§
M said that I should see the power of my outsider position and I said
that I could not claim to be an outsider. It was not a coincidence that
I was in London now, during ‘Frieze week’. Not earlier or later. I was a
conflicted person.
Later I thought about it from a different angle and realized that
there was a confidence in me that related to this feeling of being
outside in a deeper way. That no matter what connections I made or what I
could ‘achieve’ through gaming the art system I would always feel
disconnected from its core. That I could never truly buy into it, and
that the Art World would always be turned off by the ambiguity of the
Warez that I was selling. Was this a promise I was making to myself? Why
was I so sure about it? Maybe it was the only way to think that allowed
me to continue.
I thought again about the Quaker meeting and about how people seemed
beautiful and dignified and a bit scary. Collective will and the search
for a higher connection rendered people beautiful.
It was easy to construct this binary: people walking out of
Tillmans’s house, the cokehead gallerists and boyfriends of shithead
former love interests, the stressed assistants; they weren’t ugly by any
means but they weren’t glowing like the Quakers. Art hustlers were grey
like the October that enveloped them. Not earth bound but not floating
either. A frustrated middle. I always had to idealize one group while
shitting on another.
§
(and M says yeah like you shouldn’t read anything into this, nothing
exceptional happened here and i’m like yeah that’s true it’s just funny
because of the contrast to this whole quaker thing, that i set out to
avoid the structure, to do something else, but then to remember about
myself that oh yeah i am really thirsty and desperate too and falling
flat on my face with that, like this rejection that i live for. like
wanting it enough to appear as someone who wants it but not wanting it
enough to get it, which will leave me in that awkward middle space where
most people reside. so i don’t feel alone at least. one day yr
#trending the next day zero likes.)
§
Desperation and hope against all odds, despite all we knew about neoliberal career games: that 99 out of a 100 would lose.
§
My ambition is not mine. It’s what I’m a slave to. People get fooled
into unpaid internships, dead end precarious art careers, student debt.
The promise is that you are unique, you are worth it. You find out that
some people are more unique than others. The economy has gone to shit
and is only booming for 0.1%. The middle class will be a historical
anomaly. London doesn’t run on wages anymore. Cultural workers are not
driven by consumption but by desire for some abstract idea of
self-fulfillment and a sense of meaning. How to make people work 15
hours a day in the service of their ‘personal brand’ while they barely
make rent. How to make them psychologize their failures quickly enough
to not see a larger pattern here.
Everyone’s in debt to the institutions that lied to them and made
them self-critical in a paralyzing way (Goldsmiths, etc.). Most already
know that it’s a debt they will default on. The promise of
self-fullfillment revealed itself to be a ponzi scheme.
from Jaako Pallasvuo's Frieze, 2013
Feeling feels for this and a lot of what Jaako writes about. I can identify with the frustration and sense it all around me, in my closest friends, in artists and designers I follow. There are attempts to ask questions, asking more questions as if the answers are going to come from nowhere. There are other attempts to keep the same strategy intact, only upping the intensity of either their production or the intensity of their self-promotion. I was working with my studio partner on a project recently and we got to a point where things were not working for the client. My worried partner says we need to push ourselves harder, work harder, work smarter. Anger rushed through me. I said we work all the time as it is and couldn't imagine working more than what was already a strange maximum that wasn't really paying off. As much as I agree with Jaako's optimism that I "believe we were the future, that success would find us or meet us halfway at least," I can't see that coming around in any of the structures or relationships that exist to make that happen currently. It's not going to come around because we make a book or assembling a collective that judges the thing we secretly want to ascend to. Repeating the same historical cycle by replacing the status-quo in order to look down on our friends and those that didn't quite make it in. Feeling that our critique was more necessary, our resolve stronger, and our perseverance more important. That is the stagnation of the present and not a future to make art for. And moreover those words; perseverance, resolve, grit, tenacity...those are words given to us to encourage us to compete because there's a narrative of glory in defeating the odds in capitalist societies. They're not our own words. They're the market's.
Another short example. I saw a HuffPost Political tweet the other day that was something along the lines of "This is how you respond to a #truther!" with a link to Noam Chomsky answering a building 7 question from a recent talk he gave. I won't get caught up in that debate but what really interests me is the twisting of language in the term truther. How many times has it been said? How many people have been desensitized to it's meaning? I don't like making an Orwellian comparison but it is there. The inverted word for an inverted world. It's like using an insulting tone to call your friend beautiful. Truther. You truther. You lover of the truth. You faithful follower of the truth. You seek a truth but you will not find it. You fool! That's what it communicates whenever someone uses that term and that should be all the more reason to investigate where the term comes from, why it is being used, and by whom.
JB to JCB
JULIEN BOIVENT — After Noce Blanche, which was an enormous commercial success, you could have had a studio career, or like Rohmer, who you knew well, gone into an intermediate system, creating a parallel economy in film, in which they are financed by their own success and investors get their money back. But you chose to stay out there on the fringe. Was that something you wanted or was it forced upon you?
JEAN-CLAUDE BRISSEAU — It was both. I discovered that a tiny group of “deciders” like having people at their feet, literally. They especially like it when people make great moral declarations, and then are forced to crawl on their knees in front of them. In order to get ahead you have to bend over, and I categorically refused. People thought I would bow and scrape like everyone else. They were mistaken. The bourgeois do that, but not the working class.Purple Magazine #20
CFCF - Music For Objects Process
This past spring we were asked to create the artwork for the companion EP to CFCF's Exercises (released in 2012). Music For Objects was inspired by a short film Wim Wenders put together for Yohji Yamamoto in 1989 titled Notebook on Cities and Clothes. Here's an excerpt from the film to give you a sense of its significance.
The music in the film certainly also seemed to influence the sound of the EP so we began to take a look at the artwork associated with Japanese releases by composers in the mid-late 80s as well as some contemporary Japanese design via the always excellent IDEA Magazine Japan.
At first we focused on representing all of the objects in some equal fashion, but soon found that any one could symbolize the whole idea. Therefore, we chose to isolate the perfume as it stood out as the most loaded object in the group as well as having the most potential for exploration. As we did more research into the meaning behind each object, across cultures, we discovered they all had unique stories that could be brought out into the artwork. A bowl, for instance, could mean the everyday cereal bowl or a ceremonial tea bowl.
The following typographic pieces were designed for the perfume bottle concept.
Two different vector sketches of the initial perfume bottle concept.
Presented here are the final concepts we mocked up for the cover.
The music in the film certainly also seemed to influence the sound of the EP so we began to take a look at the artwork associated with Japanese releases by composers in the mid-late 80s as well as some contemporary Japanese design via the always excellent IDEA Magazine Japan.
At first we focused on representing all of the objects in some equal fashion, but soon found that any one could symbolize the whole idea. Therefore, we chose to isolate the perfume as it stood out as the most loaded object in the group as well as having the most potential for exploration. As we did more research into the meaning behind each object, across cultures, we discovered they all had unique stories that could be brought out into the artwork. A bowl, for instance, could mean the everyday cereal bowl or a ceremonial tea bowl.
The following typographic pieces were designed for the perfume bottle concept.
Two different vector sketches of the initial perfume bottle concept.
Presented here are the final concepts we mocked up for the cover.
HUO to AC
HUO: What do you think of someone like James Lovelock, the scientist who developed the Gaia Hypothesis?
AC: Well, he’s the absolute opposite. He was a NASA engineer, and his dark vision is an engineer’s vision. It’s a machine vision of the world. It’s not about biology. It’s a self-correcting machine that doesn’t care for us mere humans. It’s actually a piece of science fiction for a generation of middle-class liberals who know that their project failed. I mean, this is the other thing we haven’t talked about, which I’ve never really made a film about, because I don’t know how to do it. By the early ‘70s, the postwar middle classes and the early hippies in this country who had originally thought that you really could change the world for the better, become totally pessimistic, almost apocalyptic. Looking at all this, it’s always puzzled me that one of the most privileged, pampered generations in the history of the world can go from optimism to pessimism so quickly. And I still haven’t worked out quite why they’ve done it. Someone like Lovelock produces beautiful pieces of science fiction that both express and seem to scientifically justify that shift towards a dark pessimism that says we don’t even matter as human beings. We’re nothing. It’s as if they became depressed. I think there is some truth in the argument that they’re a generation of total narcissists, and now that they are growing old and facing death, they can’t even conceive of their own death. Instead, they project their own coming death onto the world. They say, I’m not going to die, it’s the world that’s going to die.
HUO:And this is an earlier generation.
AC: Yes, it’s the generation before mine. They’re basically heroes of their time, a time that believed in self-expression as almost a public duty. They are individualists who believe that self-expression is the most important thing. This means that what you feel inside yourself, inside you head, is the most important thing in the world. But if the world is all in your head, then when you die, the world dies with you—it ceases to exist, because you can’t express yourself. Because narcissists don’t have anything beyond themselves, apart from their children, which is why these people are obsessed with their children—they don’t have a trade union or a political party or religion. They know these people will go on beyond their death, but they won’t. On the other hand, people like me who were brought up by old socialists, although I’m not a socialist, what it did instill in me is a strong belief that you work towards something that will go on beyond your own death. I mean, that’s really what you’re put on this world to do.
AC: Well, he’s the absolute opposite. He was a NASA engineer, and his dark vision is an engineer’s vision. It’s a machine vision of the world. It’s not about biology. It’s a self-correcting machine that doesn’t care for us mere humans. It’s actually a piece of science fiction for a generation of middle-class liberals who know that their project failed. I mean, this is the other thing we haven’t talked about, which I’ve never really made a film about, because I don’t know how to do it. By the early ‘70s, the postwar middle classes and the early hippies in this country who had originally thought that you really could change the world for the better, become totally pessimistic, almost apocalyptic. Looking at all this, it’s always puzzled me that one of the most privileged, pampered generations in the history of the world can go from optimism to pessimism so quickly. And I still haven’t worked out quite why they’ve done it. Someone like Lovelock produces beautiful pieces of science fiction that both express and seem to scientifically justify that shift towards a dark pessimism that says we don’t even matter as human beings. We’re nothing. It’s as if they became depressed. I think there is some truth in the argument that they’re a generation of total narcissists, and now that they are growing old and facing death, they can’t even conceive of their own death. Instead, they project their own coming death onto the world. They say, I’m not going to die, it’s the world that’s going to die.
HUO:And this is an earlier generation.
AC: Yes, it’s the generation before mine. They’re basically heroes of their time, a time that believed in self-expression as almost a public duty. They are individualists who believe that self-expression is the most important thing. This means that what you feel inside yourself, inside you head, is the most important thing in the world. But if the world is all in your head, then when you die, the world dies with you—it ceases to exist, because you can’t express yourself. Because narcissists don’t have anything beyond themselves, apart from their children, which is why these people are obsessed with their children—they don’t have a trade union or a political party or religion. They know these people will go on beyond their death, but they won’t. On the other hand, people like me who were brought up by old socialists, although I’m not a socialist, what it did instill in me is a strong belief that you work towards something that will go on beyond your own death. I mean, that’s really what you’re put on this world to do.
In Conversation with Adam Curtis, Part I
already-mades
Since the 1930s total mobilization has not stopped; we are still and permanently mobilized within the flux of "active life" (la "vie active"). Being whatever singularities we are like blank pages on which any history could be written (that of Eichmann, that of a great artist, that of an employee with no vocation); we live surrounded by objects that could become ready-mades, could remain everyday objects, or traverse these two states. However in front of these possibilities, in a light sleep, beneath the surface of the real, a spread of advertising slogans and a host of stupid tasks saturate time and space. Until an interruption, we will remain foreigners to ourselves and friends with things.
Parataxis is thus the very form of our existence under a regime said to be democratic. Class difference remains calm, racism stays hidden, discrimination is practiced amidst a multitude of other facts, all flattened on the same horizontal plane of an amnesiac senile present. The images, impressions, and information we receive are a succession of "stuff" that nothing differentiates or organizes. Collage and channel-surfing are no longer separate activities, they are the metaphor for our perception of life. This is why we believe that it is no longer necessary to go one way or another on the death of the author: for if the author as "convention" seems more necessary than ever in the meaningless struggles to protect copyright and in the interviews with creators that infest the periodicals, we no longer even have to ask whether it was ever anything but a convention to serve the interests of power.
Claire Fontaine
Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike: A few Clarifications
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