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.

Nathan Sharratt: Young Machete

Sometime around 8:00PM, after two hours of sarcastic live-tweeting, aimless-drifting, and general time-wasting amongst the hit-or-miss art installed on the mall at Underground Atlanta, I finally found a map for the events and artworks sponsored by Elevate, Art Above Atlanta.  Of course, I had seen most of them in my modern version of a dérive, but had not yet ventured out to the corner of Peachtree and Decatur Street, for what would be the highlight of my night, Nathan Sharratt’s interactive performance/installation Be My Blood Brother. (Note: the Elevate map is slightly off - Blood Brother is not on Edgewood and Peachtree.)

This was Sharratt’s third run at Blood Brother.  He first performed it for a Sculpture class at SCAD, then publicly in March 2011, at The Granite Room in Castleberry Hill.  Although, I did briefly see the performance in Castleberry, the Elevate opening was my first real interaction.

I walked into the small storefront to find it transformed into what may be best described as a slightly futuristic mash-up of a doctor’s office, DMV, and shaman’s lair.  In the center, Sharratt, looking more like a serial killer than a doctor, was seated on a small white stool, facing a small white table, wearing all white coveralls stained with fake-blood.  Opposite the artist sat an identical stool, empty and inviting.  On the table between the two were various syringes, jars, and beakers flanking the main props for the interaction: a small puddle of fake crimson-colored blood, a butter spreader, a rubber stamp, and a stack of card-sized certificates.  In the otherwise sparsely decorated red, grey and white room, Sharratt’s assistants guided viewers to their appropriate tasks.

Sharratt performing Be My Blood Brother (photo by Mona Collentine) ©2011 Nathan Sharratt

First, I sat down with the artist, who welcomed me with a deadpan, “Would you like to be my blood brother?”  Upon accepting, I was asked for my name, which he wrote on the certificate that he would also stamp with a serial number.  After this, he did not speak.  Sharratt proceeded to mix the ‘blood’ on the table with the completely blunt butter spreader, followed by pretending to cut the flesh of his hand, leaving the red residue in his palm.  Then, with an obvious gesture of sharing, offered me the knife.  As silly as this felt, I played along, repeating his actions with my own body.  We then justified our actions by clasping our ‘bloody’ hands.  This is where it became real…

Sharratt took a firm grasp of my hand and began to peer deeply and purposefully into my eyes.  Maybe it was a minute or two, but it felt much longer.  I felt helpless.  I did not attempt to release my grip, but was fully and overwhelmingly embarrassed.  Something metaphysical changed.  Through the artist’s gaze, I had been ‘subjectified’.

Sharratt performing Be My Blood Brother (photo by Mona Collentine) ©2011 Nathan Sharratt 

With ‘artist’s gaze’, I mean to arouse Jacques Lacan’s idea of the almost benevolent gaze that art allows, as found in Of the Gaze as Objet Petit A.  Generally for Lacan, the gaze is a property of inter-subjectivity where, when one perceives that he/she is being viewed by another, one is objectified by the other. A latent result of the psychic break that occurs in the Mirror Phase, to experience the gaze is to be reminded that one does not exist in the Real, but instead in a Symbolic realm as a sign (which actually has less of an existence than an object.)  This can be extended to include subject/object interaction, where observing an object reminds one that he/she is an object.  The gaze (as objet petit a) is a reminder of our inherent lack, the source of desire.    In good art, according to Lacan, the artist puts his desires into the work, laying down his gaze by revealing to the viewer that the other also has desire.  We are presented with an image, but an image that reveals itself as such.  In understanding that the image is a veil to be looked beyond, we are relieved, feeling that we have seen something more real.  We, in turn, also feel more real.  In Be My Blood Brother, this scenario plays out perfectly. 

In an interview on Google+, Sharratt shared with me the way that his  adopted father is thought of as his real father; so much so that his mother sometimes forgets, worrying that he will develop similar genetic traits.  The extended coexistence that formed the meaningful bond between  adopted son and  adopted father is translated in Be My Blood Brother via the sharing of fake blood.  In what Christians may read as an analogy to the Eucharist joining the Church family, Sharratt sees  his “bonding with a new Brother” as a way to form a constructed bond that is as real as possible.  The artist describes it as “try[ing] to be a mirror through which [the participant] can see themselves.”  Taking it a step further, Sharratt provides a digital forum (http://www.wearebloodbrothers.com/) for initiated Blood Brothers to share their stories.  Here, he gives an arena for what was once a group of strangers, a collections of others, to lay down their gazes and acknowledge each other’s subjectivity.

Maybe I have romanticized Be My Blood Brother by giving it the qualities that so many people who claim to be interested in “Relational Aesthetics” or interactive art usually espouse, but what I do know for sure is that for at least the rest of the night after I became a Blood Brother, I felt very Real.

Interview with Nathan Sharrat

Image from performance of Be My Blood Brother ©2011 Nathan Sharratt (Photo by Mona Collentine )

1) What is the inspiration for Bloodbrothers?

This goes back a ways. In 2004 I was living in New York City and working as a designer and photographer in the magazine industry. At the time, I didn’t really know who I was as an artist or where I was going or what I even wanted to do. I just knew I had a lot of shit building up inside that had no way out. Since I wasn’t finding any success with external sources, I started looking internally to the things that created the greatest personal emotional response. A big one was my family. No matter how much crap life threw at me (unemployment, homelessness) they were always my rock of stability. I had just finished a book by Margaret Atwood on writing called Negotiating With The Dead, and in it she talked about how the dead wanted our blood. Dead being our ancestors and blood being a metaphor for life and creativity. At least that’s how I choose to read it. I had also read an interview with Stephen King, where he was asked how he, a family man with children, could imagine and write such horrific stories. He replied that if he wrote it, it wouldn’t happen. So I decided to use those sources as a starting point. I took a color-printing class with a coworker at the International Center for Photography, and used that as a way to explore these themes of family and protection. I drove upstate to my family’s home in Cooperstown and took some portraits using a borrowed plastic Holga camera. I gave each family member, excepting my father, a tool from my father’s workshop and covered them with fake blood (http://nathansharratt.com/section/215401_Family_Portraits.html). At the time, the fake blood was an analog for real blood, and the portraits were meant to be a protective mantra.

            It took another 4 or 5 years before I started examining family in my work again, mostly at the behest of my sculpture professors. This time I began to get really interested in fake blood and the whole concept behind its existence. We, as humans, are obsessed with not spilling our own blood, yet we have such a bloodlust that we’ve created this blood analog to be used strictly for entertainment purposes. We love watching violence as long as it’s pretend. Action and horror films are just public executions and gladiator fights without the actual death. I started realizing the vast amount of content available in using fake blood as a material. The difficulty was in the execution, how to elevate fake blood as a fine-art material and have it be seen for what it is—and what content it brings to the table—and not just as a non-biological blood substitute. I made some object-based art using fake blood, So I started making connections between the constructed qualities of fake blood and my own constructed family history: my biological father (Robert) left before I was born, and my mother met my non-biological father (Dwaine) when I was two, and they’ve raised me ever since. When I was five my non-biological father wanted to adopt me, but Massachusetts’ state law didn’t allow adoption for a minor with a legal parent or guardian, so my mother had to give me up to the state for all of ten minutes, or however long it took to fill out paperwork, then they both adopted me. I remember sitting in the cavernous marble hallway of the statehouse while all this was going on. I was no longer Nathan Kaczynski, I was now Nathan Sharratt. The connection I felt to my parents had not changed, only some paperwork. So the idea of a constructed family led me to think about constructed bonds in general, and how we create this social construct called “family.” The fact that my father isn’t my biological father is such a non-issue in my family that my mom even forgets sometimes, and warns me about genetic health issues on my father’s side. There are no “half-sisters” or “step-fathers,” we’re just family and we love each other and in my opinion that’s how it should be.

2) What is your obsession with blood in general?

For me it’s a material, so it’s kind of like asking a painter what is their obsession with paint? Any material has a pre-existing connotation that viewers carry with them, and many materials were resisted in their initial introduction as a fine-art material (David Smith’s welded-steel sculpture comes to mind). Blood is one of our most primal common denominators. It’s also the challenge of using a material that isn’t traditionally associated with fine art, and seeing if I can find ways to elevate it to make new connections that maybe viewers hadn’t thought of before. Also, I went pretty in depth about it above.

3) You are interested in creating multiple layers in your work, what do you think is the most missed meaning/layer in 'BloodBrothers'?

Probably the connection to my personal history. I don’t make that a large part of the performance because the whole installation is about me, so when I’m bonding with a new Brother, I want to make it as much about them as possible. I give my Brothers my absolute undivided attention during the ritual, and try to be a mirror through which they can see themselves. I make my name really small on the ticket so that when it’s pinned to the wall you see their name most prominently, not mine, and I give them the opportunity to share their story through the www.wearebloodbrothers.com website. However, I will be adding a few new hidden clues to the room for sharp-eyed viewers to find.

4) What other projects are you currently working on?

I’m still looking for participants for Words On Shirts Project (wordsonshirtsproject.com), and I’m working on a public art installation for Art on the Atlanta BeltLine that should be up soon. I’m also building a sound-trigger box for Martha Whittington’s 100 Whispers installation, in addition to being her studio assistant for the MOCA GA Working Artist Project grant. I’ve been slowly peppering donated clothing with It’s All My Fault labels (http://nathansharratt.com/artwork/2115157_It_s_All_My_Fault.html) and last but certainly not least I’ve been hard at work on my Dashboard Co-Op “Ground Floor” installation which is coming in October.

Nathan Sharratt's "Be My Blood Brother" preview

Here is a link to images from the performance that will be the subject of my next article on BURNAWAY: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nathan_awesome/

Seana Reilly at Whitespace

Seana Reilly is currently in a two person show with Ann Stewart at Whitespace. 

Seana Reilly Mean Curve

There is really only one way to describe the formal aesthetic of Seana Reilly’s current work on display at Whitespace: undeniable.  In a series of experiments with liquid graphite, Reilly posits myriad dualities that coexist harmoniously to produce art that calls for serious contemplation, perhaps even meditation.

According to http://www.insightatlanta.org:  “Vipassana meditation…was taught by the Buddha as a means for investigating the nature of reality through cultivating awareness of present experience with acceptance.”  Reilly cites Vipassana meditation as a source for the insights for her practice, which is apparent in her process.  Reilly sets up resists or boundaries around which she allows the liquid graphite to freely flow, establishing the symmetry between human will and letting go.  Her awareness of her materials, and the moments in which they interact result in images of sublime beauty and delicate balance.  The viewer is given a wide open space to peacefully exist in the dialectics of drawing and painting, light and dark, organic and geometric, order and chaos, presence and absence.

But the work is not without regions designed to create tension and unease.  Reilly also sites as influence her experience as both a justice and healthcare planner, a career that surely imbued her with a desire to analyze, predict and control.  In many of the works, especially the smaller pieces, Reilly goes back into the work (after it has become a historic document of the aforementioned process) to articulate a pseudoscientific analysis in its margins.  It is in this act that her work separates itself from a Romantically idealized mise-en-scène, and asserts itself as a battleground of contemporary semiotics.  It is in this duality, between the mostly organic relationship established in the experimental stage of the work, and it subsequent analysis, where the most pressing issue arises for the interpreter of meaning. 

It seems understandable that there are dualities, and that in one way or another these dualities assimilate into a workable medium that is life.  This is a quotidian understanding of Yin-Yang, a basis for much Eastern Philosophy.  The problem of contemporary awareness comes with the monkey wrench that is Western Philosophy.  Socrates tells us that the unexamined life is not worth living, and the rest of Western history delivers us the hegemony of Science.  While, theoretically, Eastern and Western philosophies are not necessarily at odds, the implementation of science as a predictive, thus active awareness, separates it from the more accepting, passive consciousness of Eastern thought.  What becomes difficult to grasp for many thinkers of either school is the way in which self-aware observation alters our perception of any such dualities.

By quantifying, thus categorizing the results of the experiments that take place in materializing her work, Reilly pin-points the problematic of scientific inquiry: when we observe a phenomenon, we necessarily alter that phenomenon.  There is a growing number of scientists studying quantum physics who would go so far as to say that our observation causes the phenomenon.  To complicate the matter, Reilly’s analysis of her process mimics scientific notation, a codified language that, except to its author and her cohorts, is a meaningless series of marks and signs.  So what could have been a simple experience of a phenomenon becomes a self-sequestering feedback loop.  

Reilly’s work puts the impasse of actual experience and our attempts to control our experience in our face, causing us to ponder: If our passive awareness generates reality, then does an active awareness destroy it?  Returning to the idea of Yin Yang, perhaps it is this relationship, the codependence of creation and destruction, that gives meaning to the show’s title: Perpetual Assembly. 

The Dream of Reason

The Dream of Logic Produces Reasonable Monsters (© Casey Lynch 2011)

It is illogic, not logic, that makes humans human.  If a dog thinks at all like a human, then when he is hungry, he thinks, "I will eat."  Then to the best of its ability, he will eat as soon as possible.  When a human thinks, "I am hungry," he/she will go through a long list of reasons to, or not to eat, and when it would be best to eat.  Further, he creates all sorts of rules on the appropriate way to eat.

Humans seem to possess a multi-tiered logic, meta-logic, or more simply, social self-awareness, that causes us to play out many if/then scenarios in theory before acting.  I think that we have the ability to create too many scenarios, somehow forgetting our initial intention, to the point that our 'then' statement often ends up no longer matching our 'if'.

Even sound logic may become illogic when we make assumptions about another's needs or desires.  This kind of other-awareness is at best empathy [which elsewhere I have called the unconscious,] and seems to be a foundation of civilization. 
So, it is possible that society is based on illogic.  If this is true, then culture, being the pinnacle of society, is the apex of illogical discourse.  This seems clear presently, as it could be argued that Art is (and maybe has always been) based on illogic, i.e. make believe, hope, or the denial of the probable.  Of course, in the exponentially growing feedback loop between the mirrors of culture and society, what was once illogical is now logical.  This illogical logic is Reason.