Liz Glynn: The Archaeology of Another Possible Future

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF ANOTHER POSSIBLE FUTURE LIZ GLYNN

II. II THE SHAPE OF PROGRESS Whittle (the 1%)

20%

2017

U.S. Top 1% Income Share

15%

10%

Reclaimed forklift pallet slatting, foam with Aqua-Resin and acrylic

1920

1940

1960

2017

2017 “Look at China, Japan and Mexico and every other country we do business with —we’re getting crushed by bad trade deals! We’ve got to redo our trade deals. I will make great trade deals!”

—Donald J. Trump, U.S. Presidential Candidate, 2016 Steel drums, steel pipe, white flag

Eternal Return I

Epoxy clay with acrylic "Observe," continued I, "This Moment!

From the gateway, This Moment, there runs a long eternal lane backwards: behind us lies an eternity.

Must not whatever can run its course of all things, have already run along that lane? Must not whatever can happen of all things have already happened, resulted, and gone by?

Epoxy clay with acrylic

2000

Eternal Return II

We’re Getting Crushed

2017

1980

­­— Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosopher, from Also sprach Zarathustra, 1883

Creative Destruction 2017 “…the history of the productive apparatus of a typical farm, from the beginnings of the rationalization of crop rotation, plowing and fattening to the mechanized thing of today linking up with elevators and railroads—is a Scrap metal, destroyed history of revolutions. So is the history of the workbench, new technology productive apparatus of the iron and steel industry from the charcoal furnace to our own type of furnace, or the history of the apparatus of power production from the overshot water wheel to the modern power plant, or the history of transportation from the mail coach to the airplane. The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation— if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.” ­­—J­­oseph Schumpeter, economist, from Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 1942

“Everything is repeated, in a circle.

History is a master because it teaches us that it doesn’t exist. It’s the permutations that matter.”

—Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum, 1989 “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” —George Santayana, Philosopher and poet, from The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense, 1905

Moore’s Law 2017 “Complexity of integrated circuits has approximately doubled every year since their introduction.” ­­—Gordon E. Moore, Chemist and co-founder of Intel, in Electonics magazine, 1965

Exponential array of stainless steel forklift pallets

In 1965, Gordon Moore observed that the amount of circuit components that could fit on a microchip has doubled every year since 1959. He extrapolated that information to make a prediction known as Moore’s law that the computing capability would grow exponentially and costs go down exponentially, setting the standard for the tech industry.

Ripple Effect / Drop in the Bucket 2017 “It is, however, to the general principle of the multiplier to which we have to look for an explanation of how fluctuations in the amount of investment, which are a comparatively small proportion of the national income, are capable of generating fluctuations in aggregate employment and income so much greater in amplitude than themselves.”

Powder coated oil drums, scrap metal, water

—John Maynard Keynes, Economist, from General Theory of Employment Interest, 1936

The Butterfly Effect

Phase Shifts (after Manuel DeLanda)

2017

2017

“Predictability: Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Texas set off a Tornado in Brazil?”

—Title of a paper by Edward Lorenz, Mathematician, Meteorologist, and the father of Chaos Theory, delivered to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1972

Powder-coated aluminum, corrugated steel, Lexan, tree, butterflies

When Lorenz initially posited this theory, he used the example of a seagull flapping its wings, in “The Predictibility of Hypodynamic Flow” (1961). However, upon the advice of colleagues including Philip Merilees, Lorenz replaced the seagull with the more poetic image of a butterfly in the decade that followed, and the example stuck. Lorenz’s butterfly effect has been applied to the volatility of interconnected financial markets and the difficulty of predicting dynamic systems.

Fiscal Cliff / The Time that is Beginning to End

Foam with Aqua-Resin, acrylic “However oversimplified this picture may be, it contains a significant clue as to the nature of nonlinear history: if the different "stages" of human history were indeed brought about by phase transitions, then they are not "stages" at all— that is, progressive developmental steps, each better than the previous one, and indeed leaving the previous one behind. On the contrary, much as water's solid, liquid, and gas phases may coexist, so each new human phase simply added itself to the other ones, coexisting and interacting with them without leaving them in the past. Moreover, much as a given material may solidify in alternative ways (as ice or snowflake, as crystal or glass), so humanity liquefied and later solidified in different forms. In other words, human history did not follow a straight line, as if everything pointed toward civilized societies as humanity's ultimate goal. On the contrary, at each bifurcation alternative stable states were possible, and once actualized, they coexisted and interacted with one another.“ —Manuel DeLanda, Theorist and Gilles Deleuze Chair and Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School, from A Thousand Years of NonLinear History, 2000

2017 “The apostle’s concern is not the last day, the moment where time reaches its end; it is the time that contracts itself and begins to finish—or, if you prefer, the time that is left between time and its ending.”

—Giorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy, University of Venice, from The Time That Remains, 2005

Avalanche of Consumer Goods 2017 Foam with Aqua-Resin, acrylic

"Achieving long-run sustainability and providing comfort to the public and the markets that deficits will come under control over a period of time—that's very important for confidence and for creating more support for the recovery.

But at the same time, I think you also have to protect the recovery in the near term. Under current law, on January 1, 2013, there's going to be a massive fiscal cliff of large spending cuts and tax increases. I hope that Congress will look at that and figure out ways to achieve the same long-run fiscal improvement without having it all happen at one date."

—Benjamin Bernanke, Federal Reserve Chairman, in a Statement to House Financial Services Committee, February 29, 2012

Household Activities (Average minutes per day, F/M, 2015)

“…an avalanche of consumers’ goods that permanently deepens and widens the stream of real income although in the first instance they spell disturbance, losses and unemployment. And if we look at those avalanches of consumers’ goods we again find that each of them consists in articles of mass consumption and increases the purchasing power of the wage dollar more than that of any other dollar—in other words, that the capitalist process, not by coincidence but by virtue of its mechanism, progressively raises the standard of life of the masses.”

Steel door frame, consumer goods —Joseph Schumpeter, Economist, from Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 1942

2017

Broken Graph (the end?)

Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey

2017

140mins

“It is time to raise basic questions about the process of economic growth, especially the assumption … that economic growth is a continuous process that will persist forever. There was virtually no growth before 1750; there is no guarantee that growth will continue indefinitely.”

100mins

60mins

20mins

Cast pigmented cement Women

Men

—Robert J. Gordon, Economist and Professor of Social Sciences, Northwestern University From his paper “Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds.” 2012

Foam with Aqua-Resin, acrylic

Liz Glynn was born in Boston, Mass., in 1981. She received her B.A. from Harvard College in 2003, and her M.F.A. from the California Institute of Arts in 2008. Glynn has presented exhibitions, participatory performances and installations across the U.S. and Europe. Most recently, she created Open House, an installation for the Public Art Fund in New York City’s Central Park. She had solo exhibitions at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2015), which grew out of an earlier series of performances exploring monumental works of sculpture in the museum’s collection. Her work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, at SculptureCenter, New York (2014); ArtPace, San Antonio (2014); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2011); and Arthouse, Austin (2009). Her work has been included in group exhibitions, including Pacific Standard Time organized by the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2012); a migrating public art project Station to Station (2013); Made in LA at The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012); Performa 11, New York (2011); and The Generational: Younger than Jesus at the New Museum, New York (2009). Glynn is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Liz Glynn The Archaeology of Another Possible Future On view beginning October 8, 2017 Principal exhibition support is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Barbara and Andrew Gundlach, and the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation.

Major support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger, The Mohn Family Foundation, and Formlabs.

Contributing support is provided by Stacy and John Rubeli, Girardi Distributors LLC, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Barr Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Pam and Alix Karlan, and Guido’s Fresh Marketplace.

1040 MASS MoCA Way North Adams, MA 01247 413.MoCA.111 massmoca.org