Notes on Dimensional Time [NYC][CAAC2011][PART 2]

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

PART TWO

MATERIAL NEGATED, IMMATERIAL NEGATED, SYNTHETICS

Greg Sholette and Susan Ryan’s Dark Matter panels at CAA Conference 2011 stood out among those I attended. Projecting into a vacuum of cultural space is a fruitful conjecture, because the yields are unknown at the point of origination. Conjecturing why cultural space is unattended or unoccupied is similarly worthwhile. Are artist activities off the grid happening there due to the respondents’ intentional or accidental omission, a selective dismissal, bias, economic or political distortions, the inherent asymmetry of critical discourse, technological marginalization? These and other interventions are typical. Self-censorship has been applied as a term to the artist effectively outsourcing his activities from public scrutiny, but that term seems seldom to appear in the discussions anymore. Media monopolization censors so efficiently that self-censorship by artist has become a more or less meaningless act, on anti-/non-act. Why the Dark Matter panels were significant I would suggest has to do with a generative function of art talk in the specialized or exclusive “public” forum of CAAC, now that the conference is connected on a secondary basis to the web. CAA recently launched a new website for its journal, and, although the media section is currently empty, maybe the recorded sessions of the conference will begin to integrated into CAA’s public offerings there, or in a dedicated space. How CAA eventually decides to model its sharing apparatus [pay-to-play, member’s only, some hybrid of public/private] will hinge on whether CAA adopts a scarcity or ubiquity approach. Given the generally conservative frameworks of the association, at the centennial of its inception, CAA will likely not take the track that newer, more web-vital entities like European Graduate School have chosen. In a cost-benefit culture, with all the management lingo of “best-practices” and the like seeping into the academies like slow-rising floodwaters, such choices are committee-driven, not arrived at through consensus or unanimity, and not really more than guinea-pig gambling ultimately. In the networked world, today’s Myspace is tomorrow’s Beta video platform. Sustainable digital humanities is a proposition, not a protocol. The fact that any wired system is contingent on grid power to exist shouldn’t be reassuring to anyone. Public infrastructure is at the moment being immolated from the top-down, and the cutters are the same people who provisioned Iraq its power-grid. Davos is a long way from the brownout-susceptible occupied Mideast, and at that distance distance begins to be a fungible commodity, relative to one’s immediate comfort zone. In the suburbs, or the gated zones, how the other 97% live doesn’t matter much. Which brings me back to Dark Matter and CAA.

The art teacher in 2011 is an endangered species. The same can be said of art, if only in the realm of metaphor. The de-definition, or definition of art, to put it more rightly, in the vernacular, is systemic. The actual production of art by all statistical measures is more common than at any time in history. However, the academy considers actual art through the lens of pre-history, like fossils. No matter how often or stridently counter-positions contradict the narrative that art is anything creative, and problematic painting and sculpture are the norm, the establishment art society resists any structure for art that excludes anything anyone might do anytime.

What are the implications of this mode of inclusion, which is fundamentally an exclusionary complex, designed to provoke canoncide, when perpetrated to a significant degree by the very social instruments ostensibly best situated to defend art? At CAA 2011 and specifically in the Dark Matter panels, positive movements were often pushed as alternatives to dysfunctional art systems. The post-60s short enemies’ list, including the secondary superclass/bourgeoisie commodities market for contemporary art, the patriarchy in its diverse manifestations, the European anti-global sects and so on, has so successfully absorbed the anti-orthodoxy movements that they hardly bear upon the discourse they sought to establish as alternative historical threads. The marxian revolutions, along with the feminist, race-based and gay revolutions at this point have been conclusively consumed by the dominant orthodoxy. Management of these movements is now an HR issue more than a vibrant counter-culture. The “art world” has played a significant role in the normalization of communism or collective action, of the feminine animus, of the colonial grievance, or the outsider status of same-sex sub-culture, along with many other exploitations. Bourgeois patronage is progressively fond of public displays of affection for these causes, through award administration, endowments, charity and purchase support. The plutocracy learned over the past half-century to adapt to the demands of the disenfranchised and passionate counter-operatives by funding them, as employees or administrators, purchasing their labor, or at least vocalizing affiliation with them, thereby rendering the leadership impotent and complicit. Simultaneously, the plutocracy conducted a sustained, professional campaign to destroy opposition, politically, economically and socially, through dimensional interventions, ancient  in their methodologies and innovative/creative or “new.” To assess these is to assess the command and control processes of three millennia, and an assessment entails examination of proven and modified or newly adopted techniques. Character assassination, impoverishment, shunning are all old methods of problem-solving, still in use today. Ask Glenn Greenwald - not an academic, but the example is germane. Violence isn’t so much necessary since the 1960s and -70s, due to the success of anger management, severance packages, drugs and other therapies. In the field of education, an array of tactics have emerged over the past forty years that when viewed recursively, amount to a strategic campaign to obviate any but the most manageable agents of alt.humanities. Attacks on teachers’ unions, public funding sources at all levels, individuals via monopoly media are only a few means to the end of disempowering the academies, and the souls who dedicate their lives to them.

The war on art and art teachers is all-directional. Economic warfare is a key plank in the creative destruction of art. The irony of the phenomenon is extreme. European art for centuries has been used as a cultural weapon, a superior technology, to enforce colonial primacy of the Euro-imperialists. The same can be said of the Asian powers, but Asian “art” is distinctive from its European relative, and should be treated as such. In conjunction with real steel and gunpowder, the force of art to enforce empire is proven. Civilization across the globe foists designated methods of expression on any people on line for subjugation, historically. To starve a thing is to kill a thing, and all manner of expression has been starved to elevate dominant, sanctioned formats to serve tyrants’ pernicious and malevolent ends through the ages. The subtlety by which art, previously a centerpiece component of civilized domination, is now folding upon itself! Art’s reformation to serve the same tyrannical ends, to prop a tiny rulership over everyone else, the neo-colonialization of civilization on a global scale in itself, is dimensional, and incredibly complex operationally, especially now with the virtual domain as expansive as it is. The cultural cannibalism observable in the contemporary art field is characterized multiply, as re-sampling, or contingency, or meta-, or any number of definitions of faceting, as an Escher-derived exponential mimetic function. Platforms like Tumblr or freeware mixing programs and apps of ever-increasing power, to cite the computer/mobile-electronic-devices-network iterations developing with light speed across the world, as symptoms, are not leveraged by any materially meaningful evaluative media philosophy yet, and if the major industrial syndicates have anything to do with it, won’t. Nor are they leveraged by violence, as far as I know, but they are susceptible to tactical marketing and surveillance state programs, not to mention copyright regimes benefitting multinational monopolies. While these evolutions have nothing to do with art or art teaching, from Google to CAA to the Curb Foundation to SONY to CNN to President Obama’s office, the marching orders are in. They apparently DO have to do with art and art teaching, based on the survey presentations at the CAA Conference, such as “Data as Medium.” Art - if you’re willing to suspend belief in art past the object into nothing but bit storage - is now just another programmable matter, and art’s instructors are expensive old wetware to be replaced by web-native Clouds of remote machines administering creativity to the world’s populations, the planet’s actual programmable matter, meaning humanity, everywhere, through a hybrid dimensional apparatus that incorporates brick and mortar facilities into staging platforms situated in the virtual sphere. The latter, as Google’s Art Project indicates, entails the animation of institutionalized real objects of the highest cultural value, at least to start with, into an architecture of simulated multi-dimensionality supposed to displace “real” art  and art experience with an acceptable, corporate-managed and sponsored, compressed and enhanced facsimile. The metaphor for modern life implicit in this program is inescapable.

To ignore the market implications of the cumulative projection of art encompassing the above developments, is to imperil individuality in any Enlightenment formulation of the word. Individuality attached to art, or so the pseudo-aesthetic argument goes, is no longer a relevant issue. The factor is the agent, and the factor is the product, and the product is us, in every facet imaginable, which is nothing but ones and zeroes. Identity itself is made obsolete, or at least fungible, like John Law’s paper and Chase Bank’s plastic wealth, now largely asset-free. Art is by definition derivative, linkable, and non-extant outside a wire rhizome of infinite possibility, which is to say, never actualized. Actualization is only pertinent to individuals, to definite particles, to objects. Now that digital non-matter can be rendered as object, with the aid of slave (human and computer) labor - as presented during “Digital Craftsmanship: How Artists Are Making Physical Objects from Virtual Data,” the last prohibitive restraint against Benjamin’s “freed” hand supposedly dissolves! The mechanical reproduction of art craftsmanship - witness the politically incorrect negated digitally - is itself for itself enough for the academy. The warning that should sound, that as goes art so goes man, is not forthcoming in the rooms of academia. Instead Creative Class instructors, juggling family life, professorial demands, studio practice, embrace such craft enhancements for their value - and lists are compiled explaining what those are. But values are another matter, and in this moment, this is a dark matter. Because this new science of art is inseparable from the science of manufacturing “humans.” I intend to focus on this problem, later. Without individuality there is no democracy and no need for art as revolutionized by America’s Jackson Pollock, and many others after him, like Don Judd and T.C. Cannon. Bearing in mind the attempts to cycle these figures into distortion complexes, and the resistance to tyranny they represent post-mortem through the power of their accomplishments and influence, one can afford some hope for the survival, at least in the short term, of American democratic art. The disclaimer is that shows like AbExNY succeed so well at their flattening of dimensional reality and value as history into packaged flat product, consuming depth, and consumed by programmable matter, for consumer culture as economic driver. Pollock is mediated into consumer portable, ratified by the institution AND the academeme.

Viral art history is natively susceptible to corruption. The power of zero, of zeroing out the Free or True or Real is absolutely a fluxing engine. Flattening the real into codes of equally necessary ones and zeroes in programming is the fundamental operating system of the Turing machine and its descendants. Without a clear understanding of Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit/Mind (Geist), [sections 73-89] one is handicapped in one’s for-consciousness activities in the field of art, and by extension all applications of one’s humanity in society. The moral component is switched “off” in the contemporary academy, except to distract from the plutocracy’s absolute immorality, and confer false guilt upon the victims of tyranny. At CAA, Debora Silverman of UCLA presented an astounding and resounding indictment of the market implications on broader society of this anti-human apparatus in her paper on Damien Hirst’s skull of diamonds, painting a picture of that abomination as a dimensional “art” WMD loosed on a corrupt and violent imperial scheme, meaning the current global top-down civilization, this New World Order. She failed to mention that Hirst was on site at Davos this year to teach artificial-person syndicate executives how to make mechanical art for the neo-colonial age - my characterization. Spin classes took on a whole new meaning in Hirst’s bloody Davos intervention. One must at least be apt at parsing the social construct sufficiently to even commence any rational analysis of plutocratic interventions in contemporary art. For example, the top-down prohibitions against vanitas, as expressed in the Thanatos genre, exist in absolute contradiction to the actual behavior of the exploitive and inheriting rich. Their charities are not sufficient in the service of freedom to replace the public art necessary to construct democratic civic pride and community identity. The global plutocracy and its instruments evidence no capacity for global democracy on a local basis, in any instance where competition for commonwealth competes with their exploitation of man and land. Barbara Rose descried the corporatization of art during the “Critical Histories” panel, and pitched a sustained sermon against many of the anti-art waves predominant in the field over the past few decades, including psychoanalytic, conceptualist and marxian critical interventions over that timeline. Representatives of the art materials industry complained about widespread disinterest among educators for basic applied skills in artmaking for their classroom activities. Such opposition was rare in the CAA. More common was boosterism for art-negations of many descriptions. The ambition of young academics seems to favor technology and performance, while elders prefer extremism in the niche, or solidarity in acceptable alt.art networked or collective resistance. Neither constituency is prone to revolution. The revolution, unless I’m missing something, will not be led by these tepid and vacuous academics, and it will not be digitized. Most are worried about health insurance benefits and pensions, more than freedom and the fight for it, and God bless them, that was an intended effect, created destructively by corrupt management. Unfortunately, if one is rigorous enough in the inventory, it’s clear that the “revolution of the 60s and 70s was not a revolution at all, but instead was a failure. The critical institution is now the corporate lackey, and the individual, unless a star, a show dog to demonstrate that greatness is still possible in the ivy-covered halls of learning, where greatness has been crushed systematically, while the celebration of parasitic counter-culture celebrated its one-generation, short-term, derivative, and artificial victories against the Man, and his Old Boy Networks. Enjoy Poverty.

Like most middle-class professionals, academics are suffering. The turnover from the last CAAC I attended (LA 2009) was remarkable. Being privy to brutal gutting of colleges in Depression 3.0, I am aware of the effectiveness by which the Management Society has decimated the ranks of the Ivory Tower, which today resemble the WTC towers. Terror reigns in the falling. The Dark Matter panels alone directly confronted the shape of the cultural/education topology in relation to the facts “on the ground,” while most panels, like “Public Art vs. the Art World” proposed false dualities and straw man theses as platforms for tough-sounding “realism” in the precarious environment. Careerism is a hollow prospect now. Upbeat oration was more frequently a stylization of pedagogy in the panel presentations, rather than a by-product of content.

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[PRECURSOR]: What is the CAA “market” for art or truth or freedom or individuality now? Naturally, opinions range across a spectrum. One might as well ask again, Who Is an Artist, and What Is Art? Beuys and Warhol, and visual culture, and global. I propose it’s better to ask for data visualization and unexpected outcomes, which constitute flipflops for illusion, as verifications of the subject, divorced from the object.

[NOTES]: CAAC has not much to do with art, in my experience. If any art of any permanence accompanied the Conference, I didn’t see it. It certainly wasn’t presented anywhere such art would be sensibly presented. A projection of art in jpeg or Quicktime formats is not art at all, and projections were plentiful. Media was ubiquitous, although none of the podiums and gear as far as I could tell accessed the web successfully, so new media presentations were conveyed mostly through PowerPoint or similar software tools. Which is maybe why the raging street fights in Tunis, Egypt, and then the surrounding countries failed to more fully affect the proceedings. Again, this is a management problem or solution. The Hilton Hotel is not necessarily a proper amplifier of real democratic revolution, although one knows that hotels have long histories as nexus points for negotiation and exchange for the mobile power complex. For college academics on tight budgets, the hotel room is a more mundane and functional location for dispatches, sleep and whatever else academicians do on work-holidays in Manhattan, when they’re not visiting museums and galleries or fine eateries. On an individual basis, a CAAC is in the short term a networking opportunity, and in the long term a kind of temporal karma center. Relationships are renewed. Agendas integrate with trends through the social exchanges. Legitimacy is awarded…

But as the Dark Matter panels suggested, what’s off the table is sometimes what’s most relevant in such environments, which are by artificial nature now risk averse. “The Erasure of Contemporary Memory” panels offered the promise of a triangulating discourse with Dark Matter and Critical Histories, but the opportunity for substantive collective consideration of dimensional content is still beyond the structure of CAAC to host, except in the interstitial [or outsider spaces] that bracket the compressed architecture of the 4-day sequenced event.