Spring 2016

unfinished Péret - - - - - - - - - SPIRALBOUND

Deškuorš Susački, če je našilo ovde, vani i nasred.

Susak Expo 2006, počel činit jideju kruoz deškuorš z judima i somim mjestom da razdili od nas i stvore starinu zajik i veze. Tuo je jideja za jerase i jideja po našu. Po našu je sve koj novo kako bi se stvorile naše misli, kako i ovuof taštamenat i ovuof projekt, tako se more sve ovo razumit i nerazumit, ol uspit ol neuspit. Pak je najglavnije da ova stvor z jideju ni jedina njihova jideja, nego uvik kako se more širit kroz novi deškuorš. „Misli kje se ne su ćakulale, Posle su se zobile“ Ove besede su bile letratone na zidu na jednoj galeriji, uputil jih je jedan umjetnik Bas Jan Ader, kako bi klol garoufuoli pored ovih besedi. Rekal je da ovi garoufuoli ne smu bit sila rakamani, da vala su obični, da bi barzo uvenuli pored ovoga taštamjenta. Nike misli ostaju zoblene, a nike misli se nanke ni ne reču. Tako ustane spomen nezoblenih jideji. Kada god nam pride čudna jiskra, ali ju pustimo da nam se ostvari. A kad nam ovuof umjetnik Bas Jan Ader poslol vuov urdin mi nikad ne bi znali negove nediškurene besede. Bilo bi tješko stvorit ovu vezu nad nas i ove jideje.

The art world, like any other cultural or social organisational sphere, is based around a principle of continuation. We tend to organise ourselves and our passions around growth, improvement and what

S lu

ice

we abstractly call ‘moving forward’. Neo-capitalist

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culture demands a linear narrative in a way that is

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unprecedented and largely uncriticised.

At Sluice_ we ask: What if we stepped sideways?

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fo r

et

What if we trailed off, or broke away, out of mere curiosity? Discontinuity – in text, in art, in the world

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– can lead to new, formerly unimaginable creations.

Nicole Sansone

Similarly, Sluice_magazine offers the opportunity for

Seeing From Both Sides:

disruptions to take place.

Susak expo fits with this narrative of discontinuous thinking, as it displaces the art exhibition from its accessible, profit-driven context that relies heavily

Vision, Technology and the Contemporary Still Life

on visitor numbers, to a remote island where it exists without being readily available to see. Nicole Sansone’s Seeing From Both Sides criticises the idea that the act of looking is a smooth, unmediated act, and I propose the performing body as a site of disruptions and hybridisations in Liminal States. Gavin Wade explains the success of the artist-run Eastside Projects in the Birmingham art scene and John Ros urges us to resist dominant hegemonies in art, culture and politics in The Artist as Citizen. Finally, in each edition we will be inviting an artist/group/whatever to curate a supplemental intervention in the magazine. They will have complete editorial and creative autonomy. For this issue we’ve invited FungiCulture, a London- and New York-based critical collective.

In this way, Sluice_magazine presents a collection of snapshots that engage with the ‘what if’ of artistic creation.

Rosanna Van Mierlo

Publisher: Susak Press Publishers: Karl England & Daniel Devlin Editor: Tash Kahn Features Editor: Rosanna Van Mierlo Design: Susak Press Production: Imago Contributing Editors: Ben Street & Charlie Levine

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DfoE A W under , N t s I i t r a G AV of Eastside Projects, r irecto ngland and d E l r a oK talks t

Rosanna Van Mierlo

Liminal States

Hybridism and Performance of the Imaginary

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? g o z r e h

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tist on ar

talks

vlirnand c e uer D g l n e e i e d l n Dan fou o Be

k Susa

expo

to

nz Lore

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supplement

r ewasse e S r e t Pe

FungiCulture James Hedges Mimi Howard

The Artist As Citizen

Lendl Barcelos / Sanna Blennow

John Ros

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Sluice_2015 Photo essay as told by Charlie Levine

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analogy 62 SU 2 0 0 6 -2 S AK 0 Alistair Gentry

16 10th a nnivers ar y of nobod a bien y gives nale a f uck a Lorenzo bou t Belengu er

IERA 75 FKuK RIV the convent holiday of curated by

ić Igor F. Petkov

expo

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SUSAK expo 2016 6-16 May 2016 House 600, Susak PV / OPENING: Thursday 12 May exhibition until end of September Palača Fritzy, Museum of Mali Lošinj PV / OPENING: Friday 13 May exhibition from 13 May to 22 May ArtHelix, Brooklyn, NY Musée Des Civilisations, Dschang, Cameroun Muzej Macura, Novi Banovci, Serbia ......................................., Rijeka, Croatia studio1.1, London

Curated by Keran James and Herzog Dellafiore Elisa Bollazzi / Microcollection Daniela Leupold Löwenthal Peter Znidarić Seewasser Werner Mandlberger Christoph Aschauer Hassan Abdelghani Tomislav Brajnović Gianfranco Mirizzi Dorothy Dellafiore Herzog Dellafiore Ada Kobusiewicz Markus Dressler Andreas Schatzl

www.susakexpo.com

Robert Findenig Igor F. Petković Gabriele Sturm Cedric Christie Boris Mihaljčić FKuK RIVIERA Christine Punz Michael Maier Dominik Grdić Hermann Fink Dejan Štifanić Daniela Urem Keran James

Daniel Devlin Avo Zimmerl David Brock Janko Matić Michael Eisl Ulrike Tisch Doug Lewis Georg Miks Free House Tom Bayer Tash Kahn Oliver Ertl Petra Varl

h e r z o g?

Daniel Devlin, publisher, director of studio1.4, founder of Susak expo, method painter and con artist talks to Lorenzo Belenguer

Daniel Devlin, a method painter and co-founder of Susak expo, has kindly agreed to respond to the following questions about this year’s Susak expo. It may be worth noticing that the highly-respected Italian American art critic, Jennifer Viviani, has described Devlin, in one of her influential essays in 2006, as: “a self-confessed cynic […] An expert in making meta-works: objects and statements that explain art or function as its accessories or souvenirs, but can never be taken for the artworks themselves […] ‘One must not spend time doubting, one must just begin’ is the opening slogan for one of Daniel Devlin’s films, and yet Devlin never really begins any art. In fact, Devlin habitually avoids making any art, preferring rather to languish in the Ur stages of the art process. He frets not about what artwork he will make but rather indulges himself in neurotic self-analysis about what art itself is.

In the video Conversation, Devlin and his Doppelganger (the artist plays both characters) sit around drinking coffee, one of the Devlins boring the other with rhetorical questions regarding the definition of ‘art’. Devlin 1 ponders one such definition he has read as ‘culturally significant meaning skilfully encoded in affecting sensuous medium’, a phrase he muses over until he drives Devlin 2 so crazy that he throws a glass of water over him. With a background soundtrack of

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IS ART VALIDATED IF NO-ONE SEES IT?

canned audience laughter, booing and hissing, the philosophical questioning here is reduced to the slapstick humour of an American sitcom. Devlin is not really interested in finding answers; if he were, then he would have to get on and make some art, not lazy conversation.” There is nothing more encouraging than a visceral review by an acclaimed art critic.

What are the benefits of organising a biennale that no-one sees?

The original reason for organising the Susak expo was as a reaction to all the art fairs, biennales and museums of contemporary art sprouting up everywhere, and to highlight the absurdity of this proliferation by staging an international art biennale in the most unlikely of places where, apart from a few people seeing it by mistake and, of course, the participating artists, the chances are no-one will see it.

The first three editions had an advert in Frieze magazine, and I like the idea that there was a remote chance that someone might mistake it for a ‘proper’ biennale and actually turn up.

If a tree falls in a forest and noone is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Is art validated if no-one sees it?

Since no-one sees the exhibition, the objects created for it (paintings, installations, photographs etc) lose importance, while what becomes central is the whole experience of artists sharing time and ideas.

When the Expo is over, some of the objects will still be there for a while, like strange artist droppings.

Maybe people should ask themselves – what are the benefits of a biennale that people do see?

And maybe realise that the desperate and misguided search for exposure and acceptance is possibly not where we should focus our energy. And, possibly, consider the idea that art might be somewhere unexpected.

Artists crave exposure.

Do you prepare them in advance of the possibility of zero attendance?

What are their reactions?

One hopes that not all artists feel the same way about exposure. You get all sorts of artists with all sorts of intentions. Artists are made aware that generally no-one turns up to the Susak expo; I want the artists to be OK with the concept and possibility of failure, or even to embrace failure as a desirable outcome. The possibility of failure ensures the unpredictability of the

expo. So even if there is a storm for ten days and we are not able to get to the island at all, Susak expo will still have happened.

Many artists don’t care, as long as it will look good on their CV they’re game, But most of the ones who think like that quickly figure out that Susak expo most probably isn’t going to look great on their CV anyway, so I don’t get many of these.

They would rather participate in an ‘anyone goes’ group show featuring many dozens of artists, where you take in your object (often the same object you’ve taken to previous shows), leave it there for a week (sometimes longer) and then take it away. Your exposure is minimal (unless your name starts with an A and some punter might have read your name scrolling down the first few names in a very long list of artists listed in a tiny font on the A4 flyer), but the gallery is in the right area and it will look good on your CV. My advice is not to bother; it’s easier just to make up your CV and fill it with as many exhibitions (group or solo), real or invented, as you want. I wouldn’t put in too many big shows, though; I would balance it out with some minor ones.

It has happened that artists have misguidedly believed that Susak expo is a ‘proper’ art event, and even though it would have been explained to them that failure is cool and no-one will see their show, they don’t believe it. These artists hate the experience and add a bit of friction to the event (not necessarily a bad thing). On one occasion, when we had the show opening in the museum in Mali Lošinj, two artists in particular had put in a lot of effort and preparation and put up some quite impressive work. Since the expo is all about the time leading up to the show, the openings tend to be

perfunctory, and these two couldn’t cope with nobody seeing their work; they dragged in an unsuspecting guy from the street – who politely stayed a couple of minutes before clearing off.

Some artists seek to disappear in plain sight. They understand the whole thing completely and it is them who tend to come back.

How do you switch roles between being the Susak expo’s founder and a participant artist?

I think that we are all founders and participating artists. I see the Expo as a collaborative venture that allows space for each of our individual practices.

Are your expectations different from previous editions? In what way?

Not that different. When you build ‘failure’ into your model as a goal and not merely a by-product, then each expo has a chance to be both different and yet the same.

There are a couple of new things that are exciting me – the documentation of the work will be shown at ArtHelix in Brooklyn and at the Musée des Civilisations in Dschang (Cameroon), which will make this expo properly international.

Another thing – but I will believe it only when it has happened – is that this year we might have someone who is neither a participating artist nor someone local who has stepped in by mistake (or been dragged in against their will), who will fly to Croatia from San Diego in California, specially to catch the opening. It’s great to think that for the 10th anniversary of the expo, we’ll finally get a real visitor!

What is the reason behind the concept of inviting the artists to make interventions in the landscape?

There seems little sense in travelling to the other side of Europe if not to make site-responsive work. Susak is not just about isolation; it sits within a wider context and, whether politically or geographically, artists are encouraged to respond to the place and to reconsider their own practices.

Lorenzo Belenguer is an artist and arts writer based in London and Valencia. He has collaborated with The Guardian, Huffington Post and currently with Artlyst and FAD Arts.

Strongly influenced by Minimalism and Arte Povera. He has exhibited in the Tate Modern and alongside the 56th Venice Biennale. devlindds.com

Seeing From Both Sides: Vision, Technology Nicole Sansone

One of the links that connects the sciences to the arts is their relation to perception. This is something that has not only driven art history at times but the sciences as well.

The more we know and understand about vision, the more profound our accomplishments in the sciences and the arts and the more nuanced our understanding of both.

This connection has a longstanding history. Hanneke Grootenboer has shown that 17th-century Dutch, breakfast-table paintings were a product of a cultural fascination with observing and recording reality in all its variety. Everything from the exquisite to the mundane was worthy of fastidious observation; the Dutch were, as Grootenboer describes it, “preoccupied with virtually scientific modes of describing inanimate objects, flowers, shells, fruits, and other edibles.” (Grootenboer, The Rhetoric of Perspective.) What drove this preoccupation was in part connected to a science of vision that was flourishing at this time in the Netherlands. (Ibid., 5.) New optic technologies such as the microscope and camera obscura produced enhanced understandings of human vision. (Ibid., 5.) As a result, these technologies not only revealed things in new and fascinating detail but they also made the act of looking in itself interesting.

This historical link raises the following question: How do we see today? With the rise and proliferation

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of mobile media and networked technologies, this becomes a complicated question on a number of fronts. First, the proliferation of home computing and networked technologies has meant that our vision is increasingly directed towards the screens of our devices. When we look at our devices, we see the devices themselves but we’re also able to forget these devices and look ‘into’ the abyss of the machine. We give ourselves over to the images that are conjured up by command lines with total absorption. We are carried into the space of images. This makes the question of where seeing takes place increasingly complicated. We look at pictures of places close to home and far away; we look at people we see in our everyday lives and complete strangers. More than this, not only do we use our eyes to look at things on screens and through lenses but we also use our hands and fingers.

We tap to look, we pinch to look at a different distance, and we swipe to change what we’re looking at.

This multifaceted approach to vision arises precisely out of the

organisation and design of the technologies that now so dominantly govern our lives. For as much as these technologies have expanded our visual field they have also equally left us more revealed, and as some might lament, more vulnerable. Fights for the right to digital privacy prove how these technologies and our expanded vision now constitute the new conditions of visibility. In place of the old order of operations, now we find ourselves squarely in the thick of an all-penetrating visual miasma, one in which voyeurism is no longer an act separated out from the rest of visibility, performed in isolation.

Rather voyeurism now moves with us, alongside us. It’s the new proviso of the flâneur: it’s what makes us knowable to the world, and the world knowable to us.

Technology reorganises the body and in so doing reorganises the senses.

Technologies, in a similar manner as in the 17th-century Netherlands, have also given way to a new way of looking and sensing. Looking today means looking through devices, looking through screens, looking through

We find ourselves squarely in the thick of an all-penetrating visual miasma

and the Contemporary Still Life code; it also means looking with our eyes, our fingers, our bodies. Looking is an act that is in motion, that is transportive, but it is also performed by sitting perfectly still, while lazing on a couch, or zooming on a train.

Just as looking has changed, and similar to what transpired in the 17thcentury Netherlands, so too is our contemporary art being affected by this transformation. In what follows I will address an abbreviated selection of still-life artworks that register this change in looking. These artworks all seem to suggest a common starting point in digital aesthetics and technology. They all have strong stylistic effects that either mirror creative digital programs – such as drop shadows or artificial lightreflecting surfaces – or are in fact entirely produced through these programs – a fact that is emphasised through comparison to more natural, or ‘real life’, elements.

Laura Letinsky’s photography series, Ill Form and Void Full is a strong example of this juxtaposition. The works are a combination of new images and cut out, collaged photographs from previous-made works, found in the artist’s older portfolios as well as in lifestyle magazines. Lacerated melon rinds lifted with surgical precision from Letinsky’s previous still lifes sit alongside actual cherry pits, all against a background of contrasting shades of white, sometimes denoting a backdrop, other times a table top.

Lotte Rose Kjær Skau, ‘Everything Twice’, 2015, digital composite collage, c-type print, 36 x 24 cm, courtesy of IMT Gallery, London

Earlier images in the portfolio are more explicit in their depth and collage play, while later images become more abstracted and subtle, conflating positive and negative spaces with dimension. The sum effect is one in which we are constantly doubting our visual sense of space. We naturally first go straight to the idea that the images have been Photoshopped or computer-produced in some way because of the extent to which they seem out of line with our natural visual reasoning. It’s a hard nagging doubt to leave behind, even after we find out the photos are a mixture of photograph, collage and still life, and this might be precisely because we know they’re photographs. We commonly learn that Photoshop and photo manipulation are never far behind contemporary photography, and it’s hard to admit exceptions to that rule – particularly when they look as suspicious as the images in Ill Form and Void Full do.

If the 17th-century Dutch science of vision was preoccupied with magnification and absolute vision, with recording items in fantastic detail – of human vision made better – then Letinsky’s studies support a 21st-century science of vision that takes aim at the blind spots of human vision – at the images and scenes we can perceive but of which we can’t

immediately make sense. Letinsky has described this process as an investigation of photography as an ideological apparatus, and it makes sense. The images in Ill Form and Void Full are operative on the basis of how materials and subjects perform both behind, and in front of, the camera.

As a study in photography as an ideological tool, the photographs in Ill Form and Void Full are an explicit metaphor of what ideology looks like: multiple parts, some clearly visible, others not, and the relation amongst them imprecise. As the product of a combination of contemporary forces, including the 21st-century condition of vision and the ubiquity of technology, the photographs make an even more acute statement about this aesthetics of ideology. They prove the interchangeability of what is properly considered natural (like cherry pits) and what is naturalised (melon rinds), suggesting how technology can be used to soothe over similarly ambiguous and contradictory internal logic in ideology. Also the moments in which the images appear to us as slurred or opaque (are those items sitting next to each other? are they flat, or three-dimensional?) seem to point to blind spots in human reasoning and intelligibility. Not all sensible ideas float along on the

This aesthetic isn’t easily explained away as a trick of the eye. It more significantly recalls the multiple and simultaneous temporalities of life lived part in reality, part in virtuality 12

surface of things, readily graspable, they seem to say to us. Equally so, perhaps not all sensible surfaces are available to be grasped.

As in Letinsky’s work, presenting items from the physical world in such a way as to suggest a technological intervention seems to be a core strategy of the new still-life works.

This sets the stakes of these new still lifes as being planted on two terrains: one, on the accurate reflection on the state of our current lives as being helmed by networked technologies and mobile media, and two, on the untangling of the abiding belief that somehow what is technological is always incommensurate to what is natural or real. This idea goes as far back as the 17th century, particularly in the works of Galileo and Johannes Kepler. Joseph Vogl has argued that when Galileo took the telescope under his scrutiny he equally brought under examination looking itself. As Vogl describes it: “In 1604, [Johannes] Kepler had already established that the eye is an optical device made up of a lens, lightproof chamber, and retina/screen and so showed how vision is itself an optical distortion and that sensory perception is based on sensory deception… Since Galileo, changes in vision cannot be understood in terms of given, natural vision: what the eye sees is now itself understood to be a construction.”

(Vogl, Becoming Media: Galileo’s Telescope.)

In bringing together the virtual and physical worlds in alternating exchange these still lifes also crack open the world of naturalised, or naturalising, representation. This is an apt effect to take on in a still life precisely because the still life aesthetic itself hangs so precariously on the natural and the naturalised.

Takeshi Murata and Lotte Rose Kær Skau’s print works here are

exemplary. Murata’s 2011 series Get Your Ass To Mars is a series of still life prints rendered entirely on the computer. Get Your Ass To Mars moves away from Murata’s previous moving image work and instead emphasises stillness and pictorial illusion. The images glisten with a hyperreal sheen and the kind of vacuous tranquility that can be produced in cyberspace.

But despite the images’ faithful renderings, their degree of realism is still warped: some images are slightly too flat, and often rounded or curved depth is lost as the software visibly struggles to apply an even texture to a shape or accommodate a diminishing perspective. Kjær Skau’s Everything Twice (2015) is an image almost in the opposite faith. It appears more instantly realistic until we are close enough to see the tension in the balancing vase on the cinder block, the slightly blurred edges of naturallooking wall and cloth textures, the swirl of rose petals or the floating knife. Both artists take the biggest liberties in their representation by purposefully mistreating gravity in their images. In Murata’s The Heretic (2011) a Dilbert cup of green liquid seemingly manages to balance floating and falling without spilling its contents, whereas all of the elements in Kjær Skau’s teeter on the brink of being gravitationally incomprehensible.

These are two images that, in one sense, work against the technology that support them: they present in the format of a photograph but simultaneously reveal themselves as an impossible reality. In this regard, these still lifes make certain claims about seeing and about a seeing audience. First, they assume that their legibility can remain intact even as they approach the limits of visual logic. They ask that we understand a moment as irregular and manipulated.

It is only logical that as new tools punctuate human history they bring about changes in human capability Everything Twice expects us to read the floating knife as a knife and at the same time understand that this knife might not actually exist, that it might be an element of the imagination.

These images also assume that, through our regular exposure to technological image manipulation and digital tools, we will understand and read parts of the image as technological. We understand that the knife in Everything Twice is a knife and we also know that it’s a knife that does not exist: it has been brought into existence through digital image manipulation. In this way, the technology that infiltrates our everyday life helps us to fill the logical blanks for what we are seeing or (as the case may be) not seeing. This fact underscores the integration of our perceptual and technological literacy.

All of the details of an image need not pertain to one category or another for an image to still be readable. In fact, what seems to be suggested

here is that we are so accustomed to the integration of technological aesthetics into our existing life that the technological can actually help us make sense of things when the organic breaks down; that it is precisely with the help of the technological that we access the visible world and process visual information.

It is only logical that as new tools punctuate human history they bring about changes in human capability. What is an area less developed here is how this symbiotic relationship equally extends to the arts and contemporary aesthetics. Sir Kenneth Clark has argued that with the invention of the telescope came the expansion of the world, not only in our sights but in our minds, and along with this so too did painting expand, resulting in the fantastic 17th-century panoramic paintings that spanned great distances and sometimes required steps for access. (Clark, Landscape into Art.)

Laura Letinsky, ‘Untitled #8’ Courtesy Yancey Richardson Gallery, New

Today’s technological advances call for a similar reassessment, and the swelling numbers of contemporary still life seem to provide the appropriate evidence to do so.

The artworks I’ve selected here represent a growing category of works that take aim at our most deeply held beliefs about what the human body is capable of and push it towards its own denaturalised limits. In particular, these still lifes apply pressure on the art historical mainstays of perspective and representation. Foregrounds and backgrounds are made so that they collapse into each other, or at other times appear imbricated with one another, and haphazardly so. Natural objects are made to look artificial; the artificial, natural.

This aesthetic isn’t easily explained away as a trick of the eye. It more significantly recalls the multiple and simultaneous temporalities of life lived part in reality, part in virtuality. Letinsky’s meticulously assembled cast of cutouts, physical items and shadow play is not just a photographer’s

exercise; it’s also precisely about the timing of photography, the clashing temporalities between the photographer and his/her subject(s).

The stop and start of flat, cutout images next to thick, fleshy objects operates on a scramble of perspectives and temporalities; they start and stop our linear reading and send our thoughts towards new planes. In Murata and Kjær Skau’s work, the uncertainty of what belongs to the physical world versus the virtual choreographs a very different reading of artwork than what has been traditionally understood in art history.

In all three examples we find that these new still lifes rely on a particular conjuring up of the motion of looking, or the movement of the eye as it shuttles between the image and the imaginary. In this way the movement of looking at these new still lifes acts as a mirror of our ‘screened eye’ – that window onto the technological soul towards which we direct most of our attention. And yet the weird and staggering motion of looking

at these images with their claims to natural representation and yet outof-whack stylistic choices should be a pace that is already familiar to us. It recalls our whizzing in and out of apps and browser windows; of holding one thought in suspension while furiously googling another. The way we look, and the things we look at, have become more fragmented.

It only makes sense, then, that the things we look at would also come to embody this fragmentation, and these still lifes appear to say that they already have – if we’d just spend long enough looking to notice.

Nicole Sansone is a curator and PhD researcher in the Digital Culture Unit at Goldsmiths’ Centre for Cultural Studies.

Alongside her work as a PhD researcher Nicole is presently a curator at IMT Gallery and a founding editor of the Fungiculture collective. She’s not as busy as her biography makes her sound. nicolesansone.com Takeshi Murata, courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York

Karl England talks to artist, founder and director of Eastside Projects

GAVIN WADE

Eastside Projects, an artist-run gallery, has sought to influence and shape the creative landscape of Birmingham since its launch in 2008. With Gavin Wade at the helm, today Eastside Projects is managed by a total of five company directors: Ruth Claxton, Simon and Tom Bloor, Celine Condorelli and James Langdon.

Sluice__ caught up with Gavin to explore the state of the arts from his perspective Gavin, when you came to create Eastside Projects you must have felt you were answering a need within Birmingham?

I moved back to Birmingham, from London, in 2004 because I thought there were a lot of artists here who were starting to become visible and I thought I could connect with them, and connect them with other people. After a period of time I realised that there was an opportunity to create a new space, we identified a huge gap in provision. When Eastside Projects opened, it doubled the capacity of contemporary art in the city and it created, in a way, a different type of institution: an artist-run institution.

Something unusual about us perhaps was that all the people involved were quite experienced, either as artists or as curators, so we already brought with us quite a big network, and on top of that we were quite strategic about how we were going to put Eastside Projects together. You could say it was a fairly refined birth, if I can use that word. From the start we brought with us a refined manifesto of what we wanted to achieve and how we wanted to fill the gap in the city, how we wanted to expand and grow contemporary art in Birmingham, which is an ongoing challenge.

photo: Andre de Jong

Many artist-run projects find the idea of being or becoming an institution, or institutionalised, problematic. Eastside Projects seems to becoming part of Birmingham’s establishment.

Are you conscious of the position you occupy? Is it strategic?

I think that, if you want to change a city you have to be very conscious of what kind of structure you are and how that compliments the other kind of institutional organisations and publics in the area. However, you do have to speak – to an extent – a language that synchronises with other entities. We often do that as an attempt to then try and change the bigger institution that is Birmingham – by acting as a small intervention into it. We wanted to change the way one might approach public art in the city, and how developing a relationship with the city council could enable that. It was a matter of putting out messages and mythologising on our part, to an extent, to say ‘we can do this!’, ‘we make a difference!’ Until enough people start to believe it and then they invite you in, because they, actually, are also in the job of trying to improve the city and make a difference, make changes, get rid of bits of the city that don’t work and try to introduce new ones.

Artists want to survive and they want to be successful, they want to come up with ideas that last forever, they want to change the world

Sometimes it’s hard to see that but actually that’s what politicians and civil servants and people that sit on the city council are all doing. When we come up with a good idea they’re actually happy to call on us to get involved. At the moment I’m involved in writing the core public art strategy for the city. This level of investment is exactly where we’d hoped Eastside Projects would be able to position itself, so we can try and then project our ethos into those policies. Although, even once you’re at the table, it’s really not that easy!

Most artist-run spaces tend not to be commercially focused. However, as artists and curators we want to be financially sustainable. There is a perceived incompatibility.

Referencing this in 2013 you staged the exhibition, ‘Trade Show’, which was a critique of the commercialisation of art. But also Eastside Projects does participate in commercial art fairs, so you’re clearly not oppositional to the commercial

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art world. How do you resolve this supposed stand-off?

My take on it is that art is inherently an exchange, and so it is inherently commercial, it has a commercial aspect to it, and that is because art can be anything in relation to anything, anywhere, at any time. So of course it’s going to do commercial things, it’s going to reflect on commercial activity. And I think that over the last hundred years, commercial galleries have been as important to the development of contemporary art as have public museums as have artist-run spaces. So I think you look at what is good about each of those models because each of those models fundamentally drives and questions why people make art.

None of them are oppositional, they are all actually complementary, they all fit together to support what artists do. Many artists operate between all three of those spheres: museum, gallery and artist-run projects. What was strategic about our initiative was that we did something with the gallery that criticised the negative aspects of all

three of those spheres. One of the things they might share a tendency towards is a sense of the white cube as a neutrality, or a default position, and so we would make a space that would try and not be neutral and try not to be a default by building in the best non-white cube aspects of each of those. I think we have to do art fairs and we have to try and sell art as much as we have to try and affect Birmingham’s cultural policy. They go hand in hand, you shouldn’t exclude any of them.

I think it’s a weird anomaly that certain types of public support of art exclude this commercial aspect, or that it’s seen as dirty if it dabbles, or that commercial galleries aren’t doing a public good. Actually, they are – dealers are really inventive, supportive people who are a part of the artist’s life.

There is a strong narrative here in the UK about the arts proximity to commerciality, suggesting that the closer you get to commercial success, the less critical validity you have. Often galleries and artists can’t afford to think like that as they have access to neither state funding nor commercial markets. However you finance your practice there are innate pressures that accompany it.

How do you feel these pressures – from wherever they come – affect artists’ output?

Artists want to survive and they want to be successful, they want to come up with ideas that last forever, they want to change the world to some degree, so they’re going to do things on impulse and sometimes it might even be that you have to have a little greed in you to be able to follow through your ideas in the way that artists do. You have to have a little bit of

selfishness and self belief and that can sometimes look like being some sharkish businesstype person. It is about getting that balance right and checking yourself: ‘Am I becoming a shark?’ and ‘Am I doing it for the public good?’

On your website there are two lines in particular that are brilliant and I think not often heard. They are: ‘We do not make art for the public, we are the public that make art’ and ‘The artist-run space is not a stop-gap. The artist-run space is a public good.’ What do these phrases mean to you?

They were both moments of realisation for me but they were also messages to myself to remember and to make sure that I’m not making Eastside Projects just for my career. I’m not doing it to make me more successful, I’m doing it because it is the career, it is the goal. I’ve often thought that when artist-run spaces are set up early on, they are places where you experiment, where you learn, where you make your career and then they fall away, and your career might become something else. In some way I felt like doing some of that experimenting earlier on, creating a space that is still about experimentation but is also a realisation that this is the goal, this is it. The artist-run space should be the pinnacle, it should be the thing that everyone is trying to do, every big art institution in the world should want to be an artist-run space, rather than the other way round. It was a message to myself. I don’t imagine that artists aren’t part of society:

we are a vital element of society, we aren’t outside it, we are it, and that’s what that message is about: we are the public that makes art.

We don’t want to be oppositional, this idea of ‘don’t give money to art, we could spend it on health’ is to misunderstand the relationship between health and art. You invest in art because it will reflect on and ultimately connect into ideas of health or education or an other aspect of society. It will feed into it, it will support it.

This reminds me of evaluation questions about public engagement. Obviously funders want you to reach out beyond the initiated, which is understandable, but at the same time if we say we got 10,000 people through the doors over a weekend – that’s not nothing, artists and the art-world are also the public.

What you really want is a city where people have the time to think about the future, to think about how society is working, and you will need art for that. The people

who don’t have time, the people whose lives are tough because society is not actually serving them: they’re the last people going through the door. Ultimately I want to affect my city so everyone will benefit, not because it will then save people’s lives and change them – but because it already has, it already has affected them, and then new publics will come and find art because now they’ve got time, now they’re living a better life, which means we’d change with it, we’d have to adapt what we are too, which sounds pretty grandiose but I think these things are fundamentally achievable.

Eastside Projects has been an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation since its inception in 2008 in partnership with Birmingham City University. eastsideprojects.org karlengland.com

“We “Wedo donot notmake mak art artfor forthe thepublic publi we weare arethe thepublic publ that thatmake makeart ar

Liminal States

Hybridism and Performance of the Imaginary Rosanna Van Mierlo -1-

THE PARALYSIS OF BECOMING ANIMAL OR: WHY GREGOR SAMSA COULDN’T GET OUT OF BED It’s hard to see the crab at first. It has merged with the grey, rocky background, taken up its texture and muddy colours, almost disappearing – wholly part of the scene.

It doesn’t move. It just sits there in the far left corner, its legs and scissors tucked away under its body. She comes by here every day, but she has never seen the crab before. Maybe he’s a new addition, she thinks, some sort of strategically placed attribute to fish-tank life, a way to get rid of the waste products that gather between the rocks. Or maybe – she has an imaginative mind – maybe he has actually grown out of the rock, first as a little bump, a minor disturbance, but as it kept growing and growing it separated itself from the stony surface, eventually becoming an entity of its own as it fell down, down, down the side and landed in the left corner of the aquarium. Who am I to say where life begins and where it ends? The pregnancy of the event can be a splitting cell, or a heartbeat, or maybe it starts with the mere shiver, a disturbance in the atmosphere, a small crack in the stone in which something suddenly starts to move.

I read The Metamorphosis (Kafka, De Gedaanteverwisseling) as a child, and although I was far too young to grasp the subject of metamorphosis as anything other than pure magic – which seemed nothing out of the ordinary – let alone a meaningful literary metaphor, the image of a giant insect lying in bed covered by blankets, its head resting on the pillow as if he were a man, always stuck with me. Hybridism seems to suffer from a state of not belonging; it is mainly defined by what it is not; not human, not animal. The hybrid is a creature prone to loneliness, consumed as it is by shame of its appearance.

Post-metamorphosis, Franz Kafka’s protagonist Gregor Samsa keeps to himself in the attic, afraid of how people will react to his new body, and this is how he dies.

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In critical discourse the figure of the ‘human’ animal has gained increasing amounts of attention from feminist scholars such as Carol J. Adams and Donna Haraway, who debate the meaning of the animal’s social status as Other (or non-human) in relation to our own sense of self. Whether this is a question of politics, anthropology or art, these discourses investigate the animal as a symbol of familiarity and strangeness, a duality that is symbolised in the figure of the family pet (Marc Shell, Family Pet, Representations 15) or other domesticated animals. They are almost human, but not quite, which enables us to infantilise or objectify them according to our needs for food or loving company. The inherent ‘hybrid’ social status of the almost human is in constant friction with our sense

of ethical responsibility, and it varies uncontrollably. This connection between a hybrid social status and oppression is shared by women throughout history, as their status as almost men – but not quite – provided an excuse for their deferral from humanist discourses: the sciences, voting rights etc. The hybrid is a symbol for a destabilisation, and in this lies its threat. In cultural historical studies we find literal hybrids in ancient mythology (the Medusa, the Sirens) that mostly occupy themselves with the destruction of wise and brave men, and live in caves or on rocks far away from civilisation. In anthropology, the status of almost-human or animal can be interpreted as a form of hybridisation.

In gender discourse, hybridisation is a metaphor for the ways in which gender is not a fixed, but rather a fluid state, and

in politics we can view the disintegration of European borders and the merging of cultures as a hybrid process. I argue that central to these investigations lies the ability to re-imagine the concept of a border as not a fixed state but a flexible area of possibility, leading to the destruction of polarised entities and the birth of new identities.

Kafka’s story illustrates the clash between the human and the nonhuman and our inability to cope with the strangeness of the animal body, the hybrid, or half-human/half-animal monster. Historically, as we see in The Metamorphosis, a hybridisation of the human and the animal body is often described as a terrifying, escalating, in this case physically paralysing event: a disintegration of the controlled, enlightened individual who has it all sorted into not only literal but symbolic animality. In the context of hybridism, animality has historically been a homonym for destruction of the rational self, a dive into sexual depravity – sometimes even leading to cannibalism – and the degeneration of the civilised subject.

(Although specifically Haraway has written about human/ cyborg hybridism, I want to focus here on animal/human hybrids, because

I hold the anthropological viewpoint that the human body is animal in its origin and as such inherently hybrid from the start, which makes our fear of hybrids all the more interesting.) The hybrid body is a body out of control, a body that stepped outside the lines we drew for it, a body that does not obey the rules of humanist logic and social hierarchy that keep us safe. (When it comes to capital, ‘hybridity’ is used in advertisements for household equipment and environmentally-friendly fuel systems, and the plastic surgery industry is soaring as never before.

But these are adaptations, partial ‘improvements’ to an existing, solid identity. A car is still a car, a girl still a girl, even more so with double D.) I am interested in this idea of hybridism as a hiatus, an indefinable, bodily manifestation of social disobedience.

Why is the hybrid such a horrific figure, and how can we think of hybrids as useful figures for feminist theory?

In this essay I want to explore the figure and destabilizing force hybrid through the narratives at play in the performance work Realness, a collaboration between artists Kate Spence and Michael Lightborne, which was featured during Sluice_2015 at

London’s BargeHouse. The performance revolves around issues of intimacy, desire and temporality. The title is a reference to Spence’s earlier work Strike a Pose (Spence, K. and Lightborne, M., performed during Queer Traces, Birmingham, 2015) as well as the film Paris is Burning (Jenny Livingston, 1990), in which the concept of ‘realness’ as authenticity is played with, and expanded, in the African-American and Hispanic drag ballroom scene. As such it questions the representation of the ‘authentic’ female body and the politics of the gaze. However, in this essay I will focus specifically on the ways in which the performance was meaningful in light of feminist investigations of specifically female hybridism as respectively informed by metamorphosis, liminality and abjection, and unfold the figure of the ‘monstrous’ hybrid as a feminist trope of empowerment, represented, as I believe, by the performance. I wonder if and how the hybrid is essentially a figure of authenticity, and how Spence’s beautifully terrifying creatures, both reality and fiction, make use of the undermining of its strategies in order to destabilise normative, repressive notions on beauty, sexuality, and what it means to be a woman.

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PASSING THE LIMIT “Because they have a hard outer shell (the exoskeleton) that does not grow, they must shed their shells, a process called molting. Just as we outgrow our clothes, crabs outgrow their shells.”

(National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, Molting, How Crabs Grow) After three days, the crab had disappeared, leaving behind his cracked shell which would now truly become part of the rock, as it slowly degenerated, becoming more and more translucent, breaking up in little pieces, falling between the gravel.

In The Metamorphosis, Kafka describes the moment shortly after Gregor Samsa discovers his own transformation from human to insect as a monstrous event that forces him into physical paralyses,

unable to get out of bed. The scene is dominated by his distress over the unknown: his own unknown body, his difficulty understanding his new situation, his worries about discovery

– which almost resemble sexual shame – and upsetting his employer and his immediate family. Not only is his new body no longer human, it is also of a species commonly perceived

to be as good as ‘unconscious’ and disgusting; that of an insect, the lowest on the anthropomorphic awareness/ emotional ladder for which we feel the least sympathy. (G.G. Márquez, A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings.) His physical paralyses can arguably be interpreted as his inability to accept his transformation, as his ‘human’ mind fails to connect with his new, strange body, leaving him stuck in a vulnerable position in which he is utterly powerless. From that point of view, Kafka’s story describes modern man’s fear of destabilisation: of identity, career and family life. These are the things we hold dearest in our neoliberal culture, as we identify financial or artistic success with the ability to be respected, and ultimately loved by others. (Michel Feher gave a compelling series of lectures on the neoliberal condition at Goldsmiths in 2014 as part of the Operative Thought Series, where he described the transformation of society from one based in romantic idealism to individual success. See Feher, Self-Appreciation; or, The Aspirations of Human Capital.)

However, more importantly, Kafka’s story introduces the animal body as a way of turning reality upside down, literally and figuratively: Samsa is turned onto his back and can’t roll back over. This experience is axial; the inversion of Samsa’s body from human to animal takes place as he lies down on his back horizontally. Somehow he cannot pacify the two versions of his new identity: this ‘human’ position becomes paralysing. The ensuing identity crisis ultimately leads to Samsa’s demise, but it enables his family to start living for themselves, as they – now no longer dependent on Samsa as a sole source of income – are forced to pick up their lives again, freed from the economical paralyses they were in before Samsa’s metamorphosis.

The performance similarly plays with an axial transformation by adding the split screen to the performance, which from there onwards plays out on two different planes; that of the

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Photos: Michael Lightborne subject being viewed, and that of the artist creating new shapes. However, Spence and Lightborne use this axial perspective as a way of refusing the static immobility (paralyses) that Samsa suffers from, but instead enable Spence to manipulate the constraint, direct view of the audience and control her own physical representation.

The hybrid creations on the screen are mash-ups of gender, digital and analogue experience, fact and fiction, but above all they are critiques of stable, restrictive, linear identities that show us the generative force of a subject that is defined by its ability to exist in-between. Realness plays with the idea of the body as unstable, generative, and prone to change as a positive, doing away with the idea of becoming hybrid as a terrible event and instead proposing hybridisation as a generative process that opens up new possibilities.

An explanation for the friction between the perception of the hybrid as monstrous and generative at the same time could possibly be found in Jacques Derrida’s theory of limitropy; his investigation of the border as a site of possibility and change, which he argues is connected to the strangeness of the animal body. In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida describes how the inherent ‘otherness’ of animals, the element that so disturbs us and enables us to feel superior, lies rooted in their unawareness of their own nudity. The visual presence of the animal as both naked and not naked at the same time poses a threat to our anthropomorphic sense of logic; it causes a rupture in the field of representation. (Burt, Animals in Film.) Our awareness of ourselves as separated from the rest of the world (the birth of our human consciousness) is connected to sexual difference: the realization that our body was naked

and this was a cause for shame, as we saw ourselves as ‘different’ from the rest of the world. In this moment we gave ourselves a name, constructing for the first time a sense of self and other, interior and exterior. (Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am.) Man is the animal who knows his limits; but the animal does not; they are without limits. Derrida goes on to urge us to investigate what is cultivated on the edges of a limit (“Let’s allow that word to have both a general and strict sense: what abuts onto limits but also what feeds, is fed, is cared for, raised, and trained, what is cultivated on the edges of a limit.” Ibid., 397), there where two entities meet. The area of the limit – classically seen as a nonspace defined by what surrounds

it – to Derrida signifies possibility of its own. Limitrophy, he says, is a “transgressal if not transgressive experience”. (Ibid.) In this way, I see the hybrid as an infectious, transgressal coming together of multiple identities, a performance of limitrophy par excellence. As a figure, the hybrid navigates in between borders, in between sexes, in between good and bad. This connection to limitrophy is where the destabilising powers of the hybrid originate, but this is also a process of re-imagining, reconnecting, re-growing.

The act of dressing up is the first stage of passing the limit that separates you from the unknown, incorporating the strange into your own appearance. It is no coincidence

that dressing up is usually reserved for ritual, children who still believe in magic, the transvestite and the insane. Trespassing the bodily limits of appearance expels you from the norm. By transforming the white, western female body – the idealised sexy blonde stereotype of female submissive sexuality – into all kinds of fantastic creatures that are wholly alien to our perceptions of what a female body should look and behave like, aided by dress-up, Spence and Lightborne use strategies of limitrophy to call into question cliché imagery of femininity as social constructs, while simultaneously claiming a certain animality that is unaware of the limits of the body.

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POLITICS OF FEMALE MONSTROSITY In Marquez’ story The Story of a Very Old Man With Enormous Wings (G.G. Márquez, Leaf Storm), the arrival of the angel is introduced by the arrival of the crabs, as they crawl out of the sea and flood the city with their white bodies, as they lie dying in the courtyards, sprawling out over the streets, and their corpses in their shells fill the air with a horrible smell. The people in the village spend hours trying to get rid of them, but they keep swarming all around them, an apocalyptic prelude to an event yet unknown, but the people can feel it, quivering in their stomachs: some sort of balance has thoroughly been disturbed.

There is an aspect to the becoming animal, or becoming strange, of specifically the female body that has a sexist narrative. Especially when it comes to female hybrids, the dominant idea seems to be that they are one-dimensional creatures of insanity, hysteria, and carnivorous lust. (Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis.)

Where male hybrids lose their status and career, female hybrids lose their minds. The taboo on hybridity is a gendered concept. In Skin/ned Politics: Species Discourse and The Limits of the Human in Nandipha Mntambo’s Art, Ruth Lipschitz addresses the

idea so present in animal/human hybridism that the proximity of the female to the ‘animal’ as incorporated in one body signifies a debasement or self-violation. (Quotations by author Ruth Adele Lipschitz, in Animality and Alterity: Species Discourse and the Limits of ‘the Human’ in Contemporary South African Art.) At the same time, the feminine and the animal share the same ‘nonhuman’ social status, according to psychoanalysis. “However […] in Freud’s narrative the animal is not just excluded from sociality and subjectivity but gendered. Phrased differently, uninvited to partake of the

primal feast, woman is not subject to its guilt. She is thus not transformed into full humanity but condemned to remain on the side of atavistic animality […]” Similar to Derrida’s thesis of the shameless animal, the woman (in Freud’s narrative of the primal feast) is not fully ‘humanised’ and as such could possibly claim to inherently inhabit the figure of the hybrid, which puts the taboo on female sexuality in an interesting light, as it is motivated by its inherent human/animal social conflict.

Does this mean that the natural animal/human hybridity in women’s social status forms the basis for the

branding of their sexuality as something abject that needs to be contained, as has been practiced for centuries, ranging from treatments of supposed hysteria to contemporary over-sexualisation of ‘girly-ness’? Is the taboo on female sexuality somehow informed by a fear of the female hybrid, the insane flesheating female vulture? And what can this abject status of female sexuality offer us?

Julia Kristeva points out the relationship between liminality and abjection in The Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection. In essence, she argues, our fear of the horrible is motivated by our attraction to it.

Distaste and desire are more closely connected than you might think, and they interconnect on the borders of the body; the orifices or the skin, there where the body opens itself up to be affected by the world, but, more symbolically, can pertain to any kind of boundary, the margin, etc., of an order. (Ibid., 66.) Furthermore, Kristeva points out the relationship between the abject body and fear of female sexuality more distinctly when she suggests a link between the abject and sexual difference, or the ways in which societies have branded feminine sexuality as deviant, infectious or monstrous as a way of establishing patriarchal power. (“[…] it is always to be noticed that the attempt to establish a male, phallic

power is vigorously threatened by the no less virulent power of the other sex, which is oppressed (recently? Or not sufficiently for the survival needs of society?) That other sex, the feminine, becomes synonymous with a radical evil that is to be suppressed.” Ibid., 70.)

Fear of contamination is a large part of abjection; the fear that the abject can somehow be transferred onto ones clean, proper body and affect its wholeness. (Ibid., 71.) Spence’s hybrids are constructs of partiality, an effect of the falling apart and reassembling of the ‘improper’ female body. Instead of banishing its hybrid qualities, Spence and Lightborne choose to enhance them, using references to sex-work – which suffers a major abject status – as a way of resisting the idea that the explicitly sexual female is without agency.

Barbara Creed takes Kristeva’s theory of abjection further and deploys it as a way to explain the status of the horrific of the feminine hybrid in film, signalling that the abject makes its appearance in film in instances where the body “signifies a collapse of the boundaries between human and animal.” “Thus, abject things are those which highlight the ‘fragility of the law’ and which exist on the other side of the border which separates out the living subject from that which threatens its extinction.” (Creed, The MonstrousFeminine.) The abject figure is a figure

that threatens the “symbolic system. It is what escapes that social rationality, that logical order on which a social aggregate is based…” (Kristeva, Powers of Horror.) It threatens the idea that the body is autonomous, comprehensible, stable, knowable.

The hybrid figures in Realness do exactly that; they exist (literally) on the other side of a symbolic order, and undermine the idea that the body and identity are fixed states. By using the visual aide of the stripper pole to both address the status of the sex worker as passive and abject, but also deploying it as a visual limit, a splitting into two of the field of vision from direct, analogue view (the dressing up) to the indirect, digital fantasy world that plays on the screen. It transforms the field of vision from horizontal, traditional and analogue to vertical, fantasy and digital. By ‘trespassing’ the limit, literally by dancing on the pole, Spence enables herself to engage with the hybrid possibilities of her female body.

In both a literal and a symbolic way, the performance enacts limitrophy, with Spence dancing in and out of her body, capable to live before shame and connect with that taboo, animal part of female sexuality that looks nothing like what we are used to see female sexuality represented as. In Spence and Lightborne’s hands, liminality enables exposure of a hybrid quality of female sexuality that will not be suppressed.

Rosanna van Mierlo is a contemporary art critic. Her essays take the form of semifictional observations that cross-stitch criticism with literature and poetry. Her research focuses around questions of loss and longing, gender, and hybridism/ morphology. www.rosannavanmierlo.com

CAREER SUICIDE

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WORDPRESS.COM GONZO ART CRITICISM FOR THE 99%

Sluice_ is for Ben Street

With apologies to Claes Oldenburg (1961)

Sluice is for an art that does something other than sit on its ass in an art fair.

Sluice is for an art gallery that grows up not knowing it is an art gallery at all, an art gallery given the chance of having a starting point of zero. That embroils itself with crap both everyday and not, and still comes out on top. With both hands up, if necessary.

Sluice is for an art that imitates the human. That takes its form from the lines of life itself. Lines that run across your failed funding application, in a cross shape. Lines that divide this space from that one, taped onto the floor. Lines in your artist’s statement that will not be read. Lines around your eyes and mouth. Lines around your boyfriend’s eyes and mouth. Heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as art itself.

Sluice is for a local art scene that suddenly vanishes. For a homepage that won’t load. For an exciting investment opportunity where once your paintings, of the backs of people’s heads, were hung.

Sluice is for an art that you find written on the back of your hand when you wake up. Sluice is for

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an art that gets caught between your back two teeth. Sluice is for an art that gets backed up into a corner and turns the corner into a new cave dwelling with desirable corner-of-the-room location, with stunning panoramic views of the room you just left.

Sluice is for the art of conversation between a naked human foot and an upturned mobile phone charger in a dark room in the middle of the night at your cousin’s friend’s house in Ipswich.

Sluice is for the crunch of cat litter in your sandwich.

Sluice is for the art of studios in notebooks and desktops. Of overdrafts, and draughts, and storage heaters, and drafts of failed funding applications with a cross shape over them. Of crossings out in desktops and notebooks. Of a list of names crossed out.

Sluice is for an art shown in the spaces underneath chairs and the back rooms of Thai restaurants on industrial estates. Sluice is for an art that grows in a pot. Sluice is for an art that comes in a can. Sluice is for an art that occupies the last chair in the back row on the far left in an otherwise sold-out screening

of I Am Legend and sleeps through the entire thing.

Sluice is for an art that is washed out of the wine glasses after the private view by a Portugese business management student called Monica. Sluice is for the thought in Monica’s head, not easily expressed in Portugese or any other known language, but which she (Monica) visualises as a bright yellow object, the size and shape of a video cassette, which rotates in the galaxy of her mind.

Sluice is for an art that falls out of the complementary art magazine and stains your white jeans. Sluice is for an art that clings to the soles of your loafers and impairs your ability to impress the new intern on the dancefloor.

Sluice is for an art that fills your handbag with marbles right up to the brim.

Sluice is for an art shouted into your ear at wherever it is we all ended up. Sluice is for an art that smells of bad crisps. Sluice is for an art that keeps rolling, and failing, and rolling, and failing, the same cigarette. Sluice is for an art that keeps forgetting to eat.

Sluice is for an art passed around like a cold. Sluice is for an art written in the margin of a library book found on the bus. Sluice is for an art that pops up and flashes on your screen just as your boss appears behind you. Sluice is for an art that lurks in your browser history, waiting to pounce. Sluice is for an art as complex as your parents’ wifi password and as simple as the translation of your uncle’s tattoo.

Sluice is for an art that hangs in the air. Sluice is for an art that you smell in your clothes, days later.

Sluice is for an art that is found lodged deep in the inner ear, and removed, miraculously intact, after thirty-five years. Sluice is for an

art that manifests itself on burnt toast. Sluice is for an art that can be seen even under heavy clothing.

Sluice is for an art that exactly fulfils the viewer’s expectations.

Sluice is for an art that celebrates the dominant discourse. Sluice is for an art that interrogates the rhizomatic. Sluice is for an art that questions the very notion of notions.

Sluice is for an art that will gradually depreciate. Sluice is for an art that will be shunted between your resentful descendants. Sluice is for an art that will fall apart in the taxi home. Sluice is for an art that will wilt under close inspection.

Sluice is for an art that is only revealed under uncertain

conditions. Sluice is for an art that will speak only when not spoken to.

Sluice is for an art that pours itself out of your hands like a cat.

Sluice is for an art that sits down in your head. Sluice is for an art that lies down in your head.

Sluice is for an art that rotates inside your head, like a bright yellow object the size and shape of a video cassette.

Sluice is for an art that does something other than sit on its ass in an art fair.

benstreet.co.uk

The Artist As Citizen A View From New York City John Ros

An artist seeking a workspace should be an easy process. Where the artist creates his or her workspace depends on several variables: affordability, community, proximity: all worthwhile negotiations when deciding where to create a sustainable and nurturing studio. Some choose to work from home for ease, value or necessity.

Others travel great distances because they have found a hub of vitality or, more likely, cheap rent. The daunting task of finding a suitable studio often pervades our thoughts, as it helps create our identity to ourselves, and, perhaps more importantly, makes more tangible the professional artistic identity we wish to portray to others. I say time and time again to my students: “A studio is about space and time. If you devote four hours a week in your bathroom to your studio practice, then it is your studio. Furthermore, you should never feel embarrassed or feel the need to apologise for this fact. Any space where you dedicate time to your practice is your studio.”

Now that you have space, what’s next? Besides the obvious tasks of creating a suitable schedule, networking with artists and industry professionals, and putting your theories into practice in a rigorous work ethic, a less obvious action may be getting to know the local neighborhood. It can be difficult

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to escape the understanding and protection of the ‘Art’ bubble we create for ourselves to feel supported and free to explore the cities where we reside. As artists, we must get out of our studios and get to know our communities. We must enable ourselves to discuss visual culture and our participation in it with people from all walks of life, including the non-art-goer. Though conversation with the like-minded, art-speaking types is encouraging, this continued back-patting and propping-up will only continue to separate our voices.

We do this without knowing, and in doing so, we help neuter our own language, rendering it irrelevant and quite possibly unnecessary.

What is important here is realising, though it may be difficult, that we do not exist only in our little bubbles. From the individual artist in his studio to the New York City or London art scene; from a graduating class to an art organisation: We are all facing tough questions in our communities today, questions on sustainable income, on human rights, on the environment, perpetual war, inequality, etc. The only way we are going to develop new ways of dealing with the constant demand of democracy is by coming together, by forging new relationships with our fellow citizens in order to create a lasting and sustainable future for all.

Public Art Work, But for Whom?

This conversation started one day this autumn on my return to New York City, tilting listlessly on the Q train over the Manhattan Bridge. I noticed more and more that the newly developed (and developing) skyline of Brooklyn seems to encroach upon the magnificent metal structure built more than a century ago. This structure, like its counterpart to the south, says Brooklyn and Manhattan like no other can.

The drastically changing landscape of Brooklyn is in part due to the development of Two Trees Development, LLC. Their website boasts, “Fueled by a frothy economy and unrelenting demand, developers hit the gas on residential projects over the past 18 months. Overall, Brooklyn development topped 41.6 million square feet … spanning nearly 600 projects and 45,359 apartments…” A DUMBO onebedroom loft at their 65 Washington location goes for a mere $3,225, compared to their 60 Water location where a slightly smaller studio lists for $3,336. The only things frothy here are the mouths of these investors, offering housing that is out of reach for most Brooklynites.

Worse, these actions are displacing them farther and farther in-borough or out-of-borough because so many cannot compete with the so-called

rising market values. Granted these prices may not be all that shocking for the DUMBO area, but with recent expansion throughout Brooklyn and Queens, where does it stop? And when did it begin?

It seems fitting that Two Trees commissioned the new Deborah Kass sculpture in Brooklyn Bridge Park. OY/YO measures 8 x 17 x 5 ft., a re-appropriated piece from a much smaller scale sculptural edition from 2011 bearing the same name.

The seeming gesture of largess, in the shadows of the aforementioned East River crossings, competes with the sculpture’s luxury surrounds.

The soft ‘review’ by The New York Times (Jonah Bromwich, ‘Oy or Yo? Sculpture With Something to Say Lands at Brooklyn Bridge’. The New York Times, November 10, 2015) fails to get into the meat of the piece; the article’s overly obvious stance adds to the constant dilemma of ‘plop art’ with little more purpose than giving the elite lurking in the towers above something to discuss.

If we regurgitate the same press release over and over, perhaps we too will believe. The more important questions are being ignored. “Do we really need more giant, expensive, out-of-reach sculptures?” If the answer is yes, we must ask: “Who is it serving?”

The Two Trees website attempts to compare OY/YO to familiar road signs on the Williamsburg Bridge and BQE, “Leaving Brooklyn: Oy Vey!” and “Leaving Brooklyn: Fuhgeddaboudit” respectively, stating, “OY/YO references Brooklyn’s ethnic communities with whimsy and warmth.” The problem is that the very ethnic communities they are talking about are being displaced by their market-driven actions. Soon all that will remain are these inane tokens – sad gestures, or worse, slaps-in-the-

face, to the many who build these neighborhoods, who are being forced out because of the slash-and-burn strategies of such vultures.

Timing seems important here. If it was twenty years ago, with DUMBO’s waxing art prominence beating the walls of the now-defunct artists’ lofts, there might have been a good reason for OY/YO’s inclusive message to be reverberated throughout an active community. Had that community and our elected representatives taken care to maintain a cultural livelihood, while also encouraging progress for all, perhaps this would have had a different effect. But with the current gentrifying trends, seemingly unavoidable, as we shrug our shoulders in inevitable defeat, have this sculpture and this park already become a token of our loss?

This trip to Brooklyn came as the Real Estate Summit hosted by the Brooklyn Museum was coming to Crown Heights. Ben Davis from

ArtNet News explained: “The museum will be playing host to the all-day Brooklyn Real Estate Summit, where, for $500 a ticket, over 800 developers will converge to hobnob and plan new ways to jack up your rent … The agenda advertises that it will help you learn how ‘to find overlooked neighbourhoods to invest in,’ teach you, ‘what you need to know about the latest batch of newcomers’; and provide tips on attracting sources of ‘international and institutional capital’ to fuel the gentrification machine.’” (Ben Davis, ‘The Brooklyn Museum Should Evict the Brooklyn real Estate Summit’, ArtNet News, November 9, 2015.)

Protests were being organised by artist and activist groups including the Brooklyn Anti-Gentrification Network (BAN), Black Lives Matter, local community organisations and others to fight back against the mouth-frothing investors looking to take over your neighbourhood. We deserve better as artists, but more importantly we all deserve better as citizens. If we do not come together to stand up against this continuous greed, there will be nothing left for all the New Yorkers that do not fit into these slick, smooth-boxed towers built in the name of progress. This is not progress. This is blatant disregard. All we will have left to ourselves is a bunch

of forgotten, meaningless tokens, allotted to us by the elites, happy with themselves for ‘supporting culture’, as the native community members, artists and poor all fight among each other for the crumbs the wealthy have thrown out of their multiplying glass towers.

A Closer Look: From the Point of View of a Protester Cities have always changed.

Immigrants move in and become active members of a community – in part, because there is opportunity, and in part, to assimilate into their new cultural surroundings. In the past this happened more naturally and contributed to lively and changing neighbourhoods throughout the city. These changes were largely controlled by the local community.

Landlords and homeowners lived locally, and community leaders and neighbours alike cared for each other and the well-being of their neighbourhood.

Today’s practice of development and displacement is something entirely different and is happening at an accelerated rate with overseas investors and non-local real estate speculators taking advantage of government loopholes, lax rules, and little to no oversight. These changes are not organic: they are a calculated and deliberate assault that destroys the foundations of neighbourhoods and the sanctity of life for vulnerable and marginalised communities.

They take our rich and vibrant neighburhoods and rather than investing in them responsibly, with community involvement, they create cultural dead zones, taking advantage of the desperate for the benefit of the few. In their wake, communities become broken, divided, displaced, and completely turned upside down, cloaked in the facade of revitalisation and promise of a new day.

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“[Gentrification] was first coined in 1964

by Marxist planner sociologist Ruth Glass, for whom the rescue of Notting Hill and Islington streets by ‘pioneering’ London bohemians with the cash to do up attractive old houses that banks wouldn’t lend on went hand-in-hand with the displacement of longstanding, blue-collar communities who could no longer afford to live there … By 1988,

New renters displacing the most recent native communities are scapegoated. They are the face of the faceless developers and elected officials reaping the benefits of such complicated and deep-rooted problems. This is not to whitewash the role of the newcomer tenant to the community. Affordable neighbourhoods are desirable to

rioters in New York’s Tompkins Square Park were carrying placards reading ‘Gentrification is class war.’” (Robert Bevan, ‘From Ruth Glass to Spike Lee: 50 Years of Gentrification’, The Guardian, February 27th, 2014.)

“Changing neighbourhoods may be a class issue, but in America, it also means it’s a race one.” (Gillian B. White, ‘The G Word: Gentrification and Its Many Meanings’. The Atlantic, May 25th, 2015.)

Today, in New York City, the term has broadly come to define white people displacing overwhelmingly black communities. Though this definition is fairly accurate on face value, the overly simplistic explanation to the much more complex problem is trite and does not begin to deal with the multitude of issues at play.

many who simply cannot afford the rising rents that surround them.

Some new tenants move into their new neighborhood with little to no respect of the historical or current political structures that lie within.

Then again, some are active and concerned members that make up the diverse structure of communities that represent so much of New York City. Polar opposites on the spectrum fill these newly vacant spaces.

Should we fault all newcomers who come in the true name of community involvement?

We are all the face of gentrification – the privileged newcomers, not-so privileged newcomers, and the native middle-class and poor community members. Those in power divide us so that their deals can be had behind

closed doors, land-grabbed, and in five or ten years, we will all be none the wiser and we will all have no place to live or shop.

The use of the word gentrification also does not enter into the discussion of increasing income inequality, or why the topic is being ignored in general. Gentrification often becomes a means to an end.

We see it as unstoppable as either the victim or the culprit. But the issues are so much broader than that. We must face these issues head-on and bring to light all of the harder, messier conversations and actions. We must not fall into the power elites’ hands, fighting among each other, dealing with symptoms as opposed to causes and solutions. We must fight for a more equal playing field for all. This is not utopian, this is democratic.

The easiest thing to do is to pretend that all of this doesn’t affect you. Whoever we are and wherever we live, we have a role to play. We have to start by playing a more active role in our own local communities.

Get to know our neighbours, have discussions, especially with people with whom we disagree. We must accept that we will never fully understand where a person comes from, what they have been through, and how those sum experiences determine their standing. We also have to be careful not to push our own experiences and expectations on each other. This goes for prejudging someone based on their external or internal, stereotypical characteristics.

Empathy and compassion for one another will allow us to find strength in our differences and work together as one community built by the diversity and individuality of all of its citizens.

Momentum must come in the form of solidarity.

If we are going to get anything done we have to realise a few things: 01. Gentrification is not inevitable.

People power comes in numbers.

We must be aware. We must show up.

02. We must fight this as a united front. We all work in different ways and have different strengths and weaknesses. Rather than allow this to work against us, we must work together. We must remember that at the end of the day, we have to want the same thing: Strong communities that can support every member. How we get there and who gets the credit will be immaterial in the end.

03. Civic action will look different for every neighbourhood.

Communities must decide for themselves how to move forward.

This is not a one-size-fits-all struggle; however, we can learn from each other and work together. There is obviously strength in numbers.

04. Our global problems must and will be solved locally first.

Join a community group. Attend Community Board and City Council meetings. Write to your City Council member, your New York Assembly and Senate representatives, as well as your federal representatives.

Have your voice heard. You are not only speaking for yourself, but for your community members that cannot be in attendance, or whose

voices have been marginalised.

We must also be present and hold our elected officials to the highest standard. Ralph Nader said recently that we should ask those seeking elected office, “Since the people are sovereign under our Constitution, how do you specifically propose to restore power to the people in their various roles as voters, taxpayers, workers and consumers?” We must hold all of our elected officials accountable.

The accelerated rate at which we receive seemingly infinite information is not only making it impossible to keep up, it is creating a cacophony of visual, written and audible noise that becomes indecipherable. It often seems our only hope is to retreat into the growing digital sanctuaries of distraction that have been so carefully curated for us. The constant clamoring of our devices gives us the illusion of being more connected, when in reality, it only keeps us distracted.

A recent study by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) found that algorithms associated with News Feeds such as Facebook actually made us more narrow readers of information as it gives us news that we find favourable.

Despite the world being at their fingertips, the study found that users “tend to aggregate in communities of

interest, which causes reinforcement and fosters confirmation bias, segregation, and polarisation.”

Decisions are more regularly made for us and we welcome this in our seemingly more complicated lives.

The speed of technology along with the insatiable corporate takeover of our globe is interconnected in a way that is destroying the foundations of neighbourhoods and the sanctity of life for the vulnerable: those deemed expendable.

So what can we do to start to change things? I have spoken before about ways of supporting the Occupy Movement. These actions pertain to being an active member of our community and seeking less comfort in seemingly unavoidable corporate mechanisms. BAN also has a great list of demands on their site (http:// bangentrification.org/about/ ) pertaining directly to displacement that you should become familiar with. To these demands I would add suspending the EB-5 Visa Program in New York City, which, in theory, works well in depressed cities. Its continued use is fueling the hyperdevelopment by giving developers easy access to low-interest loans with no oversight and should no longer be allowed in this city.

American capitalism and the global corporate expansion are destroying our democracy (along with our environment). As long as we still live in a democratic society we must act as democratic citizens and be active and passionate about the policies that are being made that affect us every day. Failure to do so will not only destroy our democratic system but will ensure our continued slip into the oligarchic global corporate capitalistic culture. Make no mistake, corporations do not only have more clout than people (from actions such as Citizens United); but,

32

unlike people, they are unbound by a nation-state, and increasingly so if the TPP passes. They have no loyalty except to unfettered capitalism, which has become their religion and form of government.

The answers ahead will be difficult, most certainly because we cannot rely on anything that has worked in the past. This is a new time that will require new solutions.

Our local communities are where the answers lie. They will be unique to each community and will require the involvement of all. We can come together as a binding force, but we must take that energy to our own communities and make them work for us specifically. Together, not only can we fight it, we can support each other and bring back our local vitality – the essence that has always made New York City, New York City.

What Else Can I Do? In light of the fifth year of the Occupy Movement, I wanted to remind everyone of the role we play everyday. These ideas, though specific, run through the general idea of everyday protest. We make a difference in the decisions we make.

Below are practical ways to support and sustain the occupy movement.

These are not all easy and they are certainly not necessarily always doable, but we have to remember that every little bit adds up. Tolerance, education and community support will continue to allow the movement to thrive. There is much to discuss and many new ideas that we need to come up with. Be fair to yourself and also understand that it is OK to not have the answer to something.

It is also OK to change your mind.

We must come together in support.

Remember, everything we do is political. Question everything and be aware!

01. Purchase only what you need. We are urged to buy more to save more. Many times if we just did with what we actually needed we would spend less. Buy less, save more, waste less. There are those that would say this is a very over-privileged way of viewing the situation. If you accept the current system as it is, I might agree with you. We have to turn everything on its head and start afresh. We have to come up with new solutions and begin to change the culture of celebrity and over-abundance that is propagated on every corner we turn and on every screen in front of us.

02a. Shop at locally owned businesses. Consider alternatives to big-box, corporate mega-stores, or mega online retailers. Small local business owners will NEVER be able to compete with large corporate buying power. Spending a little more on a product at a local store puts more money directly into your local community. Again, this is difficult when there are few options for some of us, especially when we are over-worked and underpaid. We must begin to change our culture of consumption and start to discuss alternatives of fulfillment, success and need that exist – for all of us, not just the few. We also must understand how businesses and corporations work – do they support their employees? Do they pay their fair share in taxes?, etc.

02b. You vote every day with every dollar you spend. Be a wise consumer. Do research. Learn about a company’s practices, workerrelations and political leaning. Seek out ethical companies that invest in their employees and promote sustainable environmental practices.

Make sure your hard-earned money is going to companies that support your values.

03. Stay informed. Resource multiple and various news sources and be sure you are learning the whole story. The more you know about something the more able you are to make your own opinion about it.

Be sure to resource factual, unbiased information. Too much of our ‘news’ is made up of emotion-based, targeted sound-bites; press-releases cloaked as news; and corporatetouting propaganda meant to coerce the public into abiding citizenry.

Talk to people that disagree with you and have substantive discussions about life and the issues that are affecting your community.

Wedge issues are placed in the ether of discourse as a way to divide.

We are not all going to agree, nor should we. We must come together in acceptance of our differences as opposed to living in fear of them.

04. Vote, especially in local elections. Your local, city and state governments control most of the policy that affects you everyday.

Contact your state senators and legislators and local elected and appointed officials. Let them know what is important to you and your community.

05. Stay connected with your local happenings. Attend city hall meetings and community advisory committee

hearings. An active community is an informed community.

06. Use open-source and nonproprietary software.

07. Support the creative commons and share your knowledge. It is also OK to consider other financial structures and options. Just because there is no viable alternative to capitalism being discussed does not mean one does not exist.

08. Avoid corporate banks. Bank at your community savings bank or credit union. These banks invest directly into your community and are often owned by community members who want to see it thrive.

09. Avoid debt. Giant banks and the corporate credit companies rely on the over-spending of the population. Avoid paying interest and fees to them.

10. Take action, follow the movement, show support, spread the word, start a movement of your own – be a community leader.

Social Appeal Being an artist is about so much more than being a maker-of-things.

Even when it comes to the vocation of being an artist, ideas do not fall simply in line. It is a messy and personal journey. Artists must remember that they are the voice

for the voiceless. We are the leaders of culture. We are the makers of trends, not the followers of them. We must strive to make art accessible to all, especially the weak and underprivileged. We must be critical thinkers beyond our studios and invite inclusive discussion about civic action through art. We must compel other artists to question how art is exhibited and how it can be disseminated for the benefit of all.

We must continually evolve and look to each other and our communities to challenge our ideas.

We are artists, but we are citizens first. The problems being faced by the world today will require new solutions.

Because of the vast change in technology, and the spreading of the new global culture, creative thinkers will play key roles in helping to solve problems. We must take the power we have and apply it to every aspect of every day. We must speak for justice in our search for truth. Culture is not a privilege: it is a right that each and every citizen is born into. We must become better at understanding our individual role in how we complete our community and we must begin to shape the future for ourselves and all our community members.

IMAGES: All images by the author, 2015 creative commons: attribution-noncommercialsharealike 4.0 international

EXCEPT: ht t p s ://w w w.flickr. c o m/ph o to s/ fleshmanpix/6417014205/in/photolist-aM3SKXaM48da-aM3Y7M-aM3US8-aM413v-aM3W4RaM427K-aM3TzD-aM3YSg-aM4 3kc-aM4 4y4aJEX3z/ By, Michael Fleshman, 2011 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

Versions of this piece have appeared on galleryELL.com

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Surfing the Timewave: An exploration and critique of Terence McKenna’s Novelty Theory James W. Hedges “At best Novelty Theory is a way to waste one’s time in a mildly entertaining manner.” 1 - PETER MEYER, FRACTAL TIME PROGRAMMER

Terence McKenna was a new age ‘guru’ who was extremely popular among certain elements of the counterculture in the 1980s and 90s. He was the originator of what he called ‘Novelty Theory’, a speculation that different points in time are characterised by differences in ‘Novelty’, a measure of the complexity of events. Novelty, he said, was increasing. In other words, history was speeding up and he anticipated a kind of apocalyptic singularity –what he dubbed the ‘Omega Point’- in the near future, where after humanity would interface with what he called the ‘Transcendental Other’. He used psychedelic drugs and the I Ching – a Chinese reference book, used by many as a type of oracle - to derive what he called the ‘Timewave’, a mathematical formula that supposedly described the fluctuations in Novelty over time, including into the future.

McKenna believed the Timewave and therefore Novelty would come to an end on the 21st of December, 2012, the date of the end of the then current cycle of the ancient Maya calendar. I believe that McKenna’s novelty theory was single-handedly responsible for the widespread belief that the world was going to end on that date.

I became more specifically aware of McKenna in late 2012, when I was travelling around the USA collecting notes for something that I never wrote about the run up to the Maya apocalypse.2 Something about McKenna stood out for me out of the ranks of peddlers of New Age ‘horse hockey – despite the infirmity of his ideas, there was something compelling about them and the way he put them across. They were fantastic teetering castles, glimpsed just the moment before they came crashing down. For me Terence McKenna became a fascinating figure, and I wanted to know how this charming fringe thinker came to precipitate the worldwide moment of

strangeness that was the 2012 phenomenon.

In this essay I will describe the trip McKenna made to the Amazon in 1971 that led to his ‘discovery’ of the Timewave, followed by an attempt to find in its output evidence of events that happened after his death. I will also attempt to contextualise his characteristic blend of occult and mystical thought with scientific language, computers and mathematics, and ask whether he truly believed in his own theories or whether he was engaging in a kind of memetic cultural experimentation. Given that the world didn’t end in 2012, is there any reason for us to look at the Timewave? I think so. I believe the central problem that McKenna’s work presents is one of pareidolia – the finding of patterns that aren’t there in chaotic information. I posit that in a world where we are increasingly reliant on science and computer technology, but increasingly few of us are able to understand how these things work, it is easy to portray the unknown as mystical.

The popular apocalyptic belief in a coming technological singularity (McKenna’s own favoured interpretation of his results) casts the computers of the future as unknowable, godlike architects of universal destiny.

THE EXPERIMENT In early 1971, Terence McKenna, accompanied by his brother Dennis and a group of friends, ventured into the Amazon rainforest in search of DMT-bearing plants, butterflies, and flying saucers. Their goal was La Chorrera, a jungle village in Colombia, where they hoped to find ayahuasca and “oo-koo-he”, another DMT-rich herbal preparation. 3 La Chorrera was not accessible by road

and had to be reached by airplane to Puerto Leguizamo, then by river in a small trading vessel. The band of “happy hippies” set off down a thick brown river in a small boat, loaded down with “animals, cameras, the I Ching, butterfly nets, formaldehyde, notebooks, a copy of Finnegans Wake, insect repellent, chloroquine, mosquito nets, hammocks, binoculars, tape recorders, granola, peanut butter, and dope.”4 A full account of their adventures can be found in Terence’s True Hallucinations. Briefly: upon arriving at La Chorrera, the group found a pasture abundant in Stropharia Cubensis mushrooms. They started to take them regularly, and made written recordings of their experiences. Dennis took on the role of medium between the rest of the group and the consciousness they increasingly believed themselves to be in contact with. He developed a complex theory, couched in pseudoscientific language, about what was happening to him. The group was trying to complete the alchemical process, which, per Jung5 was not seen as the literal creation of gold from base metal but rather as a process of spiritual individuation. Their goal was to find the Philosopher’s Stone, which Dennis saw as a state of being that could be achieved by the chemical binding of the psychedelic alkaloids from the ayahuasca and mushrooms with human DNA. As Terence later put it: “We dreamed … of a union of spirit and matter” –the human mind and the external universe were to become one. This bond was to be catalyzed by sound resonances produced under the spell of the mushroom: hence, Dennis began to make strange, “machine-like” vocalizations.6 He called this process “hyper-carbolation”.

Convinced that the “teacher” had chosen them for a starring role, and feeling themselves “very much on the brink of deep water”, the brothers and their friends decided to contrive an experiment.7 This was an attempt to immanentize the eschaton – to bring about a new, positive apocalypse.8 Events (in Terence’s telling), began to take on a Frankenstein complexion: … [W]e heard an exclamation of fear and a kind of moan, a yell of amazement. We all clambered out of the hut to find Dave, white-faced and staring at the sky, pointing. The light of a first-quarter moon revealed the tattered sky and, directly above the path returning to the river, an enormous black thunderhead rearing its twisting and writhing form up through thousands of feet of moisture-and electricity-saturated air. It looked like an enormous centipede with broad strokes of lightning flickering out of its lower portions, stroking the tops of the jungle canopy with a roar that, when it broke over us, was as deafening as field artillery. Over the howl of the wind now whipping into a wild frenzy the jungle all around us, I heard Dennis yell: “It’s a backwash from the approaching breakthrough.

It says to me there is now no doubt that we’ll succeed!”9 On the night of the experiment, the group started to brew ayahuasca. Later, Terence claimed that their inexperience led them to brew a potion far too weak to be efficacious: therefore, the mushrooms were the dominant

influence on their experience. They sat quietly in their little stilted hut, “completely transformed by the expectation that we might witness the outbreak of the millennium”.10 After eating two mushrooms each and drinking half a cup of ayahuasca, the group were ready to begin. They extinguished the candle, and in darkness, Dennis let forth a howl of hyper-carbolation: “It was mechanical and loud, like a bull roarer, and it ended with a convulsive spasm that travelled throughout his body and landed him out of his hammock and onto the floor”.11 A cock crowed three times outside, and the friends looked at the mushroom in the center of their hut.

Terence claims he saw, fleetingly, an image of the planet Earth, “lustrous and alive”, in the place of the mushroom.

This was taken as confirmation of the success of the experiment. Dennis was in possession of the Philosopher’s Stone.

After the Experiment, Dennis explained that he had gained access to “an enormous, cybernetically stored fund of information. And this information was freely available to anyone in the world who looked into their mind and prefaced their question with the word ‘Dennis.’”

– he was a terminal on a kind of cosmic Internet.12 He also claimed to be able to communicate across time, at one point calling his dead mother’s telephone in the 1950s.13 Terence was initially sceptical, but soon grew accepting of his brother’s new oracular abilities, and later claimed that there was no doubt that Dennis was telepathic during this period.

Terence maintained his ability to communicate with this universal database, and Dennis remained in a state of shamanic raving for two weeks, even though they ceased their use of hallucinogens.14 It was during the period of recuperation that Terence claims his thoughts turned to the I Ching, which forms the basis of ‘Novelty Theory’.15 The I Ching is a Chinese oracle of great antiquity: some writers, such as S.J. Marshall, place its origins as far back as 10,000BCE, though this is not generally accepted.16 It takes the form of a reference book, with entries for different hexagrams. The hexagrams themselves are sequences of six lines, each of which can be in one of two states: broken or unbroken. These are divined by the throwing of coins or sticks to produce random numbers.

The most ancient known arrangement of the hexagrams of the I Ching is known as the King Wen sequence. McKenna’s work with the I Ching is based on the construction of the King Wen sequence, not in the readings of the I Ching.

He was, however, influenced by Carl Jung’s ideas about the I Ching and synchronicity (Jung’s “acausal connecting principle” between all things).17 This was the catalyst of the discovery of the Timewave, though it’s apparent from McKenna’s writings that he was expecting to discover something about the nature of the end of time long before he set out to La Chorrera.

Each hexagram in the King Wen sequence is followed by its logical opposite, either by its being vertically inverted or by replacing all broken lines with whole ones and vice versa (this is applied to the vertically symmetrical hexagrams).

The King Wen Sequence (Wikimedia Commons)

McKenna made an analysis of the sequence (see his essay ‘Derivation of the Timewave from the King Wen Sequence of Hexagrams’18). He first examined what he called the ‘first order of difference’ – the number of different lines between each hexagram. He observed that this number is always even between hexagram pairs. He also notes that when the sequence is graphed, the beginning and the end of the graph match up. He goes on to list other formal properties of the sequence, and concludes that they occur through deliberate design. He then states that out of 27,000 randomly generated hexagram sequences, only four satisfy these formal properties.

The sequence of numbers undergoes several more transformations, which are covered in detail in McKenna’s essay. As he continues with the building of the time wave, McKenna’s reasoning becomes increasingly ‘inspired’ and less rigorous. Numerological coincidences, the staple of conspiracy theorists, abound, all adding supposed significance to this particular sequence of numbers, adding to the idea that they constitute a communication to the human species from the ‘Transcendent Other’.

The graph thus generated shows a complex landscape of ups and downs. It is also fractal in nature.19 McKenna tells us that the ups and McKenna tells us that the ups and downs represent a quality of time that he calls Novelty. The universe fluctuates between periods of increased Novelty and increased ‘Habit’, as described by the graph, before the 21st of December 2012, when the value of Novelty crashes to zero, and time as we know it ends. The December 2012 date was revealed by aligning dramatic peaks and troughs on the time wave with significant historical events, notably the United States nuclear attack on Hiroshima.

Mathematician Matthew Watkins is highly critical of McKenna’s process. In his essay ‘Autopsy for a

38

Mathematical Hallucination?’20 (to which McKenna wrote the introduction and thereafter referred as ‘The Watkins Objection’, perhaps in an attempt to confer academic legitimacy onto his theory), he demolishes the mathematical basis of Novelty Theory. Watkins met McKenna in Mexico in 1996, after a series of goodnatured email exchanges regarding the merits of the theory. He initially approached Novelty Theory with a desire to believe. However, he was “disappointed to find that the mathematical process which was applied to the King Wen sequence to generate the fractal “time wave” seemed worryingly arbitrary […] and mathematically clumsy”, and “really quite inelegant”.21 Starting in 1984, McKenna collaborated with programmer Peter Meyer to produce a software program called Fractal Time that allowed detailed examination of the Timewave. It had a sophisticated user interface for the time, and popularized the idea of the 2012 Maya apocalypse. The fact that millions of people anticipated a cataclysm in the December of that year is probably single-handedly due to McKenna’s work.

WHO WAS TERENCE MCKENNA? Magazine profiles of McKenna return to the same themes with stunning regularity: he is a “mesmerizing talking machine”22, an “intellectual prankster” who is possessed of “magnetism and flamboyance” as well as “vivid imagery, dagger-edged wit and a daunting vocabulary”.23 He’s a “modern Celtic bard” whose “hours of apparently endless rap, rant and rhyme”24 “spiral inward upon themselves […] with the relentless complexity and eerie beauty of a rhetorical Mandelbrot set”.25 McKenna had the power to be completely fascinating in his speech and writing. McKenna shared with other New Age writers some serious logical fallacies, but with a magician’s wave of the hands, could persuade the listener to move on and accept his arguments. Even in interviews, his words would come out structured, poetic and persuasive. As his brother Dennis put it, he had “the gift of blarney”.26 McKenna also made repeated claims to be a rationalist, something not borne out by his research, which was full of magical thinking, mathematical elisions and leaps of inspiration. It seems to me that his work falls squarely within the occult tradition, but is coated with a thin, but compelling, veneer of cyber-stuff –as fashionable then as it is now. Terence McKenna’s belief system and teachings were convoluted and sometimes not altogether easy to understand. There is a lot of speculation and innuendo, and few concrete statements: whether this was a case of him hedging his bets, or displaying a genuine openmindedness, is hard to tell. He saw the world as a living entity, a “Gaian biosphere”27, an organism in its own right, echoing James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis.28 Despite his disdain for the term, Terence Mckenna was a New Age thinker insofar as he believed in an impending New Age:

this he called ‘The Archaic Revival’.29 The idea, briefly, was that humankind had in the distant past enjoyed a paradisiacal state of communion with nature and a deep sense of cosmic awareness, combined with a pervasively egalitarian society; this antediluvian dream was lost due to the agricultural revolution (around 10,000BCE 30), and our collective spirituality has suffered as a result. At some point in the near future humanity will undergo a shift in its fundamental consciousness, and begin the process of returning to its original Eden.

In The Archaic Revival, McKenna hints that the global shift in consciousness he anticipates to occur in December 2012 will take the form of a technological singularity.

This idea is part of the current zeitgeist, and was also fashionable in UseNet circles and in science fiction in the 1980s and early 1990s.31 The idea that humanity is to be imminently replaced by an explosion in artificial intelligence is one that, while seemingly far-out, some very intelligent people are willing to bet on. However, we do know that it didn’t coincide with the end of the Maya calendar.

TESTING THE TIMEWAV E For this section I’ve used McKenna and Peter Meyer’s Timewave Calculator32, a stripped-down online version of the original Fractal Time software to test the Timewave against historical events that have occurred since McKenna’s death. For the settings, I’ve used the end date as December 21st 2012 unless otherwise stated, and I’ve used the Kelley timewave.33 There is no label to the y-axis; it is instead fit to span the highest and lowest values of each particular graph. Therefore, we can’t know the absolute value of points along the y-axis, just their value relative to each other.

Here’s the Timewave for the year 2012, showing the minimum on the 21st of December of that year, when Novelty finally peters out:

anticipating a very real cataclysm. Perhaps, then, a subtle change was begun on the 21st of December of that year34, but one too subtle for us to feel right now. This is the most generous interpretation possible, given the results.

9/11 I thought I’d use some other stretches of time to experiment with the time wave, and to see if major historical events that have occurred after McKenna’s writings can be correlated meaningfully with the graph.

First: 9/11/01. Would you be able to pick out the alQaeda attacks on the World Trade Center if the graph didn’t have labels? I suspect only a highly skilled exegete would be able to do so.

One would expect a dramatic dip in Novelty to occur on such a world-changing event. Instead, September the 11th falls more or less exactly in the middle of the graph.

From this we can conclude that either: 1. The Timewave is measuring a different scale; even if the attacks on the Twin Towers were significant in mundane terms, they mean nothing on the cosmic scale of consciousness that the Timewave applies to.

2. The Timewave is meaningless.

2011 I chose as my next candidate 2011, one of the most eventful years in recent memory.

For this graph, I used Wikipedia’s timeline of the Arab Spring35, as well as various sources for other major world events. The events listed are as follows: 14th January: Tunisian government overthrown, president Zine al-Abedine Ben Ali deposed We (think we) know that the world didn’t end in 2012; McKenna himself made vague statements about or a shift in consciousness on that date as opposed to a literally world-ending event, but certainly many of his fans were

24th January: Domededovo International Airport bombing, Moscow – 37 killed 11th February: Hosni Mubarak, president of Egypt resigns

15th February: Protests in Benghazi, Libya, leading to the Libyan Civil War 3rd March: Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Shafik resigns

graphs use the July 18th 2018 zero date, as they take place after 2012. Here’s a graph showing the whole of the year 2015, with the part is yet to occur at the time of writing highlighted in green:

11th March: Earthquake and tsunami off Tōhoku, Japan kills over 15,000 2nd May: Osama Bin Laden killed by the USA 3rd June: Ali Abdullah Saleh injured in a failed assassination attempt 22nd July: Right-wing terrorist Anders Breivik kills 77 in Norway 20-28th August: The Battle of Tripoli. Rebel forces capture Tripoli, Libya 17th September: Occupy Wall Street begins 9-10th October: Coptic Christians protest in Egypt; many are killed by the Egyptian army.

20th October: Muammar Gaddafi captured and killed 23rd October: Official end of the Libyan Civil War 23rd October: Earthquake in Van, Turkey. Over 600 die 19th November: Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, Muammar Gaddafi’s son, captured in Nigeria 19-21st November: More protests in Tahrir Square, Cairo 17th December: Kim Jong-il, dictator of the People’s Republic of Korea, dies 18th December: Last US troops leave Iraq 20th December: Many women protested in Egypt against human rights violations There is a certain arbitrariness to the selections. For the events of the Arab Spring, I’ve gone with what Wikipedia has deemed noteworthy. The other events were chosen from a Google search for ‘most significant events of 2011’, and will as such be tailored to a certain view of what is significant.

There is a stunning lack of correlation between these significant (with all the qualifications given above) events and the shape of the time wave. Certainly, some events can be correlated with minor peaks and troughs; for example, there’s a small but dramatic dip in the days after the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. However, many other events are not associated with any such changes, and those that are can be expected due to the laws of chance.

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE What happens when we extrapolate the time wave into the future, as Terence McKenna did, and try to use it to predict events that haven’t happened yet? The following

There’s actually a pretty good hit on this graph: the dramatic dip in May nearly corresponds with an earthquake in Nepal on the 12th of that month. However, it becomes much less impressive once we take into account the fact that there was a much more severe and deadly quake in the same country in late April, which doesn’t register on the time wave at all.

The yearly maximum and minimum in Novelty occur during this period yet to come. Therefore, we can expect significant events occurring on the 16th of September and the 29th of December.

What will the nature of these hypothetical events be?

It’s impossible to tell. Terence McKenna was expecting something dramatic to coincide with the end of the Maya calendar, and to corroborate his beliefs he picked moments in history that correlated with the Timewave.

Without a previous prophecy like the 2012 apocalypse to compare it to, the time wave becomes useless for predicting events. If we believe in it, we can predict that there will be upcoming events, but can know nothing of their composition.

Ray Kurzweil – perhaps one of our best authorities on this arguably specious topic36 – estimates that the Technological Singularity will occur in 2045.37 The Singularity is, roughly, the point at which technology becomes so advanced, that artificial intelligence will outstrip human intelligence, making the world completely incomprehensible, and potentially rendering humanity as we know it redundant. Such an event, were it to occur, would be by far the most significant in human history, and possibly the end of it.

Terence McKenna was guided by his intuition to choose the 2012 date as the Timewave’s zero date. As Peter Meyer puts it, “Despite the common assumption to the contrary, the theory of Timewave Zero does not imply any particular date as the zero date, and in particular it does not imply that 2012-12-21 is the zero date. Any other date is theoretically possible”.38 This means that we can hypothetically pick any date on which we expect

the singularity (or some other apocalyptic event), and find prior events that correlate with peaks and troughs on the graph leading up to it. This is seriously damning.

As mathematician Matthew Watkins put it in his ‘Autopsy For a Mathematical Hallucination?’39 […] disappointing, I discovered that the December 21, 2012 date (now generally associated with McKenna’s name) was in no way calculated - it was selected to give the time wave the “best possible fit” with the historical occurrence of novelty as McKenna sees it. It was difficult to accept that such an exotic, imaginative idea could have such unsatisfactory foundations.

In conclusion, both the mathematics and the results of the time wave are fundamentally meaningless. At best, we can use it as a tool to confirm our suspicions about an event that we already believe to be impending.

PLAYING CARDS WITH THE COSMIC JOKER It may appear that this is all a waste of time – an investigation into a theory that is already known to be pseudoscientific, and is demonstrably illogical. However, there is much of interest in the context, especially if we consider the possibility that Terence McKenna was not entirely earnest in his predictions. He was often described as a shaman by admirers and contemporaries. While he eschewed the title for himself, he definitely saw himself as being essential to the future of the world at the time of the La Chorrera experiment. As somebody interested in shamanism and the work of Carl Jung, it’s unlikely that he would have been unaware of the archetypal role of the shaman as a trickster. The trickster archetype is embodied in such diverse global deities as Anansi, Loki and Coyote, and describes a figure who plays tricks and perpetuates deceptions in order to ““...violate principles of social and natural order, playfully disrupting normal life and then reestablishing it on a new basis”.40 He also describes, in True Hallucinations, “myth-making and image-making”. 41 Terence McKenna was not sold on the literal scientific truth of his own theories. In True Hallucinations, he speculates as to why he was so convinced by Dennis’ shamanic ravings, and in the end describes himself as the “victim of a cognitive hallucination” (Dennis was yet more

sceptical in retrospect, even though he was the focus of events). Yet still he accepted the conclusions he reached through the experiment. Again, he accepted Matthew Watkins’ objections to the theoretical underpinnings of novelty theory, and admitted that his theory “had no basis in rational thought”.42 Still, he propagated it.

Methods of divination and prognostication have traditionally involved two things: a random element, and a seer, whose job it is to interpret the randomness and find meaning in it. This is a use of pareidolia. If we believe in a ‘Transcendent Other’, or intelligent universe, then we can believe in the interpretation of that which is seemingly random, as any randomness is an aspect of that Transcendent Other. If we throw the coins to read the I Ching, we must then consult the reading for the specific hexagram thus divined, and confer with a seer to interpret the reading as it pertains to our life. Similarly, people will read the random patterns of the tarot, coffee grounds or animal entrails and interpret them as a message from the universe.

Thus the role of the seer is as a medium or interpreter between ourselves and the will of the universe. Believing as he did in preordained time and a universe that can be communicated with, McKenna tried to play the role of the medium between the will of the universe (the Transcendent Other) and humanity at large, using then new computer technology as his 20th-century scrying mirror.43 There are many implications to this. Increasingly, the world is divided into those who understand computers and those who don’t. The divide may become increasingly economically real as more jobs are automated, and only those who control the code are in a position to make money.44 A possibility to consider is that the Transcendent Other, not McKenna, was the trickster in this scenario.

Charles Fort, the influential early 20th-century writer on anomalous phenomena, coined the term ‘Cosmic Joker’ to describe the idea of a cosmos that messes with people’s heads for the hell of it. McKenna references this with a mention of ‘the cosmic giggle’ in True Hallucinations.45 What if, instead of Terence McKenna messing with our heads, he was simply a conduit for the universe itself to do so?

James W. Hedges is an artist and writer based in Hong Kong. He is the co-editor of living in the future magazine litfmag.net. He uses computers, painting, writing, performance and installation to explore a range of ideas, including religion and ritual, the future, the occult, apocalypses, human thought and creative processes. jameswhedges.com

Notes 1. Quoted at http://deoxy.org/mckenna.htm.

2. Some parts of this made it into my introduction to the second issue of Living in the Future, from 2014. See http://www.litfmag.net/ issue-2/introductory-essay/ 3. ““[…] the Witoto tribe of the Upper Amazon, who alone knew the secret of making it, used it to talk to “little men” and to gain knowledge from them.” – True Hallucinations, Chapter One (Harper San Francisco).

4. Terence McKenna, True Hallucinations, Chapter Two. 5. C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, The Collected Works Of C.G. Jung, Volume 12 (Princeton University Press, 1968). The group also had a flying saucer experience on their first night, something Terence rationalized using Jung’s interpretation of the flying saucer as “an image of the self”.

6. I’ve personally experienced a profound aspect to certain vocal frequencies under the influence of other drugs; however, the McKennas felt this effect was specific to the mushroom-entity.

7. There is a tradition in occult history of placing great importance on particular rituals and invocations, such as John Dee and Edward Kelley’s 1500s experiments in necromancy and Aleister Crowley’s unsuccessful attempts at his Abramelin Ritual. It can be argued that this derives from a desire in the occultist and the observer to shape the occultist’s life into a mythic narrative, perhaps to enhance the psychodramatical potency of the life itself as a work of magic(k). As Colin Wilson astutely points out in The Occult (1971), there is an aspect of the con-artist in every famous magician. While the McKenna’s gave their ‘experiment’ a scientific veneer, it harked back in form to earlier occult invocations of noncorporeal intelligences.

8.“We had somehow stumbled upon or been led to the trigger experience for the entire human world that would transform the ontological basis of reality so that mind and matter everywhere would become the same thing and reflect the human will perfectly.” True Hallucinations, Chapter Nine.

9. True Hallucinations, Chapter Ten. 10. True Hallucinations, Chapter Eleven.

11. True Hallucinations, Chapter Eleven.

12. Terence also described it as “a telepathic ocean whose name was that of its discoverer: Dennis McKenna” (True Hallucinations, chapter eleven). There are shades here of Stanisław Lem’s 1961 science fiction novel Solaris, with its sentient ocean, perhaps displaying more science fiction influence on the brothers’ thinking. Although the Internet per se did not exist in 1971, similar concepts had been current in science fiction and academia for some time.

Its immediate precedent, the ARPANET (built by the US Department of Defense), had existed for two years. Terence McKenna was an admirer of UFOlogist Jacques Vallée, who worked on the ARPANET (Vallée was an exponent of the Interdimensional Hypothesis of UFOs, rather than a believer in literal visitations from fleshand-blood aliens. Terence apparently shared this

belief, as evinced by his interpretation of his UFO encounter at La Chorrera.)

Another precedent for this cosmic telephone exchange comes from occultism, and the notion, popularized by Helena Blavatsky in the late 19th Century, of the ‘Akashic Records’, a database of the past and future history of the entire universe existing somewhere on the astral plane. What I see as most likely is that this concept is an amalgam of images from contemporary cuttingedge technology and the history of occultism, a running theme in the McKennas’ work.

13. True Hallucinations, Chapter Thirteen.

14. Terence quite rightly takes care to draw a distinction between their prolonged altered mental states and schizophrenia or any other ‘mental illness’.

15. Conversely, Dennis’ account, given in The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, claims that the hexagrams of the I Ching featured in their earlier rituals.

26. ‘Omega Man: a Profile Of Terence McKenna’, Richard Gehr, April 5th 1992 http://www.levity. com/rubric/mckenna.html.

27.‘T-Shirt Syllogism’, Will Self, Pills-a-Go-Go #20, Summer 1994.

28. First published in ‘Gaia as seen through the atmosphere’, Atmospheric Environment, 1972.

29. His theories on this are much expounded in The Archaic Revival, (Harper San Francisco, 1991).

30. The belief in a lost civilization at this date is common in New Age thought. It also coincides more or less with the fall of Atlantis in Theosophical doctrine 31. For example, Vernor Vinge, ‘The Coming Technological Singularity: How To Survive In The Post-Human Era’, 1993. http://www.aleph.se/ Trans/Global/Singularity/sing.html.

32. http://www.fractal-timewave.com/timewave_ calculator.php

16. S.J. Marshall, The Mandate Of Heaven (2002, Columbia University Press).True Hallucinations, Chapter Thirteen. See C.G. Jung’s Foreword to the I Ching, (1949), to be found online at http://www.iging.com/intro/ foreword.htm. Philip K. Dick, who the McKennas were fans of, was also enthused by the idea of the I Ching as time and dimension-transcendent communication device, as it appears in his 1962 novel The Man In The High Castle (Putnam, 1962).

33. The other option for End Date is July 18th, 2018 (see ‘The Zero Date Reconsidered’ by Peter Mayer, http://www.fractal-timewave.com/ articles/zerodate_reconsidered.html. The other available Timewave is the Watkins Timewave, which hews closely to the original (Kelley).

17. True Hallucinations, Chapter Thirteen. See C.G. Jung’s Foreword to the I Ching, (1949), to be found online at http://www.iging.com/intro/ foreword.htm. Philip K. Dick, who the McKennas were fans of, was also enthused by the idea of the I Ching as time and dimension-transcendent communication device, as it appears in his 1962 novel The Man In The High Castle (Putnam, 1962).

35. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_ the_Arab_Spring

18.http://www.levity.com/eschaton/waveexplain. html

37. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near (Viking, 2005)

19. ‘Fractal’ was a buzzword in the early 1990s (see Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel Jurassic Park and a million raves) and there are claims that McKenna applied it to his work retroactively, after it became fashionable.

38. http://www.fractal-timewave.com/articles/ zerodate_reconsidered.html.

20. https://www.fourmilab.ch/rpkp/autopsy. html.

21. John Sheliak provides a rebuttal in ‘A Mathematical and Philosophical Re-Examination of the Foundations of TimeWave Zero and Novelty Theory’, http://www.johnsheliak.com/ subspace_bridge_domain/sheliak_formalization. pdf.

22. ‘Words With The Sham Man’, Chris Twomey, eye WEEKLY, July 7th 1994 23.‘Renegade in Babylon’, James Kent, Whole Life Times, December 15th 1994 24. ‘Timewave Surfer Dudes’, Paco Xander Nathan, bOING-bOING #10, 1992.

25. ‘Omega Man: a Profile Of Terence McKenna’, Richard Gehr, April 5th 1992 http://www.levity. com/rubric/mckenna.html.

34. I wrote about it in Living in the Future issue 2, ‘A Short History of the Apocalypse’, August 2014. http://www.litfmag.net/issue-2/ introductory-essay/. The Earth didn’t move for me, either

36. Opinion is heavily divided between AI experts as to whether there is anything in the idea of The Singularity at all, with some claiming it as nonsense, and some describing it as literally the single most important issue in the history of humankind.

39. 1996, https://www.fourmilab.ch/rpkp/ autopsy.html 40. https://www.nytimes.com/ books/98/02/15/reviews/980215.15mattict. html.

41. True Hallucinations, Chapter Twelve 42. Watkins, ‘Autopsy for a Mathematical Hallucination?’

43. Terence McKenna was keenly aware of his Irish ancestry, and the stereotypical association of the Celtic peoples with psychic abilities and visions.

44. Jaron Lanier discusses this at length in Who Owns The Future? (2014 Simon & Schuster). See also ‘Artificial intelligence: ‘Homo sapiens will be split into a handful of gods and the rest of us’, The Observer, 7th November 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/ nov/07/artificial-intelligence-homo-sapiens-splithandful-gods.

45. True Hallucinations, Chapter Seventeen

‘Rhythms’ of a Total Event: Walter Benjamin’s Intoxicated Messianism Mimi Howard

The degree to which Jewish mysticism influenced Walter Benjamin’s thought was carefully considered after his death. “He transposed,” wrote Theodor Adorno eulogistically, “the idea of the sacred text into the sphere of enlightenment…his ‘essayism’ consists in treating profane texts as though they were sacred.”1 While particular dogmas are difficult to detect in his writings, hidden behind the unorthodox appropriation of certain teachings, at the very least it was certain that his ideas were partially derived from kabbalah, a form of Jewish mysticism that emphasized the relation between an infinite God and a mortal universe.2 For Benjamin, grasping the presence of God was not simply cerebral or intellectual, but required in addition an intensely sensory, nearly unthinking, experiential state.

This state proved difficult to achieve when stuck within the monotony of everyday life. It was, however, a bit less difficult to achieve if one found a way to exit everyday life, even if momentarily, so that one might begin to look back at it anew.

As it turns out, intoxication, operating as a kind of materialist magic, could open the window to mystical modes of experience. Benjamin’s writings on intoxication (and his intoxicated writings) say this, and yet say this obliquely. Because he thought that the language of philosophy had been alienated from divinity, secularized thoroughly, any evidence of these mystical feelings needed to take shape through the use of a new vocabulary. Rhythm, joy, happiness, and ecstasy are used in a decidedly imprecise and open-ended manner throughout Benjamin’s writings on hashish. What is strange or significant is not simply that this vocabulary acts enigmatically—and we might therefore say, mystically—but that it is continuously echoed throughout Benjamin’s corpus, even in writings that do not address intoxication directly. Particularly, we find these words in essays that, in the spirit of kabbalah, strive to reconceptualize the relationship between the sacred and

profane, the messianic and the mortal. As Adorno suggested correctly, Benjamin was always interested in making-sacred the profane, in founding a new way to think through historical and philosophical problems while keeping an eye to the messianic.

Looking at these works side by side, the writings on intoxication and the writings on messianism, we are thereby presented with a kind of key. In crossexamining the words that move across these two planes, a set of correspondences show up that might illumine the presence of mystical thinking within some of Benjamin’s more difficult writing. But, however much one is inclined to read one text onto the other, and treat the correspondences as code, this method will never be fully satisfactory. Something essentially obscure lies within Benjamin’s writing, an element that falls beyond the grasp of full linguistic comprehension. In fact, the obscurantist qualities of such writings might be taken as evidence of an unshakable mystical core in Benjamin’s thinking, which does not simply draw from mysticism, but acts out of awareness for the messiah, unknowable and yet knowable, at each and every moment. It is itself, mystical.

mmm In “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy,” an essay written in 1918 just after he finished university, Benjamin argues that the coming philosophy, a form that accommodates both messianic and historical thought, must be historically continuous with the past.

This continuity would require a relationship between whatever future form of philosophy might arise, and the old Kantian system. But the Kantian system, which was radical in founding a connection between knowledge and experience, was also flawed in a fundamental way: Kant failed to incorporate religious or transcendent experience into his concept of experience at-large. Benjamin argues

that this was because his thinking was limited by the constraints of a experientially impoverished era; which is to say, Kant’s notion of experience necessarily took shape within the context of the Enlightenment, and its rationality-obsessed principles. “He undertook his work on the basis of an experience reduced to a nadir,” Benjamin wrote, “to a minimum of significance.”3 To his mind, Enlightenment principles foreclosed upon an understanding of knowledge that did not derive from epistemologically secured mathematical and physical laws. They ignored mystic, transcendent, and intoxicated modes of experience. The task of the coming philosophy would thereby involve integrating a Kantian notion of experience, which had been scientifically founded, with a richer notion of experience, expanded to include the mystic and transcendent.

Nearly a decade after Benjamin laid out his program, the coming philosophy began to take shape through a series of formal experiments with hashish. In 1927, along with a physician friend from college named Ernst Joël (who would later die from a morphine overdose), and a neuroscientist colleague named Fritz Fränkel, Benjamin carried out a series of inquiries into the mystery of trance. The researchers’ methodology was veritably scientific or semi-scientific. They called their notes “protocols” and took objective precaution to mark date, time, and dosage at the beginning of each entry.

And yet, in spite of these methodological pretenses, the protocols were something more than the mere musings of off-duty scientists. Because the object of study was inherently illusory, the application of scientific rationale to the experience of intoxication produced, over and over again, the oddest kind of notes. Riddled with poems, drawings, and meanderings, the notes recount feelings of anxiety and alienation, or descriptions of physical symptoms. Rational research techniques were applied to an inherently irrational object of study, and metaphysical musings are reported as though they were scientific findings. The notes continually bear witness to a certain kind of kinship between these two realms. Through the continuous movement of the hashish trance, it seems that mysticism and rationality are able to come into relation with one another, as though suspended together in mid-air.

But perhaps most significantly, we see that the project of the coming philosophy takes shape through the hashish protocols in their mutual concern for establishing historical continuity. That is to say, the hashish research is not simply enacting a continuity between itself and the Kantian system, through a kind of détournement of scientific principles towards a mystical outlook, but between itself and the recent historical past. After all, Benjamin’s interest in hashish was oddly anachronistic, as though someone in this day and age sought to document the effects of LSD. In large part this can be attributed, and has been attributed, to his fascination with Baudelaire and a legion of likeminded writers from 19th century, who often wrote about

their experiences with opium and hashish in the forms of poetry, novels, and essays. But by re-recording the past material by means of a novel medium, Benjamin managed to carry on the project of his predecessors as he staged a new progression in the history of hashish writing, changing the form to one which more closely identified with both Kant and mystic thought. The past was both incorporated and elaborated through the transplantation of profane (i.e. secular) texts into a sphere of a hashish writing made sacred or mystical.

The historical element of the hashish trance was thereby preserved in carrying the past into the future.

And this was not simply because the anachronism of the experience ensured a relationship to the past, but because the trip itself consisted of a continuous rupturing of time and space.

The hashish trance provided, albeit fleetingly, a chance to become estranged to the everyday. In passing through the medium of intoxication, one was exposed to a state in which otherwise mundane and everyday objects were transformed into vessels of time, while surroundings underwent displacement through space.

He writes, in an entry called “Crock Notes” (crock being the code-word for hashish), that “there is no more valid legitimation of crock than the consciousness of having suddenly penetrated, with its help, that most hidden, generally most inaccessible world of surfaces which is constituted by the ornament.”4 The surface is unmasked by intoxication, allowing the hashish-user to glimpse the typically invisible veneer that coats his perceptions of the world. His perceptions begin to operate on a higher order, space itself appears to expand outwards and time begins to encroach upon infinite magnitudes. The sensation of the present as a particular moment, in a particular time and place, is evaporated and dispelled through the intoxicated state. Or, as Benjamin writes in another note, “against the background of theses dimensions of inner experience, of absolute dimension and immeasurable space, a wonderful beatific humor dwells all the more fondly on the contingencies of the world of time and space.”5 The past could come into being within the present moment. One might begin to grasp the simultaneity of two distinct sensations of space-time through intoxication: one which is ever expansive, and another which is more particular, contingent, or historical. The present does not fully vanish, but returns to us through new eyes against the background of infinite dimensions. We begin to understand the present as being undergirded by the fullness of time.

The presence of two distinct yet coordinated understandings of time-space is also discussed in Benjamin’s “Theologico-Political Fragment.” Here he tells us that non-mystical conceptions of history function according to a fundamental confusion between historical and messianic time. These are perceived as one and the same, both progressing teleologically towards an identical end. But he says that these two

things must be considered more precisely since, “only the Messiah himself consummates all history, in the sense that he alone redeems, completes, creates, its relation to the Messianic.”6 It was, in other words, an application of profane thinking onto theological ground that perpetuated the similarity between historical and messianic time, but this was a total perversion of the way that the relationship in fact occurs. According to Benjamin, the historical is borne from the messianic, not the other way around. In order to avoid this reversal, Benjamin proposes a new, “mystical conception of history,” which would, like the coming philosophy, entail the reorganization of the relationship between orders of the profane and divine. A special kind of separation between these two spheres would make possible their eventual relation, one that would be “redeemed, completed, and created” by the Messiah himself. This to-be-related separation would operate according to an essentially dialectical mechanism: “just as a force can, through acting, increase another that is acting in the opposite direction, so the order of the profane assists, through being profane, the coming of the Messianic kingdom.”7 According to Benjamin, the forces that propel this mechanism of profanity need to stem from humanity’s awareness of its dependence on the messianic. But the language Benjamin uses to describe this is rather odd. “The order of the profane,” he writes, “should be erected on the idea of happiness.”8 While we find no precise definition of happiness in the essay, one of the most famously dense in Benjamin’s writings, we are still given a few clues to decipher its meaning. Near the end of the fragment, Benjamin counterposes once again the profane/historical against the divine/messianic, but this time he does so with a new vocabulary: “To the spiritual restitutio in integrum, which introduces immortality, corresponds worldly restitution that leads to the eternity of downfall, and the rhythm of this eternally transient worldly existence, transient in its totality, in its spatial but also its temporal totality, the rhythm of Messianic nature, is happiness.”9

mmm If happiness is the foundation upon which the order of the profane is erected, then here it becomes further elaborated as a rhythm. So, this profane happiness is a rhythm, but of what sort? What does this mean?

According to the above passage, it appears that happiness is inextricable from the “rhythm of eternally transient worldly existence” or “rhythm of Messianic nature.” These rhythms are characteristic of, or/and perhaps produced by, the correspondence between immortality and mortality. The supposed oppositions between transience and intransience, between history and eternity, are connected by means of this rhythm, which at once signifies a contradiction in-terms and a resolution of terms. It brings into tension the co-

existence of human time with divine time. In other words, the rhythm of messianic nature, or happiness, is the grasping of the divine by the profane. Messianic immortality appears even before the individual who experiences nothing but an eternity of downfall.

We find similar mention of an ‘ecstatic rhythm’ in a reflection called “Hashish in Marseilles”. Here Benjamin asks about how one might “solve the riddle of the ecstasy of the trance,” and suggests that we ought to begin by meditating on the myth of Ariadne’s thread, which was given to Theseus in order to exit the Minotaur’s labyrinth. He writes: “What joy in the mere act of unrolling a ball of thread.

We go forward, but in so doing, we not only discover the twists and turns of the cave into which we’re venturing but also enjoy this pleasure of discovery against the background of the other, rhythmic bliss of unwinding the thread.”10 The ecstasy of the trip is apparently two-fold. It consists not simply in following the thread through the labyrinth, in making strange discoveries (i.e, seeing along our way the everyday objects unmasked, or the ornamental surface revealed) but also in experiencing the exploration’s ‘pleasurable’ accompanying act, the “rhythmic bliss of unwinding the thread.” Formulating a response to ecstasy thereby involves recourse to this concept called rhythm, which was previously invoked to indicate a coordination between messianic and historical time. And here too, the mechanism is similar. The rhythmic bliss of unwinding the thread is the foundation that allows for the discovery of the labyrinth just as an understanding of history is achieved by a decidedly rhythmic messianic nature. The two acts, following the thread and unwinding it are, as in the context of the relationship between the messianic and historical, separated and yet related through the experience of the trance. Moreover, the bliss is not derived from following a string to an end, or coming to a particular point—the thread is stubbornly un-teleological. The two sensations operate without particular end in sight, and thereby come together to create the “ecstasy of the trance” in their coordination of a rhythmically experienced, transient and intransient, present. The rhythmic element is thus the correspondence between two simultaneous activities, two simultaneously experienced, yet distinct, sensations of time.

The riddle of the trance might here begin to be solved. It appears that the ecstatic element is produced in the presence of rhythm. This rhythm is itself the effect produced by the correspondence between two distinct feelings of time: one is contingent, particular, or historical, while the other is intransient, everlasting, and immortal. Intoxication thereby simulates the conditions of a mystical conception of history—it allows the hashish user to fully grasp what he would not otherwise, namely, that historical time and messianic time are constantly coordinated by a relation that is made and

redeemed by the messiah himself. This is a relation that does not seek towards an end, but feels the rhythms of unraveling within the present moment, and keeps in sight a “pleasure” of the background movements that our discoveries depend upon. One feels the presence of the Messiah throughout the unraveling of twists and turns through time and space.

Benjamin’s use of hashish was something very similar to what Mauss had described when he remarked, in 1934, “underlying all our mystic states are corporeal techniques, biological methods of entering into communication with God.”11 Intoxication was a technique, a biological method of coming into communication with God—a way to grasp the historical alongside the messianic. But, still some questions remain unanswered. The use of the word ‘rhythm’, which has heretofore acted as a kind of hieroglyph to describe this simultaneity of two times, messianic and historical, needs to be pressed a bit further. What exactly is it doing within the text? And how is it possible that it appears there in the way that it does?

mmm The analogy between inner experience and musical vocabulary would have been a common one around the time that Benjamin was writing. By 1914 Wassily Kandinsky had already categorized artistic construction in terms of musical composition. All works were either symphonic or melodic, and were subdivided into the categories of improvisations, compositions, or impressions. “Brought to light by Cézzane and later by Holder,” he writes, “these melodic compositions of our time, are designated as rhythmic.”12 Rhythmic art was the product of a painter who, finding mimetic painting unsatisfying, “strives to create his inner life” with the “simplicity and ease with which such an aim is already achieved in the non-material art of music.”13 Kandinsky writes this in a book called On the Spiritual in Art, which claims that the way an artwork is constructed corresponds to the artist’s spiritual life.

Rhythm, then, is the quality ascribed to the meetingpoint between the inner experience and its outward appearance—the unspeakable and intuitive qualities that an artist hopes his work will bear.

Similarly, a concept of monotony (whose origins belong to music) began to enjoy metaphysical currency throughout the nineteenth century. Expanding beyond the horizon of industrial production, beyond the sounds of endlessly repetitive mechanical movements, it entered into the vocabularies of philosophers, writers, and revolutionaries, who sought to describe the phenomenon of sameness that increasingly seemed to govern everyday existence. Perhaps most famously, its entry into philosophy took place with Nietzsche’s resurrection of a concept of the ‘eternal return,’ just at the moment when the revolutionary attempts of the 1830s and 40s in

Europe were beginning to fade even from the memories of its participants. Later, it caused Auguste Blanqui to succumb to a cosmological view of politics, proclaiming in his final years that men of the nineteenth century were condemned to “the same monotony, the same immobility” as celestial movements. “All worlds,” he wrote, “are engulfed, one after another, in the revivifying flames, to be reborn from them and consumed by them once more—monotonous flow of an hour glass that eternally empties and turns itself over. The new is always old, and the old always new.”14 Monotony, politically speaking, was useless if the world continued on according to epistemologically secured scientific principles.

By the end of the 19th-century a notion of monotony, which Nietzsche initially posited hypothetically, was born into the philosophical landscape of the twentieth-century, and inherited by a new generation of thinkers who began to examine it from a less paralytic perspective. Georges Bataille argued that monotony could be internally rejected by a heterodox mind. In Inner Experience he writes, “when the mind rejects the blissful monotony of inner movements, it can itself be thrown back into imbalance…it has meaning only in irrational audacity, can only seize upon fleeting, ridiculous visions, or yet: awaken them.”15 One must struggle to awaken the mind against phantasmagoric, monotonous image—one must turn in against himself. This turning in on oneself, which Blanqui could not bring himself to do (choosing instead to look out at the stars), produced the image of an otherwise, a momentarily graspable understanding of experience. In Guilty, taking-up the dialectician’s view of progress, Bataille writes that life itself “is a constant destabilization of equilibrium without which it wouldn’t be.”16 Life takes place against the backdrop of monotony; is possible because of and in the face of this monotony.

Bertolt Brecht invoked a similar idea in his plays.

Believing that his audience could be shocked out of monotony, or congruity with the external world, he harnessed the forces of astonishment for drama.

Benjamin wrote that the Brechtian method was like “the damming of the stream of real life, the moment when its flow comes to a standstill, makes itself felt as reflux: this reflux is astonishment.”17 Like a rock in the river, which stays put amidst a continuously flowing steam, astonishment could produce a fleeting image; it could show the “dialectic at a standstill.”18 The movement was not altogether different from Bataille’s: one can only be shocked, and shown an image of the “dialectic at a standstill,” if there is a monotony against which one struggles, if there is a phenomenon of sameness that underlies the disruption.

Like Brecht and Bataille, Benjamin saw monotony as a kind of paradigm for understanding everyday experience. And while he did not deny its blissful and narcotic qualities, he also wrote, particularly in “Work

of Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” that it had a possibly emancipatory capacity. This is clearest in his writings on art and technology, where the function of film-montage, the orchestrating mechanism of capitalist temporality, is seen both as a method of enslaving and liberating the viewer. On the one hand, the viewer becomes acclimated to the stream of images on the screen, and is thus “trained” to the perceptual apparatus of capitalist production; on the other, the viewer begins to understand that freedom can only occur when humanity adapts itself to the productive forces of that very apparatus. He can perceive the image of the present because it has been given by the images in front of him.

This approach thereby differs from that of Bataille and Blanchot in a significant way. Benjamin does not believe that a coming into consciousness entails a violent overturning of the quotidian, but rather involves adapting to the circumstances at hand in order to change them.

An example of this might be his own insistence upon a deep connection to Kant, and understanding of his thought, in order to undo his system. One cannot think to change the future without having a firm grasp on the present, and the way that the present has become itself.

Benjamin found the montage method useful enough to be employed in his own work, calling it the “principle” around which the Arcades Project was structured. Here he argued that montage, in piecing together fragmentary images, might provoke an analysis of these small individual moments, historical fragments, that could lead one to grasp “the crystal of the total event.”19 Benjamin’s conception of history thereby refused a representation that depended on the myth of the continuum or narrative; it relied instead on the flashing up of fleeting images, the passing away of each moment as a new one appeared on the horizon. It relied on the rhythmic interval as a historiographical tool. “A true picture of the past,” he wrote shortly before his death, “flits by.”20 But this picture of the past is not simply valuable in and of itself, rather it always works in service of the messianic; which is to say, it is always involved with the primordial inklings of happiness—“our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption…the past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption.”21 Here the relationship between happiness, the messianic, and the historical, is finally relayed clearly. If Benjamin says that rhythm is precisely this sensation of happiness, then rhythm itself is the constellation that organizes them together, and orchestrates the relationship. Rhythm acts to facilitate the image, transitory and ambiguous, of the total event. It acts, in other words, as a temporal index that refers humanity to its own redemption.

Notes 1.Theodor Adorno, “A Portrait of Walter Benjamin,” Prisms. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982. 233.

1. Ibid.

3. Walter Benjamin, “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy,” Selected Writings Vol. 1, 1913-1926, ed.

Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Belknap, 1996). 101.

4. Ibid. 81.

5. Ibid., 49.

6. Walter Benjamin, “Theologico-Political Fragment,” in Reflections edited by Peter Demetz ( New York: Schocken Press, 1986), pp. 312-313.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., emphasis added.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid., 53.

11. Quoted in Michael Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave.

Marcel Mauss, “Les techniques du corps,” lecture 17 May, 1934 translated by Ben Brewster, Sociology and Psychology (London: Routledge, 1979), 95-123.

12. Wassily Kandinsky. On the Spiritual in Art. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. 1946. 97.

13. Ibid., 35.

14. Aracdes Project, 114.

15. Georges Bataille, Inner Experience. Albany: SUNY Press, 1988. 116.

16. Georges Bataille. Guilty. Venice, CA: Lapis, 1988.

15-16.

17. Walter Benjamin. “What is Epic Theater?”

Understanding Brecht, 13.

18. Ibid.

19. Walter Benjamin, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press), 461.

20. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schoken Books, 1968), 254.

21. Ibid.

Mimi Howard writes essays and lives in New York.

SILENT RHYTHMS by Lendl Barcelos lendl.ca and Sanna Blennow samesizeworks.com

[NOT AVAILABLE IN GOOD BOOK SHOPS]

MANIFESTO OF A TRANNY

RECLAIMED POETICS IN THE AGE OF AUTOMATION

Reclaimed Poetics In The Age Of Automation “This absorbing and inspiring text delivers precise accusations as well as well defined insults.”

Contemptible Art Magazine

SUSAKPRESS / SPIRALBOUND

www.susakpress.org/spiralbound

SUSAKPRESS / SPIRALBOUND

photo: Laura Mott

Sluice_2015 as told by Charlie Levine | Associate Curator based on The Spirit and Culture of Artist-Run Spaces,

by Gabriele Detterer*

* 2012, Cornerhouse Publications and Zona Archives.

photo: Daniel Devlin

“Out with convention! In every respect new times were dawning, and the traditional role and function of the artist was therefore also questioned critically in this phase of rethinking, looking ahead, and experimentation ... nonprofit artist-run spaces …These organisations can be defined as collectively-run, non-commercial associations founded by artists.”

photo: Laura Mott

“Happenings … performance, visual poetry, and sound poetry … Everything was centred on the ‘concept’, in the form elaboratedelaborated approach ofananintellectually idea, an intellectually approach or direction, with the concept’s realisation – described as a ‘perfunctory affair’ – being of secondary importance.

This meant that the canvas as a picture support had served its time. Instead forms of expression with few images and simple working materials came to the fore.”

photo: Laura Mott

“Identified as alternative art spaces, nonprofit art organisations, artistorientated spaces, or artist-run spaces, these places define an area of shared experiences of experimenting with a concept of art that had no boundaries, and they linked art forms and the operating model of collective self-organisation self-organization into a single venture.”

photo: Laura Mott

“In the context of the avant-garde, the broad concept of community defines an enduringinternational internationalweb webof ofrelationships relationships enduring among a group of avant-garde artists, relationships that collaborate and reinforce one another and fulfill commitment to a particular culture of shared values, ways of thinking, and attitudes in the visual arts.”

photo: Laura Mott

“Artist-run spaces form focal points in this phase of looking for an expanded art audience, and they allow the artist to get a foothold in the new territory of progressive art movements progressive art movements by means of collective self-help culture, after leaving behind the conventional conception of art.”

platforms “S us ak expo begins as an idea to ex tend ough dialogues by exchanges of contexts and languages thr the move, between people and locations. It’s an idea on nslated, an idea in translation. And this tex t too, tra other tex t. will emerge with differences, to become an structure Translation can slip between languages to experiences net works of thought. It enables simultaneous ompletion to interact. It is vulnerable and open to inc as well as failure and misunderstanding.

“The project may fail or it may succeed, its outcome and even the idea of its complet ion is unc erta in.

And bec ause of this openness it is vulnerab le, this is its character.”

Jo Melvin, 2006

Susak expo is a bi-annual art event that has taken place on the remote Croatian island of Susak since 2006.

Its proximity to La Serenissima has led to it being wrongly mistaken as a collateral event for the Venice Biennale as they alternate years and are located opposite each other. The only audience is the tiny community of 140 islanders who seem to be completely uninterested in Contemporary Art. Even though the point of the expo is that noone sees it, it has appeared in Frieze Magazine and been featured on national and local TV, and received in-depth coverage by the local media. This year is the tenth anniversary and it promises to gain the attention of the indifferent villagers for the first time ever.

64

The idea of staging a biennale somewhere where, most probably no-one would see it, was conceived

by Herzog Dellafiore, a painter and performance artist. Always bitter, sometimes drunk, and not much of maker. He has not produced more than three works in the last 20 years and accuses other artists of being ‘lost in the fog of neo-formalism’. Dellafiore was big in London in the 90s. Rumours circulated, although it has never been proven, that he was part of the YBAs, the eponymous artists’ group that included Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and the Chapmans among others, but Dellafiore started getting drunk and molesting the artists, male and female (a claim that he vigorously denies). His behaviour was frowned upon and he descended into complete invisibility.

2006 The biennale idea was picked up by method painter Daniel Devlin after a conversation he had with Jo Melvin, a Reader in Fine Art Theory at the Chelsea College of Art who is currently working on a catalogue raisoneé of the sculptor Barry Flanagan. The text, written by Jo, was translated into Susakian (a language that is still very much alive

SUSAK EXPO 2006-2016

10th anniversary of a biennale nobody gives a fuck abou Lorenzo Belenguer

and is spoken in Susak and New Jersey) and published in a booklet

by Susak Press. The text appeared in both English and Susakian, and it’s thought that it was the first time the Susakian language has been in print.

It was not difficult to convince a bunch of art renegades with the lure of sunshine and free food.

Susak expo became The Promised Land for the unbelievers. Anarchy at its best. There was no grandiose theme favoured by the cult curators today, just a place and a time, no expectations, no impositions and no obligations to make Art. An experience that proved to be so

intense and radical that some of the artists involved are still on nonspeaking terms with the founder.

More than thirty artists participated in the first Susak expo in 2006, mainly in the form of interventions, performances and other types of failed experiments.

Failure to achieve anything was an accepted goal. Brain Chalkley placed photos of Hackney into the Susak landscape; Janko Matic cleaned, or pretended to clean, the beach; William Mackrell attempted to turn the derelict military base into a pinhole camera but failed; Bruce McLean sent a fax; Aya Fukami made

work with fruit to the amusement of the local nuns; Paul Carr, Eddie Farrell, Michael Wedgewood and Graham Hayward made work using a pack of A4 paper which blew away on the first windy evening, no-one even noticed it; Wendy Repass drew ancient Croatian letters (Glagolitic script) with seawater, evaporated within minutes; Rodrigo Oliveira and Tomaž Kramberger built a giant light switch and made the children believe it had the capacity to switch the electricity off in the upper village; Jo Melvin discussed philosophy and Herzog Dellafiore did nothing.

Daniel Devlin painted more than fifty

wheelbarrows orange. Melvin says: “In Susak, wheelbarrows are highly significant functional objects. They are commonplace, as there are no private vehicles on the island. Some are customised and everything from builders’ materials to shopping is carried in them. Wheelbarrows are a familiar sight once you’ve spent any time on Susak. When Daniel Devlin told me he was thinking of painting the barrows orange as an art piece my reaction to the idea was that its enactment would simply and directly address critical considerations on issues of intention, ownership and originality in contemporary practice.”

2008

Everyone expected 2006 to be the only expo and few people know that the expo in 2008 actually took place. Off The Grid, was an undercover festival where a few artists made work collaboratively. The title came from a rumour they spread that Susak was taken off the map by Tito for National security reasons (Susak is the most western Croatian island and had a military base), and when Croatia gained independence, they forgot to re-instate it. It was during this biennale that the portrait of Frank Sinatra was made and the expo wheelbarrow was placed at the centre of the island.

2010

Cedric Christie and Vanja Balog curated Susak expo 2010 under the theme of Family. By then it had established itself as a permanent fixture in the Susakian landscape. All the artists came with their families and it had a cool London vibe. Christie exhibited his trademark car with artist logos on car-shaped pedalos.

Ludmilla Andrews invited everybody to inscribe thoughts on blank labels that were then left hanging on the steps to the upper village. Other artists such as David Brock, Simon Liddiment, Hedley Roberts and SianKate Mooney made works with the use of objects found on the island. Lucija Stojovic filmed the failed attempt of locating a wheelbarrow (dropped in the middle of the island in 2008) for The Guardian. It was not found until a more robust search located it in 2014.

Rose English, an influential British artist working in performance, theatre, dance and film, says: “I visited Susak in 2010, the island is tranquil and aromatic with ancient footpaths, deep black star-studded night skies and sudden dramatic storms, an amazing place to encounter the thoughtful, delightful, integrated and playful expo. I loved it!”

curated by Cedric Christie & Vanya Balogh

CEDRIC CHRISTIE • PETER BLAKE • CHRIS OFILI• JEFF WALL • DAN KNIGHT IMI KNOEBEL • LAWSON OYEKAN • LEE CAVALIERE • AMELIA CHRISTIE BRUCE MCLEAN • KATHY PENDERGRASS • PETER DOIG • PERRY ROBERTS CORNELIA PARKER • CROFT & BALOGH • GAVIN TURK • CATHERINE YASS GEOFF MCMILLAN • CATHY DE MONCHAUX • DANIEL DEVLIN • DAVID BROCK MICHELLE GARNER • REBECCA SCOTT • MARK WOODS • GRAHAM GUSSIN MATHIEU MERCIER • KATARINA DRAGOSLAVIC • LUDMILLA ANDREWS

SUSAK expo is devised and organised by Daniel Devlin for Susak Press.

This third biennale is curated by Cedric Christie and Vanya Balogh.

www.susakexpo.com • info@susakpress.com

2012

Translation / Change / Mutation curated by Keran James (studio1.1) and Herzog Dellafiore. Fleur Axelle wrote some text in English that was then translated into Serbo-Croat and then back into English again. What was lost in translation and what remained became the main interest at that year’s expo. The show travelled to the Museum on the neighbouring island of Losinj and then on to studio1.1 in London later that year.

It seemed to have reached maturity and accepted the established, and expected, presentation of art exhibitions.

KWM

studio1.4 presents

SUSAK EXPO[RT]

2012

Galerija Fritzy Mali Lošinj

TRANSLATION

CHANGE MUTATION APRIL 2012

2014

For its fifth incarnation, Susak Expo 2014, artists Cedric Christie and Daniel Devlin travelled by car with an oversized wheelbarrow attached to its roof, from London to Susak via Munich and Vienna. The British and the German police decided not to do a stop-and-search and instead had their photographs taken with the car. Devlin and Christie happily obliged and the picture is now on the catalogue’s cover.

All selected artists were requested to produce an artwork that could be hung outside House 600, as a kind of sculptural collage and open-air gallery. The Contemptible Art and Culture Magazine described it in April 2014 as: “… shared oscillation between the nugatory, solipsistic act of making and its concomitant absence of superficial or ‘gaze-accessible’ meaning or pragmatically physical public access binds together (sometimes disturbingly so) exhibiting artists Georgina Corrie, Janko Matic, Keran James, Cedric Christie, Petra Varl, Peter Seewasser, Hermann Fink, Alistair Gentry, Daniel Devlin and Herzog Dellafiore in a determination to displace this lack, i.e. of intrusion by external forces, into a gustatory, domestic period of heimlich/ unheimlich internal deflection that nonetheless finds external replication in a certain ephemeral outdoor monumentalitism that forces us to envision.”

All the work is still up although one of Petra Varl’s sculptures has been stolen. And we thought the locals weren’t interested in Contemporary Art! They might be warming up to the idea by now.

p. znidaric seewasser 27.2.2016 in co-operation with musee des civilisations - dschang - cameroun

art guerilla camp /: [free colony]: FKuK RIVIERA — holiday of the convention at the SUSAK EXPO from 6th to 16th May 2016 international multimedial and interdisciplinary art guerilla camp The 10-day international artistic and scientific Symposium ‘FKuK RIVIERA – Holiday of the Convention’ with artists and scientists from the participating countries Austria and Croatia come together on the Croatian island of Susak to spot new, process-oriented artistic and scientific positions on the subject of act, naturism and nudism in the media of photography, painting, film, literature, music and performance, including historical and contemporary trends emerge. During the symposium, participating artists can direct their knowledge and Apply self experiences in the nudist community and convert it into contemporary forms of art. A sensitive interaction with naturists, but also open processes are made possible and will enrich an aesthetic and critical discourse continuation of the project ‘FKuK RIVIERA – Holiday of the Convention’.

Project leader: Igor F. Petković (CULTerror) in cooperation with Peter Znidaric Seewasser

/:

Igor F. Petković

multimedial artist / cultural researc and manager / curator FKuK RIVIE

Ada Kobusiewicz

visual artist and multimedia art

Boris Mihaljčić

Over 100 years ago as an expression of radical reform of life in German-speaking countries, nudity has become a wide, global phenomenon in society and the media. Every year there are hundreds of thousands of Naturists – and Nudists on nude beaches enjoying this natural way of life, free from the otherwise prevailing conventions. Nudity in advertising, in reality shows and in political and artistic activism are widespread. Nudity has become omnipresent, but what does it say about our culture, society and values? What is behind the bare facts and what story do they tell?

multiinstrumentalist / composer

FKuK RIVIERA - Holiday of the Convention is a 10-day symposium to create artworks that explore the nude human body in context of nature, culture and art. The artists will live as naturists on the beach of Susak to create works that explore contemporary questions to nudity: What does nudity mean today in a (overerotic) media company? How can naturism and nudism contribute to a contemporary (body) consciousness and a harmony with nature? What was and is a naked body and what does it say about the usual conventions? How designed is physical beauty (form the norm)? What important role played Austria and Croatia in the development of a global and nudist movement? Does stripping away clothing rid us of class, gender and personal expression? Do the connections between our bodies and the land change when nude? What is the role of the nude in historical and contemporary art?; The artists work individually or collaboratively to create artworks that explore these questions through media of their choice, such as photography, video, installation, drawing, painting, performance art, dance, sound art, media art, music, etc.

photographer / galerist

www.itsch.org / fkuk.itsch.org

Christine Punz

cultural manager / literature

Werner Mandlberger musician / historian

Michael Eisl

sound designer / musician

Hassan Abdelghani Dejan Štifani photographer

Michael Maier paintings / objects

Susak Expo 2016 13.5 — 22.5 Crkve i kapele cresko-lošinjskog arhipelaga (Churches and Chapels of the Cres and Lošinj Archipelago) 25.5 — 24.7 Malološinjski obrambeni sustav od 1797 do 1991 (Defensive system of Mali Lošinj from 1797 to 1991) 2.8 — 11.9

OLIVER WASOW Ween 2.0 2015

Alasdair Duncan - Andrew Witkin - Juliette Losq - Darren Norman - Eric Poitevin - Andreas Blank Patrick Caulfield - Richard Paul - Daniel Levine - Jonathan Calm - Barry Le Va - Catherine Murphy Peter Soriano - Matthew Draper - Sam Dargan - Lisa Beck - Philippe Richard - Damien Flood Joy Garnett - Andrew Seto - Don Voisine - Dana Bell - Scooter Laforge - Christopher Moss Chris Baker - Mel Bernstine - Gary Petersen - Harriet Korman - Steven Charles - Peter Krashes Richard Hamilton - Brian Dupont - Marie Harnett - John Squire - Corinna Spencer - Damien Hirst Neil Winokur - Michael Callaghan - Oliver Wasow - Joyce Robins - Jason Tomme - Nancy Handler Sarah Reynolds - Erik Hanson - Michelle Vaughan - Jack Davidson - Michael Scott - Jay Shinn Eric Brown - Samuel Laurence Cunnane - Bill Mutter - Sharon Butler - Carolyn Blackwood - Bill Albertini

56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn, NY 11206 theodoreart.com 212 966 4324 theodoreart@gmail.com TA_Sluice_2016.indd 1

2/20/16 10:11 AM

Sluice_updates

_screens

c C Prize 2015 Screenings of the 2015 prizewinners 1 April

LUX Critical Forum Glasgow

_archive

_magazine

The interactive Sluice_archive was launched on December 26 2015 and features every gallery and project we have worked with (including those only featured in the _encounters project).

In addition to the print magazine the Sluice website hosts an online version with extra content, reviews, interviews and general Sluice__ updates. sluice.info/magazine

_shop

20 April

Caustic Coastal at Islington Mill Manchester

t-shirts, totes, back issues of the Sluice_magazine

sluice.info/screens sluice.info

_talks Forthcoming Averard Hotel with Slate Projects London A day of quick-fire talks by a range of speakers speaking about a single work of art/book/film that has informed their practice. sluice.info/talks

_encounters Ongoing

An ongoing project that aims to create an archive of independent initiatives. Including those we’ve worked with and those that we’ve simply encountered.

Updates are sporadic but currently the project features 32 interviews. sluice.info/encounters

sluice.info/magazine

_opportunities Check sluice.info for current and upcoming opportunities including participating in Exchange Rates and submitting work to the 2016 edition of the sluice_screens cc prize.

Sluice__, Theodore:Art and Centotto present

R e g n a h a c t x e s E • 2016 •

The Bushwick International Exposition

The second biennial international collaborative exposition of galleries and projects in and around Bushwick, Brooklyn, NYC

Thursday 20 - Sunday 23 October 2016

sluice.info/er2016

#er2016

analogy [GENTLEMEN AND PLAYERS] Alistair Gentry

being paid for your skill or effort was firmly categorised as a vulgar aspiration of the ungentlemanly I don’t know much about sport, but I know this: in the colonial era, there were two types of teams who competed against each other for the same prizes on what was the very definition of an uneven playing field. The players were professionals, or would-be professionals, who dedicated themselves completely to the game. Their gentleman opponents obviously also liked to win, but didn’t have to because they could afford to play the game for its own sake. Off the pitch most of them had already won the game of life simply by being born into the right place, time, and social class.

After his already superlative start an imperial era gentleman continued to play life with the rules applied far more leniently and the rewards handed out far more generously to him than to anybody else.

In 19th-century association football, most players had day jobs despite being paid for playing because the pay for playing was too low on its own. Then the headmasters of Victorian public schools like Charterhouse and (the eponymous) Rugby – then in due course the masters of Oxford and Cambridge – saw its value as a way of instilling in boys the imperial values of discipline

and manliness. At this point being paid for your skill or effort was firmly categorised as a vulgar aspiration of the ungentlemanly. The gentleman amateur who didn’t do it for money was promoted as the model football player, along with the new, strict rules of the games known nowadays as rugby and soccer.

Within a very few years, however, consistent payment for the best players crept in. Even worse for the Oxbridge amateurs, most of these top players were from growing, northern industrial cities like Manchester, Birmingham or Glasgow, dedicated to professionalism and determined to play their best game, gentlemanly or not. This was the origin of the split that is still technically in existence, between the Football Association founded by ex public schoolboys in 1863 – although they magnanimously voted to ‘allow’ payment to players in 1885 – and the Football League which was founded in 1888 by a draper who was also director of Aston Villa, incorporating six teams from the north-west of England and six from the Midlands. Some gentlemen switched to Rugby football in disgust, so they wouldn’t have to compete against vulgarian teams who played for money. Posh gents like the

Corinthians refused to even enter competitions that awarded trophies, making themselves increasingly ridiculous, irrelevant and uncompetitive with high-minded tactics such as not trying to score or defend from the recently introduced and completely by-the-rules penalty kicks; they believed (or affected to believe) that no gentleman would commit a foul in the first place. Those who played for the thrill of it looked down upon the common players who thought it should pay, had to seek subsidy from elsewhere, or needed to work at a non-vocational job to avoid dropping out entirely. The class issues I’ve drawn attention to are still very much live ones. Like an Old Corinthian with his nose out of joint because some shop boy from Tyneside is better at playing his game, the well off can choose whether or not to play the arts for fun or for profit as they see fit, and they often sneer at or simply don’t comprehend those who can’t or won’t make that choice.

Hence the blatantly retrograde and sexist title, because for most of us in the early 21st century it seems to be exactly the state into which our vocation is devolving; gentlemen and players. Duncan Campbell, 2014’s Turner Prize winner, declared that he was going to spend his £25,000 prize money on paying his rent and other household bills. This is how we support artists in Britain. All an artist needs to do in order to make ends meet is to be one of the four nominees for the Turner Prize and win, every year.

Alistair Gentry is a writer, artist and performer. According to a passing stranger who recently shouted out of a car window, he is also a fucking weirdo.

He is based, divides his time and works. gentry-a.co.uk

With thanks to: Marmite Prize for Painting Siddharth Sthalekar Sabine Casparie Art Tours Catherine Loewe IMT Gallery Robbins & Roberts Andrea Simone Pontes Laura Moreton-Griffiths Angus-Hughes Gallery Anna Canby Monk

Giovanna Paterno Maggie Williams Gat Yifat Sandra Crisp Charley Peters James Hardy Mark Sheerin Eleanor Glacken Ted Haddon Alice Nedin

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[SPRING 2016]

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