Notes on Dimensional Time [NYC][CAAC2011][PART 1]

Notes on Dimensional Time
A Review of College Art Association Conference 2011

PART ONE

[CONTEXT]: A Despot Is Toppled; The Revolution Will Not Be Digitized; Immaterial and Material; Media Philosophy as Game Changer in the Domain; Karma; The Elephants in the Halls of the Academy; The Cobalt Tower; Dark Matter as Anti-Cloud; The 60s Finally Cremated; The Trolls in the House and the Fiduciary Reasons for Anti-Public Art; Commonwealth and Market Share; The Popular Imagination as an Instrument or Apparel for the SUCK Domination of the World - Art , Tyranny and War as the Artificial, Perpetual Conditions of Free Market Anti-Democracy; Hegel Is Present and Right; Simulation, Data Visualization and the Terrorism in the Politics of Economic Repression; Reform, Resampling and the Inevitably That in New York a First-Order Witness Will Be in the Audience; Freedom and Speech in Controlled/Command Discourse [2011]; Resistance and Social Media in the Creativity Complex; The Value of Print, Scholarship, Public Arenas and Humane Science; Technology Is the New World Order - A Serial Distortion and Erasure  of Individual and Collective History; Quality of Life - Food, Coffee and Conversation in the Shadows of the Davos Winter; Performance and Permanence - A Madman Street Artist is Stabbing Strangers on the Subway

[SELECTED PANELS]:
> The Aesthetics of Sonic Spaces
> Risky Business
> Digital Craftsmanship: How Artists Are Making Physical Objects from Virtual Data
> Data as Medium
> Artists and the Art Materials Industry
> Dark Matter of the Art World, Part 1
> Critical Histories
> Prophet/Profit: The Famous Case of Damien Hirst
> The Artist-Critic: The Critic-Artist
> New Media, Art-Science, and Mainstream Contemporary Art: Toward a Hybrid Discourse?
> The Unwritten, Ill-Begotten Art History of the 1960s and 1970s
> The Erasure of Contemporary Memory, Part 1
> Public Art World vs. the Art World
> Dark Matter of the Art World, Part 2

[ANECDOTAL OVERVIEW]
2011 CAA Conference NYC was dimensional. Although the organization of the conference is routine for the most part, the context for this year’s gathering of academics, artists, writers, curators, administrators and all kinds of art industrialists was not. The pay to play model must to a degree ensures selection for audiences and presenters. The channeling mechanisms are built in. How much of the criteria is pragmatic and how much intangible one can’t know. The event is subsistence corporate in its structure, albeit high-performing as a phenomenon of economics, location, situational discourse, plus more, operating as status quo with open source elements. Approaching its centennial, CAA is relatively stable, and the model appears sustainable.

This was only my second CAAC. The first was in 2009 in LA.

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Mubarak went down during the CAAC timeline. The events in Egypt and elsewhere in the Mideast served as subtext and propulsion for interjections in presentations, or references, and excited conversations between sessions. It’s about time. The unwritten and ill-begotten art history of the 1960s and -70s floated through the Hilton Hotel halls like poltergeists. Among the herbivores of academia, however, if there was a tremor of celebratory consuming solidarity, at least there was no outburst. Invisibly, the bottom fell out of the anti-establishment establishment pantomime of achieved idealism as excuse for oppression of free concourse, be it gender- or race-based, economic or political, social or psychological. The technology, the speed of transmission doesn’t permit such obsolescence to coagulate into trope anymore. Maybe this is the best effect of the new media, in the interplay among hard-, soft- and wetware. The analyzed, drained and brittle fields of nostalgic reverence for that misdiagnosed era a few decades ago in America dried up and blew away. Certainly the most newsworthy contemporary conference, CPAC, did not evidence a similar animus. The only ghost of consequence at CPAC was Ronald Reagan’s, a specter whose destructive value is on the increase instrumentally, not the wane, thanks to artificial entities like Heritage Foundation and FOX. A good metaphor for the CAAC is a typical monumental Kiefer landscape, but not as an original, specific object. Instead, the CAAC functions as a jpeg of a Kiefer, a few hundred pixels in either dimension let’s say, presented via projector at the wrong resolution, with too much distance separating the device and the reflecting surface. Even though the projection and actual art might be similar in size, one in fact and the other by projection, placed side-by-side in an imagined exhibit space, the two phenomena, one material and the other not, would not sufficiently resemble one another, at least to confuse an educated observer. One is not the other. One is art, the other not. In the case of Egypt’s revolution and the operations of CAA at conference, the former is not a performance, presentation, intervention, deconstruction, critique, contingency, linguistic and so on, and the latter is not a street fight. Pretense to the contrary is immaterial, too. The fact of this juxtaposition, as imagined creatively, dissolves any presumption of the former art/projection and conference/revolution to being the latter, even as related 4D composites. Relationally, to use one mode of displacement circuiting through many of the academics processes at CAAC, even comparing the two/four episodes as historically connected is bogus. By extension the definition and de-definition of art at CAA - as routine now as the organization of and the organizational behavior at the conference - was subtly obliterated. Not that many attendees seemed to notice. The performative features of the format encourage an empathetic buzz, not unlike complicity. The buzz is social contract, hive mind, predominantly, and even exclusively, but not absolutely. Which isn’t to say that the mono-optic or myopic specialization is limited to art. Life is more like art, and less like any projection. Nothing is surprising in this frame. Neither did many CAAC attendees realize that a murderous madman was loose in Manhattan and Brooklyn, a “street artist” serial killer terrorizing straphangers and closer relations, knifing the victims, or mowing them down with a car, concurrent to the conference timeline. Nor did the attendees seem to be aware of the pending sale of the NYSE to the Germans. Or that the House Republicans were proposing budgets to de-fund or significantly impoverish NEA, CPB and NPR. Economists often describe bubbles, as metaphors for precarious markets with potentially brutal consequences attached when these metaphorical bubbles burst, which they inevitably, supposedly, must do. A bubble is a bubble is a 4D metaphor, a phenomenal instance of networked data-mining. To summarize, CAAC is a management operation essentially. It isn’t a singular creative action, nor a collective one. It’s a question of false equation as truth-negation, with respect to art. A goal of management is to externalize risk. What happens when risk is internalized? Fear. And fear was an object or palpable presence here, if not pervasive, then prevalent. The subtlety of conditioning is not extensible to environment, if one accepts the artificial self-favoring of corporate mentality or praxis. MoMA, just down the street from the CAAC site, is exhibiting AbExNY and Andy Warhol movies. The proximity of lies to source is not always enough to prove criminal conspiracy, in a court of law, but the burden of proof is lighter in civil court. Maybe that’s a good metaphor. Complex software requires meta-complex coding. If art is society’s GUI, then where does the objectification of art exist in its most risky and vulnerable stage? What does material art require to exist? CAAC? MoMA? These are institutional architectural provisions, one static and one mobile. One permanent, one temporary. If art is for humans, for us, who or what do CAAC and MoMA serve? The obvious answer is that corporations serve no one, since they do not materially exist. They are dimensional constructs with material rights and privileges attached to corporate proxies or beneficiaries, exploiting and consuming people and property to extract bottom-line value. People are dimensional, too, but at least for a while, on a timeline, we do exist materially. How is it not possible to discern between the good for the corporation in opposition to the good of people? Or art, or truth? False equation is the virus, the design fiction that binds these several examples. For a moment the collective actions of individuals in the streets of Cairo uncoupled the viral false equations of the corporate syndicates, and un-designed their destructive fictions, which manifest as real anti-human and anti-ecology effects generally. At such moments, the global corporate illusion quivers and damage control complexes activate. Such moments present opportunity for resistance to capitalize, for asymmetrical amplification, as is apparent with the spreading of the Egyptian street actions to neighboring, similar states. If the waves of revolution reached CAAC, and they did, thanks to electronic transmissions, the receiver did not immediately respond in kind to the sender’s coded message. Is Egypt structurally different that the United States? When politicians claimed over Mubarak’s 30-year reign that he was America’s friend, was he like a Facebook or Myspace friend? Was Mubarak virtual in the New World Order? What kind of friend was Mubarak to the American (natural) person, actually? Now that his regime is at its end, and he evidently will be replaced by a secret policeman, an enforcer, who will America befriend - the people of Egypt, or this bloodstained manager, Mubarak’s presumed replacement? History would suggest likely outcomes. Patterns form a projected field, whether the result is good representation or a bad one, in terms of the original, real object. We might agree that the object of all these cited phenomena is freedom. We might be wrong, as in the case of the murders, or CPAC, or the purchase of NYSE, etc. At CAAC, anyway, the historical bridge from erasure to dark matters did not collapse, and no one member as far as I know chanted, and no baton split a skull, although images of chanters and skulls (as content) were shared as projected jpegs, Youtube movies, in quotations, and by links to sites, as ubiquitous elements in the representation of art, contemporary and otherwise. All in all the dispersion of material with immaterial was reproduced at CAAC as one might expect in any art fair side-room galley, balanced by individual instances of humanity, if only in the interstitial spaces, and off-site, off-program, and out of reach of management. The academy is now in a perpetual state of vacation, enforced. An art and artist for humans can only function away from there, although interventions are demonstrably still possible, and even potent. For no other reason, a member revolt is due, along with the dues, for erasure of entry costs, as an example, not for profit, so more students can attend. Students are routinely unmanageable, as Egypt’s events again prove.

To summarize, the alternate reality proposed in the over-written and ill-begetting 1960s and -70s revolution-negation has failed, and been proved a parasitic drain on human affairs. The political, economic and social resources for progressive movement, solo and collective, in the realization of truth and/or freedom, which are dimensional facets of the same existential, historical apparatus, have been brutally mismanaged by the idealists of the 60s and 70s, and the democracy that permits such failures in its winding course abandoned to tyrants, new and ancient. The failed alternate reality of the hippie generation, which is to say, their artificial reality or illusion, a Hegelian bad reality, neither secular nor religious nor monarchical. The entire false construct, a true monster, a hybrid anti-human/human consumer, has been temporarily displaced by a massively compressed and mediated projection of the real thing, of freedom. Unfortunately, the synthesis is contingent on the worst immaterial, the artificial person, collaborating dimensionally with the possibly sentient machine, as network, as instrument, as architecture, as language and “art.” The question is, Will the revelation of this systemic failure with global implications, revealing each component for what it is, separately and combinatively, be missed or denied by the viewer, negated, making the viewer complicit, as a voyeur, or will the transmitted data, corrupted though it may be by process, serve as a catalyst, a reminder of our individual and collective agency, which is to say, citizenship, producing democratic action to overthrow the tyranny that afflicts us and our commonwealth now?