In 2011, when Tiger Lilies came to Athens to perform, they arrived during two tumultuous days in June when the state proceeded to pummel its citizens with tear gas (most of it expired) through the might of its riot police. After all, this was the a crucial two-day period – June 28 and 29 – and the government had to pass through yet another round of austerity measures imposed by the dreaded Troika. This was another quarterly injection that would only lead to greater debt – something the Greek people, who had already experienced years of straight recession, could not accept. The result was unprecedented violence against the people. On both days, police even threw tear gas into the central metro station on Syntagma Square, where medical volunteers had set up a makeshift clinic, only to be gassed like rats (a war veteran said he had never seen anything like it).

That night, on Zougla.gr, a local internet radio station, call-ins from listeners revealed a growing sense of militancy; a realization that the state no longer fended for its people, but rather a conglomerate of technocrats belonging to a vast pool of global stakeholders. In between such moments of realization, there were appeals for medical equipment and medicine for those still holding strong at Syntagma Square; a public space named after an uprising in 1843 when the Greek people demanded a Constitution from their foreign King. In 2011, the square had become a Tahrir, where the Greek Indignants  – the first Occupiers in the West after the Spanish – set up camp, inspired by the Arab uprisings that same year.

As the sun came down that evening of June 28, and the flames and fumes subsided, Tiger Lilies played an impromptu gig on Syntagma Square: “a concert in the teargas” as one spectator called it. It was a show of solidarity from one subcultural performer to another; the kind of subculture the Greek people have known for hundreds of years – one that is slightly left of field and not quite subservient to dominant cultural norms. What the Tiger Lilies performed in Syntagma Square, like the protests that had been taking place in and around this square for years, even generations, was a song of protest, uttered in a space of protest. It was a song sung directly to and for a people for whom music has long been a form of resistance, since the Ottoman occupation that started in the 15^th century, to the occupation of market forces in the 21^st, and from the music of the Cretans and their eagle-like war dance, to the song of the rembetes, the Greek-speaking riff raff from Asia Minor, expelled from Turkey in the great population exchange of 1923 when an estimated 1.5 million Anatolian Greeks were sent back to the mainland (and 500,000 Turks shipped back to Turkey).

It is after the rembetes that a particular genre of music was named in Greece: Rembetiko, used to define a certain type of folk music that emerged from the Greek underground during and around the Ottoman occupation. It is a genre – and a word – used to describe the traditional tune of the vandal and the vagabond; the thief and the fighter against the powers that be. It is a style that lends its name to the 1983 movie by Costas Ferris, Rembetiko, which focuses specifically on the life of one woman – a rembetiko singer in an all-man band. In her first ever performance, she sits in the middle of the band before a crowded kafeneion, a traditionally male space. The frame of the stage invokes a Renaissance Last Supper. She is a Mary Magdalene figure; a tainted woman wrought in a man’s world. I’m burning, I’m burning, she sings slowly and deliberately, demanding the listener to throw more oil onto the fire as if it would soothe her.

The audience recognizes her pain, forged from the ashes of war and the salty tears of exile; she is a daughter of Smyrna. A child of one the many refugees in the above-mentioned population exchange that had never set foot in Greece proper, facing an impoverished local population who did not want them, and for whom war, and upheaval were part of daily life. It is a history that haunts modern Greece like the spectre of Constantinople, or Istanbul, the spiritual capital of Eastern Orthodoxy, occupied in the fifteenth century by the Ottomans; an occupation that marked the beginning of an occupation of Greece proper that would last for some four hundred years. It was from this historical point that waves of Greek migration began, triggered thereafter by such events as World War I and II, civil war, military occupation and the current Crisis. As a consequence of this history, there are more Greeks living outside Greece’s modern borders than within them, and many a song has lamented this fate, like the one in Ferris’s movie: Kaigomai: I’m Burning.

It’s funny because in Athens, people can literally tell you when the city will burn, like when Angela Merkel comes to town or when debt is fed with more debt. Sometimes, ‘Athens Burns’ can be seen scrawled on public walls around the historical centre – huge swathes of which have become ghettoized in the space of only a few years – as if to remind those who forget that Athens does burn, often. As the music continues in this scene, the controlled, sustained melodic rhythm forms a perfect sonic tableau. I’m drowning, I’m drowning; throw me into the sea, she sings, lyrics describing a certain, Sapphic state of mind that drives people off cliffs so they might quiet their relentless pain. Such lyrics recall looking over the Bosphoros from Galata Tower in Istanbul (or Constantinople), and thinking of another song written by Nikos Zoudiaris, “I Want to Drink the Whole Bosphorous”, simply because the experience of watching, experiencing and therefore feeling the world’s borders change is too unbearable. It is a famous song, mourning the memory of something that has become distant and removed. It is the notion of a lost “home” as described by Constantine Cavafy’s Ithaca, a poem for the displaced, for whom “home” has become nothing more than an idea or a memory.

Perhaps not having the choice is what feeds the turmoil when one must abandon a certain reality: why oil becomes the remedy for a burned up soul. It could certainly explain the pain experienced by a nation struggling with the memory of what it once was – or never was – while coming to terms with what it really is.

Returning to the woman in Rembetiko, singing a song about burning and drowning in that masculine, kafeneion space, that ubiquitous male gaze is never perverse. Rather, it exudes solidarity, reflective of an emotive transaction between audience and performer enacted as seamlessly as the way the singer’s voice is absorbed into the ensemble arrangement; a song that cuts so deep it leaves man and woman equal in their suffering. The same could be said of the suffering in Greece today; a nation plunged into a Crisis not entirely of its own making, shaped by global currents dictating an economic system rooted in post World War II modernization and marketization, from the Truman Doctrine, a bailout plan for Greece and Turkey, to the Marshall Plan, both devised by American policymakers to rebuild Europe’s ravaged economies, and the establishment of the European Economic Community in 1961. Then there was the premature entry of Greece into an economic system it was not equipped to handle, resulting in a populace now disciplined by forces beyond its control – like the woman in this movie, caught in a mortal journey that follows the social and historical currents of time and circumstance. And it burns, quite literally.

Intoxicated, she stares straight into the camera fleetingly, her face gilded by the composition of the frame like a Madonna, swearing on your eyes as she sings that she’ll turn this knife wound “you” inflicted on her into laughter. Her smile harbors a frightening power; wielded by those who know they have nothing to lose, like those protestors today, unafraid to walk into the plumes of prickly, peppery teargas that can choke and blind. As Greek writer Augustine Zenakos observed of a June 15 protest that took place at Syntagma Square, also in 2011:

The police had attacked Syntagma Square. The people sat on the grass and some sang, others danced, when they saw the first teargas canister fall between them. In the peaceful crowd, teargas seemed to come from nowhere – it was so much – but as the skin started to burn and no one could breathe any longer, the assembled found incredible strength to sit there: do not leave, do not leave the Square.[1]

It is an act of defiance, to ‘sing’ in this way, like the woman in Rembetiko, as she sings her haunting song. She turns towards the camera once more, with calculated precision, surrendering to you, the viewer, so ‘deep in hell’, to ‘break the chains’ and take her with you if you can manage it. There is a smile at the corners of her lips. An invitation. But, like those of us who watch Greece’s demise from afar – as we watch it burn – we know those chains are unbreakable because we have little power over how these chains were formed. And they bind us, too.

Writing from the perspective of the amateur who perceives his practice as the only thing he has – not the theory behind it, not the label on top of it, not the object at the end of it – why was I drawn to Formcontent? Because being a spectator at their four events at the David Roberts Art Foundation, titled The School, helped me formulate this position of the amateur. I am not using this word to tag Formcontent. Rather, I am placing myself under its cover to better analyze work that proposes new positions – artistic, aesthetic, “political” – that in turn inspire a new reception of art.

When we met, the question on my lips was burning: have you actually sensed this movement from I to it? What is it then? Why is everyone talking about it, why do we now preach Speculative Realism, what can I do to think as an object if this is what is required of me now? What is thinking a world without thought, as Ray Brassier puts it?

“There is no distinction between I and it. Any research is already a product”, Pieternel told me over the table. “I” and “it” are taken together in the movement.

We are not discussing a shift, but a process. A re-arranging. A creation of a personal language, intended in order to position the collective, however subjectively, in the art world.

At first taken aback, I had to inquire further into this expression. It couldn’t have just been a coincidence. Besides, art historian Michael Newman had given a talk as part of the group’s program at DRAF, in which he had discussed this movement from I to it as a programmatic one in contemporary art, fuelled by the turn towards social practice.

Pieternel again: “It came out as the title because of the frustration with the division of things. Our way of thinking became production, and our production became a way of reflecting.” Indeed, this was obvious in the program – in fact it was its core. It’s moving from I to It started as a set of abstract characters – the Becoming Subject, the Host, the Portable Object, a Tiger, the Stranger – that the three curators invited artists and writers to take up in whichever medium they chose. Their task was to produce something as close to a play as they could or wanted. There are now 14 scenes to this play – pieces of text, operas, exhibitions, songs. The virtual structure of this arena replaces the worn-out gallery space the collective had run in East London for five years, before deciding to embark on their 15-month nomadic project.

During this time, the initial abstract characters have taken shape, have become – humans? Strangely, the exact opposite of what the title suggests. But the “I”, as far as Formcontent see it, means “how to relate to the idea of practice, how to create autonomous visual language.” In this case, there was an implicit “I” from the beginning in the choice of these characters, and the movement was indeed between a subjectivity and the definition of this subjectivity. Something like: naming names. As I understand it, the program was a proposition to become wrapped up in a game; one in which the characters you play define you as much as you define them.

Being a spectator at only four of their events, I can try and evoke the general atmosphere. Siôn Parkinson proposed an intriguing one-man performance of an opera he had written using the given characters. It was short but tight. He recited the story of a creature who, when in love, would suck the partner’s blood and thus kill him. He used melodramatic songs to back this up, keeping the audience in amused tension. Bloodstains kept appearing over his face and neck, in an accentuated exhibition of his story. It was funny, he was funny, and pathetic and aware of it.

Some weeks before that, art historian Michael Newman had lectured about the theoretical implications of the title, It’s moving from I to it. He discussed Blanchot, Lacan, the usual crowd. Analyzing the event with Formcontent, I understand why I had been so enthusiastic about it. Apparently, Newman had found a new freedom in lecturing in a gallery, using interpretation, presupposition and speculation – that is, not falling into academic constraints. His theoretical approach had gained from the proximity with art.

Another idea that comes to mind after overviewing the entire program is that, perhaps, things and humans have finally become equivalent.

Anca: “Curating still starts from a very subjective point, the material is your own subjectivity. The role of curating is to make something discursive, to create a relationship between subject and object.” And looking at the way in which abstract characters, artists, performances and artworks are constantly rearranged, put in relation one to the other – one gets the sense that this equivalence is the privilege of the curator. And it is for him that it is indeed moving from I to it. Artistic practice is still viewed in a traditional, subject-centered manner. It is the curator whose position is properly examined by Formcontent’s démarche. Only the curator has the vision of the entire project, the ability to juggle subjects and objects. Once he has let go of authorship, he has the opportunity to occupy a more radical position – one that Formcontent is now defining.

This starts with the emphasis on collaboration. The script is written and enacted by many people; only on one occasion is the collective properly involved in writing a scene. As curators, their “medium is different from that of the artist, but their process is similar.” This means that they are in control of their work because they build it upon a structure – because their work itself is the building of this structure. “We are the librarians of our work”, Pieternel confesses, the only ones to have witnessed all the situations that arose from their initial proposition. The website is the only other total image. This reminds me of John Cage’s massive performances, in which every spectator witnessed something different, a matter of their own chance. Only with Formcontent the scale is bigger: not one night, but almost a year. Not one room, but the entire globe. To do things for one’s own pleasure? To give because you know there’s much more where that came from? To look but never own? I like these questions because they seem appropriate for the contemporary modes of experiencing the world. Programmed chance, common authorship, and a constant avoidance (reinvention?) of tags. The new professionals of the contemporary world shed a new light on the position of the amateur: not someone who doesn’t know, but someone who enjoys experiencing more than knowing. This was the invitation that I received from Formcontent – and I said yes.

So for me the interest of Formcontent lies in their ability to stop right before they reach a definition. It’s moving from I to it, but it never really arrives anywhere. It is perhaps the value of practice over theory, this ability to move without stopping to take the shape of something. But the position Forcontent endorses is not one against theory either. Amongst the many contemporary attempts at “theory-practice”, theirs gains value from being a constant situation: text is performance is definition is reflection is experience is is is. The entry points are everywhere and the development endless. In a way, the perfect situation.

Images (top): Siôn Parkinson’s event for the series - In the end, as a worm: a melodrama - held at the Library at David Roberts Art Foundation on February 9 2013; photo by John Thorpe.

(middle): It’s Moving from I to It, Contemporary Art Gallery, Brukenthal Museum, Romania, 2012; photo by Scott Eastman.

(bottom): Not surprisingly, he is wearing gloves, Eastside Projects, 2012; photo by Stuart Whipps.

All quotes are taken from two interviews by the author with the collective, March 2013, London. Formcontent is Francesco Pedraglio, Pieternel Vermoortel, Anca Rujoiu and Astrid Korporaal.

When I discussed Lana Del Rey’s ten-minute video Ride [1] in my aesthetics seminar group there was a strong disagreement amongst the students about the quality, novelty, inventiveness, and meaning of the identity claims formulated within the video. The first impulse of several students was to regard the video as a highly commercial remix of existing clichés. They recognised echoes of road movies like Dennis Hopper’s 1969 Easy Rider and its evocation of the myth of an unrestricted biker life, and the way in which it revisits the myth of the U.S. as “the land of opportunity”.

On this basis, some of the students criticised the video in simple terms as calculated and banal. For them it seemed to fit into the common commercial rhetoric of music videos, and they thought it nothing special. In a way, I had to agree – not least because the use of images, of atmosphere, landscapes and environments seemed relatively familiar, unsurprising, since there was nothing revolutionary in the images or edits made by the director of the video, Anthony Mandler. The former Men’s Health and Entertainment Weekly photographer became famous through producing commercials with stars like David Beckham and writing and directing videos for Rihanna, Snoop Dog, Eminem, The Killers, Beyoncé and others, making him one of the most successful and most viewed directors of commercials and pop music videos.

Viewed in this light, and taking Lana Del Rey’s overall media performance into account, it comes as no surprise that the video is not ground-breaking – and this was exactly the position adopted by most of my students. But if there is a lesson to be learnt from Cultural Studies, it is that the simple identification of something as being within the mainstream does not identify whether or not a phenomenon is interesting, or complex, or provokes an in-depth analysis. Art historians and aesthetic theorists fall regularly into the trap of assuming that the attribute “mainstream” explains everything about particular qualities of a piece of music, a movie or an object – as if the label “mainstream” renders any extensive analysis superfluous. And in considering the students’ reaction, it became quite obvious that terms like “mainstream” and “kitsch” are still used as a kind of death knell for any further aesthetic discourse. The term “kitsch”, once introduced by avant-gardists like the American art critic Clement Greenberg in order to claim a clear distinction between authentic invention and second-hand emotions, the real and the fake, novelty and cliché, and so on,[2] is still used as a terminal phrase, and therefore often causes us to overlook how deeply popular culture is connected with the multi-layered practices of self-construction and the blueprints of our social life. No wonder, I explained to the participants of my course, that I did not select the video to celebrate it as an example of the aesthetic inventiveness of an individual artist or to present my own musical taste (since such an approach is highly questionable), but rather to demonstrate that this ten-minute film draws significant attention to the aesthetic manifestation of so-called under-classes, more precisely that of “white trash”[3]. And despite – or perhaps precisely because – the retro-aesthetics the video refers to this milieu in, for the moment, an irritating way, then this is worth a closer look.

Lolita got lost in the hood

To begin an analysis of the video, which I will then integrate into a broader discourse, let me start by describing the way Del Rey stages herself in the clip, since the singer is – quite conventionally for a music video – the main character. Del Rey appears in three guises: firstly, as a kind of bored and lascivious street urchin, seemingly only one step away from prostitution, then as a biker babe, and finally as a glamorous 1960s pop diva.

Within the first persona she strolls around at night, buys a soft drink at a 24 hour store, waits at a corner until, seemingly at random, a man in a car stops and she gets into the car and kisses him. In this scene she wears cut-off-denim-shorts, a baggy white T-shirt (obviously without a bra underneath), and Converse chucks.

The stocky and tattooed middle-aged man is dressed in a so-called “wife beater” and has greasy long hair. Later, we will see the two playing a pinball machine – or more precisely, we see him standing behind her, pressing his groin against her bottom while playing pinball, whereas she, lascivious and bitchy, lolls on the machine and smokes.

If we were in search of a single image to describe the American white trash lifestyle, this scenario would provide the perfect example. All gender stereotypes and attitudes, all objects and behavioural patterns point in this direction.[4] “I was a singer. Not a very popular one”, Del Rey says during the video’s three-minute prologue, which “alludes to the fact that her character might be a prostitute”, writes a blogger in The Huffington Post.[5]

One might say that this kind of slutty image is quite common in current mainstream pop videos, and even more within the hip-hop and rap genres, where glamorous ‘bitches’ in bikinis dance in dirty underground tunnels accompanied by overweight men covered with striking fake jewellery. Del Rey, however, translates this genre into lascivious naïve romantic melancholy. Her interpretation of the lower classes and the abandoned suburbs is different. She gives the white trash iconography a particular interpretation. Del Rey performs this character with a certain gloom and fatalism. Her description of herself as “Lolita got lost in the hood”, given in an interview in The Guardian[6], seems therefore an appropriate way to describe this archetype.

Easy Rider

Her second way of staging herself, that of an American biker-babe, is not easily distinguishable from the first image. She wears similar but more decorous clothes and seems to be part of a biker gang. Dressed in a studded and washed-out jean-jacket with long fringes, or a black leather jacket, again with fringes, or just a white T-shirt with a sexist print and cut-off shorts and white cowboy boots, she hangs out at a gasoline station and smokes close to the “no smoking” sign.

Some bikers on choppers pick her up after a while. Later we see them riding on long roads through the desert, Del Rey as a pillion passenger, her long hair flowing behind. In other scenes, the bikers ride through a campfire, drink alcohol and play with guns. Del Rey now wears a Native American feather headdress and holds the Star-Spangled Banner. “I’m tired of feeling like I’m fucking crazy,” says the singer in the epilogue, voiced-over images of the campfire scene, and then she ends:

“Every night I used to pray that I’d find my people, and finally, I did. On the open road. We had nothing to lose, nothing to gain, nothing we desired anymore, except to make our lives into a work of art. Live fast, die young, be wild, and have fun. I believe in the country America used to be. I believe in the person I was to become. I believe in the freedom of the open road, and my motto is the same as ever: I believe in the kindness of strangers. And when I’m at war with myself, I ride. I just ride. Who are you? Are you in touch with all of your darkest fantasies? Have you created a life for yourself where you can experience all of them? I have. I am fucking crazy, but I am free.”

Most of the biker images are connected directly to the song’s refrain, “just ride”, and, like the epilogue, are obviously reminiscent of “Easy Rider”, a tragic vision of the American Dream in which the search for freedom is corrupted and hindered by conformists and violent rednecks. The text of Del Rey’s song engages with this issue and presents her own desperate quest for identity ensnared within a retro-view on America and a dark version of freedom.

Fatal Vamp –and other identity claims

While these two identities – or should one say personalities? – appear from the very beginning of the video, the third alter ego turns up only when Del Rey starts to sing.

She stands alone on a stage and wears a white retro-style dress. Similar to her very first video for the song Video Games, Del Rey combines a glamorous retro outfit with the image of a trash-pop queen. This is how we know her. Interestingly, the camera turns outside the building to show lettering above the event venue spelling-out “Fatal Charm”, and under it “Lana Del Rey”; media commentary of Del Rey integrated in the scene.

In many critiques of Video Games it was stated how disconcerting Del Rey’s amateurishly injected “Daffy Duck lips”[7] and her obviously cheap nail design appear in combination with her vintage sixties style; glamorous, melancholic. This image gave her the reputation as a “White Trash Vamp”[8] or a “Gangster Nancy Sinatra”[9] who intermingles “film noir and nostalgia”.[10] Her eclectic mix of codes fascinated many critics and led to controversial conclusions. Some celebrate her style and claimed she asks questions about identity in such a way that they appear as answers.[11] Others think she is just a through-and-through fake.[12] At least, however – and this again is typical for a pop discourse – all efforts to decode her strange symbolism become entangled with the old question of authenticity. Is Lana Del Rey, alias Elizabeth Woolridge Grant, just an artificial figure? Questions like this frame almost any interview with her.[13] Despite Adorno’s doubts formulated in The Jargon of Authenticity[14], or Foucault‘s discursive analytical transformation of subjectivity into subjectivation[15], the concept of authenticity and the search for the real or “authentic ego” still seems to be a robust mental entity; one which has survived various efforts of deconstruction. In spite of postmodern intellectual approaches claiming that there is no such thing as a “real ego”, people continue to ask questions: Is Lana Del Rey just a pulp novel figure falling in love with the wrong men, a simple B movie character ready to absorb all kinds of cheap romantic escape fantasies, or is this just her stage persona?[16]

But we will not make much progress in exploring the phenomenon of “Lana Del Rey” in this direction. It does not help if one knows she grew up as a middle-class American girl who, after a serious identity crisis, studied philosophy, was employed as a social worker and lived in a trailer park on the outskirts of New York.[17] Even if it is true, it does not reveal secrets about the figure in the video; it only produces new layers of codes. And in the end, the old question of authenticity – if we put it in this way – will always lead to a dead end. I will therefore not evaluate the video in terms of the “commercial” or “non-commercial” or “authentic” and “fake”. The more interesting question seems to be: what kind of desires and identity claims are generated in Del Rey’s work? What constellation of symbolic worlds make-up this piece of pop culture? And finally: What does a successful work like this tell us about the aesthetics of today’s mainstream culture?

Why White Trash?

One stimulus for me to examine this piece was the interaction between the female protagonist – Lana Del Rey’s alter egos – and the overweight, greasy older men. My impression was that these scenes were more than simply a calculated provocation. With regard to Del Rey’s other videos, they seem a more obviously related reference to the American lower class and the so-called white trash milieu.

In a distinction from women in rap and hip-hop, Del Rey does not stage herself as the typical sexy it-girl or the rebellious voice of the so-called “underdog”; someone who gives the underprivileged a voice to articulate social evils or the struggles of everyday life under conditions of poverty, unemployment, desperation, drugs and violence. On the contrary, in Del Rey’s projection of them, the underprivileged seem to combine moments of bored, meaningless existence with fragile and elusive promises of freedom and happiness.

I would like to go through some elements of the video and try to demonstrate that Del Rey’s videos are not simply a mixture of vintage images with a range of references, but also a striking example of a new aesthetic interest in social sub-stratum – an interest which can also be observed in some current art practices.

My thesis is that the interest in the white trash milieu is not voyeuristic. It has, in fact, become a screen upon which to project yearnings and desires – desires for a life beyond the flexible late capitalism, in which every emotion has become a subject of the service economy. An economy in which every artistic utterance is suspected of being made to promote a career or to produce or sell a commodity, and in which all emotions have become quotes from the cultural industries, since it was, after all, through the cinema that we learned how to feel.[18] Within this “liquid modernity”, to use a term of Zygmunt Bauman[19] – the whole of everyday life, the whole process of subjectification, our emotions and social relations are not just suspect as being the subject of economic interests, but, as Eva Illouz puts it, are themselves a product of and designed by the cultural industries.[20] I would like to argue, therefore, that the present aesthetic interest in under-privileged social groups and societal outcasts results from a desire to escape the ubiquitous logic of a dominant capitalist system. A successful middle class, itself endangered by potential social decline, considers the lower class not only as a danger, but as a projection of an existential way of life. A life, reduced to basic needs and a particular emotional veracity. That, at least, would be my reading of the video.

I do not pretend to claim that this is an overall phenomenon. But it is one possible framework of interpretation; an interpretation that becomes all the more plausible the more we think of other famous figures within the current pop culture. Lady Gaga’s hyper-artificial staging, for instance, also performs a model to escape the system of late capitalist society. Her performances and videos invoke over-alienation and could be interpreted as a form of cynical enlightenment and example of a post-ideology-critical era.

The Social Substratum in the Arts

In order to substantiate my interpretation I will re-frame Del Rey’s work with a few other examples. I will argue why this video shows a search for – or maybe a reconstruction of – the written-off idea of authenticity, and that Del Rey’s pop-cultural project is to insinuate that this can be found in the milieus of the underprivileged, where people are presumed to be uncorrupted by career ambitions or the concept of permanent self-improvement. Seen from this perspective it makes sense to re-make the Easy Rider motif, and re-tell the story of outcasts and white trash bikers in search of “the true America”.

To underline my argument that this new focus on outcasts or the under- or lower-classes also plays an important role in visual arts, I would like to use some examples from the art of the nineties. These are not given to suggest imitation by Del Rey; rather to suggest that many artists borrow their content from underprivileged classes, and approach these milieus in various ways.

One example is the American photographer Nan Goldin who became famous in the 1990s with a slideshow called The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Her pictures involve a circle of friends from the New York drug and drag queen scene to which the artist herself belonged.

Nan Goldin, ‘Nan One Month After Being Battered’, 1984. From the series The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

A glamorous demimonde and subculture is documented in intimate moments: in the bathroom, in bed, in the shower, having sex, and so on. Goldin’s photographs oscillate between tender and fragile dreams of happiness and existential gulfs.[21]

Another example is the British artist Richard Billingham, who took a series of photographs that were, in relative terms, shocking for the art world of the 1990s. The snapshot-like photographs showed an elderly couple in dilapidated social housing: she, the woman, overweight, and always involved with food, pets or puzzles, or fighting with her husband; and he, toothless, almost always sitting next to or holding a large bottle of cider.[22]

Richard Billingham, Colour Photograph 1996. From the series Ray’s a laugh.

The photos give close insights into the private sphere of people at the bottom of society. From the first glance, Billingham’s pictures raise questions of how a photographer gained access to these people and how the interaction between photographer and his subjects must have been. It is therefore all the more surprising to learn that Billingham is the couple’s son. The series of photographs provoked a debate about social pornography.[23]

Another example is Boris Mikhailov, the Ukrainian artist, who took a series of 400 photographs entitled Case History, in which are reflected the everyday life of people in Ukraine. Within this series, his most famous group of images were about homeless people – those without any social support.[24] And a last example: The German photographer Tobias Zielony took several series of photographs of marginalized groups and youth subcultures in the UK, Germany, France and the US. Of these, in particular, the series about Trona, a stronghold of crystal-meth users in the Californian desert, brought him international fame.[25]

I will not go any further into these examples. And the differences to Lana Del Rey’s fictitious video narrative are that all these photographs are documentary works, and that the photographers are more-or-less participating observers of these milieus. They brought pictures of marginalized groups to public attention. I would call this a significant on-going trend in photographic practice. This kind of photography seems to follow a particular demand – but what is the nature of this strange demand? Is it simply an interest in society and its relations of inequality?

A cause of more irritation however, is that this sort of photography has become a luxury commodity. It seems anomalous to show pictures of socially excluded groups in the elegant surroundings of MOMA in New York. It seems inappropriate to look at kids sniffing glue and to see eczema on the ass of an unknown poor man in a dignified and reputable gallery. And what is even stranger is that these pictures are traded like Hermes handbags.

Social documentary photography has a long tradition – it is nearly as old as photography itself. But its current presence and significance in the art field is relatively new and has to do with an overall tendency: political art has become fashionable.[26] The documentation and representation of outcasts is assumed to be a political action, and is often regarded as social criticism, as an act of giving a voice to people who cannot speak for themselves. It is questionable how credible this interpretation is, but it could be understood as a parallel trend to hip-hop and rap culture in the last twenty or so years. And so what I want to make tenable is that Del Rey’s video is not only a follow-up, but a reinterpretation of this trend – from an entirely opposite position.

Reading Social Criticism Against the Grain

So to conclude, I will come back to Lana Del Rey’s Ride. Del Rey’s work is far from being social criticism. Rather it belongs to the post-ideology-critical era. Her plots are fiction; fiction which does not, in any way, document real social circumstances. What is irritating about her approach to the white trash aesthetic is that she plays with it and in doing so returns to this in search of what Sloterdijk calls “basic fictions”. In his famous critique of critical theory, Sloterdjik asks: “Can we afford to shake up the ‘basic fictions’ of privacy, personality, and identity? Be that as it may, in this question both old and new conservatives have come to the hard decision to take the ‘stance’ of defending, against all the demands of reflection, their ‘unavoidable lies for living,’ without which self-preservation would not be possible.”[27]

If we understand Del Rey’s video as a reflection about identity, it is not a naïve reflection, but one made in Sloterdijk’s sense. When Del Rey’s film ends with an epilogue, in which she postulates that her only desire is “to make our lives into a work of art”, she suggests that the only way to be free and at peace with yourself is to understand yourself as a fiction, a story, an image. This is insisting on exactly what Sloterdijk calls “basic fictions”, fictions which are informed about their own fictionality, but at the same time insist on their reality, since there is no other reality beyond this fictionality. So, on the one hand Del Rey’s film celebrates the artificiality of the concept of identity, but on the other it permanently recalls and reverts to a layer of basic needs, a kind of existential sediment. And this sediment is the white trash milieu and the dark side of the glamorous vamp – the “Lolita lost in the hood”.

When Del Rey’s alter ego in Ride spoons with a man from the white trash milieu, this is far away from a political rap. It is clichéd idealization of the lower classes. The same applies to the scene in which a tattooed biker combs her hair: it is a gesture of protection.

The middle class girl seeks shelter and refuge from someone who clearly does not belong to mainstream late capitalist society, and is located within the white trash milieu. A milieu that, if it is addressed as such, also makes visible that “whiteness serves a sort of invisible norm“[28] or an oppressive ideological construct; since, as Newitz and Wray wrote, “making whiteness visible to whites” also uncovers and exposes the assumption that being white is a norm or a privilege.[29] Newitz and Wray go on to identify that: “White trash speaks to the hybrid and multiple nature of identities, the ways in which it comes to issues of race and class in the US: because the term foregrounds whiteness and working-class or underclass poverty, two social attributes that usually stand far apart in the minds of many Americans”[30]. Del Rey refers to white trash in a particular way. By staging herself integrally as a part of this milieu – without any criticism or rap – she also suggests that there is no privileged way of life but simply moments. And the most precious moments are those moments in which she is sheltered and protected by underprivileged men. Del Rey’s video, therefore, also reanimates Ernst Bloch’s myth of the spiritual warmth of the underclass.[31] The crucial difference is that the underclass is not an oppressed proletariat, but is staged as a new formation: a dirty-yet-free post-labour society.

[2] Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review, 6, 5 (1939), pp 34-49.

[3] Concerning the term cf. Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray “Introduction” in White Trash:  Race and Class in America, (New York: Routledge, 1997).

[4] One can find descriptions of outfits exactly like this on several webpages like the urban dictionary f.i.: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=white%20trash; cf. also Dana Rasmussen, Things White Trash People Like: The Stereotypes of America’s Poor White Trash (Charleston: BiblioBazaar, 2011); for an explanation of the term Newitz and Wray, “Introduction”, p. 2 et seq.

[5] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/12/lana-del-rey-ride-video_n_1960887.html (last accessed 20/2/2013)

[6] Rosie Swash, “One to watch: Lana Del Rey. After posting one song online, this 24-year-old American singer sold out a London gig in half an hour”, in: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/sep/04/one-to-watch-lana-del-rey (last accessed 20/2/2013)

[7] Jan Wehn and Timo Feldhaus, “Lana Del Rey im Interview. Sexelnde Samplequeen,” De:Bug 159 (2012); http://de-bug.de/mag/8816.html (last accessed 20/2/2013).

[8] Ibid.

[9] Edward Helmore, “Rhinestone Maiden”, http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/12/lana-del-rey-rhinestone-maiden (last accessed 20/2/2013).

[10] Wehn and Feldhaus, “Lana Del Rey im Interview“.

[11] Ibid.

[12]  Matthew Perpetua, “Lana Del Rey Tries to Live Up to Her Glamorous Image at New York Show. The online sensation has the voice, but not yet the stage presence”, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/lana-del-rey-tries-to-live-up-to-her-glamorous-image-at-nyc-show-20111206 (last accessed 20/2/2013).

[13] Paul Harris, “Lana Del Rey: The strange story of the star who rewrote her past”, http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/jan/21/lana-del-rey-pop (last accessed 20/2/2013).

[14] Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (London: Routledge, 1973/2003).

[15] Cf. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House, 1975).

[16] Cf. Tim Noakes, “Lana Del Rey. Bad Girl Blues”, http://www.socialstereotype.com/_/Features/Entries/2011/7/27_LANA_DEL_REY.html (last accessed 20/2/2013).

[17] Anne Waak, „Einführung in die Metaphysik der Lippen. Lana del Rey wuchs im Trailerpark auf und studierte Philosophie. Eine Begegnung mit dem Popstar der Stunde”, Welt am Sonntag (29/01/12); http://www.welt.de/print/wams/kultur/article13839455/Einfuehrung-in-die-Metaphysik-der-Lippen.html (last accessed 20/272013).

[18] “Kein Gefühl, das nicht bloßes Zitat eines anderen wäre. Man kennt die Liebe, schließlich war man im Kino.” (Thomas Hübener, „Lana Del Rey Video Games“, www.spex.de/2011/10/13/lana-del-rey/) (last accessed 20/2/2013).

[19] Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004).

[20] Eva Illouz, Saving the Modern Soul (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008).

[21] Cf. David Amstrong and Walter Keller, Nan Goldin. The other Side (Manchester:  Lovelybooks, 1993); Karen van den Berg, “Glück in der zeitgenössischen Kunst. Wellnessübungen und Neuro-Apparaturen, Süßigkeiten und Drag Queens”, Glück. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, ed. Dieter Thomä, Christoph Henning, Olivia Mitscherlich-Schönherr (Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2011), pp. 326-334.

[22] Michael Collin and Julian Germain (ed.), Richard Billingham. Ray’s a laugh (Zürich/Berlin/New York: Scalo, 1996).

[23] Cf. Greg Fallis, „Richard Billingham“, http://www.utata.org/sundaysalon/richard-billingham/

[24] Boris Mikhailov, Time is out of joint (Berlin: Distanz, 2012).

[25] Streetlife and Homestories, Exhibition catalogue (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012).

[26] Political artists have become the new market winners. Andrea Fraser explains the phenomenon with a joke, which goes like this: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to quote Marx.” Cf. Andrea Fraser, „Speaking of the Social World“, Texte zur Kunst, 8, (March 2011), pp. 88-94; ref. on 93.

[27] Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 60.

[28] Newitz and Wray, “Introduction”, p. 3.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Ibid. p. 4.

[31] Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, transl. N. Plaice, S. Plaice and P. Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986).

Screengrabs from ‘Ride’, Dir. Anthony Madler. Courtesy Universal.
Other images copyright the artists.

David Foster Wallace proclaimed that the generation of artists who would oppose postmodernism would perhaps be “some weird bunch of ‘anti-rebels’, born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values” (Wallace 192).  These artists would address “old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction,” who would have to be “[t]oo sincere.  Clearly repressed.  Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic,” who for all their naivety “risk disapproval” and dare to “risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘How banal’” (Wallace, 192-93).

One such anti-rebel is the photographer Dylan Hollingsworth.

Hollingsworth’s work includes conceptual photographs of surreal landscapes and raw footage of average individuals from N.Y.C. to Nicaragua.  He couples photography with narratives that range from poems or philosophical contemplations to audio-recordings from his subjects – testimony is presented by Holocaust survivors, prostitutes, and American farmers.  His photography always focuses on “people, stories and events that have universal meaning and the potential to remind us of the broader life we often miss while lost in our own immediate journeys” (Hollingsworth). He shares his photography and stories through Cowbird, an online community of storytellers whose goal is to “find connections between your life and the lives of others, forming a vast, interconnected ecosystem, in which we all take part” (Cowbird). He recently confessed that, “[m]ore than aesthetic or technique, I watch for emotion and depth…those will always take precedent over creating a perfectly exposed and framed photograph” (Dallas Observer). Indeed, if anything, Hollingsworth presents himself as one of those anti-rebels whose time has come.  It is in light of his departure from postmodern gimmicks – kitsch, play, or pastiche – and his reinvestment in sentimentality, sincere and interpersonal connections among artist, art, and audience, that I interviewed Hollingsworth.

Telling Stories

Q: What influenced you to begin to use your photography as a means of telling the stories of other people?

A: I think I’ve always had a story-telling gene within me.  None of us really know what we’re doing here.  We’re trying our best, we’re trying to meet our needs, we’re trying to find a life that makes sense, and a lot of times our efforts to do that cause more confusion.  I started to, instead of seeing differences, see the parallels between us.  When I picked up the camera, I realized there’s so many ideas out there, there’s so much nobility out there, there’s so much suffering out there, that everyone lives in a bubble and doesn’t want to look at it [the suffering].  I want to say, “Hey, there’s other stuff going on.  There’s people that need help.  There’s people that are overcoming problems that you’re struggling with right now, and you’re not alone.”  I started to realize that this is a tool that can promote consciousness and can tear down the walls between us.

Q: Do you find that when people tell you their life-stories that it liberates them from their own story that by telling their story in their own terms that they have a sense of power over what has happened to them?

A: I think it all comes down to the individual, but I do think that there’s some healing that comes from someone telling their story in their words because we all really want to be understood.  We want to feel like someone has seen our side of things and has had an empathy or compassion for what our experience has been.

Q: There is a passage in J.S. Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, “Everyone could know what everyone else felt, and we could be more careful with each other” (2005, 163).  Is this something you want your audience to come away with?

A: [Yes], to feel more connected.  To put forth ideas of service.  To put forth something about the joy of being alive, and that there’s a utility in suffering.

Q: In your description of your photography you wrote that you want to focus on “stories and events that have a universal meaning.”  How do you define universal?

A: Universal means that it’s something that everyone everyone could see and have a moment of connection or identify with – doesn’t mean they will but they could if they thought about it.  There are some things that every one of us [needs], physical worldly things – Maslow’s hierarchy of needs type stuff.  Bigger than the worldly stuff is this kind of internal thing – the human condition – so every one of us is suffering from it, is trying to make our way through it, is trying to overcome it.  And that’s the universal thing; that is: making our way through life, trying to find some meaning, wrestling with the human condition.  There’s no one that’s not doing that.

Hopes

Q: At present, what some are defining as the metamodern condition seems to focus on artists’ endeavors to bridge, and move beyond, modern and postmodern preoccupations. Some artists are for instance reinvesting in the notion of the universal or are moving away from irony.  Do you see your art as exploring both universal and individual stories/concerns? Both global and local issues?

A: One of my favorite lines from a movie is, “the specifics hardly matter; everyone is everyone” (from Synecdoche, New York–2008), and I think that.  Everyone is everyone, and I know that sounds really kind of Eastern and mystical and new-agey – “we’re all one” and stuff – but nobody’s going to remember all these details and stuff later.  We were here and one day we’ll be gone, and we did some things and the things that propelled us were usually love and fear.  Love: we did some good things.  Fear: we destroyed some things.  I sum it up like that, saying, the specifics don’t matter so much.  In the same breath I do appreciate the detail.  I do like the individual stories, but I like them because I think everyone can find a mirror within it, they can find something.  The hope that I mentioned a few times [is] that the individual story will have the ability to spark a connection in anyone if they want.  I do think some of the local and individual stories are symptomatic of where we are globally, and these global times are different.  But again, I think the details of our time doesn’t matter; the source of those defining issues are always going to be the same.

Q: Do you think your art speaks to the individual’s sensibilities or to a specific cultural sensibility?

A: It targets the individual because what’s culturally popular is whatever is amusing us the most and whatever most people are saying, and we’re distracted by a whole lot of stuff.  When we talk about culture we talk about a group of people who, especially as Westerners, are very flighty and it’s always changing.  I want to be able to put forth stuff that may not be popular with what is “in” or “relevant” on the grander scheme in their minds, but the individual – when you isolate them – is always going to trigger something in them.  The truth is if you are talking about things with universal meaning, which is just everyday human stuff, it’s always going to be relevant.  I think there are probably nations, cultures, or subcultures that are more attuned to this kind of stuff we’re talking about – but it’s what I’ve tried to do – and I have found that when you strip it all away and you can kind of guide someone into looking past a person’s exterior that they do see and they’re like, “That did touch my heart.”  I’ve found that, regardless of people’s social or economic class they are coming from, that when they see something that is about humanity they will feel that, and it’s such a good thing.

Q: David Foster Wallace said, “In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness….it’d find a way both to depict this dark world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it” (McCaffery, 1993, 131).  Do you find that your photography and journalism does both?

A: That is my hope.  My hope and my belief about myself, and because I believe it about myself, I have to believe it for everyone else.  The main belief is that life is good even though it’s difficult; we’re beautiful even though we are flawed; that it’s worth getting up in the morning even though things aren’t going to turn out the way we want them to; that in spite of our suffering, life is a pretty sweet deal.  That’s what I believe; I hope that it comes through in my work, and I hope that by showing the darkness that people are more propelled to discover the light.  That by showing the struggle to people that they are more propelled to want to overcome it.  I think you need both.

Affect

Q: Tanja Wagner, a gallerist in Berlin, observed that: “I am seeing a lot of new tendencies and sensibilities in terms of artists really wanting to have a dialogue again…they want to engage again, but not in a dry conceptual way.  These artists want affect again, they want to talk about love, which I thought was almost not possible” (Forbes, 2012). Do you find that your art instigates sentimentality?

A: A hundred percent!  It’s what I do.  That is why I do what I do because I think that we are all on this journey and wrestling with some stuff and I want to talk about this internal conflict; I want to talk about the joy that comes when we overcome it.  I want to put forth those ideas to people because that’s just the world I know. It was darkness, and I fought and was kind of delivered in the same sense, and now it’s light. But I know both of them.  Let’s know what we’re up against and let’s know that we can get through it, and I want to show both of those things cause those are the two worlds that I’ve known. I do want to trigger that in people because it promotes change and it promotes thought.

Q: As an artist, if you could choose one emotion that all of your viewers would experience from your work, what would that emotion be?

A: Elation.  Gratitude.  Compassion.  Elation: the idea of putting something in front of people that’s saying, “Damn it!  I’m alive!  Wow, look at this thing we’re apart of; it’s so confusing and yet it’s kind of really good.”  Gratitude.  I have this moment where I see that all my needs are met.  I have valuables.  I’ve got human relationships.  I have purpose.  I kind of know why I’m getting up in the morning; I get to touch some people’s lives.  That’s enough.  Compassion: the feeling of caring about other people, being affected by other people, appreciating other people.

REFERENCES

- Cowbird.com/about

- Dylanhollingsworth.com/about

- Foer, Jonathan Safran (2005): Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, New York: Houghton, 2005, p. 163.

- Forbes, Alexander (2012): “the metamodern mindset,” Berlin Art Journal.com

- Hungerford, Amy (2010): Postmodern Belief. American Literature and Religion since 1960.  Princeton: Princeton UP.  Print.

- McCaffery, Larry (1993):  “An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” Review of Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 13: Iss. 2 (1993): 127-50.

- Mixmaster (2013) “Dallas Observer Masterminds 2013: Meet the Winners of Our Annual Art Awards,” Dallas Observer.com

- Wallace, David Foster (1993) “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” Review of Contemporary Fiction : Vol. 13: Iss. 2, 151-194.

Images (from top): ’Of Human Bondage’ from the series ‘Ascending’;
Two images from the series ‘Occupy Wall Street’;
‘The Wilsons Dallas, Tx.’ and  ’Words With Friends Dallas, Tx.’
‘Tachowa’ – photo essay on the man who turned a junk tank into a junk palace (see: dylanhollingsworth.com/tachowa).

All images copyright Dylan Hollingsworth

Fotomuseum Winterhur’s candidly titled blog, Still Searching, does – as its title suggests – take a hopeful, open, perhaps at times perfunctory look around various theoretical and historical approaches to discussing photography and its related cultures and technologies.

A number of writers, academics, scholars and artists – since the website’s beginnings in January 2012 – have been asked to contribute a succession of written blog posts on a chosen topic. At the time I write this, the current list of contributors include: Bernd Stiegler, Aveek Sen, Walead Beshty, Hilde Van Gelder, Geoffrey Batchen, Kelley Wilder and Martin Jaeggi. In addition to this a number of other commenters were invited to respond to the central texts by one or more of the aforementioned authors. These individuals include David Campany, Charlotte Cotton and any other member of the wider photography community that wants to participate in the conversation through the open comments form.

The writing ranges in style from the concise to the discursive, and in doing so, covers plentiful ground. With this in mind, I will go over what I see to be two key theoretical positions, with the hope that I might draw out both some of the strengths, and the limitations, of what we could clearly refer to as an example of current writing on photography. In order to focus this text somewhat (at least before opening up again in its conclusion) I have selected two of, what are in my mind, the most interesting posts that have appeared on the Fotomuseum Winterhur blog – if not always in their form and approach, certainly in their content.

I will look at photographic realism in two different guises, one aesthetic and one political, by reading some of Bernd Stiegler and Walead Beshty’s contributions to the blog. I hope the reader, as I have done, will work through these texts before reading my analysis, which can be seen both as a reflection and an elaboration on some of the ideas therein. The essays focus on realism and the real as theories, but also on the reality of photography theory and education today. Although not by any means expansive, I hope that the two texts at least allude to some of the key concerns within photography theory and education one might consider relevant, if not important, today.

Imperfecting the real: Some preliminary thoughts on the use of axioms and imperfections 

Bernd Stiegler begins his writing with an approach to photographic realism. His intention is to ‘Explore options beyond familiar theoretical trajectories, such as the indexical nature of photography or photography as social documentary’[i]. The notion of a theoretical option here is paramount to understanding the logic of his intentions: Stiegler successfully manages to highlight a series of nebulous “options” for a theory of photographic realism while avoiding directly citing much already-established thought on the subject. I will briefly focus on the author’s first blog post, which posits a notion of imperfection as an example of the real, in order to explain what I see as a series of theoretical problems.

In the opening paragraph of Imperfection, Stiegler states that imperfect photographs are the new ‘ideal of contemporary photography’ and that ‘imperfection serves as the contemporary modus of the real in photography’. The author’s statements are somewhat unclear. One reflection of this opacity is the metaphrasing of Jaques Ranciere’s concept (originally formulated by Plato) the “ethical regime of images”.[ii] This section of the text can be boiled down to a kind of skewered, unannounced reading of Ranciere where the author ambiguously phrases the original term, in casual gesticulation[iii]. Stiegler’s thoughts are philosophical, but lack the necessary unpacking.

The author states that ‘Imperfection transforms every object into a photographic reality, which emphasizes a different regime of images precisely by eschewing and renouncing the perfection of technology.’ There is no following definition of this regime of imperfect images – which unnecessarily expands formal imperfection to the level of some fundamental renouncement of technology’s strive for perfection – or of his notion of the perfection of technology (presumably a reference to Benjamin or indeed Heidegger, but this much is unclear). Furthermore, the text lacks a definite theoretical framework regarding realism, reality and the real – which are three quite distinguishable terms. What might their differences be?

What appears as blur, a scratch on a negative or over-saturated colour, may be the photographer ignoring technical conventions in order to make an image that is, to all intents and purposes, as natural and intuitive as possible. This way of making a photograph might see the photographer capturing the impressionistic, non-pictorial state of what he or she photographs – the way a body moves and blurs; the way light dances about the place – instead of an evenly framed, seamlessly composed image. Such technical imperfections are a type of formal embellishment: they serve to signify the difference between what is in front of the camera at the point of photographing, and how that is represented in the supervening photograph. The difference between the thing that is photographed and the resulting picture is the difference between reality and realism. Reality is what we think exists and realism is the, in this case photographic, representation of it.

The real is something altogether different. Lacan’s real resists signification altogether, while Stiegler’s real posits imperfection as the distinct signifier of a composed realism (the imperfect picture). Stiegler’s real fails because it enables a form of representation. In order to properly theorise the photographic real, Stiegler’s concept would need to avoid symbolising or signifying any single aesthetic, including the examples he gives of photographic imperfection (technical errors, deficient cameras and snapshots). The real is beyond the symbolic and is not composed of discrete signifiers.

Lyle Rexer’s book, The Edge of Vision (2009), charts a particular rise in abstract photography, many of whose visual signifiers can be compared to Stiegler’s imperfect pictures in as much as they incorporate similar visual traits, for both formal and conceptual reasons. However, as Rexer notes this is no new enterprise: one might follow an obfuscatory line between abstraction and imperfection from Fox Talbot to Penelope Umbrico and beyond. ‘Obfuscatory’ strikes me as an apt way to describe the gap between reality and photographic realism. But how can that gap be conceptualised?

In order to properly root the argument within a discussion of the difference between reality, realism and the real, it might be more useful to consider the recent re-appearance of imperfect images as an example of Roland Barthes’ reality-effect: a detail within a text that does little to develop its narrative. Like Stiegler’s attempt at a theory of photographic realism, reality-effects are a feature of literary realism, but with so many of Barthes’s concepts, the way text informs image is of paramount importance. As Barthes states: ‘For at the very moment when these details are supposed to denote reality directly, all that they do, tacitly, is signify it.’ (Barthes 1982: 16) Imperfect images provide an ‘index of atmosphere, and their function is to state ‘we are real’, and thus to signify the category of reality…’(Macey 2000: 325)

Imperfect details do this by embracing the logic of visual abstraction (blur, colour shifts, emphasis on texture) as actual components of a form of photographic reality. This form of photographic representation embraces imperfection and abstraction as an actually existing, almost quotidian component of both photographic reality and photographic realism. As Rexer states: ‘photography is simultaneously an investigation of reality and of the means of investigating that reality.’ (2009: 11)

This form of realism does not reproduce reality, but instead, its form – one of its many significations. As John Tagg asserts in his essay The Currency of the Photograph ‘realism is defined at the level of signification.’ (1982:111) Imperfect images exist within the space between reality and realism: imperfection and abstraction are axioms of photography; they are ways of visually signifying the complicated nature of this gap. Contrary to what Stiegler states, imperfect images are not an example of the real but rather, to return to Ranciere, and to conclude this line of thought, “the representative regime of art”.

Rather than reproducing reality, works within the representative regime obey a series of axioms that define the arts’ proper forms: the hierarchy of genres and subject matter, the principle of appropriateness that adapts forms of expression and action to the subjects represented and to the proper genre, the ideal of speech as act that privileges language over the visible imagery that supplements it. (2004: 91)

The author goes on to add to his developing theory of photographic realism by writing posts on reflection, order, practice, form and invisibility. The comments, especially following the post “Order,” are often more interesting than the original statements. One example includes David Campany’s highlighting of the problematic use of the term photobook in as much as it doesn’t accurately describe a form of photography, despite its widespread use as a term within the recent resurgence of interest in photographic books: ‘This is the teeming chaos that has led to the word ‘photobook’ to be taken up as a handy catch-all in this renaissance. It’s barely a category.’

A note here must be made about some of the particularities of tone and style adopted by blog writers, often and specifically within comments forms. The still often-casual nature of publishing theoretical writings in this accessible and free context allows certain authors a wonderful pliability in the pace and humour of their prose. Various contributions contain a soupçon of disagreeing humour, to intelligent effect.

Why collapse a discourse for the sake of education? Photography, use-value and capitalist realism

Walead Beshty ups the contextual ante with a series of posts not always about photography. However, his surveying of other pertinent subjects that should very much concern photography as a ubiquitous discourse is highly interesting. Although Beshty considers a wider set of problems relating to the notion of a medium, the role of the institution and art’s relationship to capital, I will try and propose some hopeful points of departure for making sense of photography’s specific role in what the author outlines here as the ‘collective understanding of a medium’ (Beshty 2012), institutional values and photography education.

In Beshty’s fourth post for the blog he begins by considering the constitution and naming of a medium. According to the author, a medium is inextricably tied to two things: its use and its position between ‘Some agents in a transaction.’ (Ibid) The author locates the inventing of a medium dialectically between applied use and technological development. In doing so, he reveals a contradiction in the way in which we name things and then go on to use them. He then defines the institution (museum, university, etc.) as the location par excellence for the creating and establishing of mediums: ‘It is the institutional act, that which makes the institution concrete, like air made solid.’ (Ibid)

This post – of little more than 1500 words – is adventurous to say the least. It gains proper traction as it concludes with three numbered points, all of which I will try to describe and respond to here. The text moves quickly, sweeping from point to point and heightening the sense that blog writing in this context can vacillate between theoretical precision and rampant esotericism, at the level of both style and structure.

1. There is no such thing as an art which is untainted by the market economy and that in no way means that art either supports or rejects the notion of a market transaction but is simply, by definition, based in market transaction. (Ibid)

In simple terms, Beshty asserts here that all art is made under the rubric of capital. Whether directly engaging with the market economy (through commercial sales) or refusing to take part in it, all art is made in response to the social conditions at the time of its creation. Under political dictatorships, art will be censored and created within the confines of state control – ‘State mechanisms are frequently able to restrict the photographer’s field of vision’ (Azoulay 2012:219) – and under capitalism, the monetisation of art practice is a long and convoluted one which represents an equally repressive set of conditions for making art to that of state control, one might argue.

It is possible to trace a history of twentieth century Western art that sees it firmly placed in market transactions (and photography, in this century, gathers pace in this regard). However, there is a potential second history; what we might call a history of ideas within photography that possesses more emancipatory potential through a particular set of educational strategies. This history might take a stance against Beshty’s capitalist realism: his assertion that ‘there is no place outside of economic transaction.’

Beshty approaches a vast but really very fascinating problem: art’s role as political emancipator through aesthetic education; a function for, in this case photography, to create a space that not only pushes up against the current restrictions of the educational institution, but also against the logic of labour and value in capitalism itself.

Tackling this huge question is to begin with a photography that possesses fundamentally civil attributes; it is to begin with a photograph that ‘is not a representation’ (Azoulay 2012:222) in order to free it from Barthes’ latent “this is X” description of objects, tied to a reality, represented in photographs. Photography would need to invent a system of political engagement that sits outside of commodification and photographic representation: a non-commodifiable, non-representational photography that embraces both aesthetics and politics.

Photography is an art of ideas: its relative closeness to reality, but failure to completely represent it, offers the medium a unique philosophical position which calls to mind François Laruelle’s “The philosopher as self-portrait of the photographer.”[iv] Although it is difficult to remain entirely persuaded by Laruelle’s intention to conceptualise photography as completely abstract (no eyes, no cameras, no techniques), his theory of photography – which seeks to read historical attempts at a theory of photographic realism as fundamentally flawed – leaves us with an interesting predicament: how to think a difference in society through an abstract form of photography, not just visually, but in terms of a political abstraction derived from the two Marxian terms exchange value and use value. This is what Azoulay might call photography’s “civil imagination” and what Laruelle might refer to as photography’s ‘insertion into a horizon of images, and from this its communicational value or its pragmatic dimension…’(Laruelle 2011:61).

From this gallimaufry of theoretical ingredients we might summarise the following things: Photography is an art of ideas; all photography is conceptual in as much as it is always both an image and a text[v]. Photographs are an abstraction of reality. ‘The logic of the abstraction is the reduction of four dimensions to a two-dimensional surface.’ (Beshty 2009:303) In light of these things, photography finds itself in a position of privilege in as much as it has the possibility to think a new reality using its already accepted ‘communicational values’, to paraphrase Laruelle. Photography is fictional and it can invent spaces and worlds, including one that might exist outside the restrictions of current institutional values (a value system which makes a commodity of education itself). In order to do this photography theory would need to develop its own principles of emancipation and institutional critique and to some extent it already has. The question is this: where do these emancipatory values currently lie, and what might one do to begin realising their value within the context of photography education?

How to sell a politically radical photograph for profit

2. This does not mean that art is incapable of progressive political change despite its dependence on the marketplace for there is no place “outside” of economic transaction. Yet, the radical proposition is art’s greater capacity for transparency (as transparency is a core artistic value). (Beshty 2012)

In 2009 Zer0 Books published Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism. Its central provocation is to argue that the very problem with society’s attitude to capitalism is that it lacks the ability to think outside it: that capitalism is the only possible political-economic system. The first chapter of this short book is titled It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (which is a phrase borrowed from Fredric Jameson, as Fisher himself acknowledges). Within this phrase lies an important logic: the current atmosphere capitalist realism creates is so all-encompassing, very few people, aside a few radical theorists, want or have the ability to think outside of it. Capitalism is the natural state of play in this regard: the art world continues to rely on its ability to monetise politically left-leaning artworks, in order to ensure the maintenance of a system of commodification that benefits the growth of capital and therefore the art market itself.

Where emancipatory, anti-capitalist thinking does arise within the art world, it is done so in an ironic fashion that often reduces political critique to the exchange value of an object within a commercial gallery, or a public institution such as a museum. The artist is willing to exchange a political artwork for a living, therefore offering what might have been of some wider social benefit over to capital in return for cash. After all, what other system for earning a living is currently available to artists in the UK?

Capitalism had created a scenario – based on itself as the only possible reality – in which it rewards radical or emancipatory thinking with income that can then be used to live and produce more work to feed back into the same system. Ai Weiwei’s practice is the ultimate example of this: political dissidence turned to art world marketeering and profitability. Commercial galleries support the careers of an incredibly small number of artists in this way and public institutions, because of drastic cuts in public funding, are forced to exhibit artists that might draw corporate or private funding and therefore essentially engage the same system. Photography – in a state of perpetual crisis as to the state of its own identity – is actively band-wagoning the workings of the wider art world in this way. More and more photographers seek gallery representation and a place for their work in the holdings of major museums. The price of photography in both primary and secondary market contexts is rising, and major commercial galleries and art fairs embrace it like never before. Photographs are relatively cheap to produce, can be sold in editions and therefore create maximum profit.

What about the university? The university lies outside of the immediate art world but regularly engages and informs it. The art department within a university is a curious place: although students sometimes produce political work, they may also be obsessed with the relationship between some niche theory (perhaps Deleuzian) and its often-tangential relationship to the objects they produce. This might be combined with a conscious decision to produce an object that is adroit, attractive and potentially salable. Why is this the case?

These approaches form a discourse that speaks inwardly to the rest of the art world, as opposed to wider society. Within this meta-discourse the artist is pressured to think about the intellectual and formal cache of his or her work, and what it might be worth to the art world on the basis upon which it currently sells objects. The artist’s concern is the art world, not the ‘sphere of daily life’. (Ibid)

3. This proximity or “coming to terms with the exchange rate of objects” is in essence one of art’s most radical potentials. It contains the possibility to leverage the world of progressive philosophical, intellectual, and political thought into the sphere of daily life, and collapse the idea of “meta” discourse, or critique, to make all discourse continuous with the world it is meant to describe. It is the destruction of the fantasy of an outside. (Ibid)

Ariella Azoulay, who is currently pointing to an alternative to this inward way of thinking within photography theory, notes that photography’s own theoretical discourse fails to problematise the ‘identification of the representation with the essence of photography’. (2012: 223) This notion of representation attributes the essence of photography to that of inherent determinism (it is fully fixed by what has gone before it). Conversely, one discourse of photography, established largely by John Tagg in the 1980s as photography’s relationship to the discourses of power, is the location at which Azoulay makes the following assertion: ‘Viewing photography as a non-deterministic encounter between human beings not circumscribed by the photograph allows us to reinstitute photography as an open encounter in which others may participate’ (Ibid). This is where photography’s potential to create an emancipatory politics, beginning with a different form of education, might arise.

It seems clear that a photography of emancipatory value must start with the question of photography education – and what better time to consider this than now, when the entire notion of education in the UK is undergoing a serious onslaught of intimidation by the current government. The artworld and its exchange rate of objects is a place seemingly untouchable to radical politics, but university education has a duty to remain open to new forms of political discourse within the arts.

On what terms do we measure education?

Every couple of years for the last two decades, I confront the task of explaining to a new group of graduate students that, although the difference between use and exchange seems immediately available to intuition, use-value and exchange-value are in the same form: the value form. To put something in the value form means to abstract it, so that it can be measured. (Spivak 2012:191)

This brings us back to Beshty’s use of the term “exchange rate”. As mentioned previously, the collapse of a fixed exchange rate system in the 1980s led to a more ‘volatile currency exchange system,’ (Harvey 2011:24) which in turn led to the emergence of hedging and its contribution to the financial crash of 2007-8. The problem with Beshty using this term within the context of art objects and their discourse (a discourse I take to be one of education), is that it alludes to the, as he puts it, ‘daily life,’ not of educational accessibility, but of exchange value in capital: the daily life or normative value of capitalism itself.

In the above lines, Gayatri Spivak talks of the relationship between education, its value – both in terms of use and exchange – and the proceeding abstraction that creates. This is a direct reference to Marx’s theory of labour and value, viewed within the context of education.

On this basis, we might consider the following two scenarios:

1. A student pays a great amount for education and it is offered at a fixed exchange rate – let’s say £27,000 for an undergraduate degree. The emphasis by the university is on what the student will receive through a process of exchanging money for education (a lecturer’s labour): what she will get for her money; what her education is worth as a commodity. In this sense the student is forced to play the role of the capitalist and ‘capital consumes by measure’ (Ibid) so her education must be measured in terms of what it is worth. In this case education is made, ‘not to be consumed, but to be sold on the market’ (Callinicos 2010:137). Clearly this is the wrong way to consider education. Education, like air and water, must be consumed so an individual can learn. ‘Exchange values reflect what commodities have in common, rather than their specific qualities.’ (Ibid:138) Education, exchanged as a commodity on a university market, reflects what it is worth, not what value it possesses.
2. A student pays nothing for education as it is subsidised by the government using a special rate of tax every worker pays for the education of others. The emphasis by the university is on what the student will understand through a process of using education (a lecturer’s labour-power): what she will need in order to gain a degree; what her education is worth in terms of its (non-commodified) use-value. The value of education is important because it allows a student to understand the power of their own labour and of what it is to possess a body of knowledge. Instead of exchanging money for labour (something measurable) we must understand the power of this labour in terms of use value.

By this insight, use-value, generally a fiction, is not a fiction for capital. Capital consumes by measure. This is labor-power, not labor. It is the use of the use-value of labor, not the use of labor…

And then comes the other lesson, better known but commonly left unconnected with the first one: that the capitalist pays back less value (in the money-form) than s/he borrowed (in the labor-power form). This is because when labor-power is used, it produces more value than its concrete pre-measurable personal base requires to reproduce itself potentially as measurable into use-value for capital: labor-power. (Spivak 2012:191)

Money for old rope: politics in photography education

It is simply not sufficient to rely on this somewhat classic Marxian position on labour and value (the cornerstone of his work Capital), for there are one thousand other subtleties, nuances and variations that contradict and displace the simplicity of combining Marxian analysis with photography (and cultural) theory. Spivak acknowledges this herself in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. However, at the risk of forming yet another meta-discourse by elaborating so much on two simple distinctions between an education system that values profit and a system that values knowledge (because this is essentially all we need to bear in mind), I will try to keep things as uncomplicated as possible here.

We might divide the system of photography education as we see it presently, into two concerns, which are taught in university classrooms: practice and theory. Practice is taught by locating current photography within a trajectory of historical practice, with attention to changing visual forms and the way in which photographs are made (technical processes) and made to look (visual tropes) today. Most students are awarded a degree on their ability to understand and mimic an already existing form of photographic practice. Very few produce original work and less still produce work that is politicised or socially concerned. There are of course a few exceptions.

Cultural theory is taught via its relationship to photography theory (and the way in which key thinkers within photography theory have taken it up). It is clear that, although interested in photography theory and its cultural implications, most photographers coming out of universities are not politically engaged, nor are they taught politics other than in the way it relates to the same, long-established historical and critical studies reading lists. My simple question is this: what if economic and political theories were taught to photographers? What if the model became, instead of “practice and theory” the more expansive “practice and politics”?

The changing nature of the way universities are funded – less pubic money and more emphasis on private investment and profiteering – endangers the future of theory, including the way in which it might activate a student politically. Current changes in political tactics in the UK – what we might call the development of neo-liberalism – directly effects our university education system, right down to the level of what the students want in exchange for the fees they pay. Capital, in this way, effects the attitude students have to education. It is my view that now more than ever, students must be taught the value of education per se, alongside the usual content of a photography degree programme. The value of education is a fundamentally political issue and therefore politics should be actively taught to students in the arts.

In Victor Burgin’s introduction to Thinking Photography (1982), the author communicates his position on photography theory by offering two distinctions between vocational training and a second form of training in which the student is asked to ‘consider photography in its totality as a general cultural phenomenon, and to develop his or her ideas as to what direction to pursue.’(1982:3) The conversion of former polytechnics into universities in the UK changed the face of photography education in this country, and in quite a clear sense has led to the disappearance of the old models of vocational training for photographers.

Recent government initiatives have turned once again to the idea of vocation. Within the arts we see a more rigorous and constant focus on a student’s professional practice, so that the student can have the “best chance” of being employed after university. Of course we know this doesn’t function the way it should within the context of photography, because there are very few jobs available in the field after completing a degree relative to the amount of students graduating, but nontheless the rhetoric continues. Perhaps, for today’s photography education, the word cultural should be replaced with the word political in Burgin’s above lines. This might collapse the meta-discourse of theory and return thinking to the ‘sphere of the everyday’: that of politics. To cite Burgin once again and to conclude: ‘We cannot go around these debates, we must go through them.’ (1982:9)

References

Azoulay, A. (2012), Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, London: Verso.

Barthes, R. (1982), The Reality Effect in French Literary Theory: A Reader, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Beshty, W. (2012), Aesthetics and Distribution Case (1): Preliminary Notes on Art’s Ability to Radicalize Academia, http://blog.fotomuseum.ch/2012/05/4-aesthetics-and-distribution-case-1-preliminary-notes-on-arts-ability-to-radicalize-academia/

Beshty, W. (2009), Abstracting Photography in Words Without Pictures, New York: Aperture.

Campany, D. (2012), in the comments feed at: http://blog.fotomuseum.ch/2012/01/3-order/

Laruelle, F. (2011), The Concept of Non-Photography, London, New York: Urbanomic/Sequence Press.

Macey, David. (2000), Dictionary of Critical Theory, London: Penguin Books.

Ranciere, J. (2004), The Politics of Aesthetics, London: Continuum.

Rexer, L. (2009), The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography, New York: Aperture.

Spivak, GC. (2012), An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Stiegler, B. (2012), Imperfection, http://blog.fotomuseum.ch/2012/01/1-imperfection/

“I paint your house, you sing a song at my boyfriend’s birthday. The next door neighbour sets up a farm on the roof of his house. Artists sell gloves knitted by Granny – the proceeds are for an art project. Things can be different!”

On May 24th, Notes on Metamodernism will be working on the future. And we would like to invite you to join us! From sustainable design to constructive engagement, and with sensitivity for each other, our surroundings and our artistic practice. And we’re gonna be hard core! New ways of working, implementing the newest technologies and getting back to basics too. It’s sure to be a success!

In collaboration with ArtEZ studium generale we present an extraordinary line-up of internationally renowned speakers and artists – starting with a wake-up call from Laura van Dolron (stand-up philosopher). Also, a diverse range of workouts packed with powertalks, idea injections and sparkling new perspectives. Including names such as: Tod Machover (composer, inventor), Hendrik-Jan Grievink (co-founder Next Nature), Ulf Aminde (visual artist, theatre maker), Nicole Beutler & Jessica Helbach (choreographer & costume designer), Rob Voerman (visual artist), Michiel Schwarz & Diana Krabbendam (sustainist thinkers & designers ), Pascale Gatzen (fashion designer), John-Paul Flintoff (journalist, film maker, auteur), Charles Avery (visual artist, writer), Wunderbaum (actors collective), Willem van Schinkel (sociologist), Nathan Johnson & Katie Chastain (musician, composer of scores to films such as Brick and Looper, producer, visual artist, performer and singer in the wonderful band Faux Fix) and many more. Finally, a cooling down with Timotheus Vermeulen & Robin van den Akker (cultural philosophers, founding editors Notes on Metamodernism).

We will see you there!

Registration from 16 April 2013 via www.artez.nl/studiumgenerale

Richard T. Walker’s three-channel video projection, the speed and eagerness of meaning (2011), sees the artist wandering across the epic expanses of the Mojave Desert on a quest for revelation; a pilgrimage in search of the sublime. As he traverses the vast barren landscape, a monologue describes the insurmountable chasm he encounters between meaning and affect:

As you try to assemble what is now before you, you mourn a little for what you have lost, for you could never again acquire the not knowing that so beautifully placed you in the centre of it all. Now you can only draw parallels, assign differences, translate things into opposites, find commonalities, draw distinctions and embrace the overarching failure of all this togetherness.

Walker has made his way to this remote corner of the globe from his native Britain in order, in that most clichéd of fashions, to find himself, to be ‘at one’ with the world. And yet, as he begins to experience the reality of his vision of unbound nature, he cannot help but collapse what he sees back again onto a familiar pictorial plane, constrained by language and proportion. The compulsion to command and compartmentalise nature appears overpowering, cementing man’s place at the centre of the world, imposing order like one of those “frock coats” so despised by Bataille (who instead envisioned an essentially formless universe).

The great American landscape has long resonated in popular culture as a site of ultimate romantic escapism, from the seductive wilderness of Marlboro Country advertisements, to countless film and television productions. Walker himself cites ‘couple on the run’ movies such as Badlands, Bonnie & Clyde, Gun Crazy and Natural Born Killers, where “the theme seems to be that in order for the couples to be together they are forced to transgress, often committing successive crimes and escaping civilization for the limitless bounds of the American landscape. It is only here that their love can exist.”

But in Walker’s works we find no violence, no romanticised form of Bataillean transgression that might act as an ultimate gateway to the Real. The subject of Walker’s love is instead the landscape itself, his works centring on an intense, solitudinous relationship with nature. He engages in the pathetic fallacy, anthropomorphising the land as an entity capable of reciprocating his desires. And yet the landscape remains impassive; a love destined to be perpetually unrequited.

As with all desires, there is the hope that a kind of deeper essence might somehow be attained; that was the promise of all those alluring depictions of this once faraway land. The artist’s frustration upon arriving is that he can at first only recognise a superficial blanket of appearances smothering all before him  — “the speed and eagerness of meaning”. Eventually, however, he begins to sense that in order to know the unknown, one must unknow the known. He attempts to lose himself to the landscape, to his feelings, surrendering his position at the centre of it all. What is now described is the simultaneous beauty and terror of the sublime, fraught with the anxiety of losing one’s place in the vastness of the cosmos:

He can’t describe anything he sees because nothing fits into words anymore. He occasionally experiences feelings that are associative to the things in front of him but they exist between and beyond emotions, so translation is impossible. He wants to see things as they were. With the ability to ascribe meaning and names to objects again, finding purpose and justification even if it isn’t true. He wants everything to be just what it was.

His search has thus come full circle, from the analytical to the sensual and back, with the fear of a loss of control proving an unbearable obstacle. But rather than simply abandon his quest, or continue in circles ad absurdum (as might be the postmodernist’s curse), he instead pursues a third path, attempting a performative engagement with the landscape that endeavours to transcend its phenomenological bounds. He picks up a guitar and begins to strum a simple, cyclical tune. He starts to gently beat a drum, to pluck the strings of a banjo, to add track upon track of wordless vocals. As the layers of lo-fi sonic texture begin to mount, the wistful intensity builds. The music acts as both a love song to the sublime, and a lament for what has been lost in its pursuit. Audible as a whole only in this final multi-channel edit, the arrangement also serves to highlight the fragmentary nature of experience and the illusory allure of images.

In other works such as let this be us (2012), the artist attempts quite literally to align images of nature with reality, as he treks across the land with photographic prints mounted on tripods, searching for viewpoints where the two will seamlessly merge. There is a simultaneous sense of joy, absurdity and disappointment in this act. Once the perfect perspective is found, an inherent failure reveals itself, foregrounding the discrepancy between visions and reality — each lacking something of the other, and neither encompassing the desired whole.

Inevitably in these pieces, the artist is seen vanishing into the distance, never once looking back towards the lens, carried away on a current of musical earnestness. This act of riding into the sunset thus presents an ambiguous conclusion, both resolved and unresolved, as filmic fantasy of romantic fulfilment, and document to the perpetual longing for elusive horizons.

David Blandy is another artist whose quests have led him to faraway lands. To the crossroads of the Deep South, retracing Robert Johnson’s footsteps, where he attempted to make a Faustian pact with the Devil. To the rebuilt metropolis of Hiroshima, where he explored his family’s wartime history alongside the imagery of post-apocalyptic anime, reinventing himself in cartoon superhero form as the Child of the Atom. Blandy adopts a range of alter egos in his works as he pursues the fantasies and mythologies of popular culture in search of self-transformation. Endearingly, however, he is never quite able to fully transcend his own self-effacing identity. Instilled with a spirit of irony and sincerity, these characters instead become surrogates for the artist’s own voyage of self-discovery.

In Duels and Dualities (2011), Blandy presents a Street Fighter style arcade machine in which the characters have been replaced with the artist’s various alter egos — The Barefoot Lone Pilgrim, The White and Black Minstrel, the all-powerful Child of the Atom — each with their own arsenal of special moves and superpowers. Doing battle with them, however, is the David Blandy character, appearing this time as himself, humorously equipped with only “a hard and a weak punch”. Blandy predictably becomes cannon fodder for his onslaught of alter ego opponents, as they hurricane-kick and sonic-boom his avatar to oblivion. Witty and profound, the work proves the artist remarkably easy to beat at his own game (in a most un-Duchampian manner), highlighting the futility and triumph of art’s transformative promise.

Blandy’s videogame interventions differ dramatically from those of artists such as Cory Arcangel, whose works are saturated with unabashed irony. Arcangel is obsessed with the anti-aesthetic of default settings, and the computer’s inability to stray from a pre-programmed course. His 2011 installation, Beat the Champ, consisted of 14 consoles running ten-pin bowling games, modded in such a way that the computer plays itself, throwing a gutter ball each and every time. The computer always loses, again and again, forever hapless and hopeless. There is a certain throwaway charm to this geeky Sisyphean one-liner, but its closed loop is perhaps indicative of a wider cynical disregard for art’s imaginative potential. Arcangel appears content to assume the role of nihilistic jester — to have nothing to say, and to say it.

Blandy’s works, by contrast, utilise nostalgic, retro technologies to emphasise the enduring power of imagination. His latest project, Background (2013), sees the artist collaborating for the first time with his father, John, who is himself a landscape artist. Blandy senior’s pursuit of nature over the years has led him to depict the same lime tree over 2500 times, documenting its daily development amid the passage of the seasons. Here, however, he has been commissioned to produce a series of pastel drawings of landscapes quite alien to him, assigned the task of depicting the backgrounds from an assortment of 90s fighting games such as Last Blade, Samurai Shodown IV, King of Fighters 99 and Vampire Saviour. Sensitively interpreting these exotic lands, the resultant images portray a peculiar sense of placelessness, as studies of the site of another’s fascination.

For David Blandy, these pixelated videogame vistas resonate in a similar way to Walker’s beloved images of the American West. They function as a ‘great outdoors’, as places of 16-bit dreams where fantasies can be enacted, offering the promise of some kind of metaphysical or supernatural becoming. The accompanying video to this work sees Blandy and his father rendered in virtual form, appearing as on-screen sprites wandering through the flickering digital lands. The pair engage in a conversation about their artistic hopes and aspirations, with the son seeking guidance from his elder, as if quizzing an in-game sage for vital nuggets of knowledge. They discuss the realities of making art, of surviving and supporting a family, and the difficulties in trying to overcome the weight of art history and push their works onwards. Ultimately there are no easy answers to be found, no straightforward routes to reach artistic goals. The dialogue across generations is touching, however, for it displays each artist’s willingness to engage with the other’s domain, united by their overlapping, though divergent journeys.

Far from presenting a series of closed narratives, works such as these speak of a determination to level up, to pursue that obscure object of artistic desire. Both Blandy and Walker are representative of the broader return of the Quest in contemporary culture, following an era of works that sought nothing more than sensationalism, reflecting a cautious metamodern optimism for something beyond our horizons that art might somehow glimpse. Whether it be truth, self-discovery, or some other entirely intangible essence, this remains a path well worth treading.

Richard T. Walker’s show ‘in defiance of being here’ runs until 13th April at Carroll / Fletcher.
David Blandy’s ‘Background’ is on display until 23rd March at Seventeen Gallery.

School of the Americas has postmodern reflection on a par with the likes of Eric Fischl, who deftly demonstrated his best with works like The Old Man‘s Boat and the Old Man‘s Dog back in 1981. In the Fischl painting, there is an outright surrender of any hope of a modern utopia, and five reclining figures on a boat couldn’t care less about the oncoming dangers of the storm, a force emblematic of a global dystopia.

Bartlett’s figures in School of the Americas deal with the oncoming world threat differently. As young protesters, they also find utopian ideals to be suspect; however, in their repose they are ironically taking action against the threat. They are confronting the inventors of the end of the world: us. Specifically, they are facing down the strongest military in the world-a military mandated to prevent apocalypse, but also one with apocalyptic potential that could explode if not regulated by the people. School of the Americas becomes a reflection of ourselves; we still want to believe in something good, even in a world with utopian enthusiasm put into checkmate.

In School of the Americas, the figures seem just as paralyzed as those in The Old Man‘s Boat, but ironically, they are just as active in facing a threat as those in The Raft of the Medusa. They do care. There is postmodern angst for sure but not postmodern apathy.

Certainly, School of Americas and metamodernism in general do not mark the return to old-fashioned identity. Rather, metamodernism allows the possiblity of staying sympathetic to the poststructuralist deconstruction of subjectivity and the self-Lyotard’s teasing of everything into intertextual fragments-and yet it still encourages genuine protagonists and creators and the recouping of some of modernism’s virtues.

Liberal democracy isn’t doing so well these days. The countries that have it seem keen to get rid of it. Presidents are installed without being elected (Italy), autocratic populist parties are on the rise (the US, the UK, France, the Netherlands), debates are settled by hand-to-hand fighting (South Korea), and freedom of speech is inhibited (everywhere). The countries that do not have liberal democracy, meanwhile, do not seem all too excited about getting it. What follows below are thirteen theses on the problems of liberal democracy.

1. History is accumulative. I know, I know. You’ll probably think: “History, huh! Wasn’t this going to be about democracy?” Don’t worry, it will be. But in order to be able to understand what democracy means, we need to get what History is about. For democracy takes place in History: it is born, it grows up, and, eventually, like everything else, it dies. I will explain this correlation further shortly. So, to get back to where I was: History is accumulative. With this I mean to say that History with a capital H, that is, the way we reflect upon thousands of years of human life on this earth, is a narrative that builds. History is not simply a sequence of unrelated events. On the contrary: the way we perceive humanity at, say, the time of the fall of the Berlin wall is linked to the way in which we understand people’s behaviour during the Enlightenment. Similarly, discourses on cyborgs are entwined with accounts of the Renaissance. Each new event is seen in the light of previous events. (To be sure, which events are remembered and which are forgotten, and how accurately these events are recalled, is another question.)

2. History is developmental. The History of humankind is a history of development. We no longer walk around in mammoth skins, we have developed language, our curse words changed, we replaced horses with cars, cars with aeroplanes. This doesn’t mean to say that things have necessarily gotten better or worse. It just says that things have changed and are changing. The way we think changes, what we want changes, how we set out to fulfil those wants changes, and so on.

3. History is plural. History is not a single line. If the writings of White and Borges have taught us anything, it is that History is the label for innumerable accumulations and developments. Some of these narratives follow each other; others run parallel. There are narratives that cross, there are those that diverge; they splinter, they rejoin; they run amok, they tear apart.

4. Liberal democracy represents a stage (or rather, stages) within this accumulative, developmental, plural History. The idea of democracy developed sometime during Greek antiquity and was reformulated at various points in History later on. At present, liberal democracy appears to be the dominant principle of rule. What this means is that, as Wikipedia informs us, most political systems today “are characterized by fair, free, and competitive elections between multiple distinct political parties, a separation of powers into different branches of government, the rule of law in everyday life as part of an open society, and the protection of human rights and civil liberties for all persons.”

5. Liberal democracy does not represent the End of History. Some thinkers in the nineties concluded that liberal democracy constituted the end of accumulation and development. “It doesn’t get any better than this”, they said. And: “there isn’t a political system in the world that is as profitable and sustainable for all those involved”. Or something along those lines. It is true that liberal democracy is the most prevalent form of government today. It is true also that liberal democracy has done wonderful things for many countries and many people. Yet it is not the only principle of cohabitation, nor is it necessarily the best (if one takes into account the many principles of rule that may exist in the future). It certainly won’t be the last. Nothing that is ongoing has ever ended. It is a contradiction in terms. In fact,

6. Liberal democracy is in crisis. Yep, you read it correctly: liberal democracy is having a tough time. I even dare say it is in decline. This is not something I personally celebrate. Although I think there’s plenty wrong with liberal democracy, I do believe that democracy in a broader sense has proven the best form of government yet. For one, it allows me to write all this (or so I hope). What I mean is that over the past few years, some of the core principles on which liberal democracy is constituted have been jeopardized. The divisions between state power and law enforcement are increasingly blurry. The public sphere is dissolving. The precise meaning of things like ‘citizenship’, ‘collective agreement’ and ‘human rights’ is subject to constant debate.  Questions of equality – of equal rights, of equal access, of equal treatment – are ignored. Freedom of expression, on blogs and on twitter and in churches, is under attack.

7. Democracy is always in crisis. There is, of course, a problem with the above reasoning. On at least three accounts (but I imagine there are more): firstly, pace Derrida and his friends, nothing is solid or stable. Everything, History and Liberal Democracy not excepted, is defined through differentiation and therefore not merely liable to change but is in a way in itself change. Second, democracy as a principle of rule is founded on dialectics, on conflict and negotiation: in theory, it is the ever changing quotidian of what all parts of society want and need. Indeed, the moment one part weighs heavier, dissensus becomes consensus, is the moment democracy ceases to be democracy and becomes something else. So not just is democracy an animal that changes in the way all animals change, growing up, growing old; it is a chameleon, for whom change is a strategy for survival. So to say that democracy changes beyond the parameters within which it is defined is something of a catch-22, since those parameters themselves are adaptable. In addition, and this is the third point, one may justifiably say that it is not so much the case that the principles of democracy are threatened now whereas they weren’t previously, but rather that the Internet and mass media have enabled greater awareness of it. That said, it seems to me that there are certain developments – five, specifically – that do not merely illustrate the ways liberal democracy changes but problematize what liberal democracy as change is about.

8. Democracy is in crisis of representation. Liberal democracy has traditionally been founded on principles of representation. Throughout the twentieth century it worked something like this: since it is impossible to all govern together if you are with, say, 100 million people, each person elects someone to govern on their behalf. That person represents you. However, because that person represents not only you but also millions of other people by whom s/he was elected, s/he has to negotiate your concerns with those of others. The bad thing about this system is that it may happen that your concerns are not always addressed as you would like them to be. But the good thing is that the more radical and/or ridiculous concerns are filtered out and their compromise will be something that is actually attainable. In this system, you may be extreme in private; but the public sphere is a space of compromise, or what they used to call PC. Since the arrival of the Internet, and web 2.0 in particular, this system has been problematized. It is possible to voice your concern to large groups of others with the click of a mouse. You can write a petition for any one cause and have it signed by millions in a day, for instance. Or you can tweet to your followers. You no longer need someone else to speak for you. This is good for liberal democracy because it allows the citizen to address his/her concern precisely as s/he’d like it. Yet the bad thing is that it allows for the most radical and ridiculous things to take foothold in the public domain. As the boundaries between private and public become blurry, so to it becomes unclear where extremity begins and ends.

9. Democracy is in crisis of postmodernism. Corollary to the crisis of representation is the crisis of what one may call, for lack of a better word, the crisis of postmodernism. Since the late 1980s, politicians no longer tell grand narratives but instead try and listen to the various micro-narratives that exist. There are no more five-year plans and utopias. What we have are political aides conducting peer groups made up from all parts of society to find out what the constituents ‘actually’ want. This is clearly a good thing since it allows politics to cater more closely to the perceived needs of the people. Yet, as the BBC satire The Thick of It has shown so well, it is also a bad thing since it reduces politics to a game of catching up, of reacting rather than acting. Instead of leading the crowds, politicians today seem to be walking after them, asking the slowest of the bunch where they are heading. I should stress here once more that I have no stake in the decline of liberal democracy. When I write that something is good or bad, it is not a value judgement but an observation on the nature of the political system. (A disclaimer: recently, stories have returned to the forefront of politics. But it is a different kind of storytelling, one very much tied up with the metamodern oscillation between modern and postmodern practices, swinging between absolutism and relativism, believing and feigning. I will leave this discussion for another time, however.)

10. Democracy is in crisis of mediation. This point has been made so often that it is turned into a cliché, but a cliché that remains valid today. Mass media, especially television with its narrative arcs and close-ups, have made politics into a series of metaphoric soundbites, emphasising emotional resonance, and, most of all, personality. As the linguist George Lakoff has famously detailed in his book Moral Politics, presidential debates are no longer about Reason, about argumentation, economical calculation and programme notes; they are about using the one allegory that sticks in audiences’ minds, about the anecdotes that people can relate to, about the human being one is outside of politics. I certainly would not wish to say that politics was not always to some extent also about the latter, but today, it seems, it is exclusively about it.

11. Democracy finds itself in crisis of affiliation. Philosophers tend to say that democracy and capitalism are historically intertwined. It’s a long story that has its origin in the reformation, in the writings of Luther and Calvinus in particular. What matters here is that for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the relationship between them was such – at least in theory – that capitalism served the needs of democracy. Put bluntly, the financial system would be changed to improve the political status quo: to create – again, in theory – general wealth, to generate peace, to maintain peace. Today, however, democracy serves capitalism. Governments make alterations to the law so as to increase capital gains they do not necessarily share in. I, as did many others, thought that the financial crisis would at least shift this balance back in favour of politics. But it did not. On the contrary. After bankers earned lots of money on which they paid little taxes, money with which they threatened to leave if they were to pay higher taxes, they asked the government to bail them out. Not only did our governments do so, they then allowed these guys to pay even fewer taxes. The gap in the government’s own budget was filled by privatising every last bit of the country. I understand things are not this simple – but are they?

12. Democracy is in crisis of territory. Where does a democracy begin and end? In the past, there were clearly defined nation states with clearly protected borders. Each state had its own set of rules, to which its citizens abided. Since the late nineties especially, however, these boundaries have become increasingly diffuse. The EU is a case in point. The borders between democratic countries like Germany and Austria, France and Spain, are no longer controlled. If I travel to Belgium, I do not have to show my passport. I can move freely. This is great, for many reasons. Yet it is also not great, for the simple reason that democracy does not travel with me. As recent research by Ines Wagner and Nathan Lillie has pointed out, there are workers in all the above countries that can not claim the rights you would expect from a democratic country, simply because they are employed in another democratic country. If you work for company X in country A, but are employed by subcontractor Y in country B, you are in a bit of a pickle. The union in country A has trouble representing you because you are employed in country B, while the union in country B encounters some problems because you work in country A. The result is that some of Europe’s most expensive and expansive projects – energy projects, academies, the European Bank – are constructed by people who earn less than the minimum wage and more often than not need to take a loose approach to labour rights. My point here is not that we should return to strong nation states. It is rather that if liberal democracy wants to prevail, it needs to think about these matters – but this, of course, would mean that it should also rethink points 11 (capitalist gains), 10 (complex issues), 9 and 8 (do something that will, judging from the recent right-wing sentiments, not go down well with everyone).

13. There are alternatives. Many of us still believe that though liberal democracy is flawed it is still the best of the bunch. It’s better, for instance, than communism, or Nazism or what not. Period. But not every form of government that is not democracy is necessarily fascism, communism, libertarianism, and so on. Just because something does not exist yet does not mean it is not possible. There are other systems out there. We just need to think them up.

Image: via Focus.de

At a first glance, the novels display many similarities with their immense size and the convoluted form of their plots. Although many differences between the works also exist, I support the thesis that they come into contact with each other in their utopian moments. As I use no secondary literature for the development of my ideas, everything which follows is my subjective interpretation.

‘Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften’ is interspersed with all kinds of utopian reflections. The main character, Ulrich, creates and experiences a multitude of utopian positions in the course of the novel, which he, however, almost always rejects. He develops his ideas alone or in discussion with other figures in the novel, until the second book where he finds an equal discussion partner in his long lost sister Agathe, and creates the last and most radical idea of the book, the utopia of the ‘other state’. Parallel to the discussions and ideas of Ulrich, a diverse range of utopian positions is formulated in the novel through other characters. However, these too also always fail or are anti-social and therefore written as a dystopia.

The development and planning of the ‘Parallel Campaign’, which is motivated by the idea of utopia, run throughout the plot. The novel is written in Vienna during the Imperial and Royal Monarchy shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. The fragmented and convoluted plot line outlines the preparations of noble personalities, amongst them – more by chance than anything else – Ulrich, for the honouring of the 70-year jubilee of Kaiser Franz Joseph in 1918. Because festivities for the 30-year jubilee of the German Kaiser Wilhelm II are being prepared at the same time in the neighbouring country, the preparatory committee calls itself ‘Parallel Campaign’. During the planning, which mostly remains very vague, several interests collide, which are constantly shifting between national, political, social, personal and spiritual motivations. The Parallel Campaign becomes a farce and a reversal of every utopian idea because it is a focus of nationalist and capitalist interests, which are always viewed critically by Ulrich. At the end of the first section of the second book, the conflicts of interest are deliberately intensified through individual characters, such that the preparations for the Parallel Campaign lead to the outbreak of the First World War and the planning of social utopia therefore reverses into a state of dystopia.

At the same time, Ulrich and Agathe begin their private attempt to live in the utopia of the ‘other state’ which they have designed. The development of the ‘other state’ is based on Ulrich’s study of the writings of mystics and on the idea which he refers to earlier as the ‘sense of possibility’ which implies that everything which exists could just as well be different, and so presents an opposite to the ‘sense of reality’.  In the ‘other state’, man finds himself in a constant state of ecstasy, in which there is no longer any definite, purposeful love but rather everything is done ‘out of love’. At the same time, however, the ideas at any point are quite clear and can reflect this state. The ‘other state’ promotes feeling as the equal partner of rational thinking and – intended as a permanent state – extends beyond the power of human imagination. Therefore, the attempts of the siblings to live in the ‘other state’ remain in the balance and no literary completion is given by Musil.

Wallace’s novel, which emerged two generations later, is set in a state of dystopia. The plot is played out in a parody of the near future in North America. The dramatic composition is fragmented and convoluted to an even greater extent than in ‘Mann ohne Eigenschaften’. Although many plot lines also run parallel to each other, meet each other and separate in ‘Mann ohne Eigenschaften’ and numerous different characters appear, these elements are taken to extremes in ‘Infinite Jest’. This impression is intensified by the aforementioned presence of 388 footnotes which explain and add to expressions or events. The plot is held together in all its complexity by central themes such as drug addiction, child abuse, competitive sport (tennis), family structures, the entertainment and advertisement industry, political tensions, oppression and struggles for independency and psychological illness. Wallace creates a strong realism and the possibility of empathy with the respective protagonists and situations by his use of enormous linguistic variety and diversity. This makes the confrontation with the many cases of violence and abuse in the novel in parts hard to bear.

At the central point stands a family, not in the least its father, James Incandenza, a film director who committed suicide. His ghost later appears to another main character, the ex-junkie Don Gately.  Don Gately and James Incandenza are connected by Joelle van Dyke who is at first infinitely beautiful and later ‘deformed’ by an accident.  She finds herself an inmate in the same rehabilitation clinic as Gately and used to work as an actress for Incandenza. Before his death, Incandenza made a film with the title ‘Infinite Jest’. The work is allegedly so perfect that everyone who sees it lapses into an infantile state of full satisfaction, can no longer think rationally and is seized by the urge just to watch the film over and over again. Joelle van Dyke was the main character in the film and different political interests are concentrated on the master tape of ‘Infinite Jest’. However, it is still unclear until the end whether the film really has the effect it is claimed to have.

In all the endeavours of the characters of the novel, the search for ecstasy seems to be of key significance. The endeavours are, to the greatest extent, perverted and manifest themselves in slight to excessive drug abuse, rape, torture, addiction to entertainment, success and sex, cruelty to animals, power and violence. The quest for ecstasy culminates in the film ‘Infinite Jest’ which links the plot lines to each other as regards both content and dramatic composition, and – in its alleged effect – presents the highest form of intoxication in the novel. Despite all this, the novel also displays scenes of humanity and charity and so creates small utopian moments in a society of dystopia.

Wallace’s ‘Infinite Jest’ and Musil’s ‘Mann ohne Eigenschaften’ link the idea of oscillation between utopia and dystopia. This parallelism is particularly interesting if one considers that ‘Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften’ emerged around sixty years before ‘Infinite Jest’. From this one could infer that the literary classification of modernism does not fully apply to ‘Mann ohne Eigenschaften’. Rather, the work – as well as Wallace’s ‘Infinite Jest’ – seems to connect modern and post-modern concepts and so, in a complex manner, to break these perceptions.

In ‘Mann ohne Eigenschaften’, a strong moment of hope prevails, which manifests itself in particular in Ulrich’s far-reaching reflections. Hope is broken again and again by reality but this doesn’t lead to stopping or giving up. Ulrich tirelessly creates utopian states although they never last. However, it is left open at the end, whether or not the utopian states can ever be realised. On a personal level, the originally cold Ulrich succeeds in finding a strong love for his sister. The novel doesn’t allow the siblings to live out their incestuous love and in this way a tension is allowed to arise between the possibility of love and its failure in real life. This question also remains unanswered and so creates a moment of tension on many levels between vision and reality. As far as politics is concerned, the novel ends in catastrophe and reflects the social situation at the beginning of the ‘30s in Berlin, where Musil completed the first part of the novel before he left Germany in 1933.

Wallace’s novel also makes despair about social circumstances into a theme. However, in Musil’s novel, Dystopia arises as the logical result of the events while in Wallace’s novel it exists as a lasting state of society. The search for ecstasy always becomes clear in the many hopeless individual fates in ‘Infinite Jest’. The state of ecstasy is not seen as a utopian moment as in Musil, rather it is presented as a delusion through varied forms of addiction and exercise of power. The search always fails. However, in doing so a reversal occurs in which, in a complete sense of forlornness, a strong longing for naturalness and love develops. This materialises again and again in the novel in small plotlines and, here too, allows the question to arise of how one can ‘become a human differently and better’ (Robert Musil, ‘Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften’).