AD603 Critical Theory

I think I understand the issue of struggling as a marginal group, I just don’t see how that is relevant today: to keep addressing the subject and making it a confrontation of “me against you”, to keep feeding an argument that, for me, it has to be destroyed and danced upon. The first problem with multiculturalism (and cultural studies) is that the voice that announces it comes from the same place: First World Academia. The designation of labels like “poor/rich”, “black/white”, “north/south” is a product of rhetoric of the self that dominates every aspect of our everyday politics and, with deadliest results, international politics as well. The construction of the “south” as en exclusive front has paid well to the ones who make a living out of macroeconomics and corporate management all over the world. This micro-elite of intellectuals, book editors and corporate managers have created a constrained language of exclusion that enhances the divisions of the world to the point that they become simple marketing segmentations, easy targets. Divide and conquer.

Artists, almost more than anybody else, fell into this linguistic trap, mainly because it makes them part of a certain market, appeal to a garantized segment of the public and be protected of any criticism under the umbrella of the “difference”. This exploitation of the difference as an aesthetic subject has helped to build a new state of pop-humanitarism where Hollywood actors and pop singers sell themselves not as performers but as saviors of humanity, which can only be seen as a commercial move, since their extravagant salaries have been going down due to the digitalization/disappearance of their formats and online trafficking (at list that’s what their bosses say, which is ironic since they are part of the same companies who provide everything that is necessary to download, store or copy digital files). The industry has created a momentum where if you copy a U2 record you are basically stealing from an African child, where if you don’t like Bono’s songs, that has nothing to do with your musical taste, it has to do with your humanity.

While the corporation and the marginal gains from this game, one being the big compassionate father and the other the lazy dumb son, it’s yet to be seen if almost 30 years of “marginal art” are doing something in breaking the differences down (if they were any in the first place). In my opinion they only enhanced them, categorized them, and put them on a plate for white corporate America to come and explode them creating comedic monstrosities as Will and Grace.

Jameson starts his writing with the claim that “postmodernism is not widely accepted or even understood today”, which reminds me (again) of a conversation between Robert Venturi and Rem Koolhaas in an article called “Relearning from Las Vegas”, in which Venturi (30 years after the release of his manifesto on the American vernacular) sounds disappointed with how iconography, as a main element, and Las Vegas as an architectural reference are often taken as a joke. “People today don’t even know what iconography means” he said to Koolhaas, while they discussed how American architecture and urbanism are today, more than ever, so reluctant to the commercial image and its application “because there is a neurosis about context, about politeness and about nostalgia…” Koolhaas says, to which Venturi replies “Yes, Americans are so ashamed of being commercial!”

These statements from prominent architects are not a coincidence, they come from an in-depth understanding of the cultural surface of our contemporary society. The cultural industry, as a modern translation of the catholic values of work, productivity and leisure, has been able to establish a strong division between cultural production and consumption (thanks to globalization we now don’t have to experience the production of the goods we find at the mall, as the workers who make our computers in China pr Taiwan don’t get to experience shopping for a computer online). There is a clear and general message found in Disney movies, Bob Marley and Beatles’ songs, literature  and even in TV shows: Having money, or wanting money, is a bad thing, “Let’s get together and be alright”, the rich is evil. But on the other hand the culture industry also makes it very clear that for you to be able to access this message of “love and peace” (now call it “indie”) you have to WORK, and WORK IS NO FUN, fun comes from leisure, and it is the function of this industry to provide you with that. Weekdays you work and suffer, weekends you have fun and enjoy (send your money back to the industry, God forbids you get rich like Cruella De Ville ).

The idea of having fun at work is seen suspiciously today, and even more in the art world. There is a consistent effort to separate the gallery from the mall, when they both serve the same purpose: These spaces are designed to showcase goods which marketing has become the essential social lubricant to our everyday life and its relationships with the public are dictated by taste, consumerism and spectacle. While architects, governments, major corporations, galleries and museum have understood this, artists seem to reject it, and that’s why art today looks so irrelevant and so disconnected from the world as it is: a huge shopping mall, with “countries” being sold as theme parks or merely as economic regions. Artist have chosen to separate their consumption from their production, to leave the mall behind and look for shelter in studios or galleries, turn the TV off and wait for divine inspiration to come from the skies (In this almost fascist scenario TV is seen as an enemy and pop music too, celebrities are targets and pop culture has no place here), anything but accept and embrace the fact that artist are not super natural figures with transcend-spiritual powers.

Artistic practices are considered to be separated from the “techno-scientific” disciplines, however, any superficial comparative study of such “fact” in the frame of history shows a very different landscape. Those so-called “sparks of emotive geniality” attached to the works that along time (and according to critics in charge of creating all this phony mystic around art) have “made history”, reduce this, their oh-so-great “spiritual transcendence” to a series of almost mathematic formulas that are effective generating specific emotions in the spectator. For me, it’s not an overstatment to consider artistic activities  as a small area of the psychoanalytic school  inscribed inside the purest conductism.

“Clearly architecture has a new centrality in cultural discourse. Although this centrality stems from the initial debates about postmodernism in the 1970s, which were focused on architecture, it is clinched by the contemporary inflation of design and display in all sort of spheres-art, fashion, business, and so on. Moreover, to make a big splash in the global pond of spectacle today, one has to have a big rock to drop, maybe as big as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao; and here architects like Gehry have an obvious advantage over artists in other media.”

–Hal Foster, The ABCs of Contemporary Design

“Artists lost something when the market made them content providers”
-Rem Koolhaas, Content

I started with a quote I used before and another one from Rem Koolhaas’ Content because I find Hal Foster and Rem Koolhaas to be the most representative contemporary theorists that carry the Foucault torch today, they sometimes, also, are included inside the post-structuralist label. Even if Foucault didn’t wanted to be labeled as an structuralist or a post-structuralist, one has to admit that his disection of power structures has paved the way to the understanding of contemporary society by artists and theorists along.

In Hal Foster’s Design and Crime you get to see how spectacular architecture works as a container of culture, nothing is to big for megastructures as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao or the Tate Modern in London: they now can contain even land art and provide the artists with enough space to install and intervene in any way possible. In this case, the big container works as an invitation to libertarian practices (being “open” to any work scale and dimensions) but in a larger scale the container works as an oppressive symbol of power too. These huge cultural containers can be seen as large-scale iPods in the way they are designed to be able to storage a large amount of aesthetic information and still “look good”. This is the “Bilbao effect”: this computer-assisted design, of exterior surfaces that rarely match up their interior spaces, appears in our cities like “cultural rocks” landing in a parachute from outer space just to make a touristic statement, they are meant to be bidimensional, they are meant to be photographed, they are designed to sell cities.

Frank Ghery’s Guggenheim in Bilbao opened its doors in 1997 and stablished Ghery as The Starchitect of our generation, our “Master Builder”




This is where Koolhaas claims that “artists lost something when the market made them content providers”, seeing how art has taken the shape, size and form of the architecture that contains it, being that space the museum, the gallery or the rich lady’s living room. The art piece is seen by Koolhaas and foster as an outmoded object, which only function relies in the support of this power mega structures followers of the Bilbao Effect.

Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth is a long crack opened in the floor of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Spectacular space calls for spectacutal art?

With the Internet a new generation of designers and artist have found a space that they believe has a structure (or a lack of) that allows them to exercise their liberties in a more comfortable and controllable fashion than the gallery or the museum. The mere fact that the Internet is seen as a “new” thing makes the gallery circuit look old and exhausted: most of these artist don’t feel the need to send portfolios to galleries and museums anymore, or go through all the burocratic process that goes along with that (a power structure by itself), since they have found a space that not only allows them to display their work, but also to market and distribute their production to a wider audience that many galleries can’t even reach. Here the game works in two different ways too: The fact that this computer-aided art production/distribution is available for everyone who owns one of these machines and the software necessary to produce “art” makes the academic world suspicious of this contemporary practice in which even a myspace page can be considered art, these new spaces (like Flickr) standardize their displays in a way that after a quick examination everything starts looking exactly the same, since they also provide a very strict frame to showcase the “artist” material. Also this new space helps the old space (gallery-museum circuit) to get rid of these obnoxious new media artists who are impossible to sell in today’s art market (try to sell a video, a song, a radio show today), and has them confined to the sense of “success” and “fame” that they experience through their online communities. The lack of materiality of this “online art” has started to require a new approach to curatorial studies in which curators are basically judging the power of the pieces by the way “internet rules” are bent and how the piece is breaking away from the boundaries of myspace.

Radio Chiguiro’s online and offline community radio





Cory Archangel’s nintendo hack “I shot Andy Warhol”





Miki Guadamur, Mexico’s favorite pixel artist.





Bazuco’s online performances

Spectacle:

Clearly architecture has a new centrality in cultural discourse. Although this centrality stems from the initial debates about postmodernism in the 1970s, which were focused on architecture, it is clinched by the contemporary inflation of design and display in all sort of spheres-art, fashion, business, and so on. Moreover, to make a big splash in the global pond of spectacle today, one has to have a big rock to drop, maybe as big as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao; and here architects like Gehry have an obvious advantage over artists in other media. In The Society of Spectacle, Debord defines spectacle as “capital accumulated to the point where it becomes an image.” With Gehry and company the reverse is now true as well: spectacle is “an image accumulated to the point where it becomes capital.” Such is the logic of many cultural centers today, as they are designed, alongside theme parks and sports complexes, to assist in the corporate “revival” of the city –that is, in its being made safe for shopping, spectating, and spacing out. This is the “Bilbao-Effect”

-Hal Foster, The ABCs of Contemporary Design

Last Thursday it was still unclear if John McCain would go to the first presidential debate. The stage was set, the University of Mississippi had expended more than 5 million dollars into this set up, and America wanted their show. Some wondered what would happen if McCain didn’t show up, it really seemed like a spectacular move, so much that his rival didn’t hesitate to express his point of view on this dramatic decision. Later on the day it was settled, McCain was willing to “resume” his campaign and attend the debate.

Millions of Americans watched the show on Friday night. Like for a football game, parties were thrown and beers were drunk. The presentation of the debate also had nothing different from sports broadcasts: the sparkling colors, the dramatic lights and titles, every single detail was designed to enhance this idea of confrontation that, like with celebrity showdown, is what fuels modern spectacle. There is no room for a critical approach of the candidates’ proposals since the frame, visual codes and language are orchestraded only for the public to behave like cheerleaders in a match that is supposed to be deciding their future as a country, the most powerful and spectacular country in the world.

The media, as a reflection of the audience, asked the candidates for their take on the economy, but nothing more than urgency came out of them. In the Society of Spectacle, there is not a notion of “real economy” anymore; for the spectacle to be created there has to be a huge accumulation of capital, and when that amount of capital exceeds the understanding of those in “Main Street” it becomes an image, an illusion. That separation of economy in the news from economy at home is key to understand this election spectacle as a commodity. Were the people frustrated with mccain putting the campaign on hold because of how much they have invested into this (time, money, attention)? or was the media frustrated that all the capital behind the show was going to be lose meaning after all the media-circus around this campaign? In both cases, the the spectacle as a commodity and its acquisition were at risk. Are WE going to have OUR show or not?

After having played in two seminal punk bands in Bogotá since I was 13, in 2000 I decided to quit playing for numerous reasons. What attracted me to punk in the first place, its openness, variability and the element of surprise, just wasn’t there anymore. What started as an open invitation to kids from all parts of the city to escape the scheme of the Colombian culture of alcohol-tropical music-dance had become a way more rigid, boring and exhausted structure. I had to get out.

My intention to keep “making” music remained intact, and even clearer, knowing exactly what I didn’t wanted to do: I didn’t want to have anything to do with rock and roll, no band interaction, and complete control of the creation process. So, since I don’t know anything about music, I decided to turn to my computer for my “backing band”, using synthetic sounds as a response to the bare-boned “honesty” of rock, and to be able to create dance beats. Dance, as a function of music, became my obsession. Sadly, I realized that you do have to know some music basics in order to write music in a computer (even with the drag-and-drop logic of today), so I just took the easiest road and started copying other people’s compositions. I would grab a riff from the Sex Pistols and a chorus from 90’s dance sensation Technotronic and put them together on a different tempo, with different instruments, as my backing track to sing my lyrics along. I became really prolific, covering and recovering old songs from my record vault. I recorded an EP and released IT under my own label as NOFUTURO.

I never saw the idea of using these instrumental tracks as a tribute but more as a resource, a marketing technique for product placement. People who listened to the songs immediately were hooked because some of those tunes were already embedded in their heads, but most people couldn’t tell what the originals were. This dynamic became my vehicle to express my ideas about music, production, distribution, and even politics. By the time I had to perform live, I started masking myself, and just sung and dance. My vast list of presentations includes house parties, two art galleries and one rock venue from where I got booed out. Some people yelled “anyone can do that!” “Where is the band?” some where just insulted that I was using their oh-so-beloved cultural gems to sing my lyrics. Apart from the “fan” comments posted on my website, that were limited to appreciate the danceablity of my tunes, the hate comments focused on the issue of originality, authenticity and reproduction. It stroke me, since that was exactly the point I was trying to make, the mere fact that the project was called NOFUTURO (no future) was proof of that. The use of the computer, the no-band presentation, the use of dance music was a representation of the broken cultural state of my context, and of course, of me.

Authenticity and originality, for me, are dinosauric concepts. The Sex Pistols and The Ramones were doing nothing more than regurgitating Chuck Berry riffs, selling their versions of bluesy-chord guitar rock, Nirvana was just a 90’s version of Cheap Trick or The Knack, but when you remind that to an angry, time-encapsuled, violent audience, you are at risk of being booed, or even physically attacked.

The “aura” is just a burgouise construction for marketing art. The self-considered “high art” or “authentic art” exceeds Kitsch or Pop in its exaggerated cheesiness because of its nonsensical intention to designate transcend-spiritual powers to human life (in these case, the one of the “artist”), like predict the future, capture the feelings of a collectivity, and more.

It is curious, but one idea that the average cultural consumer uses to avoid its sad condition consists in considering him/herself “special”, “different from the others” or “one of a kind”. These pseudo aristocratic concepts (that have their origin in the idea of “exclusive” inserted by marketing to sell products of a supposed better quality, and thereby, more expensive) appear more useful as daily lubricants before a perspective of a life which infinite mediocrity its impossible for us to digest in dry.

DOWNLOAD AND LISTEN TO NOFUTURO HERE AND HERE

I couldn’t get myself to write this time and luckly found this amazing writing from one of Colombia’s greatest thinkers: Profesor Bazuco. Maybe this link will help to understand the complexity of his message.

Here some screenshots!

Best critical show on TV, cancelled after first episode. Shortage of capital.QUESTION MARX with Karl Marx

Juan and I will be presenting a video, but here is some text to whet your appetite.  Enjoy!

Question Marx diagram

The service that art provides to the public typically overshadows the business generated by the by the purchase of supplies and equipment.  An artist will spend money on paint, inks, guitars, amplifiers, computers, et cetera, to create a product.  The end product will become part of the artist’s portfolio which in turn will generate a profit.  The end product also becomes exposed to the public, providing the service of art.  Art does something else more significant once it has been enveloped by the public: it becomes a vehicle for the Culture Industry.  Not only does the manufacturer of the equipment and supplies profit from the purchase of their product to create the art, but to a greater extent they also profit from the emphasis the art places upon the necessity of their product.

Between the artist, the public, and the manufacturer, who benefits the most from this cycle?  How does the notion of “benefit” today compare to how Marx would define “benefit”?  Can the abstract service art provides (entertainment, cultural progression, influence) be quantified?

TRANSCRIPT OF KARL MARX INTERVIEW WITH ARTIST ESTEBAN GARCIA

Karl Marx: Hello, and welcome to Question Marx.  Today we have Esteban Garcia who’s an artist here in Lafayette.  We’re gonna ask him some questions.  Esteban, thanks for being here.

Esteban Garcia: Hi Karl.  Can I call you Charlie?

KM: Yeah, sure.  No problem.

EG: Well, I’m very happy to be here today.  Thanks.

KM: Esteban, tell us about your work.  What do you do?

EG: I make flyers and I print t-shirts and sell them.  Lately I just made a lot of tapes for my friends the Minivans.  So I made those.  And I just finished painting a mural.  I also make some video work too.  So I guess I do different things.

KM: Tell us, what are those pieces of equipment you have there in the corner?

EG: A couple of things.  First the computer there that I use for storing files.  Music for a radio station.  And there is a radio transmitter and it has a mixer.  So the mixer also reamplifies the signal for the radio transmitter… makes it stronger.

KM: So basically how long have you been working on all this stuff that we see here today?

EG: For the good part of three years.

KM: Three years?  Do you have an estimate, or how much do you think you have spent?  Who pays for this?  Do you pay for this?

EG: Yeah.  Well, sometimes.  And there is a lot of people that pay for their own things.  A lot of the events are free events that I help organize.  I’m not paying for the gas for people to get there.  I’m not paying for the bands’ equipment.  I try to keep my work really cheap because I don’t have money.  I print things at school for free.  I try to just use materials that I can find for free.  I just got back from a residency and had been doing this project, so I had a stipend of money for materials that I was not expecting.  But that is through some sort of funding that is like art, like some sort of art organization that pays for it.

KM: What would you say you gain with this?  What, in terms of economy is your surplus value?  Oh, but first of all, do you work for yourself?  You don’t work for anybody else?

EG: No, I don’t work for anybody.

KM: So in this case you bring the capital and your work force.

EG: Yeah, in terms of capital I just printed those shirts with the puking mouth over the summer.   I pretty much worked in a bar for a weekend.  Made like fifty bucks.  And then ordered some shirts.  Printed the shirts.  Then I made three or four times what I made in the bar that night.  So I could pay rent with that money.  So my artwork, some of the stuff like the t-shirts are good for that kind of selling.

KM:  So in this case what do you gain with this work, Esteban?

EG: What do I gain? Just good times.  I’m not getting too much profit.  If I do get profit it just enough to maybe buy food.  That’s it.

KM: So it’s all about experience.

EG: Yeah, pretty much.  If I wanted to make money with my art I would definitely do something completely different.

KM: So how are you going to support yourself as a working man?

EG: I dunno.  I think that there have been ways it has been possible.  That’s why I teach at Purdue University.  It’s an activity that I do so I can make a living.  It’s something that I enjoy doing, but it’s separate from my artwork that you were asking me about.

KM: Well, Esteban, best of luck in the future.  What I see here is your body of work and in terms of a surplus value maybe this work being presented and future shows will help you get a better living or situation, right?

EG:  Yeah, I’m looking forward to it actually.  That wouldn’t be too bad.

KM: Excellent.  Well, best of luck.  Thanks to you people out there, the audience of Question Marx.  We’ll be here next week discussing the topic of dance.