Four Minutes to Midnight Issue 13
SPRING 2014
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no more of this shit.
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A.C.A.B.
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Four Minutes to Midnight 13 Winter 2013 Spring 2014
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NE V E R PA RT OF TH E
SW IS S HA RD CO RE
NEVER PART OF THE SWISS HARD CORE SCENE
SC EN E
Never apart from desire Never apart from the light , not really
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TH E
Too young,  (too late)  and you, younger still
MU SI C
it was never about the music the smartly-run squats
but simply the way lines were drawn between point A
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Between
and
typography language culture politics fear and
and and and and and love
language culture politics fear love ...
and and
memory the printed page
point B
Between
death memory
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M O N T R É A L; THIS
LAST
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CITY
UNDER
EMPIRE
covered in soot, bathed in dust.
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DANCING SEEDING
TANGOS ALLEYWAYS
TONGUES AND
ON WITH
ROLL
GROLL POPPY
OUT CRASH
WORDS WOUND ROUND CALLOUSED FINGERS STAINED WITH SOOT OVER TEN YEARS WE BUILT A NEW VOCABULARY WROUGHT LANGUAGE UNDER EMPIRE WHERE THE GLYPHS ARE THROWN TO THE FORGE RECAST AS SMARTPHONES AND GUNS INTERNATIONAL LONG – DISTANCE HANDS – FREE AUSTERITY — MEASURES THE WORD IS THE CANARY AND ITS FEATHERS ARE FALLING OUT W A R — A N T I – W A R — W A R W A R — W A R — W A R THE WINE IS DRYING UP RATS DEVELOPER COPS PIGEONS WAR COPS
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A KNIFE HELD UP AGAINST THE RAIN
( we might drown )
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between rent hikes and drone strikes between our refusals and our desires
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4
3
2
AM
the feedback kicks in and I get up to leave
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walked the Roland JCM900 three blocks down Parc the drum kit up St-Laurent backpack full of posters waiting in half-empty rooms between
5380
and
backpack full of books walking to the printers under overpasses
6003a across train tracks
lugging boxes to the church basement and walking home with half-empty boxes and bags full of friends / strangers’ ink smeared profanity, love, anger, and cute All the legs and arms holding it up, year after year .
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IT WAS
A
N
D
BIRTH OF COOL
NEVER ABOUT
GRIND YOU DOWN
THE MUSIC
ANYWAY
DON’T LET THE
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TORONTO. We were lucky to not get arrested that night outside the movie-studio-prison, raising a cacophonous noise so that those inside could hear that we were there. In solidarity. We were still there.
A
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BETWEEN
What a lie. After the riot cops charged the crowd, we slunk away, afraid. Found a bar, sat down on the terrasse, drank beer and smoked cigarettes. Surrounded by young professionals. Tired.
B
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WINTER
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Only the Old, the Hungry and the Humbled Kept at this temperature a sense of place, These days it’s so hard to get past the long shadow of our thoughts. We all nuzzle in for months, some fall into inaction, some workshop furiously, some tumble into gaping pits, some face it head on, and some ache and ache. Listen the snow is falling o’er town, Listen the snow is falling ev’rywhere. Between your bed and mine, Between your head and my mind. Listen, the snow is falling o’er town.
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1998 2012
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I first moved into a 1½ with worn hardwood floors and cockroaches. 8 months later I moved into a 100-yearold 4½ on Roy and Coloniale streets. The apartment was dingy and in disrepair, but its high ceilings made it feel like a palace. Empty storefronts spotted St-Laurent. Red À LOUER signs stood in apartment windows up and down the streets of the plateau. Rents were cheap, landlords were absent, and condos didn’t exist. A surprising number of squeegee punks lived in the streets, and fast-scrawled graffiti proliferated everywhere. On weekends there were frequent street sales where people liquidated their old clothes, old slide projectors and books, cracked mirrors, typewriters, out-of-style shoes, Super 8 cameras, 1970s schmaltz records, costume jewelry and anything else that may once have held The dramatic tuition increase value. being imposed by the Liberal government will further threaten equitable access to education and will bury future generations under massive debt. It represents a neoliberal policy of austerity economics that targets the social infrastructure of Québec and reinforces systemic social inequalities. Montréal felt like a beaten city. The bad years that it had suffered were visible on its face. Major commercial strips housed used furniture stores that opened in May and closed in October. This was before it was made illegal to sell used mattresses, before widely reported bedbug epidemics. The assault on education is also an assault on culture. Artists and cultural workers also produce knowledge, they engage in the vitality of public discourse and ideas. The ideology underlying the current changes in the universities, of which the tuition hike is only one aspect, is the same ideology that aims to privatise and commodify our cultural production.
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I loved those junk-shops, fripperies, second-hand-anything stores, as they made the city accessible to a young person. The low-income existence shared by so many Montréalers was a source of urban vitality. It animated the streets, the commercial lofts that artists rented and lived in, the parks, cafés, and louche performance venues. We strongly condemn the repression and criminalisation of dissent that is currently taking place and denounce the violence of the police, who seem to place the value of property above people. For a few magic years, the city neglected the Plateau and Mile End. Bylaws weren’t enforced. Apartments stayed empty, and rents hovered at 1970s prices. A feeling of aimlessness and near-lawlessness With this declaration, pervaded. we commit to further amplifying the voice of the student struggle. We declare our steadfast support for the hundreds of thousands of students who have courageously ignited one of the largest popular mobilisations in Québec’s history. We are inspired, we are thankful, and we will not let them fight alone. In 1998 I was 23. I didn’t own a thing.
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Each phase of capitalism has a particular affect which holds it together. This is not a static situation. The prevalence of a particular dominant affect is sustainable only until strategies of resistance able to break down this particular affect and/or its social sources are formulated. Hence, capitalism constantly comes into crisis and recomposes around newly dominant affects.
AUSTERPRECARIG
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Those
who are allergic
to the sea
Those
accustomed
to red light
Anyone
who has in actuality
danced upon a grave
Those
who stop
to speak to dogs
Those
who believe in
the idea of poetry
Those
who reject
the idea of the internet
Kickstarters
with
Range Rovers
New model men
with consumptive
reflections of
mid-century masculinity
The colour blind /
culture blind /
gender bind
Those
who form
identity through exclusion
People
who wear
kicks
The hopeless lot
who think
“sound fiscal management” is more than just sound
GENTRIFIRACISM Graphic designers
who court
blackletter and set it
like drunken masons
Vorticists
between all that Blasting
that got confused
and Blessing
Those
who fear
tetanus at every turn
Those
who say
“those...”
Weak-kneed academics for whom
‘theory’ is a religion and
cannot understand the
obscenity of their elitism
Ibid.
—oh
what would Howard Zinn do?
Journalists
who read
the Onion for inspiration
Bloggers
writing
lists
Purveyors
of
“Excellence!”
Cultural workers
who are ignored
at dance parties
Activists
who are shunned
at dinner parties
Anarchists
who watch
hockey
Those
who stop
to look up at the sky
Petition engines
Finance students Werewolves Alberta
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TO
PERFORM THE RETURN, A TURNING BACK, AS IN TURNING BACK TO A PLACE, to perform the return, a turning back, as in turning A back to a place, a time. what a lie. TIME. WHAT A LIE.
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A man puts a digital camera into his mouth :
— a coat with frayed sleeves
— cracked boots
— a bike with bent wheel
— a bed turned in on itself
— the curve of her shoulders
— the nape of her neck
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AS EX QU IS IT E
— empty bottles on the kitchen table
AS BR OK EN GL AS S
IN TH E YA RD AT
— a plate with crumbs and dust
PE LI CAa janitor at the place N of the dead
— a violin case
if things have names
always having to turn
BAand walk away towards the of the living Y places where only memories can conquer the dust and these tears mean nothing
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Spring [spring] verb (used without object), sprang or, often sprung; spring¡ing. 1. to rise, leap, move, or act suddenly and swiftly, as by a sudden dart or thrust forward or outward, or being suddenly released from a coiled or constrained position: to spring into the air; a tiger about to spring. 2. to be released from a constrained position, as by resilient or elastic force or from the action of a spring: A trap springs. The door sprang open and in he walked. 3. to issue forth suddenly, as water, blood, sparks, fire, etc. (often followed by forth, out, or up ): Blood sprang from the wound. 4. to come into being, rise, or arise within a short time (usually followed by up ): Industries sprang up in the suburbs. 5. to come into being by growth, as from a seed or germ, bulb, root, etc.; grow, as plants.
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Th e ed 44
felt
The red-felted spring 100,000 in the street is also a rare poetry.
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Right before it happens, there’s no sign at all One minute blue skies, then the rain begins to fall
We have become accustomed to contracts for everything.
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We have avoided everything resembling a pact because a pact cannot be rescinded;
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it is either respected or broken.
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And in the end that is the hardest thing to understand:
that the effect of negation depends on the positivity of a common,
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that our way of saying “I” determines the force with which we say “no”.
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&&&
As their kettles overflow, it’s only a matter of time till they get burnt.
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Flickering lights in summer storms when the rain brooms down the street and the trees sway like hippies in the dark. Some’ll run outside to celebrate the brief release from the heavy humid blanket. But I’ll be kind of pissed because all those posters just went up yesterday. We’ll be alright hiding tonight.
Who imagined this place?
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&&& everything looks real nice in this morning slanty gold sunshine. the lake between the friperie and fish monger telephone poles shorn of posters, stitched with staples sidewalk books waiting for new homes bagel bags that steam when opened dapper old men playing poker, laughing at the freaks Billy shortcuts down alleyways street parties with hot dogs and grass on the sidewalk furtive hungover glances and knowing smiles all the lost cats, found cats and yes, the train tracks and the holes in the fence that keep springing up.
How do you explain all this to a sleeping giant?
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Pigeons circle overhead like signposts, outlasting most storefronts here. The night doesn’t fall, it gathers.
&&&
Our words remain static. Language shudders under the weight of irony. Over time, the search for form will leave you hollow.
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If the first wave of social movements provided a machine for fighting misery, and the second wave a machine for fighting boredom, what we now need is
A MACHINE FOR FIGHTING ANXIETY.
So, be careful with each other. Be kind.
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the smartly-run the younger-still the country itself
Here are the lines, simply drawn:
the way matter breaks down the way we bury our dead the way time keeps coming
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I want to talk about the body now. the way matter breaks down the way we bury our dead the way time keeps coming
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..
. .
.
. ..
.
.,
.
zerø hour nerves . an addict’s slow shiver
.
BONE
. ,
. ...
. ..
..
.
&
.
FLESH
.
I am ripped apart I am held together I am holl wed out I am full of light
& SINEW
INK & PAPER
&
GLUE
& WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS
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WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS
WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WHAT TIME IS LEFT FOR GRIEF? WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS
between our desires and our refusals
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ALWAYS FACE OUTWARDS. LINK ARMS, FORM BARRIERS, USE YOUR BODY.
The time spent in common; an accretion, a weight, a geography, mapped a joy.
Move quickly and calmly, never giving them time to react.
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63—76 PHOTOGRAPHS Kevin Yuen Kit Lo, Lotti Thiesen and Võ Thiên Viêt · SUPER 8 STILLS Ted Hung Tat Lo / Kevin Yuen Kit Lo PAINTING Alex Schaefer
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Shock Troops and Cheerleaders KEVIN YUEN KIT LO
Graphic design is a shell game, a What does it feel like to be living cheap hustle, when it could be a in the world today? language. A practice of seeing and On this side of the world, the listening, speaking and writing, apathy of the infinite scroll thinking and making, that might seems like an apt metaphor. point towards a way out from under the wire, and maybe, just “I have enjoyed Print Magazine maybe, out of the game entirely. for 15 years now. But I have to say, the cover of the current issue The constant buzz of the upsets me. If you were to tell me semiotic stock market. Endless an eight-year-old child designed it, Tumblr feeds filled with nothing I wouldn’t believe you. I’ve yet to but blind utopianism, nostalgic meet an eight year old as aesthetisentimentality, or hollow cynically inept as whoever duped you cism. Empty words set in a into printing this “thing.” Seriously, geometric sans-serif, centred in who approved it? Also, can I have white space and framed in black. their job?” Faux-weathered lettering pasted — Comment posted on printmag. over a photo of a forest, or the com by ChrisAtAcces in response ocean. Stretched Times New to Metahaven’s design of the Roman is as radical as it gets here. October 2011 issue. Repeated Or Pornography... or Fashion... three times (likely a Wordpress
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error), this is the only comment about the issue.
on the new Midwest vernacular and finding solace in our reflections in the white-washed cube.
The new ugly ain’t got nothing on the old ugly. It’s hardly a Legibility is a condition of cult, more like a gang ; a pack manipulation... of wolves circling the contem—James Scott, Seeing Like a State porary art galleries and fashion magazines. At least the dramatilike, like, like... cally labelled ‘legibility wars’ of yore held something of a promise, The expanding multiplicity the belief that something was of ordered forms, our means worth fighting for. Where are our of being read, identified and Emigrés now? categorized (and to perform the same to others) relates directly It would be naive to think to our state of nervous anxiety. graphic design could instantiate Each night my jaw keeps getting any genuine social change. Yet tighter. Each night the state there is still something radically draws closer. enticing in its position as one of the few ‘professional disciplines’ Given the ever more violent (read as being crassly utilitarabstractions performed by ian to capital) to have flirted so capital, the critical positionpassionately, if briefly, with criti- ing of graphic design as one of cal theory and cultural studies. concerned, civic, mediation is no Importantly, this flirtation bore longer even possible. Softening material form, and a vulgarized, the edges is futile when there is visceral one at that. no outside anymore. And it’s only going to get worse. For a moment, graphic design looked a bit, felt a bit, like the The urgent task is one of reificworld, of the world. ation. Not in the Marxist sense of the thingification of our social But the blood didn’t stick to the relations, but as a concretization walls. Experimentation devolved of our ideas, the materializainto style. We all got oΩ the tion of the possible, as physical streets and strolled back to the resistance. office mall incubators, brunching
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Historical Interlude The International Typographical Union was founded on May 5, 1852 (in 1869 the name was changed from National to International after it began organizing members in Canada). The ITU was composed of typesetters and printers, apprentices and journeymen, and was considered one of the most democratic and progressive unions; condemning Sunday work, actively supporting organizing eΩorts by other craft unions, and being among the first to institute membership by women. Its organisational model, which strongly valued the autonomy of locals, acted as a preeminent case study for ideal union democracy, minimising bureaucracy and sedimented elitism. In 1906, the ITU secured the eight-hour work day through the use of tactical strikes in major cities, paving the way for a standard that would eventually be implemented across all other industries. After World War I, when employers sought to lengthen the work day to 12 hours, the ITU fought back with massive strikes across the country, engaging in a three-year long battle that cost employers dearly, and successfully defended the union’s significant gains. Typographers were able to punch above their weight in numbers due in large part to their unique position at the presses of every major city, where they were able to intervene on the production and dissemination of information and influence publicity in their favour. § The Montreal Typographical Union was formed in 1867 as Local 176, hosting the first ITU convention outside of the United States in 1873. Amongst the prominent members of the MTU was linotype operator and typesetter Kalmen Kaplansky, who served on its executive in the 1930s and early 40s. Kaplansky was a leading activist in the Jewish community, advocating for anti-discrimination eΩorts that extended beyond fighting anti-Semitism to combat discrimination against all minorities.
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Between 1940 and 1943, Kaplansky served as the chairman of the Workmen’s Circle (Arbeiter Ring) in Montreal. The organization conducted itself as an irretrievable part of the radical labour movement, and provided education, health benefits, a library, open forums, clubs and cemetery plots for its members. In 1936, the Workmen’s Circle Centre at 4848 St. Laurent blvd. was completed, and served as a cultural and political centre for the community. The centre hosted many notable speakers, including the famed anarchist Emma Goldman, who delivered lectures on literature and poetry, sex and birth control, art and revolution. Since the 1980s, the Centro Social Español has occupied the building and continues to use it as a cultural centre for people of Spanish decent. Since 2000, the building has housed La Sala Rossa, a popular, family-run, music venue that has hosted many of Montreal’s most acclaimed musicians. The building across the street houses Sala Rossa’s in-house print shop, Popolo Press, run by Kiva Tanya Stimac. The press houses letterpress, relief printing, screen-printing, die cutting, bookbinding and foil-stamping facilities. Stimac describes it as ‘printing without a wire.’ § In order to avoid romanticism, it should be noted that throughout its long history, the International Typographic Union was not always on the side of the oppressed. In Detroit, the ITU ended up on the conservative side of the Black Radical movement of the 1960s. They made it impossible for the League of Revolutionary Black Workers to print their newspaper, Inner City Voice, in Detroit. On December 31, 1986, the ITU dissolved. The remnants of the membership merged with the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Before its dissolution, the ITU was the oldest union in the United States.
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( Insert Silence ) Graphic designers today, in our labour, are the shock troops and cheerleaders of precarity. Dressed in tutus and wielding nightsticks. Millions served daily with a smile. The entrepreneur, the studio, the startup, the freelancer. The atomised individual. The ironic endgame of high modernism.
Oh, and by the way, fuck you: “As more of our basic needs are met, we increasingly expect sophisticated experiences that are emotionally satisfying and meaningful. [… ] Design thinking is the tool for imagining these experiences as well as giving them a desirable form.” —Tim Brown, IDEO CEO
Over time the search for form will leave you hollow.
Sorry Tim, but whose basic needs are really being met here? I increasingly expect these gilded cities to burn. And I expect that to be a sophisticated and emotionally satisfying experience.
“The burial site of the Russian avant-garde artist and theorist Kazimir Malevich has been covered in concrete by a real estate developer to make way for When the time comes — and it luxury housing. [… ] Russia is in will — we should be ready to once the midst of o≈cially promoting again stop the presses. the artist. Mr. Malevich’s works, along with those of Wassily Kandinsky, inspired the design for the logo of the G-20 meeting opening in St. Petersburg next week.” —NY Times, Artbeat August 30, 2013
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The following interview with the Amsterdambased graphic design studio Experimental Jetset was originally published in a special edition catalog of the Swedish version of the Forms of
In 2003, I left Montreal Questions by Magnus to study graphic design Ericson, answers by in the Netherlands, Experimental Jetset. largely inspired by a culture of design championed by the likes of Experimental Jetset. I had naively hoped that after several frustrating
Inquiry exhibition. The exhibition took place in November 2008 at IASPIS (the International Artists’ Studio Program in Sweden) in Stockholm. The text was presented alongside an interview with Nille Svensson (of Sweden Graphics), who was asked the same questions. By showing the two interviews next to each other, the intention of the catalog editors was to reveal the differences and similarities existing between two studios firmly rooted in typical North-European welfare states.
years trying to build a ‘socially-engaged’ design studio in Canada, the Dutch would accept me as one of their own and help fund my budding practice. Experimental Jetset have kindly allowed us to reproduce their interview in full. Within the present context, the preceding text can be read as an atemporal, scattershot introduction from across the Atlantic. And their text might then be read as a lucid and comprehensive counterpoint to mine. — Kevin Yuen Kit Lo
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DESIGN AND IDEOLOGY EXPERIMENTAL JETSET 85
00. Discussing design and ideology is of course rather difficult because it’s such a big and complex issue. We agree; it’s an incredibly large subject. Thinking about how to tackle it, we came to the conclusion that there are two possible ways to approach the issue: we could either investigate the notion of ideology-as-design, or the notion of design-as-ideology. The first notion, ideology-as-design, would lead us to explore the idea of ideologies as designed entities in themselves. This is not a farfetched notion at all; in fact, most ideologies did not evolve organically, but were clearly constructed, in limited amounts of time, by limited amounts of people. In other words, these ideologies were designed. The most obvious examples of designed ideologies are of course the many art movements that sprung up around the beginning of the 20th century. Many of these movements (Surrealism, Dada, Futurism, etc.) did not solely propagate a specific artistic program, but very often, within their carefully crafted manifestos, offered a very complete view on the world (‘Weltanschauung’). In that sense, many of the ‘isms’ coming from the realms of literature, painting and design can be seen as full-fledged ideologies. In the context of designed ideologies we can also mention the way in which Régis Debray, in his marvellous ‘Socialism and Print’ (more about that essay later), describes socialism: as a movement fabricated by printers, typographers, publicists and librarians. In other words, in Debray’s essay, socialism is not only designed; it is graphically designed. And, to mention just one more example, let us not forget how many religions and belief systems are designed as well. Take for instance the First Council of Nicaea (325 AD), in which a small group of religious leaders compiled and edited the Bible into the form we now know it, during a brief cut-and-paste session that can only be seen as an act of design. In fact, it is precisely the fact that many ideologies and belief systems are fully based on texts (scriptures, manifestos) that shows us the construction of ideology-as-design. Just as texts only exist in their designed form, ideologies only exist as designed entities as well.
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The second notion, design-as-ideology, leads us down an interesting path as well. After all, the notion of design is intrinsically linked to the ideology of ‘makeability’: the idea that we are living in a world that can be understood by people, interpreted by people, and thus can also be consciously shaped by people. In English, the word ‘makeability’ might not have the same resonance as the Dutch translation ‘maakbaarheid’; but we can assure you that, in the Netherlands, the word ‘maakbaarheid’ is loaded with ideology, inextricably associated with social-democracy and the welfare state. The notion of makeability and the notion of design cannot be seen apart from each other; there is no possible way that they can be separated (nor should they). It is only logical that the awareness of the fact that the world around us can be shaped by people (makeability) will automatically lead to the actual act of shaping the world around us (design), and vice versa. In that sense, every designed object, every cultural artefact, is a manifestation of the ideology of makeability, an ideology summed up best by Marx’s famous axiom “If man is shaped by his surroundings, his surroundings must be made human”. (Or, to speak with Devo, “whip it / into shape”). Following this line of thought, every designer is an ideologist, whether he/she likes it or not. It is this line of thinking (‘design-as-ideology’) that we would like to follow to its logical conclusion in this interview.
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01. What is an ideological designer? What does ideology as an idea mean to you as graphic designers? Are you driven by ideology or are you just interested in the notion of ideology? Is ideology important in design? As we already established in the above introduction, design is intrinsically linked with ideology, so in our view, every designer is ideological, whether he/she is aware of it or not. This has been our opinion from the very beginning of our career. However, precisely a year ago, we read an essay that reaffirmed our beliefs, in a very enthusing and energizing way. That essay was ‘Socialism and Print’ by Régis Debray, published in issue 46 (July/August 2007) of New Left Review (this essay was later placed online, under the title ‘Socialism: A Life-Cycle’). ‘Socialism and Print’ is the best article about graphic design that we read in a very long time, taking into consideration that Debray nowhere actually mentions the word ‘graphic design’. No wonder, as during the period that Debray describes (the birth and early years of socialism) the word ‘graphic design’ was still non-existent. However, when Debray describes the versatile subculture of printers, typographers, librarians and publishers that turned out to be the cradle of socialism, it is not hard to see that the not-named-yet heart of this “craft-based network” (as Debray himself describes it) is what later became widely known as ‘graphic design’. It is a rollercoaster-ride of a read, in which Debray repeatedly shows the many ways in which socialism grew from a particular ecosystem, an ecosystem consisting of printing and typography. Debray calls this system the ‘graphosphere’, and situates this sphere in the period running from 1448 to 1968; in fact, in our own interpretation of his text, the word ‘graphosphere’ could as well be a synonym for ‘modernism’, a modernism starting with the Gutenberg Revolution, and ending with the rise of postmodernism. In Debray’s ‘graphosphere’, ideology is a product of design, rather than design being a product of ideology, which is an exhilarating revelation. Debray’s enthusiasm is contaminating: it is not hard to suddenly see socialism as the political manifestation of graphic design, and modernism as the social manifestation of graphic design. Design is not a tool to spread ideology; it is the other way around.
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“An Olympic marathon: the glow of a letter (...) passing from runner to runner, the heart of the message laying precisely in its transmission”. The glow of a letter, the transmission as the heart of the message... Debray is talking about something eerily close to the modern notion of graphic design, and he places it right at the center of the socialist project. At first sight, Debray’s essay seems quite straight-forward. Debray sets out to explain the demise of the socialist project, and concludes that this demise is caused by the collapse of the ‘graphosphere’ and the emergence of the ‘videosphere’: the age of the image. Seen in this light, Debray’s message is all-too-familiar: the end of history, the end of print, the end of socialism, the end of modernism — the dreaded mantra of postmodernism. But sprinkled throughout the essay, there are endless glimmers of hope. Many times, Debray suggests that his simplified time line (‘logosphere, graphosphere, videosphere’) doesn’t have to be as linear and definite as it seems. Debray leaves a lot of room for a more dialectical model of progress — a model in which the future can be shaped by the ghosts of the past. Debray mentions words such as memory (“when it is cold outside, and the night is long, memory means that we are not alone”), the archive (“the medium of history as practice”), and most significantly, includes the following paragraph: “The greatest modernizers inaugurate their career with a backward leap, and a renaissance proceeds through a return to the past, a recycling, and hence a revolution. (...) Behind the ‘re’ of reformation, republic or revolution, there is a hand flicking through the pages of a book, from the end back to the beginning. Whereas the finger that pushes a button, fast-forwarding a tape or disc, will never pose a danger to the establishment”. The ghost of the past as an active agent of change, as a specter of the future. The very concept of hauntology (as described by Derrida in ‘Specters of Marx’) invoked. The notion of dialectical progress: a future being shaped through an active dialogue with the past. Our hope, our drive, all that we believe in; it’s all encapsulated in this simple paragraph.
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02. Do you find it important to have a well-formulated ideology when working with design? As we already described a few paragraphs earlier, we see ideology as a product of design rather than the other way around. We don’t see ideology as something that has to be ‘had’, that has to be owned or studied in order to design. To us, ideology is something that can be generated during the actual act of designing. What we find so fascinating about graphic design is precisely that, in its ideal form, it is a perfect example of ‘praxis’: a synthesis of theory and practice in which each informs the other, simultaneously. In the true practice of graphic design, the artificial borders between manual labor and intellectual labor are torn down. Thinking becomes a form of making, and making becomes a form of thinking. In ‘Socialism and Print’, Debray hints at a similar model of praxis, when he refers to both the professional typographer and the professional printer as quintessentially a “‘worker intellectual or intellectual worker’, the very ideal of that human type who would become the pivot of socialism: ‘the conscious proletarian’”.
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03. How does your relation to ideology affect your methodology? Right after we graduated, there was a short period in which we were truly obsessed with Guy Debord’s ‘Society of the Spectacle’. In retrospect, it might have been a somewhat childish obsession, but it did influence our methodology profoundly, to this very day. We are sure that most of you are familiar with Debord’s famous essay, but if we had to explain it very briefly: in ‘Society of the Spectacle’, Debord critiques what he calls the ‘society spectacle’ (Debray would call it ‘the videosphere’, others would call it the postmodernist condition): a world dominated by images, representations, projections. A society of alienation, in which images are completely separated from their material base. This essay was quite an eye-opener for us, and we responded in a very literal way: our aim became to create objects, not images. Our goal was to design pieces of printed matter that would refer to their own materiality, their own physical dimension. We wanted to design posters that would never imprison the reader in some sort of false illusion, some sort of floating image; instead, we wanted to design posters that would constantly refer to their own material base. We tried to achieve this by literally showing the poster as ‘just’ a piece of printed matter, a sheet of paper with some ink on it. By using methods such as overprint, perforation, folding, etc., we wanted to focus on the poster as nothing more (but certainly nothing less) than a physical construction. Through a specific use of white, empty space, we wanted to reveal the paper, the material base of the poster. We also tried to make the poster point to its own materiality by way of ‘self-referentiality’: through employing references to graphic design itself, we tried to let the poster be totally honest about its role as a piece of printed matter; we really wanted to show the construction of graphic design as a medium. (It is interesting: self-referentiality is often seen as a postmodern, ironic device; we see it as anything but. In our view, self-referentiality is essentially a modernist gesture, making transparent the conceptual construction of the designed object. After all, what can be more modernist than the wish to make a construction transparent?)
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While we are writing all this, we notice that we are using the past tense, while in fact the above paragraph perfectly encapsulates the way we still work. We may have drifted from Debord a bit, but we still believe in this principle of showing the designed object as primarily a human-made construction. This methodology is indeed very closely related to the idea of makeability (‘maakbaarheid’) that we discussed in the first paragraph of this interview. “If man is shaped by his surroundings, his surroundings must be made human”: we absolutely believe in this. For us, ‘human surroundings’ are not surroundings that try to represent or reflect humans, or surroundings that are overtly responsive to humans, but surroundings that show their own physical and conceptual construction, surroundings that show that they are human-made. Everything that is made by humans, can be changed by humans: that’s why the human-made always carries with it the possibility of change. To show surroundings as human-made, is to constantly open the horizon of change.
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04. Are there any particular commissions that you turn down because of ideological reasons? There have been numerous commissions that we turned down because of ideological reasons, political reasons, personal reasons, emotional reasons, sometimes downright silly reasons. We have certainly made mistakes: in retrospect, we have done a couple of assignments that we shouldn’t have done, while we also might have rejected a few assignments that we should have done. So we are certainly no saints. But in general, there are a couple of types of assignments that we always turn down. First of all, in our 11 years of existence, we have always refused to work for advertising agencies. And secondly, as long-time vegetarians/vegans, we have always turned down any assignment that is connected with the meat industry. Just to give two examples. However, we don’t think it is things like these that make a designer political or not. The way in which a designer selects his/her assignments, the question whether a design carries a political or commercial message, the political orientation of the client, etc. etc. — for us, things like these do not automatically affect the true political potential of the designed object. In our opinion, the true political potential of a designed object is foremost located in its aesthetic dimension. It is the aesthetical that makes the design political. (And just to be absolutely clear: when we say ‘aesthetic’, we are not just referring to the composition of forms, but also to the composition of ideas, of references, of concepts).
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05. Can design make the world a better place to live in? Do you think that graphic designers in particular have an important role to play here? David Carson (whose work we admire, by the way) once said that “graphic design will save the world, right after rock & roll does”, which was supposedly meant as an ironic remark. However, this remark is only ironic when you assume that rock & roll won’t save the world. We actually think rock & roll can save the world, and so can graphic design. To put it more concretely, we absolutely believe in the transformative, utopian potential of aesthetics. As we already explained, our world view is somewhat shaped by Debord’s idea of the ‘spectacle society’, and also by a slightly Marxist notion of alienation. In short, this means that we actually think we are living in a state of constant alienation. This state of alienation is not just one of many problems; we see it as the underlying problem, of which all other problems are, to a greater or lesser extent, merely symptoms. The only way out of this alienation is the “liberation of the senses”, as Marx called it. In our opinion, this “liberation of the senses” can certainly be found in the de-alienating power of aesthetics. Let us be clear that we are absolutely convinced that we are living in a world of extreme misery. Billions of people are starving to death. Day after day, innocent men, women and children are being killed, tortured, raped. There is no justice, no meaning, no logic. We are living in a valley of utter darkness. The fact that we are stupidly lucky enough to be part of the small percentage of people who live in considerable wealth doesn’t make us feel better at all; the continuous feeling of guilt is a torture in itself, and we do carry it around like a shadow. Add to that the unspeakable cruelty that we, as humans, inflict on animals. Millions of living creatures are abused, mutilated and slaughtered everyday. Pigs, who are supposedly smarter and more sensible than cats and dogs, are born into a living nightmare: they are robbed from any love and affection, kicked around, castrated without anaesthetic, locked into brutally small cages, electrocuted, and skinned while they are barely dead. What we, as humans, do to each other is one thing; but what we do to animals is so extremely sadistic, so merciless; it’s impossible to capture in words. These are the things that really keep us awake, night after night.
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So how can we justify, to ourselves, the fact that we are spending all of our time on the micro-aesthetics of graphic design? How can we explain to ourselves all the hours, days, months and years that we put into wordplay, abstract composition and obscure pop-cultural references? Herbert Marcuse asks himself the very thing in the beginning of his marvellous essay ‘The Aesthetic Dimension’. His first sentence is this: “In a situation where the miserable reality can be changed only through radical political praxis, the concern with aesthetics demands justification”. In the rest of the essay, he explains in crystal clear words why the concern with aesthetics is fully justified; more than that, he shows that aesthetics is a form of radical political praxis in itself. In fact, Marcuse states that, in order for an aesthetic practice (Marcuse uses literature as an example) to be truly political, it should stay clear of explicit political messages: “Literature is not revolutionary because it is written for the working class or for ‘the revolution’. Literature can be called revolutionary in a meaningful sense only with reference to itself, as content having become form. The political potential of art lies only in its own aesthetic dimension (...) The more immediately political the work of art, the more it reduces the power of estrangement and the radical, transcendent goals of change. In this sense, there may be more subversive potential in the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud than in the didactic plays of Brecht”. Note that, when Marcuse says ‘estrangement’, he actually suggests ‘de-estrangement’. In a world that is already alienated, the truly de-alienating will appear as something alienating. Or, better said: only alienating art has the power to de-alienate. In the words of Marcuse: “On the basis of aesthetic sublimation, a de-sublimation takes place in the perception of individuals — in their feelings, judgments, thoughts; an invalidation of dominant norms, needs and values”. For us, Marcuse is talking here about Marx’ “liberation of the senses”. And we do think that what Marcuse describes here not only holds true for literature, but for any aesthetic practice, including graphic design. This idea, of the transformative, utopian (and thus subversive) potential of aesthetics, is often ridiculed, obviously by critics, but also by designers themselves. Designers are generally very good at selfdepreciation: “I’m just drawing pictures”, “what do I know?”, “it’s not
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rocket science”. In contrast, it is interesting to note that it are exactly those with concrete political power, the leaders and rulers, who are very much aware (and afraid) of the subversive power of aesthetics. We recently read the autobiography of the musician Caetano Veloso (‘Tropical Truth’, a very inspiring book), and in it, Veloso describes (among a lot of other things) his detention: in 1969, both he and Gilberto Gil were arrested by the right-wing Junta of Brazil. Ironically, Tropicalia, the musical movement started by Gil and Veloso, was often attacked by the Brazilian Left for not making any explicit political statements; and yet it were Gil and Veloso who were captured, and later exiled from Brazil. In a startling passage, Veloso describes being interrogated by one of the military captains: “He [the captain] alluded to some of my statements to the press in which the term ‘deconstruct’ had appeared, and using it as the keyword, he denounced the insidious subversive power of our work. He said he understood clearly that what Gil and I were doing was much more dangerous than the work of artists who were engaged in explicit protests and political activity”. In other words, those who dabble in very concrete political power (the leaders, the rulers) are all-too-well aware of the subversive potential of aesthetics; it’s surprising that not more designers are.
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06. Do you think that art and design have a similar function here? We see both art and design as aesthetic practices, so we certainly think that both have the same subversive potential, the same transformative power. We realize this is a leap of faith, as nowhere in ‘The Aesthetic Dimension’ Marcuse actually mentions graphic design; he focuses very specifically on literature. But then again, when we look at Marcuse’s definition of aesthetics, we think he is describing something that is very close to graphic design as we know it. Marcuse describes aesthetics as “the result of the transformation of a given content (an actual or historical, personal or social fact) into a self-contained whole”, and we certainly see graphic design as the act of transforming given content into self-contained entities. Moreover, in the beginning of the ‘The Aesthetic Dimension’, there is a page containing acknowledgments in which Marcuse thanks his son Peter, “whose work in urban planning led us to common problems”. If the premise is that literature and urban planning both deal with common aesthetic problems, it is fair to say that graphic design deals with aesthetic problems as well. But then again, Marcuse might have been horrified by the idea of graphic design as an aesthetic practice. In the end, we are dealing with our own interpretation of his writings. In the same way the book shapes the reader, the reader also shapes the book.
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07. Can you see that your background, being brought up in The Netherlands/Sweden (as two welfare states with similarities in its politics) has influenced your attitude to ideology in relation to your practice as designers? Absolutely. Our work is a direct result of the welfare state, a clear manifestation of it, and we are very aware of that. This whole notion of social-democracy, of makeability (maakbaarheid) is encapsulated in the inner-cells of our work. This we also recognize in Nille’s work. He might disagree, but when we look at his work, we really see the language of Swedish social-democracy in the 60s and 70s, the context in which we assume Nille grew up. In the same way, our work is formed by the language of the Dutch social-democracy in which we grew up. In that sense, we really are children of the welfare state. We shouldn’t shy away from that incredibly interesting cultural heritage. Many designers and critics coming from countries unfamiliar with this typical Scandinavian/Dutch model of the welfare state have a very one-dimensional take on the relationship between design and social-democracy. In their view, the design mentality that exists in our countries is the direct result of government funding and subsidy systems. Needless to say, this view is completely misguided. In fact, the situation is the other way around: our collective design mentality is not a product of our subsidy system; our subsidy system is a product of our collective design mentality. Subsidy and funding are very conscious acts of design, committed by the welfare state to shape itself, a tremendous process in which the designer becomes part of the collective, and the collective becomes part of the designer. This process is definitely not something to be cynical about.
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We think it is significant that both we and Nille are now experiencing the dismantling of the welfare state, which basically means the destruction of the things our childhood memories were filled with. In our case, this dismantling only strengthens our desire to keep referring to the language of social-democracy, against the tide of neoliberalism. We want our graphic design to serve as a sort of memory, a subjective archive, of social-democratic aesthetics. Debray writes in ‘Socialism and Print’ about the archive as a “medium for history as practice”, and argues that “the story of communism — as revolutionary utopia, not bureaucratic dictatorship — has been a tale of archivists and old papers”. The story of social-democracy — as aesthetic language, and as childhood memory — will be a tale of old papers as well; we are designing those papers right now, in the form of posters, catalogs and t-shirt prints.
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08. Are you modernists? What kind of relation do you have to modernist design? There was a time that we were a bit reluctant to call ourselves modernists: the designation ‘modernist’ always felt too much like an honorary title, something you had to deserve rather than something you can just call yourself. Also, ‘modernism’ always seemed so hard to define; there are so many interpretations of it. However, if we take our own interpretation of modernism as a starting point, we certainly think we can be considered modernists of some sort. For us, modernism can be defined by two propositions: the assumption that we are shaped by our material environment, and the assumption that it is possible, even desirable, for us to shape this material environment. Since we can safely say that these are the principles we work and live by, we would definitely place ourselves in the modernist camp. Our relationship with past modernist design is more complicated than some people might think. It is certainly not so that we believe that our work is automatically modernist because of a certain choice of typefaces, or a certain way of placing the type. Referring to the aesthetic language of past modernism is not a modernist gesture per se; but in our work, we think it is. The reason why, in our work, we often refer to the aesthetic language of past modernist movements (and especially the language of so-called ‘late modernism’) is twofold. On the one hand, referring to historical modernism is for us a way to achieve the ‘selfreferentiality’ we already discussed a few paragraphs earlier. In our opinion, by letting graphic design refer to its own modernist history, the construction of the medium becomes visible, which we see as a modernist gesture. On the other hand, the references to late modernism in our work have a clear emotional undertone. For us, late modernism is the context in which we grew up, our childhood, our natural language, our mother tongue. In our work, we are actively investigating late modernism, because it is the material environment that shaped us. This makes our emotional motive also a modernist one.
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09. Do you think that our rapidly changing society (influenced by ‘the market’, rapid globalization and dismantling of the welfare state etc.) has created a new situation and platform for an ideological discussion in design? Are we at a paradigm shift? Can we compare the present situation with what was going on in the sixties and seventies? A paradigm shift for sure. As we have seen, Debray places this schism in 1969, with the rise of what he calls ‘the videosphere’. Others situate this rupture around 1989: the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the evaporation of the Iron Curtain. It was inevitable that, after the age of modernism, we would experience a backlash, almost a regression to pre-modern times. Because that is how we ultimately see postmodernism: as a slight return to the period before modernism. (Of course, it isn’t an actual return; in true dialectical fashion, it’s more of a synthesis of modern means and pre-modern ideals). If we had to sketch, in a couple of seconds, in a few simple sentences, a general time line, it would look roughly like this: 1. Pre-modern times, in which we are governed by untouchable forces from above: the laws of the jungle, gods, superstition, Platonic ideas floating high in the sky. 2. The age of modernism, in which we free ourselves from these forces from above, and see the world around us as something that could and should be interpreted and shaped by ourselves. 3. The postmodernist condition, in which we believe again in the laws of the jungle (free market capitalism) and untouchable forces from above (the ‘market’, the ‘public’, the ‘target audience’, the ‘shareholders’, etc.). Not surprisingly, this age is also characterized by a new uprising of religiosity (Islam Fundamentalism, the Christian Right). To get back to your question, we are definitely aware that we entered the age of postmodernism. What does this, in concrete terms, mean for graphic design as a practice, as a craft?
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First of all, we see the rise of the advertising agency in the cultural sphere. In areas that used to be the natural habitats of independent designers and small design studios (areas such as art institutes, book publishing, theatre, etc.), we see that the role of the graphic designer is getting increasingly marginalised. In an attempt to shed their ideological ballast, more and more of these cultural commissioners turn to advertising agencies (dressed up as hip communication agencies). This institutional desire to shed ideological weight can not be seen separately from the widespread phenomenon of privatization, and the dismantling of the welfare state. Secondly, we see more and more attempts to rename graphic design: ‘visual communication’, ‘branding’, ‘innovation’, ‘design research’, ‘service design’, ‘concept development’, ‘image building’, etc. etc. All these labels deny the material base of graphic design (printed matter) by cutting the ties that bind us to graphic production methods. These are deliberate attempts to let graphic design dissolve into a visual culture without memory, without ideological weight, without material ground, without terra firma. Thirdly, we see that the role of printed matter is under attack, not only by the obvious online (‘virtual’) means of distribution, but also by methods coming from the sphere of printing itself: printing-on-demand, digital printing and other quick print media. With this, it looks as if we are at risk of losing the stubborn permanence of printed matter, its universal dimension and ideological weight, its ‘slowness’ so to speak (Debray speaks of the “delayed-action mechanism” of printed matter). This is a very bleak picture indeed. What can we do? (And when we say ‘we’, we specifically mean us three; we aren’t so vain that we automatically expect others to share our concerns).
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As Debray writes, the ‘graphosphere’ (modernism) collapsed “when print lost its lead”, which we think is a very interesting metaphor. Obviously, lead refers to typesetting, but it can also refer to a weight, a counterbalance, a sort of anchor needed to keep culture grounded to its material base. Print might have lost its lead in a literal way, but we think it is still possible to let graphic design function as a ballast, as a weight to keep culture grounded. For Debray, the ‘graphosphere’ might be over, but for us, the struggle has just begun. We do believe we can keep the ‘graphosphere’ alive, if not as a dominant force, then at least as an underground movement, as an undercurrent. True, graphic design is being marginalised, but let’s not forget that margins are in fact graphic spaces; the margins are ours. And in these margins, “we await silent Tristero’s empire”. Experimental Jetset Amsterdam, 15.09.2008
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MADAME GILLES
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I PERFECT PUSSY
MY BEST FRIEND IS BACK IN TOWN. THERE’S A BAD TASTE IN MY MOUTH. HER EYES FELL LOW AND HEAVY WITH SHAME AND CUM. SHE MUST HAVE BEEN DESPERATE; SHE ACTED SO LONELY. SHE IS DESERVING OF AFFECTION, I AM GLAD THAT SHE FOUND LOVE. WHAT LOVE LAYS BARE IN ME IS ENERGY, SO I GIVE UP THAT WHICH KEEPS ME GOING AND I STILL END UP LONELY. SICK WITH LOSS AND SHAME SO I EDIT FOR MISTAKES TO DETERMINE WHAT I’D DONE THAT MADE HER ACT THIS WAY. SHE’LL FORGET HER ACTIONS. SOMEDAY I’LL FORGET HER ACTIONS. ASHES TO ASHES TO ASHES TO ASHES, WE WILL ALL DIE SOMEDAY. I AM FULL OF LIGHT. I AM FILLED WITH JOY. I AM FULL OF PEACE. I HAD THIS DREAM THAT I FORGAVE MY ENEMIES.
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II PERFECT PUSSY
I TREMBLE WITH NO DESIRE, I NEED NOTHING. IN LOSS I DISCOVERED COMPLETION. IN HAVING THINGS STOLEN I FOUND THAT I HAD MORE THAN EVER. IN THE ABSENCE OF EVERYTHING, I FOUND ALL THINGS. AND I UNDERSTOOD MYSELF, SO I UNDERSTOOD NOTHING, SO I STOPPED QUESTIONING. ALL THINGS PASS THROUGH ME, I’M A TOUGH BOY, WILD AND INNOCENT AND DANGEROUS AS HELL. I’M AWAKE AND AWAKENING. I AM HERE AND I HAVE DIED. I KILLED THE PARTS OF ME THAT SAID THAT I KNOW. I KILLED OFF ALL THE PARTS THAT KEEP ME AWAKE. I’LL DIE A THOUSAND TIMES TO PROVE THAT I’M LIVING. I’LL KISS MYSELF TO PROVE THAT I’M NOT AFRAID OF SNAKES. NOTHING SHAKES ME ANY MORE; I’M TOUGH NOW, BABY. REALLY, I HAVE LOST ALL FEELING, AND I’VE LOST ALL DESIRE FOR FEELING, AND I CAN’T THANK YOU ENOUGH.
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III PERFECT PUSSY
SOMETHING CASUAL, SO SURE. SOMETHING I HAVE NEVER KNOWN BEFORE. I DON’T WANT TO GO. (WHAT WAS I SAYING THE FIRST TIME AROUND—WHAT WAS I THINKING? WHAT WAS I SAYING—) THERE IS A SICK GRACE INHERENT IN HEALING, IT’S LIKE PEELING OFF MY SKIN. IT’S LIKE FEELING EVERYTHING FOR THE FIRST TIME, LIKE IT’S FINALLY SINKING IN. (WHAT WAS I SAYING THE FIRST TIME AROUND?) UPSTAIRS THROUGH THE DARK AND STARS AND OUT THE OTHER SIDE. SAT A FOOT APART UNTIL THE SUN WOULD RISE. SOMETHING SO SUDDEN AND SO GOOD, I NEVER EXPECTED THAT WE COULD. MY GOD, I DON’T WANT TO KNOW. (WHAT WAS I FEELING THE FIRST TIME AROUND? WHAT WAS I TRYING TO DO, WHAT WAS I TRYING TO PROVE?) THERE IS A SICK GRACE INHERENT IN HEALING, I HAD FINALLY CHOKED THAT DOWN. (WHAT WAS I TRYING TO GET YOU TO APPROVE THE FIRST TIME AROUND? WHAT WAS I DOING THE FIRST TIME AROUND?) FIRST I WAS SOFTER, THEN I WAS STRONGER, NOW I AM FRIGHTENED, WOULD YOU LOOK AT ME NOW? HOW LONG WILL I HAVE YOU? WHO AM I TO SPEAK OF PERMANENCE? I’LL BE FIFTY IN THE BOOK OF NAMES BUT GODDAMN IT, I’LL BE THE LAST ON THE LIST. SOMEDAY I’LL STOP BEGGING YOU OF WHO AND HOW. FIRST I WAS STRONGER, THEN I WAS SOFTER, NOW I AM FRIGHTENED, LOOK AT ME NOW. SOMEHOW WE MANAGED TO MAKE IT THIS FAR- SEEMS NOW EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED. I DON’T WANT TO KNOW. (WHAT WAS I SAYING THE FIRST TIME AROUND? WHAT WAS I THINKING? WHAT WAS I DOING THE FIRST TIME AROUND?) IT’S NEVER WHAT I AM, IT’S ONLY WHAT THEY WERE. I DON’T WANT TO KNOW.
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IV PERFECT PUSSY
I’VE BEEN TALKING SHIT ABOUT YOUR FRIEND. I’VE BEEN LYING TO GET ATTENTION. THANKFULLY NONE OF IT EVER HAPPENED— NOTHING EVER REALLY HAPPENS. I HAVE A HABIT OF TELLING EXTRAVAGANT LIES; ASK ANYONE, THEY’LL TELL YOU. SO WHY DIDN’T I COME FORWARD, WHY DIDN’T I? HA HA HA, I DESERVE TO BE HURT LIKE THAT. HA HA HA, IT’S SO FUNNY ISN’T IT. OH, WHY DIDN’T I COME FORWARD? IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT THAT I DIDN’T FEEL SAFE. I’M A REAL PIECE OF SHIT, I’M A REAL LOST CAUSE. DARE TO ACT LIKE YOU’RE SURVIVING AND GET THROWN TO THE DOGS. EVERY DOG DESERVES FORGIVENESS, NO MATTER WHO HE BIT. I’M A REAL LOST CAUSE. I’M A REAL PIECE OF SHIT. THERE’S NO ROOM IN THIS WORLD FOR PEOPLE WHO HATE MEN. I CAN’T WARN THE NEXT ONE CAUSE I CAN’T GET OUT OF BED. I’VE BEEN LYING TO GET ATTENTION, I’VE BEEN LYING AND LYING. I THINK I’LL JUST STAY HOME FOREVER THIS TIME. WE’RE NOT STANDING IN THE BACK, WE’RE SAFEST NEAR THE EXIT BECAUSE GOD KNOWS YOU’D BURN A WITCH TO WARM YOUR HANDS. SUPPORT YOUR BROTHERS, DISREGARD SURVIVORS, CLOSE YOUR HEART FOREVER, WHAT ELSE CAN YOU DO? THERE’S NO ROOM IN THIS WORLD FOR PEOPLE WHO HATE MEN. FUCK YOU.
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Written on a Train from Duisburg to Berlin LOTTI THIESSEN
the holidays explode in your face with a sneer of grandmother’s eighteenth antique watch all disappointments pointing at just that little child’s face playing the guitar in 1970. Now stuck in this tube you wish for a violent Santa humongous phallus-head screwing up that brunch in all its obsolescence. yes to violent rhetorics and anger
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under Christmas tree nicely wrapped in grenade ribbons. you and the deer on the stove forgot your safe word and keep getting fucked in reality’s straight jacket cornering you on balcony with bread and cookies smoke fat accumulates like sin you grow heavy and slow in heat melt give in acknowledge the undeniabilty of those walls surrounding. And as you feel yourself ——glue to wall—— you silently demand “freedom from the viscosity of the real” and a vocabulary that knows exactly what you want.
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And what would have been if the conditional tense hadn’t been such an asshole?
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How to Experience Solitude LOTTI THIESSEN
Think about a conversation you had once and how it established contemporary reality post destruction of the material and forced one into the arena of the two. Think about the Amazon and how that’s the natural habitat of crocodile tears. Think about a funnel and gravel and stones that signify work and marriage.
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Listen to the steps behind you and delve into reflective silence. Think about how you have to pass a bike on the road and there is nobody next to you to shove aside. Think about the silence again think about how you are thinking meanwhile not uttering a word. Think about how silence began and how you are now trapped in it. Think about the alleged correlation between depression and your memory. Think about how all you can do is hold on to each other and how you forgot to hold the other. Think about how a drop of water falling on paper isn’t anywhere close to tears. Think about the ink
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you are shedding ——closer to tears. Or just think: this is as close as you will get to solitude: it is.
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Foul Rag + Bone Shop HILLARY REXE
Of the heart, I have only fuck-yous : astors, milkweed, links to Youtube, long-suΩering wives’ tales, the minute, well-rehearsed programs of what to say to you. Of the heart, I have only ring-worms and half-nudes, ratios of orations, foul rags rung-through, desperations of earwax, melted ice cubes, longlists of mentions, lingering mildew. Of the heart, I have only eyesores, sharp first teeth, rainspew, rust, watermarks that leak, a dozen worthing words all meant to breach, a gravel back, a coral reef — Of the heart, this time, I come and I go. I roll wanton and fold and eschew. I sing sweet songs and line and run through.
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Of the heart, I only want — of the heart, I only want -want, of the heart, this heart, this ragged toothbone, this rank no-go, this rat-tailed disaster zone, this putrid, slung-shot ozone, this bunk-ass rifled-through, of the heart, this heart: you.
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âˆŤ Nazik Dakkach
NOTES ON RETHINKING TIME
JACOB WREN
Leaving one place not yet arriving at the next. Also not really traveling. Hovering on the cusp of movement. Some anxiety around the decision: will I go for it, make the necessary choice, arrive somewhere? Fondness for this space of non-arriving but fearful it’s a trap. There are in fact three traps:
• the place left, • this in between of both traveling and not, • some final destination.
It would be easier to arrive if one was certain, less uncertain, that one could leave again. But I’m already beyond tired, comically dying of exhaustion, and if given a chance to rest I suspect I might rest forever, until the end, an end — one of many.
NOTES ON RETHINKING
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David Graeber, from The Art World as a Form of Politics: It is the peculiar feature of political life that within it, behavior that could only otherwise be considered insane is perfectly effective. If you managed to convince everyone on earth that you can breathe under water, it won’t make any difference: if you try it, you will still drown. On the other hand, if you could convince everyone in the entire world that you were King of France, then you would actually be the King of France. (In fact, it would probably work just to convince a substantial portion of the French civil service and military.) This is the essence of politics. Politics is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge its essence. No king would openly admit he is king just because people think he is. Political power has to be constantly recreated by persuading others to recognize one’s power; to do so, one pretty much invariably has to convince them that one’s power has some basis other than their recognition. That basis may be almost anything — divine grace, character, genealogy, national destiny. But “make me your leader because if you do, I will be your leader” is not in itself a particularly compelling argument.
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RETHINKING TIME I had ideas but lacked motivation. Who doesn’t have ideas? Who doesn’t lack motivation? The situation is desperate, yet everyone still scraping by wonders if somehow they’ll scrape by forever. Something I read a long time ago, a review of a Bob Dylan song, Dylan dreamdriving through the empty streets of the post-apocalypse city. The review said the problem was in his dream he survives, everything is gone, annihilated, not a living soul for miles, centuries, forever. In his dream he survives. In each of our dreams, as everything burns to shit around us, bad decision after bad decision, we, each of us, survives. Breathing underwater because we hope we still might. No one falls asleep and gently dreams their own annihilation. Being murdered, sure, attacked, beaten to death as each good individual is beaten to death through the long haul of life. Various pleasures along the way. But being annihilated like a speck of nothing along with everyone else, all at once, in one fell swoop, gone. Where is the value in feeling as
unimportant as we truly are? Daily life under global famine. Life during the plague. I arrived too late for Dylan. Missed the moment when he rode his wave, a wave I suspect he never deeply cared for. A wave he rode by hanging on to each mask. But he survived. Luc Boltanski, from On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation: Everyone recognizes reality (or recognizes what, in their experience, clearly pertains to reality) only because others designate it to them as such. Reality suffers from a species of inherent fragility, such that the reality of reality must incessantly be reinforced in order to endure. What we can and cannot change in the world comes back to questions of what is and is not reality. Convincing people, winning them over, is mainly a matter of slightly altering the socially defined parameters as to what reality might become. The reason propaganda is so effective. If something is everywhere, presenting itself as reality, it becomes a reality. The everywhere is the reality.
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NOTES ON
If the king says he can breathe underwater he is still, for all intents and purposes, the king. Until overthrown. Kindness is not complex.
We all have a sense of what is and isn’t possible. If we were to each feel as unimportant as we actually are, might we think more of the future? Of the future without us — a future in continuity. But to think this future requires a new idea of time, a conception of time within which ‘the future’ might no longer exist. Past, present, future are lines in the sand. Where and when will we find this new sense? What daily experiences is it analogous with? If I do something now for the future, already I have set myself apart from it. How do I do something with the future as if it were part of me and I am still alive within it? As if destroying the future was destroying myself.
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TIME Nina Power, from The Pessimism of Time: But should the Left be coming up with ‘new’ ideas all the time? Politics is not fashion — and, in any case, even fashion is more cyclical rather than endlessly transhistorical. […] Certain fundamental things that the Left seeks to abolish — exploitation, inequality, material poverty, exclusion — are more present than ever and while they may take on ‘novel’ forms, the real newness may simply be quantitative, as more and more people ‘pay’ for a crisis they didn’t create. Perhaps the real problem here is the way in which time itself always serves as the measure for all politics, and all critique of politics, whether it be the bleak future, the heroic past, the desolate present, the utopian tomorrow, the shadowy past or the dawning of a new day. […] If time is a weapon used against people fighting against the speed and brutality of what is happening, we may be forced to use a different image of time — or perhaps an image of a world without time altogether — against those whose only measure seems to be the maximisation of profit in the shortest possible period. The question of whose finitude counts and whose doesn’t — a brutal marker not only of the division between life and death but between the more important distinction between those whose life/death ‘counts’ and those about whom nothing is counted at all — is played out in the only post-religious ‘infinite’ permitted to matter: permanent accumulation. The dedication to amassing at the expense of life itself reveals a terror of time so disturbing that any politics of temporal pessimism / optimism looks insignificant by comparison.
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From the other side, nature is reality. There is nature as social construct and then there is nature: lungs, blood, air, water, nightfall, hunger, running, sunlight, food. Nature no amount of propaganda can erase.
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Time before clocks,
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after every last clock has stopped. For the people in your own tribe you fight to the death. All kindnesses pertain. Other tribes are another story. By this I want to say something about time. Breakthroughs in History don’t pertain to Geography. In Geography they must have the same breakthrough again, using their own language, their own terminology, their own moment. But I slipped when I wrote the word breakthrough. Breakthrough denotes progress. Instead: History and Geography as the same thing. Time against progress. Time that keeps itself alive.
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Biologist Jonas Salk: If all insects on Earth disappeared, within 50 years all life on Earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the Earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish.
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Sometimes I think we must gather and fight. Other times I think: a fight is something you can win or lose, our situation too tragic for further loss and further loss is exactly what’s coming. A new way of thinking about time might be something else. Not fighting, not winning, not losing; stepping aside and into continuity. Out of history then we don’t quite know what. Then no more then’s. No more or less alive than the world. There are lines between days, between years, between eras, positions and disciplines. Lines, once drawn, fight for their self-fulfilling survival. What is and is not reality and how what is not reality is useful for maintaining territory. Everything that destroys the world gives at least someone’s ego a quick, powerful boost. Neoliberalism is the totalitarianism of capital. Monsanto is the Lysenko of neoliberalism. “The resistance of being to purity.” (Inger Christensen)
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The term planned obsolescence is generally attributed to the industrial designer Brooks Stevens who used it as the title of a 1954 talk. Wikipedia says: Stevens defined it as “instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary.� His view was to always make the consumer want something new, rather than create poor products that would need replacing.
Planned obsolescence is our current economic model of time.
And so little reality would be required to prove, allow us to feel, be smashed by, the reality that this is in no way the case. A matter of slightly altering the socially defined parameters as to what reality might become. You cannot throw time away and then get another chance.
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Gianni Vattimo, from The Transparent Society: Amongst the many definitions, there is one that may be generally agreed upon: modernity is the epoch in which simply being modern became a decisive value in itself. Kindness is not so complex. Solutions are not so complex. But the course we are on is enough to make me believe in the fucking devil. The devil is insecure. To do these things you must be driven by something awful. There must be some great pleasure in it. That we are the pinnacle of history and it’s all downhill from here. Reality TV and shit pop songs are the pinnacle of glorious history and it’s all downhill from here. No one wants the middle, so much more tragic and musical to be the first and last. Business is business.
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I am searching for a new sense of reality and a new sense of time. As must be obvious, I don’t have answers. I have thoughts. I spend many hours blankly staring at the internet each day ( All citations above found online ). My work, my writing, my art for so long has hinged on wanting to be new, unlike the rest, breaking something open, cracking the paradigm, the hot new thing that leaves all past art in the dust. It’s part of the problem as is so much else. I don’t know if art and this new sense of time will exist in the same world.
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(this is a poem about time)
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Four Minutes to Midnight Issue 13 Conceived and composed by John W. Stuart and Kevin Yuen Kit Lo Designed by Kevin Yuen Kit Lo Fugue 13 ( 17–58 ) stole words from Artistes contre la hausse, W.H. Auden, Earth First! (Guide To Public Order Situations), Jean-François Gagnon, the Institute for Precarious Consciousness, Kaie Kellough, Loren March, F.A. Nettelbeck, Emilie O’Brien, Michael Ondaatje, Yoko Ono, Dan Seligman, Karen Elaine Spencer, Tiqqun, Tune-Yards, Alex Turner Contributors Nazik Dakkach ( 125–130 ) Experimental Jetset ( 83–101 ) Madame Gilles ( 105–112 ) Ted Hung Tat Lo ( 65, 67, 71, 72 ) Perfect Pussy ( 113–115 ) Hillary Rexe ( 123–124 ) Alex Schaeffer ( 74–75 ) Lotti Thiessen ( 64, 64, 68, 69, 73, 117–122 ) ( 2–6, 44–45, 66–70, 76, 148–149 ) Võ Thiên Viêt · ( 131–143 ) Jacob Wren Printed by Kata Soho La Presse du chat perdu Made in Mile End, Montréal
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more of this shit.
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ยง
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