Greg Fraser McLaren
MA Research Architecture
2017
Goldsmiths, University of London
I am on a search for a twin-headed enemy beast the size of cosmoses. One head is empty yet full of blinding reflection; the other continues to erupt fatuity as it shrinks and expands into the narrative of daily life. One head shall be called Cave and the other shall be called Hypercrap.
Introduction This thesis contends that the public space, as a locus of appearance and collectivity brought into being as a bundle of action, speech and recognition, is unwinding in the face of a new contemporary urban epistemology. This epistemology is rapidly evolving under the conditions of being blinded, dispossessed and unbound by the material effects of late capitalism. Huge reflective, inaccessible buildings house and hide financial information; the spectacle of mass media and the call of social media cause people to walk along the street eyes down to the phone screen. We are rendered powerless and complicit, slinging our attention to whatever hails us and governing ourselves through adherence to power’s signs and lines.
Looking out of the night-time train I see myriad windows, panes, planes, silhouetted figures, each reflecting one another to appear simultaneously flattened onto a desultory filmstrip while, at the same time, spectrally unfolding across the hard silicate vertices of work-space, show-off-space and home-space. Â
As each temporary perspective flashes past multiple assaults on this reality by artists and philosophers come to mind. Timothy Morton for one chides us that we are wrong to wait for the end of the world for it has already happened,1 The Invisible Committee warn that “the normal functioning of the world serves to hide our state of truly catastrophic dispossession”.2 Meanwhile the writing on the wall near the Goldsmiths library by a man who took his life out of this world implores us to destroy the appearance of a “necessary and inevitable” natural order.3 How are we to respond to such emancipatory calls? This thesis and its archive represent work to take these calls seriously and in doing so attempt, using humour and performance, to prise open a space where ethical and political paradoxes can be untangled. At this stage, while living within this great glass vice, emancipatory revolution risks revolving all the way back around to where we are. What is
1 Twice, once in 1798 with the patent for steam engine, and once in 1945 with the first nuclear test. For more see Morton, Hyperobjects (2013) pp7 2 The Invisible Committee, The coming insurrection (2009) pp81 3Mark Fisher, memorial wall, Goldsmiths University (2017)
needed now is revelation. But how? Let us call upon Mohammed and Plato for they share, in a sense, a genesis. Their revelations required a particular spatial formation, subterranean and mysterious: the cave. For Plato, it was the site of a false visualisation of existence; for Mohammed, it was a space of divine contact and listening. But for those of us seeking revelation in London in 2017 where angels slave in fibre optic and shadows fall to high dynamic range, the cave is a void produced by endless reflections of the self. Hypercrap is something of a joke term that emerged from the CRA studio as Donald Trump was inaugurated President of the United States. At the time, I was producing some cynical renderings for the proposed wall along the USA Mexico border. The aim was to make the crappiest example of a design possible in order to test if it registered as a satire of the un-satirise-able. So in relation to Trump, hypercrap came to define the moment, the man, and whatever he did. Two artistic, material examples of hypercrap quickly came to mind: The Richard Serra piece, East-West / West-East in the Doha desert; and Mount Rushmore by Gutzon Borglum. Although those pieces do not represent the oppression
of any people through the physical blockade of their paths, they do deeply trouble, in both their form and in the arrangement surrounding their existence, by their serving to show that one man (not necessarily the artist) can set in motion a geological scale celebration of male ego and power. Establishing a quest for the traces, connections and effects of hypercrap is an experiment to draw on humour (itself a powerful weapon against oppression) which in turn broadens the base for revelation. Hypercrap is that which is so massively, pervasively crap that nothing and no one go unaffected by it, establishing it as a decisively influential force in the new epistemology. Of course, other non-art structures can be hypercrap too - buildings of course, but it is potential urban developments that seem already instrisically hypercrap. Take the marketing language deployed on building development hoardings:
“The definition of urbanity”
“New apartments, retail space, and landscaped public realm”
In his super cynical and very funny diatribe against shopping malls (which he describes as voided conditions of frightening sparseness) Rem Koolhaas claims that globalisation has reduced language to junkspace (for which we might as well read ‘hypercrap’) and in what could be considered a direct comment on the marketing language above, notes that “aberrant linguistic ecologies sustain virtual subjects in their claims to legitimacy.”4
4 Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace (2013) pp186
Hypercrap: My modification of Serra’s desert work and a comparison of Mt Rushmore and the Sphinx
This thesis and related practical work aims to interrogate the condition by diagnosing it, noting key attributes and then actualising scenarios through experimental artistic practice. This process will reveal useful contradictions and paradoxes which a purely theoretical discussion could not. These artistic experiments, through which my concerns about life in London and the contemporary condition of western metropolitan existence are given form, respond to the calls above to find the spaces of critical reflection beyond the kaleidoscope of the self.5 Undertaking this search for what lies potentially outside the realm of human sensory perception will require the development of an instrument, similar in function to the instruments of science which reveal things that can only be made legible by the instrument itself. The attempt to do this produces playful and subversive artworks which want to re-activate spectators and observers by implicating them in the production of images or actions, thus creating the workspace for staging ethical concerns, in short, providing the ground for people to ask anew “How should I act?” 5 This would be the visual version of the well-worn idea of the ‘echo chamber’ popularised by Adam Curtis in his film HyperNormalisation
REFLEX
One of the key understandings of this Cave is its appearance across dimensions. It is physical and virtual, optical and metaphorical. Indeed, its empty, reflective nature describes much of our online experience. The majority of readers will have been connected to the internet at one time or another, then disconnected only to be connected again at some other access point, exchanging connection either for a cup of coffee, personal details, or knowledge of a password. What exactly is this ID granting us access to? An unregulated, occluded, supranational stack that handles communications and commerce, such as Benjamin Bratton has described?6 Or the very financial heart of the state itself, such as when one logs on, via the Government Gateway, to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs service there to disclose earnings and pay tax upon them? These are just two examples of the very different entities one plugs into when one simply 6 Bratton, The Stack, (2015)
‘connects’ to the internet. Whatever you connect to, it hardly needs to be mentioned the amount of screen time and space taken up by reminders of what you like, what you have just bought, recommendations, viewing histories and so on that forms your browsing profile. As much as you may routinely try to ignore this, it is worth mentioning because this is in fact your reflection as behavioural metric. You are face to face with how that corner of the internet sees you. Our lives in the metropolis are filled with such connections both online and in the physical dimension. Bleeping the oyster; swiping the entry-card; facing off with an array of tiny cameras until the bulletproof glass doors swing open – these actions all constitute crossing a line, a gate, a border, usually unmanned, granted by an affirmative response from a hidden database, state, private, or other. In the case of moving your person from one nation state to another, however there remain a greater number of human officers than machines checking passports at border controls. A look at what happens in this moment of identification will help us to understand where the Cave appears in this same scenario. The officer takes your passport. Here is an
encounter to relish, you are scrutinised by another human, your actual presence compared to the metric presence encoded in your passport. This is in its way a sublime moment for it is then that you occupy your fullest legal citizen being, the highest state of human, exposed and recognised as both subject and animal. What’s more there is a Levinasian ethics at play: the face of the other is before you, and you before it. It is the living face of a human being which confers upon you your existence. As you look you see the other looking straight back: incontrovertible truth that you both exist in that moment. Compare this to the stand-off with the facial recognition cameras at the threshold of the e-passport gate; you are instructed where to look and see only a reflection of your face as the machine registers your existence only as its metrics.7 Perhaps it is only my anxiety in the face of authority, but I’m arguing here that an attempted connection, however mediated, retains the vestiges of face-to-face eyecontact and as such creates the anxiety one feels when locking eyes with the other, and as we shall see later, an anxiety many would prefer to avoid. Perhaps because 7 See Zach Blass, Facial Weaponisation Suite for a full discussion.
the breaking off of such a connection is painful. We all know the feeling of being abruptly disconnected or refused: temporarily an almighty crack appears in the riverbed and the flow is gone. Or worse, a quasitelepathic link to a person, bot or shop is broken like an HD synapse shattering into uncountable fragments of “fuuck!�. And since this metro-moment I am describing wants nothing more than repeated attempts to interpellate, to connect, successful or otherwise, the anxiety is constant.
There I am,the figure in shorts to the front, reflected in a security van at a checkpoint entrance to a music festival.
CONNECTION
While the ways in which public space and political community are formed has been a major topic of discussion between Arendt, Agamben, Habermas and the rest, and as such is outside the scope of this thesis, there are a few key points that will contribute to the definition of the condition I am outlining. First is that the figures of subject and citizen appear between the poles of inclusion and exclusion. Second is the understanding that the public sphere can only exist within the nation state, for it is the state that gives and protects rights. Once you make it through the gates and into the political arms of a state, there is one more line to cross before you are truly ‘there’. The threshold to cross in order to make a public appearance is the moment where one shifts from a private, withdrawn state to the political one - where the act of citizenry is taken up. The simplest way to understand this
is to say the moment of ‘appearance’ in the public realm is activated by acting or speaking to someone – committing a political act. One is then connected to the public, to the group; the one becomes plural. These multiple connections open up a public space which propagates outward as speech, recognition and action bundle up people and physical space into publicity.8 However, the Cave lurks ready to unfold like a hypercube in the crack between inclusion and exclusion as the following anecdote describes.
My mother at the age of 63 decided to up sticks and leave Bristol after 30 years. An active and friendly woman she complained “I’ve been in that butcher’s shop nearly every day for 10 years and never once has he asked me how I am… if I don’t call you or one of my friends I can go a week without speaking to anyone”.
8 See Arendt, The origins of totalitarianism (1998), or The human condition (2004) for more
My mother had become almost terminally disconnected. Retired and with her friends leaving town, she went un-interpellated, privatised against her will. In limbo between the public and the private. Neither included nor excluded but in the Cave – seeing oneself reflected everywhere, while remaining unrecognised. Although the Cave seems confusing and unappealing to someone like my mother, clearly it appeals to many other people. The person on the street wearing huge pilot style headphones conducting a telephone conversation, for example, what is their vector in the scrambled web of connections and appearance that makes up the public space, how do they contribute? Or the people, including myself, that walk along a busy street answering messages and looking at maps on the phone screen - where are we?
We’re all in the Cave, mate.
The Cave. A new space where public and private, citizenry and subjectivity are constantly bound and unbound in any number of formations, its interstitial nature maintained by constant connection and disconnection. To return to the two different examples of what one may plug into, HMRC, or the Black Stack, we become aware that exclusion from one does not mean exclusion from the other. The private online spaces formed by supranational entities maintain an ersatz public space, separate from that which the state provides and lacking any face to face encounter save that of our own metric avatar. Nevertheless, disillusionment with the state and a feeling of anomie (there are no longer any agreed norms and nothing makes sense) discourages some from entering the public space in the way Arendt claims is necessary for political society to function. And so the glinting Cave, a counterintuitively familiar frontier, may well seem preferable.
I am there, reflected in the Urban Decay, House of Fraser.
INSTRUMENTAL
The attempt to describe the Cave as a physical and virtual space nested within metropolitan life which emerges to surround us at moments of uncertainty and disappointment has produced some useful insight as to the attributes of the coming epistemology. But what about the quest for Hypercrap? Is the Cave Hypercrap? Is the Cave a symptom of Hypercrap, or the other way around? The fact is that Hypercrap is a chimera. A hoped-for thing hovering at the edges of plausibility. How then should I begin the quest? How to find something that is already a conceit? A good starting point it to ask how other hidden, withdrawn, chimeric things are brought to knowledge. Â Scientific instruments provide a useful example, especially those that provide access to vastly different scalar dimensions.
Particles, nuclear radiation, neutrinos, quanta and more are unavailable to human perception outside of the ‘knowing thing’ of the instrument used to detect them.9 As one trusts the bubble in the spirit level or trusts the nose of a trained dog, it is not the thing, it is the reading of the thing. It is what is signified that matters. I propose then that my artistic practice be the instrument to illuminate hypercrap. A helpful material example of how such an instrument interacts with its theoretical target, how it might operate to give rise to useful outcomes that are not necessarily germane to the original purpose, is the IceCube Neutrino detector. This is an enormous array of very, very long sensors sunk into the Antarctic ice. Its job is to detect hadron showers which are, it is thought, tell-tale signs of neutrinos moving through the area. Normally there is far too much disturbance across all fields to detect these incredibly delicate hadron cascades; only in the deep silent ice of the planet they can be detected. Objections to the planet being hijacked for the detection of theoretical particles notwithstanding, in their paper on the detector and its relation to the 9 For more on the epistemology of scientific instruments, see Bueno in Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Science (2016)
technosphere, authors Thompson and Engelmann offer a description of an artistic process or methodology that encourages the search for something like hypercrap: a theoretical particle that when discovered will improve understanding of the world. Too grand a claim? In a way the target is less important than its capacity to provoke a certain kind of search. “…the gesture of reaching for the imperceptible, of sensing at, or across, predefined limits, generates methods and spaces of insight that are precluded by gestures of bracketing, framing or graining, however sophisticated the resolution may be.”10
While this gesture to generate spaces of insight sounds very technical, it is a common move in the production of narrative. An apt example is the documentary Project Grizzly11 where in the first scene the protagonist tells us 10 Engelmann and Thompson, Intra-acting with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory… pp9 11 Lynch, Peter. Project Grizzly, (1996) Film Board of Canada.
about his face to face encounter with a grizzly bear, “It happened because it happened in that the bear didn’t kill me. I’ve been on its trail ever since.” This single encounter with the bear compels the hero to spend years and a lot of money creating bear-proof suit in which he can confront the bear. Alas he never gets to that point and the majority of the film focuses on violent but very funny tests of the suit against swinging logs, drunk bikers, and so on. The focus becomes the process of making and testing the suit rather than the search for the bear. This unfolding of the conceptual tool across contingency mirrors what happens with an instrument such as the neutrino detector, whereby a constant flow of emerging technology gives new understandings which, in turn, reconfigure those technologies.
This is both the model for this project’s method of research and the process by which the works may influence that research’s next step.
Hypercrap? A nearby housing estate labels car parking spaces. By interrupting the semiotics of the car-park I suspend entitlement to this particular car-parking spot, potentially making it available for anyone that wishes to park there. Is it easier to contravene the rule that says only Greg may park there than it is to contravene the rule that only those from Greenwich House may park there?
TO SPEAK
The previous section discusses elements of this project’s aims and processes. This section will show how work is produced through such a contingent methodology and how that work materialises in the spatial dimension, touching the ground from its abstract heights. Agamben, Arendt, and Artaud are all agreed that to speak, to not speak, to be able to speak and to be able to not do so, is at the core of what makes us human, both biologically and politically. Mladen Dolar, after Lacan, is of the same opinion though his field is that of psychoanalysis. Since psychoanalysis is a field primarily concerned with how selfhood and subjectivity are formed, it seems sensible to ask what it can tell us about appearance and the voice. The voice, as an object, is positioned in the gap between phone (making a sound) and logos (meaning). Dolar describes it as lurking ambiguously between and through the sacred, the profane, the animal and the human, acting as a “lever of transference” even as it remains an elusive
entity; within and without the void.12 Here is the void in productive form, from where the voice originates both physically and psychoanalytically, and a nothingness from which the Judeo-Christian God spoke the cosmos into existence. To speak, air is needed to aspirate the voice and to speak publicly. Who does not take a deep breath into the void of the lungs before saying something meaningful? For the actor or interpreter, the voice is the primary tool, giving life to the literary.
“The void stretches out between two breaths, then it becomes like open ground stretching out. Here, it is a strangled void. The choked void in the throat, where the very fury of the deathrattle has strangled all respiration.�13
Here, Artaud seems to be saying that voice is life, or that the fear of not vocalising will choke him - no one really 12 Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (2006) 13 Artaud, Theatre and its double (1993)
knows, it’s a poem and therefore open to interpretation. Can a person be a poem, equivalently open to interpretation? At the point of connection to the state, one would have to say no, but it is the view of theorist and poet Edouard Glissant that the other should remain opaque, untroubled by the West’s “old obsession with discovering what lies at the bottom of natures.”14 Here I would like to refer to two of my works, both proceeding from these thoughts. Of these, the first is the performance piece Glissando.15 A man in a suit swims out of the Thames estuary onto the pebbly beach at Whitstable. He is on the phone as he swims toward the shore. He is reading aloud a poem called Promenade of Solitary Death16 which people on the shore can hear as they wear headphones through which the phone call is transmitted. There were several audiences to this performance, the headphone wearers being the first. Second were those that knew a performance was happening as they had seen the preparation, but did not share the intimacy of the headphone wearers. Third and most interesting were those that simply observed a 14 Glissant, Poetics of Relation (1997) pp190 15 Whitstable Biennale 2016 16 Glissant, in Black Salt (1998)
man in a suit walking out of the sea on the phone. One of these observers came up to me and said, “You from Albania then?”, a reference to that particular coastline in Kent being known as the “front line”17 – a popular spot to alight on English soil. At some point he must have asked himself, “how shall I act?”. The fact he approached me proves that the performance created the space for him to implicate himself in the image and hail me.
17 http://www.kentnews.co.uk/news/immigration-the-big-debate-1-2220867
Second, the piece Scream no. 6. This features the same character. He has gotten from the beach to a lift in an office block, but the lift cannot deliver him where he wants to go, to work, and so he screams. The audience watches from a middle floor. A speaker in the same room as the audience emits sounds of screams of volunteers I had recorded over the previous week, plus my own screams transmitted live from the telephone. The audience are encouraged to scream in solidarity with the Kafkaesque character trapped in the mirrored lift. From the other floors which were populated by other groups not related to the event, the scene was of 50 or so people screaming into the atrium of a half-vacated office building on the site of the old East India Docks. The re-situating of private anguish into the public space and the encouragement to contribute to it activates audience and onlookers alike, they ask themselves if they will join in, they consider the line they will cross. It is a minor thing to ask them to do, but the effect is major.
The Crags in Edinburgh. I drew a line between the Cave and Hypercrap. On one end, while looking to that which normally provides an utterly non-human scale sense of grand meaning pointing to our insignificance, people saw a very straight, authoritative, only human, white line. On the other end, an attempt to join with sublime, to make it mean something. Honestly, if I could have written a massive GREG on the rocks I would have.
THE VIOLENCE THAT THE WORK IS NOT
The scream is a signal of the collapse of comprehension. Descriptions of the sublime from Longinus to Burke to Wordsworth to Kant identify a moment where the mind can no longer make sense of something and, there, the sublime kicks in. 18 In common parlance, it might be the moment where you say ‘There are no words to describe…’ and then say hello to art, or not speak at all and just wail as the logos collapses. “Howl, howl, howl” says King Lear. When artists are aiming at the sublime, they are aiming at a place beyond reason. Pre-moderns would have called this target the spirit or the soul; the realm of beauty and affect. In her discussion on whether Georges Bataille can draw art and pornography together,19 Susan Sontag defines the modern artist as a ‘broker in madness’, journeying out to the edges of experience and reporting on what is found there. This in 18 Burke also claimed he’d rather the rights of an Englishman than the Rights of Man. 19 Sontag, The Pornographic Imagination in Bataille, G. (1987). Story of the eye. San Francisco, City Lights Books.
contradistinction to the pre-modern artist whose job it was to tell a story of glory. But that was 1967. The artist as reporter from the outer limits of creativity has been joined in 2017 by the artists as explorer of the archive, no longer a spaceman but a mole, untangling and retangling endless ends in their own version of the Society of the Spectacle - the Society of the Tentacle. Perhaps that is what Lyotard meant by the postmodern sublime, it would present the previously imperceptible but not in a revelatory way, not provide the experience of a new paradigm, but in a more straightforward way present unseen connections between existing knowledge. Does this not reduce the sublime to the mere discovery of another facet of the Cave?
“Rather than talking about where we live and what to do there, we end up talking about horror�20
20 Personal interview conducted with a teacher friend in Manchester, July 2017
In 1920s Artaud complained that the masses were stupefied and cared only for mystery and horror in the place of a sublime. His idea was that the true should be sought on the street (and not the stage) for he was convinced that “if the crowd in the street is offered an occasion to show its human dignity, it will always do so”.1 In 2017 it would appear that the desire for mystery and horror has become manifest in the real world and Artaud’s conviction is proved wrong as people now show the least socially productive side of themselves on the street; riven with fear and jealousy they show nothing but the same paranoiac neutrality. that is, until violence appears and everyone relaxes into an instinctive state. Indeed in the novel Cocaine Nights, J.G Ballard discusses the necessary role violence plays in the development of society and the appreciation of life.2 Violent public protest erupts from lack of agency. 1 the passage is strikingly relevant “…if we have all finally come to think of theatre as an inferior art, a means of popular distraction, and to use it as an outlet for our worst instincts, it is because we have learned too well what the theater has been, namely, falsehood and illusion… it is because every possible ingenuity has been exerted in bringing to life on the stage plausible but detached beings, with the spectacle on one side, the public on the other--and because the public is no longer shown anything but the mirror of itself.” 2 Ballard, Cocaine Nights (1996)
The London riots of 2012 show that lack of agency creates violent protest.3 Everyone knows how it feels to lash out. These occasions are a collective lash. How effective these violent moments become is not as important to those that lash as the satisfaction of the action itself. Was it a productive violence? Certainly, one thing was produced; a collective clean up. In the days after, thousands of people took to the streets with brooms and dust pans and simply tidied up. This to me is evidence that denizens of a metropolis or London at least, are truly falling into the condition I diagnose, where empathy has evaporated and in which all cruelty will be registered as attempts at art which fail on the level of affect, a spectacle for general viewing which is sadly not taken for what it is, a true reflection of the state of society. Taking brooms to the streets attests to the deep hope of the privileged this was some superficial (i.e., unconnected to them) glitch in society to which the appropriate response is to simply sweep it away.
3 Reading the Riots Guardian newspaper report (2012)
States of emergency throw the public space into sharp relief and create ripples in the flat topography of the metropolitan paranoia. The classical sublime, as Burke has it, is the invocation of terror in the mind from a position of safety. Contemporary terrorism inverts this subject arrangement, popping the violence out of the picture and directly into your face, making it real. In the age of hypercrap, violence is perpetrated as an artistic act creating what has been termed a negative sublime.4 Recall the recent assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey in an art gallery, already legible as a post-modern art joke, the assassin in black suit and thin tie heavily reminiscent of the film Reservoir Dogs, Chris Burden’s Shoot recreated as a mortal failure. 5 The ISIS execution movies, too, are indistinguishable from independent cinematic science fiction – they are edited with the same commercially available Adobe After Effects themes and presets.6 Dear reader, does not the anxious heat in your mind conflate the murder 4 Berleant, Sensibility and Sense: The Aesthetic Transformation of the Human World (2010) 5 Andrei Karlov, the Russian Ambassador to Turkey, was assassinated by Mevlüt Mert Altıntaş, an off-duty Turkish police officer, at an art exhibition in Ankara, Turkey on the evening of 19 December 2016 6 See talk with Hito and Biffo for more on this https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=bcf_Zce_J90
in l’Etranger with so-called ‘Jihadi John’ slicing the neck of a prisoner on the desert sand? What is going on here is that art has become an active, para-aesthetic mode of personal expression. Violence is the central element of this work because historically it is what liberates humanity from necessity and what forms nation states. If this violence carries such symbolism and aesthetic qualities that it approaches the territory of art, and if, as so many arts advocates would claim, artistic activity has the power to change social conditions, it is seemingly impossible to separate creative power from destructive power. Picking up these thoughts in his writing around the subject of the secular imagination, Stathis Gourgouris warns us we had better “come to terms with art as a realm in which humanity exercises its utmost creative/destructive potential, and not in the so-called (since Hegel) world of the spirit, but in the world itself.” Or as Biffo Berardi sums it up, “terrorising suicide is the total work of art of the century with no future”.7 Self-motivated terrorists and mass murderers are surely drawing on the imperative to destroy the natural order. If stories and reason and law are 7 Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody, Semiocapitalism and the pathologies of the post-alpha generation (2009)
recognised as instruments of control, and it is accepted that human intelligence is entirely born of tricks lies and manipulations for protection and position because it is that which guarantees if not power then survival; if this holds true, why not do everything possible to harm and destroy this way of thinking and behaving, to do the literally unthinkable: create a new human / animal consciousness through radical change of surroundings and milieu?
CONCLUSION
“The basic structure of perception mediated by media is such that there is no experience of a connection among the individual images received but above all no connection between the receiving and sending of signs; there is no experience of a relation between address and answer.�8
8Lehmann, Post Dramatic Theatre pp185/6
This quote from the German theatre theorist HansTheis Lehmann skewers exactly the condition of being in the Cave, and why everything seems like hypercrap. The aim of this research project and practical element is to mutually implicate actors and spectators to make visible the broken threads between experience and perception, that is, escaping the Cave, providing and ethical and political experience. It does so by issuing call for spectators or observers to make what is shown part of their personal experience. For example My neck is thinner than a hair a performance lecture by Walid Raad, consists of the artist showing several images of car bombs from news media. Over each image he reveals some trivial, tangential information seemingly incommensurate with the horror of the image. This tactic serves to re-situate the images and in doing so reactivates the spectator, requiring them to make what is represented part of their own experience.
In January of this year I and some colleagues from CRA helped to organise a huge banner-drop from London bridges, calling for solidarity with those who would be
effected by a shift to the right in the prevailing mood of the nation catalysed by the election of Trump in the United States. It was early in the day, people were going to work. As much as we would have liked to get people involved in holding banners and chanting and so on, we knew that this wasn’t going to be possible in the London morning rush hour. No matter the immense global significance of the issue, getting a person to stop on their way to work at 8:30am on a January morning in London is nigh on impossible, demonstrating explicitly the priorities of the metropolitan denizen. The strategy to implicate passers-by (crossers-over of the Millennium Bridge) had then to be sympathetic to their priorities and the reserved nature of the morning Londoner. The solution was to hand out smallish plainly coloured flags, orange or blue, which the passer-by would be relieved of at the other end. On either end of the bridge were larger banners in the same colours that read “Open Hearts” and “Open Minds”. In this manner, it was possible to implicate more people because of the modest and deferred meaning. Whether or not all those carrying a flag agreed with our calls to solidarity is hard to say. The modest flag as a practical solution to
engaging an extremely wary public, shows how seriously that public take the application of signs to themselves. The process of delicately constructing an action that can call on the powers of the public by incorporating them into an action, is an impoverished act because in reality it points to another occurrence of hypercrap. Crap is an old word for waste; chaff. It is exactly what grappa is made from. In this formulation - the hypercrap as wastage – it refers to the diversion of human potential away from emancipation and living the ‘good life’, toward abstract productivity. If Heidegger can propose the world has become a picture, can I make the next step and propose that each person has now become a picture, lower, a jpeg? Downsampled from life to image, information and connections, reflected off the walls of the Cave, we come to know ourselves as the machines of capital know us.
People here, now, feel powerless. I know because I feel powerless and so do many people I have spoken to. They understand very well what needs to be torn down and destroyed. It simply seems impossible and dangerous. It is this feeling of being bound up in the hypercrap that leads to recession into the Cave. It is my project to cause encounters, ideally not particularly serious ones (ostensibly, at least) as a counterpoint to reflection. My practice works as a reminder to people to trouble the metrics and information borders we live by, to actually scream, to do something impulsive instead of the sensible and to kick up, as the picaresque does, to meet the challenge of recuperating the public space characterised at the start of this thesis as untangling in a deleterious way, by choosing encounter over reflection.
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Thank You Gregor & Laura Henderson-Begg Frances McLaren James Chaplin Neil Bennun CRA TRU CRU Susan Schuppli and Joanne Dodd Phil Ormrod Eleanor Cuthbert Bridges not Walls crew