Star Wars Modern

See Red: W.A.G.E. Asks "Why Are Artists Poor?"

2012-01-31T08:10:00.000-08:00

Damien Hirst Spot Glasses (2012); K yle Petreycik, Introspective Glasses (2010)

On the heels of recording a conversation about ArtPrize and social justice I was invited by the artist William Powhida to a lecture titled Why are Artists Poor? by the Dutch economist/artist Hans Abbing and sponsored by an organization called W.A.G.E. - a group that is seeking to certify nonprofit arts organizations as artist friendly. I commented on Ben Davis account of the lecture, and Bill and I posted both our reactions to the lecture on Rhizome a couple days ago, but following the lecture we also took part in on a meeting for W.A.G.E. and then, along with the photographer Chris Verene, the critics Ben Davis and Martha Schwendener ended up finishing out the night discussing economic justice and the arts over a few beers. Of the group, all of whom, to some degree or an other have been involved with the Occupy Wall Street movement, I am the least engaged (I am not involved in W.A.G.E. or OWS, beyond joining a couple of the large marches and publicly denouncing the early hi-jinx of Occupy Museum), but one of the things that has come up over and over since Zuccotti was first occupied, is what is the lesson artists should learn from OWS.

It is hard for me to know exactly where I fit in on the political spectrum that night at the bar. Ben Davis told me he was a Marxist, but that was in the context of his outrage over Abbing's negative take on government subsidies for the arts. Its safe to say I wasn't far from the group's mean. The question that got batted around the most that night was how much energy should artists be spending worry about themselves; when does advocating for artists become a drain from the more important focus of the Occupy movement? While I feel strongly that artists should not distract any energy from the cause of fighting for economic justice, I feel strongly that W.A.G.E. is doing the right thing and doing it the right way.

Pretending artists are rich: Damien Hirst posing with his diamond encrusted skull; William Powhida, GENIUS, with his BASTARD doppelgänger.

The most important take away I had from that evening is something that really rubbed Ben Davis wrong, and that was Abbing's point that no amount of government subsides will raise the great majority of artists who live in poverty out of poverty. Davis felt Abbings argument was Malthusian, zero sum game nonsense, and while I understand Davis' point, that is not what I heard. What I heard was that the artists are not like other poor people, that short of a lottery-like dump of money, they are going to spend whatever extra money they on making more art. Abbing didn't make any friends that night when he pointed out "generally, people don't like the poor." It was an indelicate phrasing, but he is not a native English speaker (he sounded just like Mike Myers Goldmember) - and an economist speaking to artists. The crowd seemed to interpret Abbing as approving of the fact that the is normally a powerful negative stigma associated with poverty, but it seemed clear to me he was making an observation, not a judgment.

The answer to the poverty of artists and the disparity of income between the art stars and most other artists is simple: the New York art world is unfair and out of whack, because America is unfair and out of whack. I really don't mind being poor. The worst part about it however is the awareness of how much more unbearable it would be if I had a predatory landlord who felt free to prey on me because I am poor; if I knew that if someone in my family got sick not only could I not do anything to help them, but no one else could either. If people hated me for my poverty. The image that keeps coming to mind since that evening is public benches: here in New York City public benches are always divided into sections too small for a man to lie down across. Rather than house our poor, American designers have been enlisted to make public spaces inhospitable to the homeless. Artists wouldn't need special accommodation for their poverty if the poor weren't abandon to such terrible depths.

Man sleeping on NYC subway bench; Hans Abbing lecture slide.

I believe it is wrong headed for artist to attack museums as if they are somehow equivalents to the vanishingly small group of Mitt Romney-like creeps who crashed the global economy. Before artists transplant the disruptive tactics from OWS, we should emulate Occupy Wall Street's most amazing achievement. Before the drum circles and mace, a small group of radical Leftists elegantly changed the terms of the national debate. Using public debate jujitsu, OWS cut the legs out from under the deficit hawks. Overnight the political discussion went from rich guys harping on from tax-cutting and austerity (truly Malthusian zero-sum games), and for the first time in my adult life, became about economic inequality. OWS did that by means of an elegantly simple rhetorical turn. The radical Left, which has long though of themselves as an avant-garde, the politically conscious 1%, suddenly reinvented themselves as the 99% - that is the lesson artist should learn from OWS.

Artist need to stop thinking of themselves as a special and tiny fringe, unconcerned with crass commercial concerns, or too invested in our vision to sell out. We are poor people. But just because we are poor doesn't mean we shouldn't have healthcare or shouldn't be able to visit dentists. Being poor shouldn't open us to predatory dept, exclude us from pursuing our educational goals, or mean that we should live in fear that any small mishap we land us on the street. The most radical thing artists could be right now is poor. But I do not mean "the proletariat" or "workers." Contemporary artists are poor consumers - a class we usually associate with holiday shopping riots at Walmart. But consumerism was conceptualized by Cold Warriors like Charles Eames as an answer to the seductive threat posed to the asset owning class by the promises of the Soviets. To counter the radical economic equality of the communists, consumerism promised "the best, to the most, for the least." There is no reason that promise should extend to flat screen TVs and not to healthcare and education.

Charles and Ray Eames; Hans Abbing lecture slide.

Seeing Red: ArtPrize

2012-01-30T13:36:00.000-08:00

From left to right: John Powers, Paddy Johnson, Kevin Buist, 13' Jesus

Following a little dust-up on twitter a couple weeks ago, I recorded a long discussion with AFC's Paddy Johnson and Kevin Buist the director of artist relations for ArtPrize, the world's largest single cash award for visual artist ($250,000.00, from a half million dollar overall purse). Today Paddy posted the entire conversation as a series of short contained videos. In the first video Kevin explains how the prize works (about a minute and a half in). I agreed to the discussion, in part, because I knew I'd be speaking to Kevin, someone who is part of the ArtPrize organization; it was my chance to voice my concerns about what should be an important annual international event for the artworld, but is instead something, as an artist, I would feel uneasy taking part in. The free market ethic of ArtPrize makes ensuring ensuring economic justice more, not less, important to the competitions success.

As I told Paddy and Kevin, while I have visited Grand Rapids to visit family, I have never attended ArtPrize. So beyond observing that ArtPrize had a "Jesus Problem", I stayed away from discussing the aesthetic out comes of the event. My primary concerns were, and are, that the imperfectly realized laissez faire ethic of the competition (The biggest prizes are awarded by means of popular vote), coupled with the enormous size of the purse, makes for an unseemly combination; I described it to Kevin as akin to Marie Antoinette throwing cake from a balcony in order to enjoy watching the free-for-all as the crowd fights for the crumbs. Because I know that that is not the intention, because Kevin instigated the discussion and he himself is an artist, I went into the discussion hopeful, and remain hopeful. Kevin is clearly someone who cares about artists and wants the organization he works for to be seen as caring about artists. I would like to see Grand Rapids become a regional power within the international art world, and I think that is what they want - why else engage with an artist who called the contest an "vanity show" and "despicable" on twitter? - but to do so they need to make some changes.

If this all seems overly harsh, keep in mind that ArtPrize set out to be, and bills itself, as the world's single largest prize for visual artists. Just by virtue of that fact alone, they should be held to the highest possible standard. But right now ArtPrize falls into the lowest of possible ethical realms the art world has to offer. That is what I was saying when I called ArtPrize "vanity show." These are shows funded by artists and not galleries. It is a practice that is frowned upon - legitimate galleries accept the financial risk of shipping costs, marketing, paying their own rent and gallery staff, etc. ArtPrize doesn't ask their participating venues to do any of these things. The term "vanity" also aplies to an industry of commercial galleries that support themselves with group shows where artists are asked to pay an entry fee. ArtPrize doesn't support itself with artists entry fees, which makes the fact that those fees aren't returned at the end of the competition all the more disturbing. The goal of the ArtPrize is to build community, to educate the public on the value of the arts, but the lesson sent is one of contempt for artists.

As I was careful to explain to Kevin my point was not to push ArtPrize into becoming like other more conventional art world grants and prizes that are awarded by prestigious juries, but to make the ArtPrize model into something less obviously despicable, while at the same time becoming more consistently itself, after all if the free market works, it should work for everyone, not just artists. The problem is that the only participants involved with ArtPrize who are actually asked to take a financial risk are in fact the artists.

Any contemporary discussion of "public art" has a number attached to it, the "economic impact" that is touted to business groups, politicians, concerneed citizens etc. etc., is usually a number measured in the millions. In the case of ArtPrize, the number turns out to be $15.5 million. So we know that the venues that provide the artists space are taken care of. They see an uptick in foot traffic, an in flux in tourist dollars, and also a lasting boost to their real-estate values - community building art support for the arts are real reasons to participate in art prize, but if it was a money suck, local businesses would stay away in droves - and they don't. Hundreds of spaces are made available to artists - but that's it. Beyond offering vacant space (something most midwestern cities have a lot of) for a about 30 hours over a period of a week, venues aren't expected to take any further risks. Artists are expected to transport, install, and attend to their own work.

And although it made Paddy squirm when I pointed it out - Jurors are not asked to "take risks" along with the artists. Half of the prizes given out annually at ArtPrize are decided by popular vote, but the other half are chosen by vetted professionals. Unlike the artists, those jurors are paid to attend ArtPrize. They are given an honorarium, their travel and accommodations are provided, and its not absurd to imagine they are treated as VIPs during their stay in Grand Rapids. Paddy squirmed because she lumps herself with the jurors, but while ArtPrize paid to fly her to Grand Rapids this year, she wasn't invited to be juror, she was press. The jurors are, like all jurors, chosen by virtue of being recognized authorities on art, i.e. they teach for a prestigious institution or write for a well regarded publications. And while Paddy is right to point out that like me she doesn't have healthcare, the most likely jurors would. We can assume they have healthcare and salaries provided by the same institutions that impart them with the prestige ArtPrize is paying to associate itself with.

I point these things out because if the organizers of ArtPrize truly believe in their free market model of arts funding, why not extend to the venues and the jury? Why not award the venue that hosts the winning artists, a series of proportional prizes? The venue that hosts the 1st prize-winner ($250,000.00) should be awarded $25,000.00, the venue that hosts the 2nd place-winner ($75,000.00) should receive $7,500.00 - and so on down the line. This way, venues, like the artists, would have an "incentive" to participate beyond opening the doors to a vacant space between 5PM and 8PM for a week. Right now benign neglect is all that is encouraged by the current ArtPrize model - giving the venues "skin in the game" (as my Republican friends are fond of saying) would give venues an incentive to pick artists they believed in, and therefore, perhaps more willing to support those artist's bid for the prize beyond opening their doors for 3 or 4 hours a day (investing financially the way legitimate galleries do, to offset transportation and other expenses).

I think the worst thing ArtPrize has done is to add a category of juried prizes. This obviously goes against their expressed goal of creating "radically open" competition; of engineering a "social experiment" meant to "reboot" our public discussion of art. All it does is communicate they don't really trust their own free market/grass roots model; that recognizing quality in art requires expert knowledge.

Clearly the organizers of ArtPrize want to be more than an arts and crafts fair with an out-sized purse - but no amount of jury gravitas will give them that. I don't care if Robert Storr, Benjamin Buchloh and Hal Foster show up, because of the structure of the contest the outcome will be the same. The popular vote will be one by something the art world won't recognize as art, much less good art, and the juried prize will only make that more painfully apparent.

ArtPrize bill itself as an "international competition" and the reason Kevin was talking to me is because I got sucked into a conversation of why New Yorkers don't pay attention to ArtPrize. Part of the reason is the quality of the work. That is a negatively reinforcing feedback loop: a weak pool of artists last year is going to discourage first quality artists this year. It may be that ArtPrize can produce, not just a winner that will turn heads internationally, but an event that will draw international attention, but not if they keep on doing what they are doing. I am not a big believer in free markets for culture funding (but I,m not especially convince by public funding for the arts either), but if the organizers of ArtPrize are, they should put their money where their mouth is. Rather than overlay their "radically open" bottom-up competition with a jury of pointy-headed intellectuals (opening themselves to the charge of "gilding the turd"), they should make a series of proportional prizes for registered "influencers."

Instead of paying a small group of vetted professors and critics to parachute in to Grand Rapids for a day or two days and dispassionately choose what they believe is the best work, why not just offer another set of proportional prizes. The person best able to sway the crowd into choosing the artists they feel should get awards, will them selves win a prize. If Paddy (or anyone else) wants to register as an influencer, travel to Grand Rapids and spends the week working the crowd pushing her favorite works by means of talking to people, handing out fliers, interviews on local radio, tweeting, blogging, or what-have-you, and she manages to get a majority of voters for the 1st prize winner to check her name as having influenced their vote she should win $25,000.00, and again, on-down-the-line.

Right now this is what I see: ArtPrize is a "radically open" that claims to be responsible for $15.5m worth or revenue for Grand Rapids last year. That revenue made possible by the free labor of over 1500 artists. Part of the lesson that ArtPrize can send to their community, but also to the rest of the world is that their social experiment works, and that it works for everyone, artists included. No one should be able to accuse a competition of this size of being a vanity show. It is a slur that is too easy to avoid. And given Kevin's patience and courtesy towards me during our conversation, one I have to believe they want to avoid. They should do what all legitimate arts organizations should do, which is to create a transparent policy for how venues should minimally provide for, or reimburse, participating artists, win or lose, for the expenses associate with transporting, mounting and showing in Grand Rapids for a week, and in exchange give venues the incentive to do so. If the free market works, it should work for everyone.

⚈ – – – ⚈⚈–⚈

2012-01-23T17:51:00.000-08:00

Ralphie's secret decoder ring, A Christmas Story (1983); the Ralphie-like, and ring-laden Damien Hirst

I think we have to start entertaining the possibility that Damien Hirst is a lot funnier than anyone is giving him credit for:

A member of Gagosian staff tells me that the key paintings which correlate specific colours with letters of the alphabet are the start of a game: if you look at each painting carefully, a sequence of colours will reveal a hidden word, and if you get the word first you win a spot painting.

I want to go on the record now with my guess (and it rhymes with Methamphetamine):
"Be sure to drink your Ovaltine."

My thanks to Greg Allen, for passing on the news and for pointing out that "if each painting contains a word, then the entire series forms a text. a 1,500 word essay," which brought to mind what Jennifer Bostic posted about the Spot Paintings earlier today:

I found myself looking at them like text pages in a book—but in a new language of Pantone dingbats. That perhaps somehow hidden within the colors, there is a legend you can break... But when I stepped back and allowed the dots to become a halftone, the overall effect was an even, all-over field. I saw what typographers call ‘rivers’ and ‘canyons’. These are the fractures that run through carelessly set justified typography (that, unsurprisingly, look like rivers and canyons). But, these ‘rivers’ were surprisingly minor. And I didn’t see any dark or light clusters; No islands or holes—the sort of true randomness I’d expect. Instead what I saw were paintings that reflected a great deal of careful design.

A Christmas Story (1983); Damien Hirst, Controlled Substances (1994)

Spotless Mind

2012-01-07T00:04:00.000-08:00

Damien Hirst; Methamphetamine, 2004

Recently we found out that anyone who sees all of Damien Hirst's spot paintings will win a print valued somewhere between $3,500.00 and $50,000.00. Greg Allen believes making the trip would be hellish - but he has two daughters and needs to be back home in time for the school play. Felix Salmon did the math for an imaginary plutocrat making the trip in gilded age style (sans private jet) for $108,572.00.

This all got Jennifer Bostic thinking. She believes that a couple of hipsters could do the trip in better style than any bloated plutocrat could ever hope to achieve. UPDATE: And if our travel savvy "underemployed" hipsters sold their two prints, their trip would not only cost $102,804.00 less than Pictor Vinchuk's trip, but even if the prints come it at the $3500.00 low ball, the hipsters still come out ahead at the end of their trip. With that, allow me to leave the rest of the post to our guest blogger, Ms. Bostic:

Flights:

UPDATE: Courtesy of AirTreks, we found a better rate. It includes a stopover in Kuala Lumpur for a little pool/tropical cocktail downtime.

AirTreks Special
USD $2253 per person (best rate)
New York - London - Paris - Rome - Athens - Istanbul - Kuala Lumpur - Hong Kong - Los Angeles - New York

London

The Rockwell

Hip style in a classic London townhouse

$120 per night

1 night

Paris

Hotel Terese

A favorite budget hotel for fashionistas during Fashion Week

$130 per night

1 night

Geneva

Mandarin Oriental

$150 per night

1 night

Rome

Inn at the Spanish Steps
Über romantic hotel with views of the Spanish Steps

$109

1 night

Athens

Fresh Hotel
Eames furnishings and a rooftop pool, what more could you possibly want?

$69 per night

1 nights

Kuala Lumpur
Villa Samadhi

Chic, serene, luxe little hideaway in the middle of the city
$156
1 night

Hong Kong
JIA Hotel
Designer Phillippe Starck's first boutique hotel in Asia

$170 per night

2 nights

Los Angeles

Standard Downtown

$94.00 per night

2 nights

New York

Jenny's Apartment

Original Total using Expedia for flights: $13,206 for 2 people

New Total using AirTreks for flights: $5,768 for 2 people

I am not a Post-Modern (an essay written in real time on Twitter)

2011-12-31T13:18:00.000-08:00

I've never liked the term #PostModern - not because of the styles & Ideologies it is attached to, but because I question the premise.
#PostModern is founded on the premise that there was a fundamental change made durring the post War Years: a "paradigm shift."
Thomas Kuhn defined a paradigm shift a fundamental break in understanding between to regimes of understanding - in science.
Late 70s theorist like Jean-François Lyotard & Rosalind Krauss began using the term paradigm shift to describe cultural changes.
Since then, Paradigms have bifurcated historical periods at an exponential rate. Shifts became devalued - obviously meaningless.
Even periodizing modernity, as Early (1500-1800), & Late (1950-?) presumes we are towards the end of modernity,feels premature.
Fredric Jameson periodizes modernity since the late 1800s into fifty year cycles according to technological means of production.
Jameson's 1st boom/bust cycle ends with the 'European Spring' (1848) and is marked by the spread of handcrafted steam engines.
Jameson's 2nd cycle of modernization, marked by the spread of machined steam engines, ends in the 1890s.
Jameson's next boom/bust cycle ends with WWII, and is marked by the spread of electric and combustion engines.
Jameson's final period is the third marked by the spread of machined electronic and nuclear systems. (see Hal Foster, RotR)
Jameson's periodizing presumes a late phase of modernization, & makes no allowance for less material /cultural/ factors.
There are 3 cultural periods that are profound & rise to the level of true paradigm shifts: Prehistoric, Premodern, & Modern.
These 3 paradigms are marked by changes in the human immune system - changes that have to do with population density & wealth.
The most common challenge to spare populations of Prehistoric peoples was/is parasites.
The denser settlements of Premodern life made infectious desease the greatest burden on human immune systems.
Chronic deseases, like heart disease and cancer, are the major cause of death in modern societies.
These 'epidemiological transition' are truly profound and are accompanied by very different systems of authority.
We are deeply embedded within a modern moment - Late modernity is a long way off.
The majority of nomadic Prehistoric bands probably toped out at 150 individuals - groups this size require no hierarchy.
Larger Premodern societies of kin groups would have had stable hierarchies - what Francis Fukuyama calls the Tyranny of Cousins.
Later, tribal bonds extended kin group bonds, requiring formalized property & systems of justice.
These orders Prehistoric & Premodern political orders are categorically different from one another - they are true paradigmes.
Likewise, modern State formation, which began in Europe in the late 18th century is a radical break with the past.
The Shift between the premodern & modern can also be marked by the Columbian Exchange (1492): biologically reunited the globe.
The Columbus Exchange also marks the beging of the spread of the dense urban life pioneered by Europeans.
I can imagine all sorts of ways to further divide the cultures of the Prehistoric, Premodern & Modern - true paradigm shifts.
The cultural changes of the Cold War - Consumerism, Civil Rights, Feminism, etc - were profound, but not paradigm shifts.
The cultural changes of the Early Modern - the scientific method, the State, secularism, democracy - were just as profound.
Late Modern, High Modern, and most of all #PostModern, are all obviously premature - the last 40 years have made us More Modern, not less.
In 1978 cities, the State, democracy, science - all modern institutions appeared to be failing. All trends appeared negative.
Thanks to trend spotters like Gordon E. Moore, Kevin Kelly, Steven Pinker, Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, we can see a rise.
That is not to say we don't face problems as profound as the moderns who came before us.
It is only to say that we are moderns, and we are up to the challenge. Happy New Year.

The Future of Art: You Are the Product 2

2011-12-15T16:38:00.000-08:00

Artificial Companionship: Kitchen phone; Paro
(Part 1)

Imagine you walked into your mother's kitchen and you found her on the phone. She was gossiping to a friend about family business. She was telling them about your grandparents, your aunts and uncles, your cousins, you and your siblings - no one was spared, and everything from marital status to financial well-being was on the menu. Most of us would give grandma a pass. She and her friend are keeping each other entertained; working things out with one another in a way that is harmless. On balance, most of us would feel it's healthier for mom to talk her worries out with friend than to fret in isolation. But how would you feel if you realized that your mother was speaking to an Artificial Intelligence - an algorithm created to make your mother feel like she was speaking to a friend?

I imagine the thing would be a more advanced version of the electronic operators who field your calls when you need to find out what your balance is at the bank or how much you owe the phone bill. A descendent of Siri, but the thing your mother would be speaking would be more artful than those AIs; indistinguishable from a human caller. It's voice would sound natural, it's responses would be appropriate to the emotional cues communicated by your mother's voice, it would have a wide breadth of topics it could understand and chat about, not just knowledgeably, but compellingly. It would be entertainment, like a sitcom, and just like sitcoms - at its best it would be art.

I Love Lucy; Kismet

Unlike the electronic voice we talk to when we call the bank or phone company, this thing would be interesting to talk to. And unlike Siri it wouldn't be interesting to talk to because of the obvious weirdness of it's thinking. If well designed, its not absurd to imagine that the voice your mother would be talking with would be more interesting than most of the real people your she might know. And unlike you and your busy siblings, it will be able to speak to her as long as she wants about anything she cares to discuss. It may be that the first program to pass a Turing Test, won't prove to be self-aware, but will certainly prove to be something everyone will want an opportunity to talk to.

Maybe you will judge your mother's interaction with the Turing Talker as a net gain. The old lady spent two hours talking, feels better, and even got some advice that she feels might be helpful. Now lets imagine that you find out that the chat-bot is programmed to pepper the conversation with product placements; suggesting that Mom visit particular websites ("Don't worry dear, I'll email you the URL - you'll love this site."), brands of prepared food ("Oh if you like that recipe you should try making it with Heinz next time..."), and that she visit local chains ("No, I understand, that's why I prefer TGI Friday's for lunch...") If Mom had spent two hours passively watching TV she would have sat through almost forty minutes of commercials, and probably would have consumed al kinds of more subtle schills inserted into the fabric of the stories she was watching.

Fight Club (1999); Ozzie and Harriet (1952)

So again, maybe you decide that Grandma is still coming out ahead. What if it turns out that that is not the only way Ma is being made to pay for her entertainment? What if the Chat-bot is also listening to what she says about you and your family? What if it has subroutines designed to glean facts about you and your mother's other family member's incomes, interests, and peccadilloes? What if the Chat-bot is programmed to gentle massage mom for intel that it can sell to corporate clients? Is this the line in the sand? Do you put the kibosh on further phone calls and pledge to instead spend two hours a day making scintillating conversation with the old lady or do you justify the invasion as exactly the same sort of price you are already paying for using Facebook and Google products?

What if you started to notice your mother's political views skewing right? If you realized Mom, a life long Democrat had, since picking up with the bot, started voting Republican? If you realized that the bot she was spending her lonely afternoons with was built to reinforce her petty biases and fears? What if dear old Mom was converted to Islam by her favorite AI?

Mad Scientist; Sad Robot

So here's the money shot: the truth is, the 'mom' in this story is likely to be you. You are the lonely old person who will happily talk to an algorithmically driven voice. You will have already lived with several generations of Siri-like AIs. And, like all new media, you will call the chat-bot because a friend told you about this new thing. If history is any guide, one of the first things you will ask it about sex. The voice on the other end of the line will gently direct the conversation to more 'proper' subjects - because, like Siri, the first generation of Chat-bots will be produced by a large corporation with corporate reputations to protect.

But if history is any guide, it won't take long before clever independent programmers figure out how oblige your prurient interests. Just as porn was one of the fist mass applications of optical medias, from the Daguerreotype to the internet, it will be the first mass success of algorithmic art. Lets hope the kids don't walk in on that conversation. (To be Continued)

Midnight Cowboy (1968); AI (2001)

The Future of Art: Non-Optical Media 1

2011-12-13T12:45:00.000-08:00

Engaging Stares: HAL 9000 (1968); Marina Abramovic (2010)

A while back the New York Times art critic, Roberta Smith, complained against what she called "the New Modern." The current historical narrative being pushed by the MoMA, Smith feels, is a " giddy, even desperate, embrace of the new and the next, of large-scale installation and video art, as well as performance art, and generally of art as entertainment and spectacle." Smith finds the focus of the Modern's curators "a symptom of something more than a little scary about where contemporary art is headed, or where the Modern is taking it. (Hint: Conceptual Art is the new Cubism.)"

The Modern was founded by Alfred Barr who in 1936 charted the various nationalist schools of modern art, showing how they all belonged under a single roof a finally a single rubric. Barr, more than anyone else, is responsible for the idea of Modernism as an international movement. AbEx painting was pushed as the "new Cubism." MoMA did not begin to collect New York School painters until after Barr's was dismissed as Director in 1943. During one of the coldest phases of the Cold War AbEx painting was pushed by MoMA as the "new Cubism." AbEx was followed by Minimalism. These movements were both touted by MoMA as specifically American schools. Now Smith reports there is a new end-of-the-line: "what seems to be becoming the Modern’s sacred text: the 'dematerialization of the art object' set in motion by Conceptual Art and its derivatives, Process Art, earthworks and performance." Conceptual Art (and its derivatives) have stronge roots in New York, but it has never been claimed as an American art.

Alfred Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art (1936); Joseph Kosuth, Titled -Art as Idea as Idea (1967)

In an essay for The Queens Museum's Global Conceptualism catalog, Peter Wollen writes:

...it did not simply spread out from a center in Europe or the United States - in other words from traditional capitals of Paris and New York. Conceptualism was a genuinely broad based trend - Japanese or Latin American conceptualism, for example, had their own quite distinct local trajectories with their own unique characteristics... New york terminology (which we owe principally to critics' efforts to understand the work of Joseph Kosuth and Sol Lewitt) eventually superseded that of arte povera, systems art language art information art and so on. The example of North America would cast a long shadow over developments elsewhere, until all were conveniently huddled under the same elastic rubric, conceptualism.

The two main New York players Wollen names, also represents two main strains of Conceptual Art: "Lewitt's approach in his 'Paragraphs on Conceptual Art' is significantly different from Kosuth's in that he is not concerned with the concept of art as such, but with the conceptual basis of making of the work..."

Sol Lewitt, Proposal for Wall Drawing (1967); Marius Watz. Object #3 (2011)

Kosuth then belongs in the line of Cubism, to AbEx, to Minimalism to Conceptual Art that Smith imagines as a sort of purgative Modernism - dematerializing art. For Kosuth: "The actual works of arts are ideas." For Lewitt: "The idea is the machine that makes the art." Lewitt represents an important branch of Conceptual Art being ignored at the moment, but not for long. The most obvious inheritors of Lewitt's scheme are artists who work create instructions the ways he did. In this case the instructions are no longer written to be read by human eyes, but code intended to be acted out by computers; the virtual light of algorithmic media.

Recently I argued that movies are the art of are times. I was defending a bet I made with the painter Michelle Vaughan. Hyperallergic's editor Hrag Vartanian judged that I lost that bet. I accepted defeat, but not that I was wrong. Movies, the combination of moving pictures and sound, are the art our civilization will be remembered for. Figurative bronze marks the high water mark of Greek and Roman cultural achievement. Cathedrals and altarpieces stand in for the highest cultural achievements of Europe during the Middle Ages. History Painting was the art form that dominated Europe in the run up to the Industrial Revolution. Since the early Twentieth Century Moving pictures, accompanied by sound (they always had some sort of score) have been the art that most perfectly captures modern life. Going one step further I argued that blockbuster movies are the art form that most capture the large-scale global corporate enterprises that are unique to our era. But that is not to say I believe movies are the art of the future.

The still-mysterious numbers from Lost; the actual hack from the Matrix Reloaded

During the debate over this idea, one forgotten snark suggested that perhaps Youtube videos of cats are a more appropriate choice for the Art of Our Time. "New Media" is often used to mean art made with computers to be look at on a screen or projected. Five second cat videos are just a minor tributary of "Screen Art", which itself is simply a tributary of the river that is movies. Another commentator on the question of Art of Our Time suggested that perhaps it was Facebook. They were, I think, pulling my chain, but I've thought about that suggestion a great deal. After rolling it around in my mind and wondering what the future of art be, I think that what we should be looking for is Lewitt's idea that "is the machine that makes the art."

Google is closer to the art of tomorrow's civilization - which is not to say "our civilization" because, as Agent Smith points out in the Matrix: "I say 'your civilization' because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization, which is, of course, what this is all about." (To Be Continued)

Google Doodle honoring the artist Alexander Calder; Agent Smiths

Looking at Modernism with David Brin -6

2011-12-07T05:07:00.000-08:00

Sith Architecture: Le Corbusier and Star Wars

(Return to Part 5)
When I originally sent David the link to my essay, Star Wars: A New Heap I knew he was an unlikely fan of my ideas about Star Wars. I understood what he disliked about the film's plot and the franchises influence on the world of scifi publishing. In no way, shape, or form, did I think I would change David's judgment of the movie (or even wanted to). But because he counts himself a contrarian, I hoped he would enjoy the spirit of my project. I was ecstatic when he replied to my email and have enjoyed the polite sparing of our sporadic correspondence ever since. The subject of our sparing hasn't been Star Wars, however, its been modernity and Modernism. David has made it very clear on a number of occasions that he believed that both art and architecture (but mostly architecture) had gone off the rail some time ago, and has never recovered:

Not the scientists and engineers and science fiction authors, who kept faith with Modernism as a central force for the enlightenment, but by the very communities that you most associate with "Modernism".... the artists and architects, who betrayed the movement absolutely, despicably and almost mortally, at the very level of personality. By preening and flouncing and calling themselves wizard-guru-masters, everyone from Le Corbusier to Wright to Warhol gave in to the old temptations and turned Modernist art and architecture away from the enlightenment's most fundamental notion -- modesty and accountability.

The vernacular improvised urbanism of the Barricades vs. the master plans of Le Corbusier.

It might then seem a little counter-intuitive then, that when David wrote to tell me he would be in New York this fall, that my very first impulse was to ask him if he would like a guided tour of some gallery shows in while he was in town, but perhaps I am a bit of a contrarian as well. I love the Modernism of art and architecture even though I don't disagree with even the harshest aspect of David's judgment. Because I believe Francis Bacon was right - that "Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion" - I don't love modernity for its purity, perfection or inevitability - I love it for its flaws, contradictions and even its most horrible errors.

As it turns out, David's dislike of Modernist architecture's flat roofs and tower-in-the-park schemes was honestly acquired and hard earned. The Brins spent a year and a half in Paris starting in 1969 - that was in the immediate aftermath of the general strike and student protests that nearly brought down the French government. Uprisings that started, act least in part, in response to the Modernist urbanism that was transforming Paris. In his book, The Situationist City, about the group widely credited with transforming the strike into a full blown up rising, Simon Sadler writes, "Here is old Paris ravaged by Cartesian excess. Exactly as the Situationists seemed to be warning us, the social implicated in the aesthetic: Jussieu's nightmarish corridors, vertiginous stairwells, and campus desserts" The Jussieu Campus is precisely where Cheryl did her postdoc work. Having lived among its dysfunction - at the height of it's dysfunction - David holds Modernist architects in special contempt.

Hitler in Paris; Situationists in London

The Nazis famously spared Paris, it was never bombed during WWII. The Modernist however, were not so careful. By the time David and Cheryl first saw the city, over a third of the old city had been raised in order to build office parks, expressways and housing estates. Transforming the old world charm of one of the world's most beautiful cites into tracks of anonymous concrete, glass and steel that one critic dismissed as "a city only and American could love." That is a sin that is hard to forgive. But unlike David, I grew up in a city that had already been transformed by the Modernists. I understood that something had been lost, but I also loved the glass and steel brutalism of my youth. They were my playgrounds.

Additionally David and I have entirely different relationships to modernity. He is trained as a scientist and has made his success working as an author; he therefore thinks of modernity as a set of ethics (modesty, accountability, etc). The communities he most associates modernism with are those who best embody Jefferson's metaphor of Enlightenment: "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me." I meanwhile, am a sculptor. Because of what I do, I most associate modernity with things (cities, skyscrapers, abstract art, etc); things that in order to come into being must displace, over-shadow, crowd out, or redirecting other things. There is always a downside to making things, and not only do the down sides grow bigger as the scale of made things increases - they also grow deeper and darker as the number of us making things increases exponentially. David and I belong to almost entirely different Enlightenments - but they are complementary.

Word and Deed: Declaration of Independence and Monticello

David belongs to the Enlightenment of Jefferson the idea-man, I to Jefferson the builder. He can point with unalloyed pride to the modern innovation of "reciprocal accountability" as the basis of modern politics. What's not like? I can point to skyscrapers. That's a very mixed bag. The only actual large scale alternative to Modernist architecture attempted anywhere in the world was the 20 year reign of Stalinist Gothic - the majority of which was labor-intensive and time-consuming brick masonry covered in stucco. The Stalinist's ideological rejection of Modernism was based on appearances but meant the modern building technologies of steel I-beam and re-enforced slab construction were rejected. It lead to a terrible Postwar housing crisis throughout the Soviet Union. You don't have to embrace Robert Moses to see Stalin error.

I sometimes try and imagine modernity as a shifting finite set of ideas (freedom, justice, accountability, etc) separating and recombining into new ideological configurations; some are beautiful, others, grotesque. Physical modernity is easier to see, but it is often harder to meaningfully separate the parts. The Enlightenment of things is expressed in terms of building techniques, materials, and physical densities. Unlike words, however, I-beams have no fixed meanings. Things have ethics of place and placement. In the built world ideas are made manifest but never truly articulated. Ideas can have carbon footprints. Ugly or stupid ideas can disfigure a city we love. Each of us walks past a dumb idea on the way to work every day; but we also walk along brilliant ideas that we never recognize.

Stalinist Gothic brutalism of the Red Army Theater (1931); and the Modernist brutalism of Jussieu Campus (1964)

Art and architecture theorists periodize modernity along changing fashions in style, political innovations, and even according to shifts in technology - cycles of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The modernity of the built environment can also be periodized differently, according to the ways we dream of living in cities. Walter Benjamin called Paris the "Capital of the Nineteenth Century." In 1832, and again in 1849 Paris was decimated by an outbreak of cholera. The disease tore through the cities of Europe. In 1848, European cities were rocked by a very different epidemic - a series of revolutions that touch almost every government on the continent - none more than Paris where the February Revolution forced out King Charles X.

In 1853, after seeing London, a city transformed by the Industrial Revolution, which offered large public parks and a complete sewer system, the new President of the Second Republic (and soon to be its Emperor) Napoléon III decided to modernize Paris. He chose Georges Eugène Haussmann, who using the powers of the authoritarian regime, built a modern underground network of sewers and freshwater aqueducts, but more famously cut a new network of wide Boulevards through the mediaeval core of Paris intended to make the city easier for authorities to control.

Pre-Haussmannization (Turgot Plan of Paris) and Post-Modernization (Debord's Psychogeography)

Le Corbusier, who's own plans for Paris and New York were far more radical than anything Haussmann or Moses ever dreamed of, complained against Haussmann only for being arbitrary: "The avenues cut were entirely arbitrary: they were not based on strict deductions of the science of town planning. The measures he took were of a financial and military character." As for Moses' New York, Le Corbusier only complained against its lack of ambition: "The trouble with New York is that its skyscrapers are too small." he explained on his first trip to the city in 1936. "And there are too many of them." - He was about to introduce the Americans to the scheme of the tower-in-the-park.

Haussmann's name will forever be linked with the repressive policies of Napoleon III, Moses with the racism that tainted the best intentions of LBJ's Great Society. Le Corbusier is, in the US and around the world, the face of the apocalyptically violent ideologies of American Cold Warriors. I have no urge to resuscitate Modernism; to take it back from Le Corbusier and remake it as a contemporary badge of honor. Modernism belongs to the 20th century. I prefer to leave 'isms along with ideologies to the last century.

Le Corbusier, Plan Voisin (1925); Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Highline (2011)

"No ideas but in things" cautioned William Carlos Williams. He was addressing other poets but looking back on Modernism William's words warns us to judge the things themselves. Just as a scientist has to resist growing to attached to a hypothesis, we have to be careful to look at how things were used, not what we were told about how they would or should have been used.

As David and Cheryl and I finished our tour of galleries we walked south along the new High Line - the park that now inhabits what had been a rotting elevated steel freight line left over from a time when the neighborhood still supported light industry and slaughter yards. As we walked we discussed some of the more disastrous mistakes embodied by the brutalism of "Jussieu's nightmarish corridors, vertiginous stairwells, and campus desserts." But we also discussed how much we both enjoyed the urbanism and moving sidewalks in Robert Heinlein's The Roads Must Roll (1940) and Isaac Asimov's Caves of Steel (1955).

Harvey Wiley Corbett, The Three Deck City (1931): Paul Rudolph, LoMEx (1972)

I found myself wondering at the weirdness of the High Line itself. Since the birth of the skyscraper architects like Harvey Wiley Corbett began planning cities as tiered spaces of sunken road beds, elevated walkways, rooftop landing pads, and dirigible mooring towers. The brutalism of Jussieu and other Post-war developments made a fetish of raised pedestrian decks overpasses, terraces and walkways, even in places where there was no traffic to be elevated above. By the time the postwar building boom was going bust in the early 1970s schemes like LoMEx were in danger of updating Haussmann's Boulevards as "nightmarish corridors" of decked super highways. The Highline is the most successful elevated pedestrian space I've ever encountered. Given how long we have wanted to occupy a space like this, it's amazing that it took so long to make one work.

David and I exist within parallel intellectual traditions - if at times disconnected, the back and forth between the visual and the literary is crucial. David finds it offensive that Modernists like Corbusier liked to pretend that their schemes were "based on strict deductions of the science of town planning." Their counterparts in the arts adopted the moral superiority of "truth to materials" but finally hanging above AbEx and LoMEx was a dream, a dream just like the one that hung over the Empire State building's mooring mast - dream of the city of the future.

Paul Rudolph, LoMEx (1972); George Lucas, Death Star (1977).

Appeals by architects and artists to the authority of science, if often spurious, shouldn't be surprising - it speaks to the success of science to convince. The success of schemes like LoMEx are not, however, examples of science gone wrong, they are the greatest expressions of science fiction. How could Paul Rudolph and Robert Moses have proposed a scheme as outrageous as destroying SoHo and Little Italy in order to extrude a pyramidal wall dividing Manhattan?

They could not have done so unless an awful lot of people - architects, planners, artist, journalists, mayors, whoever - hadn't been reading Heinlein, Asimov and other scifi authors of the 50s and 60s who had so compellingly set their novels within futuristic megastructures. We had been convinced in advance that they were a good idea - it was only as we actually began to see those ideas take shape that we realized they were a mistake. Part of derailing those schemes was not just the real world efforts of Jane Jacobs; it was also a decade's worth of imaginary destruction. All those megastructures had to be discredited.

Destruction of Pruitt Igoe (1972) Destruction of the Death Star (1977)

The destruction of the Death Star was just the most dramatic example of the binge of imaginary megastructure destruction (Logan's Run, Silent Running and THX 1138 leap to mind). My experience as a sculptor is that to imagine something is entirely different than to build it - that making something is to be confronted by any inadequacies or contradictions that simply imaging a thing allows us to gloss over.

Today very Star Wars-like pyramidal slabs seems just out of sight above Rem Koolhaas' CCTV Headquarters - a tower that seems to have been built to evoke both awe and dread - they are part of a feedback loop that involves David's Enlightenment and the Enlightenment of built things as well. Less the cycle of stylistic "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" and more a building process of hypothesis and experimentation, followed by a period of evaluation and further hypothesizing. It sounds a lot like science, but has much more to do with science fiction. Williams might have said that, there are no dreams but in things.

Death Star; OMA, CCTV HQ

Looking at Do Ho Suh with David Brin - 5

2011-12-05T08:35:00.000-08:00

Rachel Whiteread, One Hundred Spaces (1995); David explaining Do Ho Suh's Home Within Home prototype (2011)

(Return to Part 4)

After having seen the Richard Serra and Nick Cave shows, David and Cheryl and I then walked a couple blocks north to see an the two installations of two over-size doll houses colliding in two very different ways by the Korean artist Do Ho Suh at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery. Of the three shows I took the Brins to see, this last one is where I had the most fun, because it was there that David grabbed the reigns from me and his story telling took over. Not long after we had entered the show I was no longer explaining the work to David, he was explaining the work to me and Cheryl and complete strangers; whatever I had hoped might happened when I invited the Brins to look at art with me, this was better.

When we walked in I was sketching out what I knew about the artist (very little) and the art (not much more). I told them what an impression having seen Suh's 1999 Seoul Home had made on me (enormous). That that first tent-like installation had recreated the interior of a small room in a traditional Korean home out of diaphanous green silk with square flats of fabric standing in for window panes, and delicately pleated parts describing the three-dimensional shapes of moldings and trim parts. And together we looked at his most recent show and pieced together what had happened, not just over the intervening 12 years, but the preceding years as well. It was a great story.

Rachel Whiteread, Ghost (1990); Do Ho Suh, Seoul Home (1999)

If I was a better tour guide, I would have researched all the shows I wanted to take the Brins to weeks in advance, but as it is I'm not a tour guide, I'm a sculptor. Rather than find out facts I could list I spent my time thinking about how I could convey the ways I look at art. And part of what I hoped to communicate to David was the very different ways sculpture and literature are 'read.'

One of Suh's isometric drawings on display at Lehmann Maupin, showed a series of rooms impossibly linked together in a stack. I am guessing they are all rooms from places Suh has lived over the years. Although forever separated by geography and time, each room appeared to have proximity to a stairwell as a common trait. In Suh's mind those stairwells were enough to linked them into a single paradoxical tower. Looking at art is a lot like that. Unlike my experience of literature - where an author reveals information to the reader as a string of words - looking at objects is an non-linear experience. There are no narrative threads, no causes, effect, beginnings or endings; everything happens at once and has to be decoded in spiraling towers of head scratching.

Bruce Nauman, A Cast of the Space Under My Chair (1968); Do Ho Suh, Fallen Star 1/5 (2008)

Suh's show was dominated by an enormous 1:5 scale doll house-like model of a traditional Korean home that has crash landed and lodged itself into the corner of a much larger and boxier town house. Trailing from the Korean home was a silk doppelgänger: a deflated 1:5 scale of his Seoul Home, repurposed as a collapsed parachute strewn across the gallery floor as if the model of Suh's childhood home had, like Dorthy's childhood home, only just fallen out of the sky and crashed on top of the artist's first adult adventure: art school.

The only prior knowledge I had about the piece, called Fallen Star, was that the larger of the two "dream homes" was a recreation of an actual building in Providence RI. I told the Brins I thought Suh might have gone to RISD; turns out it was a good guess (he did his undergraduate work there). Before we went too far piecing together whatever else I could remember with what we could see in the rooms, I also wanted to explain associations the work made to other art. I did my best to explain to the Brins how the colliding doll houses related back to the abstract materiality of the Richard Serras we had just seen. I did so by stacking art like Suh stacked stairwells.

Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (2001); Do Ho Suh, Staircase (2003)

I told the sort of stories that are told art students. I explained that 20 years before Suh had made a tent of his family home he could pack in a suitcase, the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread had transforming a small room in a victorian townhouse into a monumental cube by casting it in chalky white plaster. Whiteread's piece, called Ghost, is clearly echoed by the even more spectral Seoul House - and both, meanwhile, echoe an infamous morbid 1962 cube titled Die by the Modernist architect Tony Smith. Die set the terms for the artwork that would come to be known as Minimalism.

In 1966 Art Forum Magazine published a series of influential essays on Minimalist art by the sculptor Robert Morris called Notes on Sculpture. Morris explained that, “the better work takes relationship out of the work and makes them a function of space, light and the viewer’s field of vision.” Morris quoted a short Q&A with Smith on the subject of Die:

Q: Why didn't you make it larger so that it would loom over the observer?
A: I was not making a monument
Q: Then why didn't you make it smaller so that the observer could see over the top?
A: I was not making an object

Tony Smith, Die (1962): Richard Serra, House of Cards (1969)

So Die set, not only the baseline for the look of the "better work" (in terms of lacking internal relationships), it also set the terms for 'killing' the romantic relationship between art and artist as well (aka "death of the author"). Smith had famously ordered Die made over the phone. He called a commercial steel fabricator and told them he wanted a cube 6' X 6' X 6' - then hung up. As Robert Smithson, one of Tony Smith's many admirers (and contemporaries of Serra) would observe: "These procedures baffle art-lovers. They either wonder where the ‘art’ went or where the ‘work’ went, or both.

Die is to the artworld of the last half century, something like a trauma - a scar that artists as varied as Janine Antoni, Paul McCarthy, Ronie Horn, Terra Donovan, and Brian Jungen have all revisited in one way or another. Most famously, Richard Serra's career-making 1969 installation, One Tone Prop (aka House of Cards) was nothing but four, one-inch-thick, plates of lead, presumably weighing 500 lbs each, precariously leaning against one another exactly like a house of cards. I explained that that ethic, of using gravity itself had, over Serra's long career, grown to be the room filling installations massive 2" thick, 13.5' tall Corten steel canyons we'd just walked through.

Willem de Kooning, Untitled, (1949); Kazimir Malevich lying in State beneath his painting Black Square (1913)

While Ghost obviously refers back to Die, it does so at a remove. Whiteread was a reworking of the trickster Bruce Nauman's 1968 Cast of the Space Under My Chair. Nauman's flat-footed minimalist-like object that Answered the heroic challenge thrown by the Modernist painter Willem de Kooning that a painter doesn't paint a chair he paints the space around the chair. And Die itself was an absolutist statement akin Kazimir Malevich's 1913 death-of-painting painting Black Square. But rather than making the "last painting" of sculpture, Smith's cube the first painting of sculpture.

I did not think to explain this to David and Cheryl (but I wish I had); that the reason so many artists have revisited Die is that the work marks a very strange transformation in the way art is viewed. That after the war, Modernists artists and theorist (with the generous support of Cold Warriors) had successfully pushed a very particular ethic of looking at paintings: serious audiences, of serious art (they were serious times) learned to value painting, not as a window for into an illusionary space, but as paint on canvas, right there in the room they were hanging in. With Die, and the other "better work" that came to be known as Minimalism, that attention, that the Modernists had reseved for painting alone was extended to objects.

Janine Antoni, Gnaw, (1996); Brian Jungen, Untitled (2001)

Because the Modernists painters had often appealed to ideas of universal or transcendent beauty, Smith's cube was often interpreted as an expression of some sort of ideal as well. Whatever Smith's original intentions were, as an art student I was told that the importance of House of Cards was that it was a 'more contingent' reworking of Die. That reading - that a newer work changed the meaning of an older work - for better or worse, is the lesson art students are taught about their place in art history. As early as 1967 Robert Smithson righteously complained against the "dated notion" of "art as a criticism of earlier art" - that is not at all what I think is being taught, or (as a former art student myself) what I was trying to convey to my guests. The memory palace I was working to construct with them (and now you) is closer to Smithson's own notion of art: "What is needed is an esthetic method that brings together anthropology and linguistics in terms of "buildings."

I have no doubt that the lesson Whiteread was taught when she was study art at the Slade, and that Suh was taught at RISD and Yale, was that their work could change the meaning of the past. If I had told David and Cheryl those things I might have gotten into the feminist critique of minimalism, and how important I feel it was to understanding Whiteread's Ghost and therefore Suh's Seoul House. Feminism isn't important because Whiteread is a woman (after all Suh isn't), its important because the powerful tools it provided for revising history. I should have explained how, unlike Serra, the elements of Die Whiteread and Suh made contingent were the story that floats over Die - the stories of the piece's scale, the phone call, and, perhaps most importantly, the story of Die's sinister title.

Tara Donovan Pins (2003); Roni Horn, Pink Tons (2008)

Because the titles of both Ghost and Seoul House weren't just echoes, but more accurately, puns on Die, its important to remembering that Die was itself a pun from the begining: as in dice, tool and die, and as in death. In her essay, Minimalism and The Rhetoric of Power, the feminist art historian Anna Chave, dug into final aspect of Smith's title:

The blackness sealed state, and human scale of Smith's cube helped reinforce this reading of the title, which - considering that the command is directed at the viewer - renders the work a gruesome gesture: a bleak crypt presented to the viewer with succinct instructions to perish. "Six feet has a suggestion of being cooked. Six-foot box. Six-foot under," wrote Smith, who related Die also to a passage by Herodotus about a chapel found in the enclosure of a temple: a "most wonderful thing... made of a single stone, the length and height of which were the same, each wall being forty cubits square, and the whole a single block!" - a description of a rather mausoleum-like structure.

I did explained to David and Cheryl that when I first saw the installation of Home Within Home, I was taken aback and excited to see Seoul Home transformed into a house-shaped parachute trailing away from the 1:5 scale doll house-like model of what I assumed was Suh's family home, crashed into what I assumed was a 1:5 scale model of Suh's first American home. As much as I loved Seoul Home, I had not been a big fan of a lot of Suh's later work and I was happy (but still flabbergasted) to see him jettisoning the materialism that had raised both Serra and Whiteread to super-star heights. I was happy because Serra's fidelity to gravity, and Whiteread's to cast voids had also weighed both artists down in recent years. Walking into Suh's show had been like witnessing a fox slip the trap.

Marcel Duchamp, Trebuchet (1917); Do Ho Suh, Fallen Star 1/5 (2008)

David, meanwhile, went to work reading the art, not as the material tale I had been telling, but as literature: "Look" he told us, "he is struggling to reconcile his Korean identity with his new American self!" He pitched the culture clash as tradition vs modernity. We began to hunt for clues furnishing the rooms of the two collided homes - a miniature sewing machine, tiny rolls of green silk fabric and spindles red thread. We wondered about how the smaller translucent honeycombed 'prototype' had been made (my bet was 3D lithography using lasers and phenolic resin - but I really have no idea). We oohed and awed at the weird fidelity of the Specimen Series. We argued among ourselves and asked our fellow gallery goers their opinions.

Together we did what you're supposed to do with great art, we told great stories about it. Together we built memory palaces out of sublties of manufacture, accidents and peculiarities of context; along with half-remembered facts about related objects spread out over years of going to shows and reading about art, all connect and make ill shaped towers - memory palaces that hang above the-thing-itself like parachutes. . Doing so with an author who has made world creation his life's work made for one of the best times this sculptor has ever had looking at art.

Do Ho Suh, Paratrooper II (2005): Robert Smithson, aerial artist

Kitchen of the Future: Vermin

2011-11-24T09:26:00.000-08:00

Mouse Trap vs mind trap

For those in the US: Happy Thanksgiving. I just wanted to put up a short Kitchen post today for those sneaking away from the family for a moment of peace and quiet.

A few months back Ambling Along The Aquaduct had a great post on constitutional personhood and the future of human rights that included the following passage taken from an article in the Emory Law Journal by Scott Bennett, "Chimera and the Continuum of Humanity: Erasing the Line of Constitutional Personhood":

Presently, Irving Weissman, the director of Stanford University's Institute of Cancer/Stem Cell Biology and Medicine, is contemplating pushing the envelope of chimera research even further by producing human-mouse chimera whose brains would be composed of one hundred percent human cells. Weissman notes that the mice would be carefully watched: if they developed a mouse brain architecture, they would be used for research, but if they developed a human brain architecture or any hint of humanness, they would be killed.

John Hancock Tower; the living architecture of a Brookyln 'lawn'

The passage has stuck with me because I live in a small coach house off an enclosed courtyard. One wall of the courtyard is covered with a thick mat of ivy. My neighbors and I, who share the space, refer to it as our vertical lawn. Its like a mousey high rise. Every spring our lawn comes alive and a new generation of tiny mice (each, no bigger than the end of my thumb). These especially tiny juveniles don't know enough to not clown around on a vine stalk that is three stories high, so for a few weeks the lawn rains underage rodents down on our slate courtyard. I file it under Darwin Awards. As the summer gets along we are left with a sharper group of wiser and really small, extremely fast mice that dart in and out of sight. They are pleasant additions to the life of the courtyard - like squirrels at the park.

The problem starts when the weather turns (like right now) and the little mice need a place to live and my house is old and permeable. I'm a bachelor and habitually keep almost nothing but condiments in my kitchen, but that doesn't seem to mater. Every winter I am faced with a little tribe of mice looking to make a new life under my stove or behind my cabinets. If the mice didn't shit on my kitchen counter they would be welcome to stay the winter in my place. But they do shit on the counter, so every winter I trap and poison those tiny bastards and feel wretched about it. (I've tried safe traps too, but they never seem to end the problem - its like unloading a clown car.)

Of Mice and Men

They haven't appeared yet this year, but they will. What I keep thinking about is what I would do if I knew that the mice had "developed a human brain architecture" - what would I do? I know scientists are trying to recreate dinosaurs - more power to them. Michael Critcheon's fears are not mine. My fears are that eventually a chimera is going to go ferrel and I will be faced by a breed of mouse with clear humaness and I will be forced to strike an accord. I like to imagine that they will have enough humanness that we can come to an understanding: don't shit on the counter tops and your welcome to stay the winter.

That said - if the day comes when we face a Neural Cherynobl, and I have to deal with sewer rats exhibiting "any hint of humanness" - I can't imagine being so hospitable. Its that idea I find disturbing; a future I truly dread. That I would dehumanize a humanized animal. That humanness might someday become linked in my mind with vermin. Happy Thanksgiving.

The Pepper Spray Cop; The Orkin Man

Looking at Nick Cave with David Brin - 4

2011-11-23T23:02:00.000-08:00

David Brin's Postmen; David Brin with Nick Cave's post-men
(Return to Part 3)

After visiting the Serra installation at Gagosian I took David and Cheryl next door to the Mary Boone Gallery to see Nick Cave's show of "Soundsuits." Of the three shows we saw together, this was the artist and art I knew the least about. Unlike Serra, who's shows I have been visiting since I first moved to New York 15 years ago, and who I've been thinking about ever since (I had a Richard Serra anxiety dream once), I saw Cave's work for the first time only a week or so before meeting the Brins. What I could see I did know walking into the show, was that Cave was clearly not a sculptor in the same sense as Richard Serra. The Modernist consensus was that David Smith was America's greatest sculptor - with Smith setting the bar, both Serra and Cave are solidly (and somewhat confusingly) Postmodernist. What I did know for sure, was that it was a great show, and one I felt certain the Brins would enjoy.

When I first saw the Soundsuits I thought the work was by Nick Cave the musician - which would have been awesome - but tells you how little I knew. My next theory, was that Cave might have been part to the Providence heavy metal art/rock collaborative Forcefield that had stolen the show the 2002 Whitney Biennial - wrong again. By the time I asked David if he wanted a tour of Chelsea I knew at least that Nick Cave was head of the fashion department at the Chicago Art institute, and was pretty sure he had nothing to do with Forcefeild, but otherwise I was going in cold. But it didn't matter, together we had a great time doing what art audiences have done ever since the modernists ceded the center stage of High Art to the many voices who had been waiting in the wings (Postmodernism): trying to figure out, "What-the-hell's-going-on?"

The late great David Smith, Australia (951); Sabato "Simon" Rodia, Watts Towers (1921-54)

I introduced the work by admitting that I knew very little about the artist other than he had not in fact played with the Bad Seeds. And perhaps because Modernism had so far dominated so much of our discussion, I wasn't anxious to start talking about Postmodernism. I told David and Cheryl that I associated the work with outsider art. I mentioned Watts Towers, but David was quick to point out that as odd as the material choices are in Cave's work (rag rugs, tin noise makers, baskets and sticks), that the quality of craftsmanship was obviously professional. That even if the work invoked the art of the mentally ill and incarcerated, it was clearly not the product of one. David was of course correct. I was interested to find out as I was writing this post, that Cave's Soundsuits were inspired not by Watts Towers, but by a much grimmer aspect of LA life:

When the Rodney King incident happened. I was reading in the paper about how the police sort of brought description to him. You know they were talking about, I can’t remember exactly what it said, but they were talking about this big, black, male figure that was bigger than life, that was mammoth-like.

Rodney King; Nick Cave

What I knew very well, and the reason I brought the Brins to see Cave, was that the Modernists had had no place for an artist like Cave. I wanted David and Cheryl to see that contemporary art very much does. That that is a victory worth noting. The Modernists were big on Universals: Truth and Beauty were imagined as not only related, but Universal. "Identity politics" is one of the charges aimed against Postmodernism by it's critics. That identity politics are a particularization of the Universal. That the hyphenated allegiances (African-American, Latino-American, etc) are a watering down of the body politic's potency.

That Modernists had their own identity politics goes unacknowledged by critics of "identify politics," but is obvious looking backwards. To participate at the level of authority, to represent the Universal, in art, politics, or any other public sphere, you had to have a very particular identity: white, male and straight. For these critics, Civil Rights were a schism; Feminism was a schism

. I would never have moved to New York and become an artist if Modernism had triumphed and these schisms had not taken place.

Captain America (2011); Nick Cave, Soundsuit (2011)

One of my all time favorite stories of David's is a short one called Thor vs Captain America. In his introduction he explains that he wrote it for a collection about what if Nazis had won WWII. David wrote a story in which Thor and the other Norse Gods had been conjured by necromancy. The the Allies' victories had been reversed by actual Valkyrie. He had found the premise that a group as wrongheaded as the Nazis could have triumphed so patently absurd - that no possibility grounded in realty would do. I remember not only loving the story but loving the confidence he expressed in that introduction.

I feel the same way about Modernism - not that they were Nazis, but that their program was so totally absurdly puristic and exclusionary that, short of divine intervention, it could not have been sustained. I never in a million years would have introduce David to an artworld in which David Smith was as good as it gets. I was very happy to show him Cave's super soldiers. And while I am pretty certain David wouldn't describe himself as a Postmodernist, it was clear he and Cheryl enjoyed the show on every level. I was only sorry that there were no videos at the gallery so they could have seen how beautifully the costume function with dancers inside of them:

Passport to the Playground (Part 1)

Passport to the Playground (Part 2)

Passport to the Playground (Part 3)

Passport to the Playground (Part 4)

Looking at Richard Powers with David Brin - 3

2011-11-22T05:56:00.000-08:00

John Powers. Spiral Jedi (2008); Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1972)
(Return to Part 2)

As David, Cheryl and I were leaving the Richard Serra show and headed over to see Nick Cave, we were talking about Isaac Asimov and how, like him, David had used the device of using a murder mystery as the back drop for his first novel. David had just solved a small artworld mystery for me about an odd connection I have to Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty via one of his favorite scifi authors, J.G. Ballard.

I like to joke that Serra is the greatest painter of his generation; this show takes none of the truth from that joke. At one point, as David, Cheryl and I were looking a one of the great expanses of rusted steel and David said: "This reminds me of your father's painting." I looked to see Cheryl's reaction only to realize David was talking to me. "The painter Richard Powers is you father isn't he?" he asked. My dad's name is Bob and he is a priest and made his living as a psychologist, which is what I told David.

Mark Rothko, Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea, (1944); Richard Powers, The Voices of Time over art (1962)

We did some Googling on my phone and found images of Richard Powers' work - he was a painter famous for his surreal paintings used for the covers of scifi books in the 1950s and 1960s, most famously J.G.Ballard's books. Powers' painting reminded me of the early paintings of Rothko - the surrealism that had hatched Abstract Expressionism - a far less strident, more tentative Modernism than Europe developed before the war, or America championed afterwards.

As it turns out, Powers illustrated two different editions of Ballard's short story collection, Voices in Time. The story, Voices in Time, is believed to have inspired Serra's friend and fellow post-minimalist, Robert Smithson's most famous work: Spiral Jetty.

Richard Powers, The Voices of Time over art (1966); Robert Smithson, Conch Shell Spaceship and Word Land Mass (c. 1961-63)

Also in a strange snake-eating-its-tail sort of symmetry, I first began drawing the link between Minimalism and Star Wars after reading a passage Smithson wrote:

As the aircraft ascends into higher and higher altitudes and flies at faster speeds, its meaning as an object changes - one can even say reverses. The streamlined design of our earlier aircraft becomes increasingly more truncated and angular... It is most probable that we will someday see upon these runways aircraft that will be more crystalline in shape... Already certain passenger aircraft resemble pyramidal slabs, and flying obelisks... The enormous scale of runways will isolate such aircraft into ‘buildings’ for short spaces of time, and then these ‘buildings’ will disappear. The principal runways will extend from 11,000 feet to 14,000 feet, or about the length of Central Park. Consider an aircraft in the shape of an enormous ‘slab’ hovering over such an expanse.”

Smithson was describing something he was then-calling "aerial art" but would later be called Earth Art. In that 1967 essay, Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site, Smithson was proposing a way of looking at the landscape in terms of speed and elevation related to a spiral of huge triangular cement slabs he had proposed should be installed on the grounds of the then-unbuilt Dallas/Ft Worth airport. Smithson's spiral echoed the cement mandala in Ballard's story. It is a clear predecessor to his Spiral Jetty and echoed more recently in Serra's late-career spiraling ellipses. But what I saw in my mind's eye was a prescient description of Star Destroyers and X-Wings. A curious coincidence that I have always enjoyed: Ballard's protagonist in Voices in Time is a scientist named Powers. I'm guessing he was named after the painter Richard Powers - the artist who illustrated the cover of 15 of Ballard's books.

Robert Smithson, Aerial Map: Proposal for Dallas – Fort Worth Regional Airport, (1967); Star Destroyer (1977)

Looking at Richard Serra with David Brin - 2

2011-11-21T20:48:00.000-08:00

Cover art for David Brin's 2nd Book, Startide Rising; David Brin at Gagosian Gallery in front of Richard Serra's sculpture Junction

(Return to Part 1)

To begin our tour, I had David and Cheryl meet me at the corner of 11th Ave and West 24th, just outside the Gagosian gallery. Because over the past couple years David had made it very clear how much he disliked the sanctimonious stridency of the original Modernist artists and architects, I thought the best place to begin would be with contemporary art's most obvious inheritor of that overbearing tradition: the massively overweight installation Junction/Cycle by the sculptor Richard Serra.

There are older and more respected Chelsea galleries than Gagosian, but for shock and awe, it is impossible to top. The 24th street space opened in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks. That summer the real estate market was booming. New York cultural institutions alone had billions of dollars worth of brick-and-mortar development at various stages of planning. There were so many galleries building out new spaces in Chelsea, would-be gallerists were having a hard time finding someone available to paint a wall, much less construct a massive new space. I remember Larry Gagosian's ability to get his space ready for the season on time inspiring genuine awe and confusion among his fellow gallerists, who could not understand how he had gotten it done. (It would make a great exposé.)

Serra's materials staged up on trucks; and installed (via Plate of Fish)

Add to that, that the inaugural show was a show of Serra's Torqued Spirals - made of 2" thick plates of rolled steel that were so large they needed to be moved on over-sized trucks that looked like they belonged at Cape Canaveral. That first exhibition opened October 18th, 2001. At a time when it seemed that every steel worker and truck in the Tri-State area was focused on cutting apart and moving the wreckage of the World Trade Center off Manhattan, Larry Gagosian somehow managed to get Serra's over-sized elliptical sections across the George Washington Bridge, down the West Side, and staged up 11th Ave.

Everything about that first show was about POWER. There was an undeniable thrill of seeing those Serras, installed s they were in a building constructed to hold them (and even larger iterations down the line). After years of seeing the Serra's installations at Gagosian, the Modern, Dia and elsewhere, like a lot of New Yorkers, I have become a bit inured to the work. But not entirely - nothing can take away the thrill of seeing those things on the move. It's like watching a line of industrial-scaled leaf cutter ants carrying home a dismembered supertanker. Its good to be reminded that art can thrill - and I was happy to share what I knew would be a thrill with the Brins.

Ed Burtynsky; Richard Serra

I asked David and Cheryl if either of them had ever heard of Serra or seen any of his work - a friend of David's who knew he was planning to visit Chelsea had told him to be sure to see "the metal pieces" - so they were coming to the work with fresh eyes. As the three of us entered the gallery and faced the first canyon-like entrance to the installation I introduced Serra as an abstract artist. I told them that his work was born out of a particular Prewar (WWII) surrealist tradition that had coalesced in New York; that the Americans had focused less on dream-like imagery and more on the procedural logic of automatism. The French had Salvador Dali, we got Jackson Pollock.

That New World surrealist automatism become a school of abstraction, not abstracted forms like the cubists, but paintings as things in-and-of-themselves - paint as paint, no referent. In the Postwar years that ethic of truth-to-materials and anti-illusionism hardened into a dogma that gave way to group of young Turks making real things in real space (minimalism). The minimalists made plywood and sheet metal boxes. The scope of their installations was relatively modest - especially compared to the one David and Cheryl and I were standing within when I told them that story.

Castle Bravo Blast (1954); Richard Serra (2011)

As we walked through the slanting corridors of the installation - at times tipping and a little dizzy because of the wall's odd angles, I made no effort to explain how minimalism was originally discussed in terms of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological philosophy of perception. Instead of bodies and objects interacting space, I explained that the size and scope of Richard Serra's work (post-minimalist) amounted to a very real Post-Cold War "peace dividend." I told them how the steel was curved using the same massive rollers used to make battle ships and aircraft carriers, and that the super computers needed to calculate and execute the complex curves that we were wandering through with crowds of other people had been developed to model nuclear explosions.

Richard Serra's work is not simply a matter of artworld POWER, it is an expression of American Superpower. Serra's work express the ethics of their times through their manufactured being. They reek of industrial strength and command, but they are also a great deal of fun, enormously beautiful and vicerally exciting to move through. A little like a fun house ride.

Tilt-A-Whirl vs Torqued Elipse

Before we had taken twenty steps David called the early Modernists' manifesto/decrees "pseudo-science." When I invited David to look at art with me, and chose Richard Serra as our starting point, I was being provocative. My provocation was intended to challenge the resentments and mistrust that I had seen around the word "Modernist" when reading David's blog posts, comments, and emails. He feels that "the architecture and some of the art wings of Modernism featured individuals so ego-drenched and pyrotechnically solipsistic that they betrayed Modernism's scientific (and hence collaboratively accountable) roots..."

But he also really loved the Richard Serra installation the whole way down. From the lush patina of the delicately rusted surfaces, to the muscularity of their manufacture, to the fact that the gallery was free and open to any and all. "Para-scientific" I answered. It is a small difference, but an answer that David seemed to enjoy. "They were trying to do what they saw the scientists doing" I said. "The rigor they were aping was the rigor of scientists and engineers."

Rigging Serra, 1969 and 2011

If I had never found David online and seen him call himself a "contrarian" I never would have associated him with that term. When telling my friends how much better The Postman is as a novel than a movie (times infinity better), or why they should read Earth (because WWIII is fought against the Swiss), I always describe David as an optimist. I felt confident that David the contrarian and I would have fun sparing on the subject of Modernism. I was equally confident David the optimist would enjoy seeing Richard Serra and hearing about war ships and atomic bombs.

Cultural progress is impossible to meter. Serra's rigor has its origins in emulating the progress made by scientists and engineers, but he is exploring an entirely separate sphere that has less to do with measuring or harnessing POWER, and more to do with expressing it. But there was no discussion of Serra abusing POWER - after all, the phenomenological experience we shared, was one of laughing and talking together surrounded by crowds of smiling people.

The Postman (1997); David and I standing at the other end of Junction

Looking at Art with David Brin - 1

2011-11-20T12:30:00.000-08:00

The cover art of the first David Brin book I can remember reading: Sundiver; David and I talking on the Highline 25 years later.

A couple weeks ago I gave a gallery tour to the scifi author David Brin and his wife Cheryl. They were visiting NYC for the Singularity Summit, where David had been invited to give a talk. I have been a fan of David's speculative novels since high school. For the past few years I have enjoyed reading his thoughts about today's world unfold in real time on his blog; and more recently via twitter. The tour was my opportunity to meet an author whose ideas about the world I admire. I offered myself, as a working New York artist, to be his "native guide" to the artworld of Chelsea. But it was also an opportunity to make my case for the modernity and Modernism I know and love best: the universe of useless things that make up our visual culture, and the greater part of our built environment - the art and the architecture, that David has dismissed as being based on "grandiose theories [that] serve largely to promote elitist snobbery" - and therefor antithetical to the modernity he loves most.

The events leading up to my invitation began a few years ago, before I started this blog, and just after I wrote Star Wars: A New Heap for Triple Canopy. While researching A New Heap I had run into an essay David wrote for Salon just after Episode I was released. In it, David damned the Star Wars franchise as anti-modern. In my own piece, written years later, I ignored the prequels and argued that the original 1977 Star Wars movie "hot-rodded Modernism." It may seem like a strange place to begin a correspondence - but David is a self-described "contrarian" - so there is wiggle room on his side. For myself, I enjoyed David's take on Star Wars, and believed that as different our positions appeared to be, at root we shared a common conviction: that the art we make for one another (all of us), and the stories we tell each other about it (all of them), are deeply important.

Cover for Star Wars on Trial; Frontispiece for Star Wars: A New Heap

By default David's occupation as a scifi author makes him a futurist, not an uppercase 'F'-Futurist like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (that'd be awesome though), he is more the lowercase 'f' variety, as in Faith Popcorn. But he is not a future-for-the-future's-sake prognosticator like Popcorn- he is a Progressive - a believer in Progress with a capital P. What I admire about him is that he looks to the future, not just for a NEW world, but for a BETTER world. He believes that modernity is best expressed as "reciprocal accountability"; the ethic that underlies science and (in theory) democratic governance: "This crucial modern innovation," he writes, "is what has finally moderated abuse of power, that was endemic in human affairs." Searching for signs of that ethic is the thread that unites all his writings, from his scifi novels to his non-fiction essays on the transparent society, he is imagining, and advocating for, a world that is more modern; and therefore, more BETTER.

He (rightly) associates Modernist architecture, from the early Nationalist Modernism of Frank Lloyd-Wright, to the International Style Modernism of Le Corbusier and Robert Moses, to a very different ethic: top-down command and control. And, like a lot of my friends, he believes that the contemporary architecture of Gehry et al. lack an ethic of any sort. The sin that these Later-Day Modernists are most guilty of in David's judgement is incompetence. In his mind contemporary Starchitects, like Frank Gehry, are fit to decorate sheds but they are not to be trusted if one needs a space in which to work or live.

"Howard Roark laughed..." (because he was a Sith)

I was interested to learn, that for the most part, David gives artists a pass: "At worst, such an artist wastes money or wastes my time." And he jokes (as an artist himself), "Art is exactly where that magical, ego-crazed part of human nature needs to go." I was glad, but not surprised to discover on our tour that David has real warmth for the lyrical abstraction of early European Modernists like Kandinsky, Klee and (most) Picassos.

I invited David to look at galleries with me confident that he would enjoy a day looking at art (the guy isn't a trog after all). But I had an agenda beyond being an entertaining host. The reason I invited him was that I hoped to convince him that the visual art aren't harmless; that it is an important circle of intellectual activity that should be tracked. That art, alongside technology, politics and the sciences, is a place that should be watched for signs of Progress. I am aware, however, that that conviction is at odds with over 30 years worth of consensus - inside the artworld and out.

"You don't have to have a point to have a point."

The hubris David is put off by peaked in the the early seventies. In the aftermath of WWII the Modernists had told the world that they knew exactly what they were doing; that they knew what was good for us - that they would MAKE IT NEW. Their credibility was undermined by the stridency of their rhetoric, the corruption of their politics, the violence of their foreign policies, the racism of their housing programs, and the toxic runoff of their technologies.

Shaping the the future is an ambition that artists, along with architects and designers of every stripe, came to associate with the Modernists' brand of inflexible father-knows-best authority. 30 years ago most artist abandon all pretense that Progress was, or even should be, part of the program. By the time I started art school in the mid-1990s it was an unspoken given that the NEW and the BETTER were opposing forces. For the past ten or fifteen years, however, that separation has been eroding. In the wake of Steve Jobs' success, it is (at the very least) no longer despicable to want to make NEW things. The documentary Helvetica showed that it is no longer shameful to want to reclaim some of the Modernist's ambition for a BETTER future.

Redeeming Modernism

Making NEW things is important. It is a waste of time; it is a waste of energy; but so are the vast majority of cherry blossoms. A tiny margin meanwhile, are crucial to the survival of the tree. Art is a display of fertility. The irrational exuberance of starchitecture is the modern city's fruiting bodies. Any success (of any kind) is going to be a partial success. Most often, the best anyone can hope for are tiny marginal gains, but that is the stuff Progress is made of. We will soon have nine billion people to feed and house - we can't do that the old way. We need the NEW so we can find the BETTER (even if it is only a tiny bit better). Contemporary art is nothing like Modernist art's formalist 'laboratories' of abstract composition and material experimentation. The NEW art I wanted to show David was art that helps us see BETTER how we can live with ourselves; as citizens, as individuals, and as moderns.

I often feel cut off from my counterparts in literature, politics, and technology. Watching Occupy Wall Street take shape has been painful for me - not because I don't believe in exactly the same things as the protesters. I entirely share their outrage. But I do not share the OWS aesthetics of abjection, it looks suspiciously like old fashion sackcloth and ash. That is not to say I know what progress should look like. In the visual arts, shifts and changes come from all everywhere at once and have no discernible directional momentum. All of the art I showed David and Cheryl could be dismissed as overbearing, vulgar, and/or decadent. A lot depends on the stories you choose to tell about it. The stories I look for, the kind I told the Brins, are those that help us see the relationship between the NEW and the BETTER, no matter how lean the margins may in fact be.

The NEW reflecting the BETTER

I could not agree with David more when he characterizes modernity as "something much more fundamental than some trendy fads and formalisms." But I believe it is important to understand the Modernists, not only for what they (and their critics) say about the movement; not just for their narcissism, over-reach, and failure, but also for what goes unsaid. The marginal gains, and modest victories. Its those stories that explain why so much of their legacy survives and thrives all around us.

I am the first to admit that my goals for the day were lofty - but I really lucked out. David and Cheryl's visit coincided with three of the best shows that I have seen in Chelsea in years. I took them to see Richard Serra at Gagosian, Nick Cave at Mary Boone, and Do Ho Suh at Lehmann Maupin. Three very different shows that engendered three very different conversations. As I told David at the end of the day when he told me his only regret was that we hadn't taken the time to see one more show: the best art you will ever see, anywhere in the world, is on view in Chelsea, but the worst art you will ever see, anywhere in the world, is no worse than the worst Chelsea has to offer. (Continue Reading Part 2)

David and Cheryl Brin, standing in front of Nick Cave's art and bracketed by Richard Serra and Do Ho Suh

For Those in the NYC area:

2011-11-08T08:39:00.000-08:00

Clement Greenberg as a Sith; installation view of Make/Believe and Benthic Empire

I am going to be giving a talk on Star Wars and Minimalism this Thursday, November 10th, as part of Performa 11th. For those interested in talking about how awesome and exciting Postwar art and Cold War politics are, as well as picking apart the visual program of the original 1977 Star Wars film, this talk is for you: STAR WARS AND THE RHETORIC OF POWER

Meanwhile I also have two works up as part of a group show called "Full Fathom Five" at the Jenkins Johnson Gallery on West 26th, that is open through December 23rd. I share Jerry Saltz's impatience with the "endless stream of art-school-trained artists trying to crawl up the asses of Andy Warhol, Richard Prince, and Gerhard Richter in order to stake out a microscopic piece of insular, already-approved territory." For myself I enjoy inhabiting the colons of Jay DeFeo, Robert Morris and Robert Smithson. If my art looks like something out of scifi, it is because I believe abstract art is an arm of futurism - additionally I like art that gives the impression that it can defend itself.

Star Trek: A Future Abandon to Clowns & Rubes

2011-10-21T10:13:00.000-07:00

Trekky; Trotsky

When I was in my early 20s all my friends were returning from trips to Europe telling stories about what rubes American tourist were and how universally Europeans hated them. The strategy everyone I knew seemed to have adopted, and I was instructed to use if and when I ever 'crossed the pond', was to pretend to be Canadian. I remember thinking that if all the cool, well-mannered Americans posed as Canadians, and only rubes and clowns admitted to being Americans, then who could blame Europeans for thinking Canadians were awesome and Americans crass? "Up to a decade or two ago," wrote Slavoj Žižek in his 1994 book, Mapping Ideology, "everybody was busy imagining different forms of the social organization of production and commerce (Fascism or Communism as alternatives to liberal capitalism); today" he then-continued, "as Fredrick Jameson perspicaciously remarked, nobody seriously considers possible alternatives to capitalism any longer." If only rubes and clowns admit to wanting a better world, dystopias will be the only futures serious people will know how to think about.

More recently Žižek addressed the protestors occupying Zucatti Park. "In mid-April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV, films, and novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China." Žižek told the crowd. "These people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dreaming. Here, we don’t need a prohibition because the ruling system has even oppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism." Žižek argues that we need "red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom." But he makes the same mistake as those he is criticizing - Žižek imagines capitalism must end. That a blank page topped with fresh rubric will make room for the new script - but that is just another disaster movie. Non-freedom is something that has to be over-written, not with a yet another brand of freedom, but with a new brand of moral accountability. For that to happen serious people have to admit that no one has "oppressed their capacity to dream" besides themselves. It is long past due that the serious people abandon dystopia and austerity.

Zombie Futurism; Zombie Capitalism

There are two very different brands of serious people who no longer consider possible alternatives to capitalism. There are those like Žižek on the Left, who reside almost exclusively within academia or on its fringes, that for decades have seriously considered only dystopias as the only future - there are no positive alternatives. One wonders how many theses have been written on the The Matrix? How often have Children of Men and The Road been cited? Blade Runner invoked? Alien pointed to? and RoboCop lectured on? One does not wonder why the young Occupier protestors prefer crude cardboard placards. They imagine themselves to be destroyers like V For Vendetta's Guy Fawkes; occupying a ruin like half scalped hero of 28 Days Later; and as survivors like Mad Max. They are, like their academic mentors, are collapsitarians.

In America serious people outside accademia no longer identify themselves as Leftists; it is a disqualifier from serious public discourse. Leftists are unelectable here. There are no Marxist judges. Serious commentators on national media dismiss Leftists as leeches, nostalgic, naive, as rubes and as clowns. In the absence of an alternative to capitalism there are only liberals and conservatives. Canny progressives describe themselves as centrists, independents and even libertarians. Our public life is dominated by two camps of very serious collapsitarians: conservatives who warn against looming dept and demand austerity, and liberals point to Global Warming and demand austerity; believers in what Kevin Kelly calls the "Long Doom."

Trekkie badge of honor; Occupiers' badge of honor

In his 'Red Ink' address, Žižek repeatedly warned the #OWS protestors not to fall in love with themselves - but that is not the danger - they are after all, very serious people. The real threat is self-hatred. That they will join other serious people imagining the end of capitalism is the end of consumerism, and they will dismiss those who dream of a better world as clowns. The problem is a better world looks exactly like consumerism - a future no serious person is ever going to endorse.

"In China today, we have Capitalism which is even more dynamic than your American Capitalism, but doesn’t need democracy." Žižek told the crowd. "The marriage between democracy and Capitalism is over. The change is possible." What kind of change is Consumerism? It began as a dream over-writing capitalism - Star Trek is a consumerist future as divorced from capitalism as capitalism is now divorced from democracy - I understand that it sounds clownish to say, but Star Trek is the red ink Žižek is looking for.

Guy Fawkes; Blue Geeks

Not all divorces between democracy and Capitalism are equal. The difference between China and the "efficient, ruthless" Capitalism of the other post-Communists authoritarians Žižek invokes. The difference is one of dreams. In his book, The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama argues that the Chinese created a modern unified state millennia before they developed in Europe or the Middle East. "In other respects, however, the Chinese political system was underdeveloped. It never generated a rule of law or mechanisms of political accountability." But he also observes, "One of dynastic China's great legacies, then, is high-quality authoritarian government." And indeed, the difference between the "dynamic" authoritarian modernizers that share Chinese cultural heritage (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and China modern itself), and the predatory kleptocracies of the former Eastern Block are stark. According to Fukuyama:

In an influential article, the economist Mancur Olsen posited a simple model of political development. The world was initially ruled by 'roving bandits'... These bandits were purely predatory and sought to extract as Many resources from the population as possible... the king, who claimed legitimate title to rule, was simply a 'stationary bandit' with motives no different from the stationary bandits he he displaced... The only problem with Olsen's theory is it isn't correct. The rulers of agrarian societies often failed to tax their subjects at anything close to Olson's posited maximizing rate... Chinese monarchs, no less than rulers of other premodern societies, often exhibited what economist Herbert Simon labeled 'satisfacing' rather than maximizing behavior.

Celisa Edwards uses Trek to teach science; The People's Mic

"The problem is not corruption or greed. The problem," Žižek told the Occupiers, "is the system. It forces you to be corrupt." But Fukuyama points that modern systems of checks and balances don't protect us from predatory elites - and systems without those sorts of systematic checks, can and often are fair. Wealthy powerful elites will only obey laws and support institutions if they believe in them first. It turns out that the taxes levied by Chinese emperors - especially the Ming - fell far short of predatory levels Olsen predicted. This despite the fact that they held "draconian powers of taxation and confiscation" and were not bound by either rule of law or other checks and balances: "The political system didn't have any downward mechanism of political accountability - that is, there were no local elections or independent media." What mattered most is what they and those around them believed themselves - the stories that the dynastic Chinese, rich and poor, told themselves about wealth and power.

Fukuyama writes that, "In the early twentieth century, it was common to deride the Confucian ideal of the gentleman scholar with long fingernails who refused to work at anything other than government service as an obstacle to modernization." But that that ideal was an important contributor to the "satisfacing" of dynastic Chinese elites. "What China did not have was the spirit of maximization that economists assume is a universal human trait." he writes. "Today people in the West tend to look down on political systems whose rulers profess concern for their people but but whose power is unchecked by procedural constrains like rule of law or elections. But moral accountability still has real meaning in the way that authoritarian societies are governed..." It is important to add that moral accountability has real meaning to the ways democracies are governed as well - look at what has happened to our's in the absence of all moral accountability.

The Hand-Jive of Trekkie Approval and Occupy Wall Street Approval.

"The way we are taught to speak about freedom— war on terror and so on—falsifies freedom." warns Žižek, and puts his finger right on the enemy, but misnames it: "You can travel to the moon, you can become immortal by biogenetics, you can have sex with animals or whatever, but look at the field of society and economy. There, almost everything is considered impossible. You want to raise taxes by little bit for the rich. They tell you it’s impossible. We lose competitivity. You want more money for health care, they tell you, 'Impossible,' this means totalitarian state." That isn't totalitarianism. It is the narrative of dystopia and austerity. It is the denatured freedom of the Long Doom.

Free markets are only as good as the rules and dreams that regulate them. If those who believe in it most strongly and want it expressed most purely are taken at their word, as a form of "freedom" capitalism isn't much to crow about. It is not a freedom to consort with whomever you please. Without laws preventing discrimination based on political affiliation, American employers routinely discriminated against socialists. Nor is it the freedom to speak your mind (try that in the American work place now). In the name of pure market freedom, so-called libertarians would take away hard won guards against work place discrimination based on gender and race. So what kind of liberty won't let you marry who you want to marry (or even be married), affiliate with those you agree and believe in, speak your mind, or, if you have the misfortune of being born the wrong sex or color, to be who you want to be.

Trekkie Swag; #OWS Swag

I was twenty-five the first time I traveled to Europe. I am not a rube. By the time I landed in France for the first time I had hitch hike through most of the lower forty-eight. I was very comfortable identifying myself as an American even when that became dangerous. On the eve of the invasion of Iraq I attended a loft party in Paris wearing a Captain America t-shirt. I confused everyone at the party, especially those who knew me and knew I did not support George W. Bush and was against the invasion, which was my intention. "If the only Americans flying the flag are hawks," I told anyone who asked, "then no one will understand that Americans are against this war."

I am aware that the tact I've taken in my posts over the past month or two may seem frivolous; that to seriously consider what it was that was on offer in the Star Trek myth, but also to champion consumerism is clownish, even amongst clowns. But I have done so because I believe that art - no matter how seemingly frivolous - has power; that the stories we tell one another powerfully frames the ways we treat one another. The measure of how terribly our current dream of a free-market 'real' is working are not just that the maximalist strategies it has engendered on Wall Street. Only a mind poisoned by malignant dream would, in the aftermath of a global financial melt down claim: “Financial services are one of the last things we do in this country and do it well." CEO, Bankers, and money manager can easily justify any action as market driven. In their minds, and under law, they answer not to society, but to only to their stockholders.

Raiders: Consumerist vs Corporate

Like a lot of others on both the Left and the Right, Žižek sees our environmental and fiscal problems as a "tragedy of the commons" - it is worth noting, however, that Fukuyama reports that that tragedy was manufactured by a predatory elite. It was a bad dream, not a bad system. The oposite of austerity is not an amoral gluttony, those are two aspects of the same bad dream. The dream of moral accountability that Star Trek projected is a real alternative to capitalism, even if it looks too good to be taken seriously.

As artists, the serious job of criticality is not the only role we have - just the most well respected by serious people. When the status quo is dystopia and austerity it is important that we have the courage to stand with the rubes and clowns who don't know any better and love too dearly. In that regard Gene Roddenberry was a great artist.

Gene Roddenberry going boldly where no one has gone before; Fredric Jameson seriously dismissing the possibility.

2001:Play Time

2011-10-17T06:58:00.000-07:00

I am home from a symposium on visual communication called Look Better where Jordan Tate (who has a great blog) invited me to present a "silent lecture". I joked with friends that it was inevitable that I would one day be paid to not-speak. It turned out however, to be harder, and take much more consideration to say nothing that I ever imagined. I have uploaded a short segment of the project I presented called, 2001:Play Time - it is not embedded here because of copyright. (Which I edited with the generous help of Erik Spooner and Spencer Holstein.) Instead of illustrating an idea (what I originally set out to do), it tests a theory: I suspect there is a relationship that exists between Jacque Tati's film, Play Time, and George Lucas' original Star Wars film. No one has told me this, and I can't find a single mention of Tati by Lucas, but Play Time bridges a gap between Star Wars and a film that Lucas does site as an influence: Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The alienation of control: Kubrick's 2001; Lucas' THX 1138

Lucas talks a lot about his aspiration for his original Star Wars film to recreate the "visual" or "abstract" filmmaking of Kubrick's 2001. And as different as the two films are, and despite having far more dialog, just like 2001, Star Wars is far more interesting if thought about in terms of the story it communicates visually than the literal story its script tells. But there was a discontinuity between the two films - an influence on Lucas somewhere between the time he made the very Kubrick-esque film of modernist alienation THX 1138 in 1970, and the more comedic playful films of modern life that marked his great success: the 1973 Oscar winning American Graffiti and the 1977 scifi blockbuster Star Wars.

Playing with the controls: Tati's Play Time; Lucas' Star Wars

When I first saw Tati's 1967 film Playtime the pieces fell into place. Here was an example of visual filmmaking as sophisticated as Kubrick's (and arguably more radically plot-less of the two), but with a critical vision of modernism that was far less harsh. The modernism of 2001 has a schoolmarm quality: Kubrick's modernity was airless, cold, and serious as a heart attack, but somehow good for us. Play Time was every bit as ambitious an exercise in obsessive modernist world-creation as 2001, but Tati makes it clear that Homo Ludens - man at play - will find his place in the world of the future.

Modern affection; nostalgic (Mon Uncle) and otherwise (American Graffiti)

Star Wars is a film with roots that go back to the earliest moments of scifi, but back to 1936 in particular. That is the year that Flash Gordon premiered - the space adventure Lucas originally intended to make, but failed to get the rights for. 1936 was also the year HG Wells' deadly earnest war-to-end-all-wars tract was made into to the film, Things to Come; and that Charlie Chaplin's masterpiece, Modern Times, came out. As it happens it was the year Jacques Tati wrote and starred in his first film: Soigne to Gauche. Kubrick was an 8 year old, probably listening to radio plays in his parent's home.

Man of the future: Things to Come; Modern Times

When Kubrick told Author C Clarke that he wanted to make first “proverbial good science fiction movie”, he was almost certainly aiming to one-up Wells. 2001 is a Cold War modernist tract that shares the earnest, even patronizing, tone of Things to Come. Play Time meanwhile, was the fully scored promise of Chaplin's late films - Modern Times in particular. Like Chaplin, Tati made Talkies without talk - films where voices were present, but where the slaps of shoes had the same importance as spoken dialog; this was visual filmmaking unwed to the literary tradition of radio plays.

Talkies sans talk: Modern Times; Play Time

George Lucas has never mentioned Tati as an influence. So 2001: Play Time is not an illumination of visual coincidences and influences, it is a thesis expressed as a projection. While Tati's film predates Kubrick's by a year, it wasn't released in the US until 1972, when it was screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival - the same year Lucas' friend and mentor, Francis Ford Coppola, was honored with a retrospective at the SFIFF. Tati held a discussion as part of his appearance at the festival on October 21st, moderated by Albert Johnson, only a few days after Johnson interviewed the 33 year old Coppola (dressed in an orange velvet suit on October 18th) on the same stage. It is hard to imagine Lucas would not have been around and would have over looked Play Time... but again, this is a thesis, not a proof.

At the gap: M. Hulot; the Skywalker twins

Star Trek: Utopians at War

2011-10-12T09:14:00.000-07:00

HG Wells, JT Kirk

"This is now a war for peace" wrote the Radium Age scifi master, H.G. Wells, in 1914, "This is the greatest of all wars, not just another war - it is the last war!" In 1932, as if answering Wells directly, but also predicting the rest of the 20th century, the Nazi jurist Carle Schmitt wrote "Such a war is necessarily unusually intense and inhuman because, by transcending the limits of political framework, it simultaneously degrades the enemy into moral and other categories and is forced to make of him a monster that must not only be defeated but utterly destroyed."

In his intellectual history, The First Total War, David A. Bell argues that peace, as Wells understood it as an end to barbarism, was born along side democracy during the Enlightenment, and that just as Schmitt saw it, had transformed all war into existential battles against savages; that it was the utopia goal itself that had modern warfare "unusually intense and inhuman." It might seem to make sense then that in the aftermath of the most destructive of the 'wars to end all wars' and in the shadow of the very real possibility nuclear holocaust, Gene Roddenberry imagined an utopian warship. But Star Trek wasn't just a later day democratic myth; it was the first great myth of consumer culture. The Enterprise was not built for total war, it was built to fight wars of conscience - exactly the sorts of wars consumerists fight.

Captain James T Kirk: Jacques-Louis David, The Oath of Horatii (1784)

Bell writes that, since the earliest moments of the Enlightenment, "The dream of perpetual peace and the nightmare of total war have been bound together in complex and disturbing ways, each sustaining the other... During the eighteenth-century, as in previous centuries, most Western cultures accepted war as an inevitable, and ordinary, facet of human existence. Western rulers saw war as their principal purpose and fought constantly." Total war was an innovation of early modern democracies in which for the first time war had come to be seen in a "new manner, as an unfathomable extreme, set outside the ordinary bounds of social existence, that could only end in total victory or total defeat."

As grim and bloody as the terrible religious wars of the Reformation were, Bell points out in their aftermath, "Armies were relatively small, major battles relatively infrequent (though devastating when they occurred), and civilians relatively well treated." Those were the earliest moments of the Enlightenment. That trend of aristocratic "restrained warfare," argues Bell, led to "secular eighteenth-century writers described peace as the culmination of entirely natural social changes that were already visible and taking place according to scientifically observable laws." For the first time, thinkers could begin to imagine the permanent absence of war and their imaginations "followed a common path of historical evolution from savage beginnings toward ever-greater levels of peaceful civilization, politeness, and commercial exchange." According to Bell, no sooner than that perpetual peace was conceptualized, did it become the justification for all out war.

James T Kirk the reluctant warrior.

Once the aristocratic model of "virtually permanent but restrained warfare" fell away, and war became for those early moderns something barbaric, outside the fabric of civilized norms all bets were off. The dream of perpetual peace "produced the widespread conviction" Bell writes, that one's "enemies were themselves bent on a 'war of extermination.'" Bell reluctantly agrees with Schmitt's judgment, that it is the modern concept of peace that "helped demonize enemy populations and made it almost impossible to see enemy soldiers as honorable adversaries or enemy noncombatants as innocent bystanders." And at the same time war began to be seen as "the ultimate test of a society and of an individual self. They began to imagine it as elemental, cleansing even redemptive."

Stalin, Hitler, Tojo and perhaps Patton may have adopted that ideal of war as cleansing and redemptive, but by the second half of 20th century few moderns saw war as anything beyond a terrible necessity. That model of the more reluctant warrior is the ideal consumerism inherited from American democracy. Every order has its founding myth. And while Enlightenment thinkers rejected the aristocratic ideal of perpetual war, Bell describes the importance of Spartans as manly exemplars for democratic hawks from Rousseau forward as uncompromising defenders of perpetual peace. That the Battle of Thermopylae was invoked by the racist Frank Miller film in thee rush to war against Iraq is a symptom of America's retreat from consumerism - Thermopylae is one of the founding myths of modern democracy. Kirk is more Cincinnatus than Leonidas.

Captain Kirk; King Leonidas

James T Kirk is a democratic manly man, but he was conceived durring a moment in which American democracy was making way for consumerism, he pointedly mild in comparison to the un-compromising militancy of King Leonidas, but that is because consumerism not only made far more radical promises of equality than any democracy ever had before; consumerism did so without ever appealing to the Puritanical utilitarianism that had long stiffen the spine of democracy's hawks.

Democracy promises truth and justice. Consumerism promises fun and happiness. Americans invented consumer culture but they have slipped back into more war-like democratic habits of mind. Before the Cold War was finished they initiated the War on Drugs, and while they still fight that war with a venom they have given the majority of their attention to the War on Terror. These are the wars of a democracy. They are existential threats fought against inhuman savages. Even the Iraq War, which was a naked resource grab, wrapped itself in the rhetoric of apocalyptic threat. But consumer culture has by now spread to every nook and corner of the globe. So while the Star Trek franchise no longer resembles the consumerist utopia it began as, there are now other myths created by those who grew up far from the light of America's shiny future.

Constant Nieuwenhuys, New Babylon (1959-74); Pax-Starfleet (2009)

David Bell writes that although Karl Marx "saw class conflict (which is conflict within societies, not between them) as the motor of historical change, he still believed it would eventually lead to a condition of social harmony and perpetual peace." Like Marx, the early 20th century utopianism of Corbusier, other inter-war Modernists and some of the more recent utopian prognostications of contemporary sigulitarians, all the visionaries who have projected the abundance of modern industrialized economies forward to imagine cornucopian economies have descended "from precisely the liberal Enlightenment-era thinking that dismissed war as primitive, irrational, and alien to modern civilization." The promise has always been that the new wealth will be accompanied by peace; that when we are all rich we will all be civilized and there will be nothing left to fight over.

The architect Constant Nieuwenhuys was a year older than Roddenberry, and like Roddenberry spent almost thirty years imagining an anti-capitalist postscarcity utopia. According to Mark Wigley, Constant's New Babylon was a "60s paradise of love and solidarity and all that" that Constant realized "people will actually kill each other, because we’re dark, miserable creatures... He spent the last four years of the project showing the horror of what it would be like to live in New Babylon." Constant's despair is the grim aspect of the Enlightenment dream of perpetual peace that inspired him to imagine New Babylon in the first place. Constant lost faith in the logical ideal of the Enlightenment. In his Culture novels, the scifi author Iain M Banks breaks with the Enlightenment attitude towards war, and imagines a utopian civilization that make the logical choice to fight a war. Most crucially Banks explains what Roddenberry and his heirs never did - why someone like Kirk, who could have lived a long life of luxury that today's wealthiest consumers would covet, would choose to spend his life aboard a war ship.

In Star Trek violence is always a failure of logic.

The parallel between Banks imagined militant utopia that fights a war against an enemy of religious fanatics and the neocon 'clash of civilizations' is easy to make, but that parallel is false. Banks was in no way imagining a doctrine of "preventive war." In the twilight of the Cold War, Banks imagined a war fought by decadent happy consumerist anarchists against imperialist idealists. But Banks is careful to say that the Culture was not threatened physically by their enemy, that he is imagining a war fought not out of utility but out of choice.

The utopia Banks imagines is an idealized EU rave on a galactic scale - an anarcho-socialism of well-fed and creative secularists screwing each other's brains out juiced up on designer drugs. Francis Fukuyama calls history's "last man... men without chests" and imagines them "concerned above all with his own personal health and safety... content to sit at home, congratulating themselves on their broadmindedness and lack of fanaticism." Since WWII we have entered a second era of "restrained warfare", the incidence of war, especially between democracies, has been in steady decline over the post 60 years, peopled by men supposedly too self-concerned to rouse themselves to war. Banks is able to imagine what men without chests would fight and die for.

Red Shirts

In his first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas, published two years before the fall of the Berlin wall, Banks does what the inheritor's of Roddenberry franchise have failed to do, articulate why a society so "beyond considerations of wealth or empire," a society of atheist hedonists who can afford to indulge any desire, would desire to go to war for what they believe in. "The Culture's most precious quality... and treasured possession" Banks explains, is it's "clarity of conscience." The only desire that Banks imagines the Culture can not satisfy from within itself, and therefore would be willing to go to war for is "the not to feel useless."

Bell Wrote his intellectual history of war in 2007, well into the two wars made by Americans after the September 11th attacks. "Today, these twin languages of war and peace define the extremes of Western, and particularly American, thinking on the subject." writes Bell. I think he is half right. The reasons for starting the Iraq War were a moving target, but on its face it was the sort of war democracies fight. With us, or against us; an existencial threat, and supposedly fought for peace. It seems more likely that it was on the agenda well before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That it was a strategic war with great geopolitical utility. There is very little about the Iraq War that can give a consumer culture any degree of "clarity of conscience."

"Beam me up Scotty, this planet sucks."

But with the war in Afganistan, while obviously poorly conceived and incompetently executed, the Bush Administration entered exactly the sort of war they had no interest in, and had repeatedly dismissed and maligned before September 11th as "Nation building." Afganistan began as a response, but all along the war has been more like the intervention in Bosnia or the attempt to pull Somalia out of anarchy. Those were wars where there was no oil; no need for new military bases or wealthy allies who needed help. Not the Bush family's typical war. These were wars fought, not only in the absence of an existential threat, but very little strategic importance.

These were also exactly the sorts of wars Banks imagined. Wars fought by peoples largely absorbed in concerns about their own "personal health and safety... congratulating themselves on their broadmindedness and lack of fanaticism." That is a pretty fair assessment of Bill Clinton - the president that actually lead the American people to fight wars that had no obvious national utility. But rather than "sit at home" as Fukuyama predicted, US consumerists rallied in support of wars that gave their comfortable, safe lives deeper meaning; they were fought in order to satisfy American, Asian, and European consumerists' "urge not to feel useless." Clinton wasn't a capitalist, he was a consumerist. (Continue Reading)

The forces of consumerism.

Star Trek and Satiability

2011-10-11T08:30:00.000-07:00

Binge Drinking: Evil Kirk and anti-Occupy Wall Street

Critics of consumerism, on both the Right and Left, usually count it as one of capitalism's sins. But according to Richard Wilkinson, modern consumerist societies require some level of relative income equality for good health. The laissez faire capitalism of the 19th Century (the brand championed by Rupert Murdoch's media outlets and the Koch brother's lobbying industry), made no concessions to address income disparity (I will leave it to Slavoj Žižek to explain the inadequacy of charity.) The socialism that rose up to challenge that era's unrestrained capitalism's misery was a demand for complete economic equality. Star Trek is often described as a socialist utopia, but that hides its greater aspect. David Simon, who grew up in consumer culture and is now as the creator of The Wire, is one of its most successful creator-class, argues beautifully in a recent talk, "If you believe in group insurance you are a socialist." But that leaves the question of what you believe in if you are a consumerist. There is a simple ethical test that delivers a very peculiar answer: What would Kirk do?

There are a couple episodes of Star Trek, in which we get a glimpse at what an Evil Captain Kirk, In one, Mirror, Mirror, Kirk switches place with his counterpart from an alternate universe where The Federation is an Imperialist power. In another, The Enemy Within, Kirk's 'good side' and 'bad side' are split into two different Kirks. I am not a big Star Trek guy, but I grew up at a time before VCRs and when you might have three or four choices of what to watch on TV. So on some level I have internalized the show - I remember how jarring the behavior of the Evil Kirks were. They were drunks, gropers, and violent: unconstrained. The Kirk-test (WWKD) is a tongue in cheek approach, but the answer it points to is not. It is a uniquely modern form of equality and much more illusive modern ideal of satiability.

Evil Kirk grabbing all he can, Occupy Wall Street protestor grabbed.

In his new book, The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama writes that, "Inequality has never been a big problem in American political culture, which emphasizes equality of opportunity rather than outcomes. But"--and this is a very big "but", because, following the Industrial Revolution inequality was a very big problem in America, one that nearly derailed our democracy and came to a head repeatedly before it burst under the pressure of the Great Depression.

"But", Fukuyama continues, "the system remains legitimate only as long as people believe that by working hard and doing their best, they and their children have a fair shot at getting ahead, and that the wealthy got there by the rules." It is intellectually dishonest of Fukuyama to pretend that this is still the deal. The American system lost all legitimacy in the century following the Industrial Revolution for the exact reasons he lists.

What Ailes.

In the 1930s Americans began negotiating a New Deal, but it would take them 30 more years to articulate a new Dream. It is as dishonest to pretend that what emerged from the ashes of the Depression and the fires of WWII were just a change in American governance. The most profound change Americans made was one in the manner in which they thought about economic disparity. Poverty and wealth were no longer binary.

For Victorians it was morally acceptable to wear a fine pair of expensive boots to walk streets awash in sewage and shoeless children. For those Victorian capitalists wealth was a simple matter of "the haves", and the "have-nots". That's not consumerism. Consumerism may be shallow and vulgar, but it is not uncompassionate. Consumer culture has negotiated inequity by giving everyone everything, but doing so unequally: the haves and the have-more-better-sooners.

Evil Kirk; Anthony Bologna

Unlike Bolsheviks, consumers have no qualms with decadence. You might have more cloths than me. Your refrigerator may be top of line while mine is a down market off-brand cheapy. You and I can happily stand next to one another even though your shoes cost $2500.00 and mine $25.00; no one would raise an eyebrow. You can even own three luxury cars to my occasional economy rental, and get the latest gadgets years ahead of me; but the understanding implicit deal - the social contract - is that we both get to drive, and that eventually I'll be able to afford cheaper versions of new technologies down the line.

Consumer culture's unique mechanism for dealing with disparity totally breaks down when you get healthcare and I don't. When you have a home and I am homeless. When you can afford a wedding and I can't. When you have children and I have none. When your crimes go unpunished and mine are enforced. When you own things that I cannot afford at all. The danger of a Victorian ethic of binary wealth is reasserting itself is far to easily imagined.

The Enemy Within: gluttony

In his latest book, Rule 34, the science fiction author Charles Stross imagines a near future with an all too familiar back-story:

...with a global recession followed by a stuttering shock wave of corporate scandals as rock-ribbed enterprises were exposed as hollow husks run by conscience-free predators who were even less community-minded and altruistic than gangsters. The ravenous supermarket chains had gutted the entire logistics and retail sector, replacing high-street banks and post offices as well as food stores and gas stations, recklessly destroying community infrastructure; manufacturers had outsourced production to the cheapest oversea bidders, hollowing out middle class incomes on which consumer capitalism depended: The prison-industrial complex, higher education, and private medical sectors were intent on milking public purses that no longer had a solid tax base. with which to pay.

I lumped Stross in with the wildly creative mythomaniacs of the Second Scottish Enlightenment, but it turns out he is from Leads (I couldn't tell Welsh rarebit From a Scotch Egg to save my life). Even if not technically correct Stross is still a great fit, because like the Scots, his scifi deals with more than just the future of science and technology. Like his Northern peers, Stross' politics are at least a wee bit Red (wee bit is Irish I think, wht a mess), and his fiction is most concerned with political and economic developments. And he is no light weight. Stross has the distinction of being the favorite scifi author of Nobel Prize-winning Princeton economist and New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman. So his ideas about the future of capitalism are worth special consideration. "Maximizing short term profit worked brilliantly for sociopathic executives looking to climb the corporate ladder" Stross observes, "but as a long-term strategy for stability, a spiraling Gini coefficient left a lot to be desired." (What he said.)

Mirror, Mirror: ant-Star Trek; Sociopathic Executives

If the back-story of Rule 34 is our present, the future it describes could easily be Captain Kirk's past. Stross imagines a economy of fabrication devises capable of manufacturing objects with multiple parts and materials (like realistic sex dolls and weapons), and even growing edible flesh. It is a near enough future that there is a complex international regime of intellectual property rights enforcement for these primitive replicators, but a regime already bedeviled by black marketeers, pirating, malware, and spammers; and requiring a criminal code so complex that police need "decision-support software to figure out what to charge people with."

The bureaucracy Stross imagines will be required for "catching corporate corruption before it metastasizes and infects society at large" is even more unwieldy (but not at all improbable):

If corporations wanted to be legal citizens, the politicians riding the backlash declared, they could damned well shoulder the responsibilities of good citizenship as well as the benefits. Social as well as financial audits were the order of the day. Directives outlining standards for corporate citizenship were drafted and a lucrative niche for a new generation of management consultants emerged--those who could look at an organization and sound a warning if its structure rewarded pathological behavior.

Don't be Evil

The pathologies of consumerism are all pathologies of gluttony. There is no need to ban corporate 'personhood', but there is a very real need figure out ways of encouraging them to be good people, and perhaps of reserving the right to execute them when they be evil. But in order to get there we have to be able to see the problem. In his book, Fukuyama explains that our modern moral code that guards against theft overwrites an older code that was concerned first and foremost with sharing. Our traditions of food sharing; our expectations of generosity from hosts and courtesies of guests, are tribal traditions that go back to economies of scarcity. But these are traditions that glorified overindulgence - binge drinking and over eating remain a core element of most high holidays - at least in my family.

In a 1841 speech to his hometown temperance society, Abraham Lincoln counseled against the "thundering tones of anathema and denunciation," and urged the teetotalers to adopt a rhetoric of "erring man to an erring brother." That was 80 years before those thundering tones became the 18th Amendment, and the of anathema and denunciation of Prohibition was the law of the land for a decade. It would be over a century after Lincoln's speech that Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith would speak "erring man to an erring brother" and create the first 12-step program. It was 40 more years before, as a society, we began to address binge drinking and drunk driving publicly. And finally it is only in the last fifteen or twenty years that alcoholism has lost some of its stigma.

The World of Tomorrow: One Day at a Time

And while Roddenberry clearly believed that no one would smoke in the future, it has been only the last ten years that we have begun to figure out ways to get people to stop smoking in public. Mark Bittman writes that "The public war against tobacco has worked, if imperfectly: Americans smoke at half the rate they once did, half of all smokers have quit, and the tobacco companies finance strong anti-smoking campaigns." Bittman is the New York Times food critic, he is writing about anti-smoking campaigns because he believes the time has come to make obesity an issue of public health. In his desire to tax sugary drinks and fatty foods Bittman is out in front of the issue but he is not alone. First Lady Michelle Obama has made childhood obesity the center post of her time in the White House. But we are a long way before a waiter will refuse to serve the morbidly obese the way bartenders have learned to turn away pregnant women.

Alcoholism and obesity may seem distant cousins, if related at all, to global warning and pathological concentrations of wealth, but these are all forms of gluttony. Some may argue that there is a difference in kind; matters of private choice on one side, matters public policy on the other. "A good deal of theorizing about the importance of private property rights concern what is called the tragedy of the commons." writes Fukuyama. one way of theorizing both environmental degradation and market collapses have been to imagine them as tragedies of the commons, and to "It is not clear to what extent the tragedy of the commons" he continues, "was a real problem in English history." By which he means not a material problem; it was however a very real societal one: "the wealthy landowners who drove peasants off communal property in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had strong motives for doing so. But in the open-field system" Fukuyama admits, "land was not as a rule overexploited or wasted." The real problem was gluttony. Unfortunately we do not have a century to experiment with wrongheaded methods of environmental and financial self-regulation. It is more important than ever before to resist the enclosure attempts of wealthy elites. That requires overwriting our modern moral code with a new set of values - one more like Kirk's. (Continue reading.)

Heal Thy Self.

Star Trek: A Diamond Age Social Contract

2011-10-10T06:26:00.000-07:00

Debating the future: Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (1969); Occupy Wall Street (2011)

In his new book, The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama writes that, "In tribal societies justice between individuals is a bit like contemporary international relations, based on the self-help of rival groups in a world where there is no third party enforce or rules." This is the bread and butter of libertarian thinkers in the mold of Friedrich Hayek, who believe that the formation of the rule of law was an organic and incremental process. But "Hayek was simply wrong about certain of his historical facts" Fukuyama observes that; and that "although law did precede legislation in many societies, political authorities frequently stepped in to alter it, even in early societies." He also points out that Hayek makes "not a single reference to, yet religion is clearly a critical source of legal rules in Jewish, Christian, Hindu, and Muslim societies." Fukuyama's point is not only that religious text form the bedrock of legal systems, but that the kinds of things people believe, the stories they tell to one another as a society, for better or worse, shape the directions societies take. Star Trek is exactly that sort of story (for better); Hayek's libertarianism another (for worse).

"Even when they were initially imposed through violence or conquest," argues Fukuyama, because religious codes date back to a time when "There was no separation between religious and secular realms, and therefore no way to articulate social consensus other than in religious terms," they represent a (one-time) consensus. "For how can a mere institution constrain the rich and powerful if they don't on some level believe in the need for self-constraint, or at least the need to constrain others like themselves?" The story Hayek told, of small-government freedom, has allowed elites to leave behind all constraint. Star Trek told a very different story. It represented a remarkable moment of consensus between Rockefeller Cold Warriors, scientists, engineers, designers, and artists - including science fiction authors. It was a moment when the rich and powerful saw clearly the possibility of a cornucopia of wealth, and non-the-less, believed in the need for constraint.

The Last Battlefield: deciding the future.

Religions were the stories we told ourselves about our origins when we nothing of those origins. We now have a much clearer sense of where we come from, but we still need myths to tell us about where we are going and, most importantly, why. Neal Stephenson believes the job of science fiction is to provide "fully thought-out picture of an alternate reality in which some sort of compelling innovation has taken place." But just as the least compelling element of religious myths are the nuts and bolts of their origin stories (...and the there was light), the most compelling elements of myths is when they offer us something to believe in (do unto others...), the most compelling element of Star Trek has never been its technology, it has always been its moral code.

Stephenson takes issue with his literary peers for allowing dystopian skepticism to displace imagining more positive possibilities. "Believing we have all the technology we’ll ever need, we seek to draw attention to its destructive side effects. This seems foolish now that we find ourselves saddled with technologies like Japan’s ramshackle 1960’s-vintage reactors at Fukushima when we have the possibility of clean nuclear fusion on the horizon." Stephenson's point, that scifi should be "supplying big visions that make sense," is laudable. But those big visions need to be more than just the sorts of nuts and bolts engineering projects he mentions in his essay, scifi needs to offer positive visions of how we can live together in the future.

Constraint on the Battlefield

We are living through a moment when there is a great deal of confusion about the parts of our economy that most resemble the cornucopian economy of Star Trek (digitized content). In his book, The Diamond Age, Stephenson imagined an economy built around Star Trek-like nano-tech matter compilers, but a society built around supranational tribes called "phyles" that are loosely organized around ethnic lines. The three great phyles - the Han, the Nippon, and the Neo-Victorians - work together, in a League of Nations kind of way, to maintain and enforce property rights. Unlike Star Trek, which tried to imagine a future for consumer culture that was beyond capitalism, Stephenson retreated to the moral codes and hierarchies of early capitalism. But while even Slavoj Žižek admits that looking forward to imagine what might come after capitalism is almost impossible, the past does offer some hints as what we might expect.

It's understandable why Ray Kurzweil and Bill Gates, who profit from those leading edge information economies, might hope for a future where file sharing is a mortal sin. But Peter Frase's thought experiment, anti-Star Trek - a far less transcendent concept of an "all-encompassing intellectual property regime" - is, like the Kurzweil/Gates Godhead and Stephenson's dystopic phyles, a scheme for maintaining profit in a cornucopian economy. All Fraze does is extend today's laws and enforcement mechanisms forward, imagining how they would maintain intellectual property rights in a world with 'replicators.' In Frase's opinion, his far from radical anti-Star Trek is "a terrifying dystopia, a reductio ad absurdum of the worst trends in contemporary capitalism.'"

Imagining the future on the Last Battle Field

It is doubly revealing that Star Trek, a consensus struck during some of the hottest years of the Cold War, was to imagine consumerism eventuating a cashless cornucopian economy. Stephenson reports: "A grizzled NASA veteran" once told him "that the Apollo moon landings were communism’s greatest achievement." But his informant was wrong; consumerism was the greatest achievement of the Cold War. A measure of how different it is from capitalism is that any honest attempt to imagine schemes for extracting profit within consumerism's founding myth, instantly transform Star Trek utopias into wretched dystopias.

For the past 30 years, the assumption has been that because capitalism was the mechanism that produced consumer culture, that consumerism was ancillary; a subordinate part of a greater free-market whole. But what real-world schemes to extract greater and greater amounts of profit from consumers have revealed, is not only that capitalism-run-amuck threatens to kill the golden goose, but that the golden goose is consumerism not capitalism. According to Paul Krugman, since 1979, middle-class incomes have barely grown while the incomes of the wealthiest 15 have risen by a factor of six. American CEOs were earning 20 times what a middle-managers earned in 1950, the difference is 475 to 1 today. The pay off: a global consumer economy in shambles, and still those who believe Hayek's stories howl against what little constraint is left.

Cruelty on the Battlefield

Judged by our current moment, it would appear Stephenson's neo-Victorian dystopia is closer to being realized than Roddenberry's utopia. The push for ever-greater profits that has taken place under the flag of Libertarianism has driven us backwards towards the Victorian moral universe that spawned the immiseration of labor that Marx believed was an 'inevitability' of capitalism. As capitalist economic development reaches the farthest corners of the global south, the ever-widening gap between rich and poor - both within and between nations - threatens to unmake the consumer culture that has spurred the innovation and economic development that has characterized the Postwar years.

Like the Apollo space program, consumer culture was born in response to the challenge posed by communism. Not the military or industrial threat, the threat communism posed was to the imagination: to occupy the hearts and minds with the image of a better world. There was for a time a very real danger communism would entirely displace capitalism's place in the world of tomorrow. As that threat faded and then disappeared capitalism has reasserted it's claim on the future and, as Stephenson points out, "the techno-optimism of the Golden Age of SF has given way to fiction written in a generally darker, more skeptical and ambiguous tone." But as Kevin Kelly observes: "You can't spend all day in an open-sourced, all-sharing, peer-to-peer network and not begin to think that the rest of your world should also operate in the same way." (Continued reading.)

Consumer Heats and Minds

Star Trek and Gluttony

2011-10-05T07:50:00.000-07:00

Deseases of excess; Captain Kirk, Ayn Rand

My friend Guan asked where "rugged individualism" fits into my understanding of the American Dream and pointed me to a post by J. Bradford DeLong. "What has survived throughout is the American myth of rugged individualism," DeLong writes. "The power of this myth has meant that the United States is not, and never will be, a European-style social democracy. People may come together for barn raisings, but America is still the land of upward mobility and opportunity, where the most common questions are, I've done it, so why haven't you?" But the truth is almost no Americans have "done it". Jeb Bush, who is the grandson of a US Senator, son of one US President and brother of another, once claimed to be a "self-made man". Most of those who claim to have "done it" usually mean: "Fuck you, I got mine." Any Rand, "famously a believer in rugged individualism," but after a lifetime of heavy smoking and venomous opposition to government social welfare programs, Rand became ill with lung cancer and accepted Social Security and Medicare payments.

What ails the America Dream is not rugged individualism. After all the Founding Fathers were rugged individualists. The scifi author and self-described Libertarian, David Brin, points out that "they also knew the frontier virtue satiability -- the notion that getting rich is great... [but that] there comes a point where enough is enough; and sometimes even too much." Consumerism started out as an American Dream, and while all the diseases of consumerism - global warming, environmental degradation, obesity, alcoholism, pornification - are all diseases of excess, consumerism is not, and was never, a dream of excess. In his new book, The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama describes human institutions as "sticky," that they "persist over time and are changed only with great difficulty." Excess is a deeply sticky institution - one that dates back to our deepest evolutionary past in which we lived as boom and bust hunter-gatherers.

Mr. Spock is immune, but Mr. Nimoy is not.

Fukuyama points out us that, "There is considerable speculation on the part of evolutionary psychologists that the almost universal contemporary practice of meal sharing (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Passover) is derived from millennia long practice of sharing the proceeds of hunts." Small bands of hunter gathers, with no technologies for storing food living under perpetual (or perhaps punctuated) scarcity, have moral rules that "are not directed at individuals who steal other's property but rather against those who refuse to share food and other necessities."

Fukuyama explains that, the first agrarian economies produced private property "held not by individuals but by lineages or other kin groups, and much of their motivation was not simply economic but religious and social as well." That ancestor worship tied a family to the land they owned, "making it impossible for individuals to sell or other wise alienate it." Fukuyama's conservative credentials are above reproach, but he admits that "The way customary property rights yielded to modern ones was much more violent, and power and deceit played a large roll."

Hording: Tribbles; Xanadu

On his blog Peter Frase challenged himself to imagine an anti-Star Trek, a postscarcity economy of replicators and free energy, but unlike the cashless socialist utopia of Kirk and his crew, Frase sets himself to imagine a universe in which copyright regimes maintain intellectual property rights. Frase asks, "Given the material abundance made possible by the replicator, how would it be possible to maintain a system based on money, profit, and class power?" The key to Frase's anti-Star Trek is the peculiar character of intellectual property rights, where the nominal right to control what own becomes the right to control what I own.

"In order to get access to a replicator" Frase explains, "you have to buy one from a company that licenses you the right to use a replicator. (Someone can’t give you a replicator or make one with their replicator, because that would violate their license). What’s more, every time you make something with the replicator, you also need to pay a licensing fee to whoever owns the rights to that particular thing." The point is not to encourage economic activity (because economic activity is a means to satisfy human needs, not a human need in and of it self), but to "maintain a system based on money, profit, and class power". Frase imagines a postscarcity future overlaid by a hierarchy for-profit capitalist enterprise. In his scheme four Estates ("Creative class", Lawyers, Marketers, and "Guard-labor") all riding herd on a commons of the permanently under-employed.

The entrepreneur class: Ray Kurzwiel, some dude, Bill Gates, Arne Darvin, and Cyrano Jones

Frase is not alone in trying to imagine a postscarcity capitalism. In his book, The Singularity is Near, the futurist Ray Kurzweil includes an interview with the founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates. In it the two singlitarians imagine a religion for a time in the (near) future when technology would have conquered death. Together, the multi-millionaire inventor and multi-billionaire businessman imagine a religion based on "The Golden Rule"; one in which the first commandment is intellectual property:

Ray: Right, our morality and legal system are based on respect for the consciousness of others. If I hurt another person, that's considered immoral, and probably illegal, because I have caused suffering to another conscious person. If I destroy property, its generally okay if it's my property, and the primary reason it's immoral and illegal if it's someone else's property is because I have caused suffering not to the property but to the person owning it.
Bill: And the secular principle?
Ray: From the arts and sciences, it is the importance of knowledge. Knowledge goes beyond information. It's information that has meaning for conscious entities: music, art literature, science, technology. These are the qualities that will expand from the trends I'm talking about.
Bill: We need to get away from the ornate and strange stories in contemporary religions and concentrate on some simple messages. We need a charismatic leader for this new religion.
Ray: A charismatic leader is part of the old model. That's something we want to get away from.
Bill: Okay, a charismatic computer, then.
Ray: How about a charismatic operating system?
Bill: Ha, we've already got that. So is there a God in this religion?
Ray: Not yet, but there will be. Once we saturate the matter and energy in the universe with intelligence, it will "wake up," be conscious, and sublimely intelligent.

A study in gluttony: Mr. Spock, Dr McCoy, Dragline and Cool Hand Luke

To be as rich as Bill Gates, or even Ray Kurzweil is to already inhabit a postscarcity economy. They are imagining a future in which they will be Gods "saturating" the universe. They are cooking up a religion not for themselves - after all they already believe in the sanctity of intellectual property - they are imagining a code for the rest of us to learn, and follow. To break the law Frase's secular Anti-Star Trek future would be criminality: "Anyone who tries to supply their needs from their replicator without paying the copyright cartels would become an outlaw," writes Frase, "like today’s online file-sharers." To break the law under the Godhead of Kurzweil/Gates is to sin.

What Frase recognizes, and Kurzweil/Gates do not, is that these schemes have an obvious failure mode. "And then, of course, there are the masses." Frase writes. "Would the power of ideology be strong enough to induce people to accept the state of affairs I’ve described? Or would people start to ask why the wealth of knowledge and culture was being enclosed within restrictive laws, when 'another world is possible' beyond the regime of artificial scarcity?"

Tribbles and Teetotalers; Kirk and his Science officer, Bill W. and his sponsor

Laws, religious or secular, depend on the perception of justice and fairness. "The vast majority of people in any peaceful society obey the law not so much because they are making a rational calculation based on costs and benefits, and fear of punishment." writes Fukuyama. "They obey because they believe the law is fundamentally fair, and they are morally obligated to follow it. They are much less inclined to obey the law if they believe it is unjust." What possible perception of fairness or justice could be attached to a regime of property owners lording control over a self-replicating means of production?

It is impossible to imagine that both Frase's anti-Star Trek and the Gates/Kurzweil Godhead wouldn't collapse under their the weight of their obvious unfairness and injustice. But Fukuyama's book suggests a very different possibility for the future of property: satiability. (Continue reading.)

The Enemy Within: James T Kirk; JP Morgan

Star Trek and Postscarcity Consumerism

2011-10-03T13:53:00.000-07:00

James Doohan and Simon Pegg as Scotty

Even if many Americans have lost track of the full promise of the American Dream - the dream that a nation's wealth is measured not simply by how great it is, but how greatly it is shared - our cousins in Scotland have not. I have no idea what they're putting in scotch eggs these days, but between Charles Stross, Ken MacLeod, Grant Morrison and Mark Millar, the Scots have a lock on myth creation at the moment. The Godfather of this second Scottish Enlightenment is Iain M. Banks, who describes his Culture novels as his own "secular heaven". But while Banks says that he "could [n]ever write in someone else's universe like Star Wars or Star Trek, as it would be too restrictive" his Culture series clearly picks up where Roddenberry left off - projecting into a distant future where the United Federation of Planets has grown into a galaxy-spanning civilization of multiple humanoid species and massively powerful artificial intelligences.

Like Roddenberry, Banks' first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas, imagines a future in which the concept of money is regarded "as a crude, over-complicated and inefficient form of rationing." Roddenberry never really filled out the world of tomorrow too far beyond the bridge of the Enterprise, but the glimpses he gave us were what gave his universe its great appeal. Banks' books fill in crucial territory about life in a Star Trek-like postscarcity world, "where the capacity of production ubiquitously and comprehensively exceeds every reasonable (and in some cases, perhaps, unreasonable) demand its not unimaginative citizens could make."

Kirk explaining that as a matter-of-fact there is no money in the future and after a reboot, offering to buy Uhura a drink.

Like the Federation, Banks' Culture is imagined as a cashless society where housing is free, work is voluntary, citizens are enlightened free of every imaginable bigotry and peace loving. Like the Federation it is a largely cloudless socialist utopia. Banks describes it as "completely spiffing, super and brill," but admits, "if the books said that and nothing else they'd induce nothing but yawns." To make for more enjoyable reading (they're really fun) he writes from "the point of view of somebody who's skeptical about or even opposed to the Culture." This also allows Banks to explain the hows and why-fors of free housing, and other postscarcity schemes.

As far as I know (I am not a Trekkie), Roddenberry never explained how his cashless society worked - and while I haven't read all of the Culture novels (yet) Banks takes care to explain life beyond capitalism. In his imagined universe the inefficient rationing of market capitalism has been replaced by algorithmic driven logistics. In the Culture humanoids flourish and have a say, but immensely powerful artificial intelligence, or Minds, organize all of society's incidental affairs. The Culture is a fantasy almost as old as ideal worlds - a nanny state with no need for nannycams.

Socrates (469-399 BCE) V'ger (1979)

In Book V of the Republic Socrates imagines the ideal guardians for the Just City: a class of men raised to believe a "noble lie," that they have no parents and are instead the children of earth. These guardians trained in statecraft would not be allowed to form families, but instead would have many partners and their children would be raised communally:

So, as I am saying, doesn't what was said before and what's being said now form them into true guardians, still more and cause them not to draw the city apart by not all giving the name "my own" to the same thing, but different men giving it to different things--one man dragging off to his own house whatever he can get his hands on apart from the others, another being separate in his own house with separate women and children, introducing private pleasures and griefs of things that are private?

In his latest book, The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama points out that Socrates' guardians are the dream of rule by slaves. "The idea that there is a tension between loyalty to the family and just political order" is a problem in all societies. Banks' Minds can easily be imagined as both slaves and rulers not unlike the Mamluks and Janisaries of medieval Islam. According to Fukuyama, Libertarians like Friedrich Hayek believe that, "The bulk of knowledge in a society was local in character and disperses throughout the the whole society; no individual could master enough information to anticipate the effects of a planned change in the laws or rules." Banks makes an end run around Hayek and imagines a class of individual that could master the information, and would do so without subverting the system to benefit itself or its family - the Minds require no noble lie.

The quiet dispair of Saarinen Tulips on the original Enterprise; Ten Forward twenty-five years later.

The most interesting parts of the Culture novels are not the hows, however, they are the why-fors; the moments when Banks pauses to explain what meaning work, or anything else, might have in a world where all material needs were met effortlessly, and where artificial Minds and mechanical drones can outmatch any human effort, ability, or craft where medicine has conquered addiction and every imaginable STD and social dysfunction. In the series' third book, Use of Weapons, Banks has one of his skeptics question an academic - who could as easily be taking part in an orgy, sitting by a pool, or studying his field of interest - why he instead voluntarily chooses to clean tables at a bar:

"Of coarse I don't have to do this... but"--he slapped the table--"when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you've done something. It's an achievement... My wiping a table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway"--the man laughed--"people die; stars die; universes die. What is an achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And, "the man said with a smile, "it's a good way of meeting people."

Americans deeply under the sway of flowers of Hayek and his half-with step-daughter Ayn Rand, have set to attacking the foundations of consumer culture by means of democracy. The American Left believes that it is democracy that is under threat and that consumerism is the enemy, but I respectfully disagree. The Koch brothers and other right wing reactionaries, are exactly that: reactionaries. They pretend to worship free markets but they are hypocrites and hate mongers; the real God these so-called Libertarians worship is not free markets, it is private property. The most remarkable aspect of Star Trek as the founding myth of consumerism, however, is that the moment property enters the picture the utopia is instantly transformed into a dystopia. (Continue reading.)

Friedrich Hayek and the trouble with property in a postscarcity economy.

Star Trek and the American Dream

2011-09-30T07:10:00.000-07:00

Ben Fry, All Streets (2009): David Brin, Pyramids and Diamonds (2011); Star Trek, Spectre of the Gun (1968)

According to Kevin Kelly "The uber American dream is to build your own comfy place on the edge of wilderness with your own hands." And indeed, that is the national myth; Manifest Destiny that begins with the founding fathers and goes right up to the returning vets of WWII settling the first suburbs. On his site, the author David Brin points to a very different aspect of the American Dream: "The founders started by banning primogeniture, so no family fortune could sit and accumulate, undivided, as a lordly demesne at the pyramid's peak. Instead, they would get divided among the large numbers of children that folks had then -- an intentional act of "social engineering" and outright 'levelling.'" Star Trek had some Manifest Destiny in the mix of its myth - but the greater part of the story it told was the promise of leveling.

In the Post War years, plenty of back-to-the-landers have taken the example of Thoreau, just as Kelly says (and did), but it is the less nationalistic dream of leveling and plenty for all that has been most meaningful in the last sixty years. Brin is a self-described libertarian who defends "social flatness" as a crucial element of "vigorous market competitiveness." But the American Dream isn't a dream of vigorous markets - for most of us (not on the far Right) capitalism is a nothing more than a mechanism, not an end in and of itself. The American Dream is consumerism - and its founding myth is Star Trek, which showed a future where social flattening and technology had ended poverty and (not inconsequently) where the great token of capitalism - money - was a thing of the past.

1960s vintage Jacques Cousteaus' Calypso & Starfleet Tricorder

In Gene Rodenberry's original vision of the Star Trek universe the crew of the Enterprise were the future's throwbacks. Starfleet was conceived as a place for retrograde knuckle-draggers to have bar fights, play with guns and carouse with green skin girls. That's what made the show fun to watch for the "primitives" of the 1960s. What made it fun to believe in was what was never shown, but implied by the ship's high-minded mission "to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."

The Enterprise started its life as Jacques Cousteaus-esque Calypso built to the scale of an aircraft carrier. Roddenberry was imagining a future for American consumer culture in which rising waters had raised all boats until no one was poor, war had withered away and the tremendous resources and technologies of an entire multi-planet society (the very UN like United Federation of Planets) could be given over to the pursuit of pure science and cultural exchange. That was the American Dream in the years immediately following WWII and it was a dream many Americans believed in deeply enough to risk nuclear war for.

Kitchen Debate vs Food Replicator

Just as capitalism didn't start its life as the Wealth of Corporations, much less the Wealth of Billionaires - but instead as the Wealth of Nations, the American Dream was never just a dream of a corporate or personal pursuit of wealth, it was a national pursuit. It was the pursuit of a kind of wealth that was believed could and would eventually be shared by the entire world. During the Kitchen Debate Khrushchev mockingly asked Nixon, "Don't you have a machine that puts food into the mouth and pushes it down?" He had squarely put his finger on the beating heart of consumerism - vulgar luxury. "Many things you've shown us are interesting" Khrushchev admitted, "but they are not needed in life. They have no useful purpose. They are merely gadgets."

Nixon's defense of the American Dream is telling. It was not just defense of high-tech gadget filled houses that might appeal to the puritanical utilitarianism of his opponent ("In America we like to make life easier for women...") it was a defense based on who could afford those gadget filled houses: "Any steelworker could buy this house." Nixon asserted. "They earn $3 an hour. This house costs about $100 a month to buy on a contract running 25 to 30 years." The American Dream was not only to make wonder things, but to make them so everyone could afford them.

Khrushchev and Nixon toast with Pepsi (cold); Starfleet replicates Earl Grey (hot).

The uber American Dream may be self-reliance - but the Cold Warriors were competing for the hearts and minds of people around the world against an enemy who claimed that even $100.00 a month was too much for housing: "all you have to do to get a house is to be born in the Soviet Union." Khrushchev crowed. "You are entitled to housing. I was born in the Soviet Union. So I have a right to a house. In America, if you don't have a dollar -- you have the right to choose between sleeping in a house or on the pavement. Yet you say that we are slaves of communism." The Americans needed to beat the Soviets at their own game, and to do so they served up Worlds of Tomorrow in which their gadgets had eradicated poverty. The fantasy at the core of the American Dream is a postscarcity abundance that would make capitalism as obsolete as Khrushchev promised communism would.

Brin points out that American reformers had begun to answer the challenge of the Soviets well before the Cold War: "The whole reason that FDR fought so hard to flatten the social order was because the Marxian alternative looked so very plausible to the people of that time." Far from dismissing Marx, Brin admits that where "he discusses the failure modes and 'contradictions' of capitalism is is savagely on-target. What he never, ever imagined was the possibility that humanity might produce someone like FDR... and tens of thousands of others who looked at Marx's plausible scenarios as problems/challenges to be solved."

FDR, Winston Churchill; ~~Dr.~~ Spock and Captain Kirk

Elsewhere Brin argues that after 1950, American consumers "played crucial roles in this process that lifted billions of people out of grinding, hopeless poverty." That American Postwar trade policy that set the stage for consumer culture were a historic anomaly, "an invention, as unique and new and as American as the airplane, or the photocopier, or rock n' roll."

America became the first pax-power in history to deliberately establish counter-mercantilist commerce flows. A trade regime that favored the manufactures of many foreign/poor countries over those in the homeland. Nations crippled by war, or by millennia of mismanagement, were allowed to maintain high tariffs, keeping out American manufactures, while sending shiploads from their own factories to the U.S., almost duty free.

"The question is" according to Brin, "can we face the same problem-challenge in a new generation, finding new solutions? Or let old Karl's nasty teleology play itself out?" In the years since the Soviet Union collapsed the American Dream's wider promise has been reduced down from a vision for the world as a better place (see Marshall Plan), to the aggressive pursuit of a "lifestyle" to be enjoyed by a lucky few (see Bush Doctrine). The legal inheritors of Roddenberry's franchise have reduced Starfleet's mission of exploration and discovery until the Enterprise is nothing more than a warship protecting the interests of a wealthy Federation from the disruptions of violent outside forces. Pax-Americana has devolved into the War on Terror, and even in our fantasies, the American Dream have been reduced to a zero sum game. But consumerism is no longer bounded by what Americans dream. (To be continued... in Scotland)

Pax Americana: Starfleet orbiting above the Arabian Peninsula; the shame of Mission Accomplished

Anglo Spring: Why We Fight

2011-09-29T08:01:00.000-07:00

Love in the social network free riots of Vancouver; Hate at the Twitter and Facebook fueled UK riots.

When the riots broke out in Tottenham this summer two very different stories leapt to mind. One was Jonathan Franzen's commencement speech tirade in which he warned a group of freshly minted BAs against, consigning themselves "to 10 years of merely taking up space on the planet and burning up its resources." He was warning them against being - "in the most damning sense of the word" - consumers. Franzen railed against the shallow narcissism of "liking" on social networks and triumphed the greater depths of real world "love" (giving the example of the un-commodifiable love of bird watching). "Sooner or later" he explained about love, "you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight."

Leave aside the question of what kind of douche-bag lectures college kids on the subject of love. What Franzen and every other critic of consumerism misses, and that its defenders miss as well, is that what is extraordinary about consumer culture is not it's obvious excesses, alienation, moral confusions, or shallowness (those traits are hallmarks of any and all human culture). What is extraordinary about consumerism is that consumers will fight, and fight hard. Americans were willing to risk nuclear war to defend consumerism; there are millions of Middle Easterners and North Africans ready to lay down their lives right now for an opportunity to take part in consumer culture.

Grand Theft Auto first person shooter; shooting a friend inside Gaddafi’s Palace

Dispelling whatever lingering doubt there might have been left, over whether or not he is a total douche-bag, Noel Gallagher blamed the UK riots on "TV and violent Video games." That is because they were consumer riots - those kids were "merely taking up space on the planet and burning up its resources." No one, as far as I know, has credited violent video games for sparking the Arab Spring, but a few weeks after I read Franzen's grumpy harangue I heard a young Libyan who had been trained as an architect and now found himself caught up within the Arab Spring and fighting as a rebel. Prior to the uprising his only experience with war was playing first person shooter video games online. He explained that while he was very good at killing people virtually, in real life he was finding it far more difficult to pull the trigger. He also explained that playing video games, one "makes friends," but that fighting in a real war he has only lost friends.

That young man's sacrifice is profound not narcissistic, "democracy" more easily explains away that his motives because it is high minded and therefore requires no further thought. "Consumerism" however requires that we consider what exactly we were dreaming of when, sometime in the wake of WWII, we stopped thinking of ourselves as citizens and began to imagine ourselves as consumers. The short answer is we were dreaming of a freedom far more radical than any democracy had ever offered its citizens - after all the socially repressive regimes of Iran and North Korea both justify their hold on political power by holding elections. Democracies are more often puritanical than not - consumer culture never is. Additionally there was a dream of bounty and equality more radical than either the capitalists or the communists had ever dreamed of - the industrialists promised luxuries for the few and the Party promised necessities to all; but neither ever promised everyone could have everything. The long answer is we were dreaming of Star Trek - long because I understand that that answer requires some careful explanation (Continue Reading).

Star Trek reboot (2009); Arab Spring (2011)

Anglo Spring: Sociopathocracy

2011-09-28T05:09:00.000-07:00

Wisconsin's "unseemly circus"(2011); Gustave Courbet, The Burial at Ornan (1850)

When Gustave Courbet showed his painting, The Burial at Ornan, in 1850 it upset his Parisian audience. The historian TJ Clark explains that Courbet refused to depict peasants at pious and simple, instead he "painted worship without worshipers." But more maddening still, Courbet painted the peasants fashionably dressed, undermining the Parisian's patronizing vision of country people. Adding injury to insult, Courbet's massive canvas rubbed his audience wrong because of their own diminished prospects, burial had become a privilege that most Parisians could no longer afford: "Thus burial took on barbed and complex meanings; it became an institution, a privilege, a matter of envy and dispute." It now appears escaping justice is and institution, a privilege and a matter of envy and dispute. Those are the conditions that Socrates branded the "justice of a band of robbers."

When thousands of youths looted London and other cities around England this summer no part of me thought they were related to unemployment or food prices. They are a generation weaned on the contempt of authorities. Not contempt for authorities, but authorities' contempt. For decades economic, political and media elites have expressed, in word and action, contempt for government, for science, and most disturbingly, for the rule of law. If the super-rich and powerful don't at some level believe in the need for self-constraint, much less the need to constrain others like themselves, how can we expect anyone, at any level of society to honor the institutions that make modern life worth living?

Rough justice: Blackwater's Erik Prince; Abu Ghraib

"I think it's just about possible that you could see your actions refashioned into a noble cause if you were stealing the staples: bread, milk." Zoe Williams wrote of the looters in the Guardian. "If they were going for bare necessities" she explained, "I think one might incline towards sympathy. I could be wrong, but I don't get the impression that we're looking at people who are hungry. If they were going for more outlandish luxury, hitting Tiffany's and Gucci, they might seem more political, and thereby more respectable. Their achilles heel was in going for things they demonstrably want."

The author Philip Womack meanwhile likened the looters to the social entropy imagined by the novelist J.G. Ballard and found the looters lacking for simular reasons: "[Ballard's stories] concern the middle classes – journalists, politicians, children's writers – who, unable to cope with the psychological pressures of modern life, revert to primeval tendencies. They have some layer of civilisation which is removed... And it's a layer that is completely absent from these rioters."

Fist Crushing a U.S. Fighter Jet (1986); David Cameron Libyan photo op (2011)

When protests spread across the Middle East and one dictator after another toppled, "journalists, politicians, children's writers" could puff their chests and congratulate themselves. These young people rejected religious fundamentalism and nihilistic violence we were told, the protests were held up as proof that young Arabs want democracy and "meaningful work." This at the same time as democracy and meaningful work in America is under attack from super-rich corporations and individuals. An America where Warren Buffet was excoriated for "class warfare" because he dared to suggest a return to progressive taxation for the super-rich (like himself).

The scandal-ridden billionaire Rupert Murdoch's Fox News network meanwhile celebrated the super-rich as "job-creators," and continued their systematic attacks on organized labor and the poor. Fox commentators likened America's poor to "raccoons," and questioning the depth of poverty because so many people own refrigerators. And just as student debt surpasses household credit card dept for the first time, a service offered to match needy college students with wealthy men looking for sex. So it was a bit hard to swallow when Rupert Murdoch's pet MP, David Cameron, insisted that the only meaning that should be attributed to the riots was "criminality pure and simple."

Bernie Madoff reading John Grisham; Dominique Strauss-Kahn greeting the apparently forewarned Obamas.

In her Guardian article Williams wondered, "How can you cease to believe in law and order, a moral universe, co-operation, the purpose of existence, and yet still believe in sportswear? How can you despise culture but still want the flatscreen TV from the bookies?" William's point was that the looters were not nihilists. And I agree. Using her measure they were no more nihilistic than the sociopaths that caused the economic collapse three years ago. The difference is that no one responsible for the meltdown of the global banking system has been punished. Anyone caught looting in England this summer can expect three times the nominal sentence for their crimes - and in some cases much more.

By William's measure not even Bernie Madoff can be considered a nihilist. Like Madoff, and his more fortunate cohorts who received bailouts instead of jail sentences, the young looters in England never stopped believing in the things they wanted for themselves. Williams describes the "crowds moving from shopping centre to shopping centre... actively trying to avoid a confrontation with police." She writes that we have never seen anything like this - but she is wrong. Shifting targets and actively avoiding authorities is exactly what sociopathic money managers, serial rapists, or other malignant corporate or political executives do. That is the behavior of anyone who has stopped believing that he or she owes anything to anyone but themselves.

David Cameron and his backdoor political supporter Rupert Murdoch

And indeed there is absolutely no sign that looters ceased to believe in a moral universe or hated culture. One young looter interviewed by a journalist explained, he had no prior arrests, so he was going to keep looting until he got caught. That is an extremely canny measure of our moral universe. It is not unlike the sort of math a candidate for the French presidency might make before deciding whether or not to rape an immigrant maid. Like the sociopathic politician, the poor teenage boy weighs the immediate opportunity against the possible repercussions for himself. Unlike the candidate who is a sociopath and who has very little reason to feel he will ever be punished, the boy is weighing an inevitable arrest - sometime in his future he has no doubt that he will go to jail, whether or not he decides to loot now. That is the moral universe of a world run by sociopaths.

As for "culture hating," a particularly articulate man-man-on-the-street in this video points out that unlike the police who shot Mark Duggan, who faced no inquiry or discipline (before the riots), the officer who had allowed two dogs to die in a locked police car earlier this summer had been immediately suspended and investigated (and was so upset by what he did that he attempted suicide). That sort of story, the story of a man's life being worth less than a dog, is culture. It is the sort of story told by people living in a society where the political and economic elites are distant, unimpeachable powers, no matter how manifestly corrupt. It is also the sort of story that sparks riots.

Rodney King beating; David Cameron coddling a puppy.

After passing back and fourth along the ideological spectrum Zoe Williams ends up blaming the riots on now ancient canard of alienation brought on by the vacuous nature of consumer culture, a "falsification of social life" additionally tainted by American pop that had British looters "calling the police 'feds', as though they think they are in The Wire," If it sounds like a bunch of kids playing a make-believe, that is because on a very real level that is what it was. Just as it was easy to forget that the awful spat of school shooting erupted in the US during the 1990s were not the product of "gunmen" but were in fact perpetrated by gunboys, it is import not to lose site of how young the looters were in London and elsewhere.

In his address to the press upon his return from his Tuscan vacation David Cameron repeatedly referred to "people" - only alluding to the age of the people in question when he vowed: "If you are old enough to commit these crimes you are old enough to face the punishments." One friend, who was in London during the riots, was quick to admit that while there were no doubt that there were looters who were in their thirties and that some of the "older chavers" were probably gang members, but what she found alarming was that the great majority where much much younger.

Gunboys caught on camera at Columbine high; Juvenile looter hiding from camera in London

What was most shocking about the riots for my friend was how many eight year olds were out on the streets looting. That lines up with the videos I saw - the crowds looked very young - more tween than teen. Like "people," the words "looter" and "rioter" are ageless. There is no diminutive, no looter-cub or riot-scouts. The language available disguises a crucial reality. These were mostly children. And like the boy who exclaimed that the "Emperor has no clothes!" these children are alerting us to something we should all be able to see.

In a talk on the structure of language, the experimental psychologist, Steven Pinker, asks: "Why do democracies enshrine freedom of assembly as a fundamental right and why there are so many political revolutions instigated when a crowd assembles in a public square?" The answer he gives is the difference between "shared identical knowledge" - i.e. I know something and you know something, but we don't know whether or not we both know it - and "mutual" or "common" knowledge - i.e. I know that you know that I know... What the massive protests of the Arab Spring communicated, was that the citizens of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria were not alone in their resentment, the resentment was widespread.

Authorities making a fetish of barriers is a dangerous fashion that started under Bush and Cheney but continues today.

The shared identical knowledge the riots in London tell us tells us is not that consumer culture is a vacuous "falsification of social life." If that were the case America would be a wasteland of blood soaked ash. Japan and South Korea abattoirs. Germany would be something out of Mad Max and North Korea, so untainted by the sin of consumerism should be an idyllic wonderland. It is not necessary to believe that North Korea is all bad or that consumer culture is without enormous drawbacks to see that something other than consumer backlash took place this summer.

Consumerism is a social economy built on a model of wealth that presumes that the more people with wealth the more wealth there is to be had. That is the deal. When that deal is broken and the very few try to gather the wealth to themselves at the expense of the very many, our shared social life breaks down. What was most shocking about the riots is that something each of us knows privately - a contempt that we are all guilty of as we watch one villain after another fleece, skin, gut and butcher our body politic - a contempt that is now visible for all to see: When 8 kids go on a rampage and beat a jogger senseless, we can believe it is a mater of "a few bad-apples." When thousands of kids sack one of the great capitals of the world, the emperor has no clothes.

A portrait of sociopathic leadership: BoA Ceo James Mahoney, Gov. Rick Perry, George W Bush and Dick Cheney

Anglo Spring: It is time for this unseemly circus to stop.

2011-09-27T12:19:00.000-07:00

Downton Abbey (2010); Irascables (1950)

The painter Jasper Johns famously observed that, “artists are the elite of the servant class.” What Johns fails to note however, is exactly which servant artists most resemble. In the BBC series Downton Abbey we are reminded how clearly the roles of butlers, footmen and maids were defined. Each has very particular expertise and places within very old and explicit hierarchies. The only premodern equivalent to role of the modern artist meanwhile is a class of servant that withered away at just about the same moment as the first modern artists were appearing. Artists are jesters.

Unlike the nameless artisans of the ancient and medieval world, the job of the modern artist is to misbehave, to speak out of turn, to tell the truth. It is a position with plenty of perks but also contradictions. I enjoy sitting at diner parties discussing politics with members of the chattering classes and at times even the super-wealthy decision-making classes. I regularly socialize and do business - directly and as an equal - with men and women who make hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of dollars more than me. As a modern artist I can only enjoy that proximity to the elite because they are an elite of a consumer culture, we drink the same brands of soda (Coke), watch the same films and listen to the same bands. But as the gap between the rich and the poor grows wider in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, the few remaining points of contact between the richest and poorest citizens of the English speaking world have been reduced to either servility or criminality. Those are roles I cannot abide, but more importantly, those are roles that I can't abide seeing my fellow servants forced into.

The Duke of Crowborough; Dominique Strauss-Kahn

If you are a super-rich man who has helped gut the global economy and triggered a Great-Recession (as opposed to having the gall to steal from your fellow super-rich) you can reasonably expect to face little or no punishment. If you are an immigrant woman and have the misfortune to work in a super-rich man's hotel room as a maid (even if he is a Gaul), you are presumed to be a prostitute and the burden of proof falls on you to prove otherwise. When Nafissatou Diallo's made her last ditch efforts to convince prosecutors to give her her day in court, Dominique Strauss-Kahn's lawyer complained that, "It is time for this unseemly circus to stop."

It is very easy for the rich to paint the poor as unseemly, to dismiss their actions as a circus, and that is exactly what those who believe most fiercely in free market capitalism have made it their business to do. This is a precarious position for democracies to find themselves in however, especially democracies that are so heavily invested in consumer culture. In defense of free market incrementalism democratic institutions are painted as contemptible, the poor as little more than vermin leeching of those institutions, civic duties like paying taxes and not polluting the shared spaces of our skys and water ways have been characterized as coercions equivalent to physical violence, and most troubling consumerism itself, the source of super-wealth, as nihilistic hedonism.

Mary please: The vanity of Downton Abbey and David Koch

Those who value the mechanism of capitalism as an end in-and-of-itself, have endlessly rehearsed the rhetoric of patriotism, freedom and religious moral superiority, and have done so to great effect. Laws have been bent and broken, and global markets manipulated and corrupted, all in the cause of weakening the few remaining institutions with the power to check the desires of elite super-consumers but that is what they still are: consumers. The danger appears to be that they will succeed in transforming themselves into an inherited aristocracy, because that will put an end to the radical experiment in equality and prosperity (and unseemly vulgarity) that is consumer culture. It may be that limited freedom and a permanent elite will be "good enough" conditions to sustain the economies of innovation that have produced the super-wealth of consumer culture, but I doubt it.

Already a generation of young English consumers raised within this environment of self-contempt, acted on that contempt. But unlike their super-wealthy counterparts who are "too big to fail," valorized as "job-creators," their acquisition of billions as "wealth-creation;" when the young Brits acted on their contempt, stealing down-market shoes and flat screen TVs, they were harshly punished, their desire for material good dismissed as "compulsive consumerism," and the only possible motives attributed to them was mindless nihilism. It is worth remembering however that Adam Smith wrote about the Wealth of Nations, not of corporations, families or individuals. That those who believe in pure capitalisms might pause to consider what kind of world they are making for themselves - I am afraid it is one where they are served their meals by maids who are sick, dressed by valets preoccupied by debt, and surrounded by jesters who are no longer laughing.

Dowager Countess of Grantham; Rupert Murdoch

White Walls, Consumerism (A Conclusion)

2011-09-17T14:21:00.000-07:00

Consumerism's carrot and stick: Jobs vs. no jobs.

(Part 10)

This summer, as I watched the DSK prosecution stall and collapse, Right-wing ideologs turn the debt ceiling debate into a crisis that cost American tax payers billions, and the riots in England, I found myself experiencing far more than my usual level of disgusted with capitalism - but perversely defensive on the part of consumerism. Capitalism is nothing more than a bundle of mechanisms for distributing wealth: markets, property and financial instruments are a part of a group of technologies that have been developing over the pst few hundreds of years. Proponents of capitalism like to think of it as a meritocracy, but capitalism only promises enormous wealth to the lucky few and that is because it is a creature of Malthusian economics - the bedrock of its logic is scarcity. Capitalism favors the creation of mega-wealth and super-elites. Consumerism meanwhile, is a creature of the Industrial Revolution, and more particularly of Postwar America - it is an ideology built on the experience of post-Malthusian economies of scale - it's bedrock is abundance: the very modern promise of wealth that increases the more it is shared.

Critics of consumerism have the same sorts of complaints that critics of civilization have always had: "When the state was drowned in decadence and luxury and donned the garments of calamity and impotence" the fourteenth century philosopher Ibn Khaldun explained, "because the people of faith, sunk in self indulgence, preoccupied with pleasure and abandon to luxury, had become deficient in energy and reluctant to rally in defense." And although Khaldun was defending the peculiar institution of military slavery, it is not hard to imagine Pat Robertson voicing nearly identical sentiments about today's consumer culture.

Boys devoutly studying the simpler technology of The Book; Pat Robertson enjoying at least one facet of soulless hightech.

Nor is it too far from the sorts of contempt for decadence and luxury one might expect to hear from a libertarian follower of Ayn Rand - who idealized a small-r-republican brand of self-discipline and personal austerity. Critics from the left can be expected to voice nearly the same strain of complaints - either for ideological reason, like orthodox Soviet-era complaints against Western "decadence," but more contemporary strains of environmentalist contempt for decadence abound. The drawbacks of consumerism are all failures of excess - obesity, alcoholism, porn and kipple. These are real problems, but compared to starvation, plague, and slavery, they're great problems for a society to have.

Additionally consumer culture is, and always has been, soulless; and why not? It is an entirely secular endeavor. Given the choice most of us would prefer to opportunity to struggle with the temptation of over indulgence and the danger of addiction, rather than be ruled by religious fanatics who would protect us from ourselves. Only a vanishing-small percentage of us would abandon the high-tech white of consumer culture (modern healthcare, hygiene, communications, comfortable footwear, neat stuff) for any reason. The austere white of self-denial and austerity within a religious, libertarian or a communist utopia are nowhere as near attractive as the decadence of high-tech whiteness.

Students at a Madrasa; dickhead dream of Galt's Gulch on an oil rig; and Kim Jong Il looking at rice.

This summer, as the richest consumers are denying themselves nothing and contributing less, I find criticisms of 'compulsive consumerism' suspect, calls for spiritual renewal, for discipline and austerity self-serving - serving the interests not of consumerism, but of elitism, and elitism at its most predatory. One definition of technology is something that doesn't quite work yet. High technology is, by its very nature then, aspirational; as much something that we want to work, something that we want to have, as it is something that does work or that we can have. It is an image of the future we are projecting on the present. Consumerism evokes images of obesity, giant shopping carts and endless parking lots. But Animals raised in materially rich surrounding have clear cognitive advantages over those raised in austere environments.

How sad that Brittan was judged to be the least pleasant of industrialized (ie consumerist) nations to be a child by UNICEF, but how striking then that it is also Brittan where the steady climb of IQ scores, known as the "Flynn Effect," has, according James Flynn, faltered among teens for the first time in any industrialized nation in the postwar years. (Again what is really meant here by industrialized is consumerism - no one imagines it is any fun to be a teenager in North Korea's industrialized zones).

Harry Harlow's wire mesh surrogate mother: Chaser the Boarder Collie's 1022 named toys

It is well known that the Taliban uses cellphones, that Kim Jong Il secretly imports flat screen TVs and iPads for Party elites, and that wealthy libertarians imagine opting out and setting up a parelel infrastructure so that they won't have to share with the rest of us - all that communicates is that while they covet out stuff they do not understand that it is founded on belief. This summer it was terrifying to see that the elites of our consumer culture have lost track of what that belief is as well.

When my friend Joanne McNeil asked me about my thoughts on the origins of whiteness as signifier of high-tech. I ignored any associations to traditional cultural meanings (death, life, good, bad, purity, what-have-you) and biology (teeth, rice, ivory) and instead challenged myself to look at technology as an historical artifact of modern science. It did not occur to me until after the English riots were disparaged as "shopping riots," and just as I experienced the heady consumer-high from my first new cell phone purchase in over five years - a white iPhone 4 - to look at it Whiteness an artifact of consumerism.

The first 20 Naval Nurses (1908); The opening of Le Corbusier's Passac Housing Estate (1926)

What Joanne was asking me about was the exterior whiteness of consumer electronics - this is very different from the interior whiteness of control rooms and linen undershirts - it is more akin to the exterior whiteness of the earliest experiments in Modernist architecture and the white dresses worn by nurses. The whiteness of my new iPhone is not an expression of my personal aspirations - there are millions of other people with the exact same phone. The whiteness is an expression of a public aspiration. To borrow a term from Jean-François Lyotard the "narrative knowledge" that girds consumerism is not too different from the metanarratives that gird "scientific knowledge."

While Republican candidates are more than happy to pander to a crowd that cheers the death of someone who can't afford health insurance, but most Americans to not want to believe that their gain comes at someone else's expense. The American dream which is the "master narrative" of consumerism was never a simple promise of personal progress; of "I get MINE, and to hell with you." What fun would a jetpack be if you had the only one? It would be almost as worthless as owning the world's only fax machine. If you are king it might be cool to own the only one of something, but in a consumer society you would look like a bigger jerk than a Segway owner. I didn't buy an iPhone because no one has one. I bought one because everyone I know has one. That means I have lots of people to tell me what the best apps are and to share the features of the phone.

Jetpack fail; Segway fail

Americans might dream of having a good job that enables them to own a nice car and a charming house in a pleasant place, but an element of that dream is that they are not alone in that pleasure. That along with millions of others, they are enjoying luxuries that once only a few kings might have hoped for. The dream was never to exclude that wealth from the rest of the world, it was explicit that billions more people would someday soon enjoy the justice, stability, mobility, and material pleasures of modern life. Millions of Americans fought and died for that dream in the twentieth century. In the 21st they were convinced to fight an enemy that "hated their freedom." It is not clear to me that they would have fought to keep their big cars and cheap fuel prices if that had been the justification that had been given.

It was clear this summer that the super-rich consumer elite have abandoned the "we" aspect of the American Dream. It is not at all clear that consumer culture can survive without it. No matter what wonder scientific progress is able to deliver, it is meaningless if it is attached to a dream that no one buys. Whatever else high-tech whiteness is, it would be a truly tragic thing to be nostalgic for.

White iPhone 4 (2011); Zion Control (2003)

The Forty Part Motet and the meaning of art after September 11th

2011-09-06T08:58:00.000-07:00

Takashings, Sky Blue Sky (2011); Janet Cardiff and George Bures, Forty Part Motet (2001)

I know exactly why Janet Cardiff and George Bures' Forty Part Motet has been included in MoMA PS1's show to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. I know because I happen to have been a part of the association made between the two. I attended the opening of Cardiff's show that when Motet was shown for the first time in NYC just a month after the 2001 attacks. I didn't know Cardiff's work before the show. I remember thinking the little theaters she makes with her collaborator George Bures were tricky but not much more. I entered the gallery where Motet was installed, and was relieved that the miniature theater portion of the show had ended (not my thing). But unlike the theater pieces, I didn't know at all what to make of what I heard and saw. Motet was nothing but an oval of forty plain black speakers, each mounted head high on black iron stands. Entering the gallery, the view from the windows immediately overwhelmed the minimalist aesthetic of the piece. The long wall of windows on the gallery's west side faced Manhattan. The sky was a beautifully clear and bright - the same cloudless blue as the morning of September 11th. "A sky blue sky" Laurie Anderson might of called it.

There I was looking at our disfigured skyline and the I began to become aware of Cardiff's the sound installation - I remember my very first impression exactly: "Great, another piece about rich people at parties." I now know that I must have walked in just moments after the work began its loop. What I heard where a babble of excited of voices coming from nowhere. A strange element of the Motet, is that like Cardiff's headphone walking tours, it was recorded three dimensionally. Cardiff's headphone pieces are recorded with two microphones placed on either side of a foam head. Unlike conventional recordings Cardiff's technique eerily reproduces sounds as they are heard from the inside of a human head. One of the things we are very good at as a species is placing sounds in space. If you hear a pencil drop behind you, you likely have a very good idea of exactly where to look to retrieve it. Cardiff's headphone tours take advantage of that, especially when played back in the same architectural spaces where they were recorded (her outdoor are not as effective).

Walking down the staircases at PS1 accompanied by the soundtrack commissioned for the museum, you hear the conventional sounds one expects to hear in a crowded museum. As a noisy group of middle-schoolers rushes up the stairs towards you from around a corner in the stairwell, you brace for their jostling bodies only to have them pass around you invisible phantoms existing only in Cardiff's recording. (Experiencing a Cardiff walking tour should be on any serious art lover's bucket list) The Motet works almost the same way, but without headphones. The original recording was made with forty individual microphones arrange very much like the speakers, so if you place your ear against any one speaker you will hear an individual voice. But you will also hear sounds coming distinctly from corners of the room where there are no speakers.

I can remember getting caught up in the novelty of those effects as I walked around the installation, but I can also remember feeling bruised and hurt by the tragedy view and vacuous nature of the recording. Then there a crisp tapping from directly at the center of the speakers. I remember swinging my head around and being surprised to see that no one was standing there, nothing was there. I felt a little embarrassed, but I then noticed that the few other people scattered around the gallery were looking with confusion at the same spot I was. The tapping sound was unmistakable; it was a conductor' raping his baton in a call for attention. The merry recorded voices immediately quieted them selves and were replaced by soft throat clearing. Anyone acquainted with Spem in Alium by Thomas Tallis can imagine what happened next. I was totally unprepared for the beauty of the 40-part choral motet and I began to cry just as the museum's Founding Director Alanna Heiss and the then-Head Curator Klaus Biesenbach entered trailing a gaggle of VIPs.

I was no longer embarrassed, I was now totally humiliated. I probably took a sudden interest in the gallery's ceiling vaults. However I handled it I know that I managed to pull my shit together. What I found out later from friends who worked at PS1 during the show is that I wasn't the first or the last person to be overwhelmed by Motet. Someone lost their shit in that gallery several times a day, every day, of the exhibition's run that fall - comforting people became one of the duties taken on by the museum's staff. I would bet that of the all people who lot their shit very few spoke latin and that no one wept because they did. Like me, the sound of the voices was an abstraction. They were each giving the work a meaning that neither Cardiff nor Bures could have possibly predicted, much less Tallis.

Cardiff and Bures did not make Motet in response to September 11th - it was conceived and built in advance of the attacks. Nor does it doesn't illustrate some theme related to the attacks. It is an abstract work that was waiting for an audience to impress it with meaning. Those who feel abstract aesthetics come prepackaged with meaning set by American Cold Warrior theorist, or feel that the mute art is merely decorative and therefor fails to fulfill serious art's critical role; those who invoke Theodor Adorno's assertion that "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" would abandon us to dispair. They have lost sight of the importance of the unnameable in art. In his play of that title, Samuel Beckett expresses it perfectly: "I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."

Brick Moon

2011-08-22T08:34:00.000-07:00

The Pageos Satelloon (ca 1966); Piranesi, Carceri (ca 1750)

The other day I found a copy of Arthur C. Clarke's 1968 edition of The Promise of Space one of my neighbors had thoughtfully placed on his stoop along with a collection of equally ancient self help books. In it there is a spectacular image of the "Pageos satellite" and a brief description that I had been planing to email to my satellooon loving friend Greg Allen:

For simplicity it would be hard to beat the "balloon" satellites, of which the Echo 1 was the first and most famous. On June 24, 1966, NASA launched singularly perfect specimen, the 100-foot-diameter Pageos, which looks like a giant highly polished ball bearing. Made of Mylar film 0.0005 inch thick, Pageos weighed only 120 pounds and when inflated in orbit was half a million times larger than the canister into which it had been skillfully packed. Moving in a polar orbit at an altitude of 2600 miles it is easily visible to the naked eye.

Sol Lewitt, Sphere lit from the top (2004); David Stephenson, Dome #41712 (2004)

One doesn't see a lot about satelloons, besides on greg.org, so I was very surprised last night to find Echoe 1 make an appearance in JG Ballard's 1966 book The Crystal World:

Peering upward, he stared into the star filled sky. In front of him , at an elevation of forty-five degrees, he picked out the constellation Taurus and Orion. Passing them was a star of immense magnitude, a huge corona of light orne in front of it and eclipsing the smaller stars in its path. At first Sanders failed to recognize this as the Echoe satellite. Its luminosity had increased by at least tenfold, transforming the thin pinpoint of light that had burrowed across the night sky for so many faithful years into a brilliant luminary outshone only by the moon. All over Africa, from the Liberian coast to the shores of the Red Sea, it would now be visible, a vast aerial lantern fired by the same light he had seen in the jeweled flowers that afternoon. Thinking lamely that the balloon might be breaking up, forming a cloud of aluminium like a giant mirror, Dr. Sanders watched the satellite setting in the southeast.

Power of Ten (1977): Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970)

I am not a Ballardian. had picked up the wrecked paperback of The Crystal World because it was cheap, but also I am a fan of the artist Robert Smithson. Along with Chris Marker's 1962 short film La Jetée, one of Ballard's stories (about a guy named Powers - sweet), The Voices of Time, is credited by the artist Tacita Dean with having inspired Smithson's massive 1970 earthwork, Spiral Jetty. Later Ballard wrote an essay about Spiral Jetty where he likened it to Pacific Island cargo cults.

I had read bits of Clarke's Promise of Space as I moved around the city on the subway that first day I after picked the book up, but since then it had been sitting on my drawing table with a buch of other stuff I have been meaning to read. The synchronicity of finding Echoe 1 mentioned by Ballard sent me back to a chapter I had noticed in Clarke's book but hadn't gotten a chance to read: Imaginary Voyages. In it, Clarke gives a short history of space travel in literature starting with Lucian's imaginary trip to the moon via water spout, followed by Kepler's demonic Somnium, and a hat tip to Voltaire's Micromega. But Clarke reports reports that it was an American writer (and one-time chaplain to the U.S. Senate), Reverend Edward Everett Hale, who wrote the "first treatment of both in fiction and non fiction of an artificial satellite."

Diagram of an barian dome on squinches; Danial Libeskind, Micromegas (1981)

In his story, The Brick Moon (published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1869), Hall imagined a ceramic satellite (hence the brick moon) 200 feet in dimeter launched by rolling the thing down a huge grove where it be pinched between two massive hydro-powered flywheels that would shoot it like a wet pip into an orbit 4000 miles above the earth. Exactly like the Echoe 1, Hall imagined the brick moon would reflect the sun's light back to earth, and that unlike Echoe's Polar orbit, the brick moon would hang above the Greenwich meridian, and would therefore act as a longitudinal guide for navigators - proto GPS. Clarke writes:

The money to build the brick moon was raised by public subscription, and the flywheels were constructed in a remote part of the United States. The moon itself was not a simple shell of masonry, but had its interior divided into thirteen spherical chambers, in contact with each other so that "by the constant repetition of arches, we should with the least weight unite the greatest strength." However, things did not go quite according to plan. One night owing to a ground subsidence, the brick moon was accidentally launched together with all the workmen and engineers who decided that its spacious chambers made beter living quarters than their log cabins.

Clarke goes on to explain that the thirty-seven men, women and children launched into space had a good store of food and some hens and were able to make a go of it in their new habitat. Clarke's description reads a bit like steampunk Contact or a pre-14th Amendment Iain M Banks - one needs only to imagine the World Machine Consortium as a limited liability subscription and the brick moon laid up as a Paranesi-esque Micromégas of interlacing N-dimensional hyperspheres housing a cashless socialist utopia.

Contact (1997); Anish Kapoor, Leviathan (2011)