Anti-EstablishmentIntellectualLOL!

I will be returning to blog maintenance soon…

Le vieux Paris n’est plus (la forme d’une ville
Change plus vite, hélas! que le coeur d’un mortel)

Old Paris is no more (the form of a city
Changes more quickly, alas! than the human heart)

-Charles Baudelaire

On Saturday after work at the gallery I drank beer beneath the 20th Street staircase that leads up to the High Line Park. I allowed myself to feel a drunken sentimentality for a historical span, unexperienced by myself, during which Chelsea’s abandoned warehouses, piers, and infrastructure found secondary use value in the work of transgressive artists and other varieties of libidinal pleasure seekers.

Day’s End (1978) Gordon Matta-Clark, color super 8 film, 23:10   http://www.ubu.com/film/gmc_daysend.html

Arthur Rimbaud in New York (in Meat Packing district) (1978-1979) David Wojnarowicz, Gelatin Silver print

Underlying my melancholic buzz was a pervasive sense that the designers of the High Line Park disregarded an opportunity to discover and articulate a critical position for architecture in our experience driven economy.

In 1980 operations on the elevated railway structure ceased and the tracks lay in an entropic state until recent efforts, that are still underway, transformed the 1.5-mile stretch into a public park. The park opened to the public one year ago, June 2009.

In an article entitled “Recurring Surfaces: Architecture in the Experience Economy” published in Perspecta Vol. 32 (2001) Sandy Isnestadt writes “As tourism has already shown, architecture is both destination and sign of arrival, the record of lofty cultural endeavors and at the same time the very thing to have a stranger squeeze into the viewfinder alongside your own face…More than ever, the spatial setting is the main event itself and can no longer be understood to simply contain events; likewise, rather than merely reflecting social change, this new role for architecture is the change…”

On this day the proliferation of cameras is striking, as each visitor on the High Line has at least one, and often multiple image recording devices. The mass ritual of picture taking produces, as it records, the High Line as architecture.

In the text Isnestadt defines a category of themed architecture as one in which “the environment takes on a shaping agency and the human subject is its chief artifact. Similar to the way the assembly line dehumanized its operators by strictly prescribing their movements, the individual in the themed environment, despite appearing as a protagonist, treads a narrow, and pre-figured track”

The High Line of course has always been, in structure, quite literally a “narrow and pre-figured track”. It is only once political power reterritorializes the outmoded infrastructure that the metaphor regains its value. The High Line as it exists a themed monument to urban renewal/gentrification, green architecture, and sustainable building. It is an expensive displacement, in which a manicured simulation of nature is substituted for the actual occurrence. During the two decades between the end of train operation and conversion to city-park, the railway was site of a dynamic urban ecosystem. The platform was already visited by a variety of people who realized the value of the unique environment used the space in diverse ways. People that visited the site before it was transformed recognize that there was already something very special there. In May 2001 The New Yorker published an article written by Adam Gopnik with photographs by Joel Sternfeld that effectively served the eulogy and the death sentence to the wild beauty that secretly flourished on the tracks. I resent the false dichotomy established that sets the developer’s interest in demolition against the community activist and design firm wish for a high concept public space. The third option would have been to leave the High Line as an uncultivated urban space open to less governed use.

The High Line before it was redesigned. Photograph by Joel Sternfeld

There is no doubt that the park is tastefully designed and that access and safety have been improved. However, the park is undesirable to visit due to the tight social control exercised over the area. Enforced closure times, regulated activities, prescriptive concrete pathways, and signs (that at one time might have seemed contradictory) stating “Keep it Wild, Keep it on the Path” are now part of the landscape. The path is curated with pleasant, easily understood and interactive art projects such as Steven Vitello’s sound project “A Bell for Every Minute” in which the bells never clang they always chime. A description of Vitello’s piece can be found on The High Line’s well designed website that also features a blog, gift shop, High Line history, and design details. Are we now supposed to accept that it is inevitable, that once desirable qualities are observed in a naturally occurring phenomenon, that it is only a matter of time before a logo is designed? http://www.thehighline.org/

Under the ascending steps of a summer crowd, I read the current issue of Artforum as I finished off the beer. In an obituary for Malcolm McClaren by Greil Marcus, Marcus describes a debate between Richard Hell and McClaren over the (non) issue of who created punk rock. “You make revolutions Hell was arguing. ‘You don’t’ McClaren said “Let it start and join in.” With knowing concession to the fact that revolution is no longer part of the architectural program (Hell was wrong and McClaren is dead), I stubbornly echo McClaren sentiment in voicing my opinion that the best design would have been no design. There was already a park in place, all one would have needed to do to enjoy it was to join in.

A VERNACULAR OF VIOLENCE: Eric Baudelaire, Rita Sobral Campos, Claire Fontaine, Lisa Kirk, Sylvère Lotringer, Walid Raad

May 14 – June 20 www.invisible-exports.com

Yesterday I attended the closing day of the Vernacular of Violence exhibition at Invisible-Exports with anxious attention (one feels that one never has enough time) to the fact that the texts, objects, and videos temporarily organized in the space would, the next day, disperse outward from the gallery into other contexts of containment. The specific gallery architecture determines that the viewer walk through three distinct spaces and then return in reverse direction to view the works. I will begin this text with a review of the art pieces in the last room and work forward toward the entrance of the gallery, an approach that borrows its methodology from the reconstruction of violent aftermath and reveals my interest in the temporal-spatial decisions made the show’s organizers.

Back Room

A video by the artist collective Claire Fontaine, “A Fire is a Fire is Not a Fire” (2006), was projected high on the far back wall of the gallery, behind the desk of staff members, Risa Needleman and Benjamin Tischer. On continuous loop, the single-scene video shows a photograph of a fire set in Paris during the riots in October 2005. Over the course of the video the photograph itself begins to burn, eventually falling away into scrap and ash. Then in reverse action the trace evidence reforms, the flames unburn, and the photograph is ostensibly restored to the distributed media image. Reconsiderations prevent the return of the image to pristine condition, as the image is now associated with its own destruction and while resilient in it’s return, it ceases to appear protected at its boundaries from the violence it depicts.

Two texts, we often and many times erroneously look to words for explanatory material, were present in the room: a theoretical text entitled VIOLENCE INC. from Semiotext(e) editor Sylvére Lotringer was pinned on the wall and a stack of a photocopied letters addressed to “dear R.” from Claire were on the floor. Links to the texts are here:

lotringer_VIOLENCEINC

Claire Fontaine chere_r-1

A small, framed piece by Lisa Kirk was hung on the wall adjacent to Lotringer’s text. Enigmatic in its representation (a portrait of a person lent mystery by concealing garb) and in its materials (laser etching on goat skin), Lisa Kirk’s portrait unsettled the literal function of the back room. There is a limit to the comprehension of violence. Beyond the approaches of report, resampling, narration, or theorizing, there is the shadowy other, the variable unknown, the subject who acts. Animal anatomy, marks on flesh, and hooded clothing signify the perpetrator of violent acts while simultaneously providing the cover.

Middle Passageway

In the middle passageway there was a monitor equipped with headphones and a folding chair was propped against the wall. The Walid Raad/Atlas Corporation video “Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (English Version)” played in a loop on the monitor. Souheil Bachar describes his experience as the only Lebanese hostage held among a group of 5 American hostages for a period of 27 weeks. Through out the piece the psychologically astute Bachar, describes negotiation of the boundary between his own exclusion/inclusion as enforced by the captors, hostages, and media. Discovering himself in disorienting social conditions where an affirmative response to a sexual invitation results in a punch to the groin and blindfolds don’t function to blind, Bachar counters the semiotic confusion by providing exacting instructions for the formal qualities of the artwork to be created from his tapes. Bachar confronts the misleading signifiers of power with resistant abstraction. Seas of grey shimmering static and blue screen color field, “blue like the Mediterranean” suggests Bachar, transform the material aspects of video nonsense and blankness into a techno-poetic metaphor for emancipation.

Front Room

An analog semblance to a default blue screen marks the entrance/exit of the commercial sign poster in Eric Baudelaires 72 minute video “Sugar Water” Shot in a Parisian metro station “Pte. Erewhon“, an anagram for Nowhere, the video depicts a man in blue work clothes entering a subway station with a ladder and his bill posting materials. He begins work by pasting a grid of 8 rectangular bills over the all blue background of a billboard on the subway wall. The composite image formed is of a Peugeot automobile on a Parisian street. The sign poster then continues his work by posting in succession three more iterations of the scene: the car exploding, the car in flames, and the charred remainder on the street. Finally he returns the billboard to monochrome blue, and ascends the stairway out of the station. All the while that the sign poster works, actors on the platform take on the routine actions of subway commuters. Ambivalent to the labor of the sign poster, their concerns are with the time, their possessions, and their destinations. The camera is positioned to create blind spots in the area where the train arrives and behind the camera. The viewer becomes conscious that the people in the subway are also involved in cyclical, repetitive movements; movements determined by a logic of synchronization in Cartesian space rather than the patterns of actual commute. The travelers disperse from the screen into the blind fields created by the camera position, but apparently never board the train, as they return to the screen with each repetition of the sign poster. The evident lack of concern toward the labor of the worker or the commercialized images of destruction that he posts is consistent with the general behavior of citizens in culture at this time.

Walid Raad’s inkjet print, Untitled Cable II precedes the video on the wall and imbues the exhibition with forceful aesthetic presence. Referencing both the evidence photograph and post minimalist abstraction, the picture shows a tangled length of black cable over a grid of copper bars embedded in a concrete ground. A shift in scale yields an aerial view that maps a dérive through the tortured psycho geographical terrain of the concrete block housing projects on the margins of Paris. Returning to our feet, the viewer is able to discern in the composition a formal semblance to the work of Eva Hesse and Carl Andre, however there is the additive tone of casual brutality appropriate to our times.

Across from Baudelaire’s and Raad’s pieces in the first gallery room a triptych by Rita Sobral Campos and two more works by Lisa Kirk are installed on the wall. Campos’ prints from “the headless plot series” find form in the official report. Irregular polygons of geometric complexity reference the crumpled paper of a rejected document and provide multiple planes to which the facts of the case are mapped. The existing heads of state are threatened by the activities of an underground group assigned responsibility for the decapitation of statues. As fantastical details emerge, it is clear that outdated modernist detective and espionage technique will never crack the case, and that a new training manual that contains Borges’ paradoxes and Deleuzian folds in the index, will be a required reading for future agents.

Cosmetic glitter and color spill over the charred and torn linens of Lisa Kirk’s two paintings. Evocative of gun shot residue and ripped clothing, the damaged linen provides a backdrop of trace violence for the artist to incompletely over layer with materials associated with glamor. It is curious that these works are exhibited prominently as the first encountered as one enters and the last seen as one departs, since the rather obvious artist gesture appears dated, and does not exceed a truism of culture by holding its product up merely as another example of a vernacular object of violence, akin to Godard’s fashionable revolutionaries or the hip hop bling of diamond encrusted pistols worn around the necks of rap superstars. Perhaps, Kirk’s diptych find it’s raison d’être in the exhibition by connecting full circle with a passage from Lotinger’s text in the back room. “It is not for certain at this point whether art is still capable of reacting creatively to its environment, it is increasingly one with it. It doesn’t have the distance.”

I will be speaking at The Observatory www.observatoryroom.org in Brooklyn next month.

Radical Detectives: Forensic Photography and the Aesthetics of Aftermath in Contemporary Art

A slide show lecture by Luke Turner

Date: Tuesday, July 13, 8:00pm

Forensic autopsy, crime, and death scene photographs hold a strong fascination in culture. These specific types of photographs present to the viewer a mediated confrontation with horror. In the context of a courtroom, there is a presupposition that the scientific or analytic use value assigned to the photograph will function to shift the viewer’s position from voyeur to detached collector of facts relevant to the legal system. Yet neither position is stable, and the psyche must contend with a complexity of vision that exceeds either classification.

In this slide show I will present images from the history of forensic photography, slides from cases that I have photographed, and documentation of modern and contemporary art works that engage the viewer in the reconstruction process. Some relevant concepts explored by artists are crime scene reconstruction in Pierre Huyghe’s “Third Memory”, entropy in the work of Robert Smithson, accumulation in Barry LeVa’s pieces, the logic of sensation in the painting of Francis Bacon, something about that guy that had himself shot in a gallery, and many more. I will also discuss the curatorial work of Ralph Rugoff, and Luc Sante who have both made important connections between art and the forensic image.

Thoughts by philosophers of the abject/scientific, such as Julia Kristeva, Georges Bataille, Paul Feyerabend, Paul Virilio, and others, will be brought into play with the visual presentation. We will explore strategies of resistance to an “official” culture that attempts to legitimize a fixed methodology for the interpretation of evidence. As we emerge from art and philosophical tangents I will conclude with an argument for why the characters of Agent Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks and Laurent, the protagonist of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s The Erasers, personify two notions of the radical detective through their unconventional approaches to the interpretation of evidence.

I lived in an apartment and shared an artist studio around the corner on the same block in downtown Oakland, California from 2007-2009. In the early morning hours of New Years Day, 2009, transit police assassinated Oscar Grant, a young, unarmed black male, on a train platform in the Fruitvale district of Oakland. The act provoked civil disobedience in the downtown area. As the requisite news media and police helicopters provided riot ambiance from above, friends and I discussed our pervasive sense of dissatisfaction with the scenes of protest enacted on the streets. The subsequent spectacles of vandalism, marches, and pamphleteering seemed at best an ineffectual reaction against the unacceptable abuse of state power and at worst complicit in the crime by obediently taking up the space in the police violence/social demonstration feed back loop allocated to these forms by liberal democracy.

On daily walks around the block from home to studio and studio to home, I would pass a mechanics garage that specializes in working on Citroen automobiles from the 1960s. During these walks I considered associations between the history of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, radical French thinkers and artists, for whom the events of May 1968 figured so prominently, and the dismal state of current affairs in Oakland. Genet, Foucault, the Situationists, and Godard all famously took interest in activities of the Black Panther Party, but Foucault identified the relative independence of the Black Panther Party’s home grown revolutionary platform from Marxist theory as a significant contribution to resistance culture. I am interested in the thought that American culture can still appear in subversive forms and that the revolutionary origins of the country have not yet been lost to our collective memory.

I intended for these prints to occupy an unstable territory between political propaganda poster and art object, since neither the representational strategies of the activist nor artist seemed capable of addressing the situation effectively. The image-text has formal semblances to some works by John Baldessari or Martha Rosler while avoiding an establishment of hermeneutic consistency. I planned the mode of distribution to be similar that of a political poster (wheat paste application, hand-out at protest site, etc.). In lacking a clear message or didactic call, the posters would confront the viewer with an openness of meaning, not usually found in the context of a demonstration. It was at this time that I encountered a poem by Paul Celan, and memorized its lines.

On inconsistencies
Rest:
two fingers are snapping
in the abyss, a
world is stirring
in the scratch-sheets, it all depends on you

I did not show or distribute the prints beyond a few friends at the time. I considered the images to be incomplete, part of a project differed. In uploading the two jpegs onto the first post for this new blog project, I betray hopefulness that they become a small contribution to an eventual discourse on art production, aesthetic thought, and political participation.