In the last seven years, in a series of performances, publications, exhibitions, and installations, Trevor Paglen has explored the world of hidden military projects and infrastructure. One of his best-known series is Limit Telephotography, for which he trained lenses designed for astronomical photography on secret military bases in the U.S., using their very-long-range photographic capabilities to capture images that would otherwise be hidden to civilian eyes. These are the “limits” that lie at the heart of Paglen’s project: the limits of democracy, secrecy, visibility, and the knowable. He is one of many artists who have evolved new and various ways of engaging with the military and the secret state in the years following the declaration of the “War on Terror.” The work of these artists remains as apposite as ever, as the U.S. and its allies continue to bomb suspected enemies (and anyone else who gets “too close”) and to run “black” sites and secret gulags in which people are held (and tortured) beyond the reach of the law. Paglen has made works that raise fundamental questions about what can be known and seen, while simultaneously writing investigative exposés of the shadow state. This interview explores some of the relations and tensions between the two practices.
Josephine Meckseper | The Final Shop « DIS Magazine
The misunderstanding that my work should reference an idea of revolutionary chic probably has to do with a projection of that same audience of how they view their environment. Contrary to this belief, I see my work as a call for street activism, in opposition to a rarified elitist art viewership. My aim is to present consumer display systems that have an auto-critique built within. This can take place, for instance, by inserting images of the opposition produced by capitalist society, namely protestors and rioters, or by using pieces of shattered glass. As a starting point I usually work with films of riots and protests and confront them with forms that refer directly to shop windows smashed by demonstrators. The installations of display forms like shelves and vitrines represent the static face of capitalism. The collective performative aspect of consumption is frozen inside the vitrine and the flip side of capitalism (like images of exploited factory workers) is literally glued to the back of displayed objects. The concealed power structures that are the core of alienated production are made visible here.
Our Weirdness Is Free – Triple Canopy
The spirit of lulz is not particular to Anonymous, the Internet, trolling, or our times. The Dadaists and Yippies shared a similarly rowdy disposition, as did the Situationists and Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers; more recently, the Yes Men have tightly fused pranksterism and activism, in one instance presenting a three-foot-long golden penis (“employee visualization appendage”) at a WTO textile-industry conference as a means of controlling workers, to the applause of the management-class crowd. These transgressions serve many purposes, upending the conventions—and highlighting the absurdities—of a political system within which substantive change no longer seems possible, and generating the kind of spectacles that elicit coverage from the mainstream media. But the aforementioned groups were conceived as radical political enterprises, with a limited purview and a vanguardist composition. What sets Anonymous apart is its fluid membership and organic political evolution, along with its combination of feral tricksterism and expert online organizing.
Hito Steyerl, Art as Occupation: Claims for an Autonomy of Life / Journal / e-flux
Lets start with a simple proposition: what used to be work has increasingly been turned into occupation.
This change in terminology may look trivial. In fact, almost everything changes on the way from work to occupation. The economic framework, but also its implications for space and temporality.
If we think of work as labor, it implies a beginning, a producer, and eventually a result. Work is primarily seen as a means to an end: a product, a reward, or a wage. It is an instrumental relation. It also produces a subject by means of alienation.
An occupation is the opposite. An occupation keeps people busy instead of giving them paid labor. An occupation is not hinged on any result; it has no necessary conclusion. As such, it knows no traditional alienation, nor any corresponding idea of subjectivity. An occupation doesn’t necessarily assume remuneration either, since the process is thought to contain its own gratification. It has no temporal framework except the passing of time itself. It is not centered on a producer/worker, but includes consumers, reproducers, even destroyers, time-wasters, and bystanders—in essence, anybody seeking distraction or engagement.
The manhunt doctrine | Radical Philosophy
George W. Bush had warned us early on: the United States has launched itself into a new kind of war, a ‘war that requires us to be on an international manhunt’.1 It would be wrong to believe that Barack Obama’s ‘justice has been done’, echoing Bush nearly ten years later, will close what was merely a parenthesis. In the interim, what had sounded merely like the picturesque slogan of a Texan cowboy was converted into a state doctrine with its experts, plans and weapons. A new doctrine of state violence emerged, finding its unity in the concept of the militarized manhunt.
Slavoj Zizek Speech at Occupy Wall Street | VersoBooks.com
They will tell you that you are dreaming, but the true dreamers are those who think that things can go on indefinitely they way they are, just with some cosmetic changes. We are not dreamers, we are the awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything, we are merely witness how the system is gradually destroying itself. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. What we are doing is just reminding those in power to look down…
Unmanned: Embedded Reporters, Predator Drones and Armed Perception Jordan Crandall CTheory.net
A channel of reembodiment opens up via reality media and its focus on unfiltered immediacy. At the same time, a channel of disembodiment opens up via automated vision and the “umanned.” Think of two modes. One is the handheld camera, live and on the scene. We watch seemingly immediate, raw footage through it. The other is the disembodied gaze. We don’t watch through it. It is the gaze that belongs to everyone and no one. The camera-riding bomb is only one example. There are many other examples that we can’t see. In many senses, this gaze has moved into the status of a condition. That is, it has moved from something that we can represent to something that helps to structure representation itself, as if lurking behind the visual field.
So which is it? If we think of perception as being relocated — and in many ways warfare is about such relocation — can we say that it is becoming re- physicalized, or not? I want to consider both of these modes.
OMNIA SUNT COMMUNIA | Deterritorial Support Group
listen to yesterday’s Novara show from Resonance FM, featuring Federico Campagna of Through Europe giving a fascinating history and analysis of the Italian workerist movement, Autonomia and its continued relevance and resonance within anti-austerity movements today- more so than the insurrections of France in 1968.
Carolina Caycedo- Local Motion (2006)
This piece was included in a solo show for Carolina Caycedo at London gallery Blow de la Barra last year. Caycedo’s work deals with identity, nationality, immigration, and economic exchange in an era of globalization.
Local Motion is a jukebox containing 60 CDs collected by Caycedo from all the different cities she’s worked or lived since 1995 as well as music projects developed by Caycedo from Bogota and her recordings from Spain and Brasil. The jukebox is both a documentation and soundtrack of the artist’s migratory life.
This piece in particular reminds me of the Babel Series which I posted a few weeks back. It similarly deals with the global media’s participation in the formulation of a universal “pop language” through popular music. While Brietz suggests that this process degrades communication through uniformity, Caycedo’s project shows how popular music may be individualized. In turn, visitors can change and manipulate her soundtrack for their own experience. The fundamental difference between the two is that Brietz assumes a static subject whereas Caycedo participatory one.
Click for more shots from the Locomotion show and an interview with the artist
Response to Sexual Onslaught /// Form Grows Rampant
This week I received an announcement for the upcoming Ramleh show. To be honest, I find the name “Sexual Onslaught” and the poster art pretty vacuous.
Clearly, I respect the abject in music, art and literature as valuable cultural critique. I consider noise and other forms of extreme music as yet another arena for the representation of the abject, which is why it’s important. Primarily because I believe music and performance are vital forms of ritual, and they have a transcendent and illuminative effect. Hence, why it’s subversive and politically charged. I also understand that the promoters are referencing the shock tactics Ramleh initially employed as a reaction to the political climate of the time and the commercialization of punk in the 1980s. But to rematerialize those same signifiers divorced from their original context means something different in 2007. On one hand- it’s an instance of base retro culture and, frankly, why is that interesting? Why even bother organizing a show like this? Live performance is an impermanent and transitory medium- and you can’t replicate an experience from 25 years ago. So why try? The other, more paramount, fact is that the promoters are using images and words representing the mutilation of women to advertise an event put on by men, performed by male performers, to a mostly male audience. Lame. I don’t care that Maya Miller, a woman, designed the poster. (And I normally like her art!) It’s a meathead move and it serves to reinforce the dominant hierarchy in a way I can’t support. It also goes to show how underrepresented and undervalued women are in the noise scene- which is unfortunate.
I had a very similar reaction to Form Grows Rampant by Peter Christopherson, which was included in the show Les Autres at Ratio 3. The video, shot by a white male British artist, erotically depicted self-mutilation rituals performed by young boys in Thailand. Ratio 3, in its current incarnation, is an exhibition space open once a week out of the gallerist’s house. For this reason, it has a very exclusive feel. The privileged nature of the screening room only elevated the feeling of a profound discrepancy in power between the subjects of the video- engaged in the destruction of their brown bodies- and the white, Western director who glorified it. It presented a colonialist and exploitative lens under the declaration of “other”- which it obviously was not. When paired with someone like Eve Fowler, whose work was in the same show, the contrast was distinctly apparent.
I mention both examples together because Ramleh and Christopherson, who was in Throbbing Gristle, emerged from the same place historically and philosophically. While, as I mentioned above, comprehend and follow what they’re doing, I also think there’s a limit to that framework. It can easily slide into a position where power structures are blindly reinforced, especially if the context or the message itself are not taken into careful consideration.
