Fig-2: the last stamp

Around the art-world in fifty weeks

Harry Bensley was an English rake and adventurer who in 1908 set out to circumnavigate the world on foot pushing a pram and wearing an iron mask.

A surreal successor to Jules Verne’s fictional Phileas Fogg, it’s said that he did it because he lost his whole fortune in a card game and accepted the extravagant wager of £21,000 as a forfeit, along with fifteen bizarre conditions including having to find a wife in spite of being married already.

These indecorous but hilarious terms suggest he did it not entirely for the money: the whole venture smacks of the most gamesome English eccentricity.

Nobody goes around the world in a metal mask like Harry Bensley, or in eighty days like Phileas Fogg, for anything so un-Romantic as a wager. An adventure must have drama, ambition, grandiosity, all for their own sake. There has to be a grand challenge to stir the senses. There has to be the strong likelihood of a spectacular and embarrassing failure.

I am pleased to announce that I am on the brink of a glorious, glittering, sensational failure!

Fifty weeks ago on the 8th of January, one boring winter Thursday I messaged a friend saying I was going to swing by the ICA to check out this new project called Fig-2 that was going to put on a new art exhibition every week for fifty weeks:

“50 weeks. I’m going to *try* to go every week. I may even notate my thorts.”

The blog started off innocently, even hesitantly, with short-ish quite technical pieces in which I teased out the meanings of each week’s exhibition.

Contemporary art often presents you with a box of parts and no assembly manual. Whether you build a car or a sex sling says as much about you as it does about the work itself.

The blog rapidly got out of hand as my historical and theoretical sweep broadened, with the intellectual breadth of the exhibitions requiring hours of extra study in esoteric fields from anthropology to crypto-zoology.

It took over my life, but I fell behind writing a long short story about an infinite library, though this made later writing a 600-line modernist poem about going blind seem easy. The pieces aren’t reviews, aren’t criticism. It’s experimental writing but it’s also documentary.

I’ve covered thirty-eight weeks (three ably helmed by Alix Mortimer) and four ancillary seminars, and today it’s Tuesday in the last week of Fig-2.  I have twelve write-ups to finish by Sunday. This is of course impossible. It was impossible from the start. Fig-2 is an intellectual banquet, and writing about each week takes weeks of research, thought and experiment.

I’m working on these last pieces all at the same time as if they were one monstrous dissertation, the last chapter in a terrible anti-thesis on Fig-2, the universe and everything. It’s taking up all my time, and I’m not even getting anywhere. People keep asking me if I’m going to things at the London Contemporary Music Festival but I just can’t.

I’ve got the usual chronic FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) but recently this has turned into a sanity-preserving energy-retaining JOMO — Joy Of Missing Overtiredness. JOMO is gonna be the big thing of 2016.

At the end of every version of Verne’s Eighty Days there is a now ubiquitous cinematic trope. The heroes think they’ve won, everything seems brilliant, but then, no! It’s all gone wrong! There’s nothing that can be done, nothing. At least they tried. Everyone starts to disperse, but then, what’s this, wait! From the jaws of defeat is snatched the, I dunno, the salmon of victory. Joy, elation, and a happy ending for some reason.

It’s by no means certain whether this salmon will be forthcoming.

What is certain is that I have visited all fifty weeks. This blog is named after the Fig-2 loyalty card, which is a sheet of paper (pictured below) bearing the promise “Visit all 50 projects and endorse this loyalty card by each week’s unique artist’s stamp. Upon completion, you will be granted a copy of the fig-2 publication.”

There’s a small bunch of us with all fifty of these stamps, winners of the Fig-2 wager, each due one of these documentary books that will commemorate the year.

The publication is currently being crowdfunded (check it out!) with rewards including personalised postcards, posters, VIP drinks, prints, tea with Bruce McLean, and the apotheotic grand prize of a box containing all fifty of the actual loyalty card stamps (pictured). The crowdfunder is unlikely to achieve great failure. The team already pulled off the fifty weeks with only mild onset chronic alcoholism and then only toward the end, and I imagine the book will fly (if books could fly).

The £995 box of stamps is obviously beyond my means but I have never wanted it so much as now, now that I’ve found out that someone else has actually gone ahead and bought it.

Perhaps we could discuss some kind of deal, maybe some arrangement by way of a wager…

 

With special thanks to Fatoş Üstek, Jessica Temple, Irene Altaió, Yves Blais, Alix Mortimer, Huston Gilmore, Adam and the other loyalty card heroes.

 

 

Week 26 – Anne Hardy – June 29-July 5

Scraping. Crackling. Rainbow sound. Filter. Whoosh and whoop and russsh of air. Brush. Breath. Sea, but not sea. Unsean. Trickle. Cloudburst. Broop, rustle. Rumble, scrapple: track fork. Nkrkrkrkr. Drum bung. Dong. Gung. Budda budda. Begin!

That’s what I hear: a Joycean overture coming from the speakers of Anne Hardy’s installation for Week 26 of Fig-2. She herself has “rrmmmph, huoooghg, op, mmmuuow, ip” which is just as good. Orthography (how we write down the spoken word as text) is an arbitrary, personal art. Joyce himself to great acclaim had Bloom’s cat in Ulysses say not “Meow” but “Mkgnao!”

You can listen to an excerpt of this soundtrack “rrmmmph, huoooghg, op, mmmuuow, ip” and imagine having it going on at full volume all day long, as the fig-2 team do. Over 45 minutes I found it oddly reassuring, even friendly, but then I like controlled noise. I’m not sure I’d like it nine to five, though to be honest I have exactly that myself: a constant soundtrack of uncontrolled asymmetrical noise, chatter, smoking, sirens, and an alarm that constantly goes off when someone constantly opens the gate constantly all day. Jessie says the Hardy soundtrack isn’t so bad but that you’d then go out and a car could crash behind you and wouldn’t notice to turn around.

The soundtrack is heavily edited and processed audio from recordings of Anne Hardy installing and creating sculptural work in her studio, leftovers from physical work, just as the space is strewn with physical leftovers of this other work that is absent. Plasterboard shapes being cut, scrunched up tape, big scrapes of smashed up concrete: your brain tries to connect the sounds to the objects, but both aspects resist each other.

The speaker system by Flare Audio uses waves or something instead of compressing air so it can be much louder than conventional speakers. It is a remarkable technical advance and Flare’s technology to have been taken seriously by sound engineers and audio nutjobs. The sound is vivid and punchy, and I know this is how I experienced the sound and it wasn’t an illusion caused by having been told about the special sound system because in my notes I wrote “Very vividly recorded sounds. Very punchy sound.” (though admittedly my notes on things are mostly a higher form of complete drivel).

The carpet is the glorious “process blue” of pure cyan. A darkish inscrutable blue that makes objects a buoyancy in an alien visual field that invites the eye in and projects the objects back out.

In such an environment with this vocabulary of sounds you do start to not so much hallucinate but question the origin of the noises. Was that noises off or did it come from the speaker? Irene steps through and kicks the bin, Jessie’s heels scrape, I blow my nose then sniff.  I think that motorbike was outside. You forget what’s inside and what outside, start hearing things, imagining you hear things. The sounds pile up on themselves and create little narratives.

Think of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth – du-du-du-DUH. Most sound you hear is just du-du-du or DUH. Joining them together, however, you can create pattern. In Anne Hardy’s soundtrack I hear the long swelling sound of water followed by a weird click edited and juxtaposed to punctuate and create a phrase which is essentially musical.

It’s a terrific use for ‘found sounds’. Years ago I went to a Wire Salon (a Q&A organised by the fiercely mandarin music magazine Wire) about field recordings, and one of the big questions raised was ‘After you’ve recorded all this stuff, what do you do with it?’ We sound recordists have hours and hours of birdsong and crowd noise and trains going out and coming in and beaches. I genuinely have a recording of complete silence (from an anechoic chamber – it sounds really odd).

The economy of Anne Hardy using discarded parts of sculptural processes in exhibiting them and soundtracking them makes her the green champion of fine art practice.  Throughout her work she has also scoured the streets of Hackney for objects that she can introduce into her work.

She made her name constructing weird spaces of which she would then take a single photo which would be all that remained of it (she wasn’t always a green champion). They’re completely amazing. Her practice later took her into creating these spaces so that not one but several photos would be needed to capture them, and to not to be so rigidly ephemeral but so that people could enter them, adding a third dimension. Her Fig-2 show takes this even further by allowing us into the process of the making of these spaces, and seems very much intended to be viewed as transitional. It will be interesting to see next month in her show FIELD, at Modern Art Oxford, how far along on her trajectory she has gone in moving away from photography and integrating sculptural installation and audio.

Opening up spaces and exposing processes, and centring on the process of making, is a functional kind of art. It’s art about art. Which is fine and modern but doesn’t invoke the sublime or the uncanny. The photos have a perfection. They are pure art. They don’t encode or include their own making except that inasmuch as there is no attempt to disguise the artificiality of the scene. This is what gives the photos their hyperreality. They’re so unreal they seem more real than reality.  Jessica Lack says Hardy is “one of a number of contemporary photographers well aware that the documentary look is best recreated by using stage sets.”

The extreme shortness of the depth of field adds to the effect, making the spaces harder to understand and interpret, harder to read. The process of “reading a space” is psychologically charged, and in a sense you project yourself onto it. The ghost in a haunted house is actually just the spectre of your fear. Hardy’s photographic spaces are difficult, and so foreground your own response. It might not be something you are even aware of.  The isle is full of noises. You might just feel a bit weird, a bit edgy, start imagining things. . .

ADDITIONAL LINKS

Fig-2 interview with Anne Hardy: https://soundcloud.com/fig2/2650-fatos-ustek-interviews-anne-hardy

The world’s largest natural sound archive just went up online – The Macaulay Library uploaded 150,000 recordings documenting the sounds of 9,000 species. It’s fully listenable and fully searchable: http://www.chartattack.com/news/2015/08/06/worlds-largest-natural-sound-archive/

Week 38 – Josh Wright and Guillaume Vandame – 21-27 September

It is not emptying your mind. The instructor explains to the class,

Meditation has got nothing to do with blanking your mind. My favourite quote on yoga is “If you want your mind to go blank, get your best friend to give you a healthy blow on the head.”

Oh God, but my mind is blank. Should it not be? Think about things. Concentrate. I mean, meditate. So it’s not just emptying your mind then?

You wouldn’t want to encourage your mind to be blank, because your mind is designed in a way that is supposed to connect you with the world around you. So why would you ask your heart to stop beating, why would you ask your digestive system to stop working?

Didn’t Houdini slow his heart down or his breathing so he could escape from padlocks under water? No matter. Some gentle stretches. She asks us to move our hands in front of us, and to project an imaginary ball of light in our hands. Oh wow! I can see it, right there in my hands, a big imaginary ball of love or cosmic libido. My body and I are one! Meditating is pretty far out.

We are going to be practicing slow movement, controlled movement, to match our breath, so that our awareness can follow.

I like the stretches and the breathing and the ball of light, and the lying down. I could lie down all day, all night even, just breathing. She tells us to touch one nostril with your thumb and the other with your finger and breathe in through the left nostril and out through the right. But I can’t. I can’t breathe through my nose. This is agony. This is excruciating. I have never been so frustrated. This is not relaxing. Meditation is sheer hell.

What we are trying to achieve through meditation, a sense of stillness, a sense of peace, tap into that sense of stillness and peace within us, something that you carry with you all the time wherever you go.

Seriously, how do they get away with it, the Bedroom Tax and the Welfare Bill, the death of Bobby Sands and parking tickets. I definitely did not ask to be born. This is cruel. My body has dissolved into feelings. At that moment I notice that the ball of light in my hands is a horrendous flaming ball of pure hate.

We are not looking for achieving something unattainable, we are tapping into something that is within – sense of stillness, sense of peace, sense that everything is well.

Everything is not well. The meditation session was not cathartic. After it’s over the guy next to me says, with a bovine docility, that he found it peaceful. In my mind a menagerie of Boschian monsters commit grave acts of bestial cruelty to each other in a landscape of flames and death.

In case you came here with the expectation of blanking your mind, it is not what we are looking for.

In Week 38 of Fig-2 Josh Wright and Guillaume Vandame turned the ICA studio space into a participatory art gym. The idea was to invite artists as well as exercise instructors, and encourage people to try new things and to promote healthy living as opposed to the impossible ideals of body image, with a social platform to discuss issues inspired by Marjolijn Dijkman’s Salon sessions held in Week 22 of Fig-2 which used the space as an open forum for discussion.

During the week there were sessions of Pilates, Zumba, Chi Kung, meditation, and eight types of yoga- Ashtanga, Vinyasa, Hatha, Meditation, Yin, Dru, as well as the mysterious “Everlasting Yoga” sessions run by artist Karimah Ashadu, the movement and meditation session that so severely stressed me out, and VOGA, an ungodly but logical mashup of Yoga and Voguing, the ‘strike a pose’ semi-static dance style that Madonna stole off the New York gay scene; logical because yoga is also a kind of semi-static dance of held poses, and ungodly because oh God just Madonna.

Vandame and Wright are strongly influenced by Vanessa Beecroft, and their week was in a sense an application of her sculptural use of actual human bodies. The participants in the classes become part of the human sculpture, as well as integral to what are in effect participatory performances. Guillaume says “the classes work within this framework about body image, gender, sexuality, etc. but are also much about chance encounters and possibility — what can happen in these situations and questioning expectations of both performance art and traditional exercise classes.”

In the sessions from three invited artists, the idea of a performance and exercise class as participatory performance were mixed up so an exercise class that is instructive becomes a participatory art event. Visitors are in a sense objectified, becoming sculptures within the installation. Objectification is a dangerous subject, beginning with how people are perceived and then defined and then repressed according to single objectified aspects of the their sex, gender, race, culture. Tellingly, the doors to the space stayed open, to foreground the aim of inclusivity. So the show’s repurposing of objectification takes issues or representation of the female body as a starting point and extends it to issues of race, sexuality, and so on through the whole list of ‘Tory low priorities’. It addresses perceived alienating effects of performance art (and indeed exercise) by inviting people into the performance.

Zing Tsjeng has written in Vice about “This is insanity!” the class/art performance led by Turner nominee Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, giving such a vivid and amazing account that it made me wonder if I was even at the same event.

INSANITY® is a provocatively competitive workout – the hardest ever! says the promo material. Chetwynd explained the hideous beast and took the class through some of its moves. It involves high-intensity one-minute bursts of strenuous activity (we did thirty seconds) followed by relative chill. This I guess means the body can’t become adjusted to either, which makes it work harder. It’s obviously stupid, but I suppose some idiots want to give themselves heart attacks.

Adham Faramawy’s “Post Rave Sweat Fatigue Workshop” was a high-intensity session combining the dance moves of rave with standard aerobics. I enjoyed this very much, but it’s hard to dance. An hour of rave anthems was pretty tiring. How the hell did we do this all night long in the nineties? Oh, drugs. Drugs were pretty good, right? I’m glad we got those tattoos.

High-intensity exercise is one thing, but nothing compared to what artists and bodybuilders have put themselves through. Francesca Steele is a kind of case study for pushing the limits of body modification as both an art and personal project. She was featured in the Superhuman exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, a show about body modification, and in the first salon discussion session at Fig-2 she spoke about her lifestyle and being a bodybuilder as an art project she did in 2008, physically changing her body and how that changed her identity, particularly regarding gender. Her diet was so rigorous and extreme, full of eggs and spinach and drugs, that upon being invited to dinner with art legend Marina Abramovic she declined because she didn’t want to deviate from her diet. It caused such a personal strain to the extent that she ended up divorced from her husband.

At the second salon session Fig-2 curator Fatoş Üstek theorized that the week invites a “critical framework” in which we discuss what forces are at play in “subjectivity and socially engaged art, how we define what is a healthy body and how art deals with this modern subject”. The mirrors along the side of the ‘gym’ were intentionally fragmented, as a visual comment on body image, which was pretty neat.

https://twitter.com/fig2london/status/648117591127498752

Developing this theme, three TVs showed one-hour edits of exercise and dance routines taken from movies and videos from the 1970s-80s. Guillaume explains “The exercise videos formally deal more with wider issues of representation and identity in terms of nationality and race — how these identities are constructed and formed across various cultures at various points in time. As well the issues of beauty, normality and difference on display – what it means to be masculine or feminine or the assumption that the individuals are heterosexual because they conform to a heteronormative ideology/society.”

That sounds very theory heavy, but it really resonates. I’ve always had a problem with these kinds of videos. They’re just so sexy. I can’t desexualise them, if anyone can. Can you? The lines of the body, particularly the crotch, are emphasised by the tight-fitting lycra gymwear. It brings out my inner prude. It’s something about the screen, whereas in real life nothing is at all sexy. Rhythmic movements of the pelvis are inherently embarrassing.

Appropriately, therefore, one sculptural aspect of the show was along one wall tools wrapped in lycra. Tools, wrapped in lycra. But seriously, ahem, it’s emblematic of the show’s mixing up of high and low culture to present the hard utilitarian teleology of hammers and saws wrapped up in the soft gaudy kitsch of spandex.

The classes and events I went to over the week involved me in physical activities that were well out of my comfort zone. What you’re reading now is in a sense a sequel to my piece for Week 27 of Fig-2 in which I dwelt on the chance encounter of my misanthropy and self-hatred with the spiritual and physical rhapsodies of Kundalini Yoga. With hilarious consequences, of course.

I do have a cosmic streak, so I wondered if my broadly positive reaction to Kundalini was more about that rather than the exercise side, and whether Week 38 would answer this. In the case of me getting so stressed out in the meditation class, clearly not.

The yoga session on Sunday morning was a classic straight-man funny-man double act with Josh (literally straight) performing standard yoga moves, while Guillaume (literally funny) plugged into his iPod and singing along to a playlist of pop songs themed around breathing. The Daniel Johnston-like tuneless strangling of Taylor Swift and Sting was a disruptive art intervention into yoga. It actually made it easier for me to concentrate on the yoga; a sort of focusing distraction. I’m the sort of ADHD guy who generally has two TVs and a radio on while I’m writing while I’m driving while I’m on the tube while I’m on the phone, masturbating and making charcoal sketches.  

The session was nothing like my previous yoga session. It definitely felt like art, art as sustained wind-up, the neo-Dadaism of Fluxus and Naim June Paik. One of the other participants was sustainedly wound up and began ignoring Josh and performing her own yoga shapes, before finally leaving the room for a few minutes, then returning, resuming her own thing, and finally getting so frustrated with Guillaume’s off-key singing that she exploded “Shut up!”

In the process of turning the studio space into an ‘art gym’ one of the interesting references that came up in the salons was to Marc Augé’s concept of ‘non-places’, those liminal spaces that are both or neither somewhere or nowhere – airports, shopping malls, motorways, supermarkets – and, why not, the gym. “The art of supermarkets, convenience stores, and so on have been explored,” Guillaume says, “but no one’s really explored the art of going to the gym. There have been references to the body throughout modern art and art history, but this context especially is unique.”

In Non-places: An Introduction to Supermodernity Marc Augé draws a distinction between “anthropological places” formed by social bonds and collective history, and “non-places” of atomized, individual travel and consumption: “If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.” (p63).

“Clearly the word ‘non-place’ designates two complementary but distinct realities: spaces formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure), and the relations that individuals have with these spaces […] As anthropological places create the organically social, so non-places create solitary contractuality. Try to imagine a Durkheimian analysis of a transit lounge at Roissy!” (p76)

It is not that the gym does not have a culture or that it’s not concerned with identity. For many the gym is active in the development and expression of their identity. It’s a hot-house for growing bodies. However, that phrase “solitary contractuality” crashes down upon it. Most people in the gym are alone. Nobody talks to each other, or exchanges are limited to a few technical reflections on abs or nutrition. It’s like being on the tube, another arena within which one is profoundly solitary not least because one is crammed into a tin with countless other people, none of whom you may interact with, not in conversation, not even making eye contact.

Gyms can be sterile, dehumanized environments that can be alienating or estranging, fuelling the suspicion of the exercise shy that it’s not for us, or that it’s for someone else, a body of people from which we are excluded just as ‘homeless spikes’ are not intended to promote a nicer society. “The non-place is the opposite of Utopia: it exists, and it does not contain any organic society.” (p90).

Solitary contractuality even extends to communal activities: exercise classes such as yoga or aerobics. Everyone is performing the same acts together, but all mediated through the class leader and each without reference to any other person in the room. It’s not a band, where if the drums stop you’ll notice, it’s not even like an orchestra where you could afford to have a few viola players pass out before anyone noticed anything was up. In these classes you are completely interchangeable, not even a cog in a machine for generating exercise, and if the gym is a non-place, then in the gym class you’re a non-person.

I was surprised but not surprised to learn that Zumba® is a registered trademark. So is INSANITY®. I have kind of respect for the holistic integrity of Kundalini Yoga but you do have to wonder if the highly invented and marketed Zumba – never mentioned without its ® – isn’t blatantly like the Scientology of exercise regimes. It’s a huge turnoff, that ®, a reminder of the strongly capitalistic impetus of exercise regimes. That your body is a product that you sell to make you a better machine to generate revenue for the capitalist machine.

By reclaiming the gym in an art context, Vandame and Wright perhaps suggested some ways in which we can go beyond the depressing eighties elements of exercise culture and really grow ourselves.

What I’d like to see is more of these free outdoor gyms. I walk past one in Anerley several times a week, and always think that’s bloody brilliant that is. Obviously I’m too lazy to actually use it, but I’d like to see these things everywhere, because proper gyms are expensive and terrifying. There is a massive moral panic about the burgeoning obesity crisis, so why don’t we build public gyms? Healthy living shouldn’t just be the preserve of the middle classes and the rich.

Week 25 – Cecilia Bengolea, Celia Hempton and Prem Sahib

What's this mimsy #whyIwrite bullshit. Who gives a fuck why you write. fuck off.

— Luke Haines Rock N Roll (@LukeHaines_News) August 26, 2015

Part 4: The Part About Me, Me, Me

Nell mezzo del cammin di nostra vita... This here is the twenty-fifth piece I’ve posted about a week at Fig-2, the curatorial ultramarathon that’s putting on a new art show at the ICA every single week for fifty weeks and which I am in my own special way documenting on wordpress, aiming to do all fifty.

As I write, it’s week 34/50, so you see I have some catching up to do before the end. It’s not easy. I have a slightly academic bent as well as a fundamentally artistic temperament, so each piece tends to go way beyond the minimum required to just tick the week off. I’m also permanently zoned out because the openings are on Zombie Mondays. I used to just go to bed with a bottle of cava and Jazz on 3 but now I have to talk to people.

By Week 29 I realized I hadn’t got beyond an ever-lengthening Borgesian short story about libraries for Week 19, and that I would have to reboot the blog. I’d have to work in two directions at once to fill the hole in the middle, while also trying to keep up with the present. Basically, in order to get through the rest of this year (or the rest of my life, whichever comes first) I’m going to have to learn to eat breakfast.

Since I re-upped the blog I’ve been posting out of chronological sequence — and hey! that’s art (loftily invoking Matthew Barney’s five Cremaster films made in the order 4, 1, 5, 2, 3). There are still gaps, but this very late 25th post (not counting curatorial seminars) neatly coincides with Fig-2 Week 25. Half way! It’s almost as if this were not a completely random coincidence after all.

It might yet all turn out okay, but at the time it was terrible. I drafted a kind of interim mission statement that I didn’t show you before.

Part 1: Fig-2 loyalty card [Reboot at Week 29]

Flann O’Brien’s classic comic anti-novel At Swim-Two-Birds opens with “CHAPTER ONE” and rattles through until it stops. There is no Chapter Two. This makes me laugh. I’m sure it has irritated many readers, which is probably part of the joke. What’s the joke? I’m not sure. Life doesn’t seem to have clearly defined chapters. Except it does. This year it has fifty.

I’ve been writing about each week of Fig-2, the project at the ICA studio curating a new art show each week for fifty weeks in 2015, but I’ve fallen behind. Every week is a chapter and the book is burning up faster than I can write it. At the moment, in Week 29 of Fig-2, having posted a piece for each week up to Week 18, I’m looking at a great burning hole in the middle of the book. There is no book, is part of the joke. Just fifty holes – 18 written and burned, 11 burning, and 21 unknown and yet to burn. Naturally it’s the ones we haven’t burned yet that burn the brightest.

This fifty-week project isn’t a book, it’s a movie. It has a three act structure. The ‘Three Act Structure’ has dominated screenwriting ever since Aristotle shot his first features on 8mm. In Act One you establish your characters and principles and set up the big dramatic question that demands action. Act Two is where it gets dark. Act Two finds our hero (usually a hero, I’m afraid) trying to resolve the big problem, but everything is turning to shit. Hamlet loses his mind (or pretends to), Luke Skywalker loses his hand OR PRETENDS TO, and everything is hopeless.

How have I got so far behind?

I’m rebooting this damn blog.

http://twitter.com/ESLifeandStyle/status/634368986600337409

Part 5: Oh, oh, we’re half way there. Whoa-oh.

Sculptor and installation artist Prem Sahib has generated a lot of art-world buzz. He has a major solo show coming up at the ICA. An article in London’s Evening Standard reveals that he is about to become a new entry in their “Progress 1000” list of London’s “most influential people”. He nonetheless somewhat rebuts a notion that he and his chums like Eddie Peake, George Henry Longly, and fig-2 collaborator Celia Hempton, are “his generation’s YBAs”. Where the YBAs fixated on shock and solipsism, if this bunch shares a special area of interest you might say it is in mixed media encounters between the eroticised human body and our public and personal spaces.

For Week 25 of Fig-2 Prem Sahib and Celia Hempton worked together with choreographer Cecilia Bengolea. Influenced by construction sites, the ICA studio space was fitted out with coloured perspex screens and floor lamps and a layout of plywood floorboards, cheap underlay and industrial rubber, with an industrial ambient soundtrack. Two dance performances took place involving three dancers (one naked, one semi-naked, one leotarded). They pulled some hard moves, and were on point most of the time. Their feet must look like mincemeat. It’s not just an interaction between harsh human-made environments and human notions of beauty (dance, dancers) but sets up each realm against itself, so there is beauty in the strange studio environment, and harshness in the body struggling against itself to create beauty in motion.

Part 2: Fig-2: fifty shows in fifty weeks

Twenty five weeks into the fifty, the Fig-2 team had put on 25 Monday night openings, held 54 events, and Sipsmith’s had served 5000 Gin & Tonics. Each week the ICA studio space has been completely reimagined. There have been all kinds of installations, films, sculpture, debates, dance, rock, roll, sex and death.

To mark these heady achievements and the half-way point the Fig-2 team appeared on George Lionel Barker’s Make Your Own Damn Music radio show. Curator Fatoş Üstek was particularly good with bons mots that memorably describe the project, describing it as being about “Improvisation. Experimentation. Unleashing Desires.”

“Theoretically it is a whole big house that has fifty rooms, and each room opens to another with a door with different characteristics, features, sizes, colours, tonalities, sensualities.”

One of the contradictions of Fig-2 being composed of fifty projects is that it naturally coalesces in the mind into one large project. It’s inevitable. This is not a criticism. On the contrary, Fatoş Üstek conceives of a “Giant Picture — not one thing — it’s squares with intersection points, trying to capture the critical and aesthetic currency of our times. With source information from different disciplines and positions.”

A house, a giant picture! I think of it that way too. My project for this year is writing fifty pieces, one for each week of Fig-2. These have varying degrees of engagement with each week’s work, and varying levels of digressive interest in themes that I draw out of the work. I’m teasing out themes and exploring my own obsessions on the way toward Act Three, building my own ‘whole big house’ — in my Week 18 room there’s the music room, Week 10 the dining room, Week 19 is the exquisitely furnished (but so far unfinished) library. A kind of meta-art.

I’m not an art critic, obviously, but sometimes writing conventional criticism is not the best way to engage with art. Sometimes more art is the most appropriate response. This is why I’ve written short stories for Week 10 and Week 23, a set of minutes for Week 12, used symphonic structure for Week 18, turned myself into an internet for Week 29 and back into a human for Week 30. But all of the fig-2 loyalty card nonetheless fulfils the function of ‘criticism’ and is therefore totally dispensable: since modern art is typically already a comment on itself, subsequent criticism, and especially my fifty week blogging project, is completely redundant. Like art itself, it is quite useless.

Part 3: The critical and aesthetic currency of our times

Experiencing as much art as I am this year inevitably makes you think about the classic and totally trite question: What is art?

The word ‘Art’ to you might mean the pictures and things in the big galleries (National, Tate, Whitechapel, Saatchi) but artists don’t tend to use the word art. Instead they talk about their ‘practice’ and ‘the work’. This reflects the diversity of approaches and makes it much easier to talk about what it is that artists do, particularly when the ‘work’ shades into sociology – for example, Leah Capaldi doused herself in strong perfumes and took herself onto the tube at rush hour, purposing to record the reactions of the other people to the whiff. Is this art, or just annoying?

Fig-2 naturally reflects ‘practice’ rather than ‘art’, and I can feel this hair splitting so finely I can barely see what I’m getting at. I’m kind of used to this stuff and forget that to most people it’s total bullshit, though I’m aware of it enough to want to address it here. If Prem Sahib’s forthcoming ICA show means he’s going to become more known outside of the ‘art world’ he could even become popular? One school of thought states that people love going to art museums but the art itself has become irrelevant, even as it seems more popular than ever. But what does ‘popular’ mean?

Last weekend I went to Grayson Perry’s Provincial Punk show at Turner Contemporary in Margate. Perry’s work is increasingly conscious of and concerned with his popularity and celebrity status with regard to being an art world insider now, but as a reflection or expression of the social marginalisation of “ordinary” people in the provinces, and how we live among brands and trends that we buy into but don’t control. Is he popular because he makes mainstream TV programmes, or because he won the Turner Prize in 2001, or because he wears dresses, or because he takes an old-fashioned level of solid craft, filling his pots with contemporary concerns (ie. swearing, celebrity culture, brands)?

Popular art needn’t be populist, though it is often accused of being so. In the run-up to the latest blockbuster show at Tate Modern, the BBC is battering us with a season about pop art. The BBC programmes are pretty nostalgic, and it remains to see whether the Tate show will be the same, though the Tate looks as if it might draw a bit of attention to overlooked international pop artists. Whether it be nostalgia or historical reclamation, either way we can conclude that whatever art is saturating the media and big galleries is in this case not ‘current’ at all except as a demonstration of the fact that we will never be free of the Sixties.

Popular art, populist art, pop art, these are three discrete things, though obviously they are connected. Classic pop art, not to mention personal concern with celebrity and blockbuster economics, seems removed from the areas that Fig-2 has been exploring. In China Xu Zhen prefers to think of his studio as a business venture as much an artistic practice. His and pop art’s concept that “Good art is the best business” is the kind of idea that Fig-2 artists have not pursued. The Warholian Paradigm is exhausted, perhaps because Money and Economics has so permeated everything that we are completely blind to it. Today money is everything. The cheeky frisson in Warhol of applying dollar values to a realm traditionally thought to be concerned with higher things is not shocking any more.

Look at Thierry Guetta (aka Mr Brainwash) in Exit Through The Gift Shop and you really see how pop art’s time has gone. Or have a yawn at the economics of the original YBAs especially Damien Hirst for a demonstration of the the artistic exhaustion of the interesting ‘business as art’ idea that was genuinely interesting when Warhol was interesting.

Fig-2 has so far largely had a fiercely mandarin interest in higher things, where it aims to capture the “critical and aesthetic currency of the times” while the Warhols and Hirsts just capture the literal dollar currency. So is Fig-2 the barometer of the times? Or the laboratory? The barometer of the laboratory sounds right. Many of the weeks are playful, but some are extremely cerebral, which I feel reflects certain curatorial predilections as much as what goes on in the art world. I mean, Fig-2 would make you wonder if anyone still painted (an accusation usually leveled at the Turner Prize). But then, painting is perennially dead, so fuck it, and fuck all forms of pop art, popular, populist, pointillist, pacifist, pugilist.

In pop art’s defence regarding intellectual art practice, we note that the important proto-pop-art bunch the Independent Group, who put on a famous show at Whitechapel in 1955, were more interested in exchanging ideas than in art. The group included Eduardo Paolozzi, whose public sculptures and murals seem to be disappearing from Oligarchal London, and Richard Hamilton, whose popularity and importance are said to be have been diminished by his being ‘too clever by half’. The group met in 1952 at the ICA, so here we are again. [Fanfare]

Art is intellectual though, niche, even when ‘popular’, and it’s also implicated in business. You might or might not find it contradictory when the popular artist Grayson Perry says “Contemporary art is the research and development department for capitalism. We come up with new ideas that the rest of the culture will kind of latch onto and sell. That’s our job, deal with it.”

I also wrote a piece at a quarter way through for the Art Fund: http://www.artfund.org/news/2015/04/01/blogging-fig-2-from-start-to-finish

Someone else wrote a half way review as well: https://www.ica.org.uk/blog/embracing-the-unpredictable

And this: http://www.artfund.org/news/2015/06/22/five-things-you-need-to-know-halfway-through-fig-2

Week 30 – Anna Barham – 27 July-2 August

Don’t be evil.

In 2007 Google (the well-known lunar landings provider who did the search engine thingy) introduced a free directory inquiry service in the US called GOOG-411. Your call was digitally parsed by the ‘robot operator’ who then offered to connect your call to its top results. It wasn’t clear what Google was getting out of providing this generous free service, which they even promoted on billboards.

Three years after its introduction the service was suddenly dropped. Google had already released its search-by-voice service in Android, and so the penny.. dropped. GOOG-411, as Google has admitted, had been a covert phoneme-gathering operation intended to create a huge database to improve voice recognition technology for Google’s search products.

Google had amassed thousands of hours of requests for plumbers and pizza delivery and connections to confusingly named places like Schenectady spoken in every accent from every state of the US. The free GOOG-411 service enabled the technology and techniques that activated the speech recognition software which was and is now amassing a vast repository of spoken words in every language on earth, improving itself in a perfect feedback learning loop every time the user corrects a faulty transcription.

Open the pod bay doors, Siri.

Anna Barham’s video “The Squid That Hid” outlines the difficulties speech presents to speech recognition software, from accent pronunciation and articulation to background noise. The big problem is that spoken words just run on from each other. It’s hard for humans too. Without visual punctuation it can be hard or impossible to arrange the string of syllables into words into sentences. To the untrained ear Polish sounds like English recorded to tape and played backwards. Yiddish sounds like someone cheating at Scrabble. English sounds like a sarcastic Swede reading words at random from a car manual (see also “Prisencolinensinainciusol”).

Ambiguity over the beginnings and endings of words is the basis of the Four candles/ fork handles sketch, and ambiguity about punctuation gives rise to the Eats shoots & leaves joke.

In the first line of Finnegans Wake we find “past Eve and Adam’s” which can also be read “Pa, Stephen: Adams” which deliberately equates Joyce’s father Stanislaus and his fictional portrait of the artist as a young man and archetypal Son Stephen Daedalus with the Bible’s archetypal Father figure Adam.

Adorno on punctuation @FatosUstek http://t.co/mdcVCbVw1h pic.twitter.com/BUI4cji4NT

— Anna Barham (@Banana_Harm) August 4, 2015

Seemingly Fleshed Inside

It all begins with this passage from Image Machine by Bridget Crone (2013). Anna Barham used it as the starting point for the film Double Screen (not quite tonight jellylike) which presents variations on Crone’s text as reworked and mangled by voice recognition software. I say “it all begins” but Crone’s text is itself a response to Amanda Beech’s Fi nal Mac hi ne. I daren’t look whether this also derives from something else for fear we’ll end up in some bottomless pit of recursion and influence.

Barham’s use of the text next went into Penetrating Squid, an ongoing novel whose third chapter forms the basis of the text that was the basis of her week at Fig-2. The text was generated in live reading groups where readers take it in turns to read a text into transcription software. Barham has apparently generated over a hundred versions of Crone’s text. Barham then went on to read short sections over and over again through the software to generate more radical disruptions and the three chapters of Penetrating Squid, which are audible on Soundcloud.

click image to embiggen

Crone’s text starts with a description of cleaning a squid and as bits fall onto newspaper the words distort and the text itself distorts and falls into associative chains of sounds and images. In the original we find “Tight pieces of sinewy flesh inside the squid try to hold onto this gooey mess” which is one of the short phrases whose variations form the bulk of the text Barham uses, which start off recognizably: “tried to hold onto the screen pieces of silver reflections cybersquaring trying to hold onto the screen” and get further “trying to hold onto the discreet/discrete maths inside the square” and further out: “listening in the pool pieces of seemingly flesh inside”.

In the ICA studio space for Week 30 of fig-2 Barham set up a microphone plugged into a Mac running OS X dictation software with a printer, plus a screen displaying the text as it was generated by the visitors reading. Visitors to the space were encouraged to read from the printouts they found, producing new printouts for the next visitors. As you’d expect over the course of a week the text bore little recognition to chapter three of Penetrating Squid.

My life I know your name and no more @fig2london @ICALondon @FatosUstek pic.twitter.com/xPvfzrkUeK

— Anna Barham (@Banana_Harm) July 28, 2015

Even over the course of successive readers the changes are considerable. In four steps we find, in no particular order, “Hello all this time”, “Hello I’m Harry”, “Okay hello and hurry”, “Okay hello unhurried”. It’s the old game of Chinese Whispers in electronic form.

"flabby, insipid flesh reproducing with the help of typographical microbes"

— Anna Barham (@Banana_Harm) July 3, 2015

The OS X software has real-time correction routines that try to identify the meaning of what is being said and retrospectively correcting it, so for example identifying whether you were ‘being discreet’ or rather talking about ‘discrete forms of meaning’.

Intriguingly, this illustrates aspects of Wittgenstein’s theory of language, that we create meaning not via the relation of individual words to the things we associate with them necessarily but via the relation of the words between themselves. The noun ‘Good’ stands for something different thing to the good of ‘good game’. Going on, Wittgenstein challenges us to come up with a meaning for the word “game”. We can’t agree, but we all know what it means in use. Meaning is use. This is the principle that Google Translate and OS X Dictation use: context.

It is awesomely powerful, but incomplete. While the machine understands to an extent meaning as generated by use, there’s still a step missing here, perhaps even missing from Wittgenstein’s theory, that would explain why we can’t agree on our game but still know what it means. It’s a cognitive next step that people working in voice recognition software are struggling with, entering the realm of Artificial Intelligence to seek the breakthrough.

Even with such clever tech and with the rich amount of phoneme data that has been gathered in exercises such as GOOG-411, it is still remarkable how hard it is for machines to transcribe speech, as Anna Barham’s work amusingly demonstrates. Never ask a robot to sell you fork handles.

PIECES OF
ONTO THE SCREEN
SINEWY FLASH
Anna Barham @fig2london
Computers and humans collide. pic.twitter.com/RL6hbWf7lQ

— Jes Fernie (@JesFernie) July 31, 2015

TRYING TO HOLD ONTO THE SCREEN

In Week 29 of Fig-2 I said that “You are an internet” and imagined inhabiting posthuman cyberspace having transcended physical form. In an act of direct regression, this week I have experimented with subverting this in real time to explore who is The Best: machines or humans? So please put your hands together for this my experiment with manually performing voice recognition transcription. You might think the transcriptions of software are laughable, but wait until you see mine.

I typed out all seven minutes of “Penetrating Squid / Chapter 3 / Seemingly Fleshed Inside” from the soundcloud, first with stops to type, and then typing straight through trying to keep up as best I could. Both attempts are viewable in this googledoc.

In the first pass, which took about forty-five minutes, I couldn’t decide between certain homonyms (discreet/discrete, you’re/your, onto/on too), made harder by the lack of conventional running sense. My ears are pretty good but I wasn’t sure if I heard lightly or likely. I typed silly instead of city.

The second pass, in real time, was of course a trainwreck. Certain omissions and conflations occur near the start and everything is mis-spelled, and then it just gets worse as I miss more, and at some point I knock CAPS LOCK on without realizing. By this point words have bled into each other and are half formed and in the wrong order, the text obliterated, repetitious. I enjoyed afterwards finding an example of spontaneous creative accident: a Joyce-style portmanteau word QWEAKNESS. At a couple of points I froze completely and I remember typing the letter ‘i’ about six times in a row, utterly defeated.

Insight is quick / inside the squid

The texts created from accidents can be beautiful and poetic. Is Anna Barham a poet? This is a kind of suggestive poetry, certainly if the meaningless syllables of dada poetry can be said to be poetry. The poetry creates kinds of sense because each word has a meaning, and new meanings are being created and found by the strange aleatory juxtapositions of the words. A clash of meanings is set up where there was no conscious intention. It is created anew by use and association, which brings us back to Wittgenstein’s notions of meaning as use.

Random associations and meanings can also occur in the physical dimension, or our perception thereof. Whenever I see or think about Anna Barham’s (amazing) anagrammatic Twitter handle “Banana_Harm” I have the sensation that I can smell foam banana sweets. For Mmm: by Anna’s tweaks.

I am indebted to Daniel Soar’s LRB article “It knows” for the Google knowledge, and Fig-2 curator Fatoş Üstek’s interview with Anna Barham.

Week 28 – Patrick Coyle & Francesco Pedraglio – 13-19 July

Fig-2 is famous for its collaborations. The project itself is a direct collaboration with each week’s artist where the artist and curators work closely to craft a seven-day show. Several of the weeks have also featured two or more featured artists in collaboration, and Week 28 was a collaboration between Patrick Coyle and Francesco Pedraglio. They both do a lot of spoken word performance and their show played brilliantly with interactions and slippages between the physical and the verbal.

The studio space was set out in a backwards S shape demarcated by the free-standing panels. On the front of these, Francesco’s black vinyl strips were laid out like mazes. Within the back were disparate objects collected by Patrick. Around the space everything was lilac or purple. Ground acai and acai berries, meths in a Dewars miniature, Winsor and Newton galeria Acrylic (purple), random purple markings, a lilac gas canister, purple cups, purple staining. It’s like Prince had a loft clearout.

Throughout fig-2 we have seen the six skylights of the ICA studio space closed off or opened to light, given colourful gels, and with this week they found a new look. One of the skylights has at some point been stepped on and it’s concave rather than convex, so it’s like a sky pond. Patrick filled it with purple water and put in weird objects, some of which over the week went mouldy, some solidified, some returned to liquid.
This is reminiscent of Jacopo Miliani’s Week 16 in which the artist brought in flowers every day but left them without water so over the week they faded away, presenting in physical form an illustration of time, which is such an all-pervasive notion in fig-2 with it’s radically curtailed exhibition times and rigid lengths.

Just as Miliani presented space as a choreographic score, here the studio space contained the raw physical ingredients that would go into the word soup of a half hour performance. The pair took it in turns to ‘read’. Francesco delivered a memorised poem three times, delivered almost slickly, with Patrick reading his speeches about purple, the mating habits of cedillas, the acai, the acaiphabet, the lab goo. All of these things were drawn into a verbal texture during the performance that magically transformed words and ideas into new ones.

Purgatorio de l’inferno is a long poem by Genoese avant-garde poet and playwright Edoardo Sanguineti which is kind of a Marxist response to the Divine Comedy of Dante. Francesco read, retranslated and reinterpreted Sanguineti’s tenth canto, a section I read as a warning to the Damned about materialism.

It is in three short stanzas. In the first we see the cat in boots, the peace of Barcelona, the locomative, the peach blossom, the seahorse, and “if you turn the page, you see the money”. We see Jupiter’s moons, the sun’s journey, the checkerboard, Latin literature, shoes, the school of Athens, butter, a postcard from Finland, the masseter muscle, and childbirth, and “if you turn the page, you see the money.” The last section is ironic: we see the generals with their machine guns, graveyards and graves, savings banks, security, history books full of history, and then when you turn this page, “you see nothing.”

Francesco presented his own translation of this three-part poem three times, each time gathering subtle variations and additions (the Arab Spring, spring break, the first day of spring, as well as socks, pillows, headaches, phone bills, and kebabs after a drunken night) concluding the whole performance with the original Italian. For each thing that Sanguineti’s poem lists, Francesco called it into being through the performance, through the imaginative act of saying it into being. The vinyl strips on the walls reconfigured themselves into signifiers that represented like a new language, a neologism, the signifieds of the poem.

By the act of naming, objects are charged with symbolic value. Francesco used the tape as well as red window blinds, lightbulbs, stones, in each case claiming that they represented the postcard from Finland, or the peach blossom or the Peace of Barcelona. This is magical. Literally the essence of magic. The magician tells us that the assistant has been cut in half and we are prepared to accept it, to countenance a new reality imaginatively.

Similarly, we take on trust the signification of words during translation, that this means that. There’s every possibility we could be misled, as happens in the Hungarian Phrasebook Sketch where a prank language book misleads Hungarians. But if we so chose we could accept these alternative meanings, that “My hovercraft is full of eels” is a way of asking for a box of matches. This is literally how codes and cyphers work, by agreed renegotiation of signification.

Francesco stresses that his translation of Sanguineti’s poem is “unofficial”. This underlines the doubt about what is being transmitted, and the possibility of transforming it into something else, perhaps not intended. He could be giving us an accurate translation or he could be giving us a hovercraft full of eels. He is certainly taking a line on the wall for a ride round the poem, so how do we trust language? If we turn the page, is there money, or nothing?

Adam naming things in the Garden of Eden, Francesco redefining the line, Patrick beginning by asking if anyone can “do me a purple” was all part of a performative tapestry of re-appropriation and resignification too. It demonstrates the arbitrariness of signification. The magical realism of bringing objects into being by naming them, the imaginative act in which we are complicit every time we accept that the invisible surroundings portrayed by a mime, or the invisible interlocutor of a stand-up comedian up there on the stage.

Are they there or not there? In Week 18 we went into metaphor, the saying that this is that which occurs with the knowledge that this is not literally that, but our minds accept it for the purpose of comparison or instruction. The show is therefore all about the process of definition and signification, the hypnotic elixir of language that drugs us with its heady excesses of meanings.

The week’s Sipsmith gin cocktail was called the LIQUID HYPNOTIC ELIXIR and it involved orange, sloe gin, and, crucially, acai. The acai is purple. The acaiphabet is a secret cypher invented by Patrick, which is unknown to anyone else and encoded by arrangements of acai berries. This private language is another example of special verbalisation seemingly intended to manifest the non-verbal communications of plants that happens through their strange mating habits involving seeds and berries. Patrick admits good-humouredly that in curatorial terms this idea didn’t go much beyond apparently spelling out the artists’ names on the wall, but it fits into the themes of definition, communication and signification.

Patrick described the life cycle of the cicada, burrowing soon after birth into the earth and staying there, only emerging to mate and having mated dying. The funny little diacritical mark the cedilla, usually found under the c in words like Haçienda, can be found clinging limpet-like under the s in fig-2 curator Fatoş Üstek’s name.  It is also found in the unfamiliar Açaí palm but not usually in the familiar Acai berry, the popular purple superfruit.

Having described the life cycle of the cicada, Patrick explained that, in contrast, cedillas live in the sky and burrow into clouds, emerging to mate; the winged cedillas attach to certain letters and once they deliver their seed they die a critic (diacritic). The young hatch and make their way through the artist guide, digging in with their strong legs to feed off “excess of egress”.

Excess of egress wasn’t to be found in the beautiful part of the installation that was a video of some viscous purple “Lab goo” being poured into a purple cup. This weird substance has the consistency of the melty terminator in Terminator 2 and won’t quite be poured into the cup but bounces back and forth without quite being poured. This is a wonderful thing to behold and in the performance brought Patrick to lilt poetically “lapping the side, lapping the side! slapping the thigh! lapping the side! shimmering bright – slapping the side! touching the left, lapping the side, lapping the side” – I thought I misheard all of this as “lapping the side” which amused me all the more, assuming it was “slapping” but it was actually “lapping” after all. Part of the show’s pleasure in wordplay delighted in such imaginative slippages as can take place between “the side” and “acai” and ICA.

The performance concluded with Patrick at the piano, and the song began with a reprise of “lapping the side” which you can listen to and enjoy via this here widget. It’s my favourite song. Cedillas sing it as part of their mating ritual.

POSTSCRIPT: The one week of this duo show was curiously dominated by threes. We had this in Week 17 where Charlotte Moth presented The Story of a Different Thought – “a bird with three eyes, three versions of the same name, three versions of a story”. It’s hard to say if this multiplication of threes could be said to be another theme weaving in and out of fig-2 or just a thing we have as a culture about threes, from at least Plato onwards if not earlier. Three’s company.

Week 16 – Jacopo Miliani – 20-26 April

Each morning during Jacopo Miliani’s week at fig-2 he rearranged the presentation of the light blue fabric rolls suspended from the skylights, and added another bunch of flowers. The idea was to create “a choreographic score as exhibition.” A choreographic score is a set of instructions for dancers. How can an exhibition, a presentation of ‘things’, function as a score? There are incredibly wacky examples of musical scores that rely wholly on the interpretation of the musician. A dancer entering a space could interpret the space, but it relies on a very loose definition of what a score is. It’s a prompt really.

Marketa Uhlirova’s Birds of Paradise is a beautiful book that documents costume in 1920s and gay 1960s film as a production of spectacle for its own sake rather than as is more usual an expression of character in narrative. The cover image is a still from dancer and choreographer Loie Fuller’s Serpentine Dance, and this might be the sort of thing that Miliani was trying to ‘choreograph’ by repeatedly installing the fabric and flowers.

The exhibition was lovely to look at, light and airy, but I’m not sure it really presented “the triumph of the spectacle” in the way that Louie Fuller’s Serpentine Dance does. In the Thursday evening talk ‘Uttering the Spectacle’ (the title following the fashion for verbing the abstract noun), it was hard to understand what he was trying to do. His ideas seemed impossibly quirky and hard to share. It seemed to make sense to him but I felt I was missing certain connections about the processes and symbolism in fashion and dance that seem to be assumed: the changes in the show’s arrangement, and in the play of light during the day, the creases in the fabric that “memorise tensions”, the purported symbolism whereby fragility is expressed through the fabric and flowers. The absence of any dancers from the choreography was intended to represent (unpresent?) an absence at the heart of the exhibition. Having an absence at the heart of your presence is very fashionable.

“There is nothing in the room because God is dead”, says mummy.

“Oh dear,” says Peter.

It’s know what to make of an attempt to “bring temporality and introduce impossibility to understand choreography in the setting for the audience, or for an aftermath as in film and image” and to evoke Japanese Noh Theatre’s precision with an admittedly impossible “movement of the space” (thinking of space as space rather than as an architectural property). I love the quirkiness and impenetrability of his thought – so overspecified, arising from a lifetime of thought and work I’m not party to. In that sense the real absence at the centre of the installation is a reflection of that disconnect, which resonates with fashionable artistic practice more widely and the inability to access someone else’s thought process. It’s impossible to enter in another’s subjectivity but isn’t this why we have art? To communicate something unknown? An unfashionable idea, I suppose.

Fabric has fragile qualities, but fragility is not its defining characteristic. In fact fabric is pretty robust, robust enough to make clothes out of. So to base a show on the fragile quality of fabric is a mistake, because that fragility is neither inherent (and therefore obvious) nor transmitted to the viewer. In this sense there really is an absence at the heart of the show, because the meaning that is sought is not apprehended by the show itself, never mind its viewer. The flowers don’t have water, so they’re dying, but you can’t see the water to know that. He describes himself as “sadistic”, a murder of flowers, but, mate, they’re just flowers.

I kind of get it, but it’s kind of nonsense. This sort of missing semantic connection has been analysed as a criticism of conceptualism. Works themselves frequently don’t include the necessary information required to understand how they function as meaningful art works. Necessary biographical information is explained on sheets of A4 or on wall commentary which without having read you would almost certainly be none the wiser. This is true of so much YBA art.

It contrasts with so much great art where there’s a transformation that occurs somewhere between the deeply personal circumstances underpinning its creation, and the independence of what is created, where it takes on a life of its own independent of its creator. I’m not saying Mandy by Barry Manilow (whose name it amuses me to pronounce like ‘manilla’) is a great song, but how many of his audience realize it was written about a dog? Or am I thinking of the Rolling Stones ‘Mandy’? To think about it, most of the great songs of all-consuming love are actually about dogs.

Communication is impossible. There’s always too much or too little of yourself, of form, of content, of meaning, and everyone wants something new but what we really want is something old, that we already understand. You don’t read a sonnet to see how well they can write a sonnet, you read it to see how cunningly they vary the sonnet form while profoundly retaining it. You demand sameness with a twist of personality, not just personality. Personality is boring. Personality is interviews, not form, not art. There’s no world record for running 85 metres, even if you’re faster than Mo Farah over 85 metres but then slow down over the last 15. We value mavericks like Harry Partch (who invented a 43-note musical scale and built his own instruments) who create their own 85 metre sprints or 15 mile marathons, but there isn’t a sense of ‘achievement’ in just doing what you feel. Anyone can pass their own exam paper. There’s a Peter Cook character who proudly boasts “I speak thirty-seven languages – thirty-six of my own invention!”

Week 14 – Suzanne Treister – 6-12 April – HEXEN 2.0

Have you ever wondered what the connection is between Diogenes of Sinope, Anarcho-Primitivism, the Unabomber, and Science Fiction? Me either!

Suzanne Treister’s HEXEN 2.0 is a compendious project that brings together technology, philosophy, politics and literature to discover dystopic and utopic futures for humanity.

There are five vast charts that visually map connections along the following themes:

• Historical Diagrams/From ARPANET to DARWARS via the Internet
• From National Socialism via Cybernetics and the Macy Conferences to Neo-Totalitarianism
• The Computer – From the Antikythera Mechanism to Quantum Telepathology
• From Diogenes of Sinope to Anarcho-Primitivism and the Unabomber via Science-Fiction
• Historical Diagrams/From MKULTRA via the Counterculture to Technogaianism

These five histories are presented as a big historical picture partly intended educationally, to illustrate Treister’s research into histories, movements and ideas that people might not be aware of, or might have been less aware of during its gestation (2009-11). It began with her interest in cybernetics or “feedback loops of control” in society and how Web 2.0 feeds back into that.

The term “cybernetics” was introduced by Norbert Wiener in 1948. Cybernetics isn’t just about cyber- stuff like in sci-fi or “Captain Cyborg” Kevin Warwick’s imagination. The American Society of Cybernetics gives about 200 definitions but it is centrally about feedback loops. Feedback is simply defined as something that is led back to modify a process of production.

A thermostat is cybernetic in that it measures temperature and uses this measurement to change the temperature. This is surprising to the newcomer to cybernetics who might think feedback relies on “understanding” in a human goal-oriented sense. It doesn’t. The thermostat “senses” the temperature via a thermometer and adjusts accordingly. That’s all. But it’s hard to get away from the metaphor: a system can be said to be cybernetic if it has an “understanding” of something else (including itself), which it modifies and reacts to.  Scientific method is cybernetic in that it aims to model the universe, but it then pokes the real universe to test these models and updates them accordingly. Science is constantly updating according to the outcomes of its latest pokings.

In 1943 Julian Bigelow, Norbert Wiener and Arturo Rosenbleuth published Behavior, Purpose, and teleology, which developed a theory of “circular causality” via feedback in which cause and effect are mutually referrent. The paper described ways in which mechanical, biological and electronic systems could communicate and interact. So called First Order Cybernetics is still largely intact in its use in our understanding of impossibly complex more recent systems of the world internet, economics and the brain at a neurological level.

Excitement about the new field of cybernetics led to the establishment of the Macy Conferences (1946-53) whose primary goal was to “set the foundations for a general science of the workings of the human mind” by developing cybernetic theories in order to prevent such circumstances as might lead to another World War or atrocities such as Nazism. With a core of thirty, its members came from a wide range of disciplines from hard to soft sciences – anthropologists, computer engineers, psychologists, physicists.

It was a dynamic moment. Macy alumni went on to do some astonishing things that changed the world. anthropologist Margaret Mead founded the World Federation for Mental Health, mathematician John von Neumann worked on the Manhattan Project, invented game theory and developed the idea of neural nets, the conceptual forerunner to the internet, and he influenced US scientific and military policy.

HEXEN 2.0 documents the Macy Conferences using phototexts and crudely photoshopped images of ‘cybernetic séances’. From Science to Séance… damn, I wasn’t gonna say that. The original conferences were not minuted so these form a kind of alternative imaginary proceedings. The séance brings us to another element of HEXEN 2.0 that blurs ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ elements, including the paranormal. Science, of course, begins as magic.

The next part of HEXEN 2.0 is its tarot deck. The 78 card deck takes aspects of the five historical diagrams and presents them in an interactive, that is, cybernetic, form as an analytical tool. It’s not a fortune-telling exercise, but neither is tarot. In modern practice, away from the husky voices and mysterious caravans of movie tarot, a tarot reading is closer to psychoanalytic practice. It’s a way of structuring the narratives of your life and re-presenting them to gain another perspective on your past and possible futures. The HEXEN 2.0 tarot deck playfully broadens this into an analytical tool to understand our entire world metasystem.

HEXEN 2.0 presents an obsessive interest in the cybernetic feedback loops of the internet and how they manifest themselves in terms of social control — Card XV The Devil is “the Control Society — in essence dramatising the ongoing struggle over ‘who owns the internet’ (and by extension our minds). There are cards for the dread forces of US CYBERCOMMAND, ARPANET and DARWARS, Google, and Intelligence Agencies, as well as countercultural examples of CLODO, Grass Roots Internet Communities, Hackers, and Networked Revolution. This struggle is informed by disparate ideas including Anarcho-Primitivism, Transhumanism, Ethics, Leary’s 8-Circuit Model of Consciousness, and voiced by a super-influential cast including Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, the Macy participants, Thoreau, Rousseau, Lewis Mumford, H. G. Wells, H. P. Lovecraft, Bob Black, Heidegger and William Blake.

The Five of Chalices, H. P. Lovecraft, could contain a comment on the purpose of HEXEN 2.0 and cybernetics more broadly, and their relation toward futures of epistemology, futures which are deeply ambivalent: the battle over who controls the internet, the intellectual burnout of information saturation allied to its ecstatic availability: “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age”

A great example of how HEXEN 2.0 projects backwards and forwards simultaneously is the ternary computer, as depicted on the Eight of Pentacles card. Ternary computing calculates using -1, 0, and 1 and is said to be more efficient than binary. The Soviets were developing it in 1958 but by ternary was so over. The Betamax to binary’s VHS, ternary became a fascinating what if because mass-produced binary components dominated the global market. It has been speculated that it could be important in the future, though this might have been profoundly overtaken by the bright future-present of quantum computing (though these calculations are encoded into binary digits, so ternary could conceivably be substituted). Greater understanding of the brain is also influencing how we think about design computer systems and computers.

On the other hand, some electronic systems are becoming more wild and inhuman, and dominating the  world. Everyone thinks economics is about numbers, but it is in fact a branch of semantics. What human agency remains is reactive, based on subjective readings of numbers that are generated electronically. The majority of the trading in most major stock markets is carried on via machine algorithm without human involvement: cybernetic feedback is automated and detached from traditional physical economies and from ‘real life’. To Treister this is “one of the evil outcomes of cybernetic theory” creating a hallucinatory unreality. Economic Cybernetics is represented in the HEXEN 2.0 deck by the King of Pentacles, which seems ironic; Gardner has this: “An earthly easy going type of man, or when supported by suitable cards in the spread, a man of wealth. When involved in the world of finance he becomes dull, hard and unimaginative.”

HEXEN 2.0 presents all of this knowledge as a cybernetic world model. It is clearly meant as a warning about the dangers and possibilities of cybernetic interconnectedness on a world level as it manifests in changing power dynamics. The capacity for information gathering by governments is unprecedented. The UK government is pushing ahead with its ‘Snooper’s Charter’ and the US is debating Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. Who owns the internet? HEXEN 2.0 has the curious status of being a seemingly post-Snowden work created pre-Snowden. It wasn’t really until his revelations in 2013 that we realised just how fucked the NSA (in the US) and GCHQ (in the UK) are. Thanks to Google they can even now mechanically transcribe phone calls. This is a story of the triumph of technology being perverted that Treister’s work curiously prefigured.

In Greek mythology, Cassandra was given the gift of prophecy by Apollo, whom she spurned romantically and so who cursed her so her warnings would never be believed. She would know the future, but never be able to change anything or convince anyone. Maybe this is how conspiracy theorists feel. HEXEN 2.0 contains a lot of material familiar from conspiracy theory, though this doesn’t mean it necessarily creates conspiracy theories, despite its cards about drones, the NSA, electronic surveillance.

The Knight of Chalices card quotes Lawrence Jarach (post-left anarchist, Berkeley, b. 1961)

“‘Conspiracy theory’ acts as a derisive dismissal which serves to characterise counter-narratives as falsehoods or fantasy. Conspiracy is the normal functioning mode of government and other hierarchies”

.

HEXEN 2.0 has proven to be prescient, but is she a Cassandra whose curse was unbroken? How good is she at predicting the future? Or even predicting the past? The final element in Suzanne Treister presentation of fig-2 at the ICA studio was a kind of ‘world tarot reading’ aiming to reconfigure history and project possible futures of humankind in terms of technology and society, so directly cybernetically applying HEXEN 2.0’s method to itself.

Mark Pilkington led the reading on a Wednesday evening, asking the audience participants to “Think of nothing. Shuffle with a clear mind. Think about what came before the void.” The significance of each card that was drawn was explained in terms of both tarot and HEXEN 2.0. The significance of the connections between the cards was treated discursively and cybernetically with a pleasing level of engaged discussion about politics, technology and culture.

The Hanged Man, Stewart Brand, kept coming up. He was both the first and last card. Spooky! Brand and cybernetics forms a link between counterculture and technology. Brand is a futurist, but one obsessed with the past, a method familiar from HEXEN 2.0. The plot randoming, one audience member happened to know Stewart Brand, and was about to go visit him. Brand’s card has a mammoth on it, because he is investigating reverse-engineering mammoths, like real life Jurassic Park. These mammoths used to get discovered but then rot, but now the hunters have mobiles, and they helicopter the specimens out. What they do with them, I can only imagine.

After several ‘group tarot’ readings we had a cheeky little consult of the HEXEN 2.0 Tarot drawing a single card each for the UK and US elections. This was a month before the UK election. This is the card that came up:

The Emperor (tarot) = Diogenes of Sinope (HEXEN 2.0)

“The Tarot Speaks” describes The Emperor card thus: “The Emperor represents consolidation of manhood. A man of being or power, promotion, honour, worldly knowledge. Father or father figure, one in authority. Negatively an egotistical power hungry intolerant man.”

The HEXEN 2.0 card overviews Diogenes of Sinope thus: “Greek philosopher — Civilisation is regressive — Artificial growths of society are incompatible with happiness — Morality implies a return to the simplicity of nature — Wisdom and happiness belong to the man who is independent of society”

It feels so long ago. History is now what happened this morning is the future. By lunchtime I’m already bored of all the tweets about whatever, and the evening news is sheer torture. Perhaps that’s what Fatos meant when she tweeted me “what is more fearsome is the meta-condition of cybernetics that we are in – and we dont know what it really means!” — but I don’t know what it really means.

*

With thanks to Andrew Wyld, Mike Freedman, Alix Mortimer, Donald Newholm, Mark Pilkington, and Fatos Ustek.

Further reading/viewing:

HEXEN 2.0 is published as a book. This is totally essential. BUY YOURSELF.

Ernest von Glaserfeld’s “Cybernetics and the Theory of Knowledge” is a great overview of cybernetics. TREAT YOURSELF.

Adam Curtis’s three-part documentary All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace is recommended:

Part one’s about Ayn Rand’s influence and Alan Greenspan and money etc https://vimeo.com/groups/96331/videos/80799353

Part two’s about ecology and mathematical modelling https://vimeo.com/groups/96331/videos/80799352

Part three’s about the selfish gene and the monkey in the machine http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2eku4s_all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace-3-3-the-monkey-in-the-machine-2011_animals

Week 13 – Shezad Dawood – 30 March-5 April – The Room

Part 1: Art For All

The fig-2 openings are getting hectic. I think some bastard has been publicising them. This isn’t how counter-culture works. It’s more like.. in the year 2009 full-time Eddie Redmayne impersonator and occasional guest on Star Trek Professor Stephen Hawking threw a party for time-travellers. Afterwards he sent out the invitations. Nobody turned up. Nobody had turned up. He cited this as experimental evidence that time travel will not become possible. My own experimental evidence is more cynical: that we don’t remember the birth of Christ with a sponsorship placement on it. The Emirates Birth of Christ. Wow, that’s confusing. How about ‘The Barclays Birth of Christ – investing in irony.’

I’m kidding about counter-culture. Fig-2 is sponsored and paid-up and part of the mainstream, whether us hipsters like it or not. I’ve been to most of the increasingly popular openings on me tod, avoiding eye contact and scribbling in a notebook. Various people I know have to my surprise popped up there randomly, which has been lovely. This week, lucky Week 13, I must have been tired. I arrived and there they were, these two nightmares from one of my previous lives, suddenly manifesting at my pretentious gallery opening. Two poets, as it happens, representatives of a beaten tranche of the counter culture that has given up on political agitation and gone to nihilism, rejecting everything including itself. Why were they there? I’m not sure. There was the gin. In the truncated time I stayed each managed to knock back three or four of the free cocktails. I kept wondering if they were going to smash shit up. I hadn’t really realised that counter-culture can also mean anti-art. Immediately it was obvious they were not there in an accommodating positively minded spirit.  I gritted my teeth, ready for something embarrassing to happen in which I, by virtue of knowing them, would be implicated. Which publisher was it said he’d sooner have an armed robber in his office than a poet?

I’ll have to invent a term for this experience, when characters from one area of your life suddenly irrupt into another, the clang of cognitive dissonance. You’re at Torture Garden being spanked and suddenly discover it’s your line manager in the next sling. It’s interesting how we separate people and realms. Colleagues and friends. Friends and ‘friends’ (qv Facebook). It might be that, but as I said it’s usually lovely when you bump into people randomly. This felt like a clash of cultures, with me crushed in the middle.

Regarding the art, the crowd, the space, they were unfailingly rude; but had at least the good grace to be rude about every single thing they talked about. I’m not sure which of the creators of fig-1, Jay Jopling or Mark Francis, they meant when they referred to “Cuntface.” As for the ICA, it hasn’t been exciting since 1955. I got the strong impression they thought all art was shit. Everything, really. Just everything. I’m sure I even detected weird homophobic inferences coming out. One of them even drew attention to the university staff card hanging around my neck, and somehow inferred some kind of disapprobation, an obscure subtext of contempt for paid work that made me feel somehow lame for having a job. I suppose to nihilistic counter-culture this is being in cahoots with the capitalist machine. Like voting; with the election coming up, we’re seeing plenty of argument that voting is endorsing the whole sick machine, so you shouldn’t vote. And as for art…

Not everyone in New York will pay to see Andrew Lloyd Webber’s face. Not everyone is a critic. But, fuck it, everyone hates art. Everyone hates criticism. So… art criticism?!?!? Jesus. What am I doing? I mean, my pal Sid thinks I’m a twat just (well, not just) because I’m on twitter. Donald has refused to read any of my fig-2 blogs on principle because he is against any and all forms of Criticism. It’s said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. I’ve always thought dancing about architecture sounds ace!

There’s a strong belief in the mind of the counter-culture that mainstream culture is dominated by cabals of powerful individuals working to exclude the rest of us. The art world is notoriously cliquey, so crony credence abounds. Unpublished novelists might become convinced that mysterious powers are suppressing their work. It was interesting to see the irruption of two figures from nihilistic counter-culturalism into the rarefied domain of fine art. Private Views are gurningly good-natured two-faced affairs. That’s what they’re for. Networking and stuff. They are exclusionary. Even when they’re open to the public like the fig-2 openings.

Part 2: Who Rules The World?

For Week 13 of Fig-2 Shezad Dawood created an animation that nods to ideas about posthumanism and secret esoteric societies that decide the destiny of humankind. Two brothers in Saffron coloured hooded robes, reminiscent of Philip Guston’s cartoonized KKK figures talk about Shangri-La in a weird landscape inhabited by Maoi (the Easter Island heads).

In his fig-2 interview Shezad Dawood says the reason he chose to make an animation was because he wanted to “do something that would surprise people in terms of expectations of practice.” Now, artists should never do this. It’s the equivalent of a band you’ve never seen before announcing “This is a new song!” — darling, to me they’re all new —

Brother P wears an adaptation of the muted trumpet from the postal service in The Crying of Lot 49. In Pynchon’s novella evidence accumulates of a secret underground postal delivery service called the Trystero, which might be a conspiracy, a practical joke, or a hallucination, indicated by arcane references on bus windows and toilet walls.

Brother S has an adapted symbol of the Pharaoh Kih-Oskh in the Tintin book The Cigars of the Pharaoh. The Kih-Oskh Brotherhood is a vast criminal organization smuggling opium throughout Egypt, Saudi Arabia, India and China, in fake cigars, with strong systems of communication and transportation and intelligence operating covertly within all levels of society.

In an amusing random continuity, Fig-2 Week 12’s Tom McCarthy has written an entire book analyzing the Tintin cartoons from a structuralist perspective. He notes that Hergé’s politics move from right to left wing during the course of the books. In Cigars from the mid-thirties the villains are “typical enemies of the right, key players in the great global conspiracy of its imagination: Freemasons, financiers…” and, of course, Jews. By the 1970s, as a consequence of World War II, the politics of the Tintin books has shifted over to the left to the extent that in Tintin and the Picaros the hero sports a CND logo on his moped helmet. McCarthy notes that “there remains the interesting paradox that, despite his political realignment, Hergé keeps the same villains in place: men in cagoules, the secret cabals of Cigars of the Pharaoh, serve as straw men for his leftist world-vision just as well as they did for his rightist one.”

In essence Lot 49 and Cigars of the Pharaoh are expressions of the question “Who rules the world?”

In his series The Secret Rulers of the World Jon Ronson goes behind the scenes of the Bilderberg conference, the annual grouping of the elite that has been accused of being a “secret government of the world”. According to the “American Friends of Bilderberg”’s press release “Bilderberg’s only activity is its annual conference. At the meetings no resolutions are proposed, no votes taken, and no policy statements issued.” Highly mysterious. If it doesn’t rule the world, then what exactly does it do? Daniel Estulin’s The Secrets of the Bilderberg Club describes “sinister cliques and the Bilderberg lobbyists” manipulating the public “to install a world government that knows no borders and is not accountable to anyone but its own self.”

Conspiracy theories exist to address our fear that the world might be completely beyond anyone’s control. It’s a theological impulse, to combat the uncertainty that is inherent in supercomplex systems such as economies and societies. There are certain things we just know (echoing Rumsfeld). Scottish mineral water from Tibet: we know it’s tap water from Peckham. We know a ‘no reply’ means ‘no’. We know the Emperor is in the nip. We know. Look. It’s quite simple. Jewish Islamist Masons in the KKK built Easter Island. It’s obvious.

The world government is really just Capital: money markets that transcend national borders and to which states and governments are in thrall. As David Graeber notes the state is no longer a bulwark against capitalist rapaciousness, but works with it hand in hand. Let us also remember that fine art is capital; owning a verified Rembrandt is a securer investment than owning a flat in central London. In short, if you are not with the boorish anti-art vision of the counter-culture, you are propping up the whole capitalist system.

How do you win? You can’t. The game is rigged. Even your dissatisfaction has a dollar value. There’s that Clash lyric: “Turning rebellion into money.” Counter-culture is culture sold over the counter. I’m a sell-out and so are you. At least Tracey Emin is honest and happy about being a Tory voter. She’s happy because she’s won.

Week 12 – Tom McCarthy – 23-29 March – Satin Island

Present: Tom McCarthy (author, installation artist), Fatoş Üstek (curator, mathematician), Clémentine Deliss (curator, researcher), Alfie Spencer (Flamingo Group Head of Semiotics), Mark Blacklock (author)

Apologies: Claude Levi-Strauss (anthropologist), Levi Strauss (businessman), Bronisław Malinowski (anthropologist), Guy Debord (situationist), Paul Rabinow (anthropologist of “the contemporary”), Alain Badiou (thinker), Roland Barthes (semiotician), Jacques Derrida (deconstructionist), Douglas B. Holt (author on brands), Daniel Defoe (novelist)

1. The Book

I find myself in the position of the narrator, U, in Tom McCarthy’s book Satin Island, surrounded by screens and data, trying to synthesise raw unconnected toomuchinformation into narratives. There are four elements: the Show, the Book, the Think Tank, the Company Report, and the Interview. There are five elements.

Satin Island is “a book about the general impossibility of writing a book about the general impossibility of etc.” U (a poor man’s Ulrich from Musil’s Man Without Qualities) is a corporate anthropologist who has been tasked with creating The Great Report, “the First and Last Word on our age.” To this end, he scrolls through countless images, circling around various obessions: oil spills, cargo cults, ethnographic objects, critical theory, the transport system in Lagos, the mysterious death of parachutists. Like Shakespeare’s Autolycus he is a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. The book documents these obsessions but can’t unify them.

ACTION: The reader will consider whether the artistic success of the book at representing (even dramatising) the unassailable rag-bag nature of information/knowledge while revelling in curious and interesting detail, is achieved at the cost of the literary failure of the book, inasmuch as we are given a plotless novel with no proper characters or satisfying meaning. What are novels for, anyway?

2. The Show

I wondered if it was just a marketing exercise, turning the book into an installation and having the whole text read aloud (flatly as a “Company Report”). It turns out that Tom McCarthy is no stranger to the gallery space, and the book itself grew out of a 2010 residency projecting oil spills. In Satin Island, U creates vast dossiers from unrelated material, sticking them up on the walls of the offices of the Company and trying to find connections, like Beuys diagrams, or Benjamin’s Constellating Dots. Stage designer Laura Hopkins designed the space, littering it with U and McCarthy’s source texts, images and scrawled connections. It was an effective representation of the book, maybe with a cheeky viral bit of marketing thrown in.

ACTION: The reader will consider whether in fact all the work that takes place in any gallery space is in fact just a marketing exercise, and ask whether what is being sold is an idea, or the work, or the career of the creator of the work.

3. The Think Tank

The Think Tank aimed to trace anthropology through corporate culture and literature through a ‘brain-storming session’ that was actually somewhere between a lecture and a seminar. A “golden triangle” was postulated combining literature, corporate culture, and anthropology. This was an exposition of the book, but interesting in itself as an interrogation of meaning-making and information gathering in several different spheres. Fatoş Üstek (who as an undergraduate studied topology) mind-mapped the event on a huge wall mirror, “curating in a semantic sense”.

Clementine Deliss (curator, researcher, publisher) discussed anthropology and ethnography, and asked probing questions about the impulses of ethnographers and museums. The anthropologist is a ‘bug chaser’ a collector writing everything down in detail, but Levi-Strauss himself advised that we should forget objects and study culture and behaviour: the oilspill of modernity.

ACTION: The reader is asked to consider what is the nature of hoarding, classification and acquisition, and whether it can be subversive when there is also immaterial culture. If authenticity refers to a local identifiable product of one culture, how do we refigure authenticity in the context of globalisation?

Alfie Spencer (the amusingly titled Head of Semiotics at the Flamingo Group) presented a theory of branding in relation to the meaning-making. Beginning with his self-definition “I brand (verb) the way an author says ‘I observe, I interpret’” and that his position (which is analogous to the central character of Satin Island) is at an intersection between production, commerce/business and capitalism. He helps corporations make money by analyzing what it is to brand versus write versus interpret. There is a confrontation between how objects resist language and can be made to ‘speak’ via branding. Writing remakes, interpretation asks what it can do within a form of life, and branding makes a future for it. In this sense, branding is a process of closure, whereas writing is open.

ACTION: The reader is asked to consider whether writing would love to be branding, whether interpretation lusts after branding’s finality, and to consider this in relation to a novel whose open form resists closure, and further to consider whether the ambition of branding is the same as that of propaganda, and whether Alfie Spencer is therefore a tool of The Company, a footman for the Ruling Class Apparatus, forcing final forms on us.

Mark Blacklock offered up literature as a site for “speculative anthropology” and discussed Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe is a corporatist, a bookkeeper, reducing everything to information, just like U in Satin Island. Information gathering becomes the central theme of Defoe’s novel too, which is also tied to the acquisitive research methods of ethnographers in putting together collections of objects that create narratives about societies.

ACTION: The reader is invited to consider whether to answer Blacklock’s call for “an anthropology of solitude” with regard to Robinson Crusoe, bearing in mind Alix Mortimer’s priceless tweet: “To get your New Paradigm name, take your real name and put An Anthropology of… in front of it”

Mark Blocklock also reported that “Robinson Crusoe spends three years using his craft to craft a craft – a boat – which when finished can’t be moved, so it becomes a sculpture.” I love this in and of itself, but this is also a teleological point that reminds me of one of the paradoxes of ethnographic objects: that whatever their original purpose was, once they are put on display they become art objects.

ACTION: The reader is further asked to consider whether this pipe is or is not a pipe.

4. The Company Report

The reading of the complete book out loud was a homage to On Kawara’s One Million Years, in which huge ledgers filled with all of the dates from a million years ago to a million in the future are read slowly and neutrally, monotonously. Perhaps McCarthy intended this to draw attention to the contrast between vast empty timescales and the overwhelmingly data rich present.

ACTION: The reader will consider the meaning of alluding to On Kawara in the performance of Satin Island being read out loud in the style of a ‘company report’ and whether this is a comment on timescales or the sheer implacableness of data.

5. The Interview

The author Tom McCarthy claims that authors are byproducts, that to think the author is the source of meaning is like saying a plastic bottle is the source of the water it contains: it’s a straight-up category error. The author is a byproduct of literature. There are author patches swirling around the Pacific Ocean as we speak, redundantly and useless. Yes, meaning is a bundle of relations that goes back centuries and forward too, but in Barthes’s seminal essay he announced the death of the author and even now people act as if it never happened. What digital culture pushes to the forefront is not even the death of the author or even the redundancy of an act of writing, but the question of which routes to pursue, the methodology of navigation. This is what the Situationists were asking; they saw things as simple as walking the ‘wrong way’ round Paris as an act of resistance and as an artistic practice. Not for nothing does the book Satin Island share the same initials as Situationist International.

ACTION: The reader is called upon to consider what writing is, and what writing would be if everything is already written. How can we understand a writing or literature that would operate differently? Can we imagine a form of writing as resistance to grand narratives, devoted to opening up ambiguities?

ACTION: The reader is asked to consider whether Tom McCarthy is a byproduct.

6. Any Other Business

Grand narratives are back. Okay so there’s no codex unlocking the master meaning of the age, but there is a master programme, and it is being administered by Apple and Google. The Company. The Corporation, Leviathon, processing vast amounts of data. Every keystroke is sold to the NSA. Apple’s locked-down battery-flattening PC-poisoning products now fill me with as much dread as the horrific self-belming output of Microsoft, the tech equivalent of those dreadful Hollywood movies that are obviously stamped out by committees rather than creatives. Is Google’s motto still “Don’t be evil”? I can’t even remember.

The world is literally being remade: the Universal Texture is a rather terrifyingly named Google patent for mapping textures onto a 3D model of the entire globe. Sometimes this goes wrong, and for a moment the workings of the Universal Texture are exposed, and it’s like being Neo seeing the Matrix, or a glimpse of the Mind of God. Clement Valla has a wonderful project documenting examples of these surreal/cubist mistakes in Google Earth when large structures are reconstructed wrongly.

ACTION: The reader is asked to consider the question “Who might inhabit these landscapes?”

How do the totalising corporations get away with it? Satin Island’s Koob-Sassen Project is explained away thus: “It is… a pretty boring subject. Don’t get me wrong: the Project was important. It will have had direct effects on you: in fact, there’s probably not a single area of your daily life that it hasn’t, in some way or other, touched on, penetrated, changed; although you probably don’t know this. Not that it is secret. Things like that don’t need to be. They creep under the radar by being boring.”

In David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King we also learn about the efficacy of ennui to make invisible, to stifle politics: “The real reason why US citizens were/are not aware of these conflicts, changes, and stakes is that the whole subject of tax policy and administration is dull. Massively, spectacularly dull. […] The IRS was one of the very first government agencies to learn that such qualities help insulate them against public protest and political opposition, and that abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy. For the great disadvantage of secrecy is that it’s interesting. People are drawn to secrets; they can’t help it.” (85)

U’s relationship to media is almost gnostic, pursuing a deep secret that is forever elusive, a Godhead beyond the veil. It is fundamentally a literary relation. The whole world is an encrypted text. McCarthy notes that we can trace this back to a theological impulse – the world was a script for god. Not to mention structuralists, and he notes that Walter Benjamin’s and Jacques Derrida’s epistemologies come out of Jewish mysticism. Digital figurations are fascinating but not categorically new.

ACTION: The reader is thanked for reading, and invited to have a lovely day. Do comment!

Date of next meeting: Wednesday 22 April, London Review Bookshop, Tom McCarthy in conversation with Nick Lezard