2008 SECA Art Award at the SF MOMA

Currently on exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art are the recipients of the 2008 Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art Award. Since 1967, the SECA Art Award has been bestowed by SF MOMA curators on a biennial basis to a small (3-6) group of up-and-coming artists. The criteria for selection is somewhat vague, but primarily the goal of the award is to showcase the work of Bay Area artists who have not yet received substantial recognition from the mainstream art world. Three out of the four 2009 Award winners are under thirty years old, and if this exhibit is any indicator, then there seems to be a clear trajectory in either the work being done by younger artists or, more likely, in what seems to be expected from younger artists by the museum gatekeepers and tastemakers: a bloodless, intellectualized, and ultimately cold art.


Tauba Auerbach seeks to uncover latent patterns in visual representations of communicative systems common to every day life - TV sets, clock radios, alphabets, etc. Some of the work was visually interesting, slyly referencing pop art and minimalism, and packing a The most prominent of her work, however, were 35 mm color close-up photographs of static-y television pictures, blown up to massive prints.

Auerbach seems to ask us to look closely at the colored grains in order to note the strange orderly-ness of "static", to see that patterns exists even at the microscopic level. Her choice to use still photography deaestheticizes the television, stripping the television static of the more interesting patterns that would have been generated by the waveforms of the analog broadcast signal, the see-saw effect of the picture floating in and out, in and out. The still photographs silence any voice the television signals may once have had, any life in them, and return the television to the realm of the cold, calculated, and pre-programmed.

Similarly, Jordan Kantor's paintings make use of images or events which are known and have been known for years, reproducing classic Manet paintings and optical processes like a lens flare. Kantor's goal is so pronounced that it becomes unclear: his palette choice, tone, style, and substance all reference x-ray images - he even includes a real x-ray of a canvas in case you didn't get it - and they all shout "i'm examining the what's underneath the surface value of commonly traded images."

Nevertheless, his images are striking for the way in which they reduce the human face to pure faciality - flat expressions pockmarked with deep, unknowing voids of pure black. Kantor is keenly aware that, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, it is the face that signifies recognition and primary signification, and it is the face that is produced in order to see the psyched made flesh. With faces reduced to nothingness upon nothingness, Kantor's subjects are disorientingly cold and inhuman.

Desiree Holman set up a room in which there were three video projections next to each other on the wall. On both the left and right videos, masked characters performed the rituals of the sitcom, estranged from any soundtrack or laugh-track or theme music except for occasional and unnerving bursts of sound. I was reminded of the rabbit-sitcom scenes in David Lynch's recent Inland Empire. Holman and Kantor must have taken classes together or read the same texts - Holman's actors wear masks that perform the same function as Kantor's thick paint strokes, reducing all facial expression to pure faciality, black voids where eyes and mouths should be. With live actors, however, the effect is startling and terrifying.

The mundane drama of the sitcom - a broken vase, dinner guests, etc. - are massively portentous when acted out by these dehumanized beings. Their actions threaten our very existence - perhaps they will soon enter our own homes and take over our own petty dramas. This frightening possibility is further suggested by the middle video projection, a blank green-screen through which each respective shows characters pass through on the way to the other show, the show which they never should have been allowed to enter.

Trevor Paglen's work continues the themes of estrangement and dehumanization, but does so in a much more nuanced, and perhaps more mature way. Paglen is the most accomplished of the four artists - he is well known and respected in the academic world as a historian and investigator of military secrets. He received a PhD in Geography from U.C. Berkeley, where he continues to work as a researcher. He has even been on the Daily Show to promote his book I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Killed by Me, which examined the insignia created by and for military secret operations and projects. Some of the military unit patches examined in the book were on display for the SECA Award exhibit.

Primarily, Paglen showed photographs of secret military operations. Seriously, his work walks a fine line between legal and not, and might be considered by some to be treacherous. In some ways, Paglen's work struck me the least of all four - it felt the least personal, and for good reason: it was done from extreme distances, using telescopes in a process resembling astro-photography. Paglen literalized the distances conceptually generated by the other artists. And somehow, his work was far and away the only work in the exhibit that could be termed "beautiful."

Overall, I was struck by how - and I keep coming back to this word - how cold the exhibit was. It felt like work that was done by artists numb to the sentiment, artists raised to be skeptical and critical, to deconstruct, but not to experience or to be outraged or to love. Across the hall,

William Kentridge's geo-political work seemed to pump red-hot blood in comparison, filled with both historically grounded archetypes, real people, jungle and savannah animals, rich people, poor people, angry people, people fucking and fighting and cutting each others limbs off. And on top of that Kentridge is a technical master, ingeniously combining elements of painting, video, stage production, music, theater, and animation. His work shows a love, both of humanity and of the work. Obviously the four SECA Art Award winners are smart and talented people, but I walked out of their exhibit wondering why everything in it seemed so disappointed with life.

The Crisis of Redundancy

A Productive Look: The Crisis of Redundancy

It is wise to consider the predictions of critics, naysayers, doomsday prognosticators with the skeptical distance they deserve, especially when they champion their predictions after the fact. Arguably, the maxim applies to Nouriel Roubini, who has received much attention of late for his oft-publicized economic foresight. Much media praise has been lavished on the NYU economist, now known as “Dr. Doom,” for having successfully predicted the housing bubble’s burst and our well known economic collapse that ensued. His knowledge of economics surely surpasses my own, and likely that of most of his readers. Yet in the face of his successful predictions, our skepticism questions, “isn’t there inevitably someone claiming that the sky is falling?” And once the sky does indeed fall, won’t someone receive praise? Knowledgeable Roubini undoubtedly is, but lucky as well. Economic predictions, however dire or bright, only appear, so goes the skeptical charge, to have been conjured from a crystal ball retrospectively.

The particular achievement of Roubini’s predictions has now found its obverse in the nearly universal achievement among American news media outlets. Theirs’ appears in the business and politics headlines declaring the sky is falling, while everywhere we look, the sky is quite obviously falling. We know we are living amidst an economic recession, “the worst since the Great Depression” so the clichéd truism goes; yet we continue to hear such recurrent statements nonetheless. Informative, surely they are – isn’t that the democratic function we assign news media – but a thoroughly redundant transmission of information. Just this last week, for example, following the G-20 meeting in London, FoxNews opened its article: “World leaders on Thursday clinched a $1.1 trillion deal to combat the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression…”[1] The rhetorical maneuver is subtle, indeed seemingly banal. Yet between Roubini’s predictive luck and FoxNews’ informative redundancy, there operates a similar logic. Whereas praise for the economist was applied from the future predicted to the prediction of the future, the self-praise on the part of news media applies to itself. The logic of both is circular: the future foretold corroborates the foretelling. And the circularity tightens in the case of news media: the future foretold becomes auto-corroborating; the foretelling of the future coincides with the present. Isn’t this the weight behind the claim that we are living through “the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression” – that there is no end in sight?

When sharpened with a critical edge, the charge of redundancy may transform into suspicion of the self-fulfilling prophecy generated by news media. Won’t the perpetual invocation of the superlative – the worst crisis – only serve to secure the vicious cycle of perceived perpetuity that foments the perpetual economic state? But surely, there is an economic crisis, and we leave amidst it; neither shutting one’s mouth nor closing one’s ears hardly charges the reality. What warrants critical (re-)consideration, however, is the function the superlative serves in respect to its ideological consequences.

Journalists’ deployment of this form of redundant statements serves a facile rhetorical function. It provides a smooth transition from the state of the economy to the “news” that, in whatever way, responds to that state. A readerly basis of familiarity is established in order to segue into whatever follows. We can chide journalists for their unimaginative prose, but my claim goes beyond simply forsaking the rhetorically ornamental.

Redundantly insisting on the economy’s failure instills the notion that this failure is given. It is not simply that the economic crisis is true (indeed it is), but that its truth transcends any divergence of interpretations. The market’s transcendence over our lives has been well noted: it elevates as a reified structure that affects our individual lives so severely; yet, we typically find ourselves unable to affect its trends in a reciprocally consequential manner. In other words, the state of the market appears objective. An object that looms over us and warrants the objective analysis of impartial experts. Hence, the diagnosis of its failure is the concern of economists, and so too are its suggested remedies, transferred to politicians in the form of “bailouts” and “stimulus packages.” By redundantly asserting the severity of the crisis, news media secure the semblance of its objectivity by figuring the market as the object upon which politicians, ostensibly informed by economists, act by legislative intervention. We easily forget, however, that the “economy” is not a thing, but a placeholder that describes the conglomeration of our actions and interactions. Figuring the economy as an object of economists’ and politicians’ actions occludes the fact that it already reflects a modern history of political decisions. Consider a recent Wall Street Journal article:

"The economy is still under severe stress," with many job losses, "so we've still got a lot of work to do," Mr. Obama added, suggesting there will be additional actions unveiled by his administration over the coming weeks to counter economic hardship.[2]

Notice how “the economy” is rendered the object of “additional actions.” Politics operates as the subject, which in turn asserts its will over the ailing economy. The de-politicization of economics ensues. There is little return to nor reflection upon the political actions that still resonate throughout the market. Political decisions undoubtedly contributed to the economy’s meltdown. Yet, the above passage demonstates, in exemplar fashion, the figuration of economics as that realm outside of politics. The political demand is to act. The economy is to be acted upon. The political options we confront are thus between action (swift action at that) and no action, while forgetting that the latter is really no option at all. In his analysis of the initial bailout proposals last year, Slavoj Zizek reflects on the market’s de-politicized objectivity:

What all this indicates is that the market is never neutral: its operations are always regulated by political decisions. The real dilemma is not ‘state intervention or not?’ but ‘what kind of state intervention?’ And this is true politics: the struggle to define the conditions that govern our lives. The debate about the bailout deals with decisions about the fundamental features of our social and economic life, even mobilising the ghost of class struggle. As with many truly political issues, this one is non-partisan. There is no ‘objective’ expert position that should simply be applied: one has to take a political decision.[3]

By eliding the nature of political economy, instead rendered the economy, the rouse of false choices – action versus inaction – paralyzes a truly democratic politics. Once our options become action versus inaction, shouldn’t we leave decisions to the men of action? But the problem is not simply the illusory heroism of such political men of action, coming to save the economy that had been tied down to the train tracks.

The ideological rouse manifests most clearly in the medicinal tropes of health mobilized to ensure the economy’s perceived neutrality outside the partisan domain of politics. If the economy is sick, just as when our body is sick, the natural course of action is to cure it. And it is the doctor who administers the cure. Of course, there is no room for debate; the sick body demands a remedy. Debate (especially of the political sort) only forestalls the patient’s recovery. What relates the sick body to the doctor’s remedy, and by analogy, the economy to the politicians’ intervention, is the transparent immediacy of action. The obfuscation of politics results, which can be read, in its patency, in Thomas Friedman’s column:

Our country has congestive heart failure. Our heart, our banking system that pumps blood to our industrial muscles, is clogged and functioning far below capacity. Nothing else remotely compares in importance to the urgent need to heal our banks.[4]

Friedman advances the all-too prevalent medicinal trope that fortifies the veil of redundancy that cloaks our perceptions of the economic crisis. Again, the implicit options are between healing (action) and not healing (not acting), tempered by the demand for urgency.

Redundancy denotes what is needless, but moreover, it depends upon the impossibility of opposition. “Did you know that my unmarried friend is actually, after all, a bachelor?” – “Surely, your statement is redundant. What else could he be?” By redundantly insisting on the economy’s failure, news media have secured a redundancy of politics, but not simply the annoying sort that leaves asking “whats your point?” There is an ideological twist. Instead of the impossibility of opposition, politics now leaves us with, via the action versus inaction binary, an opposition to the impossible. Inaction becomes the demon from which politicians and economists save us, which means they save us from the specter of a ghost that never actually haunts us. What we’re left with is their action and our acquiescence. Therein lies the true crisis of political economy.

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[1] “G-20 Leaders Develop Trillion-Dollar Crisis Plan.” Foxnews.com. April 2, 2009.

[2] Judith Burns, “Obama Highlights “Hope” in Struggling Economy.” Online.wsj.com. April 10, 2009.

[3] Slavoj Zizek, “Don’t Just Do Something, Talk.” London Review of Books. October 10, 2008.

[4] Thomas Friedman, “This Is Not a Test. This Is Not a Test.” nytimes.com. March 10, 2009.

Kind mit Pudeln

Kind mit Pudeln (Baby with Poodles)

1995/1996

Sculpture, plaster, foil, polyurethane, and paint

When I saw this uncanny piece at SF MOMA, my immediate reaction was laughter followed by an uneasy feeling. I felt estranged from my visceral response, unsure of what I found funny about the scene before me. The repetition of black poodles juxtaposed with a helpless, flailing child in the center seemed downright menacing, and I became suspicious of the malicious quality of my laughter.

Katharina Fritsch's iconic objects, images, installations and sound works seem able to imprint themselves on the mind, as if they were gestalts or things we have seen and experienced before. Hearts, crosses, skulls, bottles and Madonnas are used to play on the fantasies and images that we share, but they are transformed through colour and material into things open and mysterious: latent notions transfigured into primal forms. 

Singular forms are often used repeatedly to create a psychotic proliferation, placed in a strictly gridded tableaux or in perfect concentric circles. Fritsch's work often has unsettling religious or quasi-spiritual associations and is deeply psychological, as if she is attempting to give an image to our deepest fears recovered from the world of myth, religion, cultural history and everyday life.   -whitecube.com

Untitled (Blackout)

When the electricity went out, I was washing the dishes from dinner in the sink under hot tap water. I thought it would be okay to stop. First there was a loud crash outside the kitchen window but I was too afraid to look outside so I didn’t. A hush swept through the apartment complex and then I started to hear people calling out names tentatively, then louder. I joined in – I called your name, first tentatively, then louder.

Our neighbors must have found the people they were looking for because soon the voices quieted down and another hush swept through the building. I gathered up my courage and walked over to the window. All this time I had been standing by the sink holding a plate still dripping warm soap water. But now, walking towards the window, I became acutely aware of the way my feet, in black dress socks, scratched across the linoleum floor. Our apartment, if you remember, was not so fancy and it was not in the best neighborhood, but it was ours and I think that we loved it.

Of course the world on the other side of the window was as dark as the world inside and I could see nothing but different shades of black and grey and vague movements. Far in the distance a candle flickered in a window. It felt familiar. Things grew in wonderment and we felt like children again.

Nobody knew why the electricity went out. Theories were invented in makeshift forts lit by candlelight and antique lanterns – it was either an act of anti-establishment political vandalism or a fraudulent act of self-destruction or perhaps both. Alternatively, it was a small animal – a sparrow perhaps – who had either decided that it had become too much or had simply wandered down the wrong path and short circuited the system. It was the beginning of spring, after all.

Sitting on our knees on opposite sides of the coffee table lit by candlelight, I looked up from my laced fingers, looked around at the books carefully arranged on the bookshelves, the records under the stereo, the small potted plant by the window sill, all suddenly strange and asked “do you think this is a good life?”

When the lights came back on, people slowly began to wander back outside. The streetlights seemed so much brighter than before, and everyone walked slowly up and down the sidewalks squinting their eyes and using hands and hats and handkerchiefs to shield their faces from the bright city lights. You looked like you had just woken up and I put my hand perpendicular to your forehead to protect your eyes. Your eyes flickered like the smallest candle flames.

I had always thought that if there were to be a blackout, there would be vandalism, terrorism, broken windows, stolen cars, looted stores, violence, rape, forgery, betrayal, consternation, limitless despair, fire, smoke, and decay. But it was just the opposite. We wandered the relit streets together and it was as though things had gotten smaller and more intimate. We were all children again. Somebody smiled at us. Someone else offered us fresh strawberries. A shopkeeper stood outside his store with a basket of small chocolates wrapped in silver and gold foil.

I wanted to find out why the lights had gone out, but you stopped me, and it was better that way.

Exiles

The image above was taken from Sunil Gupta's "Exiles," a photographic series in which he produced a number of images of gay men in his native New Delhi. Sunil is an accomplished visual artist and author whose work often centers around sexual minoities in his native country.

sunilgupta.net

preliminary sketch for a something

I have had for some time now various ideas which I have attempted to put down in writing on multiple occasions, only to find that what initially seemed like a cohesive structure or line of inquiry contained tangents and digressions which undermined the unity and structural integrity of the piece irrevocably. I think I have finally figured out the right method for approaching the material though, and I would like to share my ideas for how to go about this project with the co-authors of this journal and I suppose the world at large, or that portion of it that is reading this.

My intention is to write a work which consists of three independent essays. These essays will be independent in that they will be completeley intelligible on their own, however they will be thematically intertwined and, informing each other, will hopefully approach a sense of cohesiveness that would not be achieved (at least by me) in a monograph.

Part one would be an essay on the dual influence of neo-platonism and Christian mysticism on visual art and aesthetics from the early christian era through modernity, with emphasis placed on the period of cultural development from the 12th to 18th centuries.

Part two would be a selected and incomplete history of transcendentalism in western literature and philsophy from the Pre-Socratics to Hegel

Part three would be an essay on the aesthetics of rituals of blood and flesh from the eastern mystery cults to the Christian concept of the Eucharist until the 17th century.

The idea is that each of the three pieces contain themes which are present to more or lesser degrees in the others. All of them are intended to analyze a larger phenomenon of which each are component parts.

I would appreciate feedback, suggested sources, criticism, restaurant recommendations etc...

9 Stories, 9 symptoms

"Philosophy precisely can not have an end, because it is haunted, from within itself, by the necessity to take one more step within a problem that already exists. And I believe that this is its nature. The nature of philosophy is that something is eternally being bequeathed to it. It has the responsibility of this bequeathal. Your are always treating the bequeathal itself, always taking one more step in the determination of what was thus bequeathed to you. As myself, in the most unconscious manner, I never did anything as a philosopher except respond to an appeal that I had not even heard."
Philosophy as Biography
- Alain Badiou
www.lacan.com/symptom/?p=62

^^Art: Louise Bourgeois
The Good Breast - gouache on paper