Burying Dig, Exhuming Nostalgia

Having graduated from high school in 1994 I currently find myself on the downhill side of my 30s, and not so coincidentally I also find myself squarely at the centre of the target market of what used to be known as the ABC's Dig Music but will henceforth be referred to as Double J.

1994 was also the year Kurt Cobain died and all this talk about it being the 20th anniversary of his death this year just makes that slide toward 40 seem ever more steep. But this is a feeling I get often, like that time just a few years ago, me and some guys from school were at a party. We were among the older people at this party, the majority were in their early 20s, us approaching mid-30s. Strangely though, our music tastes were aptly catered for: Pavement, Superchunk, Pixies, Sonic Youth, et al. These songs that I had grown up with, were now accompanied by the inane self-congratulatory tones of the 20-somethings, squeaking giddily as if they'd discovered it without a thought for the age of the music or the age of the other people in the room. I wanted to storm over and switch it off and yell 'Nam veteran style, "YOU DON"T KNOW, YOU WEREN'T THERE, MAAAAN!". But out of respect for their ignorance of bands like of My Chemical Romance and Kings of Leon, I decided to just leave them to it. We went home, put Bubble and Scrape on and proclaimed loudly, "They can take our Pavement, they can take our Pixies, BUT THEY'LL NEVER TAKE OUR SEBADOH!" A friend, much more eloquent than I, wrote at the time that she felt her monkey had gone to heaven. And indeed it had.

I’m hopefully less self-righteous and rude these days. I kind of need to be, because for the last six months I've been informed by ads with increasing frequency that Dig Music was "now powered by Triple J". The playlist changed quite dramatically, I was all of a sudden hearing all the bands that I loved in 1994, which I of course still have in my collection. Bands like Pavement, Sebadoh, Sonic Youth, The Pixies, even Mudhoney, were appearing more frequently, I'm sure, than they ever did on Triple J in the actual 90s when they still represented the raw edge of popular rock. We used to call it "indie" then without ever really knowing why or how exactly to define it. Nevertheless, all five of these bands are still producing music in different capacities and qualities and of course Dig has also been playing their new stuff; Sebadoh and ex-Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus's new band have had feature albums as has Mogwai and Julia Holter who segue nicely into that mix. So much so that I felt a little guilty and uneasy that my taste was being catered for so astutely and consistently.

But I also felt uneasy for other reasons. Sure, I like the new Malkmus, the new Sebadoh isn't terrible either, but I just feel a little bit embarrassed when some of those 90s songs come on, a little bit like somebody has publicly posted some of my bad high school poetry on Facebook. This is partly because the music you like in your teenage years becomes intensely personal for any number of reasons. But it's also because much of it speaks so clearly of that time that it's really hard to just transport them seamlessly into the present. Helen Razer said as much writing about Kurt Cobain's death and the way his music hasn't travelled so well on the long journey from the 90s.

But this isn't really my point. Dig Music has spent the last few months asking us what kind of station we want the new Dig to be, what music do we want it to play, do we want presenters or not, and even what we think of the name. All of our responses from official surveys, social media comments, and the "dig it" buttons with which we could indicate when we liked a song (sadly there was no bury it button), were apparently all compiled into a neat little statement that said we wanted pretty much what they had been giving us for the last six months but that we want a presenter some of the time, and we want it to be called Double J. I have no evidence to back this up but I can be pretty certain not a single Dig listener would have suggested that name, and even though Dig hints at a very strong vote towards the negative in relation to the question of presenters, this has been qualified as just not wanting them "24/7".

One does have to wonder, though, why they needed to go to all of the trouble of surveys and "dig it" buttons if they were just going to change the station into what they had already changed it into. It's no coincidence that an ad playing in the lead up to the change to Double J that ran the tagline "playing the best new music from Australia and overseas, plus the songs and artists that shaped your life", turns out to be the exact conclusion that Dig has reached after analysing all the data from the surveys and social media complaints about the new playlist.

There are only two possible reasons for this outcome. One is that they are genuine when they say that this is indeed the result of the surveys, which is still ridiculous because audiences had been being given a vigorous 90s priming in the months prior. But the second, and more likely, outcome is that they just completely ignored the data, or just pretended to collect it in the first place and were always going to be Triple-J-in-the-nineties regardless of what "we" said. However, I am actually in favour of this second outcome on a strategic level, just not so much with the playlist that has resulted, and I probably wouldn't have bothered with the surveys either. If Dig relied on us, the public, to dictate what they would play the results would be unlistenable. Just like the movie Snakes on Plane (which incorporated pre-release input from fans generated through internet hype, into the final film) is unwatchable, just like the people's choice award winner at art prize exhibitions is always rubbish, and just like the way focus groups put political parties and advertisers further out of touch with people rather than closer.

Pop artist Claes Oldenburg said it best in relation to public art: "The public don't know what they want." And he's right. Even though I filled out one of the surveys, when I think about it deep down, I've got no freaking clue what I want from a radio station. I know nothing about radio, how playlists are created, how to create diversity within a playlist without making the changes between songs too jarring. I like music, so I fancy that I would put together a pretty good playlist, but the only person who would really like all of it would be me.

No, Dig I don't know what I would like you to be. What I want is an expert to use their expertise and guide me, and maybe surprise me. What I don't want is to have assumptions made about me. Probably the only place I can tolerate this kind of autocracy is in the complex world of culture. Not because I believe all our cultural decisions should be made for us but because I have, as a result of working in the arts industry, a large amount of respect for the people that have devoted their careers and education to arranging and organizing cultural products for popular consumption. Many of these people are or have been artists themselves, they are smart people with years of research, learning, successes and failures behind them. I respect that the decisions they make are good ones because they have this knowledge informing them. But more importantly I get a sense from such people and their decisions that they respect their audience enough to make the assumption that they will be open to exploring their curatorial strategies that take risks, rather than adhere to the safe and familiar.

Sure, as a white middle-class male in his late thirties, I pretty much personify the Double J demographic. And I will still call Pavement one of the greatest bands ever to anybody who will listen, but that doesn't mean I actually listen to Pavement that much anymore. My music taste has matured with me, become more diverse, more enthusiastic about electronic music and pop, more interested in originality rather than a particular "sound", more interested in how musicians evolve rather than their ability to stay the same, essentially, just less pretentious than I was in the 90s. And the old Dig wasn't necessarily a radio station that satisfied that particular taste, but it didn't treat me like an idiot either. It appeared unselfconscious and didn’t seem to be trying to please anybody in particular, and for that fact alone, pleased me greatly. However, now it is trying to please me. Me specifically. It’s counting on my 90s penchant for nostalgia, but what it is often overlooked by such simplistic views of that decade is the fact that it was old to begin, it was already a nostalgic time, and had a nostalgic sound. And that is not a sound that is sustainable over time.

I caught a bit of the launch broadcast, the bit where the new lead announcer Myf Warhurst reminisced with Paul Dempsey about the time they shared a house together in the 90s. Dempsey played an old Something For Kate song and when asked why he chose to play that particular song, he said that it was because it sat well with the nostalgic tone of the station. That is, the new nostalgic tone. And it was only at this moment that I figured out that the reason why I was so uncomfortable at that party a few years ago was because of this tone of nostalgia. It wasn't because Gen Y was all of sudden claiming my musical adolescence as their own, they most likely did genuinely like it, they most likely were as blown away by it as I was at their age, which is great, but doesn’t make it relevant. What made me feel so awkward was not the youthful enthusiasm for music that was no longer youthful, it was that the original nostalgic tone of that music was being mistaken for youthfulness and had therefore become something much worse than old, way worse than retro… it was "classic".

The radio classic can’t be defined better than as a form of hollow nostalgia. Nostalgia for its own sake, without any real meaning beyond being nostalgic. Radio creates classics by adding an extra layer of nostalgia to the music simply by broadcasting it. Although the word “classic” will never be used on Double J, that is where the Bryan Adamses will be replaced by the Dinosaur Jrs. But this is not an exchange that can be made without serious collateral damage. As much as Triple J would like to claim it, radio was not where I discovered these bands, and most certainly was not where I looked to discover them. The pre-digital network of mixtapes, album liner notes and Rage guest-programmers yielded more new music to me than radio ever did. The problem now is context, the radio is not the natural home of the majority of the music that is being re-animated by the burgeoning nostalgia market of which Double J is but a symptom, and cafes furnished with mismatched second-hand decor maybe the cause. No major Australian radio station in the 90s could have safely played "Range Life" and "Dirty Boots" within minutes of each other as happened the other day on what was still Dig.

Digital radio might be the new home for the nostalgic yearnings of beer guts in band shirts and nose studded nannas, but for the moment I’m happy for my personal music collection and my radio to remain separate. Some monkeys should just be allowed to stay in heaven.

[And fuck it, I’m listening to Dig - I  mean Double J - as I write and the most annoying prick in Australian music, Ben Lee comes on with "American Television", which is, I’m embarrassed to know, essentially a song about nostalgia for the 90s. You look beautiful in 1994. You sure do. Shame it’s 20 years later.]

The Artist is Not Present: Why Banksy Hates You

On Facebook, a friend recently posted a story about a new work by Banksy. It happens a lot actually, and normally I don't pay much attention because, while I'll admit to liking a few pieces, I've never really been able to articulate exactly why I otherwise find Banksy thoroughly objectionable. I get the humour, I'm entertained by the pranks, and I enjoy smites upon authority just as much as the next white middle-class male who has never had any real reason to. But there is something about Banksy's practice that troubles me. This new work provided an opportunity to interrogate it in real time as new works are emerging on a daily basis for the month of October.

Better Out Than In is a "residency" Banksy is undertaking "on the streets of New York", the title obviously referring to the fact that his work is taking place outside, in the streets rather than in the stuffy confines of the mainstream art gallery. Cool. Despite its lack of imagination, the title does reflect one of the truisms of street art - that it is in fact better outside on the street than in art gallery. By contrast the Space Invaders exhibition that toured Australia a few years ago was an absurd exercise, but made street artists and the galleries that showed it feel as if they were doing something edgy and contemporary, the anti-establishment, anti-capitalist themes sat surprisingly well within the walls of the museum. When it showed at the University of Queensland Art Museum, Triple J presenter, Rosie Beaton told the reporter covering the exhibition that she'd heard there were some boring old portraits in the space the previously. Good thing then, that street art came in to fuck shit up! The problem is though that street art is made in the street and it derives most of its power from that environment. The immediacy and brevity of its message work on the street precisely because we're usually there doing something else in that context and a good piece of street art can interrupt that urban somnambulance. It just doesn't have this effect in an art gallery. It's not that street art should not be allowed in the art gallery, it's just strange that it willingly ends up there. Nevertheless Banksy manages to enjoy commercial success from gallery exhibitions and some entrepreneurial souls have taken to removing works, presumably intact, from the concrete walls upon which they are painted. I am not the first to make the suggestion that as little sense as these events make, they are inevitabilities of the capitalist art world. Both the capitalist concrete thieves and gallery exhibitions of street art remove two of street art's key characteristics - one is its connection to the specific site in which it is created and the other is the fact that the works have a finite lifetime. Whether it is destroyed by philistine plumbers or painted over by civic authorities or other artists, longevity is just not part of its nature.

This limited lifespan is something of an anathema to the art establishment but is not an unfamiliar one. Where preservation is the norm, a few art forms and art works have presented challenges to it. Recently at a public lecture at the Queensland University of Technology, Peggy Phelan argued that the fragile and friable work of Eva Hesse not be preserved in the traditional sense but be allowed to deteriorate (as the artist had apparently intended), and if the work is to be shown after such time as it has deteriorated beyond exhibition standard, then the work should either be recreated or shown through documentation only, but would in this process become something else. She bases this argument on her understanding of performance art that, she says, draws its emotive and political power from the immediacy of the live experience, occurring in real time and space. Because performance is tied absolutely to this specific spatial, temporal and experiential moment, it "cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance," there is no way to truly preserve it. Phelan believes that this logic could legitimately be applied to other forms of art where longevity is either not the intention of the artist or a realistic expectation of the materials used. The difficulty in convincing the capitalist art world of this is that it trades on authenticity and originality as the determinants of value. Phelan's is a progressive view that challenges the traditional conservatism of the museum system, but one that makes infinitely more artistic sense. The trope of performance art that Phelan puts forward is useful in a discussion of street art and identifying the absurdities discussed above, but also because of the primacy that performance places on site and temporality. But the argument can be extended into a discussion of the work in Banksy's New York residency which includes sculpture, mobile works mounted in trucks, his usual stenciled work, and actual performances. In looking at this work through the lens of performance art the figure of Banksy is revealed as a vacuous mythology with motives more conservative than might be expected.

Street art now enjoys a widespread following largely driven by Banksy's cultivated mythology. But it is a meticulously constructed mythology that the New York residency provides ample opportunity to analyse. In an interview about the residency Banksy was asked why he began painting in the street, his reason is, predictably, "...because it was the only venue that would give me a show" and of course because "it saves money on having to buy canvases." Remarks like these are part of the reason I hate Banksy, and also evidence that Banksy hates us. They build an image of a self-deprecating subjectivity, that struggles, just like the rest of us cash-strapped, undiscovered geniuses, to get a show in a nice gallery. It appeals to our resentment of the art establishment for not recognising our obvious talent. Similarly, on the website for Better Out Than In, the word "residency" is quaintly misspelled with an extra "e" which has been visibly corrected. 

I'm even ignoring the missing apostrophe

This seems like a fairly innocuous act of poor spelling, and poorer correction, but is in fact a highly contrived performance of a particular kind of identity. It makes no sense to retain such a correction in a digital format, so it must therefore have been deliberately included for a reason. This is the language of contemporary mythology: a contrivance is made to appear natural and self-evident through an excess of signification, concealing the true motivations for the contrivance. This form of mythic speech is the essence of Banksy-as-performance. The corrected "e" is a deliberately included 'error' that works to demonstrate just how down to earth and anti-elitist Banksy is, after all, correct spelling and grammar, just like the scarf and t-shirt look, are the property of the artworld elite. This typo, understood as a deliberate contrivance, is intended to conceal Banksy's true identity - a commercially successful artist, as reliant on the market gallery system as Jeff Koons. The performance of 'Bansky of the street' conceals the fact that he actually is, and has always been, 'Banksy of the gallery'.

The first work posted from Bansky's New York residency is an image of two children, one standing on the other's back to reach a spray can that appears in a presumably pre-existing sign informing would-be vandals that "Graffiti is a crime." This kind of intervention into public space and critique of figures of authority and state power are typical of Banksy's work and really, what he does best. With most of these works Banksy has included an audio tour style commentary available on the website or by phoning a number posted near each work. These are obviously parodies of the usual audio tours you get in museums and take a predictably tongue-in-cheek tone, pre-empting and poking fun at all possible intellectual readings of the works, a clever strategy Banksy employs to avoid at all costs being mistaken for smart rather than smart-arse.

The audio tours in these works hark back to the physical museum interventions he did in New York in 2005, installing his own works in the institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum some lasting for days before museum staff realised and had the works removed. These works do actually make some worthy points about museums, cultural authority, and curatorship but the concept owes more to Dada, and to some extent artists like Andrea Fraser and Fred Wilson, than it does street art. 'Institutional critique', as such practices are known, is now a recognisable form art practice and as such has been adopted by the mainstream gallery and museum system as part of a self-reflexive revisionism emerging out of postmodernism. A similar thing is happening with street art today, with institutions expanding their collection and exhibition policies to include street art, and Banksy is complicit in it rather than against it.

Rather than take aim at civic authority or the art world, the second work posted pokes fun at one of his fellow street artists. Mind you, it is unlikely that Banksy would bestow that title on the authors of these particular works, as there is an ongoing internal debate, apparently, about the difference between 'graffiti' and 'street art'. "This is my New York accent" reads the text painted in white spray paint in the angular typeface that spray cans seem to force their users to adopt. Banksy highlights the obvious pretention in this statement by adding a line beneath it in a boring, less expressive italicised Baskerville font, "normally I write like this" as if the New York accent is an unnatural, performed identity, one accent among many possible others. A similar subversive strategy is adopted in a couple of other more recent works where Banksy inserts the words, "The Musical" at the bottom right of existing political ("OCCUPY!"), or gangster ("PLAYGROUND MOB"), or childish ("Dirty underwear") graffiti. A mockery that instantly knocks any efficacy or power out of the statements like a punch in the guts, that is, of course, assuming that they had any power to begin with.

These are clever and accurate, though not necessarily intelligent, criticisms of graffiti and art world clichés. But what is it that grants Banksy such a vast and overarching critical distance that he is able to critique both the conservative values and practices of the mainstream art world and the clichés and pretentions of "underground" graffiti practices? The answer is that his is also a performed identity, or an adopted "accent". His kind of branded anonymity, stylised covert operations, and collectable anti-capitalist imagery have fed his cult status beyond any sense of grounded identity, or in other words, a real person. A real person would have to answer questions, respond to criticism, the buck would be forced to stop. But Banksy-as-performance is able to operate outside of these burdens of reality and is therefore always removed enough from the conversation to rubbish its content regardless of what it is. He is always able to have the last word because he can theoretically pop up whenever its suits him, he is not burdened by having to think on his feet, or to respond to the conversation in real time, he never walks away from an argument saying "THAT'S what I should have said!" because he is never in the argument at the time. In fact, whether or not their identity is known to the wider public, all street artists use this method of deferred argument to some extent.

As I suggested above, the concept of Banksy-as-performance, goes much deeper than simply the performance of his identity. His wider practice and also the practices of street art generally, and the ways it is appreciated and created, are actually embedded in the tropes of performance art. On the surface, the kind of performance that was made famous in the 1970s through work of artists like Marina Abramovic, Chris Burden and Mike Parr seem to be antithetical to contemporary street art. In contrast to the street art methodology suggested above, based on stealthy absence and perpetual critical distance, the work of the 1970s performance artists and the traditions that followed them, privileged presence as the key element of the work. The presence of the artist is simultaneous with the audience in a unique spatial, temporal and experiential moment. A fact made poignantly clear in Abramovic's recent work The Artist is Present featured in the documentary of the same name. The argument or the conversation is conducted in real time between real artists and real audiences. Street art, conversely, trades on a kind of myth of presence. However rather than position the two practices as binary opposites, it is an analysis of their commonalities that reveals the mythological nature of street art.

Street art shares a number of key characteristics with performance art; site specificity; temporal specificity; the primacy of the act of making the work, and; the presence of the artist. These are obvious important tropes in performance art theory but they are also relevant to street art, however only in a kind of inverse state. Site specificity for example is most easily applicable to street art because the works often incorporate elements of their immediate surroundings as in the first work of Banksy's residency. Performance art, particularly that occurring in public space, often incorporates site in a similar way but performance (as distinct from theatre) is able to respond to sites and objects as they are encountered, and in fact this encounter may often be the primary purpose of the work (see artists such as Lee Wen, Valie Export). The sense of engagement with site however differs vastly between each practice. And the reason for this is the role of the audience. The audience is present to witness the performance work but hidden from by the street artist. The audience shares the same temporal moment with the performance artist but always arrives after the fact for the street artist. The audience is integral to, if not a participant in the creation of the performance work, but this moment is only ever imagined by the viewer of street art. This is, of course, the case with most gallery based works of art but with street art the stealth, brazenness and often illegality of the work mythologises this moment of creation to the point that it is as important as the live moment of the performance, that the content of the work is often secondary to the brazenness of its creation. It is essentially this moment that is the central message of street art: "look what I got away with!" It is therefore presence that is the shared central premise of performance art and street art: immediate presence in the case of performance, and deferred presence in the case of street art. The co-presence of the artist and audience is what gives performance its central power, street art also trades on this experiential power but never delivers, it simply works to self-perpetuate the mythology. Audiences make pilgrimages to the sites of Banksy works as if they were significant historical mythologised sites like the Normandy beaches or the Roswell crash sites. They don't expect to see Banksy himself but simply bask in his delayed aura. Knowing that he was here is enough. Marcus Westbury's desire to take home a Banksy rat from one of Melbourne's laneways in his TV series Not Quite Art, is an example of this. The public outcry when a Banksy rat (maybe the same one, it doesn't really matter) was destroyed by a plumber is another, as is the diligently prompt vandalism of the daily New York works.

Street art's perceived value owes as much to presence and authenticity as performance art does. But street art trades on a mythological version of these concepts. Mythological because the narrative that is suggested by street art, particularly that created by anonymous celebrities, is a narrative of presence told through perpetual absence and trace. Performance artist Chris Burden demonstrated this process succinctly when he exhibited remnant objects from previous performances as Relics. The original performance, became totally absorbed into the objects existing now only as a semiotic ghost, animating it in the present moment as a myth. A piece of street art is this same kind of ghost but there is no original performance of which it is a trace, it begins its life as a myth with the attendant stories and exaggerations built into the practice itself. And Banksy is a seasoned professional in putting this myth of presence to work.

No work makes this clearer than the October 13 work. A stall set up near Central Park was selling "100% authentic original signed Banksy canvases. For $60 each." Banksy himself was of course not present to be selling his works. The public were fooled into thinking that the works labelled "SPRAY ART" were just cheap imitations of the 'real' Banksy's work. The few sales that were made on the day the stall was operating could not have been more perfect. One woman wanted something for her kids, but only for half price, and a man wanted something for his walls. A mad rush on the stall and a sell out would have been a disaster for Banksy, luckily he was still able to run the self-deprecating line that he, a world famous artist, only made four hundred dollars, and that those that did sell, sold to people who had no idea anyway. The underground cred remains intact, and Banksy continues to smirk down from above... or behind, anywhere but here and now.

The truth is though, even the most diehard Banksy fanboy would not recognise the "authenticity" of the works at the stall anymore than the nice mum or the man with bad interior decorating taste. Anybody with any ounce of scepticism would dismiss them as rip-offs. Banksy has of course gone out of his way to make them appear so. Apart from Tim Rogers from You Am I spitting into the crowd at the Godfrey Tanner Bar at Newcastle Uni in the late nineties, I can't think of another instance where an artist has shown more contempt for their audience. As Banksy's website informs us with aggressive courtesy: "This was a one off. The stall will not be there again today." As is the case with every other Banksy work, the audience misses out. In fact, the audience missing out seems to be the entire point of Banksy's work. The soft targets of civic authority, multi-national corporations, the art establishment, other street artists, himself, are not the real targets of Banksy's acerbic wit and school boy pranks. These are just decoys to fool you into thinking that he's on your side. The real target is you. With each work that you smirk at knowingly, raise your fist in support of, or alter your political beliefs to align with, you are perpetuating the myth that something has actually happened, that some left wing agenda has subverted the march of capitalism, that Banksy actually exists, and that you are part of something bigger. But you're not. You're too late. You don't know who Banksy is, and more importantly he doesn't know who you are and he doesn't care. Your sole purpose is to wish that you were there, to yearn to not miss out, to continue your desire for a piece of Banksy. Because that is what makes Banky's work valuable.

As a reader called "shakers" commented on a story on the stall published in the Sydney Morning Herald, "Its my dream to buy a Banksy at such a low cost...please come to Sydney!" But even if Banksy did listen to shakers and came to Sydney, he would not really be there in the sense that shakers wants him to. Because he is never anywhere, at least never anywhere you are. He is not in New York at the moment because he is not anywhere. His myth of presence has already inspired a couple of supposed sightings which, like the inane discussions of whether Banksy is a he, a she, a few, or a many, go nowhere in uncovering who Banksy actually is but a long way in figuring out what he is. He is a business with a shrewdly effective marketing plan that participates in the capitalist system while critiquing it, insults its clientele while sending them away happy customers. You are Banksy's primary medium, you are the material that he uses to communicate with his real audience - the market.

When Marina Abramovic is present in her work it is a respectful, selfless, rather than egotistical, presence. To be challenged on such an individually intimate level is the highest mark of respect an artist could pay to an audience. But the myth of presence that Banksy trades on is the opposite. To use an adoring audience as pawns in a marketing plan whilst appearing to operate in solidarity with them is the ultimate in contempt. But this relationship between performance art and street art is not simply a convenient academic comparison, nor is the mutual reliance on presence the only element that necessitates it. Banksy himself has suggested such a comparison:

Graffiti is an art form where the gesture is at least as important as the result, if not more so. I read how a critic described Jackson Pollock as a performance artist who happened to use paint, and the same could be said for graffiti writers-performance artists who happen to use paint. And trespass.

That Banksy has the audacity to make this comparison with reference to "gesture" proves that he possibly even believes his own myth of presence. It is either through a misunderstanding or manipulation of the meaning of presence that Banksy attempts to legitimise his practice. Either way his adoption of the trope of performance here is one of egotism and theatricality, not one of respect and relationality. This is the essence of the Banksy myth, and the reason, ultimately, why Banksy hates you.

Compression

[This is an abridged version of the catalogue essay I wrote for an exhibition I curated entitled Compression that is currently running at Crane Arts, Philadelphia. The full essay and other info about the show is available here]

Hereafter, here no longer exists; everything is now. – Paul Virilio

Paul Virilio has been saying for over a decade that digital media that has brought about what he sees as a collapse of the physical into the digital. Virilio theorises this collapse as a kind of “temporal compression”, a situation where the nature of space, time and distance are fundamentally altered due to the speed that the global flow of information has now attained through digital communications and imaging technologies. (Virilio, 2000, p.13) Virilio’s views are reflective of those put forward in the mid 1990s and early 2000s as to the nature and impact of digital media on everyday life. While they vary considerably, from the enthusiastic like the artist Stellarc to the cautious and cynical like Virilio, these views were based on the one fundamental assumption that ‘the digital’ represented an immaterial alternative to everyday ‘physical’ life. Most often this relationship was characterised in terms of the binary of real/virtual. Canadian theorist Arthur Kroker reflected on this perceived capacity of the virtual to consume, if not colonise the real completely. He also recognises that this viewpoint was very much tied to the specific decade he called “the flesh-eating 90s” in a book title in 1996. (Kroker, 1996)

In that decade the distinction between real and virtual worlds was commonplace. Its extension into theories of photography is also evident, where digital images are seen as immaterial surrogates of ‘real’ film-based photographs. It is also the idea that underpins the spatial metaphors we use when talking about the internet. The terms site, domain, gateway, navigate and of course, cyberspace indicate that we understand the digital as possessing at least some of the spatial characteristics of real space rather as possessing any of its own positive inherent characteristics. The ‘version’ of space that the digital offers however is infinitely customisable, limited only by the individual desires of users. Inevitably, the binary of real and virtual space propagates the same distinction within concepts of identity; the real identity inhibited by its ties to flesh, opposed to the infinitely customisable virtual identity. One example of this tendency is William J. Mitchell’s (1995, p. 11) City of Bits, published in 1995, in which he discusses online textual identifiers, such as email addresses as being s eparately constructed, disembodied identities that need not have a relationship with an embodied originator:

it is not trivial, and perhaps not even true, to say that wjm@mit.edu is Dean@mit.edu or that either one is the embodied William J. Mitchell! When names float around without precise, unambiguous attachment to unique things, referential complexities abound.

However more recently, and in line with other reflections on 90s media theory, Mitchell has questioned his own assumptions. In Me++ from 2003, Mitchell re-evaluates the basis of his previous thinking:

The trial separation of bits and atoms is now over. In the early days of the digital revolution it seemed useful to pry these elementary units of materiality and information apart. The virtual and the physical were imagined as separate realms – cyberspace and meatspace… The metaphor of “virtuality” seemed a powerful one as we first struggled to understand the implications of digital information, but it has long outlived its usefulness. Bits don’t just sit out there in cyberspace… it makes more sense to recognise that invisible, intangible, electromagnetically encoded information establishes new types of relationships among physical events occurring in physical places (Mitchell, 2003, pp. 90-92, 139).

By conceding that extreme distinctions such as real and virtual are unproductive in our understanding the actual impact of digital technology, Mitchell comes to the realisation that many everyday users of the medium experienced around the turn of the 21st Century.

A nostalgic blog post from a veteran blogger known as ‘Joe’ (2005) on his Livejournal blog bostonsteamer, tells how it was actually blogs that contributed to this refashioning of the relationship the Web had with offline life:

It's fun to look back on the old days of blogging, when everyone was so wide-eyed and naive. People really opened their hearts so their readers could take a look inside. Every blogger had the same "coming of age,” where they'd post something that hurt another person, and after the fallout they'd realize, "hey, what I blog about really does affect my meatspace life.

Essentially what has occurred is a greater general understanding and assimilation of a particular technology. The virtual does indeed have a major impact on the real but they are more intimately connected than we initially thought.

More recently however, new theories are emerging that again take up the analysis of the impact of digital media on everyday life. This is predictable in a sense as the media itself undergoes such massive changes in relatively brief timeframes. The “new aesthetic” is one such theory. It essentially makes a case opposite to that of Virilio in that it theorises the “explosion of the digital into the physical” (Sterling, 2012) rather than the collapse of the real into the digital. This explosion of the digital into physical refers to particular emergent design aesthetics, architectural features and art practices that incorporate or otherwise engage with ‘the digital’ in some way. Some examples given include the Telehouse West data centre, in London which appears to have a pixelated facade or a three dimensional version of a primitive digital water fountain that would look at home in a primitive 80s video game environment. The new aesthetic, as a theoretical perspective, attempts to make sense of rather unwieldy, impermanent and non-specific phenomena, and its critical value will no doubt reveal itself over time as its objects and practices become more familiar. Its usefulness cannot be underestimated as things have clearly changed since the 90s and new critical perspectives are needed. As the examples above show, the digital future that was a seductive theoretical fantasy has become our lived reality and in the process the flaws in its attendant theories have been revealed.

However, current perspectives put forward in discussions of the new aesthetic actually operate on precisely the same binary opposition of real and virtual, only the direction of the force of one side into the other has changed. While the new aesthetic brings previous theories like those of Virilio and Mitchell full circle by initiating the reversal of this trajectory, it does not overcome it. In order for the ‘digital’ to explode within the ‘physical’ the two must remain materially distinct domains: real and virtual. What such a distinction ignores is much of what has been learned about digital media in the past decade, as Mitchell’s confession indicates. Rather than witnessing the sudden explosion of one into the other we have instead come to terms with a new material reality that incorporates digital media, at times almost as a mere aesthetic curiosity. This is of course a fundamentally different world than the one that existed before the digital, in the same way that internal combustion engines and photography shaped new worlds of their own. However what is usually at stake in theories based on the real/virtual binary is the simple fact that we experience the world, not through photographs, motorcars or computer screens, but through our bodies.

N. Katherine Hayles has been the most articulate voice in arguing for more critical attention to be paid to embodied experience as the way in which humans generate meaning from the physical world, be it through art, architecture or digital media, rather than toward the physical world and its objects. Hayles (1999, p. 1) criticised the concept of virtuality very early on in her book How We Became Post-Human by deconstructing the several theories that saw “virtuality as a division between an inert body that is left behind and a disembodied subjectivity that inhabits the virtual realm.” Crucial to Hayles’ strategy for overcoming this division is a particular understanding of materiality. Materiality, she says, encompasses this idea of embodiment but is distinct from physicality as it relates to how this physicality comes to have meaning for us. Hayles explains this in her later book, Writing Machines:

An emergent property, materiality depends on how the work mobilizes its resources as a physical artifact as well as the user’s interactions with the work and the interpretive strategies she develops—strategies that include physical manipulations and as well as conceptual frameworks. In the broadest sense, materiality emerges from the dynamic interplay between the richness of a physically robust world and human intelligence as it crafts this physicality to create meaning. (Hayles, 2003, p. 33)

Understood in this way materiality emphasises the body, or the embodied viewer, as the site of all experience, the point at which all meaning is generated. It makes very little sense then to oppose the digital and the physical as the digital is, of course, just as capable of generating embodied experiences as any other medium. Therefore, far from being an immaterial version of the real, ‘the digital’ is a site of unique embodied experiences which of course will be fundamentally different to those of any other medium but they will be no less physical and no less real.

How then, could the digital be seen to be exploding within the physical? It would seem, initially at least, that this idea has come about as a similar kind of coming of age process that occurred in the blogosphere around a decade ago, and that William J. Mitchell experienced a couple of years later. James Bridle is the foundational voice of the new aesthetic and describes his purpose at the end of his recent blog post on the topic: “My point is, all our metaphors are broken. The network is not a space (notional, cyber or otherwise) and it’s not time (while it is embedded in it at an odd angle) it is some other kind of dimension entirely.” The echo of Mitchell’s sentiments cited earlier is obvious but so is the echo of Mitchell’s reluctance to re-embody meaning. Bridle continues: “But meaning is emergent in the network” not, as Hayles demonstrates, in the body of the viewer. Meaning is indeed emergent but it can only be a disembodied meaning if it exists only in the network. It is important to get these debates right, that is, to ask the right questions, because new technologies need to be engaged with critically and it is important for artists in particular to engage with these issues, to use and indeed misuse technology for the sole reason that it is not humans who are in control of the distribution and implementation of them but the languages of the market and consumption. These are the true disembodied, immaterial forces at work in contemporary society, and art has the capacity counteract them by communicating on an embodied level.

When Virilio warned that “here” no longer existed and that it was being replaced by “now” through the speed of digital communications, he was imagining a particular kind of future. We now live in that future and not only have we adapted to the rapid changes in technology, nostalgia has become a powerful cultural force. However, this nostalgic impulse is possibly a more pervasive virtualising force than digital media precisely because it trades in an appreciation of the present moment for an idealised version of the past, an embodied experience located in a place for a disembodied memory of somewhere else. This is the real effect of the unchecked advance of technology but it is far more subtle and indirect than most theories of disembodiment that focus on technological objects themselves. And it is for this reason that a critical eye needs to be cast on these indirect effects that appear to have nothing immediate to do with new technology. There is nothing wrong with being in the now but we also more than ever need to remember that we are here.




References:

Hayles, N. K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, University of Chicago Press, Chicago

Hayles, N. K. (2002) Writing Machines, MIT Press, Cambridge

Joe (2005) "Girl on a Bike: 5 Years Later" [Blog] bostonsteamer, July 06 2005 [accessed 07 July 2005] from http://bostonsteamer.livejournal.com/734917.html (no longer available)

Mitchell, W. J. T. (1995) City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn, MIT Press, Cambridge.

Mitchell, W. J. T. (2003) Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, Cambridge, MIT Press.

Sterling, B. (2012) “An Essay on the New Aesthetic”, Beyond the Beyond [blog] April 02 2012, [accessed 12 June 2012] from www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2012/04/an-essay-on-the-new-aesthetic/

Virilio, P. (2000) The Information Bomb (trans. Turner, C.), Verso, London.

Guns Don't Use Social Media, People Do: A lesson in meme ethics

Today I was as shocked as everybody else to hear about the shooting in a Denver cinema at the premiere of the new Batman film. It is indeed a tragedy not only because what happened was a truly terrible thing but also because there are responses to it that are a tragedy in themselves.

As would be expected social media came alive immediately as the news broke. This happened in the usual ways: twitter trends, facebook posts and memes, etc. and of course happened with phenomenal immediacy to the event. But today I found myself booted off a facebook page that I had previously "liked" and was being accused of spamming by its moderator for participating in a discussion about the appropriateness of an image posted on this site in that image's comments section. This is a first for me, as I don't consider myself a troll by any measure. The problem I had was the use of the image posted with the intention of paying respects to the victims of the shooting and their families, which was the same as the image below but had "REST IN PEACE" in large type across the top.

My issue was, as I posted, that this is in fact not a tribute, it doesn't pay any form of respect to anybody, and is actually quite insulting to both the victims and our intelligence (both intellectual and emotional). Using a movie poster to pay respect to the victims of such a horrible event reduces their experience to the pop cultural realm of movies and entertainment. It happened at the movies not in the movies.

I was not the only person to notice this. In fact, the first comment on this post was, "This picture is in bad taste." There were then three or four other comments that were collectively addressed by the moderator who protested that the image was "not about taste, it was about trying to pay respects to the victims of such a terrible tragedy" and later that it was not the intention of the author to upset people and the all further comments against the image would be regarded as spam and their authors would be blocked from the page.

I resolved that I didn't really "like" the page anyway and that I would to try to set the moderator straight. What he didn't realise, and what so many people don't realise is that images are actually very difficult to use as an effective form of communication. We have a responsibility as image makers, and indeed image users, to be aware of this. With the surge of digital text-based communication that occurred 15 - 20 years ago, everybody in their own way came to terms with the realisation that text and voice, while they both used words, actually possessed very disparate expressive qualities. We all struggled over the fact that email and SMS could not capture the tone of voice adequately. But we've never given a thought to how the speed of this manipulation and the quick digital transmission of images might impact on our understanding of how they communicate. This is because, for some reason, we think we understand images and how they work.

There is still, surprisingly, a heated argument going on in photojournalist and professional photography circles about the digital manipulation of images but this argument focusses mainly on whether or not the photograph is "true" if it has been digitally altered, and under the guise of ethics its pundits are actually arguing over aesthetics. That argument is way too boring to address here but I will add that these arguments rarely, if ever, address the much more ethically pertinent question related to the speed with which images can be manipulated and how quickly that manipulation is distributed. Manipulation is now the norm, the nature of its use and distribution is what we should be looking at critically. What does it say about our visual intelligence, not that an image such as the movie poster memorial can be created, but that it can be created so quickly and without even a split second of reflective thought about what it might mean, and what it might mean in all of the many and varied contexts it will appear in over the next few minutes?

I have since found about three versions of this "tribute", one of which even mentions "God" in the text. I admit that I don't recognise the source image, I don't know if it is actually a movie poster, a production still, publicity shot, or frozen action from one of the films, or something else altogether. And I've got no hope of figuring where its life as meme began either, who its original author was, but what this kind of viral culture proves more than anything is that origins matter very little. But it seems also that destinations matter even less. Like the ye olde chain letter, it doesn't matter where it ends up as long as it keeps going, perpetuating and replicating itself ad infinitum... they are called "memes" after all. When these images are posted in desperate attempts to generate long flowing streams of comments and a four or five digit "like" counter, we lose sight of the actual message that is being perpetuated.

Take a moment to think. How would one of the survivors of the massacre feel about seeing an image of Batman, as respectful and as solemn as his pose is, as well-meaning as the memer's intention is, as respectful as the text may be? The trauma of this kind of event is impossible to imagine, and the image of Batman may have very little negative affect on a victim, but the point is: we don't know. The reality is that images do in fact have origins, and in this case it is enough to say that it comes from the general quagmire of popular culture and entertainment. And if the text on these tributes is to be taken literally, they also have a destination, which in this case is actually the victims themselves (see image below). The trouble is that this origin and destination are not actually what the memer thinks about. Despite the presence of presumed addressees in the text they are not the intended audience, really. People share or like these kinds of images in accordance with the myth of solidarity the act implies.

The real point of this image, or more acurately, the point of its use, is to express one's shock and sympathy. But what actually happens is that because of the viral distribution of the image, and of course its ridiculous content, the very real trauma of witnessing the shooting, being shot at, or losing somebody close is simplified and sanitised down to a corny pop culture reference. These memorial memes become a generic emotional response despite the sharing being driven by a presumably very specific emotional response. The speed with which these memes are created and distributed prevent the intervention of a critical viewpoint which is an absolute necessity when this is fast becoming the primary mode of our interaction with images. I made this mistake recently, immediately reposting a hoax image from Back to the Future showing that particular day's date which had been digitally altered.

The point of what I have written here is to be mindful of the power of images. But it is also a caution to not overestimate that power. Just as the Kony 2012 viral campaign a few months back did nothing, an image you share on facebook will not comfort the victims of the Colorado shooting. But what it can do is diminish and trivialise the seriousness of the real event. But to his credit, the moderator of the page in question did take the image down in the end, hopefully he will now treat images a little more carefully.

Air Blogging

Right now I'm on the plane between Philadelphia and LA. Wifi on the plane might be common place for Americans but it's new to me. Anyway, I'm on my way back home from a few days in the US, New York and Philly specifically. New York was fantastic, I could go back in a second. I met up with Rebecca Ross and we went for dinner in Hell's Kitchen, despite the waiter forgetting Bec's meal it was really nice.

After New York I met up with Matt Ditton in Philly. We visited Crane Arts and checked out the 100ft projection screen and the Icebox space it's in and it's actually more impressive than it sounds. It's difficult to explain exactly what it's like, and nothing anybody told me about it prior could have prepared me for the experience of being in there. Likewise viewing the video made for the massive screen. So we're looking forward to puling something together for the show in September.

NYC/Phili

I'm preparing right now for a hastily organized trip to the US. Myself and Matt Ditton are curating an exhibition of digital work from QCA at Crane Arts in Philadelphia. We're going to check out the space (that houses a100ft projection screen) and meet the Phili team etc. But I've got few days in New York beforehand, so I'll no doubt distribute posts about the exciting bits between here, twitter and facebook.

Mike Kelley

About a week ago I read in shock as my twitter feed delivered news of Mike Kelley's death. It was enough to move me to devote my first ever tweet to him, in which I said that he is the reason I am an artist. Below is a more detailed version of that sentiment that I couldn't fit into 140 characters.

Admittedly, my first exposure to the work of Mike Kelley was not in an art context. While I was still at school around 1992, I bought the Sonic Youth album Dirty. The bizarre hand-made stuffed toy on the cover was intriguing, cute and frightening all at once. Sonic Youth had, up to this point, always interesting covers: Raymond Pettibon's cool post-pop rebellious youth comic style cover for the previous album Goo and one of Gerhard Richter's candle paintings for Daydream Nation. However it wasn't until I got Dirty home and played it that cover art really stood out as much more than a decorative image. The cover unfolded revealing a series of more mugshot-style portraits of similar stuffed toys. The odd thing was though, that this was a lot of space to give to the cover art, there were very few liner notes and no song lyrics, just these toy portraits. But there was also a picture of an adolescent kid with acne and longish black hair staring out, not smiling. To top this off there was an image behind the orange transparent piece of plastic onto which the CD was mounted, of something very... well... dirty! I later found out that the people in the image getting dirty with the stuffed toys were the performance artist Bob Flanagan and his wife Sheree Rose.

There is a line in a Smog song that I relate to: "While I listen to a record/ I stare at the cover/ don't come over." Back then when you could actually hold album covers, I could get lost in those private moments of listening to an entire album doing nothing else but staring at the cover. Despite there not being that much to read on the cover of Dirty, found myself fixated on this cover for months trying to figure what the fuck was going on in the Bob Flanagan picture and why the images of a pimply kid and some stuffed toys disturbed me so much. But it wasn't until about five years later when I started art school that this all started to make sense. I should have figured it out earlier because unlike most other albums that credit an artist with the "cover art", the credit on Dirty simply read: "Art: Mike Kelley". What they had done was actually include a complete work of art in, or even as, the album packaging.

The Bob Flanagan image was one of two images Kelley took in a collaboration with him, not part of the Ahh Youth! series of stuffed toys but they worked together under the 'dirty' theme of the album context. This I found out once I started art school, as I managed fit Kelley into any project I could, I had constant library fines from always keeping the only three books they had on Kelley in a continual state of "overdue".

What I learned from Kelley in those undergraduate years are many of the values that I teach my students today. Art should not be an easy answer to a question, art should challenge its viewers, and also its creator. Kelley's work embodies all of this. The incongruity of the adolescent self portrait in amongst the children's stuffed toys is simple yet completely captivating device. What is the relationship between the adolescent (or adolescence) and the children's toys? Are they his? Were they his? At what point do we let go of such toys? Is this moment as precise as that captured in the photograph, is it that locatable in memory? In Ahh... Youth the ambiguous and confusing experience of "growing up" is communicated on a visceral level, beyond the reach of words or numbers, like the child's height measurements etched into the door frames of family homes over time. Not only does Kelley's work communicate this experience, it simultaneously emphasises the inadequacy of the linguistic labels of "child", "adolescent", "adult" in attempts to differentiate and categorise these lived physical and emotional states.

That is the kind of thing I want art to do, and Mike Kelley is what I want artists be. Let's hope that is his legacy.

Mike Kelley, Ahh... Youth!, 1991