Commemorating the Great Recession

The Great Recession (21 September, 2012) © Casey Lynch 2011

A new work, in the style of Goya. Also, a proposed public sculpture for anywhere there is an apple store...

The Work of Art in the Hyper-Relational Age

Benjamin at Tiravanija Opening © Casey Lynch 2012

The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art issues today in a new form. Quantity has been transmuted into quality. The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation. The fact that the new mode of participation first appeared in a disreputable form must not confuse the spectator. Yet some people have launched spirited attacks against precisely this superficial aspect. Among these, Duhamel has expressed himself in the most radical manner. What he objects to most is the kind of participation which the relational art elicits from the masses. Duhamel calls the relational art “a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures who are consumed by their worries a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no intelligence which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope other than the ridiculous one of someday becoming a ‘star’ in Los Angeles.” Clearly, this is at bottom the same ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator. That is a commonplace.

The question remains whether it provides a platform for the analysis of the relational art. A closer look is needed here. Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of an the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. This is most obvious with regard to buildings. Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction. The laws of its reception are most instructive.

Buildings have been man’s companions since primeval times. Many art forms have developed and perished. Tragedy begins with the Greeks, is extinguished with them, and after centuries its “rules” only are revived. The epic poem, which had its origin in the youth of nations, expires in Europe at the end of the Renaissance. Panel painting is a creation of the Middle Ages, and nothing guarantees its uninterrupted existence. But the human need for shelter is lasting. Architecture has never been idle. Its history is more ancient than that of any other art, and its claim to being a living force has significance in every attempt to comprehend the relationship of the masses to art. Buildings are appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by perception—or rather, by touch and sight. Such appropriation cannot be understood in terms of the attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building. On the tactile side there is no counterpart to contemplation on the optical side. Tactile appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as by habit. As regards architecture, habit determines to a large extent even optical reception. The latter, too, occurs much less through rapt attention than by noticing the object in incidental fashion. This mode of appropriation, developed with reference to architecture, in certain circumstances acquires canonical value.

For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation.

The distracted person, too, can form habits. More, the ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction proves that their solution has become a matter of habit. Distraction as provided by art presents a covert control of the extent to which new tasks have become soluble by apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses. Today it does so in the relational art. Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the relational art its true means of exercise. The relational art with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway.

The relational art makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the relational arts this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.

*of course, this is the final section of The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction with the words "movie" and "film" replaced with "relational art."  this really saved me a lot of time coming up with a good critical stance...

What makes a meme a meme? Can ambiguity, self-referential-ity, and critical implications make a meme art? Do memes already have these attributes  Are memes already art?

Calling Home

Since I moved out of my parent’s house 10ish years ago, I’ve never had a “home” phone, only a mobile. In that time, I’ve had 5 or 6 phones, and 3 different numbers. I’ve always been pretty good at having Sprint transfer my contacts, or using Google to back them up. Among the ever growing number of contacts was my parents home number, the land-line number to the house that I grew up in. It has always been in there as “Home,”  and there were separate entries for my Mother’s and Father’s mobile numbers, “Mom” and “Dad” respectively.

My wife and I have been together, counting dating, most of those ten years since I left home.  She is listed under “Jennifer Lynch” and “Kittun”. This March, we found out that she is pregnant. In order to try to get some of our finances in order, we decided to sell our house. It was not our first home together (we have lived in apartment homes all over Atlanta, in NYC and Providence,) but it was the first home that we owed, the first property that had our names on the title. Still, we never had a home phone, a shared landline number. When filling out documents, whoever was holding the pen or typing on the keyboard would put her or my mobile number in the “Home” blank – it probably makes for a quintessential definition of the “postmodern home.”

At any rate, we are currently in another apartment, another temporary home, until we get another house.

We used the money we made from selling our house to pay off some debts, buy my wife a new car, and get me a new cell phone. All my contacts transferred just fine: “Jenifer Lynch/Kittun”, “Mom”, “Dad”, “Home,” etcetera, etcetera.

When we moved, we had to transfer all of our utilities, and the cable company convinced my wife to add a home phone to our bundle in order to save some money. I thought this was a good idea, because as someone who does contract work, I could get a fax machine and start writing off a portion of our rent/mortgage as a home office.

A couple weeks went by, we got settled into our new place, and decided that there’s not quite enough space for a fax machine, so the landline went unused. At the same time, we had both been experiencing poor reception in our apartment, so I started thinking that we should maybe get a phone to plug into the wall.

This past weekend, Jennifer and I took a 350 mile round trip to visit all of our parents. We met each set at a different location; at the lake, at the house, at the stadium. We were able to stay in touch, make and change plans, and get directions by using our mobile phones.

While at my parent’s house, I asked my mom if they had any old phones they weren’t using. She listed all the ones lying around their house, to which I responded with a wishy-washy, half-hearted rejection. On a whim that evening, she picked up a $10 corded-phone while running an errand to the office supply store. It was perfect.

When we got back to our apartment, we unpacked our stuff, started the laundry, and took showers. Tonight, relaxing down into my current home, I decided to plug our new phone into the wall to see if it would actually work. (And to find out what our phone number is.)

After hooking it up, I picked up the receiver and heard a noise I hadn’t heard in a long time, a dial-tone. For my first test, I pushed the buttons to call my mobile phone, and recalled how as a teenager, my friends and I would try to play pop songs with the different key tones. Within seconds, my cell phone rang. I had a silly thought that this would be a good opportunity to have a talk with myself.

Then I really realized something. What label was I going to give this new number in my cell phone “contacts?”

Maybe it’s not as big of a deal as I have made it, but knowing that this new number would stick with me at least as long as I continued living in the Atlanta area, it would need a name…

I went to my “contacts” folder on my mobile phone as if I was walking through a wormhole. I first went to the contact “Home.” I clicked “Edit,” and changed the name to “Grandma and Papa,” the name my nephews and nieces, and soon my little baby girl, call my parents. I then went back to my call history, selected my new landline number, and added it to my contacts as “Home.”

Animal (Internet) Farm

In thinking about our diets, and what it is that allows us to eat the way that we do, I stumbled upon a loose connection between freedom, vegetarianism, and the internet.  I start with what I feel is the general understanding of freedom, and will end with a question of how freedom exists.

            I will assume freedom to mean being able to do whatever we want, as long as we do not harm another.  I feel like most people take this to mean that they should always be able to do whatever pleases them, so long as they don’t perceive the one who is hurt…

Animal (Internet) Farm  (© Casey Lynch 2011)

Humans are omnivorous - we can and do get nutrition from eating both plants and other animals.  However, we are not cannibals, we do not eat others of our same species.   Further, the moral law that forbids the killing of (which usually happens before the eating of) another human has been rationalized as truly ethical because to kill another is to remove the basic rights, or oppress the other.  This can be teased out to show that to make another conscious being suffer, directly or indirectly (as is so often the case with murder), is wrong.  This partial definition of freedom is a major foundation of (Westernly-defined) civilized societies.

Somehow, and in many cultures, civilization has extended to non-humans.  In the thousands of years of domesticating of animals, many of us have begun to breach the division between (human) self and (animal) other, assigning non-human animals human-like consciousness, and in turn human-like rights.  This has made it harder for many humans to be able to rationalize killing an animal for any reason, especially for our enjoyment, especially where enjoyment is the sating of hunger (that could be satisfied in other ways.)  For some, not only is the killing of the animal seen as wrong, but to alienate an animal by means of removing it from its natural habitat (farming) is oppressive.

From here I need to jump to Marx for a minute.  As most of us know, Karl Marx saw industrialization and capitalism as modes of production and commerce that were sure to oppress the proletariat and alienate them from their labor.   But alienation not only removes one from the reality of his labor, but also the labor of others.  Further, alienation inserts the proletariat into the reality of the bourgeoisie in that he is allowed not just more leisure time, but more importantly, distance from labor and its consequences under industrialized capitalism.  In this sense, part of the proletariat's alienation is (an ironic) freedom.  In a capitalist society, the proletariat is able to purchase goods made by (other) oppressed peoples without having to feel any empathy or connection to fellow workers.  For example, a normal moral person would not buy a garment directly off of a sweat-shop-factory-line attended by children, nor would he/she make a garment under squalor conditions.  In these two examples, the garment simply would not be had - but many people do buy clothes that are made under such conditions.  A moral or ethical person would not buy goods that he/she knows were made under oppressive conditions, but the alienation that occurs in an industrialized, and especially globalized, society allows us enough distance from that oppressive labor to pretend it does not exist – this is the deniable distance.  This allows to obtain what we actually desire – self gratification.

Here we can return to our discussion of humans as conflicted omnivores.  Many people would not, or are not, capable of killing an animal in order to eat it, but are fully capable of eating a dead animal that has been killed elsewhere, packaged, and presented to them in a form and place that possesses a deniable distance, i.e. the supermarket or restaurant.  We see this in many degrees, even in those who do kill animals.  Few, if any, non-sociopathic people kill an animal with his/her bare hands.  On many farms, the “processing” of cows, chickens, etc. is mechanized - industrialized.  Even the hunter uses a bow or a gun, technologies that not only give a tactical advantage, but a partial deniable distance.  Often, when the hunter obtains proximity to the targeted beast, it is already dead.  In cases where it is not, the job is finished with a subsequent shot, or a blade; rarely with the hand.  Even a relatively short blade creates a distance that makes the act more digestible.  To be extreme, even at the table we use a fork, knife, spoon, or chop-sticks to distance ourselves from our prey’s subjectivity.  Again, in the end are allowed to attain self-gratification.

Here we see freedom being defined as being able to do what one desires through the advantage of existing at a deniable distance from ethically/morally problematic acts.  It is a relative and individual freedom.  It is a freedom based in illusion, and I would suggest that all freedom in the future will be as well.

Returning to Marx, he and Engels saw democracy as the vehicle that would facilitate the rise of the proletariat, and even though it would have to go through the rise and fall of capitalism, ultimately, democracy would lead to the realization of communism.  The debate as to the utopianism of Marxism is not the point here, instead it is to assert that the goal of a communist society is to produce equality, and that this equality is equated with (universal) freedom.  The question now and in the future, in the time of the internet, especially Web 2.0 and beyond, is how does/will deniable distance prevent us from being free.

We all remember (and still hear) the specter of communism’s return in the utopian prophecies of the democracy of the internet.  “Everyone will have a voice,” or “everyone will have a choice.”  The partial truth that precipitates from such proclamations of equality is that as long as you can pay for or get access to a device that connects to the internet, and pay for or find access to a physical site that broadcasts the internet, you will receive some level of freedom to information depending on where in the world you actually, physically live.

First, the internet is not free.  In general, we pay someone somewhere, like the cable or phone company, to connect to it.  Once we are on it, whatever services one believes he/she is obtaining for “free” is actually being paid for by the giving away of one’s  information (think gmail or facebook), personal time/labor (this blog post is one example), or allowing oneself to be inundated with advertising that affects him/her on some level (probably subconsciously.)  In a sense, while one is on the internet, he/she is working for someone else, producing goods in the form of information, without being paid.  All the while, the entities actually reaping the monetary benefits in the real world are widening the gap between the wealthiest few and the majority.

Second, the internet does not make all information free to everyone.  The internet is much less of an anarchic utopia in China than it is in the U.S.  Also, most of us are unsure of if, and how much information is censored in the U.S.  All we know is that we get enough information to gratify our selves.

Finally, web purchases create an indefinite distance between the objects we order online, and the labor that went into their creation.  We usually have no connection to the possibility or actuality of oppression that occurs in the production of goods and services we purchase online.

So what does this mean in terms of the denial distance?  First, the internet seems free because most of us are alienated from the charges we pay to the service providers; we never actually see the physical money before or after it goes to the phone or cable company because we pay it with a credit/debit card, or even more distantly, have it automatically drafted from our account when it is due.  We are abstractly indentured servants.  Second, we essentially never-ever see the inventors/controllers of the content and services we use on the web.  Occasionally we may see a Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, or Steve Jobs on television, but most of us have never met, or even seen someone like them in real life.  (As a larger irony, I bet most people don’t even know who Larry Page and Sergey Brin are.)  The confusion of producer and consumer, as well as the gap between subject and object on the internet is especially interesting:  because of their nearness to infinity, they most clearly show how deniable distance allows the simulacrum that is democracy to function on the internet.  To further examine this phenomenon may expose an analogy to how democracy functions as ideology everywhere.

We have come to believe that the internet provides us with a virtual reality, leading us to believe that everything we experience on the web is only virtual.  Actually, it would be more accurate to call the internet a semireality.  I use “semireal” as a word descending from Jean Baudrillard’s hyperreal.  Where hyperreality suggests an indistinction between the real and a copy or simulacrum, the semireal is a reality that exists within or parallel to another, completely apprehensible reality.  Semireality places no hierarchical value in distinguishing between some hypothetical real-real versus a hyperreal, but instead emphasizes the relative strata between all possible levels of reality.

It is only in a semireality that democracy is possible, and only through deniable distance that semirealities are comprehended.  In this sense, there must be a deniable distance for democracy to exist.

The internet gives us a virtual infinity of distance between ourselves and our masters.  (Ironically, they have us closer than ever.)  The deniable distance the web provides, the fact that we don’t interact directly with others, whether equal or not, gives us the feeling that we are free to indulge in the gratification of ourselves (under the illusion that there is no ‘real’ other to be harmed by our actions.)  We see neither those who oppress us, or those we oppress.  This should quickly lead to the question of how oneself is oppressed, and if we are okay with this lack of freedom.

Marcia Vaitsman at Solomon Projects

I just wanted to do a quick review of my experience of Marcia Vaitsman's work currently on display at Solomon Projects in Atlanta.
The title of the show, "A Study of Strange Things" seems to be a bit simple and possibly naive, and when one sees the show, the sparse population of works can easily lead to confirming this reaction.  But then again, the appearance of simplicity is often due to a lack of investigation.  It is from this idea that the rest of my analysis will grow...
Two opposing walls in the gallery  each hold a tetratych of large photographs. Another wall has a video, while the other wall, technically holds nothing, instead has an installation of maybe forty small photographic light boxes.  Essentially, there is a visual-spatial intersection of two lines; one whose points connect images that are the result of a photographic process whose media absorbs (and reflects) light, the other connecting images created through a similar process, but whose end form emits light.  In this way, Vaitsman sets up a conversation around the ideas of photography (and video) in relation to the medium of light.  Her graduate thesis, of which I only had time to scan, mentions influence of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, so I will indulge.  In his lecture, On the Gaze as Objet Petit a, Lacan alludes to a subject that exists as the relationship between a light source, and the image that light source produces.  Imagine a film projector.  It is a light source.  The light it projects is caught by a screen.  When we perceive the image, we do not see it on the screen, but in or beyond the screen.  This situation explains the existence of the subject, where the subject is the screen.  [A two-dimensional image like a painting or photograph uses the inverse function of light to produce perspective, or the appearance of depth, within an image.  Still, in this instance, the image, or surface of the two-dimensional object is analogous to the existence of the subject.]

Vaitmans similarly sets up a site of subjective existence in a perpendicular intersection of images that produce and absorb light.
Another relationship I found in the work was a conflation and confusion of the large and small.  The large photographs on the wall are all macro images, who subjects are blown-up to be larger than their real world (pre-photographic) existence.  The images from the lighted sources, are fragmented and made smaller than their original existence (for the light boxes some may be similar in size.)  This dichotomy really fleshes out the understanding of all of the unused space of the gallery.
One of the most intriguing naturally occurring optical illusions is the changing size of the moon (or sun).  When on the horizon, the moon looks large, yet while it is in the middle of the sky it seems relatively small.  The actual reason for this illusion is still up for debate, but the common explanation is that the moon looks larger at the horizon because it has other recognizable distance cues for judgement - i.e. the horizon is obviously far away, so the moon is only perceived to be large, while the 'dome' of the night sky is immeasurable, so it is assumed to be closer, thus giving the illusion of a smaller moon.

When this idea is brought to the photographs and video Vaitsman provides, we begin to relate the vastness of the empty space in the gallery to the border (frame) of each work.  Similarly, we relate the size of each image to the size of its frame, and our assumption of the original size each image's subject to its subsequent photographic size.  When we assert ourselves into the intersection of the images that is representative of our subjectivity, we become Alice - one who changes size in relation to the (perceptual) tasks at hand.
Now, we can see the imagery in each of the works as a portrait of ourselves; a zebra with no stripes, who is not a zebra at all, but a voodoo doll of wound-up physical matter partly frozen, partly thawed; a fragmented peacock of sexuality, whose kaleidoscopic identity is constantly shifting; the list can go on with each image, and each grouping of images...

A Study of Strange Things is just what its name suggests, and as with everything that at first seems simple, the longer it is studied, the stranger it becomes.