display space. Robert Cornelius was Unveiled,” Time, January 11, 2013, accessed March 12, 2014, http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/01/11/kate-middletons6 Anthony Faiola, The Washington Post. January 31, 2013, accessed April 16, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ world/europe/in-uproar-over-duchess-of-cambridgeportrait-its-artist-speaks-out/2013/01/31/cbe0eff4-6bc411e2-8f4f-2abd96162ba8_story.html.

7 Kevin Maney, “Baby’s Arrival Inspires Birth of Cellphone Camera—and Societal Evolution,” USA Today, January 23, 2007, “Baby’s arrival inspires birth of cellphone camera — and societal evolution,” accessed March 12, 2014. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/ kevinmaney/2007-01-23-kahn-cellphone-camera_x.htm.

8 “Camera-phones: Dotty but Dashing,” The Economist, April 8, 2010, accessed March 12, 2014, http://www.economist. com/node/15865270.

suddenly able to hold his face in his hands and have it look back at him.9 of a mirror, a photograph preserves arrested time. Passes it on. Makes images that ensued from the advent of digital photography transformed over time into a stream of simulacra, drifting into anonymity and shifting from a portrait of a face to a mere image of some face: “this endlessly reproduced image is no longer a piece of information but a suggestion… something else than showing reality.”10 Advancements in imaging

to trace.

Thanks to re-blogging, almost no face is lost. Only the trace leading to its source disappears. The face turns into an anonymous orphan, swept far away from the home shores, taking on multiple lives of its own. Suddenly the orphaned face of a middle-aged woman resurfaces as Carole Gayle, a medical journalist on ezinearticles.com and Nancy King, a housewife in Indiana reviewing How to Cook Better in Ten Steps on amazon.com. Nancy and Carole have different names signifying different identities; however, they

of faces—not that there suddenly are more new faces, but rather more of the same ones. The anonymity of the face allows for tag categorization: #hugelips #cute #nerd #glassesrhot.

Categorization makes faces searchable and has turned micro-blogging site Tumblr—used primarily as personal mood boards of scrambled pixels and/or PhotoBooth snapshots with or without boyfriend/cat/clothes—into a vast, involuntary stock photography vault, material readily accessible for identity theft. The most prominent feature and content generator of Tumblr is “re-blogging,” a re-posting option available for every image on Tumblr that allows images that were once created for a limited public to be swept away into virtual oblivion.

Tags make the face vulnerable to bots

fake pop-up friend request ad for Facebook. A Google image search

each uploaded .img with an .img ID and custom URL, making any .img possible

The development of coins in Greece marks the inception of the face as a

daguerreotype photograph, in 1839.

10 Paul Virilio, Politics of the Very Worst, (New York: Semiotext(e), 1999), 46. Virilio argued for a future of realtime: a hyper concentration of time in which we will attain absolute speed and experience a communication revolution reducing the world to a virtual city.

websites of breast enlargement specialist Annabelle Larkins and of teacher Adriana Boteanu, who a college in Romania, as well as to the After multiple attempts to contact the school listed as Boteanu’s employer in Romania failed, and no other contact was available on all the websites Laura’s real identity and the source of the image remained unclear. The multiple online personalities of different names but same faces all seemed somewhat believable.

Flexible Power Product

heads of deities were engraved on coins. Alexander the Great was the coins. His expanding empire demanded

a power product to mark his position in the vast and remote territories of conquered lands. Regardless of the accuracy of Alexander’s portrait, engraved on a coin it lifted him into the sphere of the gods. In constant circulation, his face became a powerful College football player Manti Te’o’s girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, supposedly died in September 2012.11 After news of her “death” circulated, a girl surfaced claiming to be the person Lennay Kekua’s. It turned out that Kekua and Te’o had never met in person, but rather as @MTeo_5 and @lovalovaloveYOU on Twitter in 2011.

They kept in daily contact via cell phone and online chatting, yet the face and the person Te’o fell in love with did not match. Her photos were from another girl’s Facebook account, a real person, but not the one Te’o had been talking to for two years. The custom 12 stealing someone’s identity to meet people online, seems to make no sense to the uninvolved.

Won’t suspicion ensue after a long enough period of written exchange, apparent great chemistry, but denial to meet IRL (in real life)? How is so much trust given to a handful of photos and a name found on a social media provides a source of authentic of the face’s power and our trust in physicality.

The face possesses power as an 11 Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey, Deadspin, January 16, 2013, accessed March 12, 2014, http://deadspin.com/mantiteos-dead-girlfriend-the-most-heartbreaking-an-5976517.

12 Rachel Dodes, The Wall Street Journal, April 5, 2013, accessed March 12, 2014, http://blogs.wsj.com/ speakeasy/2013/04/05/nev-schulman-on-texting-

intrinsically human trait that suggests a physical body somewhere. Carole Gayle and Nancy King have a face, or at least a facial online representation.

The face is real, yet detached from the corporeal body. The orphaned face power product in constant virtual circulation. Pop-up ads that entreat you to become friends, LinkedIn emails suggesting connections, Facebook and a bunch of “photo albums”—the face can be in all these spaces while signifying a “real human” behind the virtual face.

TheChive.com, a self-described photo entertainment website, hosts

of teenage girls assembled by lonely guys. The images have desperate, scribbled messages of “Find her”, “MOAR!!” (Chive-speak for “more”).

These wanted notices are posted with the hope of retracing the face’s source from the display space to IRL. Techno Norms, or the Deliberate Production of FaceValue in the Display Space Technology creates techno norms, standards of human behavior and a result of perpetual innovation and extension of possibilities. In the display space, consisting of screens, devices, and gadgets where we encounter faces, techno norms evoke new standards of appearance. The display space provides involuntary encounters of faces in pop-up ads and phishing emails as well as voluntary encounters through telecommunication and social

merchants in the display space and must adapt design strategies to the mutating standards of display spaces.

Among the most effective transmitters of faces have been TV and cinema.

With the development of broadcast TV, distances decreased and audiences increased. Suddenly, thousands of people would stare at the same face simultaneously from thousands of different places.

Technological advancements in TV required a new functionality of makeup. Makeup that looked good in person appeared terrible on black-andwhite television. In 1946, Max Factor Jr. and white commercial television.13 “Green lipstick and rouge replace the customary red in makeup designed for actresses appearing in television broadcasts. The television camera, it is explained, does not record the red coloring in the human complexion, unnatural. When green is substituted, however, the lips and cheeks of a performer appear in accurate relation of tones with other facial features as the image is projected on the screen of the receiver.”14 In the mid ‘60s color broadcast started on prime-time TV.15 Once again, makeup needed to adapt to new technology. Standards evolved as did the image quality. introduced what was called “pancake make-up,”16 a thick layer of heavy 13 F. Basten, Max Factor: The man who changed the faces of the world (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2008), 145.

14 Popular Science, “Green Replaces Red in Make-up for Television,” (January 1938), 44, accessed April 16, 2014, http://books.google.it/books?id=OygDAAAAMBAJ&pg.

15 Mitchell Stephens, “The History of Television,” (Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia, 2000), accessed April 16, 2014, http://www.nyu.edu/classes/stephens/History%20of%20 Television%20page.htm.

16 James Bennett, “Pancake Make-up,” Cosmetics and Skin,

cream foundation that evened out any wrinkles and blemishes, creating a smooth appearance. The on-screen smoothening functionality of the product, was unmasked off-screen.

Disguised by relatively low image quality, the thick makeup technique rendered faces into shiny wax cast lookalikes. Nevertheless, on-screen makeup changed women’s physical appearance IRL. “Pan-Cake” foundation, trademarked by Max Factor in 1937, gained popularity among actresses, as it had a lighter formula than previous, oil-based products. A 1948 advertisement promised “Pan-Cake Make-Up for that smooth, young look […] Marilyn Maxwell in Metro-Goldwyn Mayer’s Summer Holiday.”17

was John Glenn’s lift-off in the space shuttle Discovery in 1998. It took another dozen years for HDTV to go ten times more resolution and less makeup. It revealed the layers of pancake makeup, ushering out the plastic look of the past and introducing a “less is more” aesthetic. Makeup has adapted to the harsh image of HDTV. Make Up Forever advertises its Complexion”18 as “both invisible on HD cameras and to the naked eye,” offering a “soft focus” effect for the face. Christian Dior Capture Totale

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Techno norms, and the resulting http://www.cosmeticsandskin.com/bcb/cake.php.

17 Max Factor, Hollywood. Pan-Cake Make-Up, 1948 Advertising Campaign.

Advertising Campaign.

19 Christian Dior. Captur Totale, 2013 Advertising Campaign.

face, only read and function in the context of their development. Once removed, they are stripped of their function. Rendered useless, they read as avant-garde interpretations of a distant future, a comical gesture born out of too much imagination rather than a new aesthetic, mutating standards over time.

In 2009, photos taken of Nicole Kidman during the premiere for the movie Nine showed the actress with a strange white powder covering her nose and under her eyes, making her look more like Tony Montana in coke heaven than an elegant beauty.20 The mishap prompted a media frenzy.

It turned out that Kidman was the victim of an HD makeup application differently than regular makeup, making it possible to apply less product while still retaining a concealing function for of an enhancing product outside of its context led to a malfunction, and publicly aired a strategy designed to increase FaceValue. Kidman’s face turned into a meme.

The makeup methods for the production of faces in display space are only temporary. Makeup can be washed off. Kidman’s mishap is (hopefully) a one-time situation, even though her viral oblivion. It has become a second face, alive only in the display space, different from the face encountered in reality. But what if we start adapting our faces to the display space permanently?

FaceTime Facelift, “a medical procedure developed to improve the 20 Michelle Villett, Beauty Editor 7, 2011, accessed March 12, 2014, http://beautyeditor. now-ashley-judd-twice-why-are-so-many-celebs-wearingvisible-white-powder/.

way you look while video chatting,” was created by Dr. Robert Sigal in 2012.21 It is named after Apple’s FaceTime video chatting feature for the iPhone.

Dr. Sigal developed the procedure after receiving multiple complaints from clients who found their faces reduced in value by the new video-chatting technology and the angles at which web cameras capture their faces. FaceTime, PhotoBooth, Skype, and similar telecommunication technologies have introduced the immediate confrontation with one’s own face in a from-downbelow perspective. These technologies add a narcissistic layer to face-to-face communication by displaying a small image of one’s own face in the corner of the communication window. Apple promises “phone calls like you’ve never seen before”22; the cell phone is transformed into a pocket mirror on steroids.

Unlike makeup, FaceTime Facelift is a permanent procedure. As it was

removed from its webcam environment?

The face enhanced through FaceTime Facelift might become the new standard. As the gadgets and context for techno norms become more affordable and mainstream, will the demand for further permanent facial enhancement rise and alter the physical appearance of faces? Virilio’s forecast of a “prosthetic man” envisions a human body enhanced by technology, a face altered by added function: “Technology is colonizing the human body just as it colonized the body of the Earth.”23 21 Austin-Weston Center for Cosmetic Surgery, accessed March 12, 2014, http://www.austin-weston.com/articles/ virginia-facelift/.

22 Apple Inc. FaceTime, Advertising Campaign 2010 23 Virilio. Politics of the Very Worst, Page 54.

Homogenous Value The spaces our faces live in change at the rapid pace of technological advancement. Methods of permanent plastic alteration and temporary redesign of the face will keep evolving. 4K (ultra HD), an extremely high-resolution image, displays more than the human eye can see. Even the most beautiful, smooth skin looks like a dry desert landscape in a 4K lens. As the real is captured in a resolution too high for the human eye to discern, special makeup is needed once again to render the new image digestible. In time, Max Factor will be advertising “4K makeup, for that ultrarealistic look,” a cream that, once applied dries up, creating a crackly surface, mimicking the hyper-realistic resolution displayed on screen for our eyes to see IRL. “The security guard wouldn’t let me in my moms gates bc he said I didn’t look like Kim Kardashian…hmmm” #rude #getglasses @KimKardashian24 Soon, we may be changing our undergoing FaceTime Facelift, you will 3D-print a custom chin implant on-demand at Shapeways.com or purchase a temporary facial accessory down the street during your half-hour lunch break before that important Skype meeting. Temporary alteration is key to versatility. In FaceValue, we may steal our own faces for the sake of versatility is power.

As we happily send off our physically enhanced faces into digital oblivion, will you encounter your face again soon, asking for a connection on 24 Kim Kardashian, Twitter post, March 10, 2013, accessed March 12, 2014, https://twitter.com/KimKardashian/ status/310846154587901953.

Linkedin via email? Will these virtual orphaned faces, living in displayspace, become more valuable than our physical faces?

2 Abigail Collins Josh Bitelli

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1-3 34.1383° N, 116.0725° W / Lt. Sims, 2014, video stills from single channel video projected with audio interview of LAPD Lieutenant, speaking about aerial views in crime scene investigations.

Drone footage shot in 29 Palms California near Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center.

4, 6, 7, 10 Outsized Nutrition, 20125, 8, 9 Outsized Nutrition, 2012-2013, porcelain cast into bread, 20 x 30 x 20 cm

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banned from the social, public space Body Geography in Virtually Public Platforms: Censorship of the Female Body

mimic our physical selves and a lot of the time are even more important.

Catherine Yang They are ways to connect with an audience, to start discussion, and to When Instagram banned the artist create change. Through this removal I really felt how strong of a distrust content, the move inspired and and hate we have towards female reopened a discussion on the problems bodies. The deletion of my account faced by females navigating the virtual felt like a physical act, like the public landscape. The controversy over Collins coming at me with a razor, sticking social media site that is a platform and space for self-representation, involved Collins’s display of herself from midtorso down in bikini bottoms with her pubic hair exposed at the top of the bikini. This was Photoshopped onto a glitzy and shimmery background as an artistic expression of Collins’s body.1 Instagram regulators deemed this photograph to be inappropriate and pornographic for its exposure of pubic hair. The ban expands upon the general tendency of social media websites and other platforms of public expression to be gendered spaces.

At the technosocial frontier, the persistence of censorship of the female body in a public, virtual space is not merely a symbolic stripping of agency, but also a physical act of removal and discouragement that regulates the discursive measures between art and pornography, between the beautiful and the disgusting, and perpetuates institutionalized conventions of heteronormativity and the “male gaze.” Expressions by women that eschew conventional notions of beauty are excluded by being physically and symbolically

to cover up, forcing me to succumb to society’s image of beauty. That these very real pressures we face everyday can turn into literal censorship.”2 Collins’s criticism suggests that the

1 Petra Collins, “Petra Collins On Censorship And The Female Body,” OYSTER, October 17, 2013, http://oystermag.com/ petra-collins-on-censorship-and-the-female-body.

2 Ibid.

3 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: feminism and the subervsion of identity (Routledge, Chapman & Hall, inc, 1990).

female castration—a devaluation of her form of gender performativity. one’s own life as if it were a diary of uncontrolled, uninitiated picturetaking by an objective third party, but rather constructs and represents the self. Collins’s own use of Instagram is a performance of the multitudinous selves that transgress institutionalized, heteronormative gender norms.3 The ban of Collins’s women’s ownership and willing display of their own bodies in virtual space are controlled by discursive or practical consciousness on social media sites like Instagram.

The discursive or practical consciousness that female bodies are subjected to in virtual spaces of hierarchical gender norms. The practical consciousness of viewers

is the subconscious awareness of gender norms that permeates into everyday discourse. Discursive consciousness is the rationalization of the aforementioned discourse. This duality of consciousnesses relegates itself into the formation and regulation of heteronormative ideals within public, virtual platforms like Instagram through expressions of approval and disapproval in the forms of “likes,”

Instagram: Petra Collins and Kim

as obscene. It can be argued, then, that through discursive and practical consciousness, Instagram as a sociospatial platform of expression— intentionally or not—has itself become an institution with its own forms of regulation. Instagram is a space where a patterned set of activities—selfpromoted photographs—organize around the production of certain social outcomes, which can be artistic expression, social acceptance, or even a basic imprint upon the global cyberspace.4 The censorship of a

indecent exposure of her pubic hair in a self-promoted photograph, as opposed to the thousands of very

owner losing his or her space of self-expression. The spatial barriers on the Internet are not physically the platform, but rather ambiguous distinctions between what is deemed attractive and what is deemed offensively unattractive, where the latter becomes evicted and censored.

These ambiguous spatial barriers have been institutionalized by the direct regulators of online platforms but also the members of society

culture,” a manifestation of the willing portrayal and self-expression of bodies on a public social platform, faced with the double standard of user disapproval and administrative censorship. Bernard criticizes the double standards imposed by the censorship of Petra Collins’s

accepted form of feminine sexuality as it is regulated by the “male gaze.”5 Bernard and Collins both demonstrate how Internet censorship can deny women who are complex and nuanced individuals.

Internet’s perceived androgyny, since the male gaze is often perpetuated by both male and female genders.

As space is a “morphic language,” according to spatial theorists Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson, the relationship between the space—in this case Instagram—and the status regarding appearance and personality is constantly re-negotiated within the system.”6 theorist Pierre Bourdieu has also argued that the dominant group renegotiating status in spatial relations is able to “control the constructions of reality that reinforce its own status

perceiving and appropriating normative gender performance.

In the article “The Power of

5 Katherine Bernard, “The Power of Instagram: Petra Collins Vogue Culture, October 23, 2013, accessed March 12, 2014, http://www. vogue.com/culture/article/the-power-of-instagram-petra-

4 Daphne Spain, Gendered Spaces (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 11.

6 Daphne Spain, Gendered Spaces, 17.

so that subordinate groups accept the social order and their own place in it.”7 In Collins’s case, the dominant group is the hodgepodge of active individuals commenting, distributing, and criticizing her photograph, while the subordinate group is composed of individuals like Collins who oppose binary gender relations (between dominant and Other) and embrace power and complexity of the female body and mind.

Collins addresses the fact that the not the only regulators of the male gaze upon her photograph, as she speaks directly “to those who reported [her], to those who are disgusted by [her] body, to those who commented ‘horrible’ or ‘disgusting’ on an image of [her].”8 This peer criticism and regulation in the virtual landscape can be understood through the concept of “spatial fetishism,” an assignment of causal power to space and its

others to accept the double standards regarding female self-representation and its regulation by the male gaze has become part of mainstream consciousness. This entrance into mainstream consciousness has created a potential relational space that social geographer David Harvey describes as “a space… contained in objects in the sense that an object can be said to exist only insofar as it contains and represents within itself relationships to other objects” within an urban system.9 Harvey’s concept of space and its meanings in an urban context seems very different now that hundreds of millions of users around the world are on social networking sites. This shift of urbanism to the virtual world creates new gendered spaces. The disconnection between participants in the virtual world often manifests itself in “real world” spatial arrangements. This raises of digital space on social media sites

The virtual landscape of Instagram creates a shield of distance between Collins and viewers that forms a sense of anonymity and lack of immediate

has worked to denaturalize the causal power of spatial fetishism and, in this case, the underpinnings of distance inevitably makes Instagram heteronormativity. seem like a neutral order that regulates On techno-social platforms like itself in a “natural” way, according Instagram, located in the cyber to the heteronormative order. Yet landscape of the Internet, people the space manifested in Instagram interact virtually by commenting, is a socially-constructed product of “liking,” and “following.” Although social and economic processes that socially accessible through a mediated unfold spatially. Spatial fetishism is thus utilized as a way to normalize disconnected on a certain level from the ban and silence of Collins within the public arena. This has led to the a universalized system of gender silencing of artists like Petra Collins. relations and expectations.

The intentional, symbolic stripping of The refusal by Collins and many Collins’s agency through the deletion 7 Daphne Spain, Gendered Spaces, page 17.

8 Collins, “Petra Collins On Censorship And The Female Body.”

9 David Harvey, Social Justice of the City (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), 14.

her in a silenced “third space,” a relational space that has since been immortalized by means other than an enacts a movement through the agency of third space feminism that promotes it means to be a modern woman.10 This controversy urges a denaturalization of the causal power of spatial fetishism in mainstream consciousness within both the “virtual” and “real” worlds through a new discourse that transgresses normative gender conventions.

10 Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Theories of Representation and Difference).

(Indiana University Press, 1999).

3 Adriana Ramic´ Conor Backman Brody Albert

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1-2 Architects of Gamma Bad, 2012, Inkjet on paper, custom chairs produced by Kakawood, i2OCR optical character recogntion, Google translate, Zhujiacun, China When the empty land on I Wish Village was marked for demolition, its owners built the most elaborate homes possible to make the transition ☆ The walls inside one of the homes is transcribed using Optical Character Recognition and translated with Google Translate, and draped in front of the wall on a specially designed chair, as well as in an accompanying

3 the orangerie, 2013, oil on canvas and black plexiglass in artist’s frame, 8” x 10” 4 green/tree/orange/house/ice/tea/ black/box, 2013, cast orange peel, 5 limonaia, 2013, oil on canvas and black plexiglass in artist’s frame, 18” x 24” 6-7 10:59AM – 1:45PM, 2014, 3-channel digital animation, projectors and cables, plays once a day for approximately 2 hours 46 minutes

C Fluxus as a Network Hillary Jacobs “Should a manifesto be launched today? It would be too beautiful, too easy. The heroic epoch of manifestos— Dada, Surrealists and others, even individuals, is well past... It is no longer a matter of yelling, it’s a matter of mattering! But how to matter? Perhaps in any way, not at all! In a certain way then? Not that either! What then? What is to do, is to create acts, gestures absurd in appearance, but in reality full of meaning ...”

–Jean-Pierre Wilhelm1 “ organization as any collection of actors (N > 2) that pursue repeated, enduring exchange relations with one another...”

–Joel M. Podolny and Karen L. Page2

critic and gallery director Jean-Pierre Wilhelm explained in his introduction Fluxorum Fluxus at the Dusseldorf Art Academy in 1963. Amid the birth of postmodernism, with its daunting schizophrenia described by Hal Foster in Postmodern Polemics, and its freereal through simulacra as proposed

by Jean Baudrillard, Fluxus found a means to ground experience, a means to connect, in the unlikely place of the scattered global network.3 Situating the Flux(us) Fluxus’s connection to the characteristics of a network is rooted

openly cited by founding member and often-cited leader George Maciunas Fluxus Festival. Maciunas continues to

Numerous essays begin with the claim that Fluxus was not an art Fluxus in a multitude of fashions: a community, a group of friends, a family, a network. In the Information idea of a group functioning as a network goes unobserved, embedded in the zeitgeist. When Fluxus formed during the late 1950s and early 1960s, understanding an art movement as a network was a revolutionary idea. Yet claiming Fluxus was a network does not encapsulate the ways in which

new ways to produce meaning, as art 1 Owen F. Smith, “Developing a Fluxable Forum: Early Performance and Publishing,” in The Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman (London: Academy Editions, 1998), 3.

2 Joel M. Podolny and Karen L. Page, “Network Forms of Organization,” Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 24 (1998), 59.

“a continuing succession of changes.”4 echoes the openness in sociologist Manuel Castells’s description of a network as an “open structure, able to expand without limits.”5 Castells’s

The endless expanse of the network 3 For more information see Hal Foster, “(Post)modern Polemics,” Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, (New York: The new Press, 1998) and Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” trans. Sheila Faria Galser, Simulacra and Simulation, (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1995).

4 Owen F. Smith, “Fluxus: A Brief History and Other Fictions,” in In the Spirit of Fluxus, ed. Janet Jenkins (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1993), 24.

5 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed., (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 501.

evokes distance and separation, the point of entry confounding and a network or Fluxus activity produces a seemingly overwhelming number of possibilities for the individual, leaving them lost in a tangled, moving web. The awareness of its magnitude and scope threatens to reduce an this may have been an ambition of Fluxus, as Wilhelm implied when he questioned the necessity of mattering, seems antithetical to Fluxus’s aim of concrete experience, a more aware understanding of existence through the fusion of art and life. Maciunas wrote, “if man could experience the world, the concrete world surrounding him (from mathematical ideas to physical matter) in the same way he experiences art, there would be no need for art, artists and similar ‘nonproductive’ elements.”6 The Fluxus project aimed to create meaning in life, as Wilhelm suggested, even in the face of the uncertainty between needing to matter and not matter. Ultimately— and precisely through its volatility— the Fluxus network facilitated a more conscious experience of daily life.

Despite the intimidating expanse inherent in the network, openness became an essential method for producing meaning in Fluxus. The open of possibilities, inviting the viewer to participate in the production of meaning, repositioning the viewer and the work. This new position reshapes the status of the work: no longer the endpoint, the work functions as the 6 David T. Doris, “Zen Vaudeville: A Medi(t)ation in the Margins of Fluxus,” in The Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman (London: Academy Editions, 1998), 107.

future connections, the generative nexus for a network of interactions and associations. For example, seminal Fluxus artist and composer La Monte Young’s composition Zen for Head (1960), which starts out as a simple direction, “Draw a straight line and follow it,” later became a memorable performance by Fluxus artist Nam June Paik in 1962 and was subsequently preserved as an object in a museum.7 Often in Fluxus, the simple framework unfolds into a complex web of associations: the network of the work. Paik expressed the need for “INDETERMINISM and VARIABILITY,” as it “is the very UNDERDEVELOPED parameter in the optical art.”8 Founding Fluxus member Alison Knowles’s compilation of responses to her score The Identical Lunch in The Journal of the Identical Lunch visualizes this revelation. The act of reading other experiences illuminates of possible reactions. The open work shifts the focus from the object, to the experiences that occur because of the encounter with the work—the experience of indeterminism. Each reading of the work creates a new node, each encounter between the work and viewer expands the network.

Knowledge through the Network

sociologists and organizational scholars claim that “network forms skills or acquire knowledge,” with knowledge in the network system gained through the “[preservation] of 7 Elizabeth Armstrong, “Fluxus and the Museum,” in In the Spirit of Fluxus, ed. Janet Jenkins (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1993), 16.

8 Ibid., 164.

greater diversity.”9 The same holds true diversity leads to real experience.

German philosopher Hans-Georg of the open work and its contingency Gadamer explained in Truth and on multivalent production through the Method that real experience is action of the viewer-participant. In “whereby man becomes aware of 10 Fluxus new understanding developed For Gadamer, only out of an awareness of the minutia of the everyday through repeated of individual experience, gained engagement with ordinary objects or from the exposure to a multitude of experiences, can one be “situated in Ay-O’s Finger Box Set (No. 26) or and [act] in history.”11 It is exactly this awareness that the work of the directed by one of Knowles’s scores.

Fluxus network provides. Flipping The logic of the Fluxus publication through The Journal of the Identical Lunch exposes viewers to all the publication, Fluxus I, consisted experiences that will never belong to of numerous scores placed into them. A similar understanding occurs individual envelopes and bolted in Mieko Shiomi’s 1972 Spatial Poem together, each envelope containing a No. 5, which asks the reader to “open situation, question or action for the something which is closed” and send viewer-participant to engage with back a report of the performance with in variegated modes of expression. the date and time.12 The amalgamated Fluxkits, often referred to as multiples responses are charted on a map, and thought of as publications, were and become a document for the varied and unique experiences of the scores for an owner to experience. individuals who performed the work.

The publications were sites brimming By recognizing that each experience of with propositions for the viewerperforming the same score is unique to the participant, an appreciation for endless opportunities to uncover of one’s own lived experience can be new ways to approach life’s materials. gained.

The idiosyncratic nature of Fluxus, Through the interaction with the demand to interact with everyday Fluxus, viewer-participants experience objects in unconventional and what they would not otherwise have profound manners, reintroduced encountered or had the consciousness the viewer-participant to life by to notice. The work of Fluxus reveals offering opportunities that insisted on to viewer-participants their own renewed consciousness and physical lived actions. The open system, one engagement with the mundane. The of the characteristics of network play of Fluxus—its focus on games, organizations, provides a framework gags, and jokes—functioned as a way in Fluxus that allows for the artwork to reveal an essential quality of through interaction, through doing.

10 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Bloomsbury, If diversity facilitates knowledge 2013), 365. in the network system, for Fluxus that 11 Ibid.

9 Podolny and Page, “Network Forms of Organization,” 62.

12 In the Spirit of Fluxus, ed. Janet Jenkins (Minnesota: Walker Art Center, 1993) p. 166.

human existence, the determinate condition of being. The network of a work becomes a site of grounding, not upheaval. Thus Wilhelm’s placement of the individual between the need to matter and not matter points directly to the importance of knowing one’s experiences. The open network The viewer-participant at once gains heighted awareness of their own actions and limitations.

Openness in Fluxus produces more than an acute awareness of experience. Open distribution methods play an important role in the production of sustained and repeated connection between individuals— openness as a tool for connection over disconnection. At George Brecht and Robert Filliou’s La Cédille Qui Sourit storefront in Villefranche-sur-Mer, the “operative ethic” was “connectivity, generosity, and friendship,” explains art historian Natilee Harren.13 The series titled Étude d’acheminement de poèmes en petite vitesse (Study in dispatching poems at low speed) the standard practices of economic

bond. Suspense poems, distributed through the mail, were a means for Brecht and Filliou to interact with others even as they lived in a provincial French town. The move to the outskirts created the opportunity to test the possibilities of forming sustained connections over spatial and temporal distance. In the poem, experience of the process became more important point A to point B. In sociological theory, global organizations are understood as “processes, not places.”14 If the global organization in the formation of a network transforms place to process, ungrounding the individual as he or she loses connection to a process to facilitate the formation of stronger bonds. The experience of detachment associated with distance in the network is transformed into a moment for connection. Closeness is paradoxically created through the distance of the global network, leading to more meaningful relations through repeated interactions.

Dispersed Collective

production, where one buys a standard product off the shelf and takes it immediately home. The repetitive and prolonged act of receiving secures the

As the Fluxus network emerged from social and artistic structures, it sought to uproot conventions and create new systems for social interaction. At its core Fluxus’s aims were social and revolutionary, attempting to fuse art and life, to undermine traditional boundaries, and to experiment with new possibilities and forms. In Fluxus Publicus, art historian Simon Anderson articulated Fluxus’s ambition to “[rewrite] the

13 Natilee Harren, “La Cédille Qui Ne Finit Pas: Robert Filliou, George Brecht, and Fluxus in Villefranche,” Getty Research Journal, No. 4 (2012), 134.

14 Peter R. Monge and Noshir S. Contractor, Theories of Communication Networks (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 4.

as “suspense poems,” were sold to the buyer one stanza at a time, creating a lengthened connection between consumer and distributor by subverting the experience of instant

notion of conception, creation, and consumption.”15 member Ken Friedman further explained, “the essence of Fluxus has been transformation.”16 To further understand Fluxus’s use of the network for its social aims, it is necessary to

we thought today. That manifesto is Maciunas’s manifesto, not a manifesto of Fluxus.”20 Instead of one manifesto written by a leader of the group, Fluxus had a multitude of manifestos written by a variety of members. Higgins compiled

to diachronic emergence of a network, which refers to “the fact that the behavior of the system over time generates properties at one or more levels that did not exist at prior points in time.”17 The formation of new ideas comes

an issue of Something Else Press, with works by artists including Knowles, Ay-O, Al Hansen, Robert Watts, and Philip Corner.21 In the issue, individuality manifested in the artists’ varied methods of addressing the very idea of a manifesto. Knowles provided

but instead through the loosely knit Fluxus network. German sociologist, philosopher, and critic Georg Simmel explained that “the narrower the circle to which we commit ourselves, the less freedom of individuality we possess.”18 The expanse of the global network produces more differentiation, leading to more innovation. Fluxus’s form is antithetical to the typical avant-garde art movement modus operandi of coalescing around a single cause. In Surrealism, for example, activities and shifts in practices are clearly marked by the Surrealist Manifesto and the Second Surrealist Manifesto. When Maciunas distributed a manifesto

also asked the viewer to make as many words as possible out of the letters in “manifesto,” alongside a list of her own results. Ay-O began with erratic prose that started “Cover your head with a yellow hat because Tristan Tzara didn’t cover his head with one in 1916, 1918, 1919 and 1920” and ended with the decimals of pi written out in thirteen rows. Hansen contributed his Lettuce Manifesto, where each phrase began with “lettuce,” such as “Lettuce bring art back to life.” The distinctiveness of the artists further delineated as each artist’s name, preceded by the word “by”, appeared on a separate line, giving the issue no single author.

1962, Dick Higgins, a fellow founding member of Fluxus, remarked that “nobody was willing to sign it.”19 He

artists’ unique perspectives, were

tomorrow’s possibilities by what 15 Armstrong, “Fluxus and the Museum,” 16.

16 Ken Friedman, “Fluxus and Company,” in The Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman (London: Academy Editions, 1998), 239.

17 Ibid., 16.

18 Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971), 257.

19 Dick Higgins, “Fluxus: Theory and Reception,” in The Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman (London: Academy Editions, 1998), 219.

individual so that he or she would be “particularly well equipped to have new experiences and to learn from them.”22 The allowance for individuality in Fluxus enabled the continued experimentation and innovation that the group sought. Thus, in order to 20 Ibid.

21 Ay-0, et al., Manifestos, ed Dick Higgins (New York: Something Else Press, 1966).

22 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 364.

maintain progressive development in Fluxus the group needed to maintain a level of distance and autonomy from one another.

The internationalism central to Fluxus, evidenced in Higgins’s inclusion of the term in his Nine-Criteria for Fluxus, made possible the expansion of available knowledge to Fluxus members and their network of participants and supporters. Fluxus centers for Fluxus activity in Europe during the mid-1960s. In Denmark, Arthur Keopcke and Eric Andersen collaborated and sponsored numerous events and performances.23 In Germany, Tomas Schmit, Wolf Vostell, and Joseph Beuys were responsible for including 24 Stunden (24 Hours).

Willem de Ridder set up, with the encouragement of Maciunas, the European Mail-Order Warehouse in the formed in France: Ben Vautier opened Laboratoire 32 in Nice, and George Brecht and Robert Filliou opened Le Cédille Qui Souri in Villefranche-surMer. In the United States, Maciunas’s unsuccessful attempts to unite Fluxus into a common endeavor led to the formation of four Fluxus centers called Fluxus West, Fluxus East, Fluxus North, and Fluxus South, headed by Ken Friedman, Milan Knizak, Peter Kirkeby, and Ben Vautier. These nine centers of Fluxus activity during the 1960s produced autonomous and

as a scattered global network. As Granovetter observed, “individuals with few weak ties will be deprived of information from distant parts of the the provincial news and views of their close friends.”24 Granovetter explains that without weak ties “any momentum generated in this way does not spread beyond the clique. As a result, most of the population will be untouched.”25 The growth of the network also became a means to connect to more people and ideas. If Fluxus sought to change the way individuals interacted with the world, the development of weak ties in network organization allowed for the profusion of Fluxus ideas to the furthest extent.

In fact, the openness of Fluxus and its network structure enabled its longevity. The poet and visual artist Emmett Williams once said that what “Fluxus was trying to promote openness, you might say, practically to the point of dissolution.”26 At another instance he recognized Fluxus as “the longest-lived thing, in terms of an art movement, in the twentieth century.”27 Even in an openness that pushes to the brink of dismemberment, Fluxus persists. The network, “built ephemeral relations,” necessitates an adaptability that allowed Fluxus 28

its end. During the 1970s—at a time when art-historical interest in

scattered nature of the network Granovetter’s theory of the strength of weak ties further substantiates 23 Smith, “Developing a Fluxable Forum,” 9–11.

24 Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited,” Sociological Theory, Vol. 1 (1983), 202.

25 Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited,” 202.s 26 Armstrong, “Fluxus and the Museum,” 20.

27 Nicholas Zurbrugg, “”A spirit of Large Goals’: Fluxus, Dada and Postmodern Cultural Theory at Two Speeds,” 175.

28 Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 501.

the group into museum shows and catalogues, leading many to herald Fluxus’s demise—Fluxus activity still continued.

It was at this time that Fluxshoe, envisioned by Friedman and a young academic, Mike Weaver, took form at the small university town of Exeter, England. Simon Anderson wrote that “Fluxshoe does not equal Fluxus,” but that it provided “a sample of Fluxus culture growing, mutating, and being exposed to the various viruses of a particular time, place and set of personalities, each of whose understanding of the original combined to create a traveling circus of experiment and adventure.”29 Fluxshoe linked to the genesis of Fluxus through the participation of artists from the earlier group, such as Ay-O and Eric Andersen, but was also open to a new generation of artist participants. David Mayor, Fluxshoe’s coordinator, chose to promote a combination of the simple Fluxus scores along with more complex works by artists such as Ian Breckwell or Su Braden that drifted farther from Fluxus’s original permutations. Yet precisely due to Fluxus’s openness, a work at Fluxshoe did not need to

the end of Fluxus centers around the death of Maciunas, ignoring the openness that he himself valued. It is Maciunas’s perpetually incomplete Diagram of Historical Development of Fluxus and Other Four Dimensional, Aural, Optic, Olfactory, Epithetical and Tactile Art Forms (1973) that most succinctly embodies the processoriented nature of the Fluxus group,

and instead could foster new Fluxus activity. Even though Fluxshoe did

In After Art, art critic and historian David Joselit examines what comes after the art object: the network of the artwork and where it moves across the globe in a technologically advanced society. While Joselit describes the image as a connecting bond between individuals across a vast global network, his argument remains solely centered on the images of artworks.

Joselit asserts that “images possess vast power through their capacity for replication, remediation, and

of the original Fluxus tactics, it still perpetuated its legacy. The idea that Fluxus ended when its teachings and productions were still in play is antithetical to the openness Fluxus practice valued through its network organization.

Much of the discourse surrounding 29 Simon Anderson, “Fluxus, Fluxion, Fluxshoe,” in Ken Friedman, ed., The Fluxus Reader (London: Academy Editions, 1998), 25.

chronicles the artists associated with Fluxus and its origins. The diagram demands continuous revision as it remains open to the shifting identity of Fluxus, a group under constant reformation as it moves through time and space. If Fluxus aimed to emphasize experience and process, then the globalized network, too space or time, provided an auspicious organizational form for sustained reinvention. The variation in Fluxus led to its ultimate continuity. As George Brecht stated, “Each of us had his own ideas about what Fluxus was and so much the better. That way it will take longer to bury us.”30 Afterword

30 Smith, “Developing a Fluxable Forum,” 6.

dissemination at variable velocities.”31 For Joselit, society depends upon the collection of “image wealth,” with the act of looking taking precedence.32 The network functions as a facilitator of image distribution. With Fluxus the network of the artwork is of equal image that circulates, but the ideas and experiences it produces for the viewer-participant. In a time of rapid technological advancement that allows for the instantaneous perfusion of images across the global network, looking back at Fluxus and its aims provides a means to focus on the embodied experiences enabled by the network. Fluxus provides viewerparticipants not with “image wealth,” but experience wealth. It presents a network of art, a life based on doing rather than looking.

31 David Joselit, After Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), xiv.

32 Ibid., 27.

4 Shoshi Kanokohata James Viscardi Nick Payne

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1 Untitled (Contour Contort), 2013, ceramics, 18” x 36” x 8” 2 Daily Defense (mixed media), 2013, plastic spray bottles, Meyer’s room deodorant, 46” x 38” 3 Recreational Modernism (mixed media) carpet, beach recliner, 46” x 38” 4 Mouse Madness 1, colored pencil on paper, 9” x 12” 5 Mouse Madness 2, colored pencil on paper, 9” x 12”

D Archives: Space and Play Mary Clark The archival impulse is quietly violent, classifying everything it touches, freezing things on contact like liquid nitrogen. An object or text’s eventual inclusion in the archive constitutes the difference between literature/art/records/collections/ I used to work in the UCLA Department Library of Special library one of the employees showed me his favorite piece in the collection: a lamp made of human skin. It was the most talked-about piece, the collection’s grotesque pride and joy, made from stretched and dried human it looked more like linen than beef reason for its inclusion in the archive.

Three days a week I met my boss at the Southern Regional Library Facility (SRLF) on campus, near the student dorms. The building is a bunker under a grassy hill. To enter it, you identify yourself and take an elevator down the cold hallways are clogged by carts stacked with black books and blue DocuDry™® boxes.

Once inside the storehouse, I would watch the lights turn on in the basement, sweeping over dark rows of steel gray and blue archival boxes.

From a distance the archive feels

help my boss sort through sixty-four 5 x 2 ft stereoscopic containers labeled “The Rudi Gernreich Papers.”

Gernreich was a Los Angeles designer most prominent in the 1970s, and his clothes and patterns are stored at SRLF. My responsibilities included removing the clothes from the boxes, unfolding them, photographing them, refolding them, and entering my the digital point of contact between the physical, personal archival material and its place within public awareness: “Thong bathing suit. 2. Black. Stained.”

In every multipurpose, acid-free box there are dog leashes used for belts, well-worn women’s shoes, dance apparel, and hoods without jackets.

Many of Gernreich’s most notable works are elsewhere, but the archive houses some of his novel thong and topless bathing suits, designer jeans, transparent clothing, and mesh materials are striking, relevant not only for their historical value but also for their creative manipulation and appropriation of fabrics and colors beyond their original or traditional uses.

All of these clothes are in some state of disrepair. Tweed jackets pockmarked with cigarette burns from the 1970s, silky miniskirts with broken zippers in ruined boxes with putrid smells. Tedious folding processes are required for all these pieces of clothing fold could have no more than one point be tissue paper between sleeves, under collars, and around buttons.

Gernreich was interested in objects and the meanings they are assigned.

Photographs of androgynous men and women in matching clothes and shaved heads were Gernreich’s

attempts to eliminate the signifying potential of materials (and bodies).

There is violence in pictures of bony people with shaved heads, but also tenderness in body-conscious materials and the obvious movement they allow. The archive treats Gernreich’s clothes with the same kind of graceful violence.

The violence I’m speaking of is a kind of yanking: objects in the archive are pulled from their place in time. In Gernreich’s case, bodies are stripped reducing difference to subtleties through shocking comparisons.

Violence is the sharpness, grace is the precision with which Gernreich treats bodies and the archive places objects.

When I worked at SRLF, I was narrowly critical of the archive. Before I had any way to conceptualize its violence or its intimacy, I felt it was tedious, insincere, grotesque, and obsessive. It is easy to be repelled by an idea—in this case, a place—so insistent on its own ability to confer meaning.

In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida described the archive as a commandment handed down from a position of power, a decree to preserve, and a physical space. He posited that the archive both takes place and has a place. “There, we said, and in this place. How are we to think of there?”1 Is there the past that is stored or the storage space? I am interested in the storage space. I think of there as a place where objects interact, where materials form a dense network of historical inclusion and exclusion, where totality/history/memory/ preservation are distilled into a 1 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Press, 1996), 1.

physical play of unlikely shapes, colors, and materials.

In its hugeness, I still felt like there was never enough space in the archive. This is true in history: the archive ignores, corrects, and excludes what it doesn’t care to hold. Much archival theory rests on the idea that placing an object or text within the archive irreversibly marks, canonizes, or situates it within a time and placeimmovable. The archive is constantly changing, but always telling the same story of itself as if nothing has been added or deleted.

But now it seems to me that the archive is a space of intimate immensity, where one’s obsessions can be and are legitimized in an intersection between personal meaning and public recordkeeping.

It is a dendritic web and a timeless stronghold, never amounting to its professed totality, but virtually endless to the individual.

It does not make me sad to see things in the archive change. I know that Rudi Gernreich’s suits are slowly rotting. But, more interesting than mere preservation, the archive is a daydream space in which memory is constantly being reconstructed. The archive’s function is the presentation of material for endless re-imagining.

Special Collections houses books, paintings, maps, manuscripts, clothing, collections from Susan Sontag and Aldous Huxley, photographs from Adams, illuminated manuscripts, and a children’s book collection. Family members of dedicated collectors donated most of these to the library, where they would be looked after and added to, theoretically forever.

Intimacy in the archive manifests the future, can be touched. Past writings, old clothing, and even relationship between the past and the present is material, and delight in the interplay of these objects is apparent within each collection and the archive as a whole. In a material sense, the archive is a space of play.

Its arbitrary alphabetical arrangements and disarrangements create opportunities for play. R. B. Kitaj’s drawings are propped up on a desk in the basement, more of Rudi Gernreich’s clothes are in a misplaced trunk under that desk, and Aldous Huxley’s library card is on display in a glass case upstairs for visitors to see.

But the archive is also incredibly

the same shape. I do not know if Derrida was interested in the physical shape of materials in the archive, as his theory concerns records and not objects, but I know that giving names to and categorizing collections from other times and other places is not into blue cardboard boxes (another playful possibility of the archive).

The accidental juxtapositions within a space concerned with regulating time give the archive a gracefulness otherwise overlooked.

Politically, the archive is often thought of as a place of disconnection to which objects are moved, away from the place or time of their former usefulness. In this sense the archive is static. It is eager for the new to

and forgotten (until it needs to be and hungry, overwhelmed by meaning remembered). How often do you see (other people’s? my own?) and moving monuments? immensity. In The Poetics of Space, There is only so much matter, and Gaston Bachelard writes that all many of its elements come to rest daydreaming begins the same way: “...it and play in the archive. The space grafts a temporal network of objects, it is far off, elsewhere, in the space diminishing time’s hierarchical 2 of elsewhere.” There are celestial opportunities present in every object to the dimensions of a basement. This in the archive, and they bounce off is the archivist’s paradise: a space each other and off me endlessly. Just without time or all time preserved in by my presence, I make the already one space.

Violence and play are not mutually “immensity is the movement” of my exclusive. Both are modes of physical “magnifying being.”3 The archive grows intimacy. To move objects around is to exponentially through daydreams and destroy them and reconstitute them. re-imagining.

Breaking down and rebuilding is the The archive is at the “intersection archive’s business, and cruelty and of the topological and nomological.”4 intimacy are its modes of expression.

2 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 184.

3 Ibid 4 Derrida, Archive Fever, 3. Note that “nomological” denotes certain principles that are neither logically necessary nor theoretically explicable, but are taken as true.

TGIF,