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[williamalderwick-blog]

Love in the age of Facefuck: Iphigenia Baal’s Merced es Benz

Original unedited text; a poorly edited version appeared in Real Review issue 4, Summer 2017. I guess I always was a little bit in love with Iphigenia Baal. I remember seeing glimpses of a whirlwind careening through parties, pubs, gigs, the backstages of shows with all of London’s seedy nightlife scrolling behind her as if the rolling backdrop of a private theatre, moving like a comet burning its own path through the heavens, a singular orbit governed by laws all its own and beware all those that fall within its thrall.         I recall a hazy cloud of curling hair, gap toothed, cheekbones, eyes that I now want to say were green, deepest hazel green flecked gems. Eyes that burned right through you, unforgivingly. Contemptuously. They had an intensity, a holding you to something, whatever it was. That’s what I remember most, a kind of smouldering raging intensity to truth — the kind that no one can really live with.         She was staff writer at Dazed at a time when, on the dole in a band and sleeping on friends couches or at the studio, I thought being on staff to write was just about the greatest job anyone could have. Somethings never change. And she was simply beautiful. Beauty like in a Greek myth, with something timeless to it, otherworldly, at once raw and serene. All carried with such attitude, an always more hardcore than you kinda attitude. I guess I was struck. Intimidated.         From afar, a distance. I never really knew her, of course, friends of friends of an acquaintance, the occasional party, a couple of words here or there, nodded acknowledgement outside an opening, doorways, corridors, street-level passings by. Stories and rumours and gossips…I guess I was a little bit in love with the idea of Iphigenia Baal. I’m probably wrong about the eyes.         And so a decade later, in another life, Miss Baal’s second novel arrives in a package for me at the office sent by her publisher. Merced es Benz is a love story, a non-fiction novel charting the relationship between the author and one Ben Thomas — seemingly the love of her life.         Bookended by Baal’s own reflective prose, we’re witness to the relationship through a little over eight months of Facebook posts and chats, SMS, BBM, email, and google searches. It’s an exhaustive record of every digital exchange between them. From SMS setting up a date or time to meet, likes on each other’s posts or updates, arguments raging across different handsets, emails, sponsored posts, Merced Es’ google search results into drug networks, police informants, flights to Australia. A transcript of all the links and communiques between them logged in the system run out in chronological order. Objet trouvé. Print All.         It’s all text-speak dialogue, slanged abbreviations, the ping-pong chat messaging we’re conditioned to now. Bite-sized fluid snippets. Situated in the media that now frame our social exchanges, it feels utterly modern. And it reads quickly. Pages are scanned, scrolled rather than read. The layout echoes user interfaces — like the wireframes used to blueprint a webpage design. And yet it’s also antiquated, a rolling-back to an archaic version — Facefuck v1.3.2 circa 2011.         The drama is often in the details. You find yourself checking the timestamps of text exchanges, noting the gaps, the jumps, the ellipses. Merced Es traveling across London to meet Benz, only to be stood up, the messages repeating, ten minutes, twenty minutes, two hours no response, ‘where are you’s turning to anger then rage towards the other who only resurfaces the next morning. Everything feels real, and these are conversations, relationships, exchanges, acts of dickishness and inconsolable rejection that everyone can relate to, has been, played out. It’s London love baby, utterly relatable stories as old as the hills and bitched across spilling pints in pub corners across the capital forevermore.         As a teen, Baal was nicknamed ‘that Mercedes chic’ by her friends for wearing one of the iconic three-pointed-star-in-a-circle emblems snatched from the hood of a fancy MB motor around her neck. In Benz, she finds her completing half. Star-crossed lovers, a real-life Romeo and Juliette for the digital age. Merced es Benz has that touch of fate about it.         Love is a fiction, a story we weave, to entwine us together.         After opening with their first exchange online, Benz responding to a characteristically disdainful ‘Facefuck’ status update from Merced Es, the book jumps ahead to the immediate aftermath of Thomas’s untimely death from a drug overdose in July 2012.         Everything unfolds under the shadow of this tragedy — a death that perhaps if not accidental, if not a suicide, might awfully be wilful. Heartbreak even. A deep sadness pervades the reading of the couple’s exchanges. A constricting fatality born of the knowledge of what is to come. The whole book is a looking back, involving both a deciphering and an occlusion. You read searching for clues why, as well as vainly attempting to forget what you know so as to experience the couple’s shared moments in something approaching an authentic innocence. But death shadows, a constant companion inexorably pulling us back towards the curtain closed.         It’s a story of a doomed love told from the surviving half. A story of survival, of the telling required to ensure the other half lives on, can become full again once more. No longer simply that Mercedes chic.         There is of course the gap here between the author and her avatar or handle, between Ben Thomas and Benz. Merced Es both is and is not Baal. They elide, and this layering, merging, pulling away, leaving out, this différence, is dynamic.         In the same way, all the events and action of their relationship are absent. In between texts or emails we have to guess and imagine what transpired. Read between the lines, and project our own experiences into their exchanges, in order to make sense of the trace. A deciphering of what-must-have-to-have-happened to provoke this.         Thus as one looks for the source, for the reasons why, all we have are the traces of events that have always already happened elsewhere. Events that have been removed, isolated, quarantined. What we read is reductive — reduced to a trace that itself is raw, it’s copy itself, a copy of a copy, and we’re left with the bare bones. We see the outlines of rich media, image boxes with no filler, YouTube links vacant. Absentia in media res. Just like the object of love (Benz) himself.         Severed from both real life and the interconnecting digital web, the printed page is a mausoleum, but doubly here, triply even. Perhaps the only true archive or resting place of our online conversations is precisely offline — otherwise they are still live, active, full of potential to change, be rewritten, re-skinned.         I toy with the idea of looking up the video links on YouTube, copying the URLs out verbatim, for veracity, to establish the mood, to listen to the same track by The Rutts. But somehow that’s not the point. Memory, clouded and somewhat made up, filled in over the gaps, feels more authentic to this story.         Across the transposed Facebook group patter names are scratched out, effaced for anonymity but still recognisable, half legible, if you know what or who you’re looking for. Photographers, stylists, former colleagues from one magazine masthead to another, public house heroines and pinups. It’s a familiar world, that London of the turn of the decade.         Perhaps always in negative, Baal captures the nihilistic decadence of modern urban twenty-something living. Our protagonists are neurotic, directionless within a drifting affluence, never short of a party full of people they loath who are their best friends. Alienation for the trust-fund generation at the end of history. All this… and nowhere to go, nothing to do. Baal’s unforgiving cynicism and rejection of this scene shines through. The tawdry sub-gossip milieu of rich kids idling the world from party to party to beach to island to who cares where next with the touch of overly perfumed Louis XIV court intrigues in their drama and tousling themselves up with all the braggadocio of a rap promo. This centrifugal star-lit social scene is contrasted with hints of stunning dawn views from her 15th floor flat in a Bow housing estate tower block out in deepest East London.         But how much of all this is true I ask myself, is this real? I certainly remember seeing some of these posts on Baal’s Facebook, the letter that got her fired from Dazed, the ‘I fucked… and all I got was this petty vendetta’ t-shirt. Maybe one of those anonymous likes is mine.         Who was Ben? Did the author make him up? If not, what would his friends or family make of who you read about here? Did she write/ make all of this up? Within a couple of quick searches Benz is revealed in the tabloid daily reports of his death. But even these always by a kind of second degree, headlines that the friend of so and so rock star kid it boy died. His death simply isn’t the story, isn’t the news, it’s his associates. Even here we miss him.         I think perhaps Merced es Benz is an attempt to reclaim part of this person lost. A way of saying it did happen, that for all of everything else he was/is/was this, at least to me. The idea and love of a person is surpassed on all sides by them, until that love is all we have left.         How much of this is a transcript? Untouched, unedited, unwritten? To read is to be invited in to be a witness, but of what? All the events here, everything that happens, happens elsewhere, IRL somewhere, off read, off piste, off script.         Merced es Benz is an account from the aftermath of a cataclysm. It’s the act of piecing together how we got here, a looking back and re-reading of archives. It’s the act of the bereft that Baal puts us as readers into, into her shoes.         It’s also the act of writing today. Through technology tracing our every move, thought, exchange, calorie burnt, website visited, link clicked, the great book of being is being written by machines in a language we can’t read. What we mean is our trace, the trail we leave behind through the systems we traverse. In this way the writer is effaced from the writing. Baal tries to take herself out of the equation, effacing herself, by instead reaching towards becoming a pure conduit to this trace of her past. It’s an act of carrying that trace forward — an act of not acting, of not writing but rather of reading — the writer in negative. In absentia.         But in this way we become her — recalling and returning to the aftermath, trying to make sense of the event(s) of our lives. This non-writing — this archaeology, this digging up — this is ours, perhaps all that we have ultimately.         There is a great vulnerability and honesty in Baal’s non-fiction novel. It pulls no punches, about anyone, least of all herself. If we’re sympathetic to her characters, they’re not faultless. We’re welcomed inside the expressions of their neuroses, doubts and rages to each other just as much as any love between them.         And here’s the thing, thinking back I wonder if there is really love in this story, in so far as it’s a story of a failed, doomed romantic encounter. Almost as if the love each of our protagonists held for the other, living outside the book, the traces of its expression and thus their ability to communicate it to each other, couldn’t navigate these mediums between them — perhaps it’s a warning about love being innately atrophied in the age of Facefuck. You’ll only find love in the real world.         Recently I’ve been seeing clips of scorpions and crabs shredding their shells recur on my social feed. There’s something strangely satisfying in watching the disconnecting, withdrawing and pulling away under the hard surface, the reveal of the soft vulnerable pink fresh skin exposed underneath and then the empty husk left behind. The hollow shape of the thing, there but without substance, without content.         I think of this husk in relation to Merced es Benz. There is bravery in letting oneself be so laid bare, opening out the vulnerability and shape of oneself. An affirmation to say a kind of, I once was this.         To be a writer is to share of yourself, invite others to step inside this externalised piece of you. You can only really write what you know, or write to unlearn yourself. Perhaps in reaching for an already externalised trace of herself at the intersections with another person, Baal finds something that enables an authentic intimate encounter with an other for a reader, a kind of genericity that everyone can reach towards.         Ultimately, I think Baal suggests that writing today is neither simply the digital trace nor using that trace as a medium of expression, but lies beyond, within a composition or choreography that primes the possibility for encounter. And against the comforting alienation of our self-reinforcing media bubbles, her book asks how one can encounter the other, perhaps even how can one love today?         Told almost entirely through social media posts and digital communications, about love and about death, Merced es Benz is an uncovering of the past and a trying to come to terms with it; it addressing the nature, and thus future, of writing itself as confronted with technology and the mediations of today; and, for the old Badiouian in me, it is about fidelity to an event, twice over, that of their love encounter, and that of his death; the one nested in the other, for only by faithfully expressing the truth of the first can one face that of the second.         I guess I’m still a little bit in love with Iphigenia Baal, but not in the way I was before. Now, perhaps on her terms, in the way that she invites us readers all into a love that is forever lost, to step into these moments, and feel and watch and recall through the moments of our own lives, what it is to know, to love someone — if not the writer then perhaps her Benz.

Merced Es Benz by Iphgenia Baal is published by Book Works as part of the Semina series guest edited by Stewart Home. Order a copy here.

[williamalderwick-blog]

Beyond the Kitsch Barrier: An Exploration of the Bauhauroque. [On Paul Laffoley]

From Under/current magazine 01 Dynasty September 2008.

Encountering US artist Paul Laffoley for the first time at a Disinformation conference in upstate New York back in 2004 has left an indelible mark on me ever since. Somewhere between Buddha and Back to The Future’s Doc Brown, Laffoley gave a slide show of his works, lecturing with a lion’s paw in place of his left foot on his various theoretical subjects encompassing alternative histories, blue-prints for future human development, Goethe’s Ur-plant re-articulated into genetically engineered living architecture and his design for a working time machine. As collector Norman Dolph puts it in his foreword to Laffoley’s book ‘The Phenomenolgy of Revelation’, Laffoley could be the ‘spokespainter of a con- sciousness yet unborn’.

The problem is that the ideas presented in Laffoley’s science fiction visions are so far removed from established reality that by definition they’re insane. His mandalic architectural blueprints of metaphysical ideas regularly pays homage to and draw on such a diverse range of intellectual ingredients that no one person can possibly be capable of properly evaluating it all: Plato, Goethe, Schopenhaur, Madame Blavatsky, P.D. Ouspensky, Nikola Tesla, H.G Wells, Claude Bragdon, R. Buckminster-Fuller and Teilard de Chardin, to name a very small and under-representative selection. Much of Laffoley’s lack of attention within the mainstream art industry can be put down to this. As Disinformation host Richard Metzger muses, Laffoley’s ‘singular erudition’ and transdisciplinary auto-didacticism, almost entirely self-taught and thus free of academic compartmentalization and categorization, is so over most people’s heads that he’s misunderstood to the point of tragicomedy.

Despite this pervading incomprehensibility, Laffoley’s credentials are kookishly ivy-league impeccable. Educated in Classics and Art History at Brown, he went on to study under the authentic Modernists then teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he was dismissed for ‘conceptual deviancy’ — for proposing a living architecture of grafted and cultivated vegetable chimera as the only logical solution to the issue of low cost housing. He went on to work in the design group for the World Trade Centre at Emery Roth & Sons before apprenticing with visionary architect Fredrick Kiesler and Andy Warhol. His first solo show, in New York City, resulted in the gallery owner appropriating all Laffoley’s works and transposing them to a pot-smoked and hay strewn tent at the Woodstock festival, leaving Laffoley to commandeer a van and drive endlessly round the festival attempting to liberate them. Forming the one-man think-tank Boston Visionary Cell in 1971, Laffoley has dedicated his life to the practice of his singular form of art and philosophy, participating in over two hundred exhibitions both national and international.

Whilst staying at Warhol’s pre-Factory studio on Lexington Avenue in Harlem, an enormous abandoned fire station conversion, Laffoley was tasked with watching a wall of televisions running night and day like in the Bowie film The Man Who Fell to Earth. As the new guy he got the worst spots, from two in the morning until dawn. All that was broadcast at that time in those days was a series of test patterns. Laffoley thought these test patterns “looked pretty much like Tibetan mandalas” and compared them to Warhol’s own screen print multiples as in the Campbell’s Soup Cans: “once you set up diagonals, circles, put in multiple images you have Tanka or Tibetan religious paintings”. Warhol completely rejected this connection between religious metaphysical imagery and post-modern representations of our iterated cultural landscape in relation to his own work, but this offers us an essential clue in attempting to understand what Laffoley’s work could mean for us today. Laffoley’s gallerist, Douglas Walla of Kent Gallery, New York, uses the metaphor of operating systems to describe his work. Whilst Laffoley’s near autistic totalizing world view could be misunderstood as outsider art, Walla contends that it is actually the very pinnacle of conceptual art. The constantly running televisions enabled Warhol to see what was filling the mass overmind – the contents of the zeitgeist’s self-image – which he could then take as the contents for his own Pop Art. The test patterns however concerned not the contents but the structure of this collective self-presentation via television; they were used to tune your set to pick up the broadcast image. Laffoley’s ‘operating systems’ could be thought of in the same way, as test images for attuning our mental software to a new frequency.

This notion of existential software or metaphysical cartography is perhaps most apparent in works such as Dimensionality or The Parturient Blessed Morality  of Physiological Dimensionality where Laffoley proposes a theory of dimensionality at once divergent from not only our immediate experience and mundane ideas but also ground-breaking scientific research. Laffoley’s rejects the multi-dimensional String Theory of physicists such as Brian Greene or Lisa Randal as “like looking through a gigantic cosmic filing system”. For Laffoley scientific theories of dimensionality fail to get “a sense of what its like to be alive in there”, and fail to think temporality fully – in terms of possibility, manifestation and types of energy – and hence get stuck with the single catch-all word ‘time’. Laffoley illustrates ‘Hyparxis’, the sixth dimension, through the role that anticipation plays in conversation. Anticipating the meaning that the other person is attempting to communicate to you determines their actuality, which of the possible manifestations or courses of the conversation become real; “completing possible manifestations for another person… you recognize you are both on the same page as the cliché goes”. Hyparxis or “the completion of being” involves the actualization of every possibility, or an infinite number of compresent universes all on top of each other and collectively manifesting every configuration of being possible. An essential aspect to Laffoley’s project is the challenge that these higher-dimensions pose and whether we can coherently think about them. As Laffoley points out, the consciousness living within this realm would be as different from us as our own is to that of an amoeba doing the back-stroke in a Petri dish. As the example of our limited conceptualization of temporality shows for Laffoley, “we have no nomenclature, I am trying to build a nomenclature to describe this because it explores possibilities and manifestations”. In effect, Laffoley’s work offers us potential cartographies of reality and the logics underpinning it on a far vaster scale than anything else we’re used to; a change of perspective capable of changing we way we live.

Perhaps  Laffoley’s  most  famous  painting  is  Thanaton III. In contrast to most of his other work, blueprints for unmade devices or metaphysical cartographies, Thanaton III is the machine itself. Laffoley describes it as a psycho-tronic device, meaning that the very structure and composition of the image utilizes the activity of looking at it on the part of the viewer to impart knowledge to them. In order to understand this we need to turn to Laffoley’s theory of the epistemic ladder. Briefly, Laffoley sees a hierarchy in the mutually interdependent relation between the subject and object of knowledge in terms of which is active and which is passive. On the lowest rung of the ladder, that of the sign, “the knower is in control and that which is known is completely controlled”; the knower is active in relation to a completely passive object. As we move up the rungs the relationship balances out and then inverts, until we get to the symbol where “the knower is passive and the knowledge is active, you reach a point where a single occasion of knowing could not be willfully released by you. In the true symbol, the environment has nothing to do with it at all. The knowledge is intransigent. You’re in rapture and you have to be pulled out of the epistemic structure by an environmental entity. That’s the way you could describe the knowingness of a mystical experience”.

Thanaton III invokes this symbolic potency through a deceptively simple optical technique. Standing about an inch away from painting with your hands touching it on the pads, you stare into the eye embedded into the great pyramid. That close to the canvas your eyes cross. Unable to sustain this, they defocus and wander outwards before refocusing back onto the black sphere in front of you. Each time your eyes de- then re-focus they effectively and unconsciously suck in more and more of the information coded both geometrically and textually into the surrounding imagery. After a while you stop seeing the image before you at all and start what could be called daydreaming. However, it’s a ‘daydream’ encoded and structured by Laffoley; the viewer is passively consuming the informational matrix actively provided by the image. Laffoley likens this to medieval illumination: “where you look at something that bypasses your conscious critical powers, and you have to absorb the ideas”. For Laffoley this image ‘downloads’ the information into the viewer through by-passing their standard routes of cognitive consumption and digestion.

Laffoley’s short-circuiting of disciplines and theories means that it’s almost impossible to think of his work in terms of the standard discourses and narratives of art history. His own typically divergent view of art history centres on the three phases of modernism: Heroic Modernism proper, post-modernism, and what he calls the ‘Bauhauroque’. For Laffoley, post-modernism began with the demolition of the Igoe-Pruitt housing project in 1972. The multi-award winning project crystallized modernist utopic visions in its attempt to solve the housing crisis but “exploded in their faces because no one could stay there”. Its demolition in turn crystallized the inherent flaws and failures of the modernist project itself. The Bauhauroque, “combining the heroic Modernism of the German Bauhaus, with its aspiration towards technical Utopia, and the exalted theatricality of the Italian Baroque, in which an exuberance of form and illusion serve to express the mystical union of art and life”, in turn was inaugurated by the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the demolition of the twin towers. Whilst Heroic Modernism penetrated the sublime barrier characterizing Romanticism – incorporating the sublimity of confrontation with the absolute and the phenomenology of eternity into consciousness – we now face the kitsch barrier and the connected aesthetic of zombies, or the relation of thought to the undead. Loose comparisons could be made with Slavoj Žižek's engagements with the psychoanalytic undead of the lamella; or the immortality of the subject to an eternal truth for Alain Badiou. Through post-modernism, for Laffoley, the kitsch took over and became ubiquitous. The Bauhauroque and “zombie aesthetics [are] the attempt to penetrate the kitsch barrier. Kitsch is the visual equivalent of a zombie, because it is a reanimated form of life, like losing your soul and then repossessing your body with the same soul. You have to get past that and you have to recognize what it is that you are getting past, because otherwise you end up just repeating yourself, like people who don’t understand history are doomed to repeat it”.

Laffoley gives examples of cultural figures who seem to lack the ingredient of consciousness, behaving like un-conscious automatons – such as Elvis in the year before his death, the current state of Michael Jackson or ‘the culturally ubiquitous Andy Warhol for his whole life’ – to explain how zombie aesthetics operates: they “exaggerate positions so that people can observe that in a way that’s never been done before and that opens up possibilities for people. The function that people who indulge in zombie aesthetics perform is that they give you an inoculation, like getting inoculated with a dead virus because these people are working with death themselves. Like recognizing there is a portal to something new, they are creative road signs to the future”. Laffoley likens this inoculation to the effect that Jules Verne’s Man on the Moon had in relation to the Apollo landings. Verne got the sensibility of going to the moon so spot on that when it actually happened the actual surprise had been muted to the point that some people believed it wasn’t real: “the shock of the new was over”. That Laffoley can easily be equated with outsider art comes from the kitsch nature of his images: “all outsider art is pure kitsch, done without any satiric content and just living in it completely. That is what in essence ends with the Bauhauroque”.

The ‘operation’ of Thanaton III – a touchstone for Laffoley’s entire body of work and a distillation of his theories – could thus be seen as purporting to put one into the state of a zombie, rendered totally passive by the inversion of the epistemic relation between the knower and that which is known, and hence penetrating the kitsch barrier. Interestingly Laffoley suggest that the same symptoms can be produced by an overexposure to visual kitsch in the ‘worlds of bad taste’ such as Las Vegas, Times Square, Graceland, Disneyland and the entire of Switzerland (Botox also produces the visual symptoms of undead zombie-ness, if only on the surface).

Laffoley makes an art form of metaphysical and conceptual speculation, continually pitching us into unbelievable worlds, pushing our incredulity and testing our abilities to think of reality in radically different ways like an instructor of transcendental yoga. He believes true science fiction died in 1955 with Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and that after that the genre “became ad hoc research and development for companies” – think the communicator from Star Trek and the mobile phone in your pocket. In this sense, we could see Laffoley’s ‘fictions’ as mapping out the radical contours or terrain of the scene of our future thought and consciousness. He believes that all knowledge is a mix of the physical and the metaphysical; conceiving the world in terms of spirit, matter or the opposition of the two is incorrect – rather “there are degrees of characteristics from one to the other”, and whilst our analogies and grasps at conceiving the world inherently fail, “each time it leaves in its wake a nomenclature that gives you the memory of having come up against a problem and from which you can eventually forge on”.

kentfineart.net paullaffoley.net

[williamalderwick-blog]

Genesis: Breyer P-Orridge

Self-styled cultural engineer, seminal performance artist, musician, poet and 'cult' leader, and someone whose life has always been lived as a work of art, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge was always going to be nigh impossible to adequately introduce. Whether one focuses on the legendary Throbbing Gristle, being decried as a 'wrecker of civilization' or the unfounded Tabloid accusation of being a child abusing Satanist that ran him out of the country, the performance works of COUM Transmissions or the cosmetic surgeries redefining identity and gender in the Pandrogeny project, far too much will always be left out. One thing is certain, not least in name alone, Genesis is one of the most Biblical entities active today.

Now resembling some bleached blonde crusty biker's grandmother, despite the final termination of TG after the sad passing of Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson, Genesis has lost none of her cultural resonance or import. Two films, several exhibitions, future PTV3 shows and a series of poetry books in the works promise to introduce Genesis as a matriarchic icon of the 'counter' culture for yet another generation.

In many ways, P-Orridge is one of our last link to the beat generation of William S. Burroughs and Gysin. Beyond personal friendships with Burroughs and other luminaries, P-Orridge has lived out their ideas and ideals unforgivingly, from the cut-up to treating language as an alien virus, all under an ethos of continual change and of individual empowerment as a spiritual quest. She links us back to a 'true' counterculture, from a time before the ubiquity of capital flattened everything into the shallows of mainstream pop.

Perhaps Genesis' last great project and a culmination of each of those coming before, outwardly the Pandrogeny project saw Genesis and her wife, Lady Jayne, having a series of matching cosmetic surgeries, breast implants and reductions, cheek re-structurings, in order to look the same. Until the tragic, untimely death of Jayne in Genesis' arms in October 2007, Pandrogeny sprang from the deepest, personal love and connection with the couple attempting to break sex, gender and identity to ultimately forge a new form of being from their union.

These themes of gender and identity carry back to the performances of COUM Transmissions, with Genesis and her then porn-model girlfriend Cosey Fanni Tutti, often exploring the interchangeability of binary gender roles. While COUM Transmissions gained increasing recognition in the art scene, earning their infamous Prostitution retrospective at the ICA in '76, the group became increasingly frustrated at the safe and cozy confines of art galleries. With Throbbing Gristle they sought to see if their strategies, practices, and perhaps most importantly, ideas of finding liberation through breaking taboos could be externalised and made into public, shared rituals via the spectacle of music. TG’s ‘avant-garde freak out’ and experimental noise enacted sonic warfare on themselves and their audiences. Originators of industrial music, pioneers of DIY self-publishing, by turns critically acclaimed and ridiculed as they waged 'nothing short of a total war', TG terminated their mission on the eve of commercial/mainstream success to remain the cult band of the next two decades. In this hiatus before TG regrouped, Genesis pioneered hypadelic pop and acid house with Psychic TV and through sister 'cult' the Temple of Psychic Youth, disseminated techniques of self-discovery, empowerment and liberation from conditioning to a new audience through the second summer of love and beyond. This is the context in which Pandrogeny needs to be seen.

It is interesting that this entity, born Neil Megson in Manchester in 1950, refers to 'Genesis' as an avatar and thus highlights the extent to which identity is a construct and a projection outwards into the various social and cultural spheres of conditioning we find ourselves embedded within. Throughout every project and artistic practice P-Orridge has engaged with she has always problematized and challenged what has heretofore been held as immutable, and aimed at exposing the contingencies that we often overlook as a means to advance our freedom. With Pandrogeny, Genesis and Lady Jayne Breyer P-Orridge attempted to reach beyond the confines of our gendered bodies, our times and places, towards a higher level of being and a liberated identity.

Within imagined scenes of our tele-connected worlds of the future, as our identities and personas expand exponentially outwards through the profiles, platforms, and people we engage with, as the accelerating changes to our world push exponentially onwards and the crushing event horizon of the future bears down upon us as a singularity, as our increasing symbiosis with the entire digitized memory of the species loosens our grip on the present and our ubiquitous tele-presence loosens our grip on space, in worlds beyond gender, race or perhaps even age, P-Orridge offers us a simple question: that there, are we not all Pandrogyn?

On being a cultural engineer Once was somebody asked me to sum up in a few words what it was that we really did. We’d been looking at the Muzak Corporation at the time and they had a sign up in the foyer of their building, ‘a concept in human engineering’, which sounded really 1984 and sci-fi. We thought that we do is really ‘cultural engineering’. It was not carefully thought through when we first improvised the idea, but it made sense on various levels. You could argue that, for example with Throbbing Gristle deciding to call our music ‘industrial music’, we inserted that concept into the prevailing popular culture and quite literally changed it forever. 35 years on and it’s a huge industry, globally. It all began with a dialogue in a squat in Hackney in 1975. The work we do is not to just create art, put our name on it and go, “Look at me I’ve made this beautiful, original object”. Our interest is more in how to interface with and explore the prevailing culture in order to destabilise it, adjust it or reveal the underlying messages inside. That’s why we tend to work collectively and with long-term concepts.

On the control process Brion Gysin used to say that the cut-ups happened at a time, in what he called a ‘hotspot’, when the Beat hotel was there with him, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac sometimes and all these other people. The seeds at work all occurred in that year in this rundown hotel. That happens at certain points in the culture; you get hotspots. What we try and do is almost scry or put feelers out to see where it is shifting and changing, what’s happening in the way people perceive everything, to get us to the control point. Popular culture to us is part of the architecture of control and is used to co-opt and emasculate subversion. As an activist from the 60s, to me you can’t just stand by and be a spectator, you have to be involved in that process, try and see if it can be made potent again, if there’re ways to create change. To do that you have locate where the pressure is that makes people censor themselves. Culture and control are linked in self-censorship, now more than ever. In this bogus concept, the art market, where things sell for millions and millions, it has nothing to do with trying to further or expand human consciousness and our perception of what we are as beings. For us, art should always ultimately be about human-kind and how to change the species in the end to be less destructive and more constructive.

On the ‘Genesis P-Orridge’ avatar Back in 1965, Neil Andrew Megson thought, “What would it be like to take Warhol’s ideas of the superstar and 15 minutes of fame even further, to consciously create a character that one would then insert into the popular culture? If that character had none the usual requisites to succeed in any of the media they chose to be active in, could it be done? Could somebody with no art training and no financial backing, no social network or free masonry, actually create an icon of themselves that would eventually become a vibrant part of the culture, that could become at least a semi celebrity.” So Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, as we are now, was an artwork created by this other person. One of the weirdest questions is, ‘Does Neil still exist?’ or ‘Did Neil create this monster that has completely devoured him?’ So we are somebody else’s artwork and that’s a strange thought.

It’s almost like trying to imagine what happened before there was anything, before the Big Bang? Nothing. Your brain can’t do it. “Where’s that guy that invented me?” Because we exist so completely in the ‘Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’ construct, we rarely remember there was a Neil.

On the genius factor Learning about art at the beginning from reading books about Dada, Surrealism, and Andy Warhol, all of them struck me as important in that these were all people who didn’t see any separation between performance and fine art, life and art. It was all one thing. Anything could be art, anything could be life and the way that you lived your life was also the art.  That was ingrained in me from the very beginning and is still our modus operandi. The performances in COUM were about looking for the ‘genius factor’, as we called it, that everybody can find a way to be creative and do something of worth. It’s just a matter of opening them up to believe they have that possibility. We had a big room called ‘the costume room’, and in it we had characters that we’d developed, partly in conversations, sometimes when you’re just all sat around joking. Basically there would be an outfit to wear with each of these characters. Each Friday night people would assemble at the commune, pick or be assigned a character and then for the whole weekend they would be that character, all the time. They all had to stay in character, even if they didn’t agree with anything that that character represented, which was part of the exercise. It was amazing, it was really liberating to have to be someone else and to suddenly realise how much of life is the projection of characters and symbols of what we want to be seen and perceived as. We were deconstructing social perceptions and social expectations. Therefore if you could take off your outfit and put on another one and become someone else, that means you can be anyone you want to be and you can always change again. That was the way we were trying to go, to make everything malleable, that nothing is fixed. Nothing has to be the way it was yesterday, you can constantly reinvent, in fact it’s healthy to reinvent.

On the external deconstructions of Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV and T.O.P.Y. After about three years we moved to London, it was basically just me and Cosey, and the COUM performances then changed. It was just two people and it became about male/female. An important part of the story is that it suddenly became about those dynamics and gender. What is acceptable and what is not acceptable? Who makes the rules about sexuality? And if there are rules, are they viable and reasonable? Or are they unreasonable? If they’re taken away, what’s damaged, what’s not damaged? By the end, COUM was very much about personal space and one’s deeper personality, not the one you project to the public but the one that you deal with inside yourself. As you probably know, it got quite extreme by the end because we were pushing ourselves to say, “Is there point beyond?” Do we get to a point where it’s both not there and it’s there? Where is that boundary again, where it becomes impossible to describe?

We were in a pub talking to some local old guys having a beer about COUM and one guy said, “It’s all very well Genesis, but look around you, how many people in this pub would understand what the fuck you’re talking about?” And we sort of went, “Yeah you’re right.” He said, “You should do something that anyone in here could understand, find a way to do it where they would understand.” And that was the beginning of TG, to take it out of the elite, safe environment that we’d ended up in with art galleries. We could have carried on being comfortable but that wasn’t the idea, the idea was to keep pushing. So we decided to see if we could apply our techniques and our strategies to that idea of having a band, because a band goes out in public and has all these people listening. What would happen if we could somehow create the ‘anti-band’ but make it work? And that was Throbbing Gristle. It was very much about taking the message out further to the public. Then, of course, with Psychic TV and T.O.P.Y. we took it even further because we now had people’s attention, and we took them back in: “How am I built? How does my character work? Where is my sexuality, can it be used so that I can reach my maximum potential?” The same themes come through all the time, in all the projects, especially in the way that they’re constructed and perceived in terms of their impact on the current status quo, in terms of culture.

On Pandrogeny and breaking gender In a way Pandrogeny is the ultimate project. It’s the refined elixir of all the others. We stepped back, looked and realised that amongst everything no matter how many overlays of media attention and glamour, we were trying to find out how does a personality work? How much control do we have over that? Can it be rebuilt so it’s exactly what we would like to be? That’s the constant search, to become a different being. Pandrogeny was an inevitable result of all of the other projects. It’s the last one, basically, that’s the last project personally.

On liberation as political and spiritual It’s true that the personal liberation at the heart of our art and ideas is a mixture of spiritual and political. But it’s not political with a big ‘P’, it’s innately political to look for utopian alternatives and utopia is a spiritual quest. For me all art is and has to be about the quest for perfection, for peace, for ultimate kindness and compassion. Even though some of the work we’ve done might seem to be jarring, it’s been to jar people into an awareness that things aren’t quite as easy and comfortable as they seem and that they should actually activate themselves in order to change the way things are. But they can, that’s the thing. We always add, “You can do it, and if you don’t believe us look! We’ve done it and we didn’t have any money, etc.” We did it through sheer will power and through sharing, through sharing with other people and having their inputs as well. Basically everything we do is the sum total of everyone we know at any given moment.

It’s not about the fabulous artist, it’s about what got done and did it work? Is it a functional option for people? It’s an almost messianic thing, to want to save the human-kind from itself. It’s always an enigma because at some points you think this is such a stupid species, still fighting, maiming and killing after thousands of years… And yet it’s also a wonderful species, miraculous. Really what’s always behind it all is the search for a way to live within what appears to be reality, doing the minimum damage and inspiring the maximum creativity.

On the Sacred We hold the potential of humanity sacred, the idea that every human being really is the owner of their own universe and capable of what we would think of as the ‘miraculous’. Everybody truly has the potential to expand even beyond the physical into pure consciousness. That that’s really what our, if we have a function as beings at all, that’s what it is. It’s for us to keep on searching for and expanding knowledge, wisdom and ideas, consciousness. The obsession with physicality and the material, consumption, endless productivity and growth is all... it’s base material, it’s a base form of existence. Personally for me, the ultimate dream for me and Lady Jayne, always was once our bodies were dead to still have enough sense of being to together become one new consciousness, the combination of both of us, and exist throughout eternity, maybe other dimensions and other universes… Who knows? But just to become one.

www.genesisbreyerporridge.com

Photos by Lukas Wassmann

www.lukaswassman.com

[williamalderwick-blog]

‘Behold, Dis!’: The Fall of Salò

“Before being a death camp, Auschwitz is the site of an experiment that remains unthought today, an experiment beyond life and death in which the Jew is transformed into a Muselmann and the human being into a non­-human. And we will not   understand what Auschwitz is if we do not first understand who or what the Muselmann is­ if we do not learn to gaze with him upon the Gorgon.” (Agamben, p.52)

Pier Pablo Pasolini’s film Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma updates Sade’s tale of debauched libertinage to the last days of fascist Italy. The film’s structure, loosely based on Dante’s Inferno, follows the progressive escalation of exploitation and violence enacted by Pasolini’s fascist­ libertines through three ‘circles’ of descent into hell. Through this paper we shall trace the progressive corruption and descent of Salò in pursuit of its inexplicable core. Establishing an interpretative framework for the film through considering Pasolini’s conception of cinema as the reproduction of reality we shall articulate the dehumanization of the fascists’ victims and the ‘refinements’ of the fascists’ architectonic. Finally drawing on Primo Levi and Agamben’s discussions of the Muselmann of Nazi concentration-­extermination camps, we shall articulate the final ambiguously un­(re)­presented horror in the closing scenes of the film.

Ante­-Inferno:

The ‘Ante-­Inferno’, the first division of the film, is a space of transition from the external world of the viewer to Pasolini’s nightmarish dream­-world in which we witness the inauguration of its logic. The film’s opening shot gazes out from the shore across water into an indiscernible horizon shrouded in blinding brightness, signifying the infinite depths of possibility within the blank (inconsistent and unstructured) celluloid. A pan shot comes in to land and the signpost, Salò. Everything that follows transpires under this primordial sign, this naming of the event. In a darkened room , silhouetted by the light of a window behind them, Pasolini’s four fascists (Duke, Judge, President and Bishop) sit like elemental watchtowers of authority around a table. With the film’s first words a field of power opens up between their mutual recognitions, its language and logic, the state of Salò, emerges enshrined in the book of rules they sign.

Bishop: “All things are good when taken to excess”.

These words, the closing lines of the scene of Salò’s birth, condense the fascist logic to an aphorism or maxim. From this point on the film is locked into an increasingly reductive cycle of excessive consumption. After the signing comes a dreamlike, beautiful pastoral shot reminiscent of an ‘old master’ painting. A riverbank is near perfectly reflected in a stream, merging with both banks as it curves off into the unimagined recesses of the image. The water/screen is at once surface and depth; a looking glass or mirror reflecting everyday existence, yet through which a surreal ‘counter­world’ can be seen. Fundamental to Pasolini’s way of seeing reality and of reading books was the belief “that the real structure of a work is its linguistic structure (in the sense of stylistics)” (Pasolini, p.181). Pasolini distanced cinema from literature and other art forms, such as painting or theatre, by claiming that instead of evoking reality through imitation or mime “cinema reproduces reality… express[ing] reality by means of reality” (Pasolini, p.20). The pastoral image presents as indiscernible the real and the symbolic, presentation and re­presentation. Between the real of the shoreline and its symbolic reflection in the water (the mirror or screen of the symbolic, of film generally, and of Pasolini’s film Salò itself), the line of indiscernibility recedes into the image, passing into the infinite of a vanishing point upstream. In light of this indiscernibility between cinema’s stylistic re­production and the structures of reality we can posit a tripartite referentiality to ‘Salò’. Firstly within the film: to the site of events, the villa itself as the architectonic power�� construct created by the fascists according to the dictates of their logic; and, to the local exterior environment within which Salò is erected, only encountered in the ante­inferno. The collapse of the gap separating real and symbolic in the pastoral scene suggests a final layer of referentiality: outside the film, to the reality of the viewer.

For Pasolini the ‘potential and hypothetical language of cinema’ is abstracted from local cultural specifics such as fashion, language or dialect. Instead cinema’s reproduction of reality tout court corresponds to the trans­national and trans­class, taking “the form of ‘the whole of civil society’” (Pasolini, p.11)2. However, the universality or genericity implied seems to conflict with ‘reproduction��� taken in a strict sense; surely one­ to ­one replication within a finite medium would fail to capture reality’s infinite complexity? Pasolini resolved this tension with a subtle inversion, claiming that reality can be seen as ‘cinema in nature’, and subsequently that “cinema is the written language of that reality as language” (Pasolini, p.20). By ‘reality as language’ Pasolini referred to the social structures shaping our experience and giving it meaning. He thus believed in a homology or correspondence between these social structures and the stylistic structure of cinema. For Pasolini Salò’s ‘ideological basis’ is the equivalence of sadism and politics, that under both human beings become mere objects. The stylistic structure of Salò, symbolizing “in a visionary way, the relationship between exploiter and exploited” (Bachman, p.40), thus reproduces the (neo)­capitalistic logic he is attempting to revoke: “universal equivalency: [that] everything can be exchanged” (Copjec, pp.226­227)3. It is this stylistic structure that we will trace through the film.

As the population of Salò make their way towards the villa in which they’ll reside one of the male victims, from a subversive family, jumps from the truck and flees along a stream to be shot on the bank. Any subversives who try to escape subjection to the fascists’ power are killed. Within the first circle, to prevent any subsequent attempts the garroted body of a subversive girl, falling to  the floor when the chapel doors are opened, is displayed to the assembly in the Hall of Orgies. There is a surreal contiguity of the storyteller Vaccari, the body of the murdered girl and a religious icon of the Virgin Mary with child. For a moment Vaccari stands directly in front of the icon, concealing the body, suggesting a perverted connection between the storyteller and the sacred. However, as Vaccari walks back and forth across the shrine, intermittently exposing the dead body, the religious image of the Virgin is inverted. Vaccari’s ‘child’ is dead, sacrificed or sold to the warped logic in operation. Death lies cold on the threshold of the shrine, emphasizing the Judge’s last words of the ante­Inferno reading out the law of Salò.

Judge:  “… the slightest religious act will be punished by death”.

These final words before entering the Inferno, inscribed upon the gates of hell, exclude more than religious comfort from Salò. Less rules than a program for living, structuring activities and imposing a routine, Salò’s dictates definite the logic of existence as subjected to the authority of the fascists. The religious icon of the Virgin functions as a cipher for any other ideology to which the victims might flee seeking respite; thus any act not in accord with fascist ideology is ultimately fatal. In Salò the choice is simple, conspire or be consumed.

The first circle of Salò opens with the Vaccari preparing herself in a mirror. Ensconced within the architecture and framework of the constructed state the previously natural reflective surface is now artificial, en­framed. Copjec notes that this switch from the exterior to the interior of the state is marked by “the replacement of the realistic setting structured through symbolic relations by a counterworld in which contractual ties are all that bind” (Copjec, p.226)4. Throughout the film Pasolini makes subtle use of background noise and sound effects. The first notable use is that of a thunderstorm that rages outside Salò during the first wedding within Inferno. The rumblings of thunder seem to signify the disquiet of nature at the un­holy­ness of the union and the unnatural ‘meddling’ or involvement of the state. From the very start of the circle of shit, as we watch the second storyteller Maggi preparing herself in a mirror, bomber­planes can be heard droning overhead. As with the shift from natural to artificial reflective surfaces, as we descend further into the interior of the state the natural sounds of the thunderstorm are transfigured into a mechanical drone. This sound, an ‘intense humming of evil’, is continued in the central scatological scene of this circle. Maggi begins her second story with mention of killing her mother, prompting the Duke to interrupt. As he denies that ‘one owes anything to one’s mother’ the shot cuts to the upset face of Renata, a victim whose mother drowned trying to save her from capture.

Duke: “Must we be grateful for her having pleasure with a man?”

The sound of the bombers returns as if summoned by the un­natural logic within these words. The sound of Renata’s tears irrupt from off camera in response to the Duke’s profession of ‘profound pleasure’ at his mother’s death at his own hands. Learning of the girl’s sorrow and realizing his opportunity to re­enact the scatological stories of Maggi, the Duke beckons her towards him, offering to ‘console’ her. Forcibly stripped by the collaborators, one of whom triumphantly waves her dress above his head as a totem, Renata wails for mercy as the drone of the bombers reaches its apex.

Duke: “This howling is the most exciting thing I’ve ever heard”

In the cacophony before us the drone of the machine(s) becomes synonymous with the suffering of the female victim; the sounds almost indistinguishable. The Duke proceeds to the head of the table, stooping behind it with a look of almost prayer­-like contemplation as he produces the excrement Renata is to consume. With the drone growing faint, the Duke beckons her forward in a mock paternal tone. Under the fascinated gaze of the fascists and their guards, Renata’s supplicant, despondent figure slowly crawls like a dog towards the mess on the floor. All we can hear is her sobs and tears. As the Duke tells her to eat the drone of bombers gives way to the sound of bombs or artillery exploding. We are presented with a long static shot, like that of the generic image of the amorous couple in the preceding circle to be discussed later. In these shots the scene is reduced, the static background receding into universality as the characters themselves are condensed to minimal isolated gestures. The choreography of these gestures attains an unprecedented significance as they become the sole focal points of the image. The Duke slowly extends a fork towards her; she takes it slowly. As he screams with rage at her hesitation, ordering her to eat, the explosions grow louder, closer. The din reaches a syncopated crescendo as, gagging and sobbing, in abject floods of tears, Renata eats.

The storytellers’ tales function to arouse the passions and stimulate the imaginative transgressions of the fascists whilst simultaneously educating and training their victims, turning them into ‘first class whores’.

Judge: “Nothing is more contagious than evil.”

Everything subjected to fascist logic is infected with and ultimately corrupted by it. As we progress further down the Inferno’s spiral, the contractual power­structures of the state’s logic invade further aspects of its subjects’ lives. In relation to the invasion of love Pasolini comments that the fascist logic is,

“a form of exploitation, a dictatorship of conformity…. a misuse in the service of power and of the exploitation of the human body. The body is forced ­sold­ into a position which dehumanizes its  soul.”   (Bachmann, p.44)

The refinement of the state’s domination, control and seizure of its subjects through degradation to complete de­humanization and eventual consumption, occurs through the restriction of the fascists’ impulses to singular gestures of transgression which are then extended and applied across the entire situation.

Bishop: “Because we’re not their masters, even the most basic manias derive from a basic principal of refinement… it’s a question of delicacy”

The methodology of this logic of refinement is articulated in the Duke’s proclamation during the sexual awakening of Renata and Sergio,

Duke:  “We fascists are the only true anarchists Naturally, once we’ve become masters of the state true anarchy is that of power However, look at their obscene gestures, like deaf­mute language, with a code none of us can break, no matter how great our power. There is nothing to be done. We must restrict our impulses to a single gesture”

There are two key aspects of Salò’s fascist logic and its operation. Firstly, there is the relation to an obscene excess of humanity. This ‘genuine feeling’, exposed in the un­breakable code or ‘deaf­mute language’ of the victim’s climatic gestures and in the amorous couple, threatens to escape Salò’s logic which respond by ever increasing and ever more refined attempts at domination, suppression and control5. Secondly, the fascists only derive pleasure and excitement when this ‘inner kernel’ of the victims is exposed at the apex of its intensification in suffering. For Copjec, it is the sight of “…the other’s free decision to identify himself with the obscene, unutilizable facticity of his pain” (Copjec, p.223), of the other choosing to stop rising above the pain and deciding instead to submerge himself in it, that arouses the sadist’s excitement. During Renata’s scatological scene the Duke is excited by the howling resulting from the collusion of the mechanical drone of state power operating upon her and the wailed suffering that it extracts. The first example of refinement occurs during the ‘Manias’ wedding in which the state’s interference in and mediation of sexual contact is extended from the ‘singular gesture’ of the couple’s sexual awakening and applied to the whole population as the Duke molests everyone present (victims, collaborators, militia and storytellers alike). Another example is the banquet of the second wedding of Sergio, this time directly to fascist authority in the form of the Judge, which inaugurates a general economy of excrement consumption extended from Renata’s scatological abuse. Maggi explain how the production process was refined through the careful selection of ‘food’ producers and the use of diets leading to diarrhoea and ‘specialist tastes’.

Throughout the circle of manias love is progressively corrupted by fascist logic. At the end of the meal scene a (male) mannequin is brought out upon which the girls will be taught how to masturbate for a masturbation lesson. A cut­away to the serene gaze into the yonder upon the mannequin’s ‘face’ as a girl is forced to manually ‘pleasure’ ‘him’ brilliantly emphasizes the dehumanization of sexual relations. The intervention of the state, its super­vention over and above nature, renders one’s sexual partner abstract and unreal, an object or image (to be) constructed by the state. In the subsequent masturbation scene sexual awakening is ritually imposed upon two victims (Renata and Sergio) as they are forcibly and homosexually pleasured by agents of the state. The ‘couple’ is then ‘privileged’ with the first wedding within Salò. Whilst all the other victims are naked, the couple is dressed during the ceremony­ temporarily, perhaps mockingly, recognized at the level of the fascists. In the following deflowering scene the fascists themselves impose themselves upon and between the sexual couple. Stripped and flung to the other end of the hall the couple hesitantly edge towards an embrace under the imperatives of the fascists. A rare beautiful and tender moment emerges within the film as the couple share their first kiss. Pasolini presents a timelessly generic image of two young lovers together for the first time. However, almost immediately the fascists interrupt. However, the dreamlike universality of the fledgling amorous encounter is shattered as the cold hard ‘reality’ of Salò reasserts itself. As authority interjects the sexual couple are alienated; separated and isolated by the fascists coming between them. Interposing themselves between the couple in the consummation of the ‘union’ the fascists take over and corrupt any ‘genuine’ feeling of the couple; thus denying any possibility of human contact unmediated by the state6.

In the early pastoral scene, on the edge of the newly inaugurated state, to the sounds of bubbling water, birds chirping and babies in the distance, we encounter rouge youth being seized by the state and conscripted to form its rank and file body. These conscripted collaborators, briefly encountered outside of the apparatus of state power, contrast with those destined to be victims. From the very start the victims are objectified and examined as if specimen in a glass box; like that into which the fascists’ votes are cast in the first ‘Selektion’ scene. This motif is immediately repeated and intensified with the next group of boys to be examined lining up inside a glass­ house veranda. The victims’ dehumanization continues when, in response to a tale by Vaccari, the fascists reduce them to animals, to dogs. The victims naked, scrabbling on all fours, are led by the collaborators into the hall. They are forced to beg for food, to eat it off the floor and are petted by the fascists, who rejoice at this degradation,

Duke: “It is when I see others degraded that I rejoice, knowing it is better to be me than the scum of ‘the people’. Whenever men are equal, without that difference, happiness cannot exist.”

By the closing scene of this circle all the victims are naked, stripped of all social significations; with all identification and individuation burnt in the eyes of the state. Vaccari’s final line, sealing the end of one circle prior to the immanent descent into the next, embodies the fall, the descent, undergone by the victims and the perverse sexual revelry of the libertines,

Vaccari: “…and he ejaculated upon the charred remains of my clothes.”

This dehumanization continues in the second circle through a competition for the ‘best bottom’ organized by Maggi. The victims are arranged on the floor of a darkened room, with their heads covered with towels and their anuses protruding into the air. The fascists, professing the need for an unbiased objective decision removed from sexual proclivities, systematically inspect each one with a flashlight. The examinatory mechanism of the fascist state, i.e. the structure of Maggi’s ‘competition’, disassembles the victims, fragmenting then reducing them to a singular body part. Prior to the competition, whilst waiting outside, the fascists engage upon a dialectic of the sodomite and the executioner.

Duke: “The act of the sodomite signifies the death of the human species, ambiguously accepting social standards while transgressing them.”

Bishop: “More monstrous than the act of the sodomite is the act of the executioner.” Duke: “True, but the act of the sodomite can be repeated again and again.” Bishop: “I think there is a way to repeat the act of the executioner.”

Under fascist logic, that ‘all things are good when taken to excess’, the more monstrous act of the executioner is valued higher than that of the sodomite. An economy of execution would be more excessive than the economy of excretal consumption, which like the act of sodomy ‘can be repeated again and again’. Thus in order to perfect their consumptive economy according to their own logic the fascists must solve the problem of how to repeat the act of execution. This is achieved with the announcement of the competition winner’s prize, instantaneous death, within earshot of the victims anonymously exposed on the floor. When the winner is selected (Franco) he is hauled up by the guards and a gun is held to his head. As the Bishop snarls ‘Fire!’, Franco, in terror and with tears etched upon his cheek, closes his eyes, expecting immanent execution.

“Click.” The gun’s chamber is empty; and the victim, made to believe he would die, is immediately admonished,

Bishop: “you must be stupid to think that death would be so easy. Don’t you know we intend to kill you a thousand times? To the end of eternity, if eternity can have an end”

Franco’s symbolic death7 is refined and extended in Maggi’s last lines at the end of the circle of shit, and the following wedding opening the circle of blood.

Maggi: “He was convinced that the tastiest faeces were those of women who had just heard the sentence of death”

The final wedding, between the fascists in drag and their militia guards, signals the exclusion of the victims from the ritual operation of the state and the extension of Franco’s symbolic death to them all. Confronted with the solemn submissive figures of the withering victims, the fascists cry out,

Duke: “What is this, a mortuary? These parasites do nothing for this festive day. Do anything you like. Laugh, all of you.”

Judge: “Go on, idiots, show how happy you are…” Duke: “Why aren’t you yelling for joy? Go on, sing!”

Firstly, the wedding hall is a mortuary of sorts ­decorated with lilies, with somber accordion music playing and the faint sound of distant church bells ringing­ its funerary atmosphere signaling a perversion, an inversion of mourning. Secondly, for the fascists this ritual is an occasion for bacchanalian celebration, a glorification of their authority. Attempting to force celebratory joy onto the victims, to make them an appropriate background for the regime’s narcissistic pomp, the fascists’ imperatives are met with frightened faces paralyzed with fear. Ironically, in what follows Eva consoles the terrified Antoniska and kisses her, threatening fascist logic with an ungraspable ‘genuine feeling’. This reveals the double bind of the victims and the paradox of the imperative to ‘do anything’ they like. They must do what they want but only by the fascists’ standards; only what the fascists want them to do.

In contrast to the second wedding, in which the victim Sergio was bride to patriarchal authority in the inauguration of an excretal economy, here it is the fascists who adopt a passive feminine role (mockingly so, in drag), and the militia­-groom an active, masculine role. The wedding seals the militia’s complicity with the state in a ritualized display of loyalty, signaling their triumphant infection with and corruption by fascist logic. For the first time the victims are fully excluded from the ritual operations of the state. The only way they can avoid the death sentence hanging over them is to repeat the militia’s gestures of complicity.

An escalating economy of betrayal ensues as a series of victims expose each other’s transgressions, prolonging their survival through complicity with the state at the expense of others. This culminates in the discovery of Ezio with a black servant or slave girl8. Instead of the torturous, degrading sexual acts of the fascists this is an act of equality, of ‘genuine feeling’, the lovers exchanging moaned professions of love. Ezio’s empathy and identification with his lover brings both the previously excluded servant and the notion of equality into the fascists’ closed sphere. As the assembled fascists level their pistols at him, Ezio raises an enigmatic salute. At this the fascists hesitate in perplexity, even briefly lowering their weapons. Is this salute an act of loyalty or defiance?  At first, due to the resemblance to Nazi salutes, Ezio’s seems to be an act of loyalty, of solidarity with the state. However, according to the fascist logic he would be proclaiming allegiance to no mercy would be shown. The act would thus be rendered hollow and inconsequential by its own lack of reasoning. It is only through closer viewing of the film that one recognizes that Ezio has been resistant to and distanced from the regime from the off9. It is only within this greater context of aversion to the state’s activities that we realize that the salute is an act of defiance. Born of ‘genuine feeling’, the ‘deaf­mute language’ of the gesture is obscenely in excess of the state’s logic. In contrast to the supplicant, oppressed posture of the slave girl, quietly executed with a single shot to the head while cowering behind a chair, Ezio confronts the state apparatus and incurs the fascists’ wrath as they degrade his corpse in a hail of bullets. Throughout the film Ezio is the most humane(e) figure Pasolini offers us. While not treated as an object through subjection to the state’s operations, neither does he actively participate in its oppressions. Until this point he has managed to survive in a gap in­between and, although trapped within the logic of Salò, his figure stares back at us across it. However, as the fascist logic rumbles on towards the final phase of purification, excluding all else, this gap closes.

In the fascists’ ‘final judgement’ the company is separated into those to be punished and those who will return to the ‘real’ world10, who will survive the ensuing death camp. In this final step of refinement the ‘populous’ is reduced and purified (refined) to those complicit with the regime and thus embodying its warped logic11. Those condemned are inscribed by the state, marked (or ‘tattooed’) with a blue ribbon (equivalent to the Nazi’s use of the Star of David). The final descent of Salò into the extermination ­camp­-like pit is marked by the final storyteller. Her cackled tales, of violent acts of extreme torture and the libertine usage of ‘horrible machines’, signal the fascists’ immanent industrialized refinement of murder,

Storyteller: “A rational man is not content to kill the same person He would recommend murdering as many as possible.”

Inferno:

Once entered the torturous activities within the pit are only seen from the vantage­point of fascist power/authority, positioned in a panoptical position of dominance; which in turn is only seen from the interior viewpoint of the collaborators. Copjec compares the subjective view of the fascist libertines upon the pit with the unflinching gaze of the Zapruder film, both illustrating “the dire consequences of the denial of the cut” (Copjec, p.203). The fascists’ disturbing looks are augmented by binoculars with which they can focus upon the various simultaneous acts of torture and murder occurring before them. For Copjec the sequence has a “suffocating nearness” (p.203). The Duke inverts the binoculars, thus transforming the attenuated view into an overview of the entire yard. Copjec claims that the audience’s expectation of relief and distance from the horrific scenes transpiring are denied. Instead the feeling of closeness is exacerbated through the almost total elimination of sound. If sound had been present it would ‘have drawn attention to the point source’, introducing a cut or limit in the field of vision which thus would have opened some distance between the viewer and the image. However, while an ascribable sound will focus attention, providing depth through privileging of particular visual elements over others, drawing them up out of the undifferentiated background and closer to us, silence renders the scene ‘flat’. Together the silence and inversion of binoculars disclose the fascists’ gaze as such. In this way instead of drawing us into a suffocating nearness to the pit, Pasolini problematizes the very relation of distance between the fascists and their victims. Through rendering the camera­ view opaque and masking its edges he indicates that the audience is grafted onto the fascists’ subjective point of view.

“The masking reveals that the scene is being shot from the exact position of the spectators, who are of course placed behind the binoculars.” (Copjec, p.203)

Thus imposing an uneasy and unwanted identification.

In an article written in 1966, ‘End of the Avant­garde’, Pasolini decries the then contemporary Italian literary avant ­garde as “petite ­bourgeois old men” (Pasolini, p.17). Failing to challenge and merely repeating the prevalent bourgeoisie social structures they claimed to subvert or interrupt, the avant ­garde were agents of its propagation. A discussion between the fascists regarding  the attribution of a maxim discloses the complicity of the avant ­garde, of the intellectual liberal elite with the consumptive engine and logic of Salò:

Judge: “The principal of all greatness on earth has long been bathed in blood. ‘Without bloodshed, there is no forgiveness; no forgiveness without bloodshed’.”

Surrounded by a menagerie of ‘cultural junk’ the quote is attributed to first Baudelaire, then Nietzsche. Finally, by way of St. Paul, it is agreed as originating in Dada. Pasolini also alludes here to the world beyond the film, and its neocapitalist mechanisms of persuasion, by way of the inane ‘dada’ ditty sung by the Duke and its similarity to a late ‘60’s television advert for chocolate. For Ranvaud, that “any cultural fragment may be begged, borrowed or stolen to justify” the fascist state exposes the ‘senseless void’ of its course (Ranvaud, p.204).

Judge: “If you like to whimper, we’ll make you, for your last few days.”

This threat in the final wedding scene, openly acknowledging the victim’s immanent death and the suffering they will undergo, strikes the musician (Pasolini’s fourth storyteller) with horror. In the nonsensical skit that follows, Pasolini damns the intelligentsia and avant­ garde as mere distraction. Vaccari and the musician stand either side of a mirror fixed to the wall, reflecting one on the opposite wall. The infinitely receding reflection created captures the essence of spectacle, of the arts, appearance as pure appearance. Pivoting like marionettes during their exchange, the performers ironically ridicule acting and writing, “all you have to write is any old thing”, making their victim ­audience laugh. The musician shrieks with anguish in response to this laughter. The ‘genuine feeling’ of this prolonged howl is incomprehensible to fascist logic, forcing a perplexed Vaccari to break character. For Pasolini, in the end all the intellectual elite and avant ­garde can offer is reduced to a mere impotent shriek of anguish at the shattering realization that they are the mere instrument of fascism.

The musician’s second horror leads to her suicide. Whilst playing dark, irrational or atonal music in the climax of the circle of blood, she tails off, gets up and slowly walks out of the hall of orgies. In near silence the camera follows her through the cold stone passageways and walkways of the villa; her footsteps the only sound. Sitting on a window­ledge looking out, with the sun on her face and the sounds of birds outside, a sudden look of horror appears on her face and she jumps out of the window. What is it that she sees through the window such that her only response is suicide? Does she see Salò itself, what the regime actually is and what transpires under it? Does she see beyond the borders of the regime, to the outside or ante­Inferno? Or does the pianist see into, or beyond, the pit?

The silence exposed by the suicidal cessation of the pianist’s playing gives way to the recurrent sound of bombers, growing in volume and intensity. Are these bombers the horror­ful machines of the regime?

“Now all the machines have begun to function… all function at once, with terrifyingly loud screeching”

Within the pit each fascist takes a turn inflicting and a turn watching the unfolding brutality of torture and execution. However, the film closes without Pasolini showing us the last fascist’s manifestation within the pit. Whilst the Bishop’s voyeurism is unrepresented, this corresponds to the Duke’s turn at inflicting his brand of violence upon the bodies of the victims. This is crucial in that these are, respectively, the last and the first to sign the laws of Salò. For Pasolini “everything, every cut, is planned to have its significance” (Bachmann, p.43). Neither the first act of the consecration of the fascists’ law, its prescription and first signing by Duke, nor the final manifestation of fascist logic, in the rampages of the Duke through the pit, are witnessed by the viewer. What significance does this lack of witness, lack of re­presentation, suggest?

Pasolini borrows “a certain theological verticalism” in the structure of Salò from the Inferno of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Bachmann, p.41). At the centre of the earth, the bottom of the Inferno’s slope, Dante beholds the embodiment of Evil,

“ … ‘Behold, Dis! Here is the place where you must arm yourself with courage’

How faint and frozen I then became, do not ask, Reader, for I do not write it down, since all words would be inadequate.” (Dante, p.163)

Although Dante goes on to describe Lucifer as a beast with three heads (Hated, Impotence and Ignorance) chewing on the bodies of three great betrayers, his description rings hollow. No words are adequate for this encounter; what we find at the bottom of the slope is in-­articulable, fundamentally and essentially beyond us.

“I did not die and did not stay alive: think now for yourself, if you have the wit, how I became, without life or death.” (Dante, p.163)

Confronted with the un­-thinkable, fundamentally un­(re)­presentable, Dante passes beyond our recognition, becoming neither alive nor dead. In If this is a man Primo Levi testifies to the existence within the concentration­-extermination camp of Auschwitz of the ‘faceless presence’ and endless anonymous mass of the ‘the drowned’.

“…All the Muselmänner… have the same story, or more exactly, have no story; they followed the slope down to the bottom…. the divine spark dead in them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death” (Levi, p.96)

“… in Auschwitz something like a Gorgon’s head, which one cannot­ and does not want to­ see at any cost… the Muselmann… the larva that our memory cannot succeed in burying… the non­living, as the being whose life is not truly life… as he whose death cannot be called death, but only the production of a corpse… what is called into question is the very humanity of man“ (Agamben, p.81)

Like the fictionalized Dante, these ‘complete witnesses’ of the absolute Evil within the concentration camps mark “the moving threshold in which man passed into non­-man…” (Agamben, p.47)12. Within the logic of the camps the only claim of humanity available to its victims was biological, of belonging to the human species. Agamben notes that the Muselmann “deprived of … all dignity: … is merely human [as in physically, or biologically human] – and for this reason, non­-human [i.e. excluded from the human symbolically]” (Agamben, p.68). Completely evacuated of any symbolic representation, they were only recognized as elements of a bio­-political scene. In the camps ‘death and the fabrication of corpses became indistinguishable’,

“In Auschwitz, people did not die; rather, corpses were produced. Corpses without death, non­-humans whose decease is debased into a matter of serial production” (Agamben, p.72).

It is racism, the distinction between people privileged by symbolic recognition (an essentially political body) and a population of the human species (an essentially biological body), which allows biopolitics to “mark caesuras in the biological continuum of the human species” (p.84). Within Salò this line of privilege and exclusion runs between fascism (the fascists themselves and those infected by their logic) and their victims; from the victims’ initial objectification through their progression dehumanization until their final industrialized sacrifice to the consumptive pleasures of the fascists.

“… Thus the non­-Aryan passes into the Jew, the Jew into the deportee…, the deportee into the prisoner…, until biopolitical caesuras reach their final limit in the camp. This limit  is the Muselmann. At the point in which the [prisoner] becomes a Muselmann, the biopolitics of racism so to speak transcends race, penetrates into a threshold in which it is no longer possible to establish caesuras. Here the wavering link between people and population is definitely broken, and we witness the emergence of something like an absolute biopolitical substance that cannot be assigned to a particular bearer or subject, or be divided by another caesura.” (Agamben, p.85)

Through the dehumanization of victims towards the threshold of the Muselmann, reduced to an ‘absolute biopolitical substance’, they become raw materials for the industrial process of the biopolitical machine of the state­ the factory of Salò fabricating either corpses or collaborators from its population.

The Muselmann are themselves un-­seeable. As Agamben notes, a British film of the camp at the end of the war to be used as evidence in the Nuremberg trials lingers calmly on the ancient site of a pile of rotting corpses but can only face the entirely new phenomena of the hollowed living corpses for moment. Recognition of them is constantly avoided by the entire population of the camp, “the Muselmann is universally avoided because everyone in the camp recognizes himself in his disfigured face” (Agamben, p.52). The confrontation with this unthinkable horror, the ill-­logic of the camps, ‘wholly destroys’ one’s humanity; thus all we can  say of the Muselmann, ‘if this be a man…’. Agamben borrows from mythology to designate this ‘impossibility of seeing’ that belongs to “the one who has touched bottom in the camp and has become non­-human” the gorgon (Agamben, p.54). To see the Muselmanner is to see the unthinkable through him, in the destruction wrought upon him, and the possibility of one’s own collapse, one’s own fall outside the human. We cannot look upon the Muselmann without risking the same petrification, without falling into its abyss.

“…the Muselmann, the final biopolitical substance to be isolated in the biological continuum. Beyond the Muselmann lies only the gas chamber.” (Agamben, p.85)

The existence of the mummy-­men, the living dead, testifies to what we cannot turn and face; that we cannot encounter without losing ourselves, without facing our own annihilation. We cannot name this unthinkable and can only refer to it by way of those who have suffered it; by way of those it has shattered.

“The untestifiable, that to which no one has borne witness has a name.… der Muselmann” (Agamben, p.41)

An enigmatic pan shot discloses the final constitution of Salò. From a shot of the headrest of the throne on which the fascists view the pit, shaped like a large eye gazing down, the camera pans left into the room. A large empty expanse of wooden floor is framed by the beautifully juxtaposed décor and arrangement of the fascist apartment, Salò itself, guarded by two bored collaborators sat against the sides of the shot. The camera seemingly awaiting the entry of a character into the frame lingers on the empty space it frames. For Copjec this an unattributable shot; in which we encounter the gaze rather than the Other itself; there is no bearer of the gaze, there is only the gaze. From Pasolini’s earlier grafting of the audience onto the fascists’ subjective view, this gaze, unattached to a particular libertine, is that of fascist logic itself. The motif of the table upon which the fascists signed the primordial rules giving birth to the state is carried through the film to this final point. The table is the field of power upon which Salò is constructed by the regime. The gaze exposes the empty wooden floor within the fascists’ apartment, within Salò. Agamben notes a secret meeting in 1937 in which Hitler formulates and proposes an extreme biopolitical concept for the first time, that of ‘a space empty of people’; a ‘peopleless space’;

“…a fundamental biopolitical intensity, an intensity that can persist in every space and through which peoples pass into populations and populations pass into Muselmänner…. ” (Agamben,  p.85)

The biopolitical machine of the fascist state has been emptied, it is finally without content. Salò’s ‘theological verticality’, like the space of concentration­extermination camps such as Auschwitz, is

“…a series of concentric circles that, like waves, incessantly wash up against a central non­place, where the Muselmann lives.” (Agamben, pp.51­52)

Exhausted, all that is left for its gaze, its excessive logic, is to turn back in upon itself; signally the finally, self­consuming symbolic collapse of the state itself. It is at this point where the violence of Salò reaches its nadir, the point where its warped logic reaches its final manifestation that, instead of showing us the great beast, Pasolini turns away. The two collaborators sat guarding the empty apartments of the fascists, the empty interior of Salò, change the radio station. With the music the mood changes, an atmosphere of apocalypse giving way to the film’s jaunty title music and the boys try to dance. Suddenly the film stock seems to change. The image becomes bleached and bright in its colouration, adding to the dreamlike surreality and lifting all weight from the film. The camera angle changes to adopt the position of the radio itself­ the radio being the only link to the outside throughout Salò. The collaborators, almost doppelgangers of each other in their near­matching outfits, shuffle through a series of graceless awkward steps, asking about each other’s girlfriends. Dancing before the surreal stage backdrop of the room’s decorations with rigid, less than human movements the collaborators become figurines passing through the mechanical patterns of a wind­up music box. Having filmed a descent into the darkest bowels of hell Pasolini finds the last kernel of Evil un­re­presentable and upon the threshold of its revelation returns the veil of spectacle; obscuring it and shielding his audience. He returns us back to the symbolic spectacle of our everyday delusions as if nothing had ever happened.

Through the course of this paper we have traced: the stylistics of structure Salò, in the religious exclusion of all other ideologies and the sounds of horror or evil exemplified in Renata’s scatological scene; the corruption and principal of refinement of fascist logic, articulating their methodology in terms of the corruption of love; the progressive dehumanization suffered by the victims, from their initial objectification and oppression to their final complete exclusion and symbolic death; and finally, how under this death sentence the only route of escape was complicity with the fascists and its economy of betrayal, “the triumph of the conspiracy of evil” (Ranvaud, p.204). Pasolini presents neither the initial event of Salò’s irruption nor the final concluding carnage of its murderous logic. Instead with the closing­curtains of the film he at  once returns us back to the symbolic realm (delusion) of our everyday lives in reality and reveals the ‘perfected’ society of the fascist gaze­ the patterned complicity in the figures of the dancing boys. In reproducing (neo­)fascist logic within the film’s stylistic structure Pasolini provides us with a matrix transferable through the layers of referentiality to the real world beyond the film. Through this transfer Pasolini enables us to diagnose the (neo­)fascist elements of exploitation and dehumanization within contemporary capitalist society. Pasolini’s use of camera angles and point of view shots within the pit exposes the fascist gaze to the audience, forcing an identification with and recognition of it logic; we are not the passive victims of this gaze but are irrevocably bound up with it in complicity. The musician’s suicidal symbolic collapse, entwined with this realization of impotence and complicity on the part of the arts, is as close as Pasolini can get to showing us the face of the Muselmann. Her gaze upon the un­thinkable, un­survivable view of the heart of Salò and its logic, its un­(re)­presentable events, confronts us with the ‘impossibility of seeing’. The existential horror one feels at the close of Salò is a vertigo of ‘theological verticality’; through transferal of the logic of Salò to the real world the specter of the Muselmann, the gorgon haunts us ubiquitously from behind the façade of the contemporary spectacle. Thus the close of the film is like an imperative. If we do not want to get inevitably sucked down the concentric circles to the damned pit of Auschwitz, of Salò, of biopolitical inhumanity this logic must change, we must escape it. Pasolini not offer us a project here as such but an object of contemplation. In this sense the return to sleep he offers at the end is hollow, once we’ve stepped out of the cave and seen the light, our returning to its darkness and shadow figures of distraction cannot fool us anymore. Notes: 1 All references to Pasolini are to ‘End of the Avant­garde’ in Stanford Italian Review 2, no 2, fall 1982. pp. 8­26. 2 To paraphrase Pasolini: cinema prefigures ‘a conceivable socio­linguistic situation in a world’ of unitary industrialization and the accompanying leveling implicit in globalization, i.e. the disappearance of local national traditions and cultural diversity (Pasolini, p.12). 3 Important for establishing the connection of neofascism with neocapitalism for Pasolini is the direct connection he makes between fascist or neofascist logic and bourgeois ideology, claiming that it is Nazism which defines the petite­ bourgeoisie as ‘normal’. Pasolini asks “can we speak of a Nazi [a fascist] rebirth? Did Nazism ever die? Weren’t we insane to believe it was merely an episode?” (Pasolini, p.25), thus suggesting that contemporary neocapitalism is inherently bound­up with neofascism. 4 For Copjec this transition is also significantly marked with a switch in cinematic style from external montage to long,  static and repetitive internal shots: “The balanced compositions, emphasized by the geometric pattern of the floor tiles, remove every bit of dynamism from the image. Cutting, as mentioned above, is minimal in this almost essayistic long-­take (rather than montage) film. It is as if the act of creation had jammed, had frozen on these aestheticized scenes, and the acts of torture were violent attempts to unfreeze it. Instead of a drive to create and a research, such as one find where jouissance bores a hole through the homeostatic pleasure of the ego, here in this perverse world we have simply a state  of certainty and display.” (Copjec, p.226). 5 Cf. “The sadist wants to trap freedom in flesh…” (Copjec, p.223) 6 Cp. Badiou on Beckett and evental truth of love, see Badiou (2003) On Beckett, ed. Alberto Toscano and Nina Power. Clinamen Press: Manchester. For Badiou the amorous encounter with the Other breaks the torture of the solipsistic cogito, allowing the world to open up with colour, meaning and significance. I have engaged with these themes in a previous essay, ‘A generic How It Is? ‘Beckett’s’ Badiou: impasse, the Other, and the numericality of Love’. In contrast, fascist logic prevents this meaningful escape into the infinities of the world through imposing itself as the sole encounter­able Other. 7 In his recent masterclass introduction to Lacan, Slavoj Žižek explained a distinction between real and symbolic death, claiming that the real death of people or institutions could occur before it was recognized within the symbolic order, and visa versa, that they could die symbolically before their actual demise. This distinction and the possibility of symbolic death is apparent in the example and theoretical concept of the Muselmann. An interesting comparison could be made been the ultimately fatal symbolic death suffered by Franco and the ‘human sacrifices’ in Fight Club­ designed to provide a life­changing rebirth to its ‘victims’; i.e. that symbolic death does not necessarily lead to the Muselmann. 8 It is important to note the all but invisibility of the servants within Salò, this is similar to the external soldiers and guards we encounter in the ante-­Inferno. Both objectified and instrumentalized groups constitute the invisible, unconscious, ultra­ in­human foundations of the state; the soldiers being its walls and fortifications. That the servant­-girl is Africa suggests a subtle reference on Pasolini’s part to colonial oppression and exploitation. 9 Ezio’s ‘community connection’ can bee seen in two early scenes: firstly, when we first see him being led off for conscription in the ante­Inferno, he exchanges parting words with a small boy; secondly, when the daughters are  rounded up and led to their unwholesome inter­marriages with the fascists, while one of the more misogynistic collaborators, Claudio, spits on the girls, Ezio offer in apology or excuse that they ‘are only following orders’. In multiple scenes of abuse inflicted upon the victims Ezio cuts a subtle figure holding back from his duties, seemingly repulsed; we never see him enjoining in the sadistic pleasures of the state as they other collaborators do. 10 As we shall see, for Pasolini the real world itself, the world of the viewer, is already corrupted and polluted with the logic of Salò. 11 The only survivors from amongst the victims are Graziella, who betrays the illicit amorous lesbian couplings of Eva and Antoniska, and a male victim who displays his complicity throughout the film, enjoying a passionate kiss with the Duke and singing the fascists song at the first meal scene. 12 Cf. “…in Auschwitz ethics begins precisely at the point where the Muselmann, the ‘complete witness’, makes it forever impossible to distinguish between man and non­man” (Agamben, p.47); “The Muselmann … marks the threshold between the human and the inhuman … [the] point at which human beings, while apparently remaining human beings, cease to be human” (Agamben, p.55); “the human that cannot be told apart from the inhuman” (Agamben, p.82).

Bibliography: G. Agamben, (2002) Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller ­Roazen. Zone  books: New York. Dante Alighieri, (1968) The Divine Comedy, trans. H. R. Huse. Holt, Reinehart and W inston: New York. Gideon Bachmann, ‘Pasolini on de Sade: An Interview during the Filming of ‘The 120 Days of Sodom’ in Film Quarterly, Vol.29, No. 2. (Winter, 1975­1976), pp.39-­45. Joan Copjec, (2002) Imagine there’s no woman: ethics and sublimation. Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Massachusetts. Philippe Lacoue­-Labarthe and Jean­-Luc Nancy, ‘The Nazi Myth’ in Critical Inquiry, 16. (Winter, 1990), pp. 291­312. Primo Levi, (1979) If this is a man. The Truce, trans. Stuart Wolf. Abacus: London. Pier Pablo Pasolini, (1975) dir. Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, bfi.­ —‘End of the Avant-­garde’ in Stanford Italian Review 2, no 2, fall 1982. pp. 8­26. Don Ranvaud, ‘Salò or 120 ways of Remaining Heretical’ in Monthly Film Bulletin, 46:540/551. (1979), p.204. Kriss Ravetto, (2001) The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis.

[williamalderwick-blog]

Preliminary Procedural Remarks on an Independent Audit of the International Necronautical Society

From Under/current magazine 03 Dawn — Spring/Summer 2010.

Following a request by INS General Secretary Tom McCarthey, Under/current submit the following remarks and recommendations upon the procedure and practice of an independent audit of the INS.

Celebrating a decade of existence, in the centenary of the Futurist Manifesto, the International Necronautical Society distributed a xerox of the front cover of The Times from Friday 14th December 1999. Although near illegible due to the poor quality of the reproduction, the First Manifesto of the INS unmistakably occupied the bottom right advertising slot. The manifesto declared that 'death is a space', that the INS intend to navigate death's dimensionality and through this construct a craft, in the widest and loosest senses of that word, to 'convey us into death in such a way that we may, if not live, then at least persist'. If space is the final frontier, then that space is death.           The manifesto baptizes the INS and marks the inauguration of its activities. A pseudo-organisation, a fictive avant-garde revivalist group playing on the trappings of international bodies, the INS presents itself within the formalism of a UN committee like the governing body of a curatorial oversight project or shadowy governmental agency tasked with studying Twin Peaks' Black Lodge.          It makes an aesthetics of bureaucracy: proliferating reports, hearings, expulsions, appointments, meetings, presentations, press releases, missives, recruitment drives, communiqués and declarations. Everything is structured through a strict hierarchy of quasi-fascistic corporate titles, General Secretary, Chief of Propaganda, and the closed cabal of the INS First Committee. Everything is provisional, interim, without resolution or culmination as each issue published defers judgment onto the next.          This endless documentation and totalising logic leaves the dry taste of mothballs upon the tongue, like staring down the endless shelves of one of Borges' great libraries of the imagination for a spark of transcendence, a kernel of creation, the sublime within logos, the archive as the monumental mausoleum of thought, only to be left wanting and lost amidst the decrepit filing systems as a land surveyor named K.          Vectors central to necronautical practice include the exploration of silence through playback, sites of erasure through low-altitude aerial recognizance and our inauthenticity.          "The revolution will not be televised." The revolution is not caught in audiotapes or broadcast on airwaves, its trace takes the form of silence. Turning London's ICA into an analogue radio broadcast station, the INS went in search of this encrypted silence. The Unit reenacted the exquisite finds of Heurtebise's broadcasts from Hades in Cocteau's Orphee through using Burroughs and Gysin's cut-up techniques upon newspapers of the day, generating 'lyrical fragments, miniature celebrations of silence and playback, illumination, mourning and avian transmission, of gods, wisdom and loss'.          After Chief Philosopher Simon Critchley declared that Berlin was the 'world capital of death', the INS undertook aerial recognisance of the city. Their study focused on a memorial in Bebelplatz marking the burning of books in 1933. For the INS the memorial actually served to reinforce the erasure of the event. A sealed, sunken library of empty shelves with a glass window set into its pavement ceiling. Continually scratched on its upper surface, the glass serves as a site of transcription taking in the entire city about it and concomitantly obscures the vacant shelves beneath. Yet in an ongoing cycle of remembrance-erasure-forgetting the civic authorities replace the glass at regular intervals - at once exposing the subterranean urn and, ironically, destroying the inscriptions.          Contributing to the prologue for Nicolas Bourriaud's Altermodern Tate Triennial, INS General Secretary Tom McCarthey and Critchley delivered the INS Declaration on Inauthenticy. With stage managed catechismo, they declared that art repetitions our failures of transcendence; that rather than surpassing the form/matter dilemma through rising phoenix-like from the ashes of matter's matterings as a complete, holistic and heroic subject, to be human is to be essentially, sententially divided. A dividual rather than an individual. 'Inauthenticity is the core to the self, to what it means to be human, which means that the self has no core, but is an experience of division, of splitting.' Our inauthenticity is our comedy, for us to trip and laugh at ourselves tripping at the same time. For Hegel, comedy is the passage from art to philosophy. The ironic self-awareness of the poet or philosopher can only be that of his own inauthenticity. 'The laugh laughing at the laugh', Critchley and McCarthey sat amongst the gathered audience and press credentialed hacks in the auditorium, witness to the ridiculousness of their selves, or rather the actors stood dead-pan delivering the Declaration by proxy in their place. As hilariously serious, seriously hilarious, as a grinning skull.          Through what terrain do these activities carry us? What vectors can we decode from these practices? What is it to be a Necronaut, to sail the seas of death? If an audit was to be conducted upon the INS from what authority would it issue, how would it proceed, in what currency should its balance sheets be quantified? One member of the First Committee was expelled for failing to meet the primary requirement of his post, being dead. Posthumously, he was reinstated. How many souls have died during the course of the INS's first decade of activity? An audit is an autopsy, an archeological dissection of putrefying flesh. What flesh should one interrogate from the body of the INS?          Under/current proposes that, as an investigation of INS procedures as much as quantifiable results, any audit should mirror the vectors of the INS’s own practices. As promulgating an aesthetics of bureaucracy, the body of the INS is its archive; the keystone of which is the first manifesto. Following these trajectories Under/current recommends that an independent audit of the INS should commence from aerial recognizance of the first manifesto itself, specifically of the tenth anniversary Xerox. As the comments that follow demonstrate this procedure will deliver the auditor, once a suitable independent body or figure is identified and appointed, to both the endlessly played-back silence at the core of the INS, that about which they cannot speak, and the organization’s own inauthenticities.          Repetition breeds difference. Amongst the grain and smudges upon the xerox, a thick black bar of ink about a centimetre long cuts across the manifesto. A staple. An artificial binding rent through the soft dry pulpy flesh of the newspaper like an invasive surgical bolt of historical revisionism. Linking the manifesto and newspaper in the crudest of forgeries, the staple at once binds them together in the dusty boxfiles of the INS itself and testifies to the petrified gap, the space between these respective layers  of archival sedimentation. The forgery testifies towards its own inauthenticity, laughs at itself and its own failures.          A suture short-circuiting two diffuse threads of history's tangled weave, the forgery conjures an origin from nothing. All true origins are lost to their progeny. Passolini's Salo opens with four fascist aristocrats signing the documents, the contracts, founding their nightmarish Inferno. Except - as with the final absolutely corrosive and dehumanising vision of evil at the base of the pit which Passolini spares his audience, instead returning them back to the soft enraptured illusions of the spectacle - only three fascists are witnessed as signing. Salo's genesis, the original mark and its original signatory, is necessarily precluded from re-presentation; as is that of the INS. The forgery is a creation myth. The manifesto is a trace of an event forever inaccessible, living on in our fidelity to it.          Central to INS ideology are Abraham and Torok's studies of Freud's patient 'The Wolf Man'. They take the form of a cryptonymy: meticulous psychoanalytic decoding of the patient's dreams, desires, neuroses, visions, language, etc, to reconstruct and expose the primal scene locked, sleeplessly and undead, like 'a pocket of resistance to reality' within the hidden fold or enclave of a crypt deep within the patient’s consciousness. A crypt ever-present, ubiquitous even, yet forever out of reach, a silenced scream echoing throughout the night.          In one INS secret-op a sleeper agent inserted the first manifesto into the source-code of the BBC website, invisibly transmitting its declarations through the intangible realm of the virtual. The manifesto could only be exhumed by those with the tools, skills, knowledge or inclination to delve into the source-code’s primordial virtual gloop.          What secret, silent truth lurks locked within the crypts of the INS, beneath the primordial encryptions of the first manifesto’s source-code, distortedly echoed in the static of their transmissions, declarations and recognisances, within the petrified gaps of the forgery's inauthenticity? Perhaps the realisation that we are all, always, already, dead. Listen Death Jesters, listen: "La silence va plus vite à reculons. Trois fois." Repeat.

Scan taken from the International Necronautical Society archives.

www.necronauts.org

[williamalderwick-blog]

A Painter of Our Time: Billy Childish

From Near Future, a special edition supplement presented by Near East magazine for the Istanbul Art Fair, 2014.

Painter, writer, poet and musician Billy Childish's abstract figurative works recall the masters of modernist painting.

A 'radical traditionalist', Childish has been painting in same style and making records in the same, arguably, narrow garage-rock genre for over 30 years. For Childish, tradition sets you free. The frame provided by working within an artistic tradition, whether abstract figurative painting or garage rock, liberates him to focus on the primary value of art – expressing the human condition. He is a painter exploring spiritual values both subtle and profound.

Indeed, Childish sees Van Gogh and the later Munch, Dostoyevsky and Norwegian writer Knut Hamsen as his contemporaries; at times even referring to them as collaborators. It is a view that jars with the racing tumult of today's art industry where young artists fight tooth and nail to carve out some new, unique niche or medium to define them within the marketplace. A thirst for novelty that Childish sees as fundamentally an illusion.

Subtly provocative, Childish embraces tradition, submerging himself in a lineage as if re-enacting some primal scene of modernist painting. Combined with his striking figure, a man styled out of time like some Bolshevik English dandy, the thought recalls Beckett's Watt. A hobo counting pebbles from pocket to pocket, exhausting every permutation of their arrangement through repetition ad absurdum.

Yet there is something inalienably contemporary about Childish's work, a vitality within them that escapes mere repetition of the masters. Something inexpressible haunts his paintings. A sadness that seems to linger, a great sorrow that hangs beautiful and tender like a sweet kiss joyfully promising all the inexplicable atrocities of living. Precisely, perhaps, an authentic human spirit.

Ahead of appearing for the first time in Istanbul with his New York gallerist Lehmann Maupin at the Istanbul Art Fair, Childish speaks to Near Future about the nature of art, why Van Gogh and Munch are his contemporaries and what success really means.

WA: What makes something a work of art in your eyes? Is art itself almost too loaded a term in the way that it's used, the way that people have built up a culture around it? BC: Yes, well anything that needs to be in an art gallery to be recognised as art probably isn't.  I feel that art is something that is to do with the hand and eye. I think it's the same thing that was going on in the caves [at Lascaux]. But I’m a bit of a purist.  I’m probably one of these people who thinks that painting and sculpture is art. WA: When you paint, what is it that you're looking to express? BC: There's no mandate at all.  It's something that is natural to me and I enjoy doing. It's a very intense process, which I don't notice is intense. The more in tune I am with allowing the picture to manifest, the less I need to be involved and the more it looks like I’m intimately involved. WA: Almost like you're channelling something and not trying to paint yourself into it in a way? BC: Absolutely and if I try and paint myself into it, it becomes quite bodged. Ideally, it's allowing the thing to find itself and express itself and not get in the way of it. WA: You've said before that tradition is something that you feel gives somebody freedom in terms of the traditions of painting and abstract figurative painting as a style.  In what way is that liberating? BC: Tradition just submerges the ego. If you give up you have freedom because you're not battling anything.  There's nothing to prove.  Everything you've got is given to you. No one creates themselves and no one creates anything within the world as such.  We get to manipulate a few pigments or move about stardust in different ways.

When I was a kid [the whole history of painting] was in books.  If you know where you are in that, a figurative painter, you look at what every other artist did of worth. Look at the late work of Munch and you can see that he's just looking at Van Gogh. Look at Van Gogh and... you don't even need to look at the work... he'll tell you in his letters of still working from Rembrandt, Delacroix and Millet to his dying breath, because he's never ever raising his ego.  He's always submerging himself in the beauty of nature and this reverence for tradition. Of course, what happens is you end up with a very radical, untraditional result. 

But completely bedded in tradition and honouring tradition and honouring all of these influences and these people who bothered engaging with the world, particularly engaging with themselves.

WA: It feels like the way that you identify artists like Van Gogh or Munch or Kurt Schwitters as being your contemporaries connects with a longer view on what is relevant. 

BC: The thing is the fundamental truth, the authenticity is all that really matters, not this preoccupation with originality which is so often about gimmick. I’m always pointing out to people that originality means origin. The origin can't be original, can it, in the sense of a new way of doing something.  The origin is the authentic real.  Do you see where I’m coming from? WA: Yes, I think I do. BC: Well if someone says this is wholly original, I mean, what a ridiculous statement.  ‘I want to be original.’  It's chasing after your own tail.  The origin is the ground; it's the beginning. I always say to people we're doing the same things they did in the caves apart from they did it better. WA: Is this chasing the gimmick, that constant newness or endless novelty that's an illusion, is it also about a lack of courage? BC: Oh yes, absolutely, yes. WA: About not facing up to yourself or not facing up to, as you were saying before, this submersion of the ego, of actually giving yourself up? BC: Yes, I think so.  It's not brave.  It's not authentic.  It's striving and if you're striving you've got some big problems because the gap between you and what you want to achieve is actually really insurmountable.  That gap can never be filled.  You have to realise there is no gap, I suppose.

WA: When you talk about Van Gogh and Munch being contemporaries are you trying to tap into that tradition? BC: I don't believe in time much because there's only now.  I mean, who's better — Dostoevsky writing The Brothers Karamazov or Martin Amis writing now?  Brothers Karamazov is more contemporary than Martin Amis. Who cares what the date is scratched at the top of the piece of paper? There's nothing more dated than the contemporary.  

The reason I like Van Gogh is because he's probably the greatest artist that's been produced. He's totally universal. Everybody understands Van Gogh's work. It transcends culture, it transcends class, everything.  It works fantastic on a calendar, in a print, on a postcard.  It works in the highest end museum.  It works in a little old lady's front room, because it's spiritual.  It's universal.  It's an outstanding achievement or occurrence.  And it's pretty much timeless.

It's the same as reading Knut Hamsun's novel, Hunger. Written in about 1890.  It's considered the first, real modern novel, and there's nothing within it that would suggest that it wasn't written now apart from it's really good.  I mean it's just so breathtakingly contemporary and it's perennial and the same goes for spiritual teachings.  

Truth is truth.  Time's got nothing to do with truth.  It's either good or it isn't. It's either authentic and real or it isn't. Fashion and trend often has things in it which are not going to last very well at all.  They're going to go off very quickly. WA: You've said previously as well that museums and galleries destroy art… BC: Well, that might be one of these big grand statements that I like chucking out there. It might be a bit grander than I would say.  If there's any meaning in it for me, it's that I don't like seeing pictures in big white walled galleries.

I went to see the Kahlo show at the big new Tate, the Tate Modern. They've got this huge big building and these tiny little rooms stuffed full of paintings, really badly hung with huge quantities of people being funnelled through and great big slogans written up about what you're meant to think about them.

I saw the Kurt Schwitters show, a large one at the Pompidou Centre, we happened to be playing out there.  I don't really go to galleries.  But seeing as Schwitters is one of my favourite artists of all time I thought I ought to go and look at it. It was like six huge rooms full of Kurt Schwitters' stuff and to me, this sort of thing, these galleries, it's like going to a Roman banquet and throwing up and eating and throwing up and eating and, you know, having an orgy and fucking until you can't feel your cock.  It's just pointless.  But most people want that.  

I don't have a television, I can't stand those giant television sets.  They want those giant television sets.  They want this giant television set, they want a sound system in each room and a sound system in the car.  They want agitation, salt in their food, extra art, extra everything and for me I feel like it's a Blitzkrieg. WA: Do you feel that your more recent commercial success in the art world has changed how or what you're painting? BC: Well, it's meant that I can do big paintings. My materials are better. When we started off in '77 playing music, we considered ourselves successful from day one and I always felt myself successful because I did what I wanted to do. As far as commercial success goes, that's lovely, but my ambition's much bigger than that.  My success is speaking to those who aren't yet born but most importantly speaking to myself.  The relationship with me and the creation, you know, knowing who I am. That is what I seek, freedom.

Images of artworks courtesy of Lehmann Maupin.

www.neareastistanbul.com

www.billychildish.com

[williamalderwick-blog]

Antarctic Pavilion in Venice

Short piece on the Antarctic Pavilion’s Concordia exhibition by Russian artist Alexander Ponomarev, curated by my good friend Nadim Samman, up on AnOther magazine. Who, What Why: read it here.

[williamalderwick-blog]

Mick Jones for AnOther

Interview with Mick Jones from The Clash for AnOther magazine, in connection with his Rock and Roll Public Library exhibition in Venice, to coincide with the Biennale. Read it here.

Photo by Federico Ferrari

[williamalderwick-blog]

Blood Orange's new video for I'm Sorry We Lied, on NOWNESS

[williamalderwick-blog]

Bring me the head of Denna Frances Glass: Hype Williams and the Bo Khat Eternal Troof Family Band

Article on now Berlin-based music duo Hype Williams, for Under/current 03: Dawn, 2010.

Sat in a Turkish café on a junction in Dalston, a couple of hundred yards from the warren of streets he has lived variously amongst for his whole life, Roy Nnawuchi is discussing the ‘foil-people’ that have featured over the past year in short films he’s made for art shows. “When you mold foil over someone’s face it gives an exaggerated version of it, like a caricature”, he explains, “I basically always look like a gorilla”. His latest short film idea, called Money, involves a parade of people wearing these foil-masks through Hackney and Clapton, culminating in a real basketball game on a street court. “It’s got to make you feel for a minute like you’re not where you think you are. It’s clearly an art performance but I want it to be a proper match that people just stumble in on”, he says. “So that you feel like you’ve been brainwashed to live in this alternative universe for a short period of time”. It’s a statement that resonates across everything that follows. We’re talking about the foil-people because performances of Roy’s musical project Hype Williams often start with him in a foil-mask. It’s a crossover that, if not merely symptomatic, is endemic. “For me the music is a continuation of the same thing”, he explains, “I’m really into approaching every medium the same”. Comprised of Roy and Aliina Astrova, a curator who runs the transient project space/gallery Ceylan Projects, Hype don’t really have songs, involve a revolving cast of collaborators and typically play in art galleries or house shows. With a torrent of tracks, mix-tapes, split-releases and videos emerging from the messily irreverent group over the past year – under at least three distinct monikers, or amalgamations of such, indicating distinct groups of collaborators involved on any given track – it’s hard to draw a line between Hype, Paradise Sisters or the Bo Khat Eternal Troof Family Band, each bearing the mercurial fingerprints of Roy and Aliina. As Roy stresses, perhaps rather paradoxically, Hype isn’t a band and its members aren’t musicians. Their performances, such as those in the basement of Seventeen Gallery or at Ceylan’s Magic and Happiness exhibition where the group played in separate rooms from the audience, suggest something above the typical fare going on. At Seventeen Gallery, for example, the audience were confronted with total darkness whilst Roy squatted in one corner with torchlight illuminating his apish tinfoil-caricatured face. After disappearing through a curtain, Hype started playing in an antechamber. Removed from the performance, hearing music and watching a video-feed piped from the other room, and isolated from each other by the pitch-blackness, the audience were left to question what they were consuming, what was on offer. A performance that denied its audience the intimacy, the authenticity even, of performance itself? Perhaps but for the percussive reverberations, dulled by the curtains separating rooms, one could think that Hype weren’t even playing at all, that instead one was watching and hearing a recording. At the least this suggests a group not content with merely using performance as a medium of expression but one actively engaged in questioning the nature of the medium itself. Whilst varying sonically between reverb-drenched psychedelic hip-hop rehashes and improvised jam sessions, Hype’s music is saturated with a hip-gnosis inducing lo-fi primitivism – like a tweaked-out epiphany attained through tuning in to the hum of a refrigerator at dawn as the sun breaks in through the window to stream across your face. Live Roy presides like a hipster-shaman beating out the percussive core of the ritualized drone to follow; looping chants, groans and yelps accelerate the ever-rising intensity into a resonating ball of feedback and alliterating fuzz; everything reaching towards saturation, to white noise, and breaking waves of nigh-religious luminosity. It gives their music an epic, timeless expanse; evoking images of barbarians thumping out rhythms on the gates of some ancient civilization as flames scorch the skies and leave the earth an ashen silhouette. Both in terms of practice and sound, it’s a transplanted echo of Gang Gang Dance’s early noise-improvs. More recently, at least in terms of live performance, Hype has almost ceased to exist as its own entity, instead being consumed into the wider improvisational collective of the Bo Khat Eternal Troof Family Band. “It’s loads of people. Us, Hounds of Hate and a bunch of other delinquents which turn up every Wednesday and practice for five or six house, record that, chuck out all the off-cuts that are really bad and put it out as a release”, explains Roy. “Bo-cat is not a good word where I’m from”, he continues. “It’s a guy that likes to go down on a girl, which basically in Hackney is an insult. We had a few people addicted to Khat in the band, so it just ended up being like, ‘Yo, Bo-Khat!’ That’s how it came together. Khat’s actually a big part of what’s been going on recently. A lot of chewing.” Roy’s since cut down on his own consumption of the African bushweed narcotic after a picture of him looking like a saucer-eyed tumbleweed farmer with Khat in his hand invading a party of innocent youths surfaced; “it’s actuall the cover of the De Stijl 7””, he adds. What marks both Hype and Bo Khat apart is their focus upon free improvisation, upon the singular events or pure moments of a musical conversation. Without songs, set patterns or directions to abide by each session can be anything, go anywhere, depending on the contributions of those that happen to be there are participating. “The best bit about playing music”, exclaims Roy, “is when you surprise yourself, flick an accidental switch and go, ‘What was that!’ If you have a point you’ve expected to get to and then you get there, are you really happy?” he muses. “Being surprised, for me, is the best state. I don’t believe in things having to be discussed or there having to be a point”. “To me this is the point”, agrees Aliina, “creating conditions in which you can be surprised by things”. Discussing Ceylan’s week-long Carnival residency, which turned Chapter One gallery into an open project space and culminated in a video of the work produced being screened alongside a Bo Khat session, in terms equally applicable to the Family Band, Aliina says, “with so many people and ideas together you have no idea what is actually going to happen”. Although toying with near-clichéd ideas of 60s experimentalism and happenings, the Family Band’s improvisations avoid feeling hackneyed through the vitality that emerges from a group forging new avenues for dialogue and collectivity between themselves. “When it comes to improv we prefer to do it in a bigger group of people”, explains Roy. So is Bo Khat about adding more and more people to the musical conversation, without having any preconditions or set playing field and just letting it generate itself from there? “Yeah, exactly”, agrees Roy. “And it just gets better and better. It’s beyond music. They just want to get involved in the conversation and say something. It’s really fun. Which is why Bo Khat is really exciting, because anything can happen. It can be anything at all. No matter what it’s like I’ll be happy, because how could a conversation go wrong? The only way it goes wrong is if people stop talking.” Underlying everything Roy and Hype are doing, mind, is a distinctly absurdist humour. “Just imagine fish spilling out of a room”, he explains of littering the threshold of the room Hype played in at the Magic and Happiness opening with fresh kippers. “Hearing all these shitty sounds and it looking like fish are literally pouring out of it, like the room is full of fish.” It’s a funny idea but it pales when compared to Hype Williams’ supposed origins, which, at once preposterous and compelling, hearken back to Roy’s comments on creating alternative universes. According to their bio, Hype were formed in 2005 by a husband and wife team of motivational speakers, Father Ronnie Krayola and Denna Frances Glass, as an 18-year relay project handed on to somebody new every three years. Think of that old-school drawing game Exquisite Corpse and you’ve got the idea. The recordings from Ronnie and Denna’s stint have been stuffed into a piñata, hidden away until the end of the project. “I think it’s just tapes of them talking”, claims Roy, “these secrets that they’re sure are going to change everyone’s lives. But not for another 14 or 15 years.” Asking around the close-knit scene of artists and musicians Hype run with meets with mixed responses of incredulity and blind faith. Whilst, for example, Hounds of Hate’s Stan Iordinov claims he’s actually seen the piñata, a nagging suspicion remains that it’s tagging along to keep a fantastical concoction going. “They’re obviously not very normal people”, Roy offers in explanation of the project’s progenitors. Apparently managing Hype and only available for interview via email, Denna seemingly verifies this in claiming the pair now sell methadrone and bootleg pulp fiction. “It’s totally true!” chimes in Aliina, “I didn’t realize that people find it so hard to believe. To us it’s all pretty normal. Roy probably makes it seem more extraordinary by his evasiveness. I think he’s just being protective over his kid.” Admitting how it could seem like one big art project he’s orchestrated, Roy protests that, “I really don’t understand what’s going on. It sounds like a pile of shit, but… sadly most of it’s true.” One wonders whether Ronnie and Denna are real people, or if he just made them up? “So do I,” counters Roy, “But that is what Hype Williams is”. Whatever Hype is one way to get a better idea of what’s going on in the wondrous looking glass worlds abounding around the group is to consider a gold plate almost ever-present at their gigs and in the videos Roy makes. He compares it to when you’re a kid, “you find something like a stone that you make into this thing of great importance and hold it up everywhere you are like Simba on the mountain”. If only through its very presence at every show the gold plate becomes that. For Roy people do this all time, with other people too and its what most relationships are based on. “Now that it has this really big importance, it has to have its presence”, he says. “But, as is anything, it wasn’t anything. It could have meaning, but really it’s just a gold plate.” “This is pretty ludicrous what’s going on. It’s not serious”, concedes Roy, “This is not someone taking their life very seriously right now”. Adding that if he thought about the future he’d probably stop what’s he’s doing. “But that’s what art is, you immerse yourself in it, you either do it or you don’t”, he continues, “Art is meant to evoke something – even if it’s disgust. I really hate indifference.” In contrast, Roy brings up Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader’s disappearance at sea during his art performance In Search of the Miraculous, “Strive for the extraordinary in search of the miraculous. He went in search of the miraculous, went out in a boat and went missing. I guess he’s dead, but… maybe that’s what he was looking for? Maybe he found it? We can all assume he died, but maybe he found the miraculous.” At once the instantiation of absolute meaning and inherently, absurdly, superfluously meaningless, the gold plate could perhaps be seen as a cipher for the miraculous ‘eternal troof’ sought by the group’s improvised musical conversations – the point of not having a point – and the Hype project itself. In a sense, it all comes down to a choice between just blandly accepting life or wanting it to really affect you strongly – that if Bas Jan Ader did die, he found the miraculous? “Exactly”, confirms Roy, “Something happened. Something occurred.”

[williamalderwick-blog]

Eastenders

Introduction for Eastenders book for photographer Robert Glowacki, 2010.

Eastenders has been one of the central soap-opera touchstones of England’s self-consciously working class moralisms for over two decades. The continual mess of intrigues reaching throughout the community around Albert Square both holds it together and threatens to rip it apart.  An encyclopaedia of tabloid taboos is reflected in the relationships unfolding on screen, these then forming instructional cartographies in how to navigate our own, how to deal with the people and events encircling us and defining our lives. The voyeuristic addictiveness of Eastenders’ hyperbolic exaggeration and cathartic tragedy of trash culture has carried its vision of east London’s working class into the heart of the mainstream. Perhaps, in this way, we are all Eastenders – a little bit of the Mitchell clan or Dot Cotton living on in us like an undead frog in the throat.

The photographs that Robert Glowacki has collected together in this book offer us another east end and portraits of very different east-enders. It would be nigh-impossible to capture all of the many beautiful juxtapositions and ruptures between worlds that make up the rich cultural collage of east London: from the Asian communities in Tower Hamlet’s deprived estates and the culinary tourismo of Brick Lane’s curry houses; through the art boom fuelled and soul-destroying gentrification of Shoreditch; Dalston’s grimey italo-disco basement clubs; and, the scenesters triangle of the London Field’s park-based catwalks; to the proto-bourgeois living in Hackney or Clapton’s Victorian houses; and, the yummy-mummy strip of Stoke Newington’s Church Street. Full of latent creativity and inspiration, east London has attracted people from all over the world to come and make it their home. It is a life fuelled on vibrancy and desperation in a city where one must continually strive amidst near crippling rents and an extortionate cost of living just to survive.

Asking people why they came to east London or what they thought of it when they arrived, some might say that it was exactly what they thought it would be before they arrived, others that London reminded them of late-70s Lower East Side New York. At that time the Big Apple was almost bankrupt. Sold down the river by successive Presidents, vast housing projects stood pregnant in their dereliction and vacancy. The downtown art scene that crystallized from the influx of young artists into these spaces still resonates today as one of the most energetic and charged periods of artistic experimentation. It spawned a dizzying quantity of sublime quality; just consider the lasting impact of the music scene and how punk, new wave and no wave have implicitly or otherwise inspired every guitar and noise band since.

Inspired by the example of New York, artists, gallerists, musicians and (perhaps most importantly) students started flocking to London’s east end during the recession years of the ‘90s. Cheap rents and derelict buildings offered spaces of possibility, a vacuum within which creativity could flourish unfettered. The resultant proliferation of art shows and galleries, gigs and clubs, market stalls and shops, design studios and fashion houses, all serialized and celebrated in DIY publications, transformed the area and made east London a Mecca of global cool.

Within the current global financial turmoil, however, it is no surprise that east London is no exception in having a fin-de-siècle atmosphere. Much of the current cultural produce smacks more of Mecca Bingo than the feted Elysian heights of yesteryears. As the cultural successes anchored in the east end, such as the YBA fuelled art boom, filtered down and outwards successive areas have been gentrified. When Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas opened The Shop on Bethnal Green Road in 1993, Spitalfields was a picture of urban desolation. Now it features a host of global chains and expensive boutiques, the area’s history, its character and charm, lost beneath globalized design and the ubiquitous non-spaces of consumer retail traps. Likewise, the nightlife of Shoreditch and Hoxton has been increasingly swamped under a deluge of overpaid, trendy city boys descending from the glass plated peaks and valleys of their corporate sweatshops to the south. These influxes of capital have squeezed out the cultural aborigines who gave the place its lustre, leading to a mercurial drift of people moving ever outwards in search of affordable rents and creative spaces. This waning of east London is perhaps clearest within the art scene itself. With recession threatening to burst the art bubble, there has been a notable decline in quality of the galleries along Hackney’s Vyner Street and the work on such. Many of the most interesting exhibitions recently have appeared south of the river in Peckham, in particularly at Hannah Barry Gallery and through the Auto-Italia group.

If we’re to ask where or what the future might bring perhaps we could turn to the famous Adbusters article by Douglas Haddow claiming that the hipster is the death of western civilization. An endemic ideological infection of irony and cynicism whereby everyone and everything is cool in the shallow superficiality of pervasive referentiality, hipster-ism is paradoxically post-modernism as hegemony. Plaid shirts, fixed gear bikes, hard-core music wearing Ray-bands running about in cliques and castes, feudal scenes and fiefdoms of socially networked movers and shakers, as a thousand little emperors and empresses carve out their niches within the demographic of the hip. It’s a generation in limbo, offered all the skills and tools to remake their worlds but waiting unendingly for the event(s) of their lives like Godot with no vision, blind to their future and rendered mute through their slavish appropriate of the past. Perhaps all this unmeaning banality is a phase, co-extensive with the death of an underground. Any new scene or style is instantly co-opted and capitalized. Plucked from obscurity and placed centre-stage into the mainstream, nothing is allowed to gestate or mature independently. This means that any potential transformative impact it could have is quelled. Revolution is sold to us stillborn and ersatz, branded under the stencilled mane of Che Guevara.

But for all that, the hipster is perhaps the first truly globalized youth tribe or lifestyle choice. Hipsters may happen to live here or there but in essence they’re a transitory breed, a circulating diaspora transfusing ideas and influences across physical expanses and cultural borders. It is this hint of the outsider within someone simultaneously freelancing for luxury brands – unashamedly part of the mainstream and everything that might be wrong with it whilst also vociferously critiquing it through Situationist agit-prop art works – that offers our cues for the future.

Within the advent of a new recession a new generation of artists, musicians, photographers and writers are forging their own scenes. Like NYC, London is brutally unforgiving. One must always be doing more, never resting, be driven ever on by the city’s unquestionable thirst to make one’s name, to shout it writ large and thunderous amidst the cacophony of a million other self-published voices. Eschewing corporate co-option, D.I.Y. music and art projects continue to spring up through gigs played in kitchens, record labels run from bedrooms, exhibitions in empty shop windows or funeral parlours, and in nearly any imaginable way.

Inhabiting interzones between a multiplicity of worlds, between those of life (leisure) and work – the feted warehouse lifestyle is itself almost a parody of the post-modern collapse of the live-work divide and a holism at once frighteningly consumptive and liberating – arched between an array of different cultures without ever quite touching or meeting them, we today live on the edge of a radically decentred and multi-polar future. It is this cultural multiplicity that has fuelled the creative booms of east London and it is this alternative eastender, portrayed in the following photographers, that perhaps will prove to be the greatest agent of regeneration.

[williamalderwick-blog]

Photo series by Philip Sinden at the Marrakech Biennale's Higher Atlas exhibition, including works by Alexander Ponomarev, Jon Nash, Andrew Ranville and Juliana Cerqueira Leite, alongside an interview with co-curator Carson Chan.

[williamalderwick-blog]

Short film by Parisian filmmakers AB/CD/CD structured by Factory Floor's Real Love

[williamalderwick-blog]

Short film on German Photographer Juergen Teller by artist TJ Wilcox.

[williamalderwick-blog]

Short piece for AnOther for the exclusive premiere of Fresh Touch's Harar Rhythm, with an interview with Yeah Yeah Yeah's Nick Zinner.

[williamalderwick-blog]

‘And Behold a White Horse…’

An essay on the work of photographer Emer O'Brien for the catalogue of her first solo show, Journeys into a Bright World, at Ferreira Projects in 2008. ‘And Behold a White Horse…’

For an exhibition entitled Journeys into a Bright World, Emer O’Brien’s first solo show at FERREIRA PROJECTS, confronts us with a dark, menacing vision of control within the seemingly innocuous portraiture of horses. Inspired by the four horsemen of the apocalypse from the Book of Revelation and E.A. Poe’s short story Metzengerstein, Journeys is a meditative mix of photography, light-boxes and film shrouded in shadows under the disquieting and un-localized sounds of stampeding horses.

Comparing O’Brien’s early photographs of space frames to the new sculpture of the 1960s, as images of and for consciousness, Ian Jeffrey identifies their true theme as being that of absence. These ‘desolate and inadequate structures’ encroached by the organic world are the residual frames of something that once stood before, with a significance now lost and formerly containing things which have now disappeared. For Jeffrey, they present us with the predicament of the subject at large in the world: faced with our own substance, materiality and sheer presence, we are confronted with the absence of that about which all the rest has been constructed, a center or source capable of infusing the world with significance or meaning. It is a vision from the edge of a great beyond, a desert in which the sands of time have eroded and washed away all but the most rudimentary traces of what stood before and have erased everything of substance, meaning and gravitas.

O’Brien’s first photograph of animals emerged out of her images of space frames with the shooting of a dead dog found in the desert in Mauritania. Shown at the Whitechapel Gallery, Contemporary Amnesia, 2003, is an image invoking many of these same themes of desolation, absence and loss. Almost desiccated completely, the animal leaves a sand imbibed husk of parched leathery skin nearly indistinguishable from the rocks and stones about it. Essentially a landscape depicting the return of the organic to the inorganic, it is a photograph in which the vitality of life has all but gone. Yet what marks this image out is the ambiguity generated by the mountain range-like tufts of fur not quite submerged within the dirt. Looking like burnt grass, one cannot decide whether they present the last dying gasp of a suffocated, sunburnt planet, or if they irrupt from the ground as the very principal of regeneration. Within O’Brien’s young oeuvre this introduction of the animal as subject marks a turning point at which, with the desolation on show reaching its nadir at the extinction of life and its dissolution into mere dirt, some vital spark survives from which substance and significance can be rediscovered. In Journeys O’Brien refers back to Contemporary Amnesia with an image of the neck and mane of a brown horse. The smooth nape of the horse’s neck accentuated against the blank background is in stark contrast to the broken earth of the earlier image. Here the animal is distinct, clear, its cohesion uncompromised by its surroundings. The reigns looped about its neck suggests a bridle, an instrument of control indicating co-option into the functional economy of human civilization. The animal is literally harnessed and transformed into a tool. Reminiscent of O’Brien’s space frames and in contrast to Contemporary Amnesia, the bridle here symbolizes civilization’s isolation of the animal from nature. But, whilst the ‘inadequate structures’ of the frames are substituted for the functional harness, the place is also transformed in this change of perspective from the ‘desert of the real’ to a blank and empty void. For O’Brien, within this dichotomy of real desert and ideal void, the source and core providing significance is the vital physicality of the body. That this core significance can seemingly only be encountered within the void or against a sky-like background suggests that it is itself ephemeral or merely illusory, as if we can only discover it through the constricting lens of civilization. It is this relation of civilization and control to the body that orientates O’Brien’s work in Journeys. A series of images arrayed along the right hand wall depict a solitary white horse, its head moving minimally as the contrast changes and the shadowy contours of muscle are subtly bleached. In contra-poise to Muybridge’s studies of horses in full flight, O’Brien limits movement to its most unassuming and docile. Cropped to the head and shoulders, limiting the strength of its limbs to the suggestion of musculature, this series presents the horse shorn of its associated potency and vigour. In another series mounted on light-boxes, the calm and dignified composure of a white horse looking at the camera, exerting its gaze and hence individuality, gives way under the re-imposition of control. Its contorted features, as it is pulled back into line and reduced again to the nondescript horse per se, captures the violence of control. Other images incorporating a horse’s flanks disclose how control is played out on the body through the grooming of manes and coats. Through reading the violence of control down to this scale of micro-gestures a spectrum of violence emerges which parallels that of the photographer’s domination and control over their subject. O’Brien’s work invokes the photograph as still life, a stilled finite slice of the immense multiplicity of life and reality, to composition, cropping and editing. On first sight O’Brien’s most famous image, from the Where The Wild Things Are series, showing a hooded donkey within a stark cell-like stable, recalls to mind infamous images of torture and abuse. The hood speaks to us of repression, of the denial of personality and recognition, and through the surgical lamp hanging from above, of an implicit violence, even imminent execution. Unlike Jeff Wall’s A Donkey in Brighton, where the ass’s un-freedom is expressed through the placement of the animal and the articulation of space about it, in which the photographic apparatus pins the donkey to the back corner in an act repeated in each new viewer’s gaze, O’Brien’s donkey enjoys an ironic freedom in relation to us. What violence is enacted within O’Brien’s photograph is actually upon us. The donkey’s hood is see-through. Seemingly submissive under an imposed constraint, in reality the donkey gazes calmly and curiously at the camera. The implicit violence of the gaze’s caesura is reversed: he can see us but we cannot see him seeing us. Yet the violence of the photographic cut extends further than this play of gazes between artist, viewer and subject within an image. The artist exerts control not only in terms of what is shot but also which shots are presented to us and how. Split into two rooms shrouded in darkness, with only the flickering half-light of O’Brien’s films and the luminescent glow of her light-boxes to guide our way, Journeys also conditions how the images are presented and demonstrates how for O’Brien this conditioning of viewing by the artist extends into the gallery space. The menacing sound loop of galloping, wild horses permeates the space. Rumbling in the shadows this displaced howl of the animals’ primal energy is at once ever-present behind and yet amputated from the clean surgical portraits on show. Its threat is that of the very mechanism of control witnessed within the images, ubiquitous, invisible and un-locatable within the situation or space itself. All we can find are the symptomatic marks, traces and scars of its action. This scarring is documented in the second film of The Listed Screen with the repetitive and clearing dysfunctional clawing at the ground of a tethered horse. The neurotic intensity of the scene is such that it is easy to mistake it for a video loop, until one notices the normal movements of the clawing horse’s partner behind it. In these two images of the horse, one regular and normalized, one pathologically deformed by its imposed constraints, we see the mis-match between a functional ideal and a feral, brute existence. The centrepiece of the exhibition is a near blank image of a white horse’s head and neck. With its one visible eye closed, O’Brien offers us a negative silhouette of the stilled and quieted steed. As the name suggests, we can read Journeys as a journey from the dark to the light, from the potent animalistic body, site of dark unknowable desires and drives, to an ideal image of the horse, one that invokes notions of domestication, of a perfected and unfettered docility. Together with the inherent anthropomorphism of the portrait form, this subdued animality reflects our own enmeshed site within culture and civility. The social and semantic ties of the cultural world proscribe, re-direct, diminish and yet focus the jouissance of our primal desires and drives, re-forging this base materiality towards an otherworldly ideal. It is an implicit cultivation and the choice of the horse as subject, with its heritage of agriculture and warfare, perfectly instantiates this; we are both the products and tools of our own civility, our own domestication.

Paradoxically the closed eye of this last horse, whilst highlighting the unassuming servility of this ideal horse which hasn’t even the presumption to its own gaze, its own consciousness even, and hence which finalizes its ideal quality as purely for the intellect, is simultaneously a pure image of the body. Yet it is an image of the body cowed, of consciousness quieted. Reduced to its minimal contours and shorn of its physicality, here is the Idea of the horse. Indeed this is the last horse, the idea left once its tether to the means of production has been severed by industrialization and its functionality is nigh obsolete. It is a portrait of desolation and disappearance as with the earlier space frames, but here it is the subject itself facing dissolution in its own ethereality and divorce from the physical boon of reality. It is thus not without reason that some Native American’s feared that having one’s photograph taken would steal one’s soul. Photography is an art of the cut, an art of seizure, of capture, that isolates and separates. Arresting a moment in time, photography preserves the scene falling under its gaze and yet, no less than the cave paintings at Lascaux, the photograph reaches us as a memorial and trace of the departed. In this way photography teaches us loss, as the shutter-click’s cut of each shot announces the incessant march of time. Thus the essence of the photographic cut is an erasure of reality un-represented within the photograph in the same motion in which it archives that which is captured. The selection of images exhibited itself constitutes a dramatic eugenics whereby the sheer scale of photographs taken is reduced through severe editing to the few presented before you. The principal ofcontrol and conditioning within O’Brien’s work signals a pre-occupation with that which is un-captured or un-capture-able by the photograph itself. Her conditioning of the gallery space with sound and light is designed to make us think of the lived reality absent from her images and halt the erasure of all that which suspended in between the images on show. In Out and About, Jeffrey contrasts the old Kantian sublime of awe at the vast magnitude and potency of nature, with a new sublime, of awe at the idea of infinity. It is here, with the lost infinity of reality looming darkly underneath the pristine glossy surfaces of her images, that this new sublime occurs within O’Brien’s work, as an idea of the absent. The question of how to read O’Brien’s exhibition, however, is problematic: is it a journey from light to dark or dark to light? One reading presents the reduction of the horse to an idealized abstraction, the other a near apocalyptic irruption of primal dark desires out of the previously docile, habitual, or servile. Within Poe’s story, the turning of its head by a magnificent white steed locked in a tapestry signals the arrival of a demonic stallion. The superhuman struggle for control between this creature and Poe’s protagonist ultimately ends with both consumed in fire. It is possible to read the four coloured horses of Journeys as the beasts of apocalypse of the Book of Revelation, with O’Brien’s photographs and films re-enacting this struggle for control under a looming and menacing threat of self-immolation. Thus O’Brien challenges all the edifices of culture, our control and domination over nature, animals and our darkest selves, to answer: who, really, is in control? And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts… And I looked and behold, a pale horse And his name that sat on him was Death And Hell followed with him -‘The Man Comes Around’ by Johnny Cash, from the Book of Revelation