The Legacy of Bruce Conner

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“I’ve always known that I was outside the main, mercantile stream. I have been placed in an environment that would have its name changed now and again: avant-garde film, experimental film, independent film etc. I have tried to create film work so that it is capable of communicating to people outside of a limited dialogue within an esotoric, avant-garde or a cultish social form. Jargon I don’t like.”

— Bruce Conner, in an interview with William C. Wees

The great filmmaker and collage artist Bruce Conner died on July 7th 2008. Conner’s films are considered as pivotal in the history of avant-garde cinema and cornerstones in the art of collage or “found footage” filmmaking. There aren’t many films that had as much impact as his debut film, ‘A Movie’ (1958), a film in which he, inspired by the surreal art of zapping (UPDATE: or perhaps it’s better to talk about “channel hopping”, see comments below), the “coming attractions” trailers in cinema, and the Marx Brother’s comedy classic ‘Duck Soup’ (especially the final battle scene, featuring the stock footage of monkeys and elephants running to save the army under siege), juxtaposed footage from B movies, newsreels, soft-core pornography, and other fragments. Patricia Mellencamp has pointed out that “A Movie is a history of cinema as catastophe” that “becomes the history of Western culture or the United States – a history of colonial conquest by technology, resolutely linking, sex, death, and cinema – questioning our very desire for cinema (a fetishistic, deathly pleasure within the safe, perverted distance of voyeurism, economic superiority, and national boundaries)”. In an interview with William C. Wees (1991) Conner explained that by observing cinema trailers and the absurd narrative techniques in televison series it became apparent to him that “you can create an emotional response which is very different from what was socially agreed upon as a narrative structure.” Conner paid attention to the things that tend to be thrown away and taken for granted as not serious, because “if you want to know what’s going on in a culture, look at what everybody takes for granted. Put your attention on that, rather than on what they want to show you. I view my culture here in the United States as I would regard a foreign environment. That is, it’s supposed to be my culture. I don’t feel that way.” In his films , Conner reflected on the relationship between the individual, the image and history in recent decades, decided by the permanent presence, in constantly changing form, of images, mostly television – the accelerating rythm in the editing, the change from film to video, the aesthetic exchange between cinema and television, the arrival of non-stop and live reporting on such networks as CNN and their associated fictionalization of the news. These transgressions have had an intrusive impact on our relationship with reality. “My films are the ‘real world’. It’s not fantasy. It’s not a found object. This is the stuff that I see as the phenomena around me. At least that’s what I call the ‘Real World’. We have ‘Reality Shows’ presented to us regularly. The most prevalent one is the five minutes ‘reality show’ – the five minute news. If you listen to a news program on the radio it may report ten events in a row. It’s no different than ‘A Movie’. Something absurd next to a catastrophe next to speculation next to a kind of of instruction on how you’re supposed to think about some political or social thing. You know: ‘President Bush had lunch with his wife and went to Kennibunkport, Maine, today. Fifty thousand people died in Bangladesh in a horrible disaster. Sony says they’re going to produce a new three-dimensional hologram television set which will be released sometime in the 21st century.’ GaGa, GaGa. I mean this is comic book time.”

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“If they give you lined paper, write the other way.”
— Bruce Conner

Other Bruce Conner classics include ‘Breakaway’ (1966), ‘Report’ (1967), ‘Looking for Mushrooms’ (1967), ‘Crossroads’ (1976, the still is taken from this film) and ‘Valse Triste’ (1977) (see here for an extensive view). Conner also did pre-production work on Peter Fonda’s 1970 film ‘The Hired Hand’ (he was pals with Hollywood bad boys such as Dennis Hopper – who took the picture below, Dean Stockwell, Warren Oates and Peter Fonda) and briefly returned to filmmaking to do videos for Devo (Mongoloid), Brian Eno and David Byrne (‘America is Waiting’ and ‘Mea Culpa’, both from the album ‘My Life in the Bush of Ghosts’). Conner also became involved in the San Francisco punk scene as a staff photographer for fanzine Search and Destroy. A corrosive aesthetic of outraged idealism that Conner had anticipated by decades, punk was tailor-made to his sensibility, and he spent most of 1978 at a punk club called the Mabuhay. In an interview with Kristine McKenna he said: “I lost a lot of brain cells at the Mabuhay. During that year I had a press card so I got in free, and I’d go four or five nights a week. What are you gonna do listening to hours of incomprehensible rock ‘n’ roll but drink? I became an alcoholic, and it took me a few years to deal with that. (…) I’ve always been uneasy about being identified with the art I’ve made. Art takes on a power all its own and it’s frightening to have things floating around the world with my name on them that people are free to interpret and use however they choose. Beyond that, I’ve seen many cases where artists have been defeated because the things they made came to be perceived as being more important then they themselves were. De Chirico struggled to develop a new style of painting, but nobody was interested-they only wanted to show his own work. This is something I’ve experienced myself, and it’s a highly unbalanced situation because essentially the artist is denied a voice about the course of his own life and work.”

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A few years ago, Bruce Conner withdrew all his films from distribution (which was mainly done by Canyon). Apparently, they are being restored right now. However, in the experimental filmworld there is quite a bit of concern about his legacy, fearing that vultures are already swooping down on his wife. This fear is well founded: for example, recently the estate of another American avant-garde hero, the late Jack Smith, has been sold to the Gladstone Gallery in New York City. The ownership of all his photographs, paintings, slides, films, etc. has been transferred. As Jerry Tartaglia (a friend of Smith, who also worked on the restoration of his films) wrote: “whether the Gladstone Gallery chooses to avail itself of the reliable resources that actually care about and understand the work, or chooses to be taken in by the salivating vultures that are perched in their ego driven clouds of unknowing, remains to be seen.”

Right after Conner’s death, lots of posts and articles appeared on the net, linking to YouTube and other video platforms hosting unauthorized dupes of Conner’s films. All these videos are gone now (you can track this process via YouTomb). Ray Pride posted this message on his MovieCityIndie blog, written by a lawyer representing Jean Conner, the filmmaker’s widow: “Bruce was firmly opposed to display of his films on-line, and on his behalf as an attorney I made numerous requests for removal. Now that Bruce has died, all copyrights are now held by Jean Conner (Bruce’s wife), and she has explicitly directed that I request and otherwise take action to have all on-line postings of Bruce Conner movies removed immediately.” This stirred quite a bit of controversy. Via Rhizome, Ed Halter wrote a call to bigger sites such as BoingBoing who paid tribute to Conner’s death and might help to bring this issue to a bigger YouTube audience. He writes,”Hi there. I write for a site devoted to net art and technology art, and wrote an obit for Bruce Conner yesterday for the site. Although Conner wasn’t a new media artist, part of this was to honor him as a pioneer of found footage re-editing, which has become such a major part of online culture and recent internet art. However, within the very short time span between writing and publishing this piece, all the videos of Conner films that I linked to in his obit were removed from YouTube and other sites –no doubt due to the attention they’ve been receiving in online obituaries elsewhere. It is widely know within the experimental film community that, towards the end of his life, Conner removed his films from general circulation (perhaps on the logic that they could be editioned as ‘video art’), and now whoever is handling his estate (a gallery? lawyers?) deems it necessary to remove any trace of his work from the internet as well. I think this irks me more than usual because, as an ardent fan of experimental film, Conner was one of my first loves‹-made possible by a VHS of his films at my local video store. I wrote this obit for Rhizome in the hopes that younger artists or those who aren’t so aware of avant-garde film could see that he is the great forefather of video remixing, but now, thanks to the short-sightedness of those who think they are protecting his legacy,this will remain an uphill battle, and I fear that the true genius of his work will be denied to a new generation. It is truly a shame and a disservice to his memory that some of his works couldn’t be made available online, if only to celebrate his life and influence. All this becomes much more ironic given that, of course, I doubt if Conner ever got permissions for the footage he used in his films. Had the originators of those images been as draconian in their time as his estate is being now, those films would never have been possible.”

This again relates to the ongoing discussions on the economics of avantgarde film and the access vs. quality issue (see my earlier post on the Ubuweb controversy). Conner’s reasons for not wanting his work posted online apparently had to do with not wanting to cut into his film rentals and sales, and also because the loss of image quality didn’t serve the films. J Gluckstern answers Haller with some clear insights: “I’m not sure we can presume that our appreciation and recognition of the value of easy access to Conner’s work (for creative, inspirational and historical reasons) syncs up with what moved him to recombine those images in the first place. He had his reasons then. And we need to give him the benefit of the doubt that his later actions reflected his original and ongoing intentions for what the work was about. Now it’s up to his estate/family to decide what happens next, and so far, it seems we’ll be seeing even less of Conner’s work on anything but film.”

Several related issues of intellectual property and appropriation came up in a post by Caspar Stracke, who also wrote about Conner’s films being available via YouTube. He brings up the case of Mark Charles Brown, who made a homage to Conner’s ‘Take The 5-10 To Dreamland’, which he titled ‘Erasing Dreamland (Accidentally Erased Bruce Conner)’. Searching through YouTube’s metadata, he collected alternative clips depicting the same objects or similar imagery as in Conner’s film and then juxtaposing them with the original. Apparently the creation of this film lead to the erasure of Bruce Conner’s “original” film from the YouTube network, “due to its content being used with out the artists permission.” But he lifted all the content from YouTube BEFORE Connor’s piece was removed, then mixed with other YouTube content, which lead to a weird situation. On the YouTube page it says that “the film (the homage, sd) currently exists in copyright protection limbo, as the footage sampled was legally obtained from YouTube. As outlined within the terms of use agreement associated with uploading a video to YouTube, the content of Bruce Conner’s film existed outside the realm of copy protection while it was still present on their network, regardless of Conner not being the original poster of the film. Furthermore, the copyright management status of the video enters an even stranger space upon the realization that both films were created using found footage.” The confusion about intellectual property in the digital age in a nutshell.

All side issues left aside, let us just hope Bruce Conner’s work lives on and can be seen, in its original form (that is: preferably on film, or at least a format that has similar qualities), but also in mashups, updates, homages and remixes, in new contexts, on new rhythms.

(For those who dig deep in the web, Conner’s films are still there. For example… For those interested in seeing the real thing: we will be showing ‘A Movie’ (a 16mm copy owned by the Belgian Filmarchive) in a special screening at Muhka Media in Antwerp on September 19. More info later)

UPDATE: One of the Walker Art Center blogs has an interesting discussion in the comments about the YouTube take-downs and the access vs quality debate, including a couple comments by Dr. Patrick Gleeson, one of Bruce’s music collaborators. Some fragments:
“He was a passionate guy and if you will notice, one of the themes that runs through Bruce’s work is the destructive power of technology–not that technology was bad; Bruce wasn’t a Luddite–but that the consequences of its careless use were far worse than most of us realize. The U-Tube is a fairly obvious example of the degradation of art that Bruce found abhorrent.”
“Bruce was very competitive in some ways–his roots were Middle American–but I think questions of distribution, fame, money, public access to his art, etc.–the things we often count up when assessing success, were secondary to Bruce. That’s not unusual–a lot of artists, probably most artists, feel that way. We want and hope to be paid, but that’s not exactly why we “do” art. However: what makes Bruce different from many artists–and I think this is the part you’re somewhat stubbornly not getting–is just how extremely secondary these concerns were when weighed against the things that for Bruce really counted–in a lot of ways, particularly later in his life, he actually opposed and disliked the art market–as his enduring and frustrated dealers would certainly affirm. For Bruce there was centrally and primarily the art experience. (…) He knew exactly how he wanted his art to be experienced and he was extremely, sometimes maddeningly, detailed and exacting about the terms. This had absolutely nothing to do with money, distribution, etc.–it had to do with how this art experience, or some legitimate variation of it that could possibly be made available to someone else. He felt passionately that a lot of what passed for the art experience in contemporary life was a cruelly stupid replacement for the real thing–a cuckoo’s egg in the robin’s nest. He found it deeply offensive. He proposed certain terms about how others could share in that experience not because he was cultural snob, but because he deeply believed that except through those terms the art-experience didn’t exist. In other words, he was trying to share with us everything that could be shared. (…) To propose that Bruce, and now his estate, ought to allow YouTube or other down-pixeled copies to circulate because of possible monetary benefits would, I’m afraid, have enraged him. (…) I think there’s a belief underlying part of this discussion that the artist, here Bruce of course, has some kind of obligation to share his experience with as many persons as possible–it’s a beautiful experience and should be shared. Where does this obligation come from? I don’t think it exists; it’s a pseudo-populist fantasy and probably has more to do with our Puritan cultural heritage whereby we save ourselves by good works and reveal god’s pleasure in us through our worldly success. Bruce was just making art. The distribution of it, the marketing of it–all that really got him down. I think he thought that indulging in it might even be a character flaw–he spent considerable energy the past few years of his life trying to purge himself of the distraction.”

Some interviews: SFB Guardian (2005), LA Times (1990), Smithsonian (1973). Some Notes on the Films of Bruce Conner by William Moritz and Beverly O’Neill (1978).

Whose idea is it anyway?

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“Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It holds tight an author’s phrase, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, and replaces it with just the right idea.”
— Comte de Lautréamont (also known as Isidore Ducasse), ‘Poésies II’ (1870)

“There are very few original ideas. Plagiarism is the name of the game in advertising. It’s about recycling ideas in a useful way.”
— Philip Circus, an advertising law consultant, quoted in an article in the Independent

Here’s an interesting case in the context of “remix culture”, and the ongoing debates on plagriarism, quotation, simulation, collage etc . You’ve probably seen Apple’s “Hello” ad for the iPhone, showing a succession of snippets of actors from Hollywood films answering phones. Now, for those of you who know a bit about the extensive use of collage and détournement strategies in “experimental” film, this idea sounds familiar. Indeed, Christian Marclay’s 1995 film ‘Telephones’ comprises a similar montage, although it features different footage. As it turns out, Apple did contact Marclay before publishing the ad, to get permission to use the concept. He refused, but they took the idea anyway. Marcley, not being too pleased at first, talked to a lawyer about taking legal action over the ripoff, but was told “there’s nothing I can do about it. They have the right to get inspired”. Later he backed off (contradicting himself a bit): “this culture’s so much about suing each other that if we want to have anything that’s more of an open exchange of ideas, one has to stop this mentality. I’m just honored that they thought my work was interesting enough that they felt they could just rip it off.”

By the way, Marcley is not the first artist who seems to have “inspired” the commercial people of Apple. Last year, Colorado-based photographer Louis Psihoyos claimed that Apple ripped off his image of a wall of videos in its imagery for the Apple TV. Apple had actually been negotiating with the photographer for the rights to use the image but backed out of the deal and went ahead and used the imagery without permission. Furthermore, there has been some controversy about another Apple ad, which seems to be a shot-for-shot recreation of The Postal Service’s music video for ‘Such Great Heights’.

Anyways, compare the Marclay and iPod videos:

There’s a whole tradition of artists and filmmakers appropriating images and sounds from cinema and televison, often commenting on consumer culture and challenging the idea of originality itself (see our ‘Ghosting the Image‘ film program). But here the tables are turned. In recent years a number of advertising campaigns have seemed to draw their inspiration directly from high-profile works of contemporary art. An article in Asian Age quotes Donn Zaretsky, a lawyer in New York who specialises in art law, is often approached by artists who perceive echoes of their own work in advertisements “They increasingly seem to be getting into the territory of blatant rip-offs.” The law governing the unauthorised use of copyrighted images and ideas, he said, is notoriously murky. “Copyright law doesn’t protect ideas, it only protects expression. The question is, where do you draw the line?”. There have been a few notable cases in which artists successfully sued advertisers for copyright infringement. For example, in May 2007 a French judge ordered the fashion designer John Galliano to pay about $270,000 to the photographer William Klein in a dispute over a series of magazine ads that mimicked Klein’s technique of painting bright strokes of color on enlarged contact sheets. But in many cases, “originality” is hard to prove, especially in the light of the well known axiom saying that there is no copyright in an idea but only in an embodiment of that idea.

In 1998 Artist Gillian Wearing complained that a commercial by BMP DDB for Volkswagen borrowed too heavily from her ‘Signs’ series. Both feature people holding paper signs that express how they really feel in contrast to their appearance. BMP DDB claimed that, while its creative team were “aware” of her work, the clip also took inspiration from a Levi’s campaign for its Dockers brand (which ironically, Wearing also contacted her lawyer over, and gave permission for) and the video for Bob Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ in which the singer-songwriter holds up cue cards as he sings (which is actually a segment of D. A. Pennebaker’s film ‘Don’t Look Back’). As it happens, that last video was recently appropriated by Ramon & Pedro as a commercial for the Macbook Air.

UPDATE: and this is ‘Subterranean House (Oonce Oonce)’ by Michael Bell-Smith, which was recently part of an exhibition titled “Montage: Unmonumental Online” in the New Museum, NY.To continue the story, Wearing wasn’t pleased at all: “what really hurts is that it stops me doing my work because people think I’m working for an advertising agency”. A year later, she also accused M&C Saatchi of using the idea of her film ’10-16′ – a succession of adults are shown talking in a confessional style straight to camera, overdubbed with children’s voices – in an advertisement for Sky television (by the way, Charles Saatchi himself owned an edition of that piece). M&C Saatchi’s chief executive, Moray MacLennan, said: “Lip-synching in advertising is not a unique or original idea. There are other ads on the box that use the technique. It’s commonly used in advertising and is not a new thing.” Wearing dropped her legal action when the artist Mehdi Norowzian was ordered to pay pounds 200,000 costs in 1999 after he lost a case against Guinness, which he accused of breach of copyright in an advertisement featuring a dancing man. Norowzian used the “jump cutting” technique in his film ‘Joy’, resulting in the image of a man dancing jerkily to music. The accused agency accepted that it had seen this film in producing the advert for Guinness, which portrayed a man performing a series of dancing movements while waiting for his pint of Guinness to settle – the actor, Joseph McKinney, had been shown the film more than once and he gave evidence that he had been told by the agency to imitate, emulate and expand upon Joy. But the judge held in Guinness’s favour and confirmed that advertising agencies can lawfully use artists’ ideas or even the format of a particular work without infringing copyright. He said: “no copyright subsists in mere style or technique… If, on seeing ‘La Baignade, Asnieres at the Salon des Artistes Independants’ in 1884, another artist had used precisely the same technique in painting a scene in Provence, Seurat would have been unable, by the canons of English copyright law, to maintain an action against him.”

Commenting on these cases, an article in the Guardian quoted a copyright lawyer saying: “A lot of visual art is seen as very irrelevant and useless, but clearly advertisers are taking a different view and recognising that visual artists are at the forefront of the culture and their messages can be very potent. Advertisers have exhausted and got bored with the books of great art and extended into images by artists that people don’t know. The one thing that hasn’t changed is the advertisers’ reluctance to pay.” Another notorius case of the last years, is the one of Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss. They have turned down numerous requests from ad agencies interested in licensing their award-winning 30-minute short film, ‘Der Lauf der Dinge’. Produced in 1987, it follows a Rube Goldberg-style chain reaction in which everyday objects like string, balloons, buckets and tires are propelled by means of fire, pouring liquids and gravity. Yet in April 2003 Honda ran a two-minute television commercial for the ‘Honda Cog’ (directed by Antoine Bardou-Jacquet, a well-known filmmaker of high concept ads and music videos, and a good friend of Michael Gondry. The clip is produced by Wieden+Kennedy London), in which various parts of a car form a domino-like chain reaction that culminates when an Accord rolls down a ramp as a voice-over intones, “Isn’t it great when things just work?”. At the time Fischli told Creative Review magazine (echoing Wearing’s complaint): “We’ve been getting a lot of mail saying, ‘Oh, you’ve sold the idea to Honda.’ We don’t want people to think this. We made ‘Der Lauf der Dinge’ for consumption as art. Of course we didn’t invent the chain reaction and Cog is obviously a different thing. But we did make a film the creatives of the Honda ad have obviously seen.” W&K’s creative director Tony Davidson answered that Fischli and Weiss’s film was only one of the inspirations for the ad (again an echo) and argued: “Advertising references culture and always has done. Part of our job is to be aware of what is going on in society. There is a difference between copying and being inspired by.”

Lots of food for thought here, not only about the tension between appropriation and inspiration, participation and exploitation (legal and ethical – what’s the distinction between fleeting reference and wholescale rip-off, and how and when does it really matter?), but also about the future of art and cultural knowledge, in a network society characterised by constant feedback loops: how, for example is one to evaluate the music-video aesthetics of Bardou-Jacques and his team on the Honda Cog, compared to the certified ‘documenta-to-Tate Modern’ art-world status of Fischli & Weiss? How to square the gallery work of Christian Marclay’s with Apple’s hip ad?

UPDATE: someone mentioned a Belgian example. Segments of the short video ‘Little Figures’ by Sarah Vanagt have apparently been copied in an ad for BGDA / ORBEM (now called ACTIRIS, responsible for the free provision of services in order to achieve full employment and the balanced development of the Brussels labour market). Both feature specific shots of Brussels statues with a voice over – in ‘Little Figures’ three migrant children stir up a imaginary conversation between the statues, while in the ad the voice over is about taking your future in your hands etc.

House of Cards

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I have to say, when it comes to the use of sociable web media as a marketing tool – this is, afterall, what the term “web 2.0” has come to imply – as well as a generator of participation and creativity, Radiohead is doing just fine. Releasing their ‘In Rainbows’ as a digital download that customers could order for whatever price they saw fit, was quite a stunt (that got them quite a bit of media attention), and although that service was temporarely, and they announced that it’s improbable that they will publish their music in the same way again, they’re still eager to experiment with the dynamics of network culture. Clearly, they’re not inventing the wheel here and obviously, being one of the most popular international music b(r)ands, they’re in a comfortable position to “experiment” with alternative distribution and marketing models, but still, as far as their trust in “user empowerment” goes, they have become the posterboys of the techno-libertarianism movement (on a broader level, the hypocritical agenda behind “open” and “free” has to be seriously discussed. The ideology that Free gurus such as Lawrence Lessig and Joi Ito are spreading is valuable indeed, but what’s lacking are sustainable income sources for cultural producers beyond the current copyright regimes. We might be excited by the idea of joining the gift economy, but we’re still paying the bills, and we know someone, somewhere else in the food chain, is cashing in). The music video contest that the band organised in cooperation with the cartoon networking site aniBoom, turned out to be quite a succes, judging by the quality of the work of the finalists (10 semi-finalists will each receive $1,000 to create a one minute long video clip. One grand prize winner will receive $10,000 to create a full length video), and the remix contest, in which fans were given the opportunity to buy isolated “stems” (vocals, drums, etc., for 99cents on itunes) from the track “Nude” and create a remix of their own, generated 2252 submissions on the project site Radioheadremix.com (deadline was May 2008, the remixes were voted on by the public). The purchase of the “stems” turned out to be widespread enough to land “Nude” in the charts. Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson has written a nice analysis of the remixes, but I particularly like the remix (not listed on the project site) by James Houston, A Glasgow School of Art student. It’s based on a collection of old redundant hardware (a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, an Epson LX-81 Dot Matrix Printer, a HP Scanjet 3c, and a Hard Drive array), “placed in a situation where they’re trying their best to do something that they’re not exactly designed to do, and not quite getting there”. It has become a YouTube sensation in the meantime, especially after is was mentioned on Radiohead’s blog.

Now they’re continuing their experiments by encouraging remixing of their latest music video ‘House of Cards’ (see below). The video is shot using only 3D scanning devices (one a close-proximity 3D scanner from Geometric Informatics, another a multiple-laser array for the “exterior scenes” rotating in a 360-degree pattern.) in place of cameras, resulting in data that was programmed with the open-source tool Processing (technical director was Aaron Koblin). The source code and the raw data (NOT the music though) is available for free (only for a few months, after that you have to pay!), under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License on the Google Code site. Part of the power of data visualization is that you can make it look like whatever you want (using Blender, for example), so it’ll be interesting to see how this will evolve. Check out the YouTube group that has been set up.

The Order of Things

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Great news! We’ve been asked to organise a few filmprograms and/or events for Muhka (Museum of Contemporary Art) in Antwerp. Dieter Roelstraete curated an interesting exhibition, entitled ‘the Order of Things’, on the ‘uses’ of image archives – which is right up our alley – and asked us to elaborate on that subject and select some cinematographic works (films as a kind of control, ordering images in time) that will be shown parallel to the expo. The pivotal figure within that selection will be Arthur Lipsett: his films will be shown on September 12th, presented by Brett Kashmere, who has been touring with the first European retrospective of Lipsett’s concise but influential career. We’ll keep you posted…

THE ORDER OF THINGS
MuHKA, Antwerp: 11 September > 23 November 2008

In the fall of 2008, the Antwerp museum of contemporary art MuHKA will host an exhibition on the ‘uses’ of archival images, image archives and image banks – and various other manifestations of a classificatory, “encyclopaedic” impulse – in contemporary art, titled “The Order of Things”.
This exhibition takes as its point of departure a web-based project by Vancouver photo-artist Roy Arden titled “The World as Will and Representation”, an online image archive consisting of a staggering 30,000+ jpegs from which Arden (who helped to flesh out many of the germinal ideas for this exhibition) culls the visual motifs for his recent ‘archival’ collage works.
In “The Order of Things”, this image archive’s use of a stringent classificatory logic – alphabetical and thus eminently logical, yet also often bizarre in its (inevitably arbitrary) ordering of one ‘class’ of images after another – operates as a curatorial trigger for a sustained reflection upon the various uses of archives, databases, encyclopaedias, typologies and other “ordering devices” (the title being an allusion to a well-known book by the historian of dis/order, Michel Foucault) as methods and strategies for confronting the delirious spectacle of the contemporary image world. This delirium is of course nowhere more palpably ‘present’ than in the phenomenal proliferation of (photographic) imagery that is the internet, which, as a conceptual horizon, figures as one of the exhibition’s defining parameters – hence the centrality accorded to Arden’s own “The World as Will and Representation” in the exhibition, and hence also the inclusion, for instance, of Thomas Ruff’s “JPEG” photographs. In some sense, “The Order of Things” talks ‘about’ – insofar as exhibitions can be about something – the world as a universe entirely made up out of images/pictures (mainly of a ‘vernacular’ photographic nature) and only made accessible to us through images/pictures; a world that may seem impossibly chaotic, and therefore invites all kinds of ‘ordering’ interventions that seek to domesticate and contain the natural excesses of the image-world. This partly ironic, self-conscious “will to order” – a classificatory impulse that is supremely aware of its own futility, and of the fatal contingency of its classificatory criteria – is the precise juncture where the archival and/or encyclopaedic impulse in contemporary art enters into the picture: the “art of classification” that is implied in the archive, the atlas and the encyclopaedia (or its corollaries, the data-base and image-bank) is an integral self-reflexive part of what Martin Heidegger has called “the fundamental event of the modern age” – the “conquest of the world as picture.”

Visual abandon/abundance and the excessive aesthetics of plenty, as formal qualities of the world encountered in this chaotic, delirious avalanche of images, are at the heart of this exhibition. They are features of our contemporary ‘digitized’ condition that inevitably invite critical scrutiny (much of which takes the shape of art – an art that will seek to impose order, or otherwise reveal the hidden order of things), yet at the same time also act as sources of authentic wonder to which art may respond by duplicating this spectacle of visual overload, by adding to it even. This deep, irresolvable ambiguity – a seamless reflection of the ambivalence of the image proper – is a defining characteristic of the exhibition, and of much of the work included in it, and of course serves to remind us of the irony implied in all uses of the term ‘order’. [The exhibition could just as well have been called “The Disorder of Things”.] This irony is also present in the awareness that, no matter how sincere and profound contemporary art’s indignant criticism of the society of spectacle may seem (and effectively be), art also irrefutably belongs to this very regime of spectacularization.
Two ‘types’ of profusion, then, are at work in this exhibition. One pertains to the brute fact of the visual abundance characteristic of contemporary society proper – the realization of the world’s overwhelming visual riches, and the mirror effect it creates in any art that seeks to respond to this relative wealth by replicating it. Here we find the rationale for the exhibition’s own character of visual overload – the sheer quantity of work on display that consists, precisely, of picturing (or imaging/imagining) quantity. Secondly, there is also the fact of the fundamental heterogeneity of the visual abundance that characterizes the image-world – hence also the heterogeneity of artistic responses to this fact: not only is it an art of visual plenty, it is also one of irreducible differences and differentiations. To grasp the baffling variety of artistic attitudes, methods and practices that are at play in this labyrinthine exhibition – a reflection in itself of the labyrinthine nature of the world as such, and one that must by its very definition remain incomplete – we have isolated a number of organizational principles that symbolize or reflect these varying attitudes, methods and practices. They are the following:

Appropriation: under this well-known rubric we have aimed to contextualize art’s critical eye upon the image world, i.e. upon the world as wholly mediated (and, what’s more, only made accessible to us) by images. The work of Sigmar Polke and Richard Prince is key here, as are the historical references represented by Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, whose collages effectively presaged ‘classical’ appropriation art. Thomas Ruff’s so-called “JPG” pictures could also be considered in this tradition, with the excessive realm of Internet imagery (an updated version of the 20th century ‘genre’ of vernacular photography) operating as the virtual horizon of the visible world. The work of Sarah Charlesworth, Sanja Ivekovic, Cady Noland and Peter Piller likewise belongs to this expansive (and necessarily porous) category of critical containment.

Archives: here we encounter the encyclopaedic impulse in all its unfettered glory, no longer (or not necessarily) inhibited by critical considerations or attempts at containing or disciplining the image world, but ready, instead, to accommodate the image realm as one that literally cries out for ordering and classification, thereby enhancing its luscious wealth. Hans Peter Feldmann is the genre’s undisputed reigning champion, and his influence can be felt in the work of many younger artists in this exhibition, from Luis Jacob to Peter Piller and beyond (Marjolijn Dijkman, Steven Shearer, Batia Suter). The vast image banks that come out of this archival tradition often (but not always, as Feldmann’s own work attests, and as Fischli & Weiss’ Sichtbare Welt or Gerhard Richter’s Atlas ‘proves’) consist of appropriated images; quite often, they serve to eulogize rather than criticize the marvel of visibility.

Collage & bricolage: a more ‘innocent’ form of appropriation perhaps, collage-as-bricolage is an age-old (hence often called ‘primitive’) attempt at making sense of the world by ordering its seemingly disparate elements into new maps, narratives and world-views – hence the traditional equation of bricolage with the magical thought of primitive art. Juxtaposition, the primary formal logic of collage, is also an important classificatory tool in the pre-modern world-views that are the subject of Michel Foucault’s “Order of Things” after which the exhibition is named. It is also in the sphere of collage – as montage – that the traditional primacy of photography in the archival field can be challenged: along with the likes of Bruce Conner and Joseph Cornell, Arthur Lipsett is one of the pioneering practitioners of the art of the film collage.

Typologies: here we encounter the classifying (‘encyclopaedic’) impulse as the regulatory driving force behind the artist’s own image production; the classic examples are August Sander, Walker Evans, Ed Ruscha, Bernd & Hilla Becher and Hans Eijkelboom. Figurations of the grid (Eijkelboom) or the index (Tine Melzer) are frequently central to this trope, as is the parodic tone of scientific, pseudo-anthropological thoroughness (Douglas Huebler and ‘classical’ photo-based conceptual art in general) and a quasi-pathological compulsion to order and repeat (On Kawara, Mark Manders). The classificatory decisions made by the artist can be entirely ‘objective’, that is, forced upon her or himself by the nature of the object in question (e.g. the Bechers, Christopher Williams), or subjective instead – the consequence of an entirely arbitrary decision, potentially resulting in bizarre taxonomies that cannot be anything other than ‘art’ (Eijkelboom, Piller). Finally, as quickly became apparent in Sander’s and Evans’ projects, this approach, regularly used to enforce pseudo-anthropologist humanist agendas (“People of the Twentieth Century”, “Many Are Called”), is often loaded with a mournful, melancholy quality that is wholly specific to the photographic medium – the hallmark of Christian Boltanski’s work in this field.

As is clear from these enumerations and taxonomies, photography will be the dominant medium in the exhibition; it is the technical innovation of photography and of the ideally limitless reproducibility of its images, theorized to such epochal effect by Walter Benjamin, that has transformed our experience of the world into an overwhelmingly visual (‘retinal’) one. Furthermore, photography has also contributed decisively to the “democracy” of imagery that is implied in the exhibition’s conceptual make-up: as a project, “The Order of Things” would be entirely unthinkable without the democratization of image production that was ushered in by the popularization of photography, beginning with the introduction of cheap cameras and film at the beginning of the twentieth century, all the way up to the advent of digital photography and the Internet as everyman’s image bank.
That said, however, “The Order of Things” is not a medium-specific or medially defined exhibition, in that it is not an exhibition about photography or solely consisting of photography. Some of the most important work done in the field covered within the exhibition’s conceptual framework has taken the shape of books (of photographs, it is true) rather than photographs, and the artist’s book will therefore take pride of place within the exhibition concentric layout – as will “the internet”, in the shape and form of Roy Arden’s “The World as Will and Representation”, which will be on view on computer screens installed throughout the exhibition, as so many images-in-motion.

Participating artists/artworks by:
Roy Arden (CAN), Sarah Charlesworth (US), Marjolijn Dijkman (NL), Hans Eijkelboom (NL), Douglas Huebler (US), Sanja Ivekovic (CRO), Luis Jacob (CAN), Cameron Jamie (US), Arthur Lipsett (CAN), Mark Manders & Roger Willems (NL), Tine Melzer (D), Marc Nagtzaam (NL), Cady Noland (US), Peter Piller (D), Sigmar Polke (D), Richard Prince (US), Robert Rauschenberg (US), Julian Rosefeldt (D), Thomas Ruff (D), Joachim Schmid (D), Steven Shearer (CAN, tbc), Nancy Spero (US), Batia Suter (CH), Els Van den Meersch (B), Andy Warhol (US, tbc) & Christopher Williams (US)

Where is My Mind?

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“I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m a…fraid.”
Supercomputer HAL, when powered down by astronaut Dave, in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey

“Today, I see within us all the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available’. A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become ‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”
Richard Foreman, The Pancake People, or, “The Gods Are Pounding My Head”

US Internet critic Nicholas Carr, author of Does IT Matter? and The Big Switch, Rewiring the World, recently published a thought-provoking piece, titled Is Google making us Stupid?, in which he reflects on on how Internet use affects our cognition and memory, possibly pounding us all into instantly-available pancakes. Drawing on some thoughts he already noted down in one of the chapters in the Big Switch (Read some excellent reviews by Geert Lovink and Andrew Orlowski), he argues that the internet “provides no incentive to stop and think deeply about anything”, since it stresses immediacy, simultaneity, contingency, subjectivity, disposability, and, above all, speed. In this era of infomania and multitasking, we are constantly searching and surfing the Internet, skimming this incredibly rich store of knowledge, gliding across the surface of data, rushing from link to link. The dream of Alan Turing, this artificial dream of an intelligent, deterministic and universal machine that can perform the function of any information-processing device and ultimately could banish ignorance from mathematics forever, is becoming reality, as the Net has been subsuming most of our other “intellectual technologies”, as Daniel Bell calls them: our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, our radio and TV. These “old media” are replaced, refashioned, absorbed, or “remediated” by Internet-based applications and services, adapting to the audience’s new expectations. What’s more, as I noted in an article, the Internet now even promises to expand society’s capacity to record daily events in minute detail (see ‘life-logging’ projects such as ‘what was I thinking’ (MIT), Lifeblog (Nokia) and MyLifeBits (Microsoft)), offering the promise of a “total recall”, a perfect prosthesis for the fallibility of human memory. Never before has a communications system played so many roles in our lives. But the Net is not only reprogramming the rules of media and the construct of social memory and history (as Geoffrey Bowker and others have pointed out: the way we record knowledge inevitably affects the knowledge that we record. To paraphrase McCluhan: we are building a new past at the same time as we are marching backwards into the future), but us as well, the way we read, write and think.

Are you also experiencing browsing the Web in staccato mode? Continuously scanning short passages of text, sound and moving images from the many sources online, browsing horizontally through sites and content going for quick wins, having a hard time not letting your attention drift away to other digital pieces of information or entertainment, following the endless path of hyperlinks, hopping from one source to another, mailing, shopping, editing, texting, reading, playing, picking up some snippets along the way, copy-pasting a discourse, collecting a series of links, text, music and video files that you’ll probably never open? Then you’ll understand what Carr is suggesting when he writes that the Net might be increasing our incentives for exploration (finding new information) while decreasing our incentives for exploitation (reflecting on or synthesizing information in order to come up with fresh ideas), that our ability to interpret information, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read, listen and/or watch deeply, remains largly disengaged. He’s not the only one who’s taking this rather pessimistic perspective: in response to Carr’s article columnist Margaret Wente, for example, wrote a piece in which she states that “thanks to Google, we’re all turning into mental fast-food junkies. Google has taught us to be skimmers, grabbing for news and insights on the fly. I skim books now too, even good ones. Once I think I’ve got the gist, I’ll skip to the next chapter or the next book. Forget the background, the history, the logical progression of an argument. Just give me the takeaway.” The idea here is that the Googlisation of knowledge is scattering our attention, diffusing our concentration, destroying our attention span. “In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.” Carr is however, unlike unconstructive complainers like Andrew Keen, aware of the dangers his rather conservative and, in a way, elitist impulses: “just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress”, he writes, “there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine.” So yes, although there’s a lot of food for thought in Carr’s arguments, we should remain skeptical about this skepticism, and, as Geert Lovink suggest, keep exploring and promoting the Internet as a tool for global mass education, and situate the medium into the techno-social context it now operates in.

But it is true that, as we’re forming our technologies, technology also forms us. Where does it end? In his piece, Carr referes to 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which Stanley Kubrick explored the possibility of a future where computer technology controls and encloses humanity. Kubrick’s vision of the future in 1968 is, albeit very bleak and pessimistic, haunting as he understood the power of technology and its occupancy in a vacant and sterile world. 2001, perhaps, now more than ever before speaks to the pervasive and dominating role of technology. In a 1971 interview, Kubrick mused: “One of the fascinating questions that arises in envisioning computers more intelligent than men is at what point machine intelligence deserves the same consideration as biological intelligence (…) Once a computer learns by experience as well as by its original programming, and once it has access to much more information than any number of human geniuses might possess, the first thing that happens is that you don’t really understand it anymore, and you don’t know what it’s doing or thinking about. You could be tempted to ask yourself in what way is machine intelligence any less sacrosanct than biological intelligence, and it might be difficult to arrive at an answer flattering to biological intelligence.” This vision is the backdrop of 2001 (and in a way also of AI, which was developed by Kubrick but directed by Spielberg after his death), that captures the intellectual currents that are operating within the field of artificial intelligence. Carr is especially haunted by the final scenes of 2001, in which HAL is shut down by the only remaining crewman, Dave Bowman. HAL’s ‘death’ feels like a tragedy of which he expresses in terms of a loss of memory (‘I’m losing my mind, Dave’), pleading like a child for his “life”, crying invisible digital tears. Carr writes: “HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence”.

UPDATE: Edge has been hosting a forum with comments on Carr’s piece, from Danny Hillis, Kevin Kelly, Larry Sanger, George Dyson, Jaron Lanier, Douglas Rushkoff… The Britannica Blog also launched a forum with posts from Clay Shirky, Sven Birkerts, Matthew Battles, and others.

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