The Specular War: Hirschhorn at the Wattis

Basically speaking, the etymology of the word “Utopia” reflects a union of two ancient Greek notions roughly amounting to “no place.” And unlike the many other ironic ambiguities of, in particular, the English language, forged from coincidence and assimilation, “utopia” has all too many charged and partisan skeletons in its closet, grinding their teeth away in the dark. Utopia can evoke strong, if not bewildering, sets of internal discourse along with its use; some hopeful, and others even being mockeries or pejorative functions assuming the self-same concept -- consider the adjective “utopian.”

Thomas Hirschhorn suggests for us a similar kind of opacity in considering the advent of military camouflage as a contemporary populist fashion widget, marking its truly globalized territory with the “endlessly repeatable” woven blobby stains of earth-tone, subverting and perhaps destroying the very idea of the civilian along with it; at least certainly it’s supposed one cannot remain a civilian once having been swept to the front lines of Hirschhorn’s labyrinthine cardboard battlefield, the taped and stapled carnage of which makes the dilemma one that is all too clear in its annunciation qua dilemma. Much like Beuys, Hurst and other “messy” postconceptualists, Hirschhorn is very good at saddling us with dense, violent and multi-layered problems.

Beuys’ violence, however, was of a particularly biographical/national flavor, while Hirschhorn’s, at least here, is exceedingly epic in thirst.

From the copious exhibition literature, provided as polemic, (in its condensed form) tyrannically stacked in six-foot piles at the entrance, it is revealed that Hirschhorn is offering the viewer a dystopia in this, his latest sprawling exhibition, UTOPIA, UTOPIA = ONE WORLD, ONE WAR, ONE ARMY, ONE DRESS. The “text” itself, essentially constituted by an extended and over-literary interpretation of (what amounts to a “who’s who” of) popular continental philosophy, numbers into the thirty some pages worth and has been inbred, replicating via photocopier, and the vertiginous walls run red with it, voided of context, cut and plastered into nearly every inch and corner, rending the text meaningless in some ways though uniquely approachable in others.

The “text,” however dismembered it appears, figures centrally into Hirschhorn’s demonic vision; itself being (with some admitted hyperbole) the metaphysical foundations of the social world: Derrida’s concept of difference, epistemological foundationalism, Cartesian “reality,” the subject/object, Kant and legitimacy, poststructuralism and the body; the list only continues, and while the twenty-nine particular summations commissioned by the artist from philosopher, Marcus Steinweg, aren’t exactly succinct, they are (here) assumed to be sincere attempts to codify the very real violence of imperialism, nationalism and economy. Whole pages and paragraphs are minced, then, in the wake of such existential concentration, to even just words and subsequently recomposed, hung from the necks of a mannequin-solider-civilians, themselves riddled with grotesque and camo-colored tumors manifesting in hyperbolic sizes more medically appropriate to a parasitic twin than to the political disease they seek to represent, the ultimate aetiology of which, may have been co-emergent with the social contract itself.

At any rate, the Swiss-born, Paris-based Hirschhorn makes it painfully clear that globalization and its both familiar yet estranging effects are dangerous, to say the least, and that we, as a globalized, singular nation of the spectacle can little expect to, in the end, tell the difference between a utopia and its opposite, the dystopia. The two concepts become merged when there are, as is suggested in the title for the show, no differences left to draw opposition from; Steinweg’s text enunciates as much, “[considering freedom:] under what conditions? Exclusively under the conditions which make freedom and truth impossible and deny them. Freedom exists only under the conditions of non-freedom.” Meaning, in this hypothetical yet alarmingly real world has been, for all intents and purposes, rent asunder and we, as the viewer, are left to wander anxiously (or appropriately bored) by its affects.

I refuse to put myself through the pains of a direct attempt at strictly formal descriptions of Hirschhorn’s exhibition, regardless of his given position as a visual artist. It seems pointless and altogether impossible to relate what it is that the exhibition shows us from a physical standpoint. Suffice it to say that what one would see is a kind of thematized heterogeneity, held together with camo-tape, and maybe, just maybe, one might find that a good reason to not see this installation, but to avoid it altogether. Either way makes little difference. At the risk of sounding didactic, it’s important to remember that indefinite heterogeneity is a pattern too, and like the abstraction of the exhibitions ubiquitous and amorphic camouflage, the many can easily become a one and indiscernible whole.

Hirschhorn is recognized as, in the program’s foreword, written by the over-enthusiastic Nicholas Baume and Ralph Rugoff, understanding UTOPIA, UTOPA as a ‘headless’ show, meaning one that offers “no easy answers” either to it’s viewers or the artist that made it. This, I can believe, though I’m still left with the moral implications of having been dropped off exactly where I started, and in fact, I’m willing to say that the title of Hirschhorn’s epic is enough to ponder on its own. He also alludes to, in his own statement, the idea that utopia might be finally possible, a carrot for the philosophically minded, meant to cover the towering and pointless ambiguity of the question itself. So are we entering a place possible for utopia? Yes and no, in Hirschhorn’s own words, “Utopia doesn’t exist, this is why it cannot disappear.”

The “easy answer” is that, like the word “utopia” itself, Hirschhorn’s dystopian vision is a “no place.” One cannot successfully arrive, I think, at the exhibition because, in some ways, it offers little that the world does not already represent in its epileptic ontology embedded in news clippings, television and internet advertisements, music videos, CNN ticker-tape, and the imperialist imposition of democracy, capitalism and the war in Iraq. Though, admittedly, failure is oftentimes more valuable in moral terms than success, and for me there is little doubt that Hirschhorn has ultimately failed to represent what the foreword co-authors call “the world as it is” as opposed to other historical attempts (cited as architectural urbanism) to realize a “utopia” through artistic exegesis. So, at least in this case, failure only serves to outline the real problems of the post-industrial world with thicker borders.

“No place” is a place, I’m sorry to say, though it’s difficult to tell exactly who has arrived there with the battalion, having set up defenses, communication relays and a fortress for us all. It is not clear whether it was Hirschhorn or the social world, but in any case, someone nonetheless has, with a curt shout and a raised sword, advanced the troops into an anxious abyss from which they will not easily return.

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Story of the Eye and a "New Criticism"

The following is an interesting selection from Jason DeBoer's 2004 critical essay on Bataille's fiction and it's relation to Stalinist sympathies. Certainly the style will impress, but it's DeBoer's attention to non-veridical methods that I found compelling.
The American Journal of Print published a review of the paper by contributor, Maynard Pierce, in which he pointed out the seemingly "endless" inconsistancies in dates, quotations and plot elements concerning nearly every work discussed by DeBoer. Pierce was somewhat upset, writing "[I]... actually could not bring myself to finish it, being so disgusted with what I [see] as out-right lies and manipulation..." and finishing, "If this is a kind of new criticism, [I'll] have no part of it."

What Pierce didn't understand was that DeBoer's brilliance resides in his (sometimes) confusingly discursive (re)presentation of the text, which in this case consists of rampant imagistic juxtaposition. What DeBoer, in his response, he sees as inaccuracy, is deliberately the case then, and serves the reader quite well in exposing the supplementarity that encloses the erotic, sadomasicistic dimensions of fascism and spatial orientation.

The selection I chose only deals with Story of the Eye which I'll just assume you're familiar with. One thing I should note for you is that the entire essay is framed alongside the image of the human pineal gland, that, among other things, regulates longterm circadian rythyms...

[...]

There is a way and place that precludes “the novel” (as it is known, and in particular this one) and thereby forces it to anachronistically succumb to the wishes of its reader. There “is” and also bears a remarkable similarity to the sprawling range of the body and its orifices, and while Bataille parted with Breton over both “personal” and “creative” issues rather early in his career, the surrealist unconscious “solar” represented within the bile drenched pages of Story of the Eye seems only too still structured in its Freudian euphoria.

There will be, during the course of this essay, a place-holder for those concepts mentioned above but also to a kind of space I wish to articulate as an emptied bottle or vase that, turned upon itself (with force) has shattered, disclosing that space. And disclosure begets exposure of one kind or another (as we know) and this space (called there) will be where Bataille deposits the slightly varying images present within the navel (?). I say the images vary slightly because of the barren qualities of the environments opposing them (figure/ground).

The characters/images are loosely constituted by the following: the eye, the egg, the testicle, the sun, the earth, the cunt, cum (spirit), the opening/orifice, and the blood/death (the being). The images wind in clockwork fashion over a few slightly varying fields whose distinctions are written as negligible as, for instance, “In less than an hour, we had ridden the twenty kilometers separating us from a sort of castle within a walled park on an isolated cliff overlooking the sea.” and “We burst into a large space…”

Slightly more revealing, however is the gem that begins and mostly ends with, “The ceiling was of carved woodwork, the walls were plastered but encumbered with religious gewgaws more or less gilded.”

The quoted above are some examples of the more descriptive elementals regarding environs and quickly become useless as a construct of there or setting for play, and while amusing, they just simply aren’t true. Play is as much surrendered to there as are the characters/images that, shifting, itinerant between vaguely opposing (though not triangulated by any means) points and doing so with a speed that dims ones eyes to locate, ever, they blind.

It is often remarked from within colloquial and sometimes adolescent exegesis regarding Adolf Hitler, Tupac Shakur, Lance Armstrong and the first emperor of revolutionary France, Napoleon, that they share the (mostly uncommon) trait of having only one testicle. Story of the Eye is a locus of imperial/hegemonic propaganda. The lack of a twin-equipped scrotum here can be directly related to a kind of blindness of depth or motion-blindness that afflicts those having only one of two possible eyes (an affliction known well to miners or other laborers of the “deep” trades, suffering repeated microscopic lacerations of the retina from some foreign air-borne particles of gravel specific to being in tunnels).

Similarly, a single American quarter, stood on end, intersected with a second and third of its kind and subsequently the three having been aligned by no more than two guides of z symmetry, can resemble the self-same (singular) bovine testicle of Granero’s wrath, who, incidentally, is turned upon himself (with force) to expose both his own testicle (of the specular kind) and that of the bull’s, in consequence.

The human participants penned into the novel become largely, also, wan and meaningless as subject only to the play of the egg, which, like them, is, being both hollow and “filled”, host to the birth of their sole and guiding principal: the gelatinous pus of deviancy. The pus of deviancy, though not my own phraseology, brought me, upon first hearing it, into a kind of deep and phantasmal reverie upon my flippant days spent, as a youth of 18, playing in the sun and sweetly pungent peat nearest my Uncle’s farm in Ornans. Those, however, were also bitter years. The “O” perhaps delivers upon some promise of completion or a search for the “(w)hole” (though we are not likely to share it with a public or “multiple” sense) for the n(o/a)vel’s draw is toward a moistened, suffocating darkness, however likely that might be in the baking heat of a sun so bent on it’s own imposition into the fantasies of Bataille’s undefined and puppeted characters, is still of debate among some of the more prominent scholars of his work.

In his later writings, Bataille would concede to having had absolutely no recollection of the book ever having been translated into English but was, in any event, reportedly “satisfied,” though of what is anyone’s guess.

The foreign object that becomes so much like the characters’ penetration into the otherwise flat backdrop of or near X (somewhere in France) and then to Barcelona is hampered by a constant and intentional misuse of pronouns by preceeding them with adjectival qualifiers, the effect being similar to the following: “and the sopping, muddied he went back into a moaning her…” Such is, of couse, disorienting, though it further hollows the a priori vacated presence of the narrative entity.

There is repeatedly substituted with only the thinning outlines of or about desire or the pus’ other, the exact and loaded sphere discussed above that we would expect to haunt, in all its syntactical bifurcations, at least the subdued confession of plagiarism that suffers the book as an epilogue. Bataille writes, “Solitary, solar, bristling with lashes, it gazed from the lunette of a guillotine and upward purloined for me a tale pertaining to my father and his many addictions, I wrote it, and shamed myself in its completion, arguing with my wife that it had meant, as some did say, the freeing of that bottle or, the asundered bowl from it’s mirrored coordinates high above our small, thatched home among the city peaks…”

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...just a note

Very soon I'll be working on pinning down the dynamics of the whole deceit/radical translation/lying etc... terminology in order to clear up any further (or earlier) consideration of the ideas and their solidification in a theory.

(Oh, and as far as lying goes, up until this point it's just been fun to think of it that way and no serious consideration is being given to that term or others similar in denotation) Full Post...

Walid Raad and Deceit as Critical Decentering

Suffice it to say that I (being mostly ignorant of the details myself) in flawed blunt and brief kind, could characterize the Lebanese Civil War (roughly 1975-90) by mentioning the following: Muslim and leftist opposition to a Maronite Christian constitutional rule of Lebanon as well as eventual Syrian intervention and displaced PLO/PFLP exchanges with Israel from within the country (following through an ill-fated cease-fire) leading to an Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the subsequent siege of Beirut; all told, casualties numbering in the tens of thousands.

In 1999 Walid Raad founded the Atlas Group with a mission framed as that of "...documenting the contemporary history of Lebanon." It is written with a straight face.
Raad, under the mantle of his group's initiative and the fictitious researchers within its ranks, gives performances, lectures and produces originally researched videos and "documentaries" centering mainly on the material facts of lives during the spell of the war, disclosing the remarkably painful coincidences of fact and narration that plague the mostly Western-paraphrased world Lebanon's history.

Though many of those "facts" are itinerant or even mere accidents of, what I'll call, creative juxtaposition that, with cunning, lock fast together those that would otherwise be irrational or reluctantly poetic conclusions. Are we to suppose, as an example, that Raad had retroactively collected exactly 100 photographs and magazine cutouts of some 250 car models used for bombings during the course of the war and then dated them, sans the year? Or that he had managed to retrieve, from Lebanese government officials, the near complete footage of a particular bridge-locked surveillance camera whose operator, in boredom, had, each evening of a specific few months in (what I remember was) the mid-eighties, trained his lens from it's designated scope to instead follow the orange and setting sun to its conclusion beneath the horizon.

As viewers, we're given more than merely a backstory. Raad's projects are a kind of reverse-engineered conceptualism, retroactively generating limits, jutting out backwards and leaving little left to wonder; as to whether "it" did or did not happen, as to whether or not his claims are "historical" ones.

In interviews, Raad has referred to what he calls the "false binary of fiction and non-fiction," and, as you could guess, that's my real focus here. As I've mentioned before, it is exactly this kind of (for a lack of a better term [don't worry, I'm still working on it]) radicalized historical translation (?) (again, deceit) that functions here.

And really, imagined as a translation from text(') to text(''), we can see the kind of rationale at work: one opening onto reading/play. Though admittedly, the limiting factor of the so-called author-function is still present; the deceit only becomes fetishized into an eccentric "formal" property, which is, of course, my only problem: the texts remain discrete. There are, however, very interesting elements:

• non-veridical(creative) biography mixed with phenomenal biography (or that which pre-dates, socially, the former iteration).
• non-veridical(creative) attribution and authorship mixed with phenomenal data
  
• (con)fusion of multiple presentations, ideally becoming inseparable
  

A key difference to point out would be presentation vs. representation which Ill be discussing in a later post framed in a discussion of Rorty and antirepresentationalist arguments, calling into question epistemology as a whole and therefore lending some theoretical backdrop to the unification of fiction/non-fiction. Full Post...

Excerpts from "Accidents of John Aubrey"

Born at Easton-Piers, March 1625,6, about sun-rising; very weak and
like to Dye, & therefore christned that morning before Prayer. I think
I have heard my mother say I had an Ague shortly after I was born.

1629. About three or four years old I had a grievous ague, I can
remember it. I got not health till eleven or twelve, but had sickness
of Vomiting for 12 hours every fortnight for years, then it came
monthly for then quarterly & then half yearly, the last was in June
1642. This sickness nipt my strength in the bud.

1633. At eight years old I had an issue (naturall) in the coronall
sutor of my head, which continued running till 21.

1634. October, I had a violent fevor, it was like to have carried me
off 'twas the most dangerous sickness that ever I had.

1635. December, the year prior, after having only late recovered of
the sickness, my father and sisters fell ill of it. Through the turn of the
year, they worsed & I sought boarde with an aunt whom I much
disliked.

'Twas May of that same yeare when I first kissed a young beauty
of my own age who I much favored. Shortly thereaftere she was
to, of accident, vomite over my clothes.

1639.  About 1639 or 1643 I had the measills, but that was nothing, I
was hardly sick. Monday after Easter week my Uncle's Nag ranne away
with me & gave me a very dangerous fall.

1642 May 3. Entered at Trinity College.

1643 April and May, the Small Pox at Oxon; after left that ingeniouse
place & for three years led a sad life in the Country.

1646.  April - Admitted of the M. Temple, but my fathers sickness and
business never permitted me to make any settlement to my study.

1651.  About the 16 or 18 of April I saw that incomparable good
conditioned gentlewoman Mrs M. Wiseman, with whom at first sight I was
in love.

1652. October the 21. my father died.

1655.  (I think) June 14. I had a fall at Epsam & brake one of my
ribbes, and was afraid it might cause an apostumation.

1656.  Sept. 1655 or rather I think 1656 I began my chargeable &
tedious lawe Suite on the Entaile in Brecknockshire and Monmouthshire.
This yeare and the last was a strange yeare to me. Several love and
lawe suites.

1656 - Decemb {Astrological sign for conjunction} morb.

1657.  Novemb 27. obiit Dña Kasker Ryves with whom I was to marry, to
my great losse.

1659.  March or April like to break my neck in Ely Minster; and the
next day, riding a gallop there my horse tumbled over and over, and
yet I thank God no hurt.

1660.  July. Aug. I accompanied A. Ettrick into Ireland for a month &
returning were like to be shipwrecked at Holyhead but no hurt done.

1661, 1662, 1663. About these yeares I sold my Estate in
Herefordshire. Janu. I had the honour to be elected Fellow of the
R. S.

1664.  June 11 landed at Calais, in August following had a terrible fit
of the spleen and piles at Orleans. I returned in October.

1664 or 1665. Munday after Christmas was in danger to be spoiled by my
horse; and the same day received læsio in testiculo, which was like to
have been fatal. 0. R. Wiseman quod - I believe 1664.

1665.  November 1. I made my first address (in an ill hour) to
Joane Sumner.

1666.  This yeare all my business and affairs ran kim kam, nothing
tooke effect, as if I had been under an ill tongue. Treacheries and
enmities in abundance against me.

1667. December --- Arrested in Chancery Lane at Mrs Sumner's suite.

Feb. 24 A.M. about 8 or 9 Triall with her at Sarum; Victory and £600
damaged; through devilish opposition against me.

1668.  July 6. was arrested by Peter Gale's malicious contrivance the
day before I was to go to Winton for my second triall; but it did not
retard me above two hours, but did not then go to triall.

1669.  March 5 was my triall at Winton from eight to nine. The Judge
being exceedingly made against me by my Lady Hungerford but four of
the {     } appearing and much adoe got the moiety of Sarum: Verdict
in £300.

1669 and 1670 I sold all my Estate in Wilts. From 1670 to this very
day (I thank God) I have enjoyed a happy delitescency.

1671. Danger of Arrests.

1677.  Latter end of June an impostume brake in my head.
Mdm. St John's night 1673 in danger of being run through with a sword
by a young templer at M. Burges' chamber in the M. Temple.


I was in danger of being killed by William Earl of Pembroke then Lord
Herbert at the election of Sir William Salkeld for New Sarum. I have
been in danger of being drowned twice.

The year that I lay at M. Neve's (for a short time) I was in great
danger of being killed by a drunkard in the Street of Grays Inn Gate
by a Gentleman whom I never saw before but (Deo gratias) one of his
companions hindred his thrust.

[1754 June 11. transcribed from a MS. in M. Aubrey's own handwriting
in the possession of Dr. R. Rawlinson.]

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Brady Bunch Architecture

Concerning architecture and scholarship/ engineering at the site of cultural mythology (read deceit): Mark Bennett is an artist, based in Los Angeles, who fabricates or extracts floor plans and blueprints for fictional TV and movie architecture. His "Archography" includes homes from popular media such as The Jetsons, 227, Psycho, and The Brady Bunch. (In my view, this is in some ways on par with the unofficial Castlevania timeline at Wikipedia, which, if you're half as cool as you think you are, you'll have already read)
With the Brady home at least, it seems there are several "mysterious" rooms that are shown during certain episodes but never relative to other sites, thus conceptually isolating them. And really, such inconsistencies are just as interesting (for myself) as the final product because they leave a kind of translator's "unintelligible" admission, scrawled near-sideways and naked in the center of an otherwise coherent paragraph.

The point is that fabricating an material legitimacy (or author-reversal) for any kind of cultural product is really, very serious business. This isn't a critique of Bennett's work, and while I think it falls short of it's potential, it still serves as another good example of invasive strategies. For this kind of work to become relevant (destructive) it needs to be applied to historical representations and narratives. Energy needs to be applied to areas that are disputed or have room for alternate interpretations and to make those interpretations, in a word, malicious. Full Post...

Wallace & Gromit: Deceit as Critical Decentering

I'd actually like to cover alot of ground in this blog and certainly a full exploration of Modernism is in order, eventually, as well as a place to finally merge it with several other (neo)historical/conceptual projects of my own.
This first official post (pop the cork, kthx) contains a link (provided below) to a short short by animator, Nick Park (famous for his Wallace and Gromit IP) that, by accident, popped into my head last night as an excellent way to begin a basic kneading of "misrepresentation" and "deceit" as methods of deconstructive and Poststructuralist criticism. Specifically, I'm proceeding from the assumption that the "text" is constituitive rather than constituted or rather, I mean to say that we can think of "text" as being a situation or a qualifier.
In order to dismantle structures, or to throw structured elements into play, one can seek to mutilate certain aspects of ideology (of the Marxian variety) that constitute a center, specifically, Levi-Strauss type binaries. Other ways include flaying a certain number of "helds" that bar the edges of a specific path toward a (sometimes) concensus.
Non-veridical measures are key, and a (con)fusion of text from within a supposedly transparent critical environment is also key, although I've never heard of anyone suggesting it as a practice. At any rate, to begin this discussion I thought the following would be a good way to start. Enjoy.
NickPark Creature Comforts (1989) Full Post...