afh2011

[afh2011]

Please note: The AFH blog is migrating to the new Tumblr, AFH2012. AFH2011 will be maintained only as an archive, now.

[afh2011]

[NOTE: This is a supporting text for Low Lives: Occupy, which will be presented by the Hemispheric Institute in early March.]

[afh2011]

Low Lives: Occupy [Draft 1]

By Paul McLean 1 In his rather grim assessment of the domain of small screen video in the introduction to Video Vortex II: Moving Images Beyond YouTube, Geert Lovink writes, “The Attention War is real.” Nothing has authenticated Lovink’s claim more profoundly than Occupy Wall Street. Earlier in the short but seminal text, Lovink doggedly propositions us with a sequence of questions about the future of online video, finishing with this one: “Is online video liberating us from anything?” Post-9-17-2011 (the day OWS materialized as an occupation of Zuccotti Park), we have some new answers about the utilitarian value of online video. I’m not referring to anything remotely art-centric here, yet, with regards small-screen, networked video transmitted on/for/by electronic devices. I mean moving images that seemingly erupt from the societal margins and shoot into the monopolized global perceptual space, disrupting the placid managed surface of acceptable 1% talking points. I mean movies that project a 99%-oriented iteration of real events into the stream of content wired people access to figure out what’s happening now, and not just what’s happening in one’s particular, preferred info-silo. Online video has erupted into Big Picture reality, finally offering more than laughing babies, cute kitties and bedroom guitar maestros. Online video is maturing as a decentralized syndicate for unmediated transmissions. What OWS has proven is that the “margins” are really the main, and the Dark Matter Greg Sholette describes in his book by the same name, the 99% - is us, to paraphrase Pogo. To date (as of this writing), Global Revolution, the OWS online video (OV) channel has logged 248,918,179 viewer minutes. OWS is winning its attention war, and it’s using OV, nested in an impressive array of network tools (websites, chat rooms, social media, email/texting chains, phone trees, etc.) to do it. The dynamics of concentricity have served OWS well, in its stunning expansion from local protest gathering to worldwide phenomenon. If OWS has taught us anything about the notion that online video is capable of liberating us, it has taught us by demonstration that 99% liberation is not a function of video technology. OV is not the cause. It’s an app. Liberation, if it is to come, will be a function of direct confrontation with the forces that would enslave us. Video can provide an important support role, mostly as verification or promotional tool, but it will not suffice as a proxy for bodies in the park or on the street. Maybe, to come at this from a different angle, we can flip-flop Lovink’s OV assertion to apply it to OWS. “The real war is attention,” and that’s not true. War is about breaking things and killing people. OWS is peaceful assembly for the redress of grievances. It’s good citizenship. Getting people’s attention with courageous action, in the face of oppression, affirming the 99%’s right to know the truth as it happens, that’s how OWS managed to help OV realize itself, as a valuable platform in a democracy movement, as opposed to a valuable asset in a co-opted 1% consumer saturation market. 2 Video is still never completely at home in the art world, and there are plenty of reasons, some technical, some philosophical, and some economic. A prime problem for online video as art is distinction. Why is one YouTube video “art” and the next one million videos less than art, say, only “entertainment?” “Play” at the Guggenheim smacked into this quandary. This is a platform issue, but the enigmatic subtext is status quo in the discourse enveloping art in the machine age. Where does the artist stop and the machine take over? The conjectures pertaining to material and immaterial qualities of art also pertain here, and are even exacerbated. The “art” of online video is untouchable by the viewer. Perhaps that’s where we should introduce Low Lives: Occupy. If we mash-up Dark Matter conditions with the classist-conditioning implicated in determining what is “untouchable,” and throw in the separation between the subject and the user that is inherent in OV, we at least get to a formulation that is rooted in Otherness. By framing the entire phenomenon in a construct as inclusive as “the 99%,” the alienating power of the Other binary is dissolved. We are the 99%. Low Lives: Occupy is an attempt to codify that togetherness. It helps to review the first three instances of Low Lives to obtain a measure of the proposition. Performance is a factor. So is the live event commingled with its documentary version in a single time-based presentation format. The network of affiliated presenters adds a layer of community as an analog feature. The virtual streaming component suggests an echo of the real that sustains, after the original action concludes. The locations, the settings, the players, the machines, the narratives, the modulating intensities varying from piece to piece – all combine to refuse homogeneity, which OV, if nothing else cannot help but induce. Compression is a fact of computerized translation. Still, with Low Lives, we know that somewhere during each performance the laws of nature apply – unless, as one participant demonstrated, the performance is situated in Second Life. In short, we have dimensional conditions, with rules that can be broken without damaging the relation between the original and the reproduction, in a span of Time that encompasses both as identical-related phenomena. 3 Lovink and the essayists in VV2, and others in the field provide excellent expansion on the prime domain issues OV engenders, affecting the medium and ripe for considering in the broader context. In my estimation the central issue is Time as object and everything else as subject. A veritable (or virtual) syndicate or consortium of fine thinkers have addressed the “everything” else already, dancing with the Object Time, which correlates as performance. To mark precursors for Occupy (and OV), we should take into account the writings of Shanken, Groys, Lillemose, Quaranta, Lanier, Sterling, Bishop, LaTour, Paul, Kittler, Manovich and some others – Baudrillard, Agamben, LaTour, Badiou, Heidegger, Hegel and the effervescent Zizec, plus the speculative realists. That said, Post-9-17, we’re beyond networks, design fictions, Second Life, curating, Continental Theory, Relational Aesthetics, gadgets, artificial intelligence, cybernetics, hacking, weakness and interfaces. Even hyperrealism and the parallax view don’t adequately intervene, deconstruct, critique or predict OWS. Not to say that all of these pre-texts don’t figure in the new schema. They do. They form a Cloud of data that in the aggregate provides ample atmosphere to supply the storm that is OWS with material and immaterial conveyance. They form a pre-extant chorus for Occupy, like a repetition of pronouncements at the People’s Mic. They introduce, clarify and explain the action. They help the OWS thing to start making sense of senseless, brutal, humanity-negating malaise, and move toward solution out of problem. To reference the post-clearance of Liberty Square’s meme, OWS is replete with big ideas, too big to be evicted. It’s just that the big creative idea isn’t bigger than violence and power, which in the end wins by evicting bodies, not thought. Still, an archived performance can play hell on the apparatus of eviction. Databased online video plays a mean game of chicken with the violent 1% powers that be, because the methodologies of spin can – especially the rewrite of history for propaganda purposes – can continue to be contradicted by the video instance of the actual event. Control of the grid, therefore becomes a first-order priority (which is why Anonymous is such a good monkey wrench, and Wikileaks, too). The powerful 1% recognizes just how tenuous, fragile and provisional management of the 99% is at this moment. Without compliance of the masses, the whole “ball o’ wax” will surely melt down. That’s not conjecture. It’s happening. Like a cloudburst. 4 Occupy Wall Street drew enough notice with D.I.Y. media to command a national stage and reorder the discussion. – “New Media Rules for the New Ways We Watch” by David Carr, NY Times (December 24, 2011) I think it’s vital to recall the leaking of the Iraq War video, pre-9-17, that showed civilians blown away by soldiers firing from an American helicopter. If the pepper spray videos had a precursor, this was it. We can talk all we want about ideas too big to be evicted. There are still some onscreen images that are bigger and more visceral than ideas, even though they’re nothing like the real thing, baby. What’s the energy driving a video’s trajectory from precarity into viral ubiquity? Two words can get to the point – “pepper spray.” Since the occupation of Zuccotti Park began, the pixilated grunge of unsteadied moviemaking has become a formidable enemy of spin. The scenes we witnessed, via OV, of kettled young women doused in chemicals, howling in pain of the euphemistic non-lethal sort, kickstarted the Occupy movement. If a General Assembly could only get a shoulder-shrug out of a couch potato, and the People’s Mic could only mostly generate mimicry, if not mockery, the shock of senseless authoritarian violence on the streets of Manhattan brought thousands of vacillating 99%ers into the streets. OWS managed to mobilize a massive demos in support of 99% liberation, in great measure because of hand-held cameras in the hands of amateurs. The low-resolution videos of police brutality during OWS street actions, uploaded almost In Real Time (IRT), substantiated liberation-as-PoV, as a new media tool and tactic. Traditional news outlets like The Guardian invited video submissions as a means of clarification of fact, of reality, of actuality. Low Lives: Occupy in a sense promises to do the same with performance art, streaming for OV. This is a new iteration of art and artifact. We can imagine the painting of the cave wall in Chauvet, as a good subject for Low Lives presentation, today.

[afh2011]

[afh2011]

What Would Jesus Occupy?

By Paul McLean 1 O little star of Bethlehem, PA Haysoos is shuffling through the empty schoolhouse with an ole mop & his yeller bucket of wishez [no dream of Amer'ca in the dingy DOW water sloshing with every broke step by stoop-backed brown man in his bleached cheap plastic sneakers haunted by echoes of USh Chambersh of Commersh who painted these glistening cinder block walls the pallor'd institutional grey green, 'n' a pint ay vodkey.] /KILL PROGAM - exec Such will be the lottery of Bill Gates, by programmable matter, won, while fuck-pump Dread Scott burns our Constitution & stomps the Flag for his wee-wee. No livin' wage steel. In Beijing, now, the star also rises. ∞ It was the Lenape gave Manhattan its name & in return got smallpox & pogroms, clearances like the ones at Liberty & of Skye. Heidegger, right about Time in 4D. So Christ should be here, now, then. There. Moving 2 Gnarled knuckles on the stick handle, a grimace and a curse, out of breath, to fear for Maria & child, blessed & all in a pen 3 Occupy Massey, that's got away wi' murder Occupy BP, that's got away wi' murder, and to p'isen     the Gulf, whilst Tony whined on his po' life Occupy Goldman, Sachs - destroyer of nations Occupy the Fed, the White House, the Congress,     the torturers, the spies, the corrupt'd/-rs Occupy Bloomberg, now there's a scoundrel! Occupy, Occupy, Occupy,     Give them all cells to Occupy! Bush & Cheney, Rove & Rummy, Paulson & Greenspan Occupy, Occupy! A NEW Treaty of Easton, Eton, etc. No more, Moravia, no mas. 'ere cauldron of bloody stew, a feast, I tell you. & look what they did to poor Edwin Drake, who was born not too far from Catskill. Oil, drilling. Jesus to Schwab the decks for a tsar, by the light of the burning barges at Homestead but for the grace a God go I, fungible 4 600 Trillion for the hedge funds, 26 for the banksters & no WMD, no victory in Iraq - just Occupy Hannity's maw so he onct could yammer true, 'at the 1%'ll do anythin' - A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G - Mother To be god & immor'al & potent as sZeus, fr' 'heir perches an ye Alps, li' vultures scanning the rims of spinning planet for a bit more of silver flash, in the mouth of the cor'se of all gentes. 5 So on the day of this white-less nativity, beginning of beginnings, same old same old, we kneel to pray. A stroke in his chest took the custodian down, and no insurance had he to pay his debt, a slave in the morning, free by night. no mas, repite, repo.

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CO-OP|occuburbs

Among the most widespread and enduring forms of progressive organization in the suburbs are environmental groups, food co-ops, and politically oriented arts groups and small galleries. These work with the domestic ethos of home and garden rather than against it, and they do a lot of good. They support open space preservation and local farms, particularly organic farms, and establish neighborly micro-economies as alternatives to the mall and highway hegemony.

Much of what the Occupy Wall Street movement advocates in the way of human-scale, participatory, and sustainable social organization already exists amidst the country clubs and ranch houses of the suburbs. It is small in scale and particular organizations tend to struggle with the attrition of a difficult economy and, alongside that, the general drift toward the preoccupied life; people have kids to take care of, things to do. Nonetheless, the alternative economy persists, resistance is fed in the most seductive way by local honey, herbs, cheese, beer and vegetables, and in a more spiritual sense by local art, music, and poetry. Seduction is not revolution, clearly, but it is something not to be scorned.

In thinking about Occupying culture in the suburbs, then, the coop and the alternative arts space came to mind as institutions to enlist. The challenge is to introduce the dynamic of a vanguard social movement, Occupy Wall Street, into these institutions and, beyond that, to determine a format that would best encourage a creative exchange of ideas and approaches among the participants in a given project. This is partly a matter of striking a balance between contributions from local artists and those based outside the area. It wouldn’t do simply to install an exhibition of Occupy-related work from downtown Manhattan in a suburban gallery; this would run the risk of being a show rather than an action. Similarly, one would hope that any event would advance the principles of the movement rather than support or illustrate them.

Occupy Wall Street is inherently transformative; it arose, and continues to arise outside of and in contradistinction to the parameters of party politics, class and social divisions, established forms of mobilization and resistance; it is a profoundly cohesive and inclusive civil rights movement, civil rights understood in terms of economic as well as political enfranchisement. If an expression of art and social activism in the suburbs is to reflect and engage the Occupy movement, it should be internally transformative, not just another cultural event in the suburbs but one that is informed by the questions that have impelled the occupations and street demonstrations worldwide: what does democracy look like? What does art for the ninety-nine per cent look like? Is an occupied suburb possible, an occupied suburban culture and social expression?

Answers to these questions will come from many places and perspectives, from experiment and trial error. All one can do is make an attempt and submit the results, however determined and analyzed, to one or some of the many channels of discussion the movement generates  What follows is a proposal for an application of the co-op model to Occupy events in an art space.  Not all that many people have experience with food coops, and there is some general confusion between various alternative approaches—co-op is not a csa, or share in a farm, nor is it an commercial organic market—so it might be helpful to begin with a brief overview of what the cooperative model.

The Cooperative

A co-op is a member owned and operated venture in which the community pools money and labor to support, as far as practical, locally produced, sustainable food and in the process reduce the costs and inefficiencies associated with various levels of the dominant economy . The same standards apply to goods that cannot be produced locally. As a collective it is able to purchase goods in bulk or close to wholesale, providing savings for members and a reliable market for local producers and conscientious national and international companies.

As a community the co-op encourages relevant ventures among themselves, be it small scale farming, cooking classes, health and nutritional education, or outreach to those in need. The co-op uses its purchasing power to support fair labor practices, conscientious farming methods and stewardship of the land and the environment.

Membership in the co-op is open to all, and typically non-members may shop at the co-op for a slight markup. Members contribute labor and contribute yearly dues to cover overhead and administrative costs of the co-op.  They support the co-op movement and build relationships with other organizations, sometimes offering assistance to startups and often collaborating with other co-ops on social concerns such as hunger and disaster relief.

A co-op is just that: a cooperative. Membership entails working together, building together, and not just using shopping privileges. It is an alternative association of neighbors and friends. It’s  kid friendly, pet friendly, and grownup friendly. It’s friendly. Difficulties can arise when members become caught up in their lives and don’t order or help out, but that is bound to happen. Membership in a co-op is an indication in and of itself that a person has goodwill and a social conscience.

The important point is that a co-op takes one out of the usual relations of a business and consumer culture. There are no ads, coupons, sales at a co-op, no inducements to buy. One spends money at a co-op, naturally, but one doesn’t shop in the usual sense, no more than one shops, quite, for a friend or a good story or a meal out with friends. Co-ops are small typically (there are some large exceptions, Park Slope Co-op being one of them). People know each other, or get to know each other through the organization and when people come together to make purchases or pick up orders the emphasis typically is on conversation more than food.

With all this said, a co-op model is practical and tough-minded.  The usual business requirements, or most of them, apply: maintaining inventory, bookkeeping, stocking shelves, arranging work schedules and so on. Nonetheless, being practical need not conflict with being communal or cooperative….

Application to Culture

So how could all this apply to art? The word coop is sometimes applied to spaces that artists pay for collectively in exchange for the right to exhibit work. This model is focused on the artists; it would be more interesting, more consistent with an Occupy approach, to include the community. That is the approach we will consider. Also, the terms local, sustainable, and even organic are so important to the coop model that it would be interesting to consider whether they can be carried over in some way to visual art.

But before doing so, it would be helpful to bracket off at least one point of conceptual tension in the greater art market or art world. If possible, and only in this limited circumstance, it would be preferable to hold off on concern with the question ‘what is art?’ Some objects that might end up in an Occupy exhibition—ephemera like signs, announcements with graphic images, clothing altered with lettering for a given event—might conceivably push at the boundaries of what some consider art, but what would be gained by stressing that term…  Imagine, for example, replacing the word art with spice; what is spice? Who gets to say what is or is not spice? What is the importance of spice in contemporary life? Is spice only for some people, Mexicans for instance, or can anyone enjoy it? Is spice really necessary? The word art, in this context, is simply an expedient.

More pertinent are the kinds of questions and concerns that follow the ‘is it art’ issue: what kind of value does a given piece have and to whom? How is this value determined? What kind of discourse does the project speak to and who takes part in this discourse? Value, of course, is a matter of money and of qualitative, subjective experience. The two are intertwined, but since the financial aspects of the cooperative model are concrete and fairly well established, it would be best to begin with money.

Value

The question of value—what is the material worth of a work of art, how is this determined--  ideally would matter to everyone, but it is particularly important when one is a collector and patron of art.  If art is to matter to the .99, is to speak to the .99, then perhaps the .99 should become art patrons and collectors.  There are different forms and degrees of ownership: one can own the factory that makes cars, own a car, lease a car with an option to buy. In a co-op, members own a share of the company and buy what the company offers, usually at a discount to the owner-clients.  In a co-op art model, members would have both partial ownership of the space, access to discounted work, and the third option, practiced in the Netherlands: an option to lease or rent a work for a given period, a year, say, with an option to buy.

Conversely, the artist might have different options in regard to the coop, ranging from membership with certain attendant privileges (exhibition rights, eligibility for commissions and various forms of paid work such as instruction) to submitting work as a non-member to juried shows and the like.

As for determining price, one can envision different forms of artist- public collaboration and negotiation, probably but not necessarily in a committee format. The operative framework, however, is not the art market or art capitalism, but the co-op community. The art world will go on as always. Artists will still strive to be the next Damien Hirst, Maurizio Catellan, Kara Walker, etc.  The co-op may well assist an individual artist’s career, but the focus is on the well-being of the community. The incentive of speculative investment, so important in the art world—the hope that a purchased work will increase exponentially in value in the secondary art market—would be replaced, in the co-op, by whatever priorities arise in the discourse of the community.

Art for the .99

Who knows what art for the .99 would look like.  It might be feasible, however, to begin to map out the conditions in which art for the .99 might develop. It is easy enough to identify the conditions in which art for the one per cent presents itself now: Art Basel Miami, Frieze, Art Cologne… All that need be said in this context is that the collusion of wealth, fashion, media and hipster social ambition at such gatherings place them at a distant remove from the lives and concerns of most people.  Contrast such occasions with something like an artists’ guild supported by member clients, one that contributes visual work to a demonstration or direct action, ‘occupies’ walls and other public spaces to encourage comment, cartoons, graphic work, graffiti (there is a statue in the Piazza Navonna in Rome that was set aside in ancient Rome for just such a purpose; it is layered in graffiti). The artists in such an organization might paint portraits of democracy or of new forms of the family and domestic  partnerships, might introduce art into the ordinary places of life: grocery shelves, park benches, clothing stores, hospitals, parks…

The same sort of program of talks, demonstrations, lessons, exchanges one finds in a food co-op could be enacted in an art space. Membership contributions—payment of minimal yearly membership dues—by artists and the non-artist public could remove at least in some degree the oppression of selling and career that distorts the greater art world.

This is the general drift; how to get people in the door, how to induce cops and plumbers and teachers, ordinary people, to join is the key. But it can be done…  If this is of interest I can expand on it. But since I have to grade finals and papers, I will stop for the moment and wait for some feedback.

Chris

[afh2011]

Wall Street to Main Street

OCCUPY WITH ART

IN COLLABORATION WITH NEW MASTERS ON MAIN STREET

Presents WALL STREET TO MAIN STREET [INTRODUCTION] Wall Street to Main Street is a collaborative art project linking Occupy Wall Street and the rest of America, via the classic small town of Catskill, NY.  Just as the Occupy Wall Street Movement has sought to focus attention on the wide needs of the 99 percent, Wall Street to Main Street illustrates the ways in which re-use of vacant storefronts can revitalize a local economy, and reconnect a battered community’s dreams and aspirations.   Focusing on art as a vocabulary of ideas, exhibitions sites are planned for 8-15 vacant storefronts along the town's Main Street, as well as nearby cultural and educational venues. Catskill is central to the historic home of our nation’s first environmental vision, several pioneering new agricultural projects, and one of the nation’s most heralded new community radio stations. The proposed project, co-organized by the OWS Arts and Culture Working Group, Fawn Potash (Project Director, Masters on Main Street) and Geno Rodriquez (former Director of The Alternative Museum), will include panel discussions, projections, radio programming, performances, and installations of the art of OWS. Nearby Bard College, Vassar College, SUNY New Paltz and Albany will be invited to organize panel discussions combining political science, economics and art experts. Tentatively scheduled for March, April and May of 2012, the project will culminate in a summer celebration in the historically influential Hudson Valley, home to both America’s first great entrepreneurial efforts and the Woodstock Festivals, with details TBA. The project goals of Wall Street to Main Street are:  

To explore art as a vocabulary for understanding the economic issues at the heart of the Occupy Movement with visual, intellectual and dynamic opportunities for education, dialogue-building, and a showcase of wildly creative artistic expressions pioneering every medium;

To show the significant role of artists in this and past movements as the vanguard of social and political change, as well as the role communities play in nurturing and legitimizing such vision;

To model a peaceful partnership between cultural organizations, educational institutions, protestors, artists and the citizens who make up our home communities;  

To explore ideas expressed in the art works calling attention to real-world economic problems, fundamental democratic processes, and an urgent need for systematic reform.  

  The unforgettable photographs, videos, signs, puppets, interventions, posters and graphics of the OWS phenomenon will be augmented for this first Wall Street to Main Street event through invitations to local artists, students and recent alumni from studio art programs that have participated in Catskill’s groundbreaking Masters on Main Street program over the past year. The organization of Wall Street to Main Street will be collaborative, fostering creative exchange between OWS artists, the local community and the 99% everywhere.   Wall Street to Main Street represents an opportunity for Catskill to be at the forefront of an international art movement, with attendant opportunities for the entire community; just as the town once benefited as the starting point for our nation’s pioneering growth westward, as the center for its first internationally-recognized art movement, and as the home to some of its leading inventors and thinkers.

[afh2011]

Wall Street to Main Street [An Essay]

By Paul McLean Mic Check! Mic Check! Mic Check! Look around You are a part of a Global Uprising We are a Cry from the Heart of the World We are Unstoppable Another World is Possible Happy Birthday #occupy movement 1 Occupy Wall Street for a short time created direct consequences for those who bear the primary responsibility for our current malaise. We knocked at the door. It was about being there. Calling out corruption, injustice, greed and the systemic debasement of democracy by the 1%, the Occupiers of Zuccotti Park disrupted the message machine of corporate media, which today is to a great extent a service industry for global syndicates. By now, a lot of us know the 1% org-chart. It’s been exposed, through the cloud of obscuration, by a bunch of amateurs, mostly. Here’s a typical Occupy logic thread: Does General Electric own NBC? [1] Does GE pay US taxes? Is the former CEO of GE in the cabinet of President Obama? A hand-painted cardboard sign held aloft by a young occupier may not be much, compared to the power of GE to suspend America’s disbelief, letting ride the reality that our democracy is corporate-owned and super-rich 1% controlled, but it’s something.   OWS protesting at Jeffrey Immelt’s home Did OWS manage to straighten out the corruption of US democracy, which GE represents, in the duration of the actual occupation of Liberty Square? The short answer is “No.” OWS wasn’t really capable of that, any more than a temporary projection of light beams is capable of knocking over a high-rise office building. The prime collateral effects so far of OWS – focusing-attention, causing-inconvenience, enforcing-transparency, pushing-accountability, etc. – are not consequences like a guillotine’s consequences for the 1%, but they are something. Maybe there are more important things than generating consequential phenomena, or after-effects, per se. Positioning is not a negation. A ripple in the water caused by the stone dropped in the pond is not the stone. Maybe tossing the rock is the expression that matters. OWS is like the rock tossed into the pond, drifting down to the bottom, disappearing, while the ripples in concentric circular formations transit the surface. OWS has platformed expression as itself, again. The signs, the drumming, the chants, the puppets, the speeches, the performances (musical and theatrical)… the People’s Mic: These are protean methods of projecting self-/collective-self into the commons; fundamentally human behavior, but in America it also happens to be good citizenship, when carried out non-violently.   Photo by Paul McLean Something’s got to give, though. People are fed up. Artists are fed up. Remember what Kennedy said about violent/non-violent protest? I saw a guillotine, pre-9-17, at the Abbot Kinney Festival (2010) in Venice, CA, made by an artist with a new vision for credit applications, and a bloody message implied. The seams in the social contract are starting to fray. Maybe in Oakland’s occupation they threw rocks, but as far as I know, that never happened in OWS. But what did happen at Occupy Wall Street? Baudrillard might have said that the something that happened between September 17 and November 15 never happened, and we have the pictures and video to prove it. OWS may not have destroyed the 1%, but it was something, something expressed. That expression continues, like ripples across a pond. 2   Thomas Paine When, therefore, a country becomes populous by the additional aids of cultivation, art and science, there is a necessity of preserving things in that state; because without it there cannot be sustenance for more, perhaps, than a tenth part of its inhabitants. The thing, therefore, now to be done is to remedy the evils and preserve the benefits that have arisen to society by passing from the natural to that which is called the civilized state. - Thomas Paine, "Agrarian Justice" The “Bat Signal” of N17 is a fine (new media) example of projected humanity, or maybe “version” is a better word than sample. To recount the 99% setting: the semiotic sign of “us” floating on the architecture of comm-tech power; pronouncing and affirming our claim to redress grievances through peaceful assembly; our burgeoning re-enlightened moment in movement, post-eviction; sparking a vision of power in numbers; overcoming the restraints of police action, which had foiled the first attempt to take the message en masse off the island of Manhattan to the rest of the world, or at least to Brooklyn; for every witness a new age dawning, of collective celebration; the event streamed on the web IRT/IRL (in Real Time and LIfe); an emergency call to the superhero in us, carried on beams of light above the heads of thirty or forty thousand souls; crossing that bridge, when they came to it. No harm was done to the Verizon building by the 99% projection, right?   Photo by Brandon Neubauer By the way - it was a Hudson Valley artist who pulled off that particular stunt, named Mark Read. [2] Not to say he acted alone. It was a team effort, naturally. Sorry, if this seems like a non-sequitor: Is it time to introduce Thomas Cole into our dimensional set of necessary considerations for our “Wall Street to Main Street” Occupy with Art project? [3] The website for Cole’s home-as-national-park claims proudly, “This is where American art was born.” That is one beginning of a beginning. The 99% bat signal gave us another. Revolution is a circular term, is it not? Revolutions are made of one-to-many/many-to-one interchanges, which are not binary configurations, if one remembers that the “ONE” is a point on a circle of many equal points, bent to the order of Pi, which is an infinite form-as-number. The American Revolution was and is like that. George Washington got it in that horrible winter of Valley Forge. Bloomberg made sure that winter bond-forging wasn’t going to happen with OWS. Given the circular or concentricity concept, which is another kind of projection, and holograph, or sketch of reality, and/or hyperreality: then Thomas Cole and Mark Read in a way collaborated on the bat signal. We could even go so far as to say that Verizon and the electric company and the producer of the projector and the witnesses (actual and virtual) were also in on that big 99%/+1% circle, accounting for the bat signal. Maybe the phenomenology is too close to Dr. Bronner’s soap packaging for some of you. But, so what? There are lots of critiques of OWS, reformations of it, like notes in suggestion boxes, and erasures or attempts at it. Those are third-party interventions. For those of us taking notes, we’re getting at a triangular formation, which will hold additional meaning for the Masons among us, especially those with an eye towards the pinnacle of the big pyramid scheme. Where you have Orders, you’re bound to have anti-orders. At some point we have to contradict the emerging OWS anarchist storyline here. [4] At the same time, we ought to consider the nature of agrarian justice, as envisioned by Founder Thomas Paine. [5]   Thomas Cole 3 A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it, either expressly or as incidental to its very existence. These are such as are supposed best calculated to effect the object for which it was created. Among the most important are immortality, and, if the expression may be allowed, individuality; properties by which a perpetual succession of many persons are considered as the same, and may act as a single individual. They enable a corporation to manage its own affairs and to hold property without the perplexing intricacies, the hazardous and endless necessity of perpetual conveyances for the purpose of transmitting it from hand to hand. It is chiefly for the purpose of clothing bodies of men, in succession, with these qualities and capacities that corporations were invented and are in use. - Dartmouth v. Woodward   John Marshall As the circle turns, let’s revisit the question posed above, now that you’ve had time to digest. No harm was done to the Verizon building by the 99% projection, right? …Unless “image” of “identity” – in this case Verizon’s – can be done harm to. Which is a legal question of importance to art, ownership, market value, and so on, now, especially in the pervasive privileged artificial person scheme for free speech. Which currently equates in one facet to corporate dollars in politics. What is art up against here? Or more fundamentally, what is expression up against? Privatizing thought, visual space in the commons, thought-occupation-through-content-blitz… These are REAL the systemic disruptions of America’s free speech complex that have concretized over our history, since 1825, [6] into a normative formation.

As Ben Bagdikian points out in the seminal text The New Media Monopoly, the business of distribution of expression – the grist of democracy – is determined by a handful of conglomerates, whose prime interest is not democracy and never has been. The Media Industry is a bottom-line operation, as the News Corp/News of the World scandal amply illustrates. In the arena of ideas, “a few bad apples” essentially run the show – and they do not in any way want the 99% to be anything but passive consumers! Is there really any reasonable dispute of this assertion? 4 In the current environment, where “branding” is power, as propaganda, the shaper of thought and discourse, interference with messaging is perceived as a basic threat to doing business. If that business is controlling and commanding hearts and minds, in order to, let’s say, Rule the Whole World, then any disruption of the message matrix is perceived in circles of power as critical. Send in the militarized police! Pull out the sound cannons, the water hoses, the guns, the drones, Homeland Security/FBI/CIA/NYPD & the Contractors!!! Unleash the Kraken! [FOX, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, et al.]   NYPD’s Anthony Bologna in action OWS has been on the receiving end of reactionary violent disruption, or to use the term with art-action currency, “intervention,” by the likes of Michael Bloomberg, and his affiliates – meaning the US mayors who have hit occupations with pogrom-like clearances, justified by many provisions, ordinances and other technicalities. The brute force employed in some of the authority actions is consequential, and no different than similar top-down suppressions of dissent that have protected Robber Baron interests in the past. Here in America, for the occupations, the aggressive measures have stopped just shy of fatality. I guess comparatively, Homestead was worse. Then, thinking about anarchists, we could mention Haymarket Square, which was one hell of a bloodbath. It cuts both ways.   Shrapnel damage at 23 Wall Street Pepper spray is not the same as hot lead, but the world turns, and the first big Occupy art event, the “No Comment” show, was held at 23 Wall Street, in the old “House of Morgan,” which was bombed, allegedly by anarchists, on September 16, 1920.   “No Comment” (Photo by David Stam) A brief disruption, “On anarchy at OWS:” [To speak poetically is to employ codes, and for a code to function it must have rules. If a code is dysfunctional, it won’t have rules, which is the problem with anarchy, as a political instrument. Without democracy, anarchy is useless as an ordering system for social formation. Without representation, democracy is not civilized, only tribal. If one is a member of a 200 or so person tribe, direct democracy is great as a means of social order. Any social order bigger than 200 people cannot function effectively without the establishment of representative mechanisms. Anarchy doesn’t get anywhere without either form of democracy. It’s no surprise that OWS employs both iterations of democracy, now. To say that anarchy is OWS’ “heart,” is to project an illusion, or false representation of anarchy, which is not much more than a concept, or pre-ideology, or anti-idea, since language orders ideas into coded meaning-formations, to have some real-world value to people. A “Cry” is a meaningless sound that humans understand. A baby cries, and the caretaker, usually the mother or father comes. Anarchy might be thought of as a cry. …A movement needs more than a cry to succeed.]   IWW Solidarity Poster While the world turns, it wobbles. 1% Management Guru Peter Drucker defined himself late in life as an anarchist, but also a conservative and a Christian. If that’s not ironic, nothing is. 5 Cyclic history manufactures irony, which isn’t to say “synchronicity.” It’s more a concentricity, as phenomena go, not a Jungian or Platonic fabrication of the ideal into which the real tries and fails to fit. In a dimensional production, like Wall Street to Main Street, we need to consider the ramifications of echo effects. We need to consider spheres, as a sonic application, and in this case, as a “Cry from the Heart of the World.” But the Occupation is not localized, post-9-17, or maybe post 11-17. It’s a “Global Uprising.” What are the rules of engagement as we rise up (or ripple outwards)? For OWS, during the occupation, the rules were markedly different for police and protester. The ongoing war on anti-1% protest is a bloody one elsewhere, certainly in the nations enjoying their Arab Spring, which inspired OWS, by its/our own admission. Art and war are not identical, but both are proper enduring functions of civilization, especially the kind of artificial civilization that has been created by the abominable decision of Dartmouth v. Woodward. For example, the “War on Terror” is nothing if not corporate war – artificial, immortal, the proxy of empire, a King’s folly. There is no OWS art of terror. To get back to the “Bat Signal” example: Again, the “culture jamming”  - to reference OWS-generator Adbusters – power of image to disrupt isn’t as consequential as actually knocking over the Verizon building, but it is something. …The Batman is a comic book superhero, and Gotham’s signal to him is a summons in times of crisis. It’s ironic to note that production on the latest franchise Batman Hollywood movie filmed in the NYC during the occupation of Zuccotti Park. Circularity abides fantasy, but who is the real 99% superhero? Who is being summoned by our bat signal, if not us?   Maybe we can learn something about OWS from “Breaking Down,” Richard Dienst’s essay in New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader: Whatever it tells us about the interplay of media, this complex material makes a startling point: the history of cinema can be told, it seems, everywhere but in cinema. Yet, as the initial episodes insist, the history of cinema is the only history that needs to be told, because only cinema has been capable of telling the story of its time. But it failed, and that is the real story. Only cinema could have constructed the linkages between technology and life required by the modern world; only cinema offered a way to show one life to another without threatening both. Montage - understood first as the production of connections, comparisons, constellations and other kinds of relationality - is the only form, the only technique, cinema has to offer to help us live historically. All the rest - its plots, its clichés, its obedience to ruling ideas and awful prejudices - would be precisely what montage could undo by cutting open. But, again, cinema got caught up in everything but pursuing its only real task. The "beautiful care" [beau souci] of montage turned out to be a burden heavier than any film, or any filmmaker could bear: it is nothing less than the obligation to make history out of every image, to know how to slip dreams into reality, when to splice memory into the flow of forgetfulness, and moments of beauty into unfolding catastrophes of modern life. Cinema let us know that all these images are somehow *there*, adjacent to each other, if not us. We do not lack for images; if anything, the images lack a "we" who could bring them together. If OWS illustrated the difference between Batman and the new hero, it also clarified the praxis of montage. We have to unmask ourselves, first.   Graphic by Anjin Anhut 6 More to the point, OWS clarified and is clarifying the impact of non-message, when the montage suffices. If the OWS message is fluid, or maybe “wireframe,” like the movement itself, post-eviction, then can it have a lasting impact on the rest of the country? Given all the environmental interference, can it even reach the rest of the country, except as a montage? The polls – and this apparently was a tremendous surprise to corporate media pundits at the time – showed that OWS was “LIKED” in the Facebook sense by a majority of Americans. More New Yorkers liked OWS than liked Mayor Bloomberg! How did that happen? Could it be that OWS was better than any movie in the Cineplex? Maybe OWS-as-neo-montage does work! So, instead of the message, let’s ask about what OWS is (and is not). Obviously, many people – including politicians and CEOs and their operatives, members of the “free press” and folks all over the USA – are still struggling to generate a reductive terminology for OWS. So far, nothing’s done the bullet-point trick. …Right after they express their confusion and/or criticism over what OWS is and is about, or isn’t, the Opinion Man, Inc., will stare into the camera with glassy eyes and shake his head, still. OWS doesn’t have one Frank Luntz type. Maybe 99.   FOX screengrab So, for clarification’s sake, let’s settle on OWS being a collective/subjective “it.” Occupation is a subject like all others. Time is the only Object. What are the peculiar qualities of OWS all-and-one subjollectivity? That question might not have a good reducible answer. I have other questions: •    Is OWS mobile? •    Does it translate? •    How prone to distortion is it? •    Does it echo? These are dimensional, technical questions. From my perspective, they are also questions that get to the presumption that art is integral to OWS. The only way to find out with both art and OWS, is to take them on the road, to folks who speak a different language, try to keep in real, and deal with the feedback. That’s a Wall Street to Main Street proposition, and we don’t know the answers, yet. 7 OWS and art have been linked from the September 17, 2011 inception of the movement. There is much new and old, historical, in the ways in which art has appeared in occupations, and certainly there is much that is worth close study. What can we learn from the role of expressive arts as a complement to Occupy protest? If status quo Wall Street has been in some aspects disrupted by OWS, it’s also clear that the art of occupation is disturbing some entrenched notions about what art and artist are, now, or can be. Occupy Museum and the Arts & Labor Working Groups have done great things in this area, but the phenomenon of OWS itself has outperformed the Situationists, Relational Aesthetes, and a laundry list of other immaterialists, agendists, radicals or Avant Gardists, contemporary and not. Protest-as-lawful-expression obviates the politically correct portfolio of binary presumptions, and the tropes of Otherness don’t jibe with a 99% maxim. Not only have the Righties been stumped by OWS, but so have the Lefties. OWS is cleaving to the middle, like Lao Tzu. People forget that the Tao te Ching is a protestation, at least in its facets. When we consider the Constitutional protections for peaceable assembly for the redress of grievances, underscored as they are by fundamental rights of American citizens to free speech, we may recall where art situates in the spectrum of our commonwealth exchange. We don’t have to stop there, however. We may continue spinning the wheel, looking for a more substantial art, one that provides a basis for another economy, or maybe ecology. The old adage goes, “You can’t eat art.” It gets at something invaluable about art, which is its non-consumable nature. In today’s “art world,” which is to say, the 1% art market with which Art is routinely and wrongly conflated, the collector, whether institutional or individual, gets to play consumer of art. Almost no one else does, for a Jeff Koons atrocity, for example. We’ll be looking elsewhere for a model on how to grow art for a 99% marketplace that will outperform the current one.   Chauvet Cave Before we commence our project, we can establish a base sample. I suggest Chauvet and Lascaux. [7] Why not? Especially in the Chauvet case, we have a prime illustration of the value of preservation, which at Chauvet involved a fortuitous rock fall. Preservation is the opposite of consumption. Somehow, in our new market for the 99% art, we have to instill valuation on preservation, flip-flopping the mechanics of civilization corrupted by thousands of years of extraction/exploitation. The fuel for the e/e machine is consumption. It’s time to turn off that tap. Then we can jump ahead on the time line to now. We have to begin with a systemic review, an evaluation, for the love of wisdom. Philosophy is handy in this undertaking. What is art for? We can simultaneously abstract and concretize the analysis, to begin, because art encompasses both tangible and intangible. Art spans the material and immaterial in a healthy society. We can play with juxtaposition, too. What’s the prevalent obverse, or converse? In a toxic society, and let’s talk specifically in the moment of New York City, USA, money has displaced art as the prime exchange utility (or at least so one would assume, let’s say, walking down Broadway toward the stock exchange from city hall). Art in NYC runs like a business, and that business’s #1 characteristic is consumptive waste. We can decide to not be Dark Matter, as Gregory Sholette calls it. If I seem to be drifting here, it’s only a seeming. The diverse concerns and/or propositions and/or conditional or environment analyses shuffled through above are vital to figuring out what is at stake. I’ll cut to the chase. This essay is for the project Wall Street to Main Street. We’re linking OWS with Catskill, NY. We’re building a throughput between Zuccotti Park and Main Street, Catskill. Art is the instrumentation for this unification attempt, or convergence, or migration, at least that’s the projected impetus. However, even in the initial phase of this production, which is where we are as of this writing, art is unquestionably only one component in the mix. Art is like the roux in the gumbo.   USGenWeb Archives We’re going to insist that OWS not be contained in a 1% perceptual cage. Occupation is not a contagion to be quarantined. It is democracy that must be once more, and maybe finally revolutionized. Maybe WW1 and 2 weren’t wars to end all wars. Maybe the only one to finish now is the one to be waged against the 1%. If there’s a chance art can win it, before the 99% start killing people and breaking things, I think it’s worth the shot. ∞ We have to acknowledge Occupy Wall Street is an imaginary, now, a virtual thing, a replicant. Sure, OWS exists in iterative form all over, at least that’s true as the New Year approaches. Who knows what Occupy will mean in March, April and May, 2012, the months we’ve slated for Wall Street to Main Street? The concentricity of the movement has facilitated some promise of a continuity of insistence. If we’re still transmitting in a few months, what will our reception be, then? A lot can happen! We do realize that enemies of OWS – they hate us for our freedom – will continue to wildly distort Occupy to “Main Street.” Friends of OWS already uncovered one big-money campaign to trash the movement by any media-means available. We assume now that corporate media and other disinfo-machines will do everything possible to ensure that the hyperreal OWS is reduced to a crap consumer product, yesterday’s news, like wrappers for McDonald’s burgers tossed on the sidewalk, in time for next year’s elections. I think we have a concentric app for that. When WS2MS is installed in Catskill, a version of OWS will surely pre-exist for our potential collaborators upstate. Will it be our projection, or theirs? If OWS were on trial, which in some sense it is (for what crime?), the defense would be able I think to argue that the jury pool is effectively tainted. There are a lot of powerful 1% entities – like Goldman Sachs, the two Parties, Bloomberg, to name only a few – who have substantial interests in disrupting or spinning whatever OWS is as a phenomenon or complex of phenomena. They hate us ‘cause we’re “off-message.” They need to preserve the status quo, the one that’s good for the 1% and cataclysmic for the rest of us.   Photo: Paul McLean Probably the idea of WS2MS initially sparked as an outreach or diplomatic transmission to short circuit the anti-OWS propaganda. At this point, what’s becoming apparent is that network dynamics must be foregrounded. The non-problematic problem is, we don’t know what that really means. As with all things OWS thus far, we are seeing the unexpected as the typical. Some key alliances that are emerging as parallel productions for WS2MS in OWS and the Hudson River Valley are not art-centric. Our discovery process is revealing 99% needs. This is because we’re asking questions, rather than occupying space. (e.g., “What does a 99% art school look like?”) We’re – meaning Occupy with Art, the artists, the “PROJECT,” and the Catskill collective, whatever and/or whoever that will be – not presuming anything. [8] We’re staging this collaboration with the presupposition that OWS and Main Street, Catskill share a commons, a 99% imperative. We’re finding this to be a productive dynamic, for translation purposes, but also for a greater purpose, a Life-driven one. That means we’ll be asking how we can help. “The beginning of the beginning” projected in the Bat Signal is true in a movement orientation, but we’re discovering in our process that there is a pre-extant history in the Hudson Valley that doesn’t necessarily require a re-beginning, so much as a recollection. This is true with respect to American art, invention, education, industry and democracy. It’s also true with respect to the question of the indigenous populations of the North America, if we are really committed to “drilling down” to beginnings. How will our project deal with such pre-realities? [Fortunately, in this instance, we’re beginning our project in Chauvet cave – remember?] So, we will be occupying ourselves with the history of place, as was done in Zuccotti Park, aka Liberty Plaza or Square.   Photo: Paul McLean And what of the commons, the “ours,” which is identically in the sounding (in my native dialect, anyway) to the Latin “ars?” We can sense the ominous shift to endgame, from the 1% top down. We’re hearing about outrageous bails being set for jailed protester, and felony charges proliferating. The harassment is escalating to the point one can’t stand on a sidewalk anymore, without a cop agitating one to “move on” or get shackled. In America! Then there are dramatic changes to Federal law, permitting the enforcers to detain anyone for nothing or anything, without trial. The confrontation is reducing our struggle to one that encompasses the trajectory of total co-optation of the nation by un-democracy. What is the endgame? The 1% is committed by any means necessary to “privatizing” the commonwealth entirely, isn’t it? Are we willing to accept the proposition that civilization itself has to run more like a business? How much of our society will have to be for-profit before we put a stop to the wastefulness of that, the “creative obsolescence,” so to speak, of mankind. Will our commons only serve as a mechanism to maximize the profit of the few over the welfare of the rest of us? Planning some storefront installations and panels in Catskill may not seem like much to the 1% right now, but it’s something. We’re going to do our best to make it something special, and maybe even important. [1] Technically, no: Comcast bought with FCC approval NBC-Universal from GE, although GE still owns a 49% stake. See: http://www.freepress.net/ownership/chart/main [2] See Brooklyn Rail, December 2012 for the first-person account: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/12/local/the-99-bat-signal-a-cry-from-the-heart-of-the-world [3] Thomas Cole’s home is a national historic site in Catskill. The great website hosts a wonderful online gallery cataloguing his art: http://www.explorethomascole.org/ [4] David Graeber and others claim that the roots of OWS are anarchist, and promulgate a revisionist-historical review of revolution that excludes the American one, which was the first successful agrarian revolt by a colony from its empire/holding-company on a nation-establishing scale. For amplification of the subtle meme, see Graeber’s essay for Adbusters, which starts the revolutionary timeline with the French one. http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/99/world-revolution-2011.html [5] “Agrarian Justice,” by Thomas Paine: http://geolib.com/essays/paine.tom/agjst.html [6] See Dartmouth v. Woodward, which introduced the concept of the infinite artificial person as property-owner/consumer into the lexicon of American jurisprudence: http://www.constitution.org/dwebster/dartmouth_decision.htm [7] See Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams or read Joseph Nechvatal’s Immersion Into Noise [8] For a systemic analytic model, we will use Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit or Mind [Geistes], especially sections 73-89 of the introduction   Photo by Paul McLean Paul McLean is an artist who works in both new media and traditional fine art. He is a co-organizer of Occupy with Art. His research interests include media philosophy, specifically pertaining to time and systems; arts management, art, and cultural economics; and the convergence of 4-D methodologies among military, political, business, and social sectors. His web site is www.artforhumans.com   www.occupywithart.com

[afh2011]

Closing Party for Social Photography II

image: Aura Rosenberg, Decemberists, 2011

The closing party for Social Photography II, A Benefit Exhibition of Cell Phone Photographs is tonight from 6 to 9 pm.  

Any prints bought at the closing party will be ready for pick-up on Thursday, December 22  from 1-6 pm.

Social Photography II

A Benefit Exhibition of Cell Phone Photographs

December 6-20, 2011

Opening: Tuesday, December 6 | 6-9 p.m.

Closing: Tuesday, December 20 | 6-9 p.m.

carriage trade       

62 Walker Street

New York, NY 10013

thur-sun 1-6pm

Peter Scott / Director

pscott@carriagetrade.org

  Vivian Cheung / Gallery Assistant

vcheung@carriagetrade.org

[afh2011]

Simulation of a Higgs boson decaying into four muons. Photograph: Science & Society Picture Librar/SSPL

This file photo shows a layer of the world's largest superconducting solenoid magnet (CMS), one of the experiments preparing to take data at European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)'s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particule accelerator, before its completion in 2007 [Credit: AFP]

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Click the image or click HERE to go to the article at Brooklyn Rail online.

[afh2011]

Click the image for the free download (48.1mb).

[afh2011]

Social Photography II Opening Tonight

image: Scott Williams, On New Jersey, 2011

Social Photography II, A Benefit Exhibition of Cell Phone Photographs opens tonight from 6 to 9 pm.

Social Photography II

A Benefit Exhibition of Cell Phone Photographs

December 6-20, 2011

Opening: Tuesday, December 6 | 6-9 p.m.

Closing: Tuesday, December 20 | 6-9 p.m.

Peggy Ahwesh

Vicen Akina

Barbara Andrus

Elaine Angelopoulos

Mia Antezzo

Polly Apfelbaum

Michael Ashkin

Markus Bartenschlager

David Baskin

Sarina Basta

Bbartho

Betty Beaumont

Laurel  Beckman

Philip Bednarski

Laura Bell

Theodora Benezra

Ellen Berkenblit

Dave Berkowitz

Cindy Bernard

Mary Walling Blackburn

Caitlin Boyle

James Bradley

Leslie Brack

Martin Branch-Shaw

Brittany Brett

Corey Brooker

Steven Brower

Chris Buckner

Shiva Lynn Burgos

Kellyann Burns

Pash Buzari

Luisa Caldwell

Andrea Callard

Donald Cameron

carriage trade

Laura Carton

Antoine Catala

Marc Van Cauwenbergh

Brian Chase

Vivian Cheung

Chris Cobb

Henry Codax

Jonathan Cohen

Willie Cole

Liz Colin

Jim Conboy

Eugene Constan

Karrie Cornell

Chris Costan

Jim Costanzo

Paula Crawford

Fred Cray

Jody Culkin

Lucky DeBellevue

Humberto Delolmo

Trane DeVore

Charles Doria

Brian Zachary Druyan

Jason Ea

Natasha Egan

Robert Elliot

Katarina Elven

Joy Episalla

Jen Ewald

Jose Gabriel Fernandez

Carl Ferrero

Gary Ford

Tara A. Fracalossi

Jan Frank

Ken Freedman

Joe Gabe

Chris George

Camilo Godoy

Jennifer Golub

Kathy Goncharov

Elizabeth Gordon-Tennant

Aaron Gordon

Christopher Gow

Joan Gow

Terence Gower

Dan Graham

Amy Granat

Robin Graubard

Angie Gray

Tracy Grayson

Agnes Gund

Janice Handleman

Mal Harrison

Sean Hemmerle Judy Hole

Uli Holz

Conor Horgan

Juan Iribarren

Shirley Irons

Carol Irving

Nelson Johnson

Aron Johnston Jr.

Werner Kaligofsky

Jennifer Karady

Olivia Katz

Kevin Kay

Kerry Kehoe

Barry Keldoulis

Mathias Kessler

Louis Kirchner

Hilary Kliros

Robert Kloos

Nicholas Knight

Sophie Kovel

John Kramer

Prem Krishnamurthy

Christina Kruse

Nina Kuo

Rebecca A.Layton

David Licht Nora Ligorano

Jeanne Liotta

Aimé Iglesias Lukin

Robert Marshall

Paul McLean

Mieko Meguro

Reed Mettler

Amaury Meunier

Frances Middendorf

Jessica Mitrani

Seamus Moran

Eric Moe

Olivier Mosset

Susan Morris

Lynn Mullin

Jon Naiman

Daniel Newman

Colin O'Con

Helen Oji

Mary-Jane Olper

Defne Onen

Valerio Rocco Orlando

Georgeana Ortiz

Spencer Ostrander

Gail Ostrow

Paul Pagk

Carlos Palacio

Stephan Pascher

J. Pasila

Christopher Passehl

Janet Passehl

Denise Petrizzo

Kenneth Pietrobono

Jonathan Podwil

Lee Ranaldo

Marshall Reese  

Calvin Reid

Lucas Reiner & Fred Dewey    

Linden Renz

Robert Reynolds

Fabio Roberti

Abby Robinson

Dorothy Robinson

Walter Robinson

Claudia Romana

Justin Romeo

Aura Rosenberg

Benjamin Rosenthal

Lorin Roser

Christy Rupp

Ethan Ryman

Serra Sabuncuoglu

David Sahkaee

Herschel Sahkaee

Nancy C. Sampson

Hope Sandrow

Ken Saylor

Julia Scher

Marie J. Jean / Klaus Scherüebel

Heidi Schlatter

Gary Schneider

Dennis Sears

Komivi Segbaya

Trevor Shimizu

Diana Shpungin

James Siena

Shelly Silver

Mara Sloan

Daniel R. Small

Allyson Smith

Rosalind Solomun

Tom Sperry

Ann Squire

Blane De St.Croix

Andrea Stanislav

Andy Steinitz

Miles Stemper

Eugenia Sucre

Diwa Tamrong

Sikay Tang

David Terry

Shawna Thomas

Colin Thomson

Sophie Tottie

Yann Traboulsi

Brian Turner

Bonnie Turtur

Pegi Vail

Giancarlo Valle

Doris Vila

Julie Wachtel

Eri Wakiyama

Lindsay Walt

Lotte Kliros Walworth

Hong-Kai Wang

David Watson

Barbara Weissberger

Joy Whalen

Van Wifvat

Scott Williams

Justin Wolf

Donelle Woolford

Karen Yama

Carrie Yamaoka

Michael Zansky

Jeremy Zini

  carriage trade       

62 Walker Street

New York, NY 10013

thur-sun 1-6pm

  Peter Scott / Director

pscott@carriagetrade.org

  Vivian Cheung / Gallery Assistant

vcheung@carriagetrade.org

[afh2011]

"Concentricity:" Animation and audio by Paul McLean. OWS graphics by Occupy Design.

[afh2011]

"Concentricity" - a new photoset at AFH Flickr.

[afh2011]

TRUE TIME: The Story of Machines [BETA]

TRUE TIME By Paul McLean 1 But prior to all calculation of time and independent of such calculation, what is germane to the time-space of true time consists in the mutual reaching out and opening up of future, past and present. Accordingly, what we call dimension and dimensionality in a way easily misconstrued, belongs to true time and to it alone. Dimensionality consists in a reaching out that opens up, in which futural approaching brings about what has been, what has been brings about futural approaching, and the reciprocal relation of both brings about the opening up of openness. Thought in terms of this threefold giving, true time proves to be three-dimensional. Dimension, we repeat, is here thought not only as the area of possible measurement, but rather as reaching throughout, as giving and opening up. Only the latter enables us to represent and delimit an area of measurement. But from what source is the unity of the three dimensions of true time determined, the unity, that is, of its three interplaying ways of giving, each in virtue of its own presencing? We already heard: In the approaching of what is no longer present and even in the present itself, there always plays a kind of approach and bringing about, that is, a kind of presencing. We cannot attribute the presencing to be thus thought to one of the three dimensions of time, to the present, which would seem obvious. Rather, the unity of time's three dimen¬sions consists in the interplay of each toward each. This interplay proves to be the true extending, playing in the very heart of time, the fourth dimension, so to speak—not only so to speak, but in the nature of the matter.   True time is four-dimensional. - Martin Heidegger, Time and Being

2 Near the end of Edwin A. Abbott’s novel Flatland, a Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), a curious conversation occurs between two shapes, a two-dimensional Square and a three-dimensional Sphere: Sphere. But where is the land of Four Dimensions? Square. I know not: but doubtless my Teacher knows. Sphere. Not I. There is no such land. The very idea of it is utterly inconceivable. Square. Not inconceivable, my Lord, to me, and therefore still less inconceivable to my Master. Nay, I despair not that, even here, in this region of Three Dimensions, your Lordship’s art may make the Fourth Dimension visible to me. Abbott’s novel may be a mathematical fairy tale, but these lines (and Lines) are telling. For though Flatland is most concerned with the differences between two- and three-dimensional geometries, the mysterious question posed by the Square as to the existence of a possible fourth dimension reveals something initially paradoxical for any such venture. Though mathematically “inconceivable,” this invisible, alluded-to realm could still be somehow seen if something, (”your…art’), would “make the Fourth Dimension visible” to us. What the Square’s words reveal is the defining paradox of any visual representation of the fourth dimension — how to represent something “utterly inconceivable.” The possibility of an unseen fourth dimension has puzzled scientists, philosophers, artists, and writers alike. In fact, part of the fourth dimension’s slipperiness as an idea is due to the disparity of interpretations of it by almost every discipline of knowledge imaginable. Answering the question “what is the fourth dimension?” is not a simple task, and the only salient way to begin is to study the representations of its as attempted by math, art, and ultimately literature. Once a broader continuum of representation is established, the fourth dimension is revealed for what the Square ultimately figures it as: an exercise in signification as artists and writers try to represent something which is beyond their palette of images or words, something both physically and theoretically invisible. - Signifying Nothing: The Fourth Dimension in Modernist Art and Literature by Brad Ricca, Ph D 3 Does true time have a native language? If Time is the only Object, and everything else is the subject, why would Time need a language? Is subjectivity the language of Time? If so, then with whom would Time be speaking, or for whom would Time be expressing? Is Time talking to Itself, and we, temporarily, listen in? It seems presumptuous to imagine that Time is speaking to the subjective. Time is not in any Master-Slave arrangement with the subjective. This is man’s twisted formulation – not all men by the way, either; not all men love enslavement of others. Not every Subject must possess, must own a subject. Not every subject must belong to a master, whether that be Time or anything or –one else. It seems worthwhile to wonder about timelessness as an object for man. We have an app for that, called “art.” Art is not a language. It is a utility. Language is another form or expression of subjectivity. It is a sickness of man that drives language and its masters to assert ownership over art, or anything or –one else. Time as used by such men is a form or expression of disease, a kind of mental illness, conflating Time with death, and indebtedness, which is slavery. Alan Grayson, an American politician whom I love, sent me an email a couple of days ago. In it he quoted Abraham Lincoln: "It is not needed, nor fitting here [in discussing the Civil War] that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions; but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effect to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor, in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them, and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded thus far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life. “Now, there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless. “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights." What we call “war” – the common usage – is a symptom of mental illness, the disease of the faulty conception of Time by man. War is the enforcer of slavery of one subject over another, in some men’s insanity of wrongful time. War in that mode, has a winner and a loser. The winner wins the prize of playing master over the loser, after the war is won. What we call “work” – the common usage – is also a symptom of the same mental illness. Its weapons are the clock, and comparative, slave-to-slave performance, otherwise known as “productivity” or “effectiveness.” “Management” is only another term for “slaver.” “Worker” is only another term for “slave.” Both management and worker are slaves to the sick conception of Time. Work is war on two fronts. As a sickness, work attacks the natural object, the only object, Time. Work, in that usage, only serves to cause man to hate Time. Work makes one hate one’s time, to create through imagination other times, that are illusions, or lies against Time. Work makes one’s timing weaker by the minute, destroying a meaningful natural relation between man and Time. Work makes one jealous of another’s time, or usage of it, as a real or imaginary projection. If a subject is comparing his time to another subject’s time, he is forgetting that Time is the only object. The comparison is wrong, on its face. Work makes one conceive of the clock - Time-diseased-man’s representation of the false conception of Time - as iconic. Work causes man to believe, falsely, that he is a slave to time, when Time and man have no such relation. Time is not, as Benjamin Franklin famously proclaimed, money. Cash, is fungible. Time is not. Money is another symptom of Time as a type of mental illness. Money, someone said, is the root of all Evil. The conception of Evil is a false conflation of Time as the only object. Money and evil, when expressed conjunctively as action, are dimensional variations of the same mental disease. Work is such a conflation, a bad utility for linking time and repetition with money, in a master-slave context. War is such a conflation, a bad utility for linking time and violence with money, in a master-slave context. Art is an indefinite article. “Art defined” means “art enslaved.” In either case, art is a utility, in that it reveals how free man is at any time. A time-diseased man defines art in relation to money, work, war, slavery, mastery, and so on. In “contemporary” art, time-disease is the non-subject, and the owner is the only object. Art is falsely consigned to the illusion that to own a thing that is timeless, or of the time, time-based, timely, contemporary, situates the owner as Time Itself. The complexity of this illusion is profound. It is a Big Lie. What are the components of the Big Lie about art? First, art is not owned, not a slave, any more than man is. Art is as essential to man as anything else. Art is no luxury item. No mastery of art is possible. Art has no subject. It is one. Art is not the object. Time is the only object. Art is not about war, or work, or money. Art is not about anything. Art is not something else. Art is not a language, although art and language are both subjective, but so is everything, except Time. For anyone who can see through the Big Lie, which is almost anyone – not all of us can see – the appearance of the master of art, the owner, the great carrier of Time-sickness, is repellant. The pretense of art “charity” is repulsive. In relative physical terms, the Rockefellers of the “art world” are akin to massive oozing boils on a human body. No owner of art, great or not makes no difference, can be adored for giving away art, to the masses of subjects, of slaves, who, due to their enslaved station, could never “own” art, much less give it away. This pantomime is a prime example of bad consciousness. …Which brings us to fear. To see through a lie, and to not identify it as such, and to not identify the lie-maker as a liar as such, is a function of fear. Fear-inducement is a key to slavery, to war, to money, to all the manifestations of time as a form of mental disease. Why would anyone not call Eli Broad, that Big Liar, a big liar? The answer is simple: Fear. > What is art? Art is the representation of Time for, in and by the subject. Who is an artist? Would that be Faulkner or Joyce, or Pound or Pynchon, or …Sorley MacLean? The second is a trick question. The answer is subjective. The real answer is whoever painted the grottoes of Lascaux. Those paintings are art for humans. Those paintings, which are not really separable from each other, are assuredly by humans. Those paintings, executed in the ground, propose a relation between man and earth in Time that is profound, as art.   What is art for? If true time is, as Heidegger claims, 4 dimensional, can the rectangular form for painting actualize 4D, as art, representative of Time? Is that Pollack or Rauch, Noland or …Odd Nerdrum? The second is a trick question. The answer is objective. The real answer is concentric, but the solution is the hypercube. I mean that art unifies the subjective and objective (meaning Time), in Time, as 4D. For anyone who can see, this is a Big Truth, and has nothing to do with war, money, fear or slavery. Whether one see or not, in this instance, is of no matter. The nature of art is assertive, at least in the creating of some new thing. The artistic action is an acceptance of humanity in Time, on an individual basis, for us (in us, by one of us). Any who would deny “authorship,” or however you would prefer to define the individual contribution to making something, is lying, or fear mongering, which is about the same thing, or rather, the symptom of the same disease. No human art is not made by a human. “Art” made by a machine, a creation of man, is another thing, and worth its own discussion. In that construction, we may find the seeds of our journey into a 4D existence (and/or we may find the erasure of ourselves – we don’t know). The artist insists on expressing the art. Art isn’t accidental. No matter what the circumstances, man finds a way to make art. In the death camps of the Nazis, art was made. Many human actions happen without any meaning attaching. Science calls this a reflex. Four-dimension art has a reflexive component, but is not pure reflex. Nothing is pure (objectively) but Time. At this point, Hegel must be acknowledged, for his thinking in Phenomenology of the Mind/Spirit (Geist). I am referring to the content in sections 73-89. Art requires a decision of the artist, which is not sufficient, but is enough to begin. What is choice, but the absence of fear, the presence of freedom? After that, there is only Time, and action, and reflection, and us. At this point, the concept of (time-disease-free) “Gift” must be acknowledged. What there is of a gift in the act of art actualization, maybe, is the partitioning of time, on the one hand, set aside from the accidental or routine, and dedicated for the generating of a specific subject, since Time is really the only object. That subject would be us. That is the gift of art, in Time. We are in Time together. “Don’t be afraid.” “We have a choice.” Life is what it is, and it is more than war, money, mastery and fearful repetition. Life is spirited love, with all that is subjective, including death, vision, birth, sickness, celebration, conflict, aging, sex, eating and the rest of human subjective experience. Humanity, itself, is not alone on this earth. We share earth with other subjects, with which we need not war, enslave, make fearful, and which we need not buy and sell. These other subjects are in Time, too. Art reminds us of this fact. Why is choice not sufficient? Being insufficient, means that completion is not present. Is any thing complete, besides Time? Is any art sufficient, complete? Is any person sufficient and complete? This is the dream of all time, isn’t it?  Choice, itself, is a sufficient dream, and a dream is a form of completeness. Perhaps I am being poetic, here. I am certainly being subjective. The timeless subject is not a finished form. Only the circle is a finished form. This is why the circle is a helpful representation of Time, with many applications. The circle is consistent in its qualities as it migrates through dimensions. The sphere is still Pi. Concentric circles are still Pi.

If geometry can be thought of as migratory, then while the circle and square are passing through the 2nd and 3rd dimensions, should they meet, they will be at “war.” They will be different. Entering the 4-dimension, they will share qualities again, as they do in the 1-dimension. I can only say so much on this subject, truthfully. My knowledge on the matter is incomplete, and insufficient. What is necessary to make art? Art is finite. Nothing is requisite to the finite, for it to be finite, except that it not be Time, itself. Time, though is neither finite nor infinite, which are subjective, anyway. Time, as an only object, exists as both finite and infinite, which only in Time’s instance, is not contradiction. That is why the circle, in its dimensional architectures, is a good representation of Time. When we make a point, we make a circle, and fill it in. Whole and hole, like in Bugs Bunny, when he paints a tunnel in the side of the mountain to escape Coyote, who meets the reality of the material, head-on, and we laugh. It’s not what we see that fools us. It is what we assume about what we see that is problematic. Art is helpful, perceptually, in this aspect, for us. So, to answer the question, in the spirit or Geist of Bugs Bunny, nothing is necessary to make art, except the real, us, art itself – in a word, everything. This everything is subjective, in the Object, and for the purposes of definition, immaterial. Art is not existing; it exists, always and never the same, not here not there, but both at the same time, dimensionally speaking. The logic of art, like Time, is circular. To frame it as less, is to make war on it, to own and enslave it, to apply to it all the attributes of time-as-disease. Perhaps, in this realization, or if you’d rather, conjecture, there is a remedy for the disease, in art. Maybe time-as-mental-illness is only a temporary condition, as we migrate through 2- and 3D perceptual evolutions, towards a 4D (r)evolution, that will bring us back to Lascaux, back to our beginning. Not being whole is no virtue, no aspiration. The void is without a center, although we can peer one at a time into the void, seeking a center for us, as each, and this is evidently not bad as a way to spend one’s time, one’s life, which exists as a span between two brackets. Art extends a presence of the artist past the second bracket, past death. Art therefore is not natural, like a person, but it is natural, like everything else that still exists, after one person dies. Killing on the other hand, is the act of removing something from Time, which is an illusion. Now – and I am playing, now – we, and art, have no need to kill Time, only time in its false conception. Rather than killing time, we should only starve the false conception of it, by devoting ourselves to being in time. Instead of using the language of Command (an acknowledgment of Agamben), and looking backward (archaeology), we should do as President Obama suggests, and look forward to our past beginning. To imagine a thing in certainty, for the purpose of formal realization, entails an unburdening, in the moment, of the self into another container, like pouring water from this glass into that one. An effort is required, like a conscious inhale and exhale, a measured breath, a cycle, of life in one, out of one into life. Breath is mysterious, not artificial, except when the ending of breath is a killing. Because breath is not an invention of man, for life – it just is, or is not. Time is like that, for man. The mystery of Time, for man, is that we cannot make it, like art. We can only express it, like a breath cycle. Post-script: It’s good to be careful about killing things. This is the story of machines.

[afh2011]

More circles.