Something fun I did for the web expo component for my David Lusk Gallery Nashville show over the weekend. Plus, check out the "Code Duello, Old Hick & a Big Bang" makeover at 4D Pop!
Code Duello, Old Hick & a Big Bang
A lovely installation curated by Dane Carder and David Lusk. The exhibition also features the animation "A Big Bang," which is projected onto the rear of the transition wall separating the main and second galleries. The opening was excellent and well-attended, coinciding with Wedgewood art district First Saturday Art Crawl (and the 4th of July weekend). The event featured a mixologist, who researched a special concoction related to Old Hickory. I hope to post some photos from the evening here soon.
"Code Duello, Old Hick & a Big Bang" opens at DLG Nashville
In his first solo exhibition in Nashville in over a decade, on view at David Lusk Gallery from July 5 through July 26, Brooklyn-based artist Paul McLean will present a rich body of new paintings and supporting media focused on the life and times of President Andrew Jackson ("Old Hickory"), and other stories from the past, here and now. For “Code Duello, Old Hick & A Big Bang,” McLean will exhibit interlinking series of mixed media on canvas, sculptural or dimensional wall-mounted pieces and ink-on-polyester works, plus digital animations and texts. The show’s subject matter will cover a spectrum of compelling narratives, including President Jackson’s colorful and controversial history, the practice of dueling in America and the art and science of the universe’s origins, as represented in modern technology through computer-enabled data visualization. "Code Duello, Old Hick & A Big Bang" opens Saturday July 5, with an artist's reception from 6-9PM
McLean’s unique approach, which he has termed “4D,” or “4th Dimensional art” since the early 80s, provides an integrative framework for layered techniques, timelines, spatial concerns and concepts. Most of the images in “Code Duello, Old Hick & A Big Bang” consist of the figure on and/or in abstraction, but operate as a kind of perceptual projection device confronting space and time beyond the limits of strict 3D and 2D pictorial architectures. Throughout his career, McLean has created art in both solo and collective platforms, and in this exhibition, the artist partners with long-time collaborator Shane Kennedy, a Tennessee native and recent graduate of The Cooper Union. McLean and Kennedy created a series of innovative pull-paintings during a residency at Chanorth in upstate New York in Fall 2013, as part of the “Code Duello” set. Kennedy also prepared lush surfaces for some of the paintings for the Jackson series, and provided substantial technical support for McLean’s project. Additional fabrication services for “Code Duello, Old Hick & A Big Bang” came by way of the robust and bustling artisanal networks in Brooklyn, especially the Bushwick district, where McLean’s current studio is located. McLean’s impetus for weaving the Big Bang into the discourse underpinning the show arose from his doctoral course work at the European Graduate School, and an encounter with NYU’s Tim Maudlin, whose specialty is combining physics and philosophy in exploring the nature of relations to the cosmos.
Ultimately, “Code Duello, Old Hick & A Big Bang” is an exposition on questions we have about what it means to be “A Man of the Times,” how we stylize our experiences for the purposes of representation, and what we consider to be meaningful action. It is McLean’s general contention that the arts - and especially visual art - give us a worthy vehicle for sharing our most profound encounters with the complex world in which we live out our lives. The artist has the means to combine craft with theory to generate singular objects that simultaneously reflect and embody our perceptions of existence and what we value most. As a valuable expression the art thus conceived can be passed down, generation to generation, as an act of hope - a “real” reminder of, meditation on, and hedge against our individual mortality.
The Artist's Zoo [e-blast]
ABOUT FLETCHER LIEGEROT
Fletcher has performed with Lilac Theater Co., Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and Lightbox. He has studied with Raïna Von Waldenburg, Steve Wangh and SITI co. He has been on Law and Order. He performed at the Public Theater and on the F train. He also plays the drums. He is a dad.
ABOUT ARTIST'S ZOO
The Artist's Zoo is a 4D art production, applying technical approaches of conceptual art, experimental theater, new media & net.art + other dimensional forms of Live Art Event or Happening in a set piece sited at the AFHstudioBK for Bushwick Open Studios 2014. Featuring C. Fletcher Liegerot as "The Artist," The Artist's Zoo [TAZ] is the first version of what we envision to be a progressive, evolving project to confront the preconceptions, prejudices, behavioral tropes and separations extant in the relationship between artist, viewer and the society in which both operate as an artificial or contrived binary. Art for Humans lead artist Paul McLean will serve as facilitator, conduit, explicator and scriptwriter/anarchivist for TAZ. His working studio, currently containing new work for his upcoming exhibit "Code Duello, Old Hick & a Big Bang" (David Lusk Gallery Nashville, opening July 5, 2014), will host the unfolding event. Supplemental material and content will be transmitted and recorded via electronic networked devices during and between live sessions of the "performance." Fletcher and McLean are framing this phase of TAZ as a "workshop" for generating and percolating the dimensional narratives attaching to the base or pre-production concepts, to hammer out logistical issues, a clarification process that will both establish protocols and erase unnecessary definitions stitching to the elements contained in our set of concerns. "Most important are the questions that emerge, moving forward," says project consultant Milo Santini. "The term 'curating' has no importance in the environment we are creating. The principles we are most obligated to are not aesthetic, and certainly have no critical relevance. The last thing the players want to do is negation." Any artwork made during the workshop phase of TAZ will be donated to science.
New paintings [Old Hick + A Big Bang]
The new series of paintings is taking shape. Most of the latest ones extend the Code Duello collaborative approach that Shane & I brought to the ink-on-polyester works executed last fall at chanorth to acrylic+ (e.g., inks, varnishes, other materials) on canvas. Very rarely have I attempted to systematically paint on canvas with another artist [only twice before, over a 30+ -year span] operating collaboratively. Which isn't to say I haven't co-opted other painter's canvases and re-appropriated them before. I have. Nearly my entire undergrad senior show at Notre Dame was executed on a trove of pre-stretched canvases some guy had left in my apartment complex's storage area! My creative relationship with Shane is unique though, due to the long-term shared studio proximity, access, 4D discourse, actualization and production - which makes this undertaking feasible. He's aware of what will and won't work in the toggling process. Shane delivered a half dozen canvases he'd additively texturized/dimensionally underpainted [beautifully] during course studies at Cooper, and I began overworking them. Shane's excellent usage of Guerra pigments contributes a lot to the ease of integrating his prep-elements with the subsequent layers. I won't go much more here into detail describing the exchange process, but I will present in the journal some photo-documentation of the development of these pieces, minus commentary, at least for the time being. (I likely will present a talk on this at DLG-Nashville in July.)
Suffice to say, Shane & I have already begun to discuss consequent steps, continuing the project. Exciting!
As for the 4D painting approach I'm employing: The Old Hick series seems to be emerging from a specific painting [see "Kittler" in the Dim Tim series]; but it also revives a way of building images that I practiced in the late 80s. ...Lots of push-pull, over-under, tricky color, perspective-play and so on, using perspectival and perceptual expectations to activate complex surfaces. I'm thinking in particular of a big body of work that I produced while inhabiting one of those awesome artist studios in Gypsy Alley, off Canyon Road in Santa Fe. I don't think I have any chronicle of those paintings at all, which is a bummer. There were many of them, but I have no idea where they are now. It's a very strange feeling. Anyway, the mash-up of simple composition (informed maybe by a media philosophy of concision, if not precision) with "drametric" effects is in itself new territory to move through.
[Click the image to view the non-chronological sequence. The pictures aren't edited in any way.]
BOS 2014 Benefit Gala + Auction
On Sunday, May 5, AiB/BOS 2014 held a fundraiser that was as great & fun as any I've attended over the past three decades. Bushwick just rox! The raw space on Ten Eyck Street had been transformed by the event volunteers into a wild, innovatively curated pop-up installation, sectioned for multi-purposed presenting of Bushwick art, supplying guests with treats, and facilitating the auction. The raffle format was excellent, with an $80 buy-in that didn't exclude precarious artists from playing. The rooms were packed when Shane & I arrived, and the happy-buzz was churning. The springtime NYC weather was (thank the heavens) lovely, & I'm sure that had something to do with the good vibes. I'm posting a few phone snaps below.
New Animation for Bold Jez Audio
Click on the link above to view the video on YouTube. The animation consists of images drawn from a database containing content from collaborations with Jez over a 2-year timeline, including NovadZINE, Novad Library, Anarchives at OAS/Bat Haus, OWS Arts & Culture, Spatial Occupation at Hyperallergic, and more. Jez has been generating a singular body of work, ranging from gathered sound, DIY music & video production, tactical & web-based net-art, texts/research, social media campaigns + cetera. His phenomenal contributions to epic ana-arts & theory in the Occupied art world(s) include performance in an astonishing spectrum of "venues" - on the street, in Novadic salons, at storied Magic Mountain, onstage... pretty much wherever the spirit moves. At this point, Bold Jez has operated in enforced & oppressed invisibility, even though his voice, concepts and actions are as potent & valuable as anything being produced anywhere by anyone today. We are working on an an animated album of ten or so pieces, one song at a time.
BOS2014 Benefit
The Arts in Bushwick/Bushwick Open Studios 2014 Benefit Tumblr is online now. What an impressive array of contributions. Again, I say this annual collective project is the best of its kind anywhere. Featuring the art of 193 Bushwick-based artists, the benefit will generate funds for BOS2014 through a raffle that only costs $80 per ticket. The organizers admit it's a paltry amount, but say the raffle fare is priced low, so artists can afford to purchase the tickets. Here's more info:
ABOUT the Benefit
Please come to see it and have fun on May 4th at Storefront Ten Eyck:Storefront Ten Eyck 324 Ten Eyck St, Brooklyn NY 11206. 6-9PM
All the artists are invited and you are very welcome to bring friends and family, it is all open the public but we are going to have a donation suggestion of $5.00 for the non-artists.
The benefit is going to be by raffle at $80.00 per ticket (we know it's not a lot but we want make sure artists are able to purchase art).
If you'd like to have more info about the benefit go to:
http://artsinbushwick.org/bos2014/benefit-2014/2014 BOS Benefit Committee:
- Jessica Hargreaves
- Christopher Stout
- Jennifer Hitchings
- Taylor Langone
- Cibele Vieira
- Sessa Englund
New AFH Studio, BOS2014 news, DLG-N exhibit update, & more
I moved into a new studio in Bushwick. It's an enclave for artists, and I love my new neighbors. I'll post more about the community soon. The production on my upcoming exhibit at David Lusk Gallery in Nashville has commenced. For those of you keeping track, the timing of the show has been changed. The exhibit [working title: "Code Duello, Old Hick + A Big BANG"] has been pushed back to the first week in July. Also, this will be a solo exhibit, now (not a two-person show).
I will be contributing a piece to the BOS2014 Benefit this year, to support Arts in Bushwick ("Cool Deputy," see image above). I am getting really excited about the tour and all the community-building events associated with it. The text and images posted in this month's (April 2014) 4Dimensions blog were generated for Pickthorn BK. I'll be participating again this year in Pickthorn's weekend-long activities for BOS2014. Their 2014 theme, appropriately enough, given Chelsey's accomplishments as a colorist in her field, is "COLOR." So far, I've been helping Jocelyn percolate ideas, in pre-production popcorning sessions, and we'll see what else develops. It's going to be fantastic! I'll be posting more info as we get closer to the event(s).
Upcoming AFH in 2014
A couple of recent developments:
- I've been slated for a 2-person show at DLG-Nashville in June. The tentative working title is "Old Hick & a Big Bang." The idea is to mash-up Andrew Jackson and some new material on the origins of the universe [see link to an article in today's New York Times for one of them]. The exhibit narrative draws from research data gathered for the Code Duello series executed at my chashama/Chanorth residency, and on my recent trip to Tennessee, which included a visit to the Hermitage, Jackson's historic cotton plantation and residence.
- I'll be working with Arts in Bushwick on this year's iteration of Bushwick Open Studios, the 8th one, NYC's biggest/best, and - arguably - the world's most rad artist zoo. I've attended a couple of BOS2014 mixers, and signed up for the Press Team, and may also be producing some AiB Blog entries, if all works out. At this point, I'm not sure what my BOS2014 studio presentation will feature. Stay tuned.
- My old friend, boss saxophonist and composer Max Abrams, who has an awesome new record out [Sway], contacted me around the trip to Nashville. He's evidently up in Manitoba on some crazy muso mission, but we e-chatted, and Max invited me to create moving images for an as-yet-undetermined selection from Sway. I of course agreed and am close-listening to several, which he suggested. One is the title song, featuring Mavericks (etc) star Raul Malo. Neat enough, during my stay in the Music City, which included a few evenings at Dane Carder's great studio at Chestnut, the Mavs were rehearsing a couple doors down on the same floor. What great moments, to pass by in the hall, taking in the sounds of those great performers, including old pals Jerry Dale and Robert (I'm assuming - I didn't knock and interrupt their practice to say hi, although mutual friends assured me I should've; ...next time...) ∞ Anyway, I will post updates on project progress here.
- When it rains, it pours. The collaboration with Max will run concurrent with ongoing and similar work with both Wilson Novitzki and Bold Jez. Wilson is about to leave on another European tour with R. Stevie Moore, and he has a really compelling photography project piggybacked on those plans. Check out his Kickstarter for more info (and to donate to this worthy creative cause). Wilson and I haven't sat down and hashed out a plan, but I'm hoping we do a DisciplineAriel 2.0 project. Jez has forwarded me several songs he recorded recently (which you can listen to at his Soundcloud). In my mind, Jez is one of most remarkable and unique talents I've encountered in three+ decades of wanderings & encounters amongst the Mighty Unfettered, the authentic and true snowflakes & fearless. We discussed my creating a full album's worth of 4Danimations (10 Songs). He's doing his works with majesty & dignity. My turn's coming.
Opening Night Photos at DLG Nashville [+ a link to a nice article in StyleBlueprint]
Photos by DLG artist Huger Foote.
David Lusk Gallery: A New Star in Nashville’s Art Scene
March 17, 2014 By Elizabeth Fox
"Nashville is the recipient of a true gem with the arrival of David Lusk Gallery Nashville(DLG). On March 1, DLG Nashville opened its doors to the public in the burgeoning Wedgewood/Houston neighborhood."
Invite for upcoming exhibits at DLG Nashville
The private opening and artists' get-together will be Saturday, February 22.
David Lusk Gallery opens space in Nashville
My longtime friend Dane Carder will be directing a new gallery owned by Memphis-based gallerist David Lusk in Nashville. A private opening will be held February 22, and a public opening will launch the beautiful exhibit space on March 1. I'll be showing recent and new work with DSL in 2014. Below is the press release (click-through, to see all 3 pages), and an image of the gallery, in progress.
AFH in the works
Over the holidays we hatched some exciting plans for 2014. We also will be making some important announcements about upcoming projects in the next few weeks. Stay tuned for updates. For now, here's a taste, a new animation:
Happy Holidays from AFH [2013]
Thank you to all who participated in or supported AFH this year!
- DIM TIM: Fallacies of Hope at SLAG Contemporary
- Shane Kennedy/Society for the Prevention of Creative Obsolescence at Brooklyn Fire Proof
- Good Faith Space at STK
- Wilson Novitzki ("Reliability")
- Bold, Jez ("Novad Library")
- Isham Christie + Bold, Jez ["Titles {R} (p)Reformist"]
- Dane Rex ("Nonesuch")
- Clemens Poole, Shane Kennedy, Joe Riley ("Voyage of the Hippo 2")
- Wilson Novitzki + friends ("The Maintenance Series")
- Shane Kennedy ("Something About Encryption")
- Eric Leiser ("Short Films 2000-2013")
- Dane Rex, Shane Kennedy, Wilson Novitzki, Ashley Strout, Ambrose Curry III, Timur York, Jakey Begin + Paul McLean ("Picture 'IS")
- Residency at Chanorth/chashama ("Code Duello" production, with Shane Kennedy)
- NovadZINE [End of the World Edition, Vol.ø, no.ONE] release party at 1067 Pacific People
- + More
NovadZINE [EotW Edition, no.ONE, vol.ø] Release Party
It was a wonderful night. The weather was unseasonably warm. Reuniting with Bold, Jez [visiting from yonder Dakota territory], Ritchie, Konstant and other Novads was a joy. Rob and Andrea of PacificPeople were excellent as usual as hosts for the event. The Open MIC featured a series of terrific performers, presenting poetry, song, music, movement (directed and spontaneous) + more. Seeing the NovadZINE IRL was a revelation. Seven copies were printed for the happening, and more were ordered by the guests. The plates were bound in a calendar format by Radix, and the zine is gorgeous. The passage of a year's seasons has served only to improve our collective achievements. To talk again about OWS & Magic Mountain & Occupy with Art to a receptive audience felt fantastic. Nothing is dead.
Here's what I read:
DIM TIM Note 1
Man loves to Love and Live, and this is his dreaming. Take his dream away, and he will Hate and Murder.
The computer is a sketching tool. Also a tool for Man to count Everything and even imaginaries. The math and science a sketch requires is nearly impossible to imagine, now because so many people have devoted so much to improving the tools for sketching, especially the computer. Imagination has become relatives with numbering. This is nothing new. Counting makes Man think he knows what is and what's going on. That's why he spends so much time numbering.
Man's beginning to realize all numbers are dimensional. He doesn't realize why this terrifies him so. Dimensional numbers can obviate matter. Uh oh. So much for knowing. So much for things. Art can help. It's supposed to remind us why we love, what life is.
Art is enough for itself.
I wouldn't have believed something that works so well could be so poorly used. The shame of it, man. Sickness, we have learned, can be traced. This is true of the sicknesses infecting art.
To see art in dreaming is to see it as it is. To live life as a dream is something else entirely. To dream a life is to set aside the time of dying.
Notations from Andrea >
Thanks to the “Physical” Open-Mic Participants:
rob, carry, mariette, jez, polina, andrea, paul, chris, robert, lin, richard, aurelio, sari, shane
and Thanks to our “Virtual” Open-Mic Participants:
ale, roo and elke
NovadZINE [EotW Edition] Release Party Supporting Text
“No slave set. All free”: The Novad Collective and Apocalyptic Freedom By KONSTANT Novad On Oct. 3, 2011, about one hundred Occupy zombies marched across from the New York Stock Exchange, a direct action that not only satirized the emptiness in the heart of American capitalism but announced what was soon demonstrated to be widespread utter estrangement from the neoliberal agenda. Of course, the feeling was mutual. The violent expulsion of the encampments in New York and around the country reframed the conflict between the left and the neoliberal hegemony in military terms. The next four or five months saw a continued escalation of repressive force, with the massing of police at demonstrations, use of helicopters, rubber bullets, snatch and grab arrests, and the infiltration of local groups.The counterinsurgency was clearly effective; mass demonstrations now are rare, and resistance in general is episodic and disbursed. Post Occupy, the zombie has returned as a trope of resistance on the left, but the context has shifted from satire of Wall Street to scenarios of the end of the world. The winter, 2014 issue of Adbusters is given to year by year speculation on the global unraveling up to 2047. The publication of “Accelerate Manifesto” by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek in May, 2013[i] revived theoretical discussion on the left of various scenarios for the trajectory of neoliberal drive to global annihilation. Noam Chomsky[ii], Slavoj Zizek[iii] and Chris Hedges[iv] have added their own apocalyptic warnings to the increasingly insistent voices of climatologists, economists and social theorists concerned about the near prospects for rising sea levels, catastrophic weather and financial collapse. The Occupy zombies have been replaced by doomed humanity. It is one thing to make the general warning that if certain steps are not taken, and soon—reduce carbon emissions, improve working conditons for the precariat, redistribute of wealth—the world will end. It is another to act as if the end is in progress, or has already happened. That is the approach of an art collective and anarchist community engaged in rehearsing apocalyptic and post apocalyptic scenarios as a liberation strategy or, if strategy is too formal a designation for such a group, a starting point for improvisation and collective work. The convergence of art, anarchism and online production is unusual, most collectives tending to favor one identity or the other, but not both. The emphasis on the end of the world as a focus for a project of communal and individual liberation is more unusual still. This is group, called Novads, is comprised of activists from the Zuccotti encampment and members of Magic Mountain, a communal group responsible for many of the Situationist street interventions during the occupation. Since physical convergence in one place is no longer feasible, the group convenes online from the locations around the U.S. and the world where occupiers found themselves in the aftermath of the expulsion. The name combines a sense of nomadic wandering and monadic particularity and reflexivity, along with associations to nova or newness, cataclysmic birth and luminous outburst. In this context the end of the world meme becomes an arena of fluid identity and play: It’s a linguistic manifestation; we’re coining the term fr a new culture based on spontaneous autonomous play. And if we play with it and play IN it we may be able to make some sense of it, engaging with it and our fellow players, calling them NOVAD as we go. As go the NOVADs so goes the world. (anonymous; Call 4 a #Novad Generation?)[v] The dichotomy of a culture of “spontaneous autonomous play” versus capitalist hegemony is offset among Novads by a strong element of ironic detachment from both terms. If play is a withdrawal from capitalist subsumption, subsumption a prospective assimilation of novadic play into market process (one way or another even an art collective cannot entirely escape subsumption), then irony is the real oftheir intersection, the space where value is derealized in play, play in a reflexive notation of value in the coming together of Novads as a collective, a creative group mind as it were, “... just EachOther; consonant reality, resonating at the same waves of collective consciousness.”[vi] The fun is in the doing, to put this in more concrete terms, and the doing produces artifacts (drawings, texts, photographs, paintings uploaded and exchanged online), the intra-group or social value of which depends in part on signifiers of valuelessness: anonymity, impromptu production, incompleteness, bricolage, fragmentation... Novads has been highly productive as an art collective, publishing manifestos, online editions of their zine Deviate, a print version, hosting a lecture series and taking part in various collaborations in the art world, including “Raw,” an affiliated performance space in Brooklyn. The production, it should be stressed, is free in every sense and ephemeral; no one owns the works, no one makes money with them, no one controls them. The approach is purely anarchist: “This is what the new (book) world order looks like for novadic playerz. No one editor. No one writer. No one master. No slave set. All free. All open & transparent. Reliant on systematic trust. Revolutionary.”[vii] In short, the project overall is to develop a leaderless or horizontal online laboratory for experimenting in forms of autonomy or freedom, if you will, under Empire and in sight of the end.The typically uneasy relationship between art and activism is resolved, in this instance, by establishing a line of demarcation. Novads is neither an instrument of a left agenda nor an exercise in utopian rehearsal. In any event, the prospect of yet another instance of a “retreat into enclaves intended to prefigure the very future the are powerless to bring about”[viii] (Toscano) has limited applicaton to an online community, the members of which have jobs and live like anyone else. From the vantage point of a post-Occupy diaspora, however, they see Empire in bleak terms, and this, rather than an off the grid lifestyle, is what prevents them from being like anyone else, to the extent that one make a judgment about the superficially calm great American middle class. It was pouring rain outside When the poet talked to the waters ‘wash away the old world, WASH AWAY THE OLD WORLD’[ix] Apocalyptic thinking among the Novads is certainly informed by Marxist and post Marxist insistence on the inevitable implosion of capitalism, a ‘consummation much to be desired’ passively or perhaps to be hastened by an intensifying of the capitalist death drive, as in the cyberpunk ‘let it burn’ nihilism of Nick Land and more engaged recent variants of Accelerationist aesthetics and politics by Bernardi Bifo[x], Eugene Brennan[xi] and Joshua Ramey[xii]. This far left apocalyticism is important as an ambient, and in some instances parallel discourse to Novad thinking. Popular culture, however,has been a more immediate influence on Novads. Their engagement with the end of the world motif began in response to generally glib speculation that the end of the Mayan calendar on December 21, 2012 signified the end of the world.There is no evidence that the Mayan people thought this, but what mattered was the amount of attention the day received. The appropriation of the Mayan apocalypse for everything from tee shirts to promotion of New Age theories of solar flare kill off and monoculture collapse speaks to a general unease about the near future of life on earth. If the joke is that we pretend to take the faux Mayan apocalypse seriously, the punchline is that we keep telling this kind of joke again and again, with the same kind of compulsive ambivalence that points to climate change in any aberration of the weather or conjures social disintegration on the news of a celebrity meltdown or, worse, a school shooting or urban sniper attack. Any humorous trope repeated often enough turns to confession, and gradually to panicked insistence. A case in point is the apocalyptic subculture to which the Novads, and earlier Occupy Wall Street, refer.In recent years the undead have assumed increasing popularity on television (The Walking Dead), in movies (World War Z), and books (The Zombie Chronicles, The Zombie Survival Guide, and on and on). The market appropriation of necrosis and soullessness is remarkable for its prevalence and general lack irony. The tongue in cheek camp of “Dawn of the Dead,” “Shaun of the Dead,” “Zombie High,” “Cemetary Man” and any number of spinoffs and variants of these in the eighties and nineties has been replaced, in the past ten years or so, by relentlessly grim and inventive ways to tell us that we are all going to die.A Wiki listing of apocalyptic films over the past five decades[xiii], impressionistic and approximate as such a list must be (precisely what is an apocalyptic movie, how far afield did the survey reach, and so on)shows a steady rise from seven in the 1950’s to fourteen in the following decade to a leveling off in the seventies (25), eighties (32) and nineties (32). In the following 9/11-Iraq-Afganistan war decade, however, the number nearly doubles (59). With over thirty apocalyptic movies releaesed between 2010 and 2013, indications are the number will double yet again in this decade. In itself, the existence of a thriving market in end of the world scenarios is not surprising. If social anxieties are increasing in response to global conditions, in particular to the intensifying destructiveness and size of natural disasters (Katrina, Sandy,Yolanda, enormous brush fires in Australia and the American southwest), then we should expect some sort of cultural response; if anything, is is surprising that there is so little indication of panic or widespread survivalist stockpiling.In any event, the apocalyptic trope woven in social concern over climate change and political violence presents a clear market opportunity. Capitalism subsumes the fantasm of mass extinction, including its own eventual extinction, much as it does pretty much everything else that arises in social and even individual consciousness; in the neoliberal economy whatever you believe, desire, or think can and will be sold back to you as a commodity. “Affects and feelings, linguistic abilities, modes of cooperation, forms of know-how and of explicit knowledge, expressions of desire: all these are appropriated and turned into sources of surplus value”[xiv] (Shaviro). Every crisis, even the horrific and increasingly frequent destruction caused by storms supercharged by climate change, presents business opportunities of one sort or another. With apocalyptic pop culture even escalation of anxiety is deterritorialized as a chilling simulation of the market excess that will, possibly, bring about the ‘response of the real’, the event that would appear to answer the mass wish for annihilation depicted in these films. The cartoon character that walks off a cliff and does not fall, in Zizek’s analogy[xv] (Sublime Object 134-35), until it looks down and awakens the knowledge (laws of nature) of gravity in the Real is, in this instance the general public walking in the thin air of endless growth commodity culture and occasionally looking down into recession-war-climate change-world-wide viral catastrophe as if it were another cartoon... The character—Bugs Bunny or whatever—worries, wonders, but keeps walking... Since the collapse of Occupy no mass movement for an anti-capitalist agenda has been forthcoming in the U.S., and those large scale movements that have appeared elsewhere (Brazil, Turkey, Egypt, Bulgaria, and Greece, among others) have been short-lived. Capitalism is here to stay, whatever we take ‘here’ and ‘stay’ to mean in a world where hurricanes with sustained winds near two hundred miles an hour may soon become commonplace: The system under which we live refuses to die, no matter how oppressive and dysfunctional it is. And we double this systemic incapacity with our own inability to imagine any sort of alternative. Such is the dilemma of what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism”: the sad and cynical sense that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.[xvi] Of course, even the end of the world is, in all but a few scenarios, not a complete end but a traumatic condition for renewal. In the end of the world genre, it takes one aback to encounter a film like “Melancholia” or “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World” that really means it; the world ends in these films, the human race becomes extinct. It is far more common for the apocalyptic fantasy to end with a redemptive new beginning, with a promise to respect the earth or foreswear war or nurture our common humanity. Even the Novadic invocation of doomsday is predicated on a promise of a new start: This is the end of the world An obituary And at the same time, a birth certificate Communa[xvii] In other words, the Novads don’t mean it in that literal way of meaning, i.e., they are not fixated on an actual calculus of resource depletion or military escalation, although they occasionally invoke the likelihood of an eventual disaster of some sort. With respect to the possibility, even likeliehood, of natural disasters in the near future they are fairly convinced, although that is about as specific as anyone can be. What might appear to be a schizophrenic, or cynical, invocation of the end-that-will-not-happen-but-it-might is more nuanced than a reading of material conditions. It has to do with the end of what we make of the world. The end, for Novads and probably for others, is a strategic dimension of everyday life under Empire, a brutal appropriation and hollowing out by Empire of the terms and categories of dignified life.Here, opportunity is precarious work, God a provocation for seasonal impulse buying, and freedom the relentless application of state violence around the world: The parallexical use ofdeath by Empire turned fear [into] in the beginning of the twenty first century. The fall of skyscrapers and the doctrine of preemptive strikes coupled with the shadowy thtreat of terrorism gave Empire the ability to justify any and every act of violence against Multitude--.i.e., swarms of excluded, exploited, explored and expropriated bodies--:: bone and flesh turned into disposable abjection[.][xviii] In a sense, the end of the world is capitalism, and capitalism is the end, played out as a self-annihilating and self-perpetuating cycle of market opportunism operating in the cinders, a soulless process of making money where money is to be made, even if this entails reducing cities to empty shells or poisoning the aquifers in a dozen mid-western states in the fraking process. It may be tempting, even comforting on some level, to project a rapid acceleration of this cycle to a point of collapse, but this is to ignore the subsumption of an eventual collapse, and the increasingly anxious anticipation of it, by capitalism; just follow the spikes in energy futures, and of energy company profits, in relation to turmoil in the Middle East. We cannot count on capitalism to fall into the black hole of its inner contradictions “because,” as Befardi Bifo argues, “the process of autonomous subjectivation is jeopardized by chaotic acceleration, and social subjectivity is captured and subjugated by capitalist governance, which is a system of automatic mechanisms running at blinding speed.”[xix] The end is in Empire, is a functional dimension of it, much as terrorism is a dimension of the U.S. military discourse not merely as a threat but as the Real of its own aggression.... We cannot engage capitalism except to be part of it, can scarcely exist except as monads of surplus value. Labor is no longer the primary constituent of surplus value. As Steven Shaviro observers: …we are still working, even when we consume, and even when we are asleep. Affects and feelings, linguistic abilities, modes of cooperation, forms of know-how and of explicit knowledge, expressions of desire: all these are appropriated and turned into sources of surplus value.[xx] Where sleep, dreams, desires, modes of cooperation do not fall under the sway of capitalism such terms lose their context and function, the world they construct ceases to cohere. Are you actually likable ifyou are not liked on Facebook? How do you know you’re in shape unless you can finally wear that pair of jeans in that size? But what if you work sixteen hours a day, or more, at minimum wage and have to time for Facebook, and no money to spare for Gap jeans? The one vulnerability of capitalism now is that whole categories of persons—artists, students, undocumented workers, the workingpoor, the growing swath of workers once considered middle class and now more appropriately understood as the precariat—are losing their place in a system their labor helps to sustain. How do we get to a place beyond or outside of capitalism except by the ejective force of capitalism itself? Increasing numbers of such people can see what is being done to them. This does not mean that one can envision a plausible scenario for overthrow in the near or even foreseeable future. But this awareness does make possible an intellectual and even physical journey to the spaces between the binaries of capitalism-socialism, capitalism-fill in the blank other (anarchism, fascism...). The end of the world, in one way of looking at things, is not the eventual outcome of a series of episodic convulsions—social disorder in Turkey and Brazil, mass destruction in the Philippines, the spread of Sunni-Shiite conflict throughout the Middle East—it is the gap between our experience of ongoing, smaller scale social and environmental insults and the capitalist construction of them.... Every now and then, and how this happens depends on the individual, the the left-right, conservative-progressive false polarity that governs discourse in the West collapses and a wormhole opens in the discourse, taking us to a black place. In the space between our increasing unease or anger over the gradual deterioration of work, environment, and social life and the insular complacency of the governmental/corporate imaginary, the Symbolic as the web of rules and assumptions that regulates our engagement with the world crumbles and drops away. This is not the place of a dialectical resolution of the neoliberal-socialist antagonism (an antagonism largely in abeyance in the West), it is the place where such terms have no meaning or application. Here, art as a neoliberal construction has no meaning, which is to say that art as a designation has no function at all and is rarely used. Names and other conceptual trappins of identity in the capitalist hegemony are also suspect.Novads have experimented with adopting numbers in place of names, and mathematic neologisms for improvistionas and impromptu riffs on ideas: fibonacci square, rhizomatic encounters, and the like. Although for practical reasons one cannot shed one’s social security number or credit card numbers, one can from time to time assume an alternate identity: prime, constant, tuple, tangent and other deliberately pretentious and silly spoofs of distopian nightmares in which names are replaced by arbitrarily assigned numbers. Novadic play with notional categories—person, agency, time, life and death, end and beginning—should be seen in relation to this larger context of neoliberal conceptual gamesmanship. Foundational concepts like democracy, equality, fairness, justice, privacy, and truth have become so discredited by corporate and Pentagon manipulation that one one can only use them with protective gauze of irony or sarcasm. The tactics of cynical doubletalk and distortion—the decorated veteran of Viet Nam is an unpatriotic coward, the president is a socialist for adopting the health care policy of a Replubican governor and so on—have become a pervasive, normative patter or background noise in our daily lives, the truth value of this patter deriving not from what is said but from the ideological position that informs it and the implied, strategic calculation of what the distortion might mean to a sympathetic audience. One radio talk show host can be relied on to deliver outrageous comments about women and reproductive rights, consolidating support among certain rightwing listenters, another talk show host to ravel elaborate conspiracy theories around the failure of the medical establishment to support juicing and dietary supplements. “How is the rest of the world not all cyborgs, zombies or vampires by now?”[xxi] Consider the embattled state of just a few of the major categories of experience. In Empire, isn’t nature merely raw material to be subsumed and marketed, rather than a living system to be nurtured and protected? The environment is deterratorialized, a wheat field become a site of extractive efficiencies—so many bushels per acre of a mono-crop—with no relation to the surrounding ecosystem.When the honeybee vanishes from these vast fields, and even the commercial honeybee business falls to species collapse, this is not merely dominion over the earth but the transformation of creatures into chemically treated and mechanically processed raw materials. The logical exentsion of this is the announcement that scientists have devised a cloning method to produce meat in a petrie dish; it is only a matter of time before flesh has become so thoroughly instrumentalized that even its species origin will be extracted like so much gristle and bone. The essence of animal is the meat concealed beneath a contingent exterior; thus the rationale of the all too common advertising trope of a happy pig sharpening the knife that will be used to slice out its soon to be barbecued pork... Similarly, in Empire, isn’t a corporation not simply a person but THE person? The right of enjoyment or the pursuit of happiness resides in the corporation, so now the maximization of profit is valorized as a fiduciary duty and the advocacy of an increase in the minimum wage condemned as class warfare (akin to germ warfare, an infection to stopped). Voter suppression laws disenfranchise categories of person (elderly persons of color, students, and so on), and campaign finance deregulation elevates capital over the voting classes that remain, concentrating power in the hands of those most beholden to business. Enfranchisement and personhood have migrated to corporations and shareholder voting blocks. In Empire, hasn’t love died and been replaced by stimulants to profit, from prenups to porn to chemical treatment of erectile dysfunction.Is opposition to gay marriage merely homophobia or does it include a defensive response to the decline of heteronormative contractual relationships: marriage, disenchantment, divorce, shared custody...In Empire, the wedding dress has assumed the fascination once accorded to the bride, the exobritant wedding reception the voyeuristic curiosity once directed to the first night...Even transgression is deterritorialized, taken from the realm of morality and emptied and packaged as a product by way of fashion, entertainment, medicine... In the face of this great wall of corporate obfuscation, Novads is to work in the zero space, the void between states and categories: to publish a journal without page numbers, author credits or editorial staff; to circulate the zine through “salons” or “Book Clubs for the End of the World” where participants are asked to decide how they would treat each other at the end, what they would read to each other as the world was approaching collapse, and what note or text they would write if it was their last.All of this is an attempt to plunge into the metaphor of the apocalypse and out of commodity culture ending, as in Badiou’s “politics without place,”[xxii] a politics which is no longer just a particular intervention into a particular constellation of social places (classes, national, religious, economic, cultural places), but an “action without place,” an action which, in a “mixture of violence, abstraction, and final peace,”creates its own virtual/non-existent space of collectivity based on the axiom of equality.”[xxiii] Liberation is a process of decentered, nomadic excursions, a dendritic radiation from the nodes of New York, Sao Paulo, Cairo, Paris and small cities in the American west. The Novad experiment should also be seen in relation to gaming culture; the formation of interactive online communities within video game environments has provided general models for the Novads not only in the use of avatars or online identities but in the mapping and illustration of an alternate utopian space complete with conceptual process spaces like The School Memory, The School of Light, and The Sensarium, online points of convergence where contributors are invited to play with the organizing frame in whatever medium and direction they wish. This is the conceptual architecture for future actual or online manifestations, perhaps anarchist, post-Novadic strategy and role-playing online games. This crossover of identity from video games (and the online chat that is part of these games) to an anarchist cultural endeavor may well be the next pioneering area for activist culture.[xxiv] If the world is dead, where are we, then? We are in a space with doors open all ways, with no national or institutional boundaries, a space of virtual freedom. “YOU are the beginning of the [new] World. Your place in it is established as WE READ.”[xxv] Much as the Novadic experiment is congruent with a general apocalyptic turn, it offers no prophetic vision, and no structural agenda to advance or accelerate an anti-capitalist revolution. Indeed, the Novads are detached even from the end of the world trope: Some time before the end of the world we’ll wake up and realize that it doesn’t matter anymore. People will realize that the Apocalypse is a myth, which actually signifies something simple as change, flux or flow. Change is coming [& going] & change will come [& go] again.[xxvi] Freedom of subjectivity from Empire will not be accomplished, or even within sight, so long as the nightmare discourse of the terminal and apocalyptic continues to hold on the imaginary, whether this be expressed in the realpolitik of terrorist ‘existential threats’ and governmental countermeasures, or in the spurious choice of scarcity versus unregulated extraction of resources in the leadup to the next consciousness changing natural catastrophe.The Novads, like Occupy with Art and Magic Mountain, the anarchist collectives from which it is descended, is caught in the ambiguous position of evolving a liberatory art process without, as yet, determining the post-apocalyptic, or more accurately the a-apocalyptic, vision. I argue that the process is liberation, that working collectively in horizontal, anonymous nodes of visual artists and writers (and combinations of the two) across the distances imposed by the repression of Occupy provides one glimpse of another world. [i] ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics. Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek: Critical Legal Thinking, May 14, 2013 (http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics) [ii] Noam Chomsky, “The Eve of Destruction,” Tomdispatch.com, June 4, 2013 (http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175707) [iii] Zizek, Slavoj. Living in the End of Times. Verso: New York, Revd ed. (2011). [iv] Hedges, Chris. “Stand Still for the Apocalypse.” Truthdig, Nov. 6, 2012 (http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/stand_still_for_the_apocalypse_20121126) [v] Novad: END OF THE WORLD EDITION, no.ONE, Vol.ø Chimera Collective [RevGames/Occupational Art School (All Nodes)/Novads/Orig. A+C ~OWS], Jan. 2012 [there are no page numbers in this edition] (http://issuu.com/novadzine/docs/novad_zine) [vi] Ibid. [vii] Ibid. [viii] Alberto Toscanno, “The Prejudice Against Prometheus,” Stir, Summer 2011 (http://stirtoaction.com/the-prejudice-against-prometheus/) [ix] Ibid. [x] Franco Berardi Bifo, “Accelerationism Questioned from the Point of View of the Body,” e-flux Journal, 2013 (http://www.e-flux.com/journal/accelerationism-questioned-from-the-point-of-view-of-the-body) [xi] Eugene Brennan. “Debate is Idiot Distraction”: Accelerationism and the Politics of the Internet. 3:AM Magazine: Monday, August 12th, 2013 (http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/debate-is-idiot-distraction-accelerationism-and-the-politics-of-the-internet) [xii] Joshua Ramey. “Inhuman Already? Zombies, Vampires, and the Accelerationist Moment,” An und für sich Thursday, June 27, 2013 (itself.wordpress.com/2013/06/27/inhuman-already-zombies-vampires-and-the-accelerationist-moment/) [xiii] Wikipedia, “List of Apocalyptic Films,” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_apocalyptic_films) [xiv] Steven Shaviro. “Accelerationist Aesthetics: Necessary Inefficiency in Times of Real Subsumption,” e-flux #46, Oct. , 2013 (http://www.e-flux.com/journal/accelerationist-aesthetics-necessary-inefficiency-in-times-of-real-subsumption/) [xv] Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso, 2009, pp. 134-35. [xvi] Shaviro, Accelerationist Aesthetics, op. cit. [xvii] Novad: END OF THE WORL, op. cit. [xviii] Ibid. [xix] Franco Berardi Bifo. “Accelerationism Questioned from the Point of View of the Body.” e-flux, op. cit. [xx] Shaviro, op cit. [xxi] Novad: END OF THE WORLD, op. cit. [xxii] Alain Badiou, “Drawing,” lacanian ink 28, p. 45 qutd. In Slavoj Žižek. "Excursions into Philosophy." in: Lacan.com. 2009. (English) [xxiii] Zizek, ibid. [xxiv] An exhibition at Eyebeam in January, 2012, “Activist Technology Demo Day” presented a wide spectrum of projects along these lines, including Augmented Reality and People’s Skype. [xxv] Novad, End of the World, op. Cit. [xxvi] Ibid.
NovadZINE [EotW Edition], FRESH OUT OF THE BOX
It's been a year, since the world ended. We celebrate the occasion on Saturday by releasing our inaugural NovadZINE, End of the World Edition, unto this troubled world. Andrea & Rob sent us photos of one of the little Chimeras, which is about to commence a global Novadic salon tour:
[NovadZine End of the World Edition, Vol. ø, No. One] Release Party
Remember when the world was supposed to end, one year ago? The Novads celebrated that non-event/conjecture with a momentous project, celebrating revolution against systemic time-based Terror regimes. NovadZINE EotW, Vol.ø, No. One was the beautiful result. I created the 96 gorgeous color plates for the book, featuring a phenomenal mix of Novadic arts and culture by many beloved contributors from the convergent circles of original OWS A+C, OwA, AFH, RevGamerz, Novads & Magic Mountain. It was and is truly a labor of love and wonder. Preview the zine at ISSUU HERE or check out the plates HERE on Facebook.
Now we are ready to start phase 2 of the production, which entails dispersion of the EotW ZINE across the globe. Of course, the Novads will have a party to mark the occasion of the first five full (5) copies [Artist Proof(s)] of the ZINE manifesting in real life [IRL]. The gathering will be hosted by 1067 Pacific People. Details below.
1067 PacificPeople present
SOLSTICE OPEN MIC & DEVIATE ZINE RELEASE PARTAY
TESTING TESTING 1,2,3: EndoftheWorld speech acts
Saturday, December 21
SIGN IN 3:32pm STARTS 4:32pm
@1067 Pacific Street, Brooklyn
In “TESTING TESTING 1 2 3: EndoftheWorld speech acts” artist Andrea Haenggi and writer Robert Neuwirth invite people to get together for an open mic on the solstice transformation of nothingness to sense the pleasure of communicating in a quest for gestures, movement, and encounters. We will break after approximately 20 minutes of the speech acts for a 20 minute partay to dance to eat to celebrate the release of our dear friends DEVIATE ZINE “End of the World Edition no. ONE, Vol.ø “, produced by the Novad anarchist art collective. Then we return to more speech acts before we go back to again to the DEVIATE ZINE “End of the World” Release Partay.
WANT TO PERFORM? This Open Mic has two micro rules that can start now -- just email Andrea at andrea@amdat.org and you can be part of the line-up and or sign-in at the day of the event at 3:32 pm
1. Any speech act goes (dance speech, talk speech, music speech...) so long you start with a test phrase to check the mic for its frequency response.
2. End of the world speech acts can not be longer then 3 minutes
For “TESTING TESTING 1-2-3: EndoftheWorld speech acts” we encourage all participants and audience members to come on the solstice switch time (4:32 pm is sunset on the year’s shortest day) to be together in this nihilist-style approach. It will be mostly outdoors so please dress warm. The more people, the more we can warm up by being close to each other! Bring all your friends so we can pack the 2000 square foot outdoor space.
The Event is free, but please bring some food, drinks and anything that goes to share with others.
Join us at Scenic Superfical Garage Resort @1067 Pacific Street, Brooklyn, http://goo.gl/ugOcy.
Onward
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1067 PacificPeople
Twitter: @1067PacificPeop
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ABOUT: 1067 PacificPeople Installation/Performance research field work
SCENIC SUPERFICIAL GARAGE RESORT gets built on: “The desire to be touched by something. Untouched. Desert. Urban Desert. Landscape Touched. Architecture Touched. People Touched. Altered. Human interference. Desertification. Desire expresses movement. Movement expresses Desire. Movement includes the missing. The failed communication. Desire to express the failed communication. Desire to Produce Affections and Sensations to address the uneasy sense of dislocation and detachment that hangs in the air.”
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http://www.andreahaenggi.net
http://stealthofnations.blogspot.com
New Essay in Brooklyn Rail
"POST-OCCUPIED - Art, Free Speech, and the 1%" appears in the November issue of the Rail. Thanks to Ted Hamm, a great editor and friend. Click the image to read the article at the BR site.