Marking the Contemporary

In the last 3 years I've spent a good deal of time drawing and painting.

Though I had been making drawings for a number of years, I was in my art work, work I was exhibiting, collaging, arranging, performing, curating. leaving the drawings aside while using design and code, photography, film, video and found objects for my online, computational films, installation, print and video.

Many of these works started with the idea of art as event, what I called the event of art, as that moment that the art work comes to consciousness, the act is configured and apprehended as that which is art, art as a way, a way to engage and see the world, make the world.


These simple early works, where actions, some times private, sometimes public. For example, stepping quickly under a large bouncing balloon,  myself and the balloon becoming one, or standing in an art fair with a sign as a sculpture, going into rooms and setting up a camera and letting others interact with it, rearranging objects in department stores, in apartments, seeing this next to that, interacting with the passerbys, others in online chats, each was an event of art, when thought of and constituted as such.

These interventions, inventions, conspirings, breakings of the fourth wall and everyday reality and habit, often whimsical and momentary, alone and communal, where the carrying forth of a belief in the power of art to make and remake the world. It was a way to inhabit the world. To retake life. It was the practice of art as the practice of life. Life could be art. Life was art. We had only to enact it as such.

These works, these actions started from the place of embodiment, my body, my breadth, how it moves, why it moves, noting what moves it. How does my body move about, physically and psychically, in what spaces, through what protocols, through what customs. What has marked my body, my person so that it goes in the world this way and not that. I am a body in space. I am a body all-too known to myself wanting to unknow myself. I am a body not knowing myself well enough wanting to know myself knowing. I am a social body, a body formed by the social. My body has the habits of its social contouring, my body which is all of me, my mind, feelings and heart, my body, me has its limits. I have been made by others. I have made myself. I make myself. I make my body. (Stars make my body. Time.) My body is made my others. My body is mine and not mine. I can't see the making of me. I want to see me made. I want to unmake me to be me.  There is no me. What is this body that is all bodies. What is this body that traces back to all things.

The event of art, the site of art, must be my body. Art itself is always a social body. A body of objects and knowledge, cultural and material. My body touched by art. Art touching my body.

The event of art, the site of art, must be the signs and systems from the bottom up to the top down that have made me. That have made everything. Everything is made and can be made again. I can make me. I can unmake the me that has been made. I can see me being made. I can see these letters forming on this page. I can see the words are in english. I know they are english. I speak english. I know that. These words are of a certain type face, Times, normal. My fingers work about this keyboard as I type. This keyboard shapes my fingers. The letters and words are so clear and consistent in type. Each 'e' is like every other 'e'. Each letter that I type comes out perfectly like all the other Times, normal, lower case 'e's'.

E. E. Cummings was the poet of the typewriter. All art is a poetry. Of materials, sense and being. I thought myself a poet of the digital camera. I don't make poetic pictures. Not at all. Well I do, but I am not after poetic pictures. Poetic pictures may be a register of picture taking for me. But like E.E. Cummings, I take pictures of the camera as he did of the typewriter.

 I know how this typewriter works. You can see its type. Its a type of writing the typewriter. It's peculiar, the things it can do.  Digital cameras are peculiar too. I wrote about this in my book Image Photograph. The camera is like my body. It's not simply an extension of my body. Rather I extend myself through its body. Its body, like a simple organism, can do certain things. I am interested in the things it can do.  Its does peculiar things.

So what is it about drawing and painting. What's peculiar about it? It's not newfangled like computation, social practice, participatory art, digital media, environmental art, the archive, performance and so on. Its much-much older than the popular return today of slide projectors, super 8 film, 16m film, over head projectors, micro film and other recently obsolesced media.

Drawing and painting have been have been around forever.  Certainly drawing forever. Both for the last fifty years have been pronounced dead again and again. Dead in the sense that there is no more they can show us. So how to approach drawing or a painting.  No doubt painting is alive as ever and the most highly priced art object on the global market today. But what can I do with it.

When I see a photograph I see the picture taken. Not the photograph but the apparatus of the picture taking. I see the form factor, I read the software, the filter, the situation in front of the camera. I see the camera seeing. Unless its a picture taken like E.E. Cummings used his typewriter I see it as a picture which has a tenuous connection to what it depicts.

I may like its sense of picture taking but I can't read it in its depictions and it startles me that others do. I don't want to see it as a depiction but as an event of picture taking. This is why I can not accept a certain line of contemporary photography and its thinking as it turns on the idea of the camera as an instrument of depiction rather than an event of an instrument of recording the world. The camera does not record it makes a world.

Unlike the typewriter and the camera, drawing turns inward. It does look out onto the world, yes, of course, but its instrument is different. Perhaps the pencil is more like the violin or a wind instrument you play it in time. One note or chord followed by another and another, building up certain patterns.

Drawing is a recording of time, the pressure of the hand, speed, line, paper, surface, attack It is the recording of one's hand, one's body, one's nervous system. It's a signature of the body. Of a temperament. It's not all at once as in taking a picture, releasing the shutter and light exposing the sensor all over, instantly. When I draw, I am taken up in a very different way.  I am distributed over time. I don't arrest an instant of seeing akin to sight, I am recording an optical seeing, a lens seeing. In drawing I make things appear with my hand. It shows me things I could not see, it suggest things. It can follow itself.

Of course an algorithm can make drawings. Only look at the program Processing.  And of course the naturalist would notate, observe and record those things in the world they wanted to make record of, they wanted to record. They wanted to catalog the world, measure it, index it.  We can clearly see that drawing and counting were once the same thing until counting became its own kind of drawing.

Now I don't want to say the camera can't make a line, because it can. Nor that a line can't do the work of depiction. Depiction as in to make a picture, a picture we recognize. Is the camera inherently more naturalistic or empirical than a pencil. More neutral. I am not sure. If we were to compare courtroom sketches of witnesses with courtroom photographs of these same people what would be the difference?

I am a body. My body is a line moving through space. My body is a mass moving. I am a painting.  I am mass and volume. Francis Bacon does not paint faces he paints heads. Lines and masses. Shapes and colors. His is not the event of 'art' but of painting. He has confronted painting. He has found his way in painting.


The event of art concerns the complex of art. The institution of art-reception is its medium. Arts history, its objects, reception and discourse frame the frisson that gives forth the event. That this is art because I say it's art. That I can say it's art is the open and permissive framework of art. Opening a space of art is the event of art. Art with a capital A. How to open art. How to open up to art.

Collaging and arranging. The subject arranged, re-arranged. The subject of Art arranged and re-arranged. How then to stage the situation of drawing or painting. Not to draw but to stage it.  To see drawing. To draw to see inside me. To draw to see the temperament of me. To stage me in drawing. Not the biography of me. Not to illustrate me. To ask drawing what it might find in me.

Perhaps the event of art, is the event of ourselves becoming present to the world, coming into being with it.  The con/temporary might be that somewhere in the nowhere of utopia, that is without innocence. As much as we long and admire the creativity and innocence of children, art remains out of their reach, (we don't want to believe this, I know) as it does not yet with children know itself as such. The event of art then, must both be a knowing event while at the same time not happened yet. We know the event only as it happens.

Drawing, painting, photography, installation, films, it does not matter: each is a way of knowing, becoming, what matters is what we bring to them and what they reveal and how they converse with us.

Go Figure or Wise up to the Marks

To figure is to give shape.  To shape is to create an event.  To figure is an event unto itself. The figure as event. 

This word figure we use for many things, to describe bodies, numbers, shapes of things, outlines, as in shapely figures, dashing and abject figures. In the realm of pictures, to figure is an extraordinary pictorial calculus. A space forever permutable. More calculus than geometry, it's not simply giving shape or form to an image of the human body but to figure bodies as events of figuration. 

How does a line suggest a figure, at times familiar and strange, familiar and impossible and sometimes  both at the same time.  There are a great many pictures that present to us figures that don't accord with anything we've seen, yet we recognize ourselves in them. We recognize us. It's these kinds of things that don't make sense to machine-reading, that is computers scanning images for color, shapes and forms. Such algorithms don't know what they are seeing. As it turns out our images are not only confusing for machines but us humans as well. 

There was a collector who bought an Andre Masson painting, one with his brilliant line that looked to the collector like a exotic flower. A year later a friend visiting had him look more carefully and the next day he took it back to the dealer having not realized the works unmistakable sexual content. Consider a Francis Bacon, have we seen such figures with their warps, smears and distortions. Yet we recognize them as readily as his contemporary's Lucien Freud whose work is high realism.  

What is this space between the recognizable and what we might call the poetic, between the clearly legibly and the suggestive, between the ritual and symbolic, between what is there and what we see there and what we think we see there, what we think we are hearing or reading.

Painting, drawing, novels, music, all have different devices and tools for figuration. Painting makes the figure more elastic,  unstable, mutable, polymorphic. Photography has its own repertoire of distortions with blurring, obscuring, collaging, layering. The novel has its own way to suggest figures, relations, places, events.

In each of them we suspend out critical awareness of the mechanics and submit to the illusion that something is depicted. Think of William Burroughs through his cut up techniques presenting gaps in time, in place. We feel we are between here and there between dream and reality, at two or more places at once, but all of it figures, all of it figuring something.

I suppose we as human being are always looking to figure ourselves in the picture. Big picture or small, we want to know where we fit in. Where we are, spliced into what narrative. That is to say we are always seeing ourselves in the picture. I suppose it's the same for seals and bees and Ibises, dogs and cats. It's always about them and what's around them.  This is how we may come to art and images, asking what is this and what is it to me and then we may how has come to be.

Look at the two images next to this paragraph. One a black and white photo taken in Milan, the other, a line drawing. The photographic image in this case is made all at once, by light being exposed to a digital sensor.  The drawing on the other hand is made line by line and by a series of marks.

Painting in its absorption of photography has taken up some of the strategies of photography but never the less for the most part it is built up by marks of the brush, pencil, ink, chalk, spray paint and more. Of course more and more painting includes a combination of digital printing and mark making and digital photography numerous layers of varied images and manipulations. In this sense painting and photography and what was once unique to each's repertoire, the building up of marks in painting and drawing and the all at once exposed image, is collapsing. Never the less for the most part this rhetorical figure of marks is what dominates the teaching and discussion of painting today.

Before we look at this concept of marks closer let's consider images and pictures as they moved from pictorial events in the age of representation to perceptual events in the age of the aesthetic regime. 

Let's start with Jeff Walls article Marks of Indifference a term he gets from Adorno. In the essay he states 'under the regime of depiction, that is in the history of Western art before 1910, a work of art was an object whose validity, was constituted by its being or bearing a depiction. In the process of developing alternative proposals, for art "beyond' depiction, art had to reply to this suspicion that, with out their depictive or representational function, art objects were art in name only, not in body form or function.'


Depiction had for a long time involved the long and grueling process of observation, comparison and rationalization of what was before us. The foregrounding of marks elides discussion of depiction, if not form as the once models, dead or alive, nudes, draperies and chairs, have disappeared. And with out depiction, what have we are marks, markings of admittedly an extraordinary variety.

The marking of the hand with brush or pencil, the gesture revealed in the mark, be it expressive, gestural, mechanical, controlled, if nothing else, is assuredly what see in pictures. What ever is there certainly there are marks in front of us. Cy Twombly is all marks, no.  In this term, then, there is the thought that in the hand or gesture, in its mark making, we will find the key to seeing and reading the modality of the artist. It is the hand's signature that is the thought. The marks built up is not only the artist style but the artist's art. In time for some marks and mark making is that term, that comes to designate the work of art itself.

But let's suppose painting, drawing, installation is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters. Replace painting, drawing and installation with the word, novel, and this is how Milan Kundera describes what for him is novel writing, a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.

What could be meant in abstraction by imaginary characters. Abstraction whose intent was to rid color and line from character, for line and color themselves to be character. Marks. Yes. But from where do they come. Why does Twombly gorge himself on so many epic texts but to mark them out. To write them in paint, pencil, scribble, smears, drips and gobs.

Starting with the impressionist, (perhaps as early as Turner) with this turn away from depiction, the relation of figure to ground changes. Prior to perspective the space of painting was an all over space, or a frontal or flat painting as with the Egyptians and Mayans and numerous other cultures. Brunelleschi's one point perspective changes this which leads to supposed naturalism or realism so much so when with the invention of the camera (lens and recording media) we came to and continue to believe cameras gave us a picture of the 'real'. 

In his interview book, A Bigger Message, David Hockney describes how the photographic image gives an uncanny sense of the 'real', of the supposed phenomenological.  But the photographic image doesn't in any way give a sense of our sense of seeing as humans. We don't see in photographs. We don't experience the world or know or remember it as images in the sense of photographic images. Of course we remember images and images become our memory of ....  perhaps images themselves,  but that's not how we experience things. Photographs are these strange unreal things that have taken up the world and had us belief them as an image of the real just as Brunelleschi did. And it turns on this relation of figure to ground and the constitution of phenomenological space.

This relation of figure to ground extends not only to pictorial space but the spaces of the novel and music as well. If figure to ground in realism or verisimilitude can be thought of as a unilinear space then polyphonic space in the visual arts, music and language opens rifts in unilinear or continuous space to create all kinds of spaces. Spaces that might be perfectly bound together but keep relative independence like thinking one thing while being in a place that has nothing to do with your thoughts. What is that space of both/and. 

In ones life lines are bound by you.

Each line has a different rhythm, a varying internal time horizon, some as fleeting as a burst, others stretching out like a long taffy, they meet with the world when they want to, when they have to, as they do, as things happen.

Now all lines need not intersect nor know of each other, but if we are alert, attuned to things, more and more lines seem to play through, echo, reverberate, digress, return, amplify, lighting up numerous counterpoints to the polyphony of our lines and lives. And soon strange, beautiful and dark things happen. All kinds of synchronies happen. Patterns begin to occur, motifs course through us, time becomes space, and everything is happening all at once.

In pictorial space, in the spaces of music and books, these lines also take flight, eddying and swirling about, in parallel, in meshes, in whirlwinds and whirpools, in scherzo, fugues, sonatas, in all sorts of speed and tempos, prestissimo, adagio, allegro and adagio. How these bounded infinities, take on lines of life, how they are composed, their architectonics, their unity or disunity, these all become strategies of form.


In painting or drawing with the starting point thought of as marks which  I suspect emerges more and more as with the movement away from depiction, away from narrative forms, with out which what what we are left with is the character of the brush mark, or the line.

 As we moved away from depiction from the pictorial we move to the perceptual still with recognition. The movement from Manet to Cezanne. There is something still to perceive in Cezanne depiction of his perception. His seeing accords to sight. A particular kind of sight, the perception of sight.

Drawing is of course the opening of a form. and a series of marks, the tip of a point when moved  across a picture plane will describe a line.  And Rembrandt's drawing is Rembrandt's own manner of drawing. And his manner of drawing affirms his singularity, his originality, his know how, his savior faire.

Now, what must not have been given in a form in order to form itself?  For those marks to form. In The Pleasure of Drawing As Jean Luc Nancy lucidly says, "Drawing is not a given, available, form formed. On the contrary it is the gift, invention, uprising, or birth of form. That a form comes is drawings formula, and this formula implies at the same time a desire, for and anticipation of form, a way of being exposed to what comes, to an unexpected occurrence, or to a surprise that no prior formality will have been able to proceed or perform."

From marks to forms, to motifs and themes...

With cubism the perceptual plays with the perspectival. After this narrative space or depictive space becomes for want of a better word psychological or interior as in Bacon, Magritte or surrealism then color and shapes and swirls and the pure affect of color follow. This all over affective space of color solves the figure ground problem. Think only of Pollack or Ellesworth Kelly.

Until the return of figurative painting with the Germans in the 1970's (many of whom never left figurative painting like Ricther trained in social realism) the problem of figure and ground was solved simply again with background foreground just by putting something in the background, something as simple as a tint or color wash. 

Planes of color, fields of color, ground/figure, space of depiction these problems can taken up in a number of ways.

So what is it that the privileging of marks does not allow us to see that maybe form or figures could. Let's think of Spinoza for a moment. For Spinoza there is only one, infinite substance that expresses itself through an infinity of modes, or affections of the substance (E I, D1, D5). This idea grounds Spinoza’s radical monism, which lies at the heart of the issue we are concerned with here.  Within this radical monism, thought and extension are therefore simply two attributes of the substance, that is, two different ways in which the substance is perceived by the intellect (E 1, D4). As a consequence, a single body is just a mode of the unique substance in the attribute of extension, while a single mind is a mode of the very same substance in the attribute of thinking. There is therefore no body-mind dualism: or in our case marks-form dualism, although thought and extension or marks and forms or figures are the two attributes that we, as finite modes, have access to, the substance is itself characterised by an infinite number of attributes. (C.Bottici)

It's these infinite number of attributes that interest me. Not simply seeing marks, making marks in drawings and painting, but in constructing modes of going, imaginary characters, who take the marks where they go. In the works of a mark-maker par excellence, more than a painter, Jean-Michel Basquiat notates, accounts and tallies with great directness and urgency histories of race, colonialism, power, class, bringing such characters as the negro policeman, ivory tusk hunters, salt traders, subjects of Jim Crow laws, Egyptian gods, baseball players, voodoo priests and many more  into consciousness. Take away all these pressing figures and concerns, this panoply of characters, situations and complexes and reduce them to marks and you get Fiona Rae a painter heralded for her facility at mark making. And what do you see there. 

Perhaps mark marking is a way to turn away from the more complex reading of just what's behind the marks. Perhaps more generously it is an opening to much more.

Every painting, every image is a question. A network of varied relations. A network of questions, including marks, forms, narratives, propensities, cultural leanings, personal biography, other drawings and so on.

But perhaps all this is moot as the contemporary artist does not make marks, nor forms, but curates and collects the traversing of objects and texts that have marked them, that have spoken and taken possession of them.  It is these marks she or he will selectively cultivate for pedigree while at the same time insist that they do not mark them and if they do they are to be undone.

Exceeding the object itself or becoming the very object and subject is the artist. The artist is the mark.
putting forward a position in the world, accounting for the world from their perspective, their joys and traumas, arranging re-arranging the representations that marked them, the tools that shape them, the networks they circulate in and through. So often lost, mangled, overwhelmed, all bodies seems vulnerable and fragmented, a disparate set of marks, not cohering in and body and so from this ground stepping out of anonymity is a subject with history and a trauma. Such is the work of vietnamese artist Danh Vo.

Go figure. That's what we do. We want to mark ourselves with brands, experiences, invented memories, be it Yves Saint Laurent ( a copy will do) or the au courant philosopher, an artist or two (better hedge your bet) But perhaps it's time to wise up to the marks, and release our selves from the physiological, linguistic, and social control of these market networks, wait a minute,  now the liberation mark, the blessed mark, there is no escaping the time/word control systems, even to be agent is to be caught.

So what is it about marks that is so compelling, is it an agitation, a testament, archive, remnant, trace of the authentic, the signature of someone behind the machine. Oz. The you that leaves traces every day on social media networks. More than this, it is the trace of the hand. Unmediated, that beautiful hand that connects to the heart and the mind and a singular person's nervous system. If EE Cummings was the poet of the typewriter who played the text machine, and Burroughs cut it up, the marks of the hand seduces us to think we are in the presence of the human. In a time of trolls, bots, Siri and big data we are all suckers, the gulls as in gullible marks, but perhaps we should look at the machine selling the marks.

*Text cited
David Hockney, Martin Gayford, A Bigger Message Conversations with David Hockney
Jean Luc Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing
Jacques Ranciere, The Future of the Image, 2007
Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel,  1986
Jeff Wall, "Marks of Indifference": Aspects of Photography, in, or as, Conceptual Art (1995)
Spinoza lectures, Chiara Bottici
Claire Bishop, History Depletes Itself (Danh Vo at the Danish Pavillon) Art Forum 2015
All photographs, paintings, drawings marc lafia

The Networked Cinema of Attractions

As we talk about the moving image, I want to give you a sense of how at the outset of film recording there was simply recording. As the Lumiere's placed their camera outside their factory to record their workers, there was no sense of a point of view of a character, of someone inside the recording, there was only the camera persons seeing of the scene. It was not until 8 years into film recording that the close up, the reverse shot, the match cut, parallel cutting, tracking shots, the jump cut, the flashback and other devices came to give a grammar to film recording. All of these techniques created a point of view of character. That is showing a close shot of a person, the subsequent shot the audience would read as the point of view of that person.

But what if the camera person and the person recorded were the same person. This leads to the observation, what if we've entered a kind of new beginning of cinema, akin to the cinema of attractions as theorized by Tom Gunning.

Gunning's, term the “cinema of attraction is a cinema that displays its visibility, willing to rupture a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator."  This meaning that cinema could be created, not necessarily as an entertainment function but more along the lines that a film would attract its spectators by presenting something exclusive, something unique.  Gunning also states, “According to Eisenstein, theater should consist of a montage of such attractions, creating a relation to the spectator entirely different from his absorption in ‘illusory imitativeness.’  I pick up this term partly to underscore the relation to the spectator that this later avant-garde practice shares with early cinema: of exhibitionist confrontation rather than diegetic absorption.” 

Gunning compares both Lumière’s and Méliès’ films, along with other filmmakers of 1906, by stating that they all have “a common basis,” which he describes as “cinema of attraction.”  Gunning declares, “one can unite them in a conception that sees cinema less as a way of telling stories than as a way of presenting a series of views to an audience, fascinating because of their illusory power (whether the realistic illusion of motion offered to the first audiences by Lumière, or the magical illusion concocted by Méliès), and exoticism.”  With this said, the act of “cinema of attraction” does not disappear with a narrative domination, rather, it takes on an undercover approach.

  

To the avant-garde artistic circles of the time, cinema was exciting because of its radical "newness"- its ability to produce spectacle with immediacy and impact. When Gunning notes that, "It was precisely the exhibitionist quality of turn-of-the-century popular art that made it attractive to the avante-garde," he links early cinema's refusal of narrative to a refusal of the previous foundations of artistic communication.  To the progressive artists of the early 20th century, film had the ability to produce "exhibitionist confrontation rather than diegetic absorbtion" (66),

While making Revolution of Everyday Life I came to the point where in auditioning actors and meeting artists to be in the film, I began to question my very method of interviewing and auditioning them. Some thing was missing. There was this feeling that there was something more they wanted to tell me, to show me. But me being there, mediating them, got in the way.

I bought several HD flip cameras and asked those interested to take the camera home and to film themselves. I had a teacher at school, the brilliant Shirley Clarke, and the first thing she had us do in our class with her was was to go into a room and video tape ourselves. She wanted us to understand how video was different. And how there was nothing needed to do to create a recording.  This nothing you will discover is much more complex than you might imagine.

Soon enough I started getting the camera back with the recordings. Each participant was given the camera for two or three days and then they had to bring it back for the next person.

And these recordings were very fascinating. 

While the above are real time recordings the below videos are loops with post production sound.

GIFS become loops and make anonymous the authors of these videos. They are not present to us as in the first two.

If you look at Permutations Vol.7 which you find here, there are a number of multi-screen clips, which in this Volume are made from Hollywood films. The still frame below is from Peeping Tom, a British thriller horror film made in 1960 directed by Michael Powell. The film is a about a young man whose father had conducted psychological experiments on him as a boy by filming his reactions to stimuli to his nervous system such as putting a lizard on his bed and sitting at this mother's deathbed. Years later as a young man he re-enacts these experiments as a voyeur who murders women while using a portable movie camera to record their dying expressions of terror.

The shift away from the early cinema of attractions, to following the relay of the gaze, an identification away from the camera and to a character or narrator, has returned today in the always-on-camera recording and playback of the network.

We can characterize the vast production of both still and moving images in network culture as a new kind of cinema, a networked cinema of dis/attraction perhaps.

No longer is there the shot|reverse shot, the relay of the gaze nor is there the interrogation of being seen or constituted by the camera, made a subject by the camera. We now present, display and willingly and wanting exhibits ourselves to the camera.

Here is a clip from my first film Exploding Oedipus. You can see in the clip, the protagonist of the story wants to smash the mirror of himself, the narrative of himself, the camera recording of himself by making a movie. Film here is still working under the regime of representation. It is thought of as a story making machine. A mirror to oneself, a drama unfolding, a narrative authored by someone, not you behind the archive of millions of online recording trying to piece it together.

This new moving image exceeds cinema and television though born from it and as a new technical apparatus is unconstrained and employed for very new and unknown ends.

In Eternal Sunshine, a show I had at the Minsheng Museum of Art, I wanted to look at how cinema once constituted a subject. How we are interpolated into film and in identification see ourselves.  Today of course we are ourselves in what was once film or television through social media.

Here are a selection of stills from part of the exhibit called Still History.

And here is the film, Double Fantasy and a description;

Double Fantasy, an18 min dyptych with Jia Hongsheng, John Lennon, Jean Luc Godard, The Beatles, and the students of Tiananmen premiered at The Minsheng Museum of Art, Shanghai, 2011-12.

Double Fantasy was the title of a John Lennon and Yoko Ono LP released in 1980. It was a collection of songs wherein husband and wife would conduct a musical dialogue. In 'Double Fantasy: On Your Own,' Marc Lafia presents a dialogue between cultures and epochs through a series of pairings, prints, videos and sculpture.

The works trace a movement from social revolutions to private revolutions, from collective states to individual states of mind.

As distinct cultures prior to globalization looked to the other, a double of sorts was produced, leading to a series of productive mis-recognitions, phantasms and mirrorings. Actor Jia Hongsheng in Beijing believes John Lennon to be his father; Jean Luc Godard argues that the French Mao’s red book is the way to analysis and social change; the Beatles go to India and look to the Maharishi to transform their consciousness; and John and Yoko lay in bed in Amsterdam for seven days to inspire peace.

This looking to others not in the cinema of narrative representation but in this new networked cinema of attractions became the subject of my film Hi, How are You Guest 10497. In the film, the actress Raimonda Skeryte, joins myfreecams, 'a website providing live webcam performances by female models, typically featuring nudity and sexual activity often ranging from striptease and dirty talk to masturbation with sex toys. MFC is used mostly by amateur webcam models, or camgirls, who earn money for their performances on the site.Customers of the site can purchase virtual tokens, which can be used to tip performers or watch private shows.' 1

Using the method of self recording I started begin with in Revolution of Everyday Life I asked Raimonda Skeryte, whom by this time I made several films with if she would like to join the MFC service and make a film about it. Over the course of six months, sometimes with two cameras, alone in her apartment she recorded her daily life and what she saw on screen and those she interacted with as she became a cam girl.

Of course these recording are set up with a narrative structure but in the entire film except for one brief outing in Korean Town New York she only interacts with voices, text and images of the computer screen.

I want to show you the opening and the last seven minutes of the film, Hi How are You Guest 10497.
In this new cinema of attractions, the camera looks as much onto the world as it does inward and onto ourselves. We are the attraction and we construct ourselves as such.

This above picture is from Tinder, a social dating service where I stamped 'Liked' on this smart image of young woman off centered and looking out from the framed rectangle common to cineaste in looking through a virtual viewfinder.

The construction of our image for consumption, once the expert knowledge of madison avenue and media professionals is now a necessary and ordinary skill, though some are much better than others, such people we call today, influencers.

Now I want to show you the ending of Revolution of Everyday Life.  Because it asks the question how can we take all these private recordings and make through them a public, a politics, a collective. I made another version of this film called Revolution of the Present, asking the same question where I interviewed Michael Hardt and he spoke of the multitude as a new kind of public. You can see the trailer here.

These are two very different approaches to films about similar subjects and that is, is there something we share and want in common.  Can there be things we may want universally.  And do we go about gaining and living those things.

In the above image from Revolution of Everyday Life you see private actions and in time in the film a group forms that has a desire to create public actions. 

Before I show the ending I want to read you this quote about the film

'the revolution of everyday life, the film tries to offer an alternative to the problem of the impotency we are all in: to go back and become animals, monkeys, lions, swans, start again, recapture the moments of real existence. two woman love, fuck, hate, beat, shout, cry with no social context, why? to make sense of it all, shameless creatures who cant handle it all anymore, this is their protest, this is what maybe we all should do,but we probably can't unless we are true to our self or just crazy.' Lior Rosenfeld

In Revolution of the Present we see people from all over the world similarly take to the streets, become present collectively expressing there desires. 

In both films we must ask what is the efficacy of these actions. And more so how do the films work, what is fiction, what is real, what are the forms that constitute their arguments. And what is the new form of networked cinema, where the reader with every click creates the next edit, sutures their cinema of attractions. 

1. The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde By: Tom Gunning

2. MyFreeCams

Depiction Document Pictures / Post Internet Art

Let's start with a picture.

And a quote 

Dutch artist Eric van Lieshout: “I couldn’t care less what people call it, as long as we can do what we want.”

Though they are both photographs, the picture and document are very different arguments.  It can be tempting and confusing to compare them on the grounds that indeed they are photographic images. I thought I would want to suggest that for each to be most realized they must, by perforce, be antagonistic. That is to be most realized each most announce itself as one or the other. 

Let's take the deadpan aesthetic strategy of imaging photographs in the service of conceptual art. A Ruscha would defeat itself as a picture, as a tableaux, as an image of absorption, however we want to define these last three terms. The Ruscha photograph must be a fact. And imaging it as a picture would take us away from our sense in seeing it as an image of something just there, ordinarily seen and most banal. 

Pictures we may think should not be banal. If we think of the picture tradition coming out of the French Salon academies, pictures were viewed with certain criteria and had certain proscriptions. Look at this image below. It seems equally mundane as the above images.

Here is the artist Jeff Wall in front of his picture, The Destroyed Room. Note the scale of his pictures and how he proudly stands in front of these rather monumental works wherein Ruscha lies on the ground acknowledging us slyly covered in copies of his small incidental artist books.

Behind him is The Destroyed Room and the light from the ceiling not seen in the first image is shown here and this and the illumination from the light box gives the picture an appearance of more depth. Each of his pictures are of a fairly large just over 7x5 feet and they alone. 

Speaking about this picture he has said.

My first pictures like The Destroyed Room emerged from a re-encounter with nineteenth-century art’, Wall has said. Here, the work in question is The Death of Sardanapalus 1827 by Eugène Delacroix, which depicts the Assyrian monarch on his deathbed, commanding the destruction of his possessions and slaughter of his concubines in a last act of defiance against invading armies.

Wall echoes Delacroix’s composition, with its central sweeping diagonal and sumptuous palette of blood reds, while acknowledging its staged atmosphere by re-composing the scene as a roughly fabricated stage-set, absent of any players. ‘Through the door you can see that it’s only a set held up by supports, that this is not a real space, this is no-one’s house,’ he has commented. Though clearly a woman’s bedroom, the cause of the violence is unexplained, leaving the viewer to speculate on the sequence of events.  (1)

In the tradition of salon history paintings, Wall's pictures are constructed as singular moments. Unique narratives. Particular events. The narrative coms before the picture. It is the sayable that's made visible.  It a play then staged. 

Ruscha's images follow one after the other, made for a book, The Strip, it is a typology of a urban landscape and their industrial forms. A much wryer version of the Becher's typologies.

“In 1966 Ed Ruscha photographed the ‘Strip’ – the notorious stretch of Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood – by attaching a motorised Nikon 250 camera to the back of his truck, shooting in real time while driving up and down the two-mile stretch. Using a mechanical device to take the photographs brought the objectivity he had been aiming for in earlier books. The length of the roll of film dictated the books final form, a concertina that unfolded to a length of twenty-seven feet and revealed an exact model of both sides of the street,” (Richards, M. 2008, p.44).

“Ruscha has said: “I’m looking at it [the Strip] almost like an anthropologist, or a geologist. I’m as interested in some of the less obvious things … People look at the buildings and say, ‘What was that building before?’ Well, what about the sidewalk in front of it, and the curb that surrounds it, and embankments here and there? I’m trying to look at the whole picture.” (Ed Ruscha cited in Richards, M. 2008, p.46).


Interesting both of this works were made as artworks and to function in there discourses. Here are two images from 'Learning from Las Vegas.'

and here from a work from Sophie Calle. 

This is a two-part framed work comprising photographs and text. In the upper part, the title Room 47 is printed below a colour photograph of elegantly carved wooden twin head-boards behind a bed covered in rich brown satin. Below it, three columns of italic text are diary entries describing findings in the hotel room between Sunday 22 February 1981 and Tuesday 24. In the lower frame a grid of nine black and white photographs show things listed in the text above. This work is part of a project titled The Hotel, which the artist has defined: 

On Monday, February 16, 1981, I was hired as a temporary chambermaid for three weeks in a Venetian hotel. I was assigned twelve bedrooms on the fourth floor. In the course of my cleaning duties, I examined the personal belongings of the hotel guests and observed through details lives which remained unknown to me. On Friday, March 6, the job came to an end. (Quoted in Calle, pp.140-1.) 

Perhaps the confusion of picture and document emerges from photography's coming after painting and wanting to be painterly or have a certain formal 'beauty.'

The picture above from Steigliz and the one below Cartier Bresson. 

Or maybe it's as simple as certain photographers going back to the idea of large scale images, in the tradition of salon pictures. 

Compare the scale of the work of Cartier Bresson and Steiglitz.

But this would deny a key idea of these photographers which has to do with the staging of the photograph.  And that is this idea of absorption and this is 

'the subject’s intentional relation to its world and other subjects is already quite complicated just at the level of the paintings, for we are dealing with so many levels of attention:  subjects in the painting and their objects and world, painter and depicted scene, painter and painting, beholder and scene or intentional object of the painting, beholder and painting, and so forth.19

I will limit this discussion to absorption/theatricality issues as they touch on depictions of human beings at work in the world [or asleep in it] and/or with others.) What Fried has discovered by collecting these paintings and analyzing them together is that so many of these painters were in effect “painting,” attempting somehow to capture such forms of mindedness as their principal object, that they were trying to demonstrate that forms of engaged, absorbed mindedness (and so a kind of genuineness or authen- ticity) were still possible.20 I am suggesting that such an enterprise must be a response of sorts to a growing suspicion that they were not possible, that there were ever fewer areas of human life not regulated by socially nor- malizing expectations, fewer objects that could engage such absorptive attention. 

The absorbed characters in such paintings are still acting intentionally and purposively but in a way that does not seem reflexively guided by some notion of how one ought to do that, how others expect one to act, in the way Boucher’s characters seem to be thinking, “Ah, this is the pose one should strike as the god of light! Don’t I look wonderful?” 

Finally, we should also note something Fried himself stresses, that such attempts are part of a narrative of decline and loss. The claim is that the evolution of painting in France between the start of the reaction against the Rococo and Manet’s seminal masterpieces of the first half of the 1860s, traditionally discussed in terms of style and subject matter and presented as a sequence of ill-defined and disjunct epochs or move- ments . . . may be grasped as a single, self-renewing, and important respects dialectical undertaking. 

(In the conventional, everyday sense, no one is more aware of another than when one is trying to ignore that person. The irony here is of course of a piece with Diderot’s famous paradox of acting, how such sang-froid is required for the genuine [seeming] display of passion.)21 In painting the absorption strategy is instead a way of addressing such a beholder, a way considered ontologically more fundamental than theatrical appeals to external spectators.22 This painterly suggestion of a mode of presence by the “supreme fiction” of absence is all obviously a fragile pictorial fiction and sometimes depends on reception conditions and historical sensitivities that the artist has no control over. 

Diderot, Kierkegaard, Thoreau, Heidegger, Cavell— all inherit in one way or other (even if some would reject the explicit terms) some aspect of this notion of freedom as self-identification, authenticity, or embodied life, as well as, with varying degrees of explicitness, some sense of why such a free life would be so valuable—that some such attainment is an ur-condition for anything else being of value, significance, salience. (Again: nothing can be of significance for me unless it is, to me, a condition not met if my life is not, let us say, intimately my own.) And for all of these thinkers, the violation of this condition not only amounts to much more than an individual’s lack of integrity but, as Rousseau first prophesied, can come to characterize a whole form of life as such, such that perhaps un- avoidable violations of this kind of integrity amount to an entire form of life.

If this is so, it might support the suggestion that the threat of theatricality stems primarily from the deteriorating sociality of the common world in- habited by painter and subject (where one means by such a deterioration something quite specific, as I try to show below). When such sociality is by and large restricted to what could be called I-We relations, with an ever more powerful, supervisory, punitive We, and without much in the way of I-you, the temptation to theatricalize, to compromise with such a new form of power, is nearly inevitable and has to make its way into traditions of paint- ing, just as much as it has to inspire rejections of such compromising, ul- timately self-undermining strategies. But, in Hegel’s terms, these initial rejections, the search for absorption, are understandable “indeterminate negations,” fantasies of self-identification and absorbed peace that represent more counterfantasies of escape than markers of a possible new form of life. '

Let's take a look at such a picture.

Picture for Women 1979

Picture for Women was inspired by Edouard Manet’s masterpiece A Bar at the Folies-Bergères 1881–2. In Manet’s painting, a barmaid gazes out of frame, observed by a shadowy male figure. The whole scene appears to be reflected in the mirror behind the bar, creating a complex web of viewpoints. Wall borrows the internal structure of the painting, and motifs such as the light bulbs that give it spatial depth. The figures are similarly reflected in a mirror, and the woman has the absorbed gaze and posture of Manet’s barmaid, while the man is the artist himself. Though issues of the male gaze, particularly the power relationship between male artist and female model, and the viewer’s role as onlooker, are implicit in Manet’s painting, Wall updates the theme by positioning the camera at the centre of the work, so that it captures the act of making the image (the scene reflected in the mirror) and, at the same time, looks straight out at us.

Jeff Wall 
Picture for Women 1979
Transparency in lightbox 1425 x 2045 mm
Cinematographic photograph

Collection of the artist. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
© The artist

The seam running down the middle of the photograph is apparent in some of Wall’s large-scale pictures, where two pieces of transparency are joined. The fact that it serves as a reminder of the artifice of picture making is something that Wall has come to appreciate: ‘The join between the two pictures brings your eye up to the surface again and creates a dialectic that I always enjoyed and learned from painting…a dialectic between depth and flatness. Sometimes I hide it, sometimes I don’t’, he has said.    (from the tate guide)

I want to understand then, that the idea of the picture we have been talking about is not simply the posed and unposed, the found and the made, but the relation of the subject to the photographer, how the subject is seen. 

How then to think of the staging or construction of photographs as pictures, documents, objects in the tradition of paintings, in the tradition of the white cube, of stock photography, to look like art on line. 

I will leave you with some pictures.  

Storytelling underlies all l4 images in this quietly brilliant series created by one of America's most celebrated and influential photographers. Triggered in 2008 in reaction to the crashing banks, growing despair, and end of the Bush era, DiCorcia responded with East of Eden, a series referencing John Steinbeck's novel of the same name, set in California in the early 20th Century, which in turn parallels the Book of Genesis, with references to Cain and Abel and The Fall. DiCorca lays biblical references onto mundane scenes and characters choreographed to suggest good and evil in incongruous situations.

Of all the scenarios, the recent Cain and Abel is most theatrical. Two gay men wrestling — or embracing — on a bed are overlooked by a naked, pregnant woman representing Eve.

A photo from DIS's online project "Competing Images: Art vs. People," 2012, showing a model in front of Katja Novitskova's Innate Disposition,2012, digital print on plastic cut-out display; at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.

In the spring of 2012, Agatha Wara, then an MFA student at Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies, organized an exhibition at Bard's Hessel Museum of works by Si-Qin and Katja Novitskova. Si-Qin showed a series of Nike bags strung from pillars by straps extended to their maximum length, along with two identical diptychs of a blonde model's beautiful face, cut along the vertical axis to emphasize slight asymmetries. Novitskova showed cardboard cutouts like the ones seen in stores, but instead of portraying celebrities or junk-food mascots they depicted tropical birds and jungle creatures, as well as a couple of anonymous black people. This weirdly racist touch seems even more odious if you're familiar with the intellectual context constructed around Post-Internet art in Si-Qin's neo-Darwinian writings that use evolutionary biology to justify both eugenics and Nike's popularity. Among his essays is "Stock Photography as Evolutionary Attractor" (2013), which describes the social and cultural specificities of modern capitalism as the natural order of things—an appeal to the absolute beauty of money, power and porcelain-skinned women.

Wara invited DIS—the collective behind an eponymous online magazine that treats art as a lifestyle brand and fashion photography as a form of Conceptual art—to organize a photo shoot at the museum. Social ties and creative collaborations have connected DIS to Post-Internet art. Si-Qin even published his essay on stock photography in their magazine. Post-Internet art ordinarily purges its white cubes of people, preferring to use passively predictable plants as a representation of life. (Sad-looking ferns have become a Post-Internet stylistic trope.) But DIS, in keeping with its lifestyle magazine mission, is constantly asking how humans contort to fit, or fail to fit, the values of fluid image economies, especially in the fashion industry.

Post-Internet defaults to an art about the presentation of art, playing to the art-world audience's familiarity with the gallery as a medium or environment for art, as well as with the conventions of presenting promotional materials online.

Whether people like it, hate it or feel indifferent toward it, they all seem to know what "Post-Internet" means today but are unable to articulate it with much precision. "I know it when I see it"—like porn, right? It's not a bad analogy, because Post-Internet art does to art what porn does to sex—renders it lurid. The definition I'd like to propose underscores this transactional sensibility: I know Post-Internet art when I see art made for its own installation shots, or installation shots presented as art. Post-Internet art is about creating objects that look good online: photographed under bright lights in the gallery's purifying white cube (a double for the white field of the browser window that supports the documentation), filtered for high contrast and colors that pop.

Supporters of Post-Internet art might say that it's not the gallery that really matters but the shot of the work there, like a shot staged in a photographer's studio. But staged photography often disguises the shoot's environment, or transforms it. Post-Internet art preserves the white cube to leech off its prestige.

David Robbins was a popular teacher at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) until his retirement a few years ago, attracting students with ideas about audience engagement and the possibility of a "conceptual art for the masses," which he called "high entertainment." He collected these thoughts in an "online book" of that title, published in 2009. For Robbins, art is an area of cultural activity distinguished by systemic self-reference; if entertainment appeals directly to its audience, Art (his capital "A") is a "satellite," receiving signals from individual artists and beaming them back to viewers, who can receive them only if their perceptual faculties are properly attuned. That is, audiences for Art have to be looped in to the self-referential game, a process that has traditionally required trips to art institutions and formal schooling. Robbins uses the term "platforming" to describe how artists can disrupt this model, reaching receptive viewers put off by the high barriers to entry into the institutional art world. He names the gallery as one platform, but includes it on a list among the radio show, the TV variety show, the magazine and "a certain kind of website (YouTube, Flickr, MySpace . . .)."

Consuming Post-Internet art most often means browsing artists' websites, which may be the optimal space for encountering the work. I recently came across an installation shot of Hhellblauu (2008-12), a work by Kari Altmann that I'd previously seen installed in a group show at Envoy Enterprises on the Lower East Side in the summer of 2010. In the gallery it looked like nothing—a dingy wading pool filled with water, where some prints of the Paramount logo and other found images on chunky foamcore floated about and piled up at the periphery. It did nearly nothing to attract my attention when I saw it in the gallery; it was just an inexpertly assembled installation by an artist who made more compelling work online. But when I saw the documentation I did a double take. The colors in the image—especially the sky blue named in the title—were intensely vibrant compared to the dull ones I remembered. The water in the pool seemed to create a viscous distance between the floating prints and the base upon which the pool rested, a platform that had looked flat when I saw it in person. In short, this bad installation suddenly looked like a good one, thanks to the way the lens of the camera and the lights worked on the materials when Altmann took the photo.

And Simon Denny 

Denny’s work often refers to the psychology and abstract language of the new media economy, invoking "clouds" of big data and the constant pressure to "update” our lives. He typically finds the sources for his work within the materials, advertising, and packaging produced by technology and media companies, and often deploys graphic interfaces borrowed from commercial display to highlight connections between the utopian goals of the new media economy and those of historical modernism.

Denny’s work has explored the culture of internet-technology firms, technological obsolescence, corporate culture, and contemporary constructions of national identity. He is interested in innovation as a driving force in business, in the rhetoric of Silicon Valley and tech start-ups, in technology’s role in shaping global culture and in the ways information is controlled and shared. He explores these ideas in installations that combine sculpture, graphics, and moving images. 

“All you need is data” teeters on the cusp between art and life and reminds me of a useful maxim, evidently about art, from the Dutch artist Eric van Lieshout: “I couldn’t care less what people call it, as long as we can do what we want.”

I confess that I tend to care what people call “it.” I value the distinction between art and life, and find that blurring them doesn’t necessarily do either category any favors. But that’s another article. Mr. Denny’s work is unusual because it works exceptionally well both ways, as art and as something more like life.

For people who frequent galleries and museums, it has a fairly high art quotient — and I.Q. — in the ways it builds on Conceptual art, appropriation art, relational aesthetics and institutional critique in its presentation, design and subject matter; its ancestors include all kinds of environmental art, from the ’60s Happenings to the installations of Cady Noland and Martin Kippenberger in the ’80s and ’90s.

1.
Jeff Wall Room Guide 1 Tate 

2.
Ed Ruscha

3.
The Hotel   Tate

4. DiCorcia

5. Karia Altmann

6. The Perils of Post Internet Art

7. Simon Denny

8. Simon Denny