Modernism

The Subject of an Object

a certain object bangalore poster

Flyer: Goethe-Institut / a certain object

Subject | Object Formation

a certain object is a multifaceted collaboration between Alfons Knogl, Holger Otten, and occasionally Daniel Ansorge, each having a strong artistic presence in various mediums

Otten and Ansorge came together in 2015 for Perspektive 02, the second in a series of exhibitions curated by Otten and Lars Breuer held at the Ludwig Forum Aachen (Cologne). Otten sought to exhibit artists working in groups or fields not typically represented in the traditional gallery space. Perspektive 01 was a collaboration with a Dusseldorf publishing house and Otten felt the image based content from Magazine, a record label run by Ansorge, Jens-Uwe Beyer, and Crato would make an interesting continuum of the series.

Magazine

Unlike most record labels, Magazine began as a visual concept. The idea took shape in 2007 when Crato (John Harten), a graphic designer by training, wanted an outlet to recontextualize his vast image-based archive of objects, materials, landscapes, science-y things, film stills, photographs of artwork, architecture, the explosive, and the mundane. Images vastly different from one another yet united by a certain level of provocativeness.  

Ansorge told the Bangalore audience that at that point the only solid idea was an archival aspect of a series, not necessarily a music label. Indeed one can imagine that Beyer, who operates under the alias Popnoname, was busy with Kompakt, the Cologne label that exploded the techno scene in the 2000s and Ansorge, best known as Barnt, was busy blowing dance floor minds with his DJ sets.

But Ansorge was taken with the tactility of the record and the cover. “An opportunity to do something, not just cover something,” he explained. This perfect square would act as a canvas for Crato’s recontextualized visuals, each release would be a reinterpretation of the exhibition, a new take on curation.  Thus the conceptual dimension of Magazine evolved.

Beyer and Ansorge struggled to find the musical identity for the label and during the talk Ansorge implied that solidifying a particularly musical identity was eventually dropped, a point discovered by listening to each release; it is hard to ascribe a particular identity to the sonancy of Magazine.

Magazine 01 was released in 2010 and limited to 300 records. Keeping true to the concept, each record features a series of curated images on the record cover, with no reference to the artist. Textual presence is limited to a numeric indication of the record’s placement within the continuum of releases: Magazine 01, 02 and so on.

Anti-Relationship

In conversation with Otten and Knogl, Ansorge was asked about the collaborative aspect between the sound of a particular release and the image curation. Ansorge explained that Crato is given complete freedom over the album cover and often creates without hearing or knowing who the album artist will be. While there was an initial temptation to coordinate between the image and the sound, Ansorge and Beyer resisted. One audience member, trying to make sense of this, asked Ansorge if maybe Magazine was trying to create a juxtaposition between image and sound to which Ansorge responded no, we’re “not trying to juxtapose because then it would be a relationship.”

Such commitment to parallel artistic processes that come together only at the moment of release is reminiscent of Cunningham’s forced divergence between sound and movement, united only during the live performance in which Cunningham’s dancers, after rehearsing for months in silence, were suddenly confronted with both audience and a sound. One imagines that Cunningham too might have resisted the word juxtaposition, preferring instead the idea of chance.

In the case of Magazine I would argue that Crato’s choreography of images is what holds Magazine together best for it links incredibly diverse musicians and their albums to a larger archival project. The fact that this is a project, with a present,  future and past was reinforced by Ansorge’s discussion of closure.

“When you do an archive or a magazine you also think about the end. Not just the moment, you think about the start, the moment, and the end.” A good curator knows the power of restraint, that by creating boundaries, criteria, and closure a freedom for experimentation, for finding similarity within the dissimilarity and vice versa, the archive begins to reveal itself. 

Collector | Collecting

There is an intertextuality (though in this instance I’m referring to the visual) at play between the notion of collecting, curating, and representing that is present within the concept of Magazine. We have the Crato the collector of images who becomes the curator of his collection in order to put forth an archive that we, in turn will collect in the form of the physical record.

Walter Benjamin, himself a serial collector of both physical objects and conceptual ideas, wrote extensively on collecting and the Collector, arguing that collecting is childlike in the sense that one collects not for the commodity value of the object, but for the potential, which for Benjamin, had revolutionary power.

While I wouldn’t say that Magazine holds revolutionary potential by way of politics and society, it offers potential by way of thinking about ownership, aesthetic, and visual composition in an age of image based information and social identity circulation. Let me contextualize this with a completely different topic.

In this week’s NYT there is an important article by Britt Julious on the appropriation of a Michelle Obama image that became a public mural in Chicago. The crowd-funded mural was initiated by Chris Devin, an urban planner/artist who wanted to ‘inspire hope’ in Chicago youth. On the mural’s GoFundMe page, a different image of Michelle Obama was used than that which eventually became the mural. He referred to the final image as a reflection of how he sees Michelle Obama: “I wanted to present her as what I think she is, so she’s clothed as an Egyptian queen. I thought that was appropriate.” When images of the completed mural were circulated on the internet it surfaced that the image was not ‘created’ by Devin but came directly from the Instagram account of 24 year-old artist Gelila Mesfin without permission or acknowledgment. Mesfin, originally from Ethiopia, used a photo taken by NYT’s photographer Collier Schorr, and transformed Michelle Obama into a Nubian queen. She uploaded the recontextualized image onto her Instagram feed, crediting Schorr as the producer of the original image.

When Devin was accused of using Mesfin’s image without credit or permission, he explained that his team ‘found’ the image online and thought it perfect for the mural. Devin apologized to Mesfin and offered royalties.

Leaving aside the extremely pertinent conversation about race and gender raised by Julious, I want to draw attention to this aspect:

“Mr. Devins’s apology fails to address why his method of finding, reclaiming and editing images was so problematic in the first place. Users of social platforms like Tumblr, Instagram and Facebook regularly act as “curators,” picking and choosing images to create a particular narrative and online presence. They are often unconcerned about the intent or identity of the images’ creators. Instead, users care about how the images fit into their personal aesthetics, helping them make a statement or tell a story.”

Julious is describing the quotidian reality of image reproduction, collection, and curation today. A reality that harks back to a statement made by Benjamin almost a century ago. “The crises of artistic reproduction which manifests itself in this way can be seen as an integral part of the crisis in perception itself.”*

Benjamin’s context might be different, but the statement holds value. For example, visit Chris Devin’s website and learn that a service offered is ‘positive graffiti’ an art form to help businesses “cater to a hipper clientele.” While I’m hard pressed to think of a time in Western modernity in which artistic reproduction, (if we are to go off the writing of art historians) wasn’t considered to be in a crisis, a man offering stylized graffiti to corporates for a fee certainly seems like a good contender. 

Mesfin, Devins, Crato, and social platforms broadly are collecting and curating images and more or less making an aesthetic statement. Some may focus on the plagiarism aspect of reproduction as grounds for differentiation between these, for lack of better phrasing, high and low art forms, but I am more tempted to focus on the question of intent (no less problematic than plagiarism) within the process of image recontextualization.

There is a veracity behind Crato’s approach (and perhaps Mesfin as well), a sincere strive to find the potential within the reappropriated image and curation of images. Evidence of this can be found in an earlier project of his, Public Folder, a serial book, that also dealt with the re-reproduction of images and meaning. Below is a call for contributions:

“The fourth edition of the serial book project Public Folder is an artistic analysis of the 120 images, which are stored on the Voyager Golden Record and sent to space exactly 35 years ago. Every image is given to an artist and should function as a starting point for the artist’s own work. The collected artworks will be related to each other by the arrangement in the book–conceptual framed by the titel [Sic].”

While I can’t verify this, I believe Crato’s repertoire of images comes before the reign of Instagram. They were not tagged and loaded into Pinterest but rather cut, with physical scissors, from physical newspapers, magazines—those objects of the pre-virtual public domain. While the curation of these images is not as politically loaded or reconfigured as that of the German dada artists, there is an essence of assemblage that seems undeniably German in artistic tradition.

I think that is why these images, even when reproduced in an edition of 300 records or showcased in a Cologne art gallery, possess a physicality and weight to them that seems to rise above, or perhaps sink with a gravitational pull not found in the virtual domain.

Introducing the Object

Now, if we couple the weighty anachronisticity of the images with the heavy tactility that comes, of course, from the music, the record, we start to gradate from the concept to the object, the question of the object of sound, something Knogl, a sculpture by training, is particularly preoccupied with.

While Knogl is not directly affiliated with Magazine, he, like Otten, intercepts in various ways. Knogl, who is from Cologne and came to India as a Bangalore Resident in 2013, explained that by way of sculpture’s physicality questions such as what is the meaning of object, the meaning of material, what an object or material could be, can be explored.

Like Magazine, there is a weight that strikes you when viewing Knogls work. This weight is more obvious because it’s an actual object (often made of cement, marble) but there is an equal heaviness of concept, process, and idea. For example, in his series of sculptural coffee tables, Knogl explains that he was attracted to this form because they represented, in the aftermath of the world war, not so much a functional object but rather a shift in perception and new direction of intellectual thinking, represented by gathering around the coffee table.

Apart from his sculptures, Knogl also makes music and his increasingly occupied with the idea of the object of sound. “I had this tendency of doing music and always had this feeling that it was connected to the work as sculpture but rarely I put it out because of course you can make sculptures about sound but it’s not about that. It’s sculpture as music or music as sculpture, but it’s not a sculpture that makes music.”

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a Certain Object: Goethe-Institut 24.3.2017

In February of 2013 Knogl performed with Otten and Ansorge for the first time. Knogl and Ansorge were friends from their time at the Academy of Media Arts (KHM) and had shown together at DREI; Otten and Ansorge met in 2008 while working as curators for Simultanhalle and started working together as musicians in 2011. Knogl was in the audience during their performance of Duett 13, which was part of a larger Stephen Print exhibition held at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne. 

The 2013 performance, also held at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, featured The World in Pieces, a “musical reflection about the unrestrained and powerful transformation of Istanbul,” that Knogl created during a residency in the city. The World in Pieces was released a month later as a 12 inch on Kompakt. This performance saw Knogl and Otten founding a certain object, with Ansorge as an occasional collaborator.

When asked by the Deccan Herald what the intention behind the recent performance at Goethe-Institut was Knogl said the hope was that audience would experience the physicality of the sound, reflected in the name, a certain object.

Knogls explained that part of this is accomplished through the absence of a beat. While the absence of repetition, particularly one often set at 125 bpms, does lend itself to a new physicality of sound, I don’t think that should be identified as a criteria. For many of us who, on occasion, commit ourselves to that dark room, that unadorned object-space with the sole intention of listening, collectively, and looking, collectively, for sound, find and experience that physicality, that certain object. Instead, what a certain object offers that is different from other sound-based experiences is a more nuanced awareness of process, an awareness found in the sculptural work of Knogls, the curatorial work of Ottens, and the project of Magazine. All three share an openness, perhaps even natural commitment to multiple artistic mediums and practices in order to arrive at something, be it an object, sound, or exhibition that both blurs and defines assumed boundaries, an arrival that is experienced in real time during during the actual performance.

For this reason the evening left me wondering if perhaps it was a certain subject that preoccupies a certain object, the subject of physicality and object in the context of sound, the subject of the process of sound becoming an object which will, undoubtedly, continue to be explored in their upcoming album.

*Benjamin, W. (1968). Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Schocken Books: New York. pg. 187.

The Gloved Era of Urban Chaos

Paris may have been the capital of 19th century modernity, but it was Berlin that gave birth to the gloved era of urban chaos. Unlike Paris, London, or even New York, Berlin at the turn of the 20th century was not just about the radical transformation of the city, but the birth of the city itself. The streetscape was a popular theme in German literature, visual art (e.g. Berlin Alexanderplatz or Kirchner’s Nollendorfplatz), and silent cinema. New techniques of speed and montage eliminated the passivity of the spectator by placing him or her directly into the frenzy of the crowded street. No matter that there was no sound, the metropolis was in motion. The stimulation was at times overwhelming, as were the passions of being confronted, even bombarded with the seductions of urban capitalism.

Chaos, desire, and disorder are urban phenomenon, and are responded to with order, control, and rationality. Desire arose from the visual stimulation, the temptation of material things in shop windows, new opportunities for physical proximity to members of the opposite sex. Disorder therefore arose not only the actually existing urban condition, the traffic, the construction, but also from the passions and desires–the possibilities–produced within the mind.

All this comes together in  Asphalt, the 1929 German film about a police officer whose life spirals into chaos after becoming entangled with a female thief. Gustav Fröhlic spends his days in the middle of a busy Berlin intersection directing everything from people, to cars, to horses and carriages. We see that he is equally precise and obedient in his home life: he comes home, removes his white gloves, eats his meal with his family, goes to bed and repeats the routine with the efficiency of machine technology.

Gustav’s spotless glove of order becomes unclean when he catches a beautiful young, impeccably dressed woman (Betty Amann) stealing a diamond from a jewelery shop. Realizing the implications of her actions, Amann breaks down and tries to appeal to the emotions and sympathies of the men around her.

“I’m behind on my rent,” she weeps (technically this is silent), “I should be thrown out tomorrow into the streets.”

So overcome by her beauty and plight, the owner of the jewelery store forgives her. Betty smiles to herself, thinking she is free to go. Gustav however insists on upholding the law, grabs her arm, and escorts her out.

In the police car, Betty once again tries to win Gustav over. She weeps onto his shoulders to let her go: “I have such fear of the streets!”

The camera focuses on Gustav, whose eyes reveal an expression somewhere between intrigue, pity, and, ultimately, indifference.

Gustav’s ability to control the chaos of the street is due to the fact that he simply has never actually succumb to it. His white gloves protect him from chaos and disorder of everyday experience, they grant him the power of objective rationality. The metaphor is extended further–into his passions. Betty asks to go to her apartment so that she may get her papers to bring to the police station. He considers her request and eventually agrees.

As they walk up to her apartment she continues to weep and plea to let her go. He refuses, walks to the window and waits for her to collect her things. As soon he looks away from her however, she locks the door to her bedroom and runs into his arms. Her attempts to seduce Gustav are so strongly rejected it is almost comical to watch. So strong is his sense of control, his refusal to go against what is right, that Betty must, almost literally, rape Gustav. There are no subtleties in this film; its explicit seduction and blatant sexuality must be interpreted as an extension of the city itself.

The urban chaos of the early 20th century was in large part due to the increased presence of unaccompanied women on the street. Woman was the sex that was undisciplined. It was thought that, because she was not in control of herself and her passions, she was a danger to both herself and the city itself. When Betty claims to fear the streets, we may interpret that in a number of ways. If she afraid of her passion, her inability to resist the temptations of luxury goods? Although her life is out of control, (gambling, shopping, a luxury apartment she can no longer pay for), by appearing out of control she is, in fact, in control. She was in control of the situation with the owner of the jewelery store, and now, after the seduction, she is in control of the situation with Gustav. He eventually loses himself to the pleasure of physicality. Afterward, he is calm, human, humbled, and embarrassed by his actions. He rips up the ticket, leaves the apartment, and returns home to his parents, where his dinner waits on the kitchen table. He tries but cannot eat, there is too much chaos within his mind. She on the other hand is unfazed by what has just happened. She eats her meal in bed and drifts off to sleep.

As the film progresses, both characters lose control and fall for each other so that the story becomes a somewhat classic love story, with Weimar Berlin as the backdrop, that third character that brings the two central characters together. Whether or not you’re a fan of the conclusion, director Joe May’s ability to capture the chaos of the Berlin streetscape is undeniably brilliant.

Work Means Liberity!

Reading Mark Kingwell’s essay, “The Language of Work,” in last month’s Harper’s Magazine is an opportunity to break from the complexities of our current global crisis and return to a more simple argument. The purpose of his essay is to get at the essence of work, what it is, and why we should resist it.

Resist work?! That sounds a bit radical, even for us Marxists who are still preoccupied with questions of labor, production, and reproduction.

But Kingwell says forget exploitation and alienation; let’s even forget capitalism (well, for a minute). Let’s question work and its invisible pervasiveness.

“The values of work are still dominant in far too much of life,” Kingwell writes, “indeed, these values have exercised their own kind of linguistic genius, creating a host of phrases, terms, and labels that bolster, rather than challenge, the dominance of work,”(19).”

The question for Kingwell is not how to achieve labor peace but why and how such a destructive concept of labor has managed to prevail under socialism, democracy, fascism, and every other political ideology. This argument makes sense, maybe even more than most the Neo-Marxists I spend my time reading. To better illustrate his point, Kingwell revisits Bertrand Russell’s brilliantly straightforward essay, “In Praise of Idleness,” a cohesive argument against the development of modern work.

“From the beginning of civilization until the Industrial Revolution, a man could, as a rule, produce by hard work little more than was required for the subsistence of himself and his family…” Now however, “Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.”

For Russell, modern society is marked by the fact that while new technologies are creating efficiencies that should let us work less, most of us are working more. Furthermore: “It seems more likely that they will find continually fresh schemes, by which present leisure is to be sacrificed to future productivity.”

Although Russell’s essay was written in 1932, it doesn’t take rocket science to see the contemporary validity of such a claim. Smaller computers that commute more faster, Wi-Fi on airplanes, overnight shipping…these are all schemes of productivity that allow us to overlook the disturbing reality that it is virtually impossible to be idle.

“Work hard, fly right,”(Continental); “Empowering People,”(Acer); “Long Live Dreams,”(American Express); “Choose Freedom”(Toshiba); “It’s Everywhere You Want to Be,”(Visa), all of these reflect the great achievement of modern work culture and it’s ability to disguise its essential nature.  While this is all quite clever, as Kingwell illustrates, there is a very dark reality behind such ideology.

“The grim ironists of the Third Reich were exceptionally forthright when they fixed the maxim Arbeit macht frei—Work Shall Make You Free—over the gates at Dachau and Aushwitze,”(19).

Reading this, I thought immediately of a quote from Rene Clair’s A Nous La Liberte, a hilarious but dead on representation of the irony of work as embodied in early 20th century capitalist society.

“Work is mandatory, because work means liberty” says one factory worker to Emile, an ex-convict recently freed from prison. Released in 1931, A Nous shares many similarities with Russell’s “In Praise of Idleness,” the most obvious being the resistance to work. The film opens with men seated along a conveyor belt assembling wooden toy horses. As the camera zooms out, we realize we’re not in a factory, but a prison. We hear:

Liberty is a man’s dues

He enjoys love and skies of blue

But then there are some

Who no worse crimes have done

It’s the sad story we tell

From a prison cell

The story begins here, with a friendship between two inmates, Emile and Louis. One evening, both attempt to escape but the plan is botched. As the prison guards run after the two escapees, Emile tosses the rope to Louis so that he may climb over the last prison wall and onto freedom. Using a combination of wit and resourcefulness, Louis  begins manufacturing phonographs.

Within a short period of time, Louis becomes the world’s largest phonograph manufacturer. He is now part of the industrial elite, participating in the idleness characteristic of the bourgeoisie: dinner parties, drinking, and pointless banter.

Louis’s success is juxtaposed as we cut back to Emile. Finally freed from prison, he heads into a field and falls asleep, only to be woken up by an officer. “Not at work? Don’t you know that….” In a classic move, Clair makes explicit the paradox of modern society by taking us out of the plot and into the French classroom where a professor, writing on the chalkboard, announces to his pupils: “Work is mandatory. Because work means liberty.” The pupils, hunched over at their desks, diligently write and repeat, “Work is mandatory because work means liberty.”We flash forward to the factory workers, hunched over the conveyor belt of gramophones and back to Emile who is walking toward the large, industrial complex by the force of the two officers.

Emile joins the ranks of men waiting to be employed by Louis’s factory. The men march into a room, sit down, and follow the directions of a recorded voice:

Walk in formation

Will give you a job of worth

You who seek an occupation

State your name and date of birth

Leave fingerprint identification

About-face in formation

Emile’s inability to adapt to the pace and efficiency of modern work quickly gets him into trouble. Exasperated with Emile, the factory supervisors bring him to Louis. While Louis doesn’t initially recognize his old friend, Emile’s endearing incomprehension of modern work strikes Louis, who suddenly recognizes what happens to the human spirit when it succumbs to “our character as social animals forever competing for relative advantage,”(Kingwell, 20).

Louis quickly returns to his old, playful demeanor, much to the disgust of his class-hungry girlfriend. She scolds Louis, calling his behavior “inexcusable” after he and Emile ruin a dinner party. His reply is simple: “What do you want? Money, here…you bore me!”

Louis understands that this boredom, while an offshoot of idleness, is not the kind Russell propounds but the kind he is weary of: namely the repetitious passivity of material comfort, the passivity that stupefies the senses and is no more enjoyable than the mechanical repetition associated with the 10-hour factory workday.

A series of events unfold and Louis is forced to abandon the factory, which has recently undergone a new technological marvel. Louis explains to the supervisors and workers:

“In our new plant, men will have no other task other than supervising the machines. The machines will do all the work. They will manufacture our phonographs. ‘Organization and progress,’ that is our motto.’” While that is certainly a motto of modern capitalism, Clair gives it a twist. The speech continues: “While the machine has proven that it can replace the hand of men, it cannot replace his brain.”

Because the factory can do the work of humans, humans are free to be idle. In the final scene we see the workers dancing together at a picnic along the water. Emile and Louis walk down the road, without a penny in their pockets.

When all things around us operate

Friends, let us enjoy our idleness

Beneath sunny skies, what a sweet life

To laze about and sing like this

Let’s indulge in this infinite elation

We can only imagine that Russell’s prophecy of idleness come true: “Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out, partly for this reason, and partly because it will involve long and severe work for all.”

Performing the Rehearsal: The Strip Tease of Modernity

Hegel changed the course of modern philosophy when he asserted that history, driven by changes in the ideals and values of a given people, is  contradictory by nature. Yet modernity for Hegel was characterized by a sense of universality, thus lending itself to a certain idealism which was soon shattered by Marx, who used Hegelian dialectics to illustrate why modernity’s self image of a universally free and just society was, in fact, history’s most dangerous contradiction.

 The contradiction of modernity is a reoccurring theme in the work of Francis Alÿs, who currently has a retrospective at MoMA. While watching his 2006 video, The Politics of Rehearsal, I was reminded why the image of the prostitute is such a fitting representation of modernity. Just as the strip tease is always a rehearsal (for the sexual act is never performed), modernity never actually performed the very image it had rehearsed, the image of a universally free and just society.

The film begins at The Slipper Room in the Lower East Side. Shot in black and white, it opens with a woman practicing operatic scales behind a grand piano before cutting to footage from Washington D.C., January 20th, 1949. The television presenter announces that “The life of a democracy is about to be renewed.”

In his inaugural address, Truman announces to the American republic: “We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas…Democracy alone can supply the vitalizing force to stir the peoples of the world into triumphant action against their human oppressors.”

We transition from Truman to the title of the piece and are told that the Politics of Rehearsal should be considered a metaphor of Latin America’s ambiguous affair with Modernity. Forever arousing, and yet, always delaying the moment it will happen.

We return to the Slipper Room, the piano player, the soprano, and soon, a woman in a sequin dress. First we see her foot, enveloped in rocket tall heels. It emerges from the wings, and a leg follows. Without words, just a sway of her hips, she announces her presence. We are captivated. A man’s voice tells us in Spanish:

“I was rethinking the implication of the rehearsal as a comment on modernity. And what becomes immediately obvious is the notion that modernity is pornographic.”

Baudelaire, that great poet of modernity was well-known for his reoccurring image of the prostitute as the juxtaposition between Paris past and present. But it’s Benjamin who uses the work of Baudelaire to make the explicit connection between prostitution, the commodity, and commodity production. In Convolute O of The Arcades Project, Benjamin discusses the prostitute and the gambler in relation to the suspension of time. While the gambler lives in a fantasy of suspended time, the job of the stripper, as entertainer and performer, is to suspend time.

The stripper must arouse and then prolong that arousal. This is what the spectator wants, for arousal to be maintained throughout the duration of the performance. But, because arousal is suspended, the spectator forgets that the sexual act will never actually be performed. The performance is, therefore, nothing more than a rehearsal of the act.

Modernity is incredibly appealing; it is seductive (even Hegel was enraptured) but, as the narrator warns us in the film, “even as it displays itself, it’s impossible to appropriate it.”

Truman’s speech is a rehearsal for modernity. The words behind his monotone voice arouse and seduce the listener. Like the order in which the stripper removes her clothes, the argument for democracy unfolds sequentially, (“First, we will continue to give unfaltering support to the United Nations…Second, we will continue our programs for world economic recovery…Third, we will strengthen freedom-loving nations against the dangers of aggression…”)

But,  in the decades that followed, the act of democracy was never actually performed; only rehearsed. Like the stripper, the role of the politician and his or her political ideology is to keep us in a constant state of arousal. The final act, the “What we have achieved in liberty, we will surpass in greater liberty,” will never be delivered. To satiate that arousal would put the stripper out of her job, the President out of power.

This means that stripper and the audience are not on the same time. She keeps it moving (she’s clocked in after all) while ensuring it never goes anywhere (stay aroused by my liberty and you will come to surpass it).

The stripper in the video removes one pair of underwear, only to present us with another smaller, sexier pair. Our eyes work hard to imagine what is behind that underwear, but, no matter how hard we try, only she, the performer, can remove them. And, when she finally does, time is up.

The strip tease of democratic fair dealing is a very nice display, but touching is forbidden. The spectator, believing it  possible to eventually overcome this small detail, repeats and repeats until there is no money left to pay for the show. We realize arousal costs a fortune and modernity never comes.

Photogenic Factory Reproduction

Let me state the obvious: modern technologies instigated new forms of consumption in the early 20th century. This is well documented in the visual arts–particularly in photography.

Right now New York is home to a number of good exhibitions showcasing photography as the medium that truly  represented the changing social and physical landscape of a historical era.  Stieglitz, Strand, Steichen, Shamberg, and Atget brought beauty to the industrial and the industrial to beauty itself.

Techniques such as photogravure and autocrome united art to technology and challenged pre-established ideologies of reproduction, aura, and art itself (Benjamin is the obvious here). Impressive images such as Stieglitz’s The Steerage practically extinguished any 19th century concern regarding the validity of the photographic image as art.

“You may call this a crowd of immigrants,” Stieglitz explained, “To me it is a study in mathematical lines, in balance, in a pattern of light and shade.”

The ability to capture the shadows and geometric planes of organic and inorganic forms not only narrated the psyche of the medium and the subject it was capturing, but of Western Society’s entire historical shift. Picasso drew attention to this when he put photography on par with painting, which pleased Stieglitz enormously.

While these photographs narrate the personal, the collective, the inanimate, and the psychological, there is one image that I found particularly striking:

This gelatin silver print is estimated to be from 1910 from an unknown artist. Although the image is fairly small (38.8 x 52.2 cm) it immediately reminded me of another photograph from a much later time period.

Andreas Gursky’s 99 cent, a chromogenic color print from 2001, illustrates photography’s technical progress as well as loyalty to early modernist themes of technology and consumption. Roughly 207 x 307 cm, 99 cent is of enormous proportions and perhaps implicitly references the linear growth of consumer appetites. While Gursky’s digitally manipulated work is an opportunity for critics to revisit that early argument of whether or not photography deserves to be placed on the pedestal of high art, the camera lens continues to provide us with an eye into historical patterns of repetition of lines, planes, light, and that persistant relationship between technology and consumption.

Utrecht: Stad Naar Mijn Hart

My encounter with Utrecht has been nothing short of serendipitous. What started as a spontaneous trip to the Schroderhuis (1924) morphed into Rietveld’s Universe and a delightful ode to Dick Bruna.

“Architects aren’t supposed to lower space,” mused Schroder in a documentary reflecting on her relationship with Rietveld. But Rietveld wasn’t an architect in the traditional sense. Coming from a family of furniture makers, Rietveld began expressing space through furniture design with his red and blue chair (1918), a form of primary colors and geometric representation.

The Schroder house was to be an experiment of form (“You have a lot less worry if you keep things simple”) and helped cohere what came to be known as De Stijl, a movement/style based on two almost contradicting ideas: rational abstraction.

Seeing the house in real life, one is immediately struck by  the small scale  and primitiveness of the actual design. This is not the modernism of today–when  we speak of clean lines and smooth surfaces we take things such as central heating for granted. When people like Jan Wils and Rietveld began experimenting with early concepts of modernism they still had to reconcile how to heat a home with large, angular, unadorned windows.

The house looks  like a toy in relation to the streetscape, to the right is an entire block of vernacular Dutch architecture, to the left is a four-lane overpass. In the documentary, Shroder explains that the lot just outside the house was where truckers would often pull over to piss.

Schroder played a very active role in the construction of the house. She and her family moved in before it was completed, testing the livability of the design. Some years later, Schroder and Rietveld teamed up again to try and address some of Holland’s mid twentieth century social housing issues. Like the Schroderhuis, these apartment blocks offer a surprisingly quiet, almost organic alternative to the severity that often associated with early modernism.

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