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The Annihilation Fountain Issue 01
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THE ANNIHILATION FOUNTAIN
A JOURNAL OF CULTURE ON THE EDGE...
TEXT ONLY - ISSUE #1
The Annihilation Fountain & TAF Copyright c 1997-99 Neil MacKay
ISSN 1480-9206
http://www.capnasty.org/taf/
the_annihilation_fountain@iname.com
CONTENTS:
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*CULTURE ART DEATH
*CULTURE JAMMING: HACKING, SLASHING AND SNIPING IN THE EMPIRE OF SIGNS
*ON A PHILOSOPHICAL IMPLICATION OF THE ASTRONOMICAL BIG BANG THEORY
*THE FUTURE OF OPERA: A PROPAGANDA PIECE PARTS I & II
*THINGS FALL APART
*CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE
************************************************************************
CULTURE ART DEATH
AN INTERVIEW WITH TORONTO ARTIST MARK ADAIR
by Neil MacKay
************************************************************************
Every generation thinks it will be the one to witness the rapture...
In 1994 I received an advertisement for a funeral home in my home mailbox.
It read something about getting to know my "quiet neighbours" and informed
me about their burial and cremation services and how to pre-arrange my
disposal upon my untimely demise, as not to put an unnecessary financial
burden on those I leave behind. I was somewhat shocked, in my own naivet
(or ignorance), that something that would have been considered tasteless to
say the least, down right morbid to say the most, has become acceptable,
even commonplace. I have since received enough of these pamphlets in my
mailbox from various funeral homes that I no longer react to them and just
toss them in the recycling bin with the rest of the junk mail.
In much the same fashion I, along with thousands of other movie viewers, am
no longer stirred by scenes of death and violence in films and videos.
Tarrantino uses violence to carry his stories and get a laugh. Swarzenegger
and Stalone are unintentionally comical in their over the top machismo
violent portrayals. Van Damme, Seagal, and all the other lesser known stars
of revenge type flicks that have very little in the way of plot line in
their movies but lot's of violence and big death, perpetuate this genre to
the tune multi-millions of dollars return on formula based pulp. The home
video market has, no pun intended, blown this genre wide open with many
titles being released straight to video. On television I see this same
desensitizing aimed at kids; "Extreme times call for an extreme hero. New
G.I.Joe Extreme." Our culture is plainly obsessed with death. Even in the
analyzing of these violent flicks we can't escape the violent over tones.
The movies made by the Stalone's and Swarzenegger's, et al, of the movie
industry are analyzed and criticized by using a system of measurement known
as the "Kill Ratio". Parents spend thousands to buy the latest, most
up-to-date computer so their kids can play the latest "kill 'em all" arcade
type game now available for the home PC or Mac. These same games have
various levels to them with names like; Non lethal, Brutal Violence, Ultra
Violence. All describing how bad the player's avatar can hurt other's in
the game or can get hurt itself. Novice, intermediate, advanced just
doesn't cut it any more. Billions are spent by the advertising industry
offering images laden with death to sell everything from food to food
processors to air travel to cars. An early 80's edition of Rolling Stone
magazine featured Jim Morrison on the cover with the caption "He's hot,
He's sexy, He's dead".
It was with these thoughts in mind that I sat down with tape rolling and
had a discussion with Toronto based artist/sculptor/painter Mark Adair.
Mark's work is itself full of violent imagery beautifully rendered in wood,
bone, lead or any other material he comes across in his travels. His work
is a dichotomy that leaves a lasting impression. After seeing his work in a
collaborative show entitled Torontoniesis, a friend commented; "It must be
art, it disturbs me." Toronto Life's March 1996 issue referred to his piece
entitled Choker as "...powerful symbolism: autoerotic asphyxiation as a
metaphor for the dark side of the pleasure principle." I wanted to find out
from Mark, as a purveyor and reflector of popular culture, why he thought
our culture was so obsessed with death. Here is our conversation.
Neil MacKay: Is the death imagery conscious in your work?
Mark Adair: First thing I want to say is that I don't think my work is so
much about death as I think that it's about trying to resolve all those
problems that arouse in my mind around the early eighties when the nuclear
fear was at its worse. Why would you get into a situation where you created
a world like that? It's something like, we were all surrounded by this
craziness so I said to myself well, why is it we're doing this?
I did Toronto Bank Robbery at that time and that is the first work where I
took a look at constructing passions to fight that. You know, like how do
you...if you're living in a culture that's doing something wrong...you know
this new Joni Mitchell song How do you Stop?, the first time I heard it I
interpreted it in much the same way. If you're in this culture, you're in
this society and the society is doing certain things, how do get that
society to stop? So the work, my work, wasn't so much concerned with death
as it was trying to avoid it.
NM: I heard Ian Brown on CBC [radio] this past weekend talking about how
himself and some of his friends have this almost cold war nostalgia. I'm
assuming he's about the same age as you. He says they grew up fearing those
same fears you mentioned of nuclear obliteration and what is this world
doing, but now they're saying the unknown fear, talks of black market sales
of Russian plutonium, etc., is worse than what the known fear was.
MA: Maybe he must be a little younger because that's a strange idea. Of
course I grew up before the worst of it. [A friend] remembers the Berlin
crisis of 1950's. She remembers when they were in Germany [living on a
Canadian military base], having to keep [packed] suitcases by the door and
they had to be ready to go at any instant and they all these drills all the
time. So you'd get up in the middle of the night and of course you wouldn't
know if it was real, because it was the army. And the effect this would
have on the children...terrifying.
I remember various periods, there was the Cuban missile crisis. I would
have been very young then, and then there was a lull. I guess if you were
on the inside maybe there wouldn't have been a lull, but I think maybe
there would have been. But you know what was the worse thing for me was
when, and not too many people discuss this, I don't know whether people
have forgotten, but the whole thing about automated response, and that's
when I got active. It's like ah well, we're handing it over to computers.
That's crazy.
The other reason I mention this in relation to Ian Brown, is that I don't
see that anything has changed. I don't have any kind of nostalgia because I
don't see that anything is any different. It's just like one of these
hydras and one of the heads is atomic weapons and another head would be,
for example, population/overpopulation another example would be global
warming and another head would be pollution and how we can't stop. We just
keep doing it. Like the people in the third world, of course they want
cars, of course they want all the luxuries and now to me it's just the same
society misbehaving itself. So I don't think that anything's changed. I
don't see that there's any standing down.
Other than that, is the death imagery conscious in my work? Well, yeah it
is. It's not the thrust of my work but it's a kind of polemic for me
because even though it's the positive I'm interested in, I think it's
necessary to state, I don't know if necessary for everybody, but I just put
the two of them up there. Like in this piece here (Chaise Longue), the
whole point of this piece is to put a very small image of death into a huge
context. So what this piece is about, it's about linguistic patterns. How
we have formulated the image of the tree. The actual [piece] is made out of
wood. That is black walnut. That is the thing itself and if you look at it
here and there you can actually see it, how rough it is, although there's
no piece with the actual bark on it. And then there's the pictures of the
trees [carved into the base]. And then you finally go up to the top and you
see the medieval pattern of the tree, the roots and the branches. At the
top at the back all you really have is the abstract patterning. What I was
trying to do, to get at, is how in societies, and this is something other
people have talked about, as the society becomes more developed and this
might go in cycles, it can become more and more distant from where it came
from. So you start as an agriculture society and then a few hundred years
down the road you become this highly technological society. Even though the
society and it's myths are the same, it's visual imagery becomes distant
from its, well in this case [Chaise Longue] literally, from its roots and
it can become disconnected and when things become disconnected you have a
problem. Because things get forgotten. They get abstracted to the point
where there's no meaning. And when you're in a position then when you have
myths and mythical references and you don't understand them. Then you can
be wandering around with no clear understanding apriories.
NM: I've been reading about the notion of God, or [of how] our previous
notion of God is dead and [how] God is now becoming a Theology of
Technology. Where technology is becoming God. People are using mystical,
religious, and quasi spiritual terminology when referring to computers and
their possible functions.
MA: I heard an interview with a guy who was saying that we shouldn't be
afraid of technology. We should really start moving toward technological
implants. Not bio-implants but technological implants even to the point of
having our brains...
NM: Downloaded into computers?
MA: (nods) He actually gave an example that if you had a car accident and
became a total amnesiac , if you ever regained your health, you could have
all that information uploaded and then you wouldn't lose it.
NM: There's also a movement of that mode of thought where they say the
flesh is obsolete, it's just meat . I'm reading a book right now by Mark
Dery, who's a current writer/commentator on that whole phenomena. The book
is called Escape Velocity. He's using the term in regards to humanity being
able to become one with technology and that whole movement of people who
want to just forget the body and download themselves into the computer and
live in the net. They want escape velocity.
MA: I don't have any problem with it. I don't know what it means. I'd have
to know what it meant to have a problem with it. One of the things I was
talking to [an acquaintance] about is that he [has a friend] who works as a
social worker with families where someone is dying of cancer... Death is
stupid. Stupid. I mean it's a stupid thing to watch. I can understand
people wanting to avoid it. Decay is stupid. I don't want to decay.
NM: Death is stupid and it's brutal and it's hard, but I also think it's
very necessary.
MA: Oh yeah, so do I. I mean that's...that's not...that's a very difficult
question isn't it? It doesn't really matter, I mean it's a given. These
techno-guys, they're saying well let's op the eight, get rid of it, let's
circumvent death.
NM: My problem with those "techno-guys" who propose that theory is that I
see technology as a means, not an end. It's a tool. It's not a lifestyle or
a religion.
MA: Well, William Gibson, that book of his I read that you leant me
[Neuromancer], that was a pretty exciting idea. It's had a new twist and
the new twist is that you could inject yourself though technology, not into
maybe a different awareness, but awareness of a different thing and that's
exciting. I mean awareness of a different thing.
NM: Is the fixation on death in your pieces an attempt of working out your
own personal dark side? An attempt at examining your own apocalypse?
MA: This is a very interesting question to me because just very, very
recently its come to me that I have a dark side. I never actually thought
of myself as having a dark side. It's only the last two months or three
months where I thought... Before that I thought that I was just like
everyone else.
NM: Wow, from an outsider witnessing your work for the last ten years,
seeing Twister and Toronto Bank Robbery right up to your current stuff, I
thought you were really in touch with your dark side.
MA: Well I think I'm so in touch with it, that's the point, I don't see it
as a dark side. Now I'm starting to see it as a handicap. I'm starting to
wonder... On a professional level, if I do very well on the grant system,
but I don't do very well on the commercial side...You know that's necessary
now in the nineties to start moving that way. I know it just can't be...I
know the work can't be all bad or I wouldn't get the grants because it's a
jury of peers. The work can't be all bad. There is a time when you have to
say to yourself am I on the right track, maybe I'm on the wrong track,
maybe my work's no good? And I can't say that. I can't justify that remark
in my own mind.
NM: The only thing I could say about your work is...if anything it's too
dark for mainstream.
MA: Yeah. Yeah... it's disturbing me for the first time. I genuinely never
thought of it as a dark side but now I'm starting to understand that people
of my generation are rapidly moving towards a very middle class style. And
I should be too, but I can't.
NM: Well, it's not who you are.
MA: It's not who I am. But you see, it's not a dark side... it's all dark.
There's no light side and dark side, it's like I'm only, I'm all lopped
sided, you see there's only a dark side. There's no light side.
NM: I think there is definitely a light side but it manifests itself in
other areas.
MA: Right. But not in the art. Now water colours... there's a certain
objectivity. Oh I sold a couple last week. There's just objectivity...you
know, that's just objectivity and incidentally, on the water colours I work
on the same series of problems. Like when I go out camping and I'm sitting
there, I'm saying well, what is our problem here? I think one of our
problems is that we don't really like the way, in the west, we don't like
the world the way it is. This is no mystery to you, you know about all
this. We're at war with the world the way it is. When I go out into
the...camping and I see the world, that natural world, because this is the
natural world too. I just want to see it I don't want to improve it.
But yeah, that's very interesting, that was an interesting question. So I
would have to say no I wasn't working out my personal dark side, I was
saying that it's just all dark. When I do sculpture that is the only...
those are the problems I work on. That is what I think about.
NM: Back at York [university] in art school has it always from day one...
MA: Yes. Yeah, I can remember work that I did in right high school that was
the same. And people thought that maybe I was being melodramatic or
something but I wasn't. It's just what I was interested in and even since
I've been accused of the same things. I used to know a guy in politics who
said that people did various things in politics for various reasons but
really he thought it was all because of personality. So I wouldn't say that
my work is an intellectual decision. I would say that it's just my job.
It's who I am. I go about doing my job but no I'm not exploring my dark
side. My dark side is actually much darker than this. I don't want to go
down there. I mean I've been there and it's very bleak. Like I thought this
book about Kali [Song of Kali by Dan Simmons], at some point I thought the
guy really blew it. He showed really how shallow he is. He has no real
wells of despair. Because if he did...
NM: Not like...talking about Song of Kali to tie in to what you mean, what
I think you mean, if you go back and read Nightshift...You said to me along
time ago, that collection of short stories by Stephen King...
MA: Oh right.
NM: ...that these were just plain, simple nasty for the sake of being
nasty.
MA: Very disturbing.
NM: I remember reading some of those when I was home sick and I had to put
the book down for a while because they were just like, there's just no
redeeming factors. It's just here is just plain, simple rottenness, read
it.
MA: Yeah, that's right. He went all the way down.
NM: They're not fun to read.
MA: No. They're scary. Very disturbing. Especially the one about the war
criminal and his relations with the suburban boy. I can't remember the
story line. I can remember the effect it had on me and the nature of the
subject matter and the...
Anyways that brought my, brought me to focus when the whole...when all
these atrocities happened in Bosnia. No problems relating to that. I know
what was going on there. I don't know what was going on there but I have a
very good idea what I think was going on there. Yeah, I guess my work
addresses some of that but no...
NM: You're not exploring it.
MA: I know what's going on there, I don't need to explore it.
NM: Have you had much personal experience with death?
MA: No. Other than my father dying and watching other people's pet's die.
I've had to do that. It's doesn't bother me, well it does bother me but it
doesn't bother me as much it bothers them.
NM: Are you afraid of death?
MA: No.
NM: Is death within the art cathartic for the artist or the audience or
both?
MA: I don't know. I didn't really think until recently much about catharsis
but [a friend of mine] went to see a play and she said that she wanted
scream at [her husband]. Just before they went in to see the play he said
something that pissed her off and she said to me that she really wanted to
SCREAM. She said to [her husband] "I want to scream", and he cringes
because he figures she's going to scream right there in the theatre. She
says "but don't worry I won't scream here". And then the play was about the
same thing and during the play this woman [in the play] does that. She
screams BLAAAAA, and [this friend] said she felt better instantly.
I don't think people want to think about death at all. I don't think you'd
see much catharsis. I think people think a lot about killing but I don't
think people really think very much about dying.
I think about mythology and some of the myths I know have a greater
attention to the subject and its fine points than anything like... Mark
Rothko the painter, he apparently was concerned with death. Was it Mozart
who was apparently obsessed with death? Mark Rothko did the big black
canvases. And they're contemplative and I think that's very real attention
the subject. You know that whole quiet... I don't know about catharsis. I
don't know anything about that.
NM: That's interesting. Does all artwork contain or emerge from a notion of
death?
MA: No, but some of it sure does.
NM: Do you think the image of death is more prevalent in art in the
nineties than in the past?
MA: This is that subject of the millennium...
NM: Yeah, that ties in with something else I was thinking about. Obviously
I'm not an art historian, but to me the most recorded death scene is the
crucifixion. Its also become the most eroticised...
MA: I'm not an art historian but if I was an art historian I would be able
to say to you that Christian imagery is pretty small potatoes. And even
though I wouldn't argue what you just said, it's like the Indian movie
industry is huge and then if you take that and put the Hong Kong movie
industry on it and one thing and another it starts to leave the Christian
movie industry far behind in terms of production. And you just take, just
the shear volume of production and their concerns, well you've got to do
the same thing then with the history of art. And the death imagery. Yeah, a
lot of people talked about that and I think you're absolutely right in
terms of the crucifixion. Though I think that the crucifixion does say
something about western attitudes towards the spirit and I think for me the
feminist argument that the crucifixion has so much to do with blood and
usurping the feminine role in creation. I think they're right in saying
that by usurping that you also get into a kind of strange contamination
because it's a preposterous notion. The bleeding wound being male. It's a
preposterous notion to try and take the feminine away from women and take
it into men, take it all that onto yourself. It can't work. And you enter
into a kind of cultural sickness.
I think that in that sense there's a real damning history of death imagery
but it's the worse sense too because it can't even be positive, it can't be
you know, you say cathartic, because it's primarily fucked up. It's sick.
It's a killing imagery. It's a lie. Right, that's what my piece Daphne and
Apollo was all about. Apollo had this great bleeding wound. It's like if
you try to construct a whole history of imagery on a false notion then
you're constructing a building on a bad foundation and it will fall down.
More to the point, you take a culture and you base that culture on a whole
series of ideas and some of them are fundamentally flawed, you've got a
mess. No matter how many of the rest of those ideas are good...
NM: That's pretty much the whole history of western society. Or any major
society based on religion.
MA: I don't know about other societies. But I do know that some societies
have escaped that. But you know, it is pretty universally true. You're
quite right that there is this negative attitude towards the feminine.
NM: What are your views of contemporary popular art and or artists and the
death symbolism used within the mass media? As an example; the Gulf war
became a video game. The more death imagery they can get without actually
showing bloody bodies...there's just this detachment. They want to show
death and destruction but they don't want to show babies and women
slaughtered in the streets lying in pools of blood.
MA: I think that goes back to this other question too; is it cathartic for
the artist and the audience? Well that was death within art and I took that
question earlier very specifically and that is Death as in personal death.
I think now violence in film or video games, I don't know much about
catharsis again, but I know that it serves a purpose something like that.
Like I don't think that we are meant to live the lives we live. I mean
we're mammals and one thing and another and I don't think we live at our
optimum and I think a lot of these things serve to release a lot of that
stuff that has to be released.
Nietzsche in the Anti-Christ argues against Christian culture. He says that
Christian culture is dumbifying. He argues in favour of the older European
Celtic Hero culture where it was through great deeds and great exertion
that you got ahead and that was laudable. He had said that was what we
should return to. We were stronger. We were more vital. And see the Nazi's
would pick up on that and they did. Unfortunately they did because it takes
that whole argument and puts a kind of negative spin on it. And of course
the Americans still believe it. They have a very strong Nietzschean side.
Deerhunter, well he turns on it. He turns on his own Nietzschean side [but
it's] a spiritual thing, that's a little different.
But yeah, what you're talking about interests me because what happens when
you have a culture that 's fundamentally screwed up? Why is it screwed up?
This is just another aspect of it. Why not strive for excellence? It's
almost like we refuse, and I know people, Christians, who believe there is
nothing wrong. There's no global warming. There's no over pollution.
There's no problems. God's in control. People have actually said to me God
would not have let us come up with pollution if he wasn't certain we were
going to have the tools to fix it.
NM: All part of the big plan...
MA: People believe that.
NM: It just doesn't make sense.
MA: Well in this particular example she can argue it because the same
technology that created the mess is also available for us to clean up the
mess if we have the political will to do so.
NM: I always take arguments like that down to the strictly personal level.
Like pollution wouldn't be there unless there was a reason God would do it.
Well OK, would God let your twelve year old daughter be raped and tortured?
I guess it's OK with God for that to happen. If you accept one, you've got
to accept both but when it comes down [to that] most people don't accept it
that way.
MA: It's funny, that question came up very recently. I heard somebody ask,
somebody who had been at a disaster sight, the shooting down in Australia
and the shooting in Scotland. These two ministers were talking on As It
Happens. And the one minister said it's very strange to [him] that [his]
parishioners did not come to [him] and say why did God let this happen?
That they didn't. The parishioners didn't do that. They felt that they
would seek solace in God but not that God was responsible. Of course that's
Anglican. I guess in Scotland it would be Presbyterian which is another
Protestant religion but it's not the born again.
The Born again religion's a different kind of animal all together. Now I
don't think that I have too much understanding about [it] but that it's a
positive movement. For these people it's a positive movement. But when I
look at it what I'm interested in is that particular twist. Like, yeah but
how does that get me? It gets me because these people say let's go on
driving eight cylinder cars. The same people, you know it, we all know it,
the same people that say this stuff also say...and the guy I work for, he's
got a great sense of humour about it. If we get on this subject, if we're
in his big suburban four wheel drive and he's going down the street in two
wheel drive and I were to bring up a subject like that he'll slam it
directly into four wheel drive and say uuuuuggggg, let's buy gas shares!!!
(laughter)
NM: Have to give him credit for a sense of humour. Do you think it's
healthy or detrimental to society as a whole for our popular culture to be
so obsessed with death?
MA: Absolutely! I think if you take popular culture, I don't think that the
mass popular culture is, but you take things like heavy metal music which
is pop culture. Excellent. Because I see [it] primarily as a youth culture.
And I think they're right. They're right to be scared. I think they're on
the right track but...
NM: At the same time you've got people like Tarrantino, and other people
before me have said this, using, like in Pulp Fiction, the notion of
someone getting their head blown off when a car hits a bump to get guffaws.
It's funny. Have you seen that movie?
MA: Yeah. I remember these Christians in New York I was talking to,
actually he has a friend, and we were on this subject about Tarrantino and
Oliver Stone. It's almost like the absorption of this death imagery has
become nihilist in intent. It's like at a certain period in American, at
certain periods in American film, because its happened before that the
Americans have had very serious films that dealt with death and rape and
things like that. But there are other times when you can't touch it, like
Forest Gump. But it's interesting that Forest Gump and Pulp Fiction were
made roughly at the same time. But it's almost like these guys are saying
America is now ready for raw nihilism. They will pay to reward their own
sense of nihilism. I think when that happens, and the first time I'd heard
of this [Pulp Fiction] I wouldn't see it. I wouldn't pay to see it. I
waited until it came out on video. It was because I felt that having seen
Reservoir Dogs, which really offended me, I felt that it's a trivialization
of, it was like people could say "yeah, well I've seen that now. I don't
have to deal with it..." or something like that. Or it's this push it off
into a corner; "oh yeah, we know what that's all about. We've done that and
now we can move onto something else...let's go back to what we doing.
Driving our eight cylinder truck or something like that."
But that aside, the mass popular culture, I think that the heavy metal and
things like that, this kind of street cultural obsession, I think it's
really healthy. These kids really do see in a personal way the way the
economy is going to affect them. And they do see a kind of global economic
collapse coming in as much as it won't be wealth for all anymore. It's only
going to be wealth for a few and the rest of us are going to starve to
death.
NM: I see a lot more and I hear a lot more hopelessness in the kids today
than what there was when I was a teenager.
MA: You're right. Yes.
NM: A lot more...a lot more severe. I think that ties in directly with,
even here in Toronto, the amount of teenagers you see carrying knives and
guns. When I was a teenager you got into fist fights that was it.
MA: I think when I was a teenager there was this kind of rebel thing. And I
think that that's a...there is a healthy side to that romantic - there's
also a very negative side - to that romantic image. But now these kids
really have a real cause to be violently opposed. So if they come up with
this death imagery, I think that's great. I think that, I can't remember
the name of the artist who did that video you lent me a video with these
big mechanical monsters.
NM: Survival Research Laboratories. Mark Pauline.
MA: Yeah. I think that he's tapping into and reinforcing something there
that should be, should be worked with. I'm not doing that. But I think it's
great. In a way I'm something peripheral. I think it's great. I think it's
too bad, I don't think that it's a good thing that this should happen, that
kids should be put in this position, but they are in this position so I
think it's great [their coping mechanisms].
NM: It's almost inevitable the way it's going.
MA: Yeah, but this is also a healthy positive reaction. It's like rage, you
know, like, what the fuck are you doing?!? You're doing it, we're going to
pay. And they're right because we're doing to them and we know we're doing
it to them and we don't care. It's this kind of...but it's always been
there, people have abused other people. Christian culture or not.
NM: This is kind of a humourous question for you; what do you think of
serial killer trading cards?
MA: Well, um... I just saw the tail end of the Unforgiven the other night.
Do you remember the comicbook writer character? There's a guy who comes in
and first he studies with Gene Hackman... Anyways in the movie there's this
guy from the east who writes comicbooks. He works with Little Bill, the
Gene Hackman character, building up this Little Bill cowboy character, well
obviously what I'm getting at is there has always been serial killer
trading cards in different formats. I think it's great. I have a suspicion
it's more to do with the old Nietzschean hero. That whole Celtic and um, he
uses the word hyperborium. The wild western...I mean the native people
refer to us as the Celts still now. We're this footloose tribe that can't
get our shit together. We have to keep going, it's almost like we're
cursed, right. I think it's part of that. I don't think the Christian
culture has been able to map over us sufficiently. Catholics have tried to
do it. They've tried to map Christ right over the cowboy so that Christ was
the great adventurer. He's the cool guy. He's the...I don't want to argue
the point but there's this...He might be a cool guy. He may be a great
adventurer but it's not at all the same
It's a very different kind of animal. I think that's what that's about. And
I don't think you can get rid of it. I think the more we try to destroy
that in our culture the more we're doing ourselves a disservice. Because,
and I really mean this, I think that the Celtic culture, and this is why I
make so much medieval art and I'm actually more interested now in going
back even further. We don't know that much about the Celts, at least I
don't. I've done some reading. But their imagery really does reinforce this
notion of being in the world. I mean being in the world. And if you admit
you're in the world you're not going to do stupid things. You're going to
accept the rules whereas Christian they accept rules that are from out of
the world. So yeah, I think that's a relevant question. Serial killers.
NM: Have you seen the movie Seven?
MA: Yeah. I think Brad Pit was fantastic in Legends of the Fall.
NM: I haven't seen that movie but [a friend] has and she it should be
Legends of the Misogynist. She just hated that movie. The only thing women
were good for was having babies and wrecking brother's relationships.
MA: Well, there's a lot of truth in that [description of the movie] but
whether or not it's misogynist or misanthropist I thought he was also very
good in A River Runs Through It.
NM: I haven't seen that one. I'm not a big fan a Brad Pit. I thought he
was...
MA: Do you actively dislike him?
NM: My first exposure to him was Kalifornia and I thought he was perfect. I
thought he was great. Then I saw him in True Romance. I thought he was
really good. And then this [Seven], I thought putting him beside Morgan
Freeman, who in my opinion is one of these best actors in Hollywood -
MA: Me too. I agree.
NM: - that it just...especially the ending when he looked in the box, it
just showed how pitiful of an actor he is.
MA: Oh, I think he's a pitiful actor but the reason I brought it up is
because he always plays the same character. And it's most obvious in Legend
of the Fall where he plays this wanderer, the Celtic wanderer, a killer.
The great blonde stud, killer, hero, natural phenomenon. Well the fact of
the matter is that was the substance of the Celtic hero. That was a big
part of the substance. You had to be a genetic superstar because that was,
it was the world. We wanted our men to be this way. They had to go out and
kill the enemy. They had to go out and kill the bears. They had to go out
there and do all these heroic deeds for survival. And Christians are in
opposition to that great hero role. Or it would seem so. If you talk to
certain Christians they say no not at all. Be careful.
NM: You're talking about the one's who want their own state.
MA: Right. Yes and this is where, it's very important -
NM: - they've got their M-16's stock piled.
MA: - A lot of those people are born again's and they go back to the text
of the bible. And they say this is what the bible says. And they all say so
much of this about the meek and the humble has got to do with Catholicism.
Then it's mediated Christianity. So the Christian culture is very different
from this great hero culture. Generally but I can't warn you enough off
thinking that two are the same. Because boy, it is very interesting talking
to these born again's because they say you show me one place in the bible
where it says you've got to be a knocked-kneed flibber-dee-jibit. You show
one place where it says you've got to be some kind of geek. No, no.
They're saying just show us one place where it, now there's this business
about the meek but that's a quote and I don't know the bible and it could
be taken out of context. So I just want to steer clear of it. I don't want
to go one way or the other.
But the whole serial killer thing, that's what that's about. The great hero
worship.
NM: We've been talking about the attraction, obsession with death but then
all of our medical science and all of our popular culture is also obsessed
with youth and beauty and immortality.
MA: Well, they're the two great questions. They're the Yin and the Yang.
Sex and death, sex and violence in the movies. I think in our society,
again so much of the mass popular culture is trivialized them and made them
into callow representations of question. I think the attraction, obsession
of immortality and youth are appropriate. I think that's natural. I think
that in terms of you mentioned [a friend's] concerns about misogyny. I
think that women's' attraction to Brad Pitt is misanthropic.
NM: How so?
MA: Because he's gorgeous. He's a trivialization of the male. He's not very
smart but he's gorgeous. Women like to look a Brad Pitt but they don't want
us to look at some feminine equivalent. It's a hypocrisy. A vicious
hypocrisy. They can argue that until the cows come home, they're wrong.
They're wrong. You can talk to women who are a little older in their
forties. They're perfectly clear exactly in what's going on. You know, he's
fuckable material. He's gorgeous, [they] want to look at him. You might
want to look at some female equivalent. Go ahead do it. Just don't talk to
me about it. It makes me feel insecure because I can't look like that.
But I think there some very serious...in our attempts to liberalize our
politics, I think there has been some very serious problems introduced into
our understanding of sex. I don't think skinny beautiful as we understand
it is necessarily the way to. But as I once said to a fat woman when she
was saying that a skinny woman was anorexic and she was hurting herself, I
said to her well, yeah, in the days when fat women were in fashion she was
saying the same thing about fat women. And it goes for men too. You can say
it's not as important and it's true, we don't suffer as much but... it's
changing rapidly. I think that's a good thing. I think it's good for
everybody. I think that's universal, this immortality, youthful...
NM: Is the obsession with death universal?
MA: Yeah. Sure it is. To the best of my knowledge. I have a book here
someplace and it has the most magnificent metaphor for immortality that
I've ever read. He argues that in the Inuit, you know Inuit prints? They'll
show the fish within the loon and the then within the...he argues that
consciousness is essentially reincarnated. So that one lifetime you're born
as a caribou and you remember your previous life as a woman. He argues that
this woman remembers herself as a caribou and actually preferred her life
as a caribou. That the Inuit, there was this immortality but it wasn't
within...it was amongst species. It wasn't just within one species. This is
a very good book.
NM: Except nowadays if this woman did remember her life as a caribou, she'd
have a whole bunch of followers...
(Laughter)
MA: That's right...
NM: She'd be working out of [a new age] bookstore.
MA: Now I would say that these people weren't obsessed with death. I mean ,
this is a poetic metaphor [the book], but let's say it was not a poetic
metaphor, let's say it was analogous to experience. In fact this is what
happened. The other thing that is so exciting about this is it's completely
obvious. When somebody says it to you and you look at that, the Inuit art,
you go (claps hands).
NM: It so obvious you missed it the first time.
MA: Of course. You live in this world and that's why they called the
animals their brothers. You eat me, I eat you. I can't live if you're dead.
You can't live if I'm dead. We live off each other. Very...it's just boom!
Now it's very interesting, whether or not they even had any concept of
death equivalent [to our notions]. I've been thinking about this quite a
bit now and I was reading my own grant proposal. I talked about [how] with
Christianity and Christian culture, [there's] this concentration on the
next world. Like when we die were do we go? Well, as I just said with the
Inuit, you don't go anywhere. Or they didn't think you go anywhere. You
stay right here. There is this great continuity but when you break that
continuity and you say there is here and then there's there, then you do
get this notion of discontinuity and death. Because if there is no there
and you don't stay here, you don't go anywhere.
NM: Food for worms.
MA: Food for worms. No, but I mean for Christians there is no food for
worms. One of these Christians said to me you will never be on the tree of
life, compost maybe. But they don't believe in the world. Christians do not
believe in the world.
NM: So why are they here?
MA: Because God put them here. But the world is an illusion. Reality is
heaven and this how Christians can justify polluting the world. Driving
cars with eight cylinder engines. Because this is an illusion. If God does
not forbid you from driving an eight cylinder vehicle then it's all right
to do so. The bible's very clear. You do this, you don't do that. That's
what they argue. I've been trying to talk to [these] people and it's very
interesting, the effect that talking to people who have a radically
different world view than yours has. It's makes you become more and more
crystalline in your understanding of yourself if nothing else.
NM: It must very hard talking to people like that.
MA: Well I've been down there [in New York] for four or five years now.
Stephen's a reasonable guy and he might think I'm full of shit but we still
go out drinking together. Drinking now, not a light beer. We go out
drinking. A few nights we've gone home drunk. He's very jealous of my
lifestyle. Now, so talking to these people, if they don't believe in this
world and I do...and then I can get back into some of the things I get
thinking about like Descartes and the Cartesian duality. The mind and then
the body and then that whole Christian thing about the spirit. And then the
real world versus this illusory world. In my grant proposal I was [asking]
what is our problem with the world as it is? When we go outside why don't
go outside and be in the world? And even when we're in our places why don't
we just be, and I'm sure you are with your children. I'm sure you're focus
is entirely there. I understand parents are like this.
NM: Sometimes...
MA: Yeah, I mean they're so into their kids. like they actually become
aware of their kids.
NM: I would agree to that for me personally because I find if I forget
myself and just get totally into my kids, just from their outlook I start
to absorb and see things their way and learn so much. What you and I take
for granted as adults, everything just in this world, I mean I'd love to
have the consciousness or a two or three month old. It must be an acid
trip.
MA: It must almost be pure consciousness.
NM: Just like a gazillion things going on you don't know anything about and
you're stuck in the middle of this kaleidoscope. That would just
be...hysterical.
MA: I was driving north on Landsdown on my way to work one morning and I
had a split second of what you're talking about. It was almost like people
had pulled the shit off of my eyes and I just saw it [reality] for what it
was. It was like...yeah that's what there.
NM: How do you think the world will end?
MA: I don't think it matters to me anymore. I've been on this millennium
theme for a few years. It might happen in [your children's] lifetime.
There's a really good chance it will definitely start to happen, I mean the
real end, will start to happen in [their] lifetime. I think the end is
happening now. People say this time all the time though, right. I heard
this discussion on the millennium here the other day on the radio and this
guy said don't forget everyday is the end of another millennium.
NM: I don't tie it in so much with the millennium. I see the end of the
world, when you say [my children] , I think you're right. I think humanity
is going to reach such a technological point that the technology is going
to be the eventual downfall. You just get to such a technological point
that there's nowhere else to go. We're killing this planet with everything
we do. No one seems to think that these resources are not renewable.
Through our desires and our technologies we're just going to reach a point
where we reach...escape velocity. And then the planet cools for a while and
something else starts. I was reading in a kind of fringe book called Secret
and Suppressed and one "conspiracist" was saying that technologies and
civilizations go in a cycle and you can trace certain five thousand, ten
thousand year old hieroglyphics. You can put it all into a one kind of
frame work that it's warnings from an elder race that reached a
technological pivot point and vanished. This was their warning [to us]
saying what happened when -
MA: You get to certain point.
NM: You get to a certain point and the cycle starts again. It's something
like everything thirteen thousand years. You reach escape velocity and your
system [culture] stops. Something else starts up.
MA: I've no problem with that. I think our culture now is almost too
diverse though. You hear about these cultures where they apparently just
stopped. Like on Tuesday morning. And I don't know how we would do that on
a planetary scale.
NM: I think a few more years of evaporating ozone and we're having a big
bar-b-que and we're lunch man...
(Laughter)
MA: Yeah, I see it.
NM: A few sunny days and there goes Florida, California...
MA: I don't want to experience it but I feel it is likely. I hope I don't
have to experience it in my lifetime. I have this hope that I'll die before
I have to see that.
NM: Me too.
Copyright © 1997 Neil MacKay
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CULTURE JAMMING: HACKING, SLASHING AND SNIPING IN THE EMPIRE OF SIGNS
by Mark Dery
************************************************************************
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read by any and all, but the author holds the copyright; none of
the following may be reproduced in any medium, traditional or
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("markdery@well.sf.ca.us"). A hardcopy version, published by the
_Open Magazine_ pamphlet series, is available under the title
_Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of
Signs_ ($4). Most college and fringe culture bookstores carry
_Open Magazine_ pamphlets; they can also be ordered from _The Open
Magazine Pamphlet Series_, POB 2726 Westfield, NJ 07091 U.S.A.
(tel: 908-789-9608; fax 908-654-3829). The series also includes
superb pamphlets by Mike Davis, Noam Chomsky, and Herbert Schiller,
among others.
* * *
_Culture Jamming_: _Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the
Empire of Signs_
I. _The Empire of Signs_
"My fellow Americans," exhorted John F. Kennedy, "haven't you
ever wanted to put your foot through your television screen?"
Of course, it wasn't actually Kennedy, but an actor in "Media
Burn," a spectacle staged in 1975 by the performance art collective
Ant Farm. Speaking from a dais, "Kennedy" held forth on America's
addiction to the plug-in drug, declaring, "Mass media monopolies
control people by their control of information." On cue, an
assistant doused a wall of TV sets with kerosene and flicked a
match at the nearest console. An appreciative roar went up from
the crowd as the televisions exploded into snapping flames and
roiling smoke.
Minutes later, a customized 1959 Cadillac hurtled through the
fiery wall with a shuddering crunch and ground to a halt,
surrounded by the smashed, blackened carcasses of televisions.
Here and there, some sets still burned; one by one, their picture
tubes imploded, to the onlookers' delight. A postcard reproduction
of the event's pyrotechnic climax, printed on the occasion of the
its tenth anniversary, bears a droll poem:
Modern alert
plague is here
burn your TV
exterminate fear
Image breakers
smashing TV
American heroes
burn to be free
In "Media Burn," Ant Farm indulged publicly in the guilty
pleasure of kicking a hole in the cathode-ray tube. Now, almost
two decades later, TV's Cyclopean eye peers into every corner of
the cultural arena, and the desire to blind it is as strong as
ever. "Media Burn" materializes the wish-fulfillment dream of a
consumer democracy that yearns, in its hollow heart and empty head,
for a belief system loftier than the "family values" promised by a
Volvo ad campaign, discourse more elevated than that offered by the
shark tank feeding-frenzy of _The McLaughlin Hour_.
It is a postmodern commonplace that our lives are intimately
and inextricably bound up in the TV experience. Ninety-eight
percent of all American households---more than have indoor
plumbing---have at least one television, which is on seven hours a
day, on the average. Dwindling funds for public schools and
libraries, counterpointed by the skyrocketing sales of VCRs and
electronic games, have given rise to a culture of "aliteracy,"
defined by Roger Cohen as "the rejection of books by children and
young adults who know how to read but choose not to." The drear
truth that two thirds of Americans get "most of their information"
from television is hardly a revelation.
Media prospector Bill McKibben wonders about the exchange
value of such information:
We believe we live in the 'age of information,' that
there has been an information 'explosion,' an information
'revolution.' While in a certain narrow sense this is
the case, in many important ways just the opposite is
true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when
vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about
who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An
Unenlightenment. An age of missing information.
The effects of television are most deleterious in the realms
of journalism and politics; in both spheres, TV has reduced
discourse to photo ops and sound bites, asserting the hegemony of
image over language, emotion over intellect. These developments
are bodied forth in Ronald Reagan, a TV conjuration who for eight
years held the news media, and thus the American public,
spellbound. As Mark Hertsgaard points out, the President's media-
savvy handlers were able to reduce the fourth estate, which likes
to think of itself as an unblinking watchdog, to a fawning lapdog:
Deaver, Gergen and their colleagues effectively rewrote
the rules of presidential image-making. On the basis of
a sophisticated analysis of the American news media---how
it worked, which buttons to push when, what techniques
had and had not worked for previous administrations---
they introduced a new model for packaging the nation's
top politician and using the press to sell him to the
American public. Their objective was not simply to tame
the press but to transform it into an unwitting
mouthpiece of the government.
During the Reagan years, America was transformed into a TV
democracy whose prime directive is social control through the
fabrication and manipulation of images. "We [the Reagan campaign
staff] tried to create the most entertaining, visually attractive
scene to fill that box, so that the cameras from the networks would
have to use it," explained former Reagan advisor Michael Deaver.
"It would be so good that they'd say, 'Boy, this is going to make
our show tonight.' [W]e became Hollywood producers."
The conversion of American society into a virtual reality was
lamentably evident in the Persian Gulf War, a made-for-TV
miniseries with piggybacked merchandising (T-shirts, baseball caps,
Saddam toilet paper, Original Desert Shield Condoms) and gushy,
_Entertainment Tonight_-style hype from a cheerleading media. When
filmmaker Jon Alpert, under contract to NBC, brought back stomach-
churning footage of Iraq under U.S. bombardment, the network---
which is owned by one of the world's largest arms manufacturers,
General Electric---fired Alpert and refused to air the film. Not
that Alpert's film would have roused the body politic: throughout
the war, the American people demanded the right not to know. A
poll cited in _The New York Times_ was particularly distressing:
"Given a choice between increasing military control over
information or leaving it to news organizations to make most
decisions about reporting on the war, 57 per cent of those
responding said they would favor greater military control."
During the war's first weeks, as home front news organizations
aided Pentagon spin control by maintaining a near-total blackout on
coverage of protest marches, Deaver was giddy with enthusiasm. "If
you were going to hire a public relations firm to do the media
relations for an international event," he bubbled, "it couldn't be
done any better than this is being done." In fact, a P.R. firm,
Hill & Knowlton, was hired; it orchestrated the congressional
testimony of the overwrought young Kuwaiti woman whose horror
stories about babies ripped from incubators and left "on the cold
floor to die" by Iraqi soldiers was highly effective in mobilizing
public support for the war. Her testimony was never substantiated,
and her identity---she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador
to the U.S.---was concealed, but why niggle over details?
"Formulated like a World War II movie, the Gulf War even ended like
a World War II movie," wrote Neal Gabler, "with the troops marching
triumphantly down Broadway or Main Street, bathed in the gratitude
of their fellow Americans while the final credits rolled."
After the yellow ribbons were taken down, however, a creeping
disaffection remained. A slowly-spreading rancor at the televisual
Weltanschauung, it is with us still, exacerbated by the prattle of
talk show hosts, anchorclones, and the Teen Talk Barbie advertised
on Saturday mornings whose "four fun phrases" include "I love
shopping" and "Meet me at the mall." Mark Crispin Miller neatly
sums TV's place in our society:
Everybody watches it, but no one really likes it. This
is the open secret of TV today. Its only champions are
its own executives, the advertisers who exploit it, and
a compromised network of academic boosters. Otherwise,
TV has no spontaneous defenders, because there is almost
nothing in it to defend.
The rage and frustration of the disempowered viewer exorcised
in "Media Burn" bubbles up, unexpectedly, in "57 Channels (And
Nothin' On)", Bruce Springsteen's Scorsese-esque tale of a man
unhinged by the welter of meaningless information that assails him
from every channel. Springsteen sings: "So I bought a .44 magnum
it was solid steel cast/ And in the blessed name of Elvis well I
just let it blast/ 'Til my TV lay in pieces there at my feet/ And
they busted me for disturbin' the almighty peace."
Significantly, the video for "57 Channels" incorporates
footage of a white Cadillac on a collision course with a wall of
flaming TV sets in obvious homage to "Media Burn." The ritual
destruction of the TV set, endlessly iterated in American mass
culture, can be seen as a retaliatory gesture by an audience that
has begun to bridle, if only intuitively, at the suggestion that
"power" resides in the remote control unit, that "freedom of
choice" refers to the ever-greater options offered around the dial.
This techno-voodoo rite constitutes the symbolic obliteration
of a one-way information pipeline that only transmits, never
receives. It is an act of sympathetic magic performed in the name
of all who are obliged to peer at the world through peepholes owned
by multinational conglomerates for whom the profit margin is the
bottom line. "To the eye of the consumer," notes Ben Bagdikian,
the global media oligopoly is not visible...Newsstands
still display rows of newspapers and magazines, in a
dazzling array of colors and subjects...Throughout the
world, broadcast and cable channels continue to multiply,
as do video cassettes and music recordings. But...if
this bright kaleidoscope suddenly disappeared and was
replaced by the corporate colophons of those who own this
output, the collage would go gray with the names of the
few multinationals that now command the field.
In his watershed work, _The Media Monopoly_, Bagdikian reports
that the number of transnational media giants has dropped to 23
and is rapidly shrinking. Following another vector, Herbert
Schiller considers the interlocked issues of privatized information
and limited access:
The commercialization of information, its private
acquisition and sale, has become a major industry. While
more material than ever before, in formats created for
special use, is available at a price, free public
information supported by general taxation is attacked by
the private sector as an unacceptable form of
subsidy...An individual's ability to know the actual
circumstances of national and international existence has
progressively diminished.
Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon level another, equally
disturbing charge:
In an era of network news cutbacks and staff layoffs,
many reporters are reluctant to pursue stories they know
will upset management. "People are more careful now,"
remarked a former NBC news producer, "because this whole
notion of freedom of the press becomes a contradiction
when the people who own the media are the same people who
need to be reported on."
Corporate ownership of the newsmedia, the subsumption of an
ever-larger number of publishing companies and television networks
into an ever-smaller number of multinationals, and the increased
privatization of truth by an information-rich, technocratic elite
are not newly-risen issues. More recent is the notion that the
public mind is being colonized by corporate phantasms---wraithlike
images of power and desire that haunt our dreams. Consider the
observations of Neal Gabler and Marshall Blonsky:
Everywhere the fabricated, the inauthentic and the
theatrical have gradually driven out the natural, the
genuine and the spontaneous until there is no distinction
between real life and stagecraft. In fact, one could
argue that the theatricalization of American life is the
major cultural transformation of this century.
We can no longer do anything without wanting to see it
immediately on video...There is never any longer an event
or a person who acts for himself, in himself. The
direction of events and of people is to be reproduced
into image, to be doubled in the image of television.
[T]oday the referent disappears. In circulation are
images. Only images.
The eutopic (literally, "no-place") territory demarcated by
Gabler and Blonsky, lush with fictions yet strangely barren, has
been mapped in detail by the philosopher Jean Baudrillard. In his
landmark 1975 essay, "The Precession of Simulacra," Baudrillard put
forth the notion that we inhabit a "hyperreality," a hall of media
mirrors in which reality has been lost in an infinity of
reflections. We "experience" events, first and foremost, as
electronic reproductions of rumored phenomena many times removed,
he maintains; originals, invariably compared to their
digitally-enhanced representations, inevitably fall short. In the
"desert of the real," asserts Baudrillard, mirages outnumber oases
and are more alluring to the thirsty eye.
Moreover, he argues, signs that once pointed toward distant
realities now refer only to themselves. Disneyland's Main Street,
U.S.A, which depicts the sort of idyllic, turn-of-the-century burg
that exists only in Norman Rockwell paintings and MGM backlots, is
a textbook example of self-referential simulation, a painstaking
replica of something that never was. "These would be the
successive phases of the image," writes Baudrillard, betraying an
almost necrophiliac relish as he contemplates the decomposition of
culturally-defined reality. "[The image] is the reflection of a
basic reality; it masks and perverts a basic reality; it masks the
absence of a basic reality; it bears no relation to any reality
whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum."
Reality isn't what it used to be. In America, factory
capitalism has been superseded by an information economy
characterized by the reduction of labor to the manipulation, on
computers, of symbols that stand in for the manufacturing process.
The engines of industrial production have slowed, yielding to a
phantasmagoric capitalism that produces intangible commodities---
Hollywood blockbusters, television sit-coms, catchphrases, jingles,
buzzwords, images, one-minute megatrends, financial transactions
flickering through fiberoptic bundles. Our wars are Nintendo wars,
fought with camera-equipped smart bombs that marry cinema and
weaponry in a television that kills. Futurologists predict that
the flagship technology of the coming century will be "virtual
reality," a computer-based system that immerses users wearing
headsets wired for sight and sound in computer-animated worlds. In
virtual reality, the television swallows the viewer, headfirst.
II. _Culture Jamming_
Meanwhile, the question remains: How to box with shadows? In
other words, what shape does an engaged politics assume in an
empire of signs?
The answer lies, perhaps, in the "semiological guerrilla
warfare" imagined by Umberto Eco. "[T]he receiver of the message
seems to have a residual freedom: the freedom to read it in a
different way...I am proposing an action to urge the audience to
control the message and its multiple possibilities of
interpretation," he writes. "[O]ne medium can be employed to
communicate a series of opinions on another medium...The universe
of Technological Communication would then be patrolled by groups of
communications guerrillas, who would restore a critical dimension
to passive reception."
Eco assumes, a priori, the radical politics of visual
literacy, an idea eloquently argued by Stuart Ewen, a critic of
consumer culture. "We live at a time when the image has become the
predominant mode of public address, eclipsing all other forms in
the structuring of meaning," asserts Ewen. "Yet little in our
education prepares us to make sense of the rhetoric, historical
development or social implications of the images within our
lives." In a society of heat, light and electronic poltergeists-
--an eerie otherworld of "illimitable vastness, brilliant light,
and the gloss and smoothness of
material things"---the desperate
project of reconstructing meaning, or at least reclaiming that
notion from marketing departments and P.R. firms, requires
visually-literate ghostbusters.
Culture jammers answer to that name. "Jamming" is CB slang
for the illegal practice of interrupting radio broadcasts or
conversations between fellow hams with lip farts, obscenities, and
other equally jejune hijinx. Culture jamming, by contrast, is
directed against an ever more intrusive, instrumental technoculture
whose operant mode is the manufacture of consent through the
manipulation of symbols.
The term "cultural jamming" was first used by the collage band
Negativland to describe billboard alteration and other forms of
media sabotage. On _Jamcon '84_, a mock-serious bandmember
observes, "As awareness of how the media environment we occupy
affects and directs our inner life grows, some resist...The
skillfully reworked billboard...directs the public viewer to a
consideration of the original corporate strategy. The studio for
the cultural jammer is the world at large."
Part artistic terrorists, part vernacular critics, culture
jammers, like Eco's "communications guerrillas," introduce noise
into the signal as it passes from transmitter to receiver,
encouraging idiosyncratic, unintended interpretations. Intruding
on the intruders, they invest ads, newscasts, and other media
artifacts with subversive meanings; simultaneously, they decrypt
them, rendering their seductions impotent. Jammers offer
irrefutable evidence that the right has no copyright on war waged
with incantations and simulations. And, like Ewen's cultural
cryptographers, they refuse the role of passive shoppers, renewing
the notion of a public discourse.
Finally, and just as importantly, culture jammers are Groucho
Marxists, ever mindful of the fun to be had in the joyful
demolition of oppressive ideologies. As the inveterate prankster
and former Dead Kennedy singer Jello Biafra once observed, "There's
a big difference between 'simple crime' like holding up a 7-11, and
'creative crime' as a form of expression...Creative crime
is...uplifting to the soul...What better way to survive our anthill
society than by abusing the very mass media that sedates the
public?...A prank a day keeps the dog leash away!"
Jamming is part of a historical continuum that includes
Russian samizdat (underground publishing in defiance of official
censorship); the anti-fascist photomontages of John Heartfield;
Situationist detournement (defined by Greil Marcus, in _Lipstick
Traces_, as "the theft of aesthetic artifacts from their contexts
and their diversion into contexts of one's own devise"); the
underground journalism of '60s radicals such as Paul Krassner,
Jerry Rubin, and Abbie Hoffman; Yippie street theater such as the
celebrated attempt to levitate the Pentagon; parody religions such
as the Dallas-based Church of the Subgenius; workplace sabotage of
the sort documented by _Processed World_, a magazine for
disaffected data entry drones; the ecopolitical monkeywrenching of
Earth First!; the random acts of Artaudian cruelty that radical
theorist Hakim Bey calls "poetic terrorism" ("weird dancing in all-
night computer banking lobbies...bizarre alien artifacts strewn in
State Parks"); the insurgent use of the "cut-up" collage technique
proposed by William Burroughs in "Electronic Revolution" ("The
control of the mass media depends on laying down lines of
association...Cut/up techniques could swamp the mass media with
total illusion"); and subcultural bricolage (the refunctioning, by
societal "outsiders," of symbols associated with the dominant
culture, as in the appropriation of corporate attire and _Vogue_
model poses by poor, gay, and largely nowhite drag queens).
An elastic category, culture jamming accommodates multitude of
subcultural practices. Outlaw computer hacking with the intent of
exposing institutional or corporate wrongdoing is one example;
"slashing," or textual poaching, is another. (The term "slashing"
derives from the pornographic "K/S"---short for "Kirk/Spock"---
stories written by female _Star Trek_ fans and published in
underground fanzines. Spun from the perceived homoerotic subtext
in _Star Trek_ narratives, K/S, or "slash," tales are often
animated by feminist impulses. I have appropriated the term for
general use, applying it to any form of jamming in which tales told
for mass consumption are perversely reworked.) Transmission
jamming; pirate TV and radio broadcasting; and camcorder
countersurveillance (in which low cost consumer technologies are
used by DIY muckrakers to document police brutality or governmental
corruption) are potential modus operandi for the culture jammer.
So, too, is media activism such as the cheery immolation of a mound
of television sets in front of CBS's Manhattan offices---part of a
protest against media bias staged by FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In
Reporting) during the Gulf War---and "media-wrenching" such as ACT
UP's disruption of _The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour_ in protest of
infrequent AIDS coverage. A somewhat more conventional strain of
culture jamming is mediawatch projects such as Paper Tiger
Television, an independent production collective that produces
segments critiquing the information industry; Deep Dish TV, a
grassroots satellite network that distributes free-thinking
programming to public access cable channels nationwide; and Not
Channel Zero, a collective of young African-American "camcorder
activists" whose motto is "The Revolution, Televised." And then
there is academy hacking---cultural studies, conducted outside
university walls, by insurgent intellectuals.
Thus, culture jamming assumes many guises; let us consider, in
greater detail, some of its more typical manifestations.
_Sniping and Subvertising_
"Subvertising," the production and dissemination of anti-ads
that deflect Madison Avenue's attempts to turn the consumer's
attention in a given direction, is an ubiquitous form of jamming.
Often, it takes the form of "sniping"---illegal, late-night sneak
attacks on public space by operatives armed with posters, brushes,
and buckets of wheatpaste.
_Adbusters_, a Vancouver, B.C.-based quarterly that critiques
consumer culture, enlivens its pages with acid satires. "Absolut
Nonsense," a cunningly-executed spoof featuring a suspiciously
familiar-looking bottle, proclaimed: "Any suggestion that our
advertising campaign has contributed to alcoholism, drunk driving
or wife and child beating is absolute nonsense. No one pays any
attention to advertising." Ewen, himself a covert jammer,
excoriates conspicuous consumption in his "Billboards of the
Future"---anonymously-mailed Xerox broadsides like his ad for
"Chutzpah: cologne for women & men, one splash and you'll be
demanding the equal distribution of wealth." Guerrilla Girls, a
cabal of feminist artists that bills itself as "the conscience of
the art world," is known for savagely funny, on-target posters, one
of which depicted a nude odalisque in a gorilla mask, asking, "Do
women have to get naked to get into the Met. Museum?" Los
Angeles's Robbie Conal covers urban walls with the information age
equivalent of Dorian Gray's portrait: grotesque renderings of
Oliver North, Ed Meese, and other scandal-ridden politicos. "I'm
interested in counter-advertising," he says, "using the streamlined
sign language of advertising in a kind of reverse penetration."
For gay activists, subvertising and sniping have proven
formidable weapons. A March, 1991 _Village Voice_ report from the
frontlines of the "outing" wars made mention of "Absolutely Queer"
posters, credited to a phantom organization called OUTPOST,
appearing on Manhattan buildings. One, sparked by the controversy
over the perceived homophobia in _Silence of the Lambs_, featured
a photo of Jodie Foster, with the caption: "Oscar Winner. Yale
Graduate. Ex-Disney Moppet. Dyke." Queer Nation launched a
"Truth in Advertising" postering campaign that sent up New York
Lotto ads calculated to part the poor and their money; in them, the
official tagline, "All You Need is a Dollar and a Dream" became
"All You Need is a Three-Dollar Bill and a Dream." The graphics
collective Gran Fury, formerly part of ACT UP, has taken its sharp-
tongued message even further: a superslick Benetton parody ran on
buses in San Francisco and New York in 1989. Its headline blared
"Kissing Doesn't Kill: Greed and Indifference Do" over a row of
kissing couples, all of them racially-mixed and two of them gay.
"We are trying to fight for attention as hard as Coca-Cola fights
for attention," says group member Loring Mcalpin. "[I]f anyone is
angry enough and has a Xerox machine and has five or six friends
who feel the same way, you'd be surprised how far you can go."
_Media Hoaxing_
Media hoaxing, the fine art of hoodwinking journalists into
covering exhaustively-researched, elaborately-staged deceptions,
is culture jamming in its purest form. Conceptual con artists like
Joey Skaggs dramatize the dangers inherent in a press that seems to
have forgotten the difference between the public good and the
bottom line, between the responsibility to enlighten and the desire
to entertain.
Skaggs has been flimflamming journalists since 1966, pointing
up the self-replicating, almost viral nature of news stories in a
wired world. The trick, he confides, "is to get someone from an
out-of-state newspaper to run a story on something sight unseen,
and then you Xerox that story and include it in a second mailing.
Journalists see that it has appeared in print and think, therefore,
that there's no need to do any further research. That's how a
snowflake becomes a snowball and finally an avalanche, which is the
scary part. There's a point at which it becomes very difficult to
believe anything the media tells you."
In 1976, Skaggs created the Cathouse For Dogs, a canine
bordello that offered a "savory selection" of doggie Delilahs,
ranging from pedigree (Fifi, the French poodle) to mutt (Lady the
Tramp). The ASPCA was outraged, the _Soho News_ was incensed, and
ABC devoted a segment to it which later received an Emmy
nomination for best news broadcast of the year. In time, Skaggs
reappeared as the leader of Walk Right!, a combat-booted Guardian
Angels-meet-Emily Post outfit determined to improve sidewalk
etiquette, and later as Joe Bones, head of a Fat Squad whose tough
guy enforcers promised, for a fee, to prevent overweight clients
from cheating on diets. As Dr. Joseph Gregor, Skaggs convinced UPI
and New York's WNBC-TV that hormones extracted from mutant
cockroaches could cure arthritis, acne, and nuclear radiation
sickness.
After reeling in the media outlets who have taken his bait,
Skaggs holds a conference at which he reveals his deception. "The
hoax," he insists, "is just the hook. The second phase, in which
I reveal the hoax, is the important part. As Joey Skaggs, I can't
call a press conference to talk about how the media has been turned
into a government propaganda machine, manipulating us into
believing we've got to go to war in the Middle East. But as a
jammer, I can go into these issues in the process of revealing a
hoax."
_Audio Agitprop_
Audio agitprop, much of which utilizes digital samplers to
deconstruct media culture and challenge copyright law, is a
somewhat more innocuous manifestation. Likely suspects include
Sucking Chest Wound, whose _God Family Country_ ponders mobthink
and media bias; The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, who take aim
in "Television, the Drug of the Nation" at "happy talk" newscasts
that embrace the values of MTV and _Entertainment Tonight_;
Producers For Bob, whose pert, chittering dance tracks provide an
unlikely backdrop for monologues about "media ecology," a McLuhan-
inspired strategy for survival in a toxic media environment; and
Chris Burke, whose _Oil War_, with its cut-up press conferences,
presidential speeches, and nightly newsbites, is pirate C-Span for
Noam Chomsky readers. Sucking Chest Wound's Wayne Morris speaks
for all when he says, "I get really angry with the biased coverage
that's passed off as objective journalism. By taking scraps of the
news and blatantly manipulating them, we're having our revenge on
manipulative media."
_Billboard Banditry_
Lastly, there is billboard banditry, the phenomenon that
inspired Negativland's coinage. Australia's BUGA UP stages hit-
and-run "demotions," or anti-promotions, scrawling graffiti on
cigarette or liquor ads. The group's name is at once an acronym
for "Billboard-Utilizing Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions"
and a pun on "bugger up," Aussie slang for "screw up."
In like fashion, African-American activists have decided to
resist cigarette and liquor ads targeting communities of color by
any means necessary. Describing Reverend Calvin Butts and fellow
Harlem residents attacking a Hennesey billboard with paint and
rollers, _Z_ magazine's Michael Kamber reports, "In less than a
minute there's only a large white blotch where moments before the
woman had smiled coyly down at the street." Chicago's Reverend
Michael Pfleger is a comrade-in-arms; he and his Operation Clean
defaced---some prefer the term "refaced"---approximately 1,000
cigarette and alcohol billboards in 1990 alone. "It started with
the illegal drug problem," says Pfleger. "But you soon realize
that the number-one killer isn't crack or heroin, but tobacco. And
we realized that to stop tobacco and alcohol we [had] to go after
the advertising problem."
San Francisco's Billboard Liberation Front, together with
Truth in Advertising, a band of "midnight billboard editors" based
in Santa Cruz, snap motorists out of their rush hour trances with
deconstructed, reconstructed billboards. In the wake of the
_Valdez_ disaster, the BLF reinvented a radio promo---"Hits Happen.
New X-100"---as "Shit Happens---New Exxon"; TIA turned "Tropical
Blend. The Savage Tan" into "Typical Blend. Sex in Ads."
Inspired by a newsflash that plans were underway to begin
producing neutron bombs, a Seattle-based trio known as SSS reworked
a Kent billboard proclaiming "Hollywood Bowled Over By Kent III
Taste!" to read "Hollywood Bowled Over By Neutron Bomb!," replacing
the cigarette pack with a portrait of then-President Ronald Reagan.
Artfux, and the newly-formed breakaway group Cicada Corps of
Artists, are New Jersey-based agitprop collectives who snipe and
stage neo-Situationist happenings. On one occasion, Artfux members
joined painter Ron English for a tutorial of sorts, in which
English instructed the group in the fine art of billboard banditry.
Painting and mounting posters conceptualized by English, Artfux
joined the New York artist on a one-day, all-out attack on
Manhattan. One undercover operation used math symbols to spell out
the corporate equation for animal murder and ecological disaster:
A hapless-looking cow plus a death's-head equalled a McDonald's
polystyrene clamshell. "Food, foam and Fun!," the tagline taunted.
In a similar vein, the group mocked "Smooth Joe," the Camel
cigarettes camel, turning his phallic nose into a flaccid penis and
his sagging lips into bobbing testicles. One altered billboard
adjured, "Drink Coca-Cola---It Makes You Fart," while another
showed a seamed, careworn Uncle Sam opposite the legend,
"Censorship is good because -- --- ----!"
"Corporations and the government have the money and the means
to sell anything they want, good or bad," noted Artfux member
Orlando Cuevas in a _Jersey Journal_ feature on the group.
"We...[are] ringing the alarm for everyone else."
III. _Guerrilla Semiotics_
Culture jammers often make use of what might be called
"guerrilla" semiotics---analytical techniques not unlike those
employed by scholars to decipher the signs and symbols that
constitute a culture's secret language, what literary theorist
Roland Barthes called "systems of signification." These systems,
notes Barthes in the introduction to _Elements of Semiology_,
comprise nonverbal as well as verbal modes of communication,
encompassing "images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and the
complex associations of all these."
It is no small irony---or tragedy---that semiotics, which
seeks to make explicit the implicit meanings in the sign language
of society, has become pop culture shorthand for an academic parlor
trick useful in divining the hidden significance in _Casablanca_,
Disneyland, or our never-ending obsession with Marilyn Monroe. In
paranoid pop psych (Vance Packard's _The Hidden Persuaders_, Wilson
Bryan Key's _Subliminal Seduction_), semiotics offers titillating
decryptions of naughty advertising. "This preoccupation with
subliminal advertising," writes Ewen, "is part of the legendary
life of post-World War II American capitalism: the word 'SEX'
written on the surface of Ritz crackers, copulating bodies or death
images concealed in ice cubes, and so forth." Increasingly,
advertising assumes this popular mythology: a recent print ad
depicted a rocks glass filled with icecubes, the words "Absolut
vodka" faintly discernible on the their craggy, shadowed surfaces.
The tagline: "Absolut Subliminal."
All of which makes semiotics seem trivial, effete, although it
is an inherently political project; Barthes "set out..to examine
the normally hidden set of rules, codes and conventions through
which meanings particular to specific social groups (i.e. those in
power) are rendered universal and 'given' for the whole of
society." Marshall Blonsky has called semiotics "a defense
against information sickness, the 'too-muchness' of the world,"
fulfilling Marshall McLuhan's prophecy that "just as we now try to
control atom-bomb fallout, so we will one day try to control media
fallout." As used by culture jammers, it is an essential tool
in the all-important undertaking of making sense of the world, its
networks of power, the encoded messages that flicker ceaselessly
along its communication channels.
This is not to say that all of the jammers mentioned in this
essay knowingly derive their ideas from semiotics or are even
familiar with it, only that their ad hoc approach to cultural
analysis has much in common with the semiotician's attempt to "read
between the lines" of culture considered as a text. Most jammers
have little interest in the deliria that result from long immersion
in the academic vacuum, breathing pure theory. They intuitively
refuse the rejection of engaged politics typical of postmodernists
like Baudrillard, a disempowering stance that too often results in
an overeagerness for ringside seats at the gotterdammerung. The
_L.A. Weekly_'s disquieting observation that Baudrillard "loves to
observe the liquidation of culture, to experience the delivery from
depth" calls to mind Walter Benjamin's pronouncement that mankind's
"self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience
its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first
order." Jammers, in contrast, are attempting to reclaim the
public space ceded to the chimeras of Hollywood and Madison Avenue,
to restore a sense of equilibrium to a society sickened by the
vertiginous whirl of TV culture.
IV. _Postscript From the Edge_
The territory mapped by this essay ends at the edge of the
electronic frontier, the "world space of multinational capital"
(Fredric Jameson) where vast sums are blipped from one computer to
another through phone lines twined around the globe. Many of us
already spend our workdays in an incunabular form of cyberpunk
writer William Gibson's "cyberspace," defined in his novel
_Neuromancer_ as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by
billions of legitimate operators...A graphic representation of data
abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human
system." The experience of computer scientist W. Daniel
Hillis, once novel, is becoming increasingly familiar:
When I first met my wife, she was immersed in trading
options. Her office was in the top of a skyscraper in
Boston, and yet, in a very real sense, when she was at
work she was in a world that could not be identified with
any single physical location. Sitting at a computer
screen, she lived in a world that consisted of offers and
trades, a world in which she knew friends and enemies,
safe and stormy weather. For a large portion of each
day, that world was more real to her than her physical
surroundings.
In the next century, growing numbers of Americans will work
and play in artificial environments that only exist, in the truest
sense, as bytes stored in computer memory. The explosion of
computer-based interactive media seems destined to sweep away (at
least in its familiar form) the decidedly non-interactive medium
that has dominated the latter half of this century: television.
Much of this media may one day be connected to a high-capacity,
high-speed fiber optic network of "information superhighways"
linking as many homes as are currently serviced by the telephone
network. This network, predicts computer journalist John Markoff,
"could do for the flow of information---words, music, movies,
medical images, manufacturing blueprints and much more---what the
transcontinental railroad did for the flow of goods a century ago
and the interstate highway system did in this century."
The culture jammer's question, as always, is: Who will have
access to this cornucopia of information, and on what terms? Will
fiber-optic superhighways make stored knowledge universally
available, in the tradition of the public library, or will they
merely facilitate psychological carpet bombing designed to soften
up consumer defenses? And what of the network news? Will it be
superseded by local broadcasts, with their heartwarming (always
"heartwarming") tales of rescued puppies and shocking (always
"shocking") stories of senseless mayhem, mortared together with
airhead banter? Or will the Big Three give way to innumerable news
channels, each a conduit for information about global, national and
local events germane to a specific demographic? Will cyberpunk
telejournalists equipped with Hi-8 video cameras, digital scanners,
and PC-based editing facilities hack their way into legitimate
broadcasts? Or will they, in a medium of almost infinite bandwidth
and channels beyond count, simply be given their own airtime? In
short, will the electronic frontier be wormholed with "temporary
autonomous zones"---Hakim Bey's term for pirate utopias,
centrifuges in which social gravity is artificially suspended---or
will it be subdivided and overdeveloped by what cultural critic
Andrew Ross calls "the military-industrial-media complex?"
Gibson, who believes that we are "moving toward a world where
all of the consumers under a certain age will...identify
more...with the products they consume than...with any sort of
antiquated notion of nationality," is not sanguine. In the
video documentary _Cyberpunk_, he conjures a minatory vision of
what will happen when virtual reality is married to a device that
stimulates the brain directly. "It's going to be very commercial,"
he says. "We could wind up with something that felt like having a
very, very expensive American television commercial injected
directly into your cortex."
"For Sale" signs already litter the unreal estate of
cyberspace. A _New York Times_ article titled "A Rush to Stake
Claims on the Multimedia Frontier" prophesies "software and
hardware that will connect consumers seamlessly to
services...[allowing them] to shop from home," while a _Newsweek_
cover story on interactive media promises "new technology that will
change the way you shop, play and learn" (the order, here, speaks
volumes about American priorities). Video retailers are betting
that the intersection of interactive media and home shopping will
result in zillions of dollars' worth of impulse buys: zirconium
rings, nonstick frying pans, costumed dolls, spray-on toupees.
What a _New York Times_ author cutely calls Communicopia ("the
convergence of virtually all communications technologies") may end
up looking like the Home Shopping Network on steroids.
But hope springs eternal, even in cyberspace. Jammers are
heartened by the electronic frontier's promise of a new media
paradigm---interactive rather than passive, nomadic and atomized
rather than resident and centralized, egalitarian rather than
elitist. To date, this paradigm has assumed two forms: the virtual
community and the desktop-published or on-line 'zine. ("'Zine,"
the preferred term among underground publishers, has subtly
political connotations: grassroots organization, a shoestring
budget, an anti-aesthetic of exuberant sloppiness, a lively give-
and-take between transmitters and receivers, and, more often than
not, a mocking, oppositional stance vis a vis mainstream media.)
Virtual communities are comprised of computer users connected
by modem to the bulletin board systems (BBS's) springing up all
over the Internet, the worldwide meta-network that connects
international computer networks. Funded not by advertisers but by
paid subscribers, the BBS is a first, faltering step toward the
jammer's dream of a truly democratic mass medium. Although virtual
communities fall short of utopia---women and people of color are
grossly underrepresented, and those who cannot afford the price of
admission or who are alienated from technology because of their
cultural status are denied access---they nonetheless represent a
profound improvement on the homogenous, hegemonic medium of
television.
On a BBS, any subscriber may initiate a discussion topic, no
matter how arcane, in which other subscribers may participate. If
the bulletin board in question is plugged into the Internet, their
comments will be read and responded to by computer users scattered
across the Internet. On-line forums retire, at long last, the
Sunday morning punditocracy, the expert elite, the celebrity
anchorclones of network news, even the electronic town hall, with
its carefully-screened audience and over-rehearsed politicians. As
one resident of a San Francisco-based bulletin board called the
WELL noted,
This medium gives us the possibility (illusory
as it may be) that we can build a world
unmediated by authorities and experts. The
roles of reader, writer, and critic are so
quickly interchangeable that they become
increasingly irrelevant in a community of
co-creation.
In like fashion, ever-cheaper, increasingly sophisticated
desktop publishing packages (such as the software and hardware used
to produce this pamphlet) ensure that, in a society where freedom
of the press---as A.J. Leibling so presciently noted---is
guaranteed only to those who own one, multinational monoliths are
not the only publishers. As Gareth Branwyn, 'zine publisher and
longtime resident of virtual communities, points out,
The current saturation of relatively inexpensive
multimedia communication tools holds tremendous potential
for destroying the monopoly of ideas we have lived with
for so long...A personal computer can be configured to
act as a publishing house, a broadcast-quality TV studio,
a professional recording studio, or the node in an
international computer bulletin board system.
Increasingly, 'zines are being published on-line, to be
bounced around the world via the Internet. "I can see a future in
which any person can have a node on the net," says Mitch Kapor,
president of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group concerned
with free speech, privacy, and other constitutional issues in
cyberspace. "Any person can be a publisher. It's better than the
media we now have."
The devil's advocate might well argue that _Festering Brain
Sore_, a fanzine for mass murderer aficionados, or the WELL topic
devoted to "armpit sex" are hardly going to crash the corporate
media system. Hakim Bey writes, "The story of computer networks,
BBS's and various other experiments in electro-democracy has so far
been one of hobbyism for the most part. Many anarchists and
libertarians have deep faith in the PC as a weapon of liberation
and self-liberation---but no real gains to show, no palpable
liberty."
Then again, involvement in virtual communities and the 'zine
scene is rapidly expanding beyond mere hobbyism: as this is
written, approximately 10 million people frequent BBS's, and an
estimated 10,000 'zines are being published (70 alone are given
over to left politics of a more or less radical nature). These
burgeoning subcultures are driven not by the desire for commodities
but by the dream of community---precisely the sort of community now
sought in the nationally-shared experience of watching game shows,
sitcoms, sportscasts, talk shows, and, less and less, the evening
news. It is this yearning for meaning and cohesion that lies at
the heart of the jammer's attempts to reassemble the fragments of
our world into something more profound than the luxury cars, sexy
technology, and overdesigned bodies that flit across our screens.
Hackers who expose governmental wrongdoing, textual slashers,
wheatpaste snipers, billboard bandits, media hoaxers, subvertisers,
and unannounced political protestors who disrupt live newscasts
remind us that numberless stories go untold in the daily papers and
the evening news, that what is not reported speaks louder than what
is. The jammer insists on choice: not the dizzying proliferation
of consumer options, in which a polyphony of brand names conceals
the essential monophony of the advertiser's song, but a true
plurality, in which the univocal world view promulgated by
corporate media yields to a multivocal, polyvalent one.
The electronic frontier is an ever-expanding corner of Eco's
"universe of Technological Communication...patrolled by groups of
communications guerrillas" bent on restoring "a critical dimension
to passive reception." These guerrilla semioticians are in pursuit
of new myths stitched from the material of their own lives, a
fabric of experiences and aspirations where neither the depressive
stories of an apolitical intelligentsia nor the repressive fictions
of corporate media's Magic Kingdom obtain. "The images that
bombard and oppose us must be reorganized," insist Stuart and
Elizabeth Ewen. "If our critique of commodity culture points to
better alternatives, let us explore---in our own billboards of the
future---what they might be." Even now, hackers, slashers, and
snipers---culture jammers all---are rising to that challenge.
* * *
Mark Dery is a cultural critic whose writings have appeared in
_Rolling Stone_, _Elle_, _Interview_, _The New York Times_,
_Wired_, and _Mondo 2000_. His column "Guerrilla Semiotics"
appears in _Adbusters_ and he edited _Flame Wars: The Discourse of
Cyberculture_ (Duke University Press). _Cyberculture_, his survey
of cybernetic subcultures, will be published by Hyperion in Spring
of 1995.
* * *
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Bill Mullen, a professor at Youngstown
University and friend of many years whose close reading and tough-
minded critique of this essay improved it immeasurably, and to
Margot Mifflin, whose slashing red pen saved me, at the last
minute, from my worst excesses.
* * *
Points of Departure
"Billboard Liberation Front Manual," _Processed World #25,
Summer/Fall 1990, pps. 22-6. This and other back issues may be
ordered from 41 Sutter Street, #1829, San Francisco, CA 94104.
The BLF has also published _The Art and Science of Billboard
Improvement (San Francisco: Los Cabrones Press, $1.50). No more
information is available as this is written; writing to _Processed
World, which acts as an intermediary for the BLF, might prove
fruitful.
William Board, "Alter a Billboard," _CoEvolution Quarterly, Summer
1983, pps. 114-116. Do's and don't's for would-be "midnight
billboard editors," written by a pseudonymous member of Truth in
Advertising. $7, Whole Earth Review, 27 Gate Five Road, Sausalito,
CA 94965.
Gareth Branwyn, "Jamming the Media," in _Black Hole, ed. by Carolyn
Hughes, (Baltimore: Institute for Publications Design, Yale Gordon
College of Liberal Arts, University of Baltimore, 1992). This
essay, as well as the companion pieces in this underground omnibus,
explore the interstice between cyberpunk and culture jamming.
Contact Gareth Branywn at 4905 Old Dominion Drive, Arlington,
Virginia, 22207.
Robbie Conal, _Art Attack: The Midnight Politics of a Guerrilla
Artist (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992). At last: the ideal gift
for insurrectionists---a coffee table art book about a wheatpaste
warrior.
_Ecodefense: _A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching, Dave Foreman and
Bill Haywood, eds. (Tucson: Ned Ludd Books, 1987). Chapter 8,
"Propaganda," includes sections on "Billboard Revision" and
"Correcting Forest Service Signs." The jury is still out on Earth
First!, which often veers disconcertingly close to neo-Luddite
knee-jerking (hence the name of the publishing company). That
said, the authors' folksy pragmatism, anarcho-libertarian humor,
and iron-spined resolve in the face of bulldozers and chainsaws is
truly inspiring.
Abbie Hoffman, _The Best of Abbie Hoffman (New York: Four Walls
Eight Windows, 1989). Chapter 43, "Guerrilla Broadcasting,"
includes nuts-and-bolts "how to" sections on pirate radio and
outlaw TV.
Loompanics Unlimited, a distributor of fringe publications, is an
invaluable source for titles on hacking; psychological warfare;
Zeke Teflon's _Complete Manual of Pirate Radio; _Muzzled Media: How
to Get the News You've Been Missing!, by Gerry L. Dexter; and more.
Loompanics' 1988 catalogue includes Erwin R. Strauss's "Pirate
Broadcasting," a historical and philosophical inquiry into the
titular phenomenon. Write P.O. Box 1197, Port Townsend, WA 98368
for a catalogue.
_Roar! The Paper Tiger Television Guide to Media Activism, The
Paper Tiger Television Collective, eds. (New York: The Paper Tiger
Television Collective, 1991). This thoroughgoing, irreplaceable
guide to culture jamming proves, to mutilate Mao, that "power
springs from the barrel of a camcorder." An essay by Schiller,
together with a lengthy "how to" section, make this a must. Write
to 339 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10012.
* * *
Endnotes (available only in hardcopy version).
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ON A PHILOSOPHICAL IMPLICATION OF THE ASTRONOMICAL BIG BANG THEORY
by Paul Laurendeau
************************************************************************
The most revolting misfortune of rational thought is when a major
scientific discovery becomes, because of certain of its superficial
characteristics, an instrument of legitimization for the most rotten
hackneyed religious incoherences. I remember, about twenty years ago, when
the first pictures of the bio-energetic field that surrounds our body
started to circulate, a stupid catholic said to me: "Doesn't it look like a
spiritual stream emerging out of us?" My answer had been: "Rather a
sparkling material undulation, you Donkey, the mystical myth or aura is
definitely dead with these pictures, sit on that and spin.."
The brief observations I will make here about the astronomical Big Bang
Theory are only another episode of that never-ceasing struggle of
rationality against lunacy. These observations being "not astronomical" but
strictly philosophical, I will have first to briefly clarify the
distinction between two major philosophical doctrines: ONTOLOGY and
GNOSEOLOGY.
ONTOLOGY (The doctrine of Being): Ontology is the higher level of
philosophical generalization that includes Cosmology and Humankind history
and addresses in the same time what they have in common and how they
interconnect as objective realities. The questions asked by ontology are:
What is it to be? What to exist is about? What are we?
GNOSEOLOGY (The doctrine of Knowledge): Gnoseology is also a high level of
generalization that includes Cosmology and Humankind history and addresses
in the same time how we interconnect them and what we find in common to
them when we THINK, DISCOVER or INVESTIGATE them. The questions asked by
gnoseology are: What is it to know? What to think is about? What is the
mind?
Ontology and Gnoseology intertwine each other. Because of their fundamental
philosophical status, each of these two doctrines potentially includes the
other. What we are determines what we know. But what we know sets the
limits of what existence is, for us. These two doctrines will complete each
other and are actually united.
Let's drop that for now and inquire our present cosmological problem. My
purpose here is to discuss the main philosophical implication of the Big
Bang Theory. I will then assume the scientific accuracy of that theory.
Consequently, readers who do not buy the Big Bang Theory for whatever
reason can kiss my ass good-bye right now and turn the page. For the
others, we can remind that currently astronomical science claims that the
"universe" is presently expanding and is quite likely to have "started" in
some sort of original Bang. Straight away, Religion - that never misses a
chance to recycle its fucking garbageâs - takes the opportunity to
reintroduce the narrow and childish concept of CREATION right here. The
Bang would be some sort of initial "act of God".
We are back to the type of problem of religious parasitism on science I
experienced twenty years ago with some catholic acquaintance of mine
already mentioned. The problem is touchy: how can philosophy scrap the
traditional idea of creation without refusing the scientific discovery of
the Big Bang, a hypothesis which is quite likely to be ontologically
accurate? Another way to ask the question: how can we demonstrate that,
despite all appearances, the scientific Big Bang Theory does not confirm
the superstitious belief in creation boated in so many shitty minds?
We will first stay cool, and ground ourselves in the following aphorism of
Francis Bacon:
"The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the
subtlety of the senses and understanding; so that all those
specious meditations, speculations, and glosses in which men
indulge are quite from the purpose, only there is no one by to
observe it."
(Bacon 1960: 41 - published in 1620)
The interpenetration of ontology (i.e. the being of nature) and gnoseology
(i.e. our knowledge of it) as described by Bacon is what will help us to
comb the myth of creation out of the Big Bang Theory. If we think the
Universe in that philosophical perspective, it is necessarily separated in
two parts:
1- The part of the Universe we KNOW about. we will call this one:
COSMOS
2- The part of the Universe that objectively EXISTS or EXISTED
and we do not know about. We will call this one the UNKNOWN PART
(of the Universe).
If we put this in figure:
THE UNIVERSE =
------------------------------------------------
| UNKNOWN |
| PART |
| ----------------- |
| | COSMOS- | |
| | KNOWN | |
| | PART | |
| ----------------- |
| |
------------------------------------------------
This is a purely philosophical presentation of the cosmological problem.
The subdivision presented on that figure is purely ontological/
gnoseological. We simply apply to Cosmology the materialist claim that a
part of existence is necessarily external to our consciousness. The
doctrine of Being and the doctrine of Knowledge are working together here,
in the line of Bacon (and several other materialist thinkers).
This being said, what we state here is simply this : THE BIG BANG IS NOT
THE STARTING POINT OF ALL THE UNIVERSE BUT ONLY THE STARTING POINT OF
COSMOS. The huge unknown part of the Universe is actually unknown in space
and time. This means that there was a moment of the Universe that has been
there but we know nothing about it. And seemingly, our present stage of
knowledge of Cosmos, as far as its generation in time is concerned, starts
with a Bang. The Bang though was not the beginning of everything but of
everything WE KNOW. Consequently, to call it "creation" corresponds exactly
to the type of asshole's speculation Bacon is referring to. The claim of
materialist philosophy is that there was complex ensembles of matter in
motion long before the Bang, and that astronomers will eventually confirm
that philosophical extrapolation by the discovery of "pre-Bang particles"
or "pre-Bang undulations".
Like the majority of religious superstitions of whatever confession, the
myth of creation is an arrogant anthropocentric nonsense. The religious
part of Humankind is too narrow-minded and/or too coward to face the pure
reality of an endless uncreated material Universe with no beginning
whatsoever. Because the Universe is inevitably radically different from his
so limited little self, the arrogant mystical human pigmy projected his own
image in the sky and hid himself under the imaginary law of a
fantas-magoric human-like megadaddy, supposed to have created the mountains
he cannot climb and the seas he cannot cross, like we build latrines in our
back-yard! Let Galileo describe, more politely than I would, the
intellectual situation of the believers :
"Such people remind me of that sculptor who, having transformed a
huge block of marble into the image of a Hercules or a thundering
Jove, I forget which, and having with consummate art made it so
lifelike and fierce that it moved everyone with terror who beheld
it, he himself began to be afraid, though all its vivacity and
power were the work of his own hands; and his terror was such
that he no longer dare affront it with his mallet and chisel."
(Galileo 1967: 111 - published in 1629)
My conclusion to these observations coldly formulates itself as follows:
You, stupid GodAssLickers and MotherMaryfuckers, are totally free to
ruminate your irrational childishness within the paddock of your grotesque
church/mosque/synagogue, if it is your wish, but, for Christâs (namely
nobody's) sake, leave sciences (which are quite able to talk rubbish by
themselves without your help) out of your pathetic tomfooleryâs.
The Universe is uncreated. God is a myth. There is no spiritual consequence
to the Big Bang Theory.
REFERENCES :
Bacon, F. (1960), The New Organon and Related Writings, New York,
Macmillan/ Library of Liberal Arts, 292p. Galileo, G. (1967),
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems - Ptolemaic & Copernican,
Berkeley, University of California Press, 496p.
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THE FUTURE OF OPERA: A PROPAGANDA PIECE PARTS I & II
by The "Puffin"
************************************************************************
Note: Part I has been previously published in Bone Games Winter 1995 issue.
The Future of opera. Who gives a fuck about the future of opera? The music
industry has finally purified it of all possible relevance, passing off the
shrieking match between Luciano and Placido and that other penguin as the
culture of our time. Art used to be a real event; today it is a video. No
need to actually confront the bellowing Viking hag in the flesh. No need to
contemplate the awful smell that this performance must entail. Nope, it is
now TV just like every other important thing in life. I want an opera that
I can love, and opera that actually works, an opera that makes a difference
for me in my life.
Make no mistake, though. Opera-as-we-know-it is still "legitimate culture,"
this is the sort of thing that governments feel obliged to pay for. They
want the same old crap, the classical stuff, because that art is ridden
through and through with their image system and hierarchy of relations. Sit
in your chair and listen to this. It is good for you. It is the culture of
your people. Here you have a place, and you must sit in it until
intermission, even if it means wetting your pants. You are expected to
anticipate such a problem, and wear protective undergarments if
necessary.(1)
There is still an audience that enjoys this variety of 'discipline.' Not
only masochists, they are also proud exhibitionists; they want very much to
be seen in the act. They display their privilege, certain that they really
know what is going on, desperate to occupy that space in the hall so all
the others can see they are in the club. Of course, this situation presents
highly fertile ground for humor farming. A friend of mine worked for a
while at a theater here in Toronto that periodically hosted opera
performances. According to her, the opera audience was distinguished not
only by their finely dressed arrogance but also their inability find their
seats, embellished by a decided reluctance to be seen to have this
difficulty.(2) They plow on in, sit right down, and insist that someone
else must be in the wrong, no matter what the tickets and seat numbers say.
My friend quietly enjoyed helping groups of 'connoisseurs' set the tone for
their evening by fighting over territory. She didn't have to do anything to
get them to put on their display! And, since she knew where the seats were,
she always got to play on the winning side. If you want to look good, it is
important to have some idea what is actually going on.
Dueling penguins, bellowing hags; the bottom line is that whatever image
springs to mind, it is of an irrelevancy; a performance of culture lacking
totally in interest or appeal for the truly contemporary awareness.(3) But
did opera ever mean anything important? Wagner sure as hell thought it did,
and David Littlejohn must agree, having called his collection of essays The
Ultimate Art. But Littlejohn is just another fucking critic, and I, as a
reformed musicologist, spit on his finely groomed head. Wagner was an
artist, and an artist should know art.
In The Art-Work of the Future he wrote this:
As man stands to nature, so stands Art to man. When Nature has
developed in herself those attributes which included the
conditions for the existence of Man, then Man spontaneously
evolved. In like manner, as soon as human life had engendered
from itself the conditions for the manifestment of Art-work, this
too stepped self-begotten into life.(4)
God! What an attitude. This is what I think he's talking about: the
appearance of Art (his capital) marks an exponential scale evolutionary
breakthrough that occurred when the humans had developed sufficiently to
produce it; one of those new age paradigm shift type things. He compares it
to the qualitative difference between Nature's unconsciousness and the self
awareness that Man (his genderization) brought to existence. This big 'A'
Art is, of course, distinguished from mere 'art' or 'music' or 'dancing' -
how otherwise could he make a claim of 'extra specialness' for his own
product?
In his writing he rambles on about the art and culture of the Greeks,
claiming it as the starting point of 'our art of today.' He says "...the
Spartan youths learned the nature of the god [Apollo], when by dance and
joust they had developed their supple bodies to grace and strength..."
Hmmm... A taste for Greek boys, eh? I don't want to read too much into
this. Some people like Greek boys; what can I say to that? The 'left hand'
of Western culture has always found a way to accommodate what the 'right
hand' would consider 'perverse.' One of its most endearing qualities.
Anyway, it's the art that is important, right? In his Gesamtkunstwerk
(universal art work) he can build his own little perfect world - the
Spartan Youth of the imagination magically transformed into shrieking
Vikings - all perfectly webbed together with leitmotifs and stuff. Then we
can become Musicologists, and find all the Jungian archetypes in it and
insist we learned something about our deepest inner nature so that we can
go forward, smugly lecturing everyone on human nature and True Culture.
However you end up taking the theory, Wager deserves a listen simply
because he did write actual 'art,' and we all know that you can't tell
'art' from Art without hearing it.
Well, I have listened to it; and I just couldn't take it. And I must
confess: it was because the music inevitably channeled a terrifying psychic
entity to me, and it was The Shrieking Viking Hag. And it isn't just the
costuming, it is also the endless, excruciating melodies, the complete lack
of earth or grounding, the constant frustration of resolution. This music
is a major tease - it just never seems to want you to get what it promises.
They say that there is a kind of transcendental resolution, clarified
vision, or some kind of payoff of some sort, if you pay attention to the
whole work. Never mind that it might go on for Ten Hours ! Ten Hours of the
Viking Hag fighting with her family! Masochists! Masochists! Masochists!
Oh, God. Let me mop up.
Okay. So I don't like Wagner. Does this mean that he has failed it his
attempt to make a true Art Work? Well, for me, obviously he has. But
perhaps he has done it for his 'Folk,' the people he wrote his stuff to
inspire. Here's Wagner now to introduces them:
The "Folk" is the epitome of all those men who feel a common and collective
Want . ...only the assuagement of a genuine Need is Necessity; and it is
the Folk alone that acts according to Necessity's behests ... Who now are
they who belong not to this People? ... All those who feel no Want ... Want
, - which shall teach the world to recognize its own true need ; that need
which by its very nature admits of satisfaction . ... The Folk will thus
fulfill its mission of redemption, the while it satisfies itself and at the
like time rescues its won foes. Its procedure will be governed by the
instinctive laws of Nature; with the Necessity of elemental forces, will it
destroy the bad coherence that alone makes out the conditions of
Un-nature's rule... etc.
Hmm.... some sort of innate gang affiliation spiced up with a bit of 'real
men know what they want,' and finally, the folk, in all their divine glory,
will destroy - yes, destroy - that which they deem un-Folk. There is
trouble brewing here.
When Hitler's Nazis brought him into Paris after the surrender, the first
place they took him was the Opera house.(5) Hitler was real tuned in to
Wagner. He was Big 'F' Folk all the way (except for his Jewish blood). The
opera suited his view of things fine; he could project his ego into those
howling creatures, and his heart would swell with pride in the glorious
wonder of it all. Mere 'man' would swoon, swept away by the Mighty
'Art-Work' of the Mighty 'Folk.' We had to kill that guy.
Now, Hitler may not have been your typical Opera fan. The difference is
that he could actually do something with his fantasy fueled megalomania;
most of them can't. (Though I suspect that those people you can never talk
to at the bank, the ones who make the really stupid policies I want to
argue about, I bet they like Opera. They see themselves bellowing away in a
Viking costume; they think that would be the coolest way to get things
done...)
No, these are not my Folk. But then, what Folk do I have? I'm a
suburbanwhitekid. I had the radio, TV, movies. Today I have billions of
images, words sounds; everything in the world , all at my disposal.(6) I
went to church, I went to school; I missed the point of that stuff
entirely. I have always said, and maintain to this day, that I learned much
more from Mysterious Sources than I did from my teachers. I Have No Culture
, in the sense that Wagner and Hitler imagined. I have had no coherent
culture handed down to me by the institutions of my nation that I respect
in any way.(7)
Maybe I could build one - I could travel the world, eat strange food, get
strange diseases - but in my mind's eye I see the suburbanwhitekid standing
there in the dusty road, hot and pissed off, wishing for nothing more than
the comfort of his clean bed Back Home. So what is that ? I'm out there in
my imaginary world of travel, poor enough to have to stay away from the
First World hotels and resorts, and I find that not only is this place
bizarrely and frighteningly different from my home, but it is also
bizarrely and frighteningly different from the last imaginary place I
stayed. I do have some sort of standard reality that I find threatened in
the bigger world. Maybe I can stick it out for a while, but a lifetime? No,
eventually I'm going to want my Mommie real bad.
The problem is not just that I can't learn everything or get used to
everything, it's that I can't understand or believe everything. I have
certain foundational experiences that lead me to expect certain behaviors
of others, and to react in certain ways when those behavioral expectations
are met, or thwarted. Make me eat fried monkey brains (or fucking eggplant
) and I will vomit, at least psychically. Give me that fried up cow disc.
Pleeaasseee!!!
Likewise, I will not be able to stomach hereditary class structures,
religious proscription of some of my favorite behaviors, etc.
Now, as a reformed ethnomusicologist, I am aware that significant cross
cultural experience is possible, and I know it can feel real good. I spent
some time (here at the 'University') in an immersion class studying African
(specifically Ghanan) dance and music. I learned a lot about some aspects
of that culture, and I loved what I saw. Not only that, but I felt
comfortable with it. I felt that in some way this was closer to me than the
institutions I had been brought up with. My 'culture' had no sense of the
body at all; as far as I knew, feeling good in the body (just feeling good
for its own sake) was irrelevant (at best) to the authorities who governed
my inherited reality. The Ghanans seem to love feeling good, and showing
it. My people are cursed with the enthusiasms of the body, must hide it,
must not give in to the weakness of the flesh . The Ghanans seem to enjoy
corporality.(8)
So here I am - a suburbanwhitekid who despises his inherited 'culture' but
who sees in the culture of the anthropological 'other' a reflection of a
certain personal inner truth. How can I explain this?
Well, there is no 'Folk.' There is no single ideal anything. Universal
Art-Work my ass. Art is not big enough for the universe.
So then: if there is no necessary goal in life, why not just go after what
you want? Make up your own gods and rituals and TO HELL WITH CULTURE AND
FAMILY VALUES AND RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY AND FUCKING SMUG CULTURE CRITICS, AND
TO HELL WITH OPERA.
I'm sure that you all completely agree with me. But before you go off
raping and pillaging, I caution you to be sure to find out what you really
want. I want some sort of culture, some sort of family values, some sort
religion, and a real authority that I actually respect. I want to get along
with people, as long as they let me do what I want when it doesn't concern
them. And I do want Opera, or something along that line. My Opera would
address the world as it is significant to me, not to Wagner. Or Mozart or
Bellini. It will not be a universal art because the universe is just too
much for me to handle. I want them to tell me about the things that
interest me.
So I better get composing eh? Ha! Someone is here to get me off the hook.
Brian Eno writes:
"...Music is actually a contingent combination of sounds whose
emotional resonances are entirely dependent on the audience's
personal and shared histories as listeners. ... Cultural objects
have no notable identity outside of that which we confer upon
them. Their 'value' is entirely a product of the interaction that
we have with them. ...Brains hear patterns and connections, or
certainly seem to try their hardest to. In a sense the function
of 'composer' then becomes shared between me (who set the thing
in motion) and the listener ( who connects it together
mentally).(9)
This gives me a nice warm feeling. I always like to start from my own
experience since it is the thing I know best. What is it that I respond to
in the 'art' that I find pleasing and useful? What is the nature of that
response? Next, By what philosophic/cognitive leap am I able to move from
this pure subjectivity to objective notions of culture and 'Art?' What
actual existing 'art' can I find that will trace the arc of this leap? Is
there anything out there that can become the Opera of the Future? And what
kind of future are we talking about anyway? Will we be dancing at the
Apocalypse, or descending into some crazed cyberpunk world, with constant
and disorienting juxtapositions of terrible banality and overwhelming power
and beauty? Will Luciano and the other blowhards be singing the same old
tunes hundreds of years from now, as clones owned by their descendants?
Will there be knockoffs that you can have in your own home? Your own pet
Viking Hag! Won't the neighbors complain?
More to come. Stay in touch.
Part II
Zombie Opera. The soundtrack for the Walking Dead. Thatâs what it is; cold,
stiff but it wonât fucking shut up, lie down, and rot away like a
respectable corpse. It eats money and talent like politics and taints the
magic of music with its pompous arrogance. We all know it. Now I question
you: should we just kill it? Sometimes I say yes, and the sooner the
better. Think of all the helpless music students we could liberate from the
prison of the aria, set free to howl about what they really have up their
backside. But then, perhaps all we would have is rock and roll; beer and
brawling, and though it is more alive, it is in the end no less stupid.
No; to kill a zombie is simply to finish the evil job of some other
perpetrator, and direct struggle with the foundational evil is certainly
beyond the scope of our pathetic efforts. Zombie Opera will lurch through
what remains of the history of Western civilization, oblivious to
irrelevance, gradually fading to deserved obscurity. Our task is to try to
understand the Institution of the Walking Dead, and if possible, to wake
some of the small Îzâ zombies from their stupid-trance. This presents an
important analytical challenge: we must seek out and expose the foundation
of the Zombie arts, and lay bare the empty space where the heart should
beat.
All creative processes begin with a vision, evoking a passion to realize
the vision and share it with others. For the forerunners and designers of
Opera (and for Wagner, as weâve seen), that vision was the ÎGreek Idealâ.
Opera emerged in the early baroque era, a time when the Greek was the model
for the arts, even though there was then (and is now) very little in the
way of specific historical knowledge of precisely what Greek music was
like, and particularly how artistic performances looked and felt. There is,
then, a lot of scope for imaginative elaboration. The emergence of Opera
itself is connected to a group of fellows known as the Florentine Camerata,
some arty guys who intended to create a performance art modeled on the
Greek solo song, which was imagined to be super wonderful in some, well,
classical sense. Here it is again; the right way to make art, an
opportunity to impose a subjectively defined objective idealization on the
practice of music-making. Now words are more important the mere music, the
drama is the central point, new rules and procedures are invented, decay
and decent into rule bound zombiedom following quickly the birth of vision.
ÎTraditionâ is all too often the elevation of the easily understood (and
manipulated) to the imaginary status of perfection. The Greek Ideal is
reduced in this elevation, made squeaky clean and safe, distant; in essence
a set of rules which formulate inquiry and response. The context of art is
limited to a cynical cartoon of aesthetic participation, with taste to be
learned, elaborated on, and defended in a sort of unwinable chess game with
the Îstandardâ. Art is Eternal, beyond the individualâs hope to touch it,
and the individualâs state of consciousness is restrained to that. Everyone
knows they should have an opinion, and since opinion is cheap on the
street, to be culturally astute is to be persuasively opinionated.(1)
There is however another notion of the Greek to be explored, not that
conjured when names like Plato and Aristotle are lofted over our heads from
the academic pulpit. Turn to the back the pages of any big city
entertainment weekly. Some Îescortsâ (read prostitutes) will offer ÎGreekâ
service.
Confronting such an offer could be problematic. There are no rules for
this; rules are manifest by literate institutions, and what most of us can
know of these matters must be gleaned through either the fumbling
amateurism of self education, or chaotic initiation with explorers on the
fringe of our culture world. There are no expectations really either,
because how could you know what to expect? Mommy never told her he might
want to put it there, and neither did the Pope. Many people think you
should die forever for even thinking about it. But the humans want to have
a look, and once the back door to the base brain is open, all sorts of
unnamable perversities well up in their imaginations. Zombies begin to stir
from their slumber.
The familiar arts of Ancient Greece are all those which have survived the
test of time precisely because of the medium in which they reside; stone,
ceramic, and recorded language. The whole realm of performance - drama,
oral culture, dance, music - is simply not present to us. And then there is
the overriding contemporary context of Greek philosophy, which presents a
very systematic and logical interpretation of the performing arts. This
coupled with our own bias placing the value of the literary over that of
performance (and experience) has, in the words of Richard Squires,
"...obscured the reality of
the early tragic performance, which are best
thought of as ÎGesamtkuntswerkâ - a song, dance, groupings, color and
Îspectacle togetherâ. In contrast to the common image of wooden actors
pounding our ponderous verse, the real Greek theater was a passionate
exhibition of wild dancing and rhythmic lament."(2)
Now thatâs more like it. Gut did you notice that word Gesamtkunt-swerk
showed up? Isnât that the label Wagner hung on his ponderous Viking show?
not a lot of Îwild dancing and rhythmic lamentâ there. Passionate
exhibition maybe - dark, slow creeping emotionality that comes on like
nausea - but this just depresses me. In sleep, the zombie Wagner has
mistaken fantasy for ecstasy.
Squiresâ article The Meaning of Ecstasy, explores his experience as an
actor and how it lead to a theory of the function of ancient Greek theater.
Permit me now to offer an extended quotation in which he describes his
interpretation of a vivid out-of-body experience he had during a dramatic
performance:
I donât believe in supernatural phenomena, and this experience,
ironically enough, has only strengthened my bias against them. It
seems more reasonable to assume that the world is a coherent
place in which every event is a natural phenomena; to relegate an
event to the supernatural is to make it in some sense unreal. So
when I seek an explanation for what happened, I think of the
various degrees of frenzy in my fellow actors, the desperate
pitch to which I had been pushed, the charged and silent
concentration of the audience upon my wildly dancing body, and
the infinite web of electromagnetic energy of which we are all a
part and which constitutes the current scientific definition of
reality. I wonder if there might be times when a man becomes so
charged with electrical potential that the normal boundaries of
the mind dissolve for a moment as the charge is released. This
sudden, lightning-like transit would be what the ancient Greeks
called "ecstasy".
In its original usage, "ecstasy" (from the Greek ek , "out" +
stasis , "standing") had two meanings: the state either of
someone who was "out of his mind" or of someone whose soul had
been transported from his body in religious trance. Since the
word was regularly applied to the cult of Dionysus, itâs tempting
to think it was used in the first sense by those who opposed his
orgiastic and theatrical rites and in the second sense by those
who actually experienced them. Whether ekstasis meant madness or
the liberation of the soul from the prison of the body would have
thus depended on oneâs own experience.(3)
The thrust of this branch of the Greek is not concerned with knowledge and
polarities of analysis, its about experience: getting high, getting active,
and getting off, getting real, getting awake. Then there is a need for
explanation, and the theory flows thick and fast. But by then you know
whatâs real and whatâs theory, and the choice of value is yours.
There are examples of this variety of musical experience widespread through
history and geography. And while what we tend to see in them is the
ecstatic, back door aspects - animal sacrifice, frenzied dancing and music
making, etc. - there are elements of classicism in these performances.
Often they involve the impersonation of religious deities or the
reenactment of some larger than life drama, such as an astronomical
anomaly. we canât see these elements because our own experience is locked
into the banalities of mass media art. But we need the drama, and we need
the excitement; our cultural sphincter is straining hard to hold the
putrefying mass of our unexpressed sensuality, and it is ripe to blow big.
Welcome to Contemporary Western Culture! Bombs Away!!
~~~~~
Notes for Part I:
1. In the November, 1983 issue of Vanity Fair, Judith Martin describes what
is undoubtedly the greatest institutional event of the Opera World, the
Bayreuth Festival: "Bayreuth is the Wagnerian Endurance Olympics, where
heavy-duty Wagnerites proudly demonstrate their physical vitality,
patience, imperviousness to bodily or emotional hardship, and unlimited
attention spans - in short, their worthiness to be devotees of Richard
Wagner. ... The 1,925 seat theater, neither air-conditioned nor heated, has
no aisles, and the orchestra seats are the armless, wooden, pop-up kind
found in junior high school auditoriums. Cushioning them, management and
audience agree, would ruin the acoustics. There is some thin upholstery in
the box towers, but by way of compensation, no air circulation.
Although Bayreuth weather simulated laboratory conditions for creating head
colds - intense heat, followed suddenly by steady chilling rain - coughing
and sneezing are not permitted. No human frailties whatsoever are in
evidence. In any other theater in the world, bathrooms are under mass siege
after forty-minute acts. In the Festspielhaus, where eight-five minutes is
nothing for a single act, and beer and champagne are consumed throughout
two one-hour intermissions. There is never a lounge line of more than
three.
When the temperature inside the theater reached 104 degrees last summer,
not one person left before the very end. Not even one relaxed enough to
pass out."
2. (There is being 'seen' and being seen. These people don't like to be
seen. )
3. Oh, alright. Some people might actually get something out of this stuff,
but I don't want to spoil my dark humor. If I want to rant on to make my
point, you can't stop me. I'm a piece of information.
4. From a book called Richard Wagner's Prose Works. I'm not going to tell
you what page because I don't have to . OK - it's on page 69. Go check.
5. See the film Architect of Doom.
6. People who say our access to information is critically limited by media
and government are simply wrong, at least in Canada. Some stuff is secret,
but everything you need to be a happy productive person is right there for
you, if you learn how to dig it out and interpret it. People are too lazy
to learn anything, or unable to do anything with what they know, perhaps
they really just don't care. Cynicism is the refuge of the otherwise
impotent.
7. Some shithead will probably want to deconstruct that statement. Go
ahead. Make my day.
8. I am not an authority on the experience of the Ghanan people. This is
just the way it looked to me.
9. Eno, Brian. "Resonant Complexity", Whole Earth Review, Summer, 1994.
Notes for Part II:
1. An easy ideal to attain, given that it is a natural posture for the
umimaginative, low energy subjectivity that peers out from under the brow
of the harried, paranoid bureaucrat when he finally stops thinking about
work. "Fucking art?? I can manage that!"
2. Squires, Richard. The Meaning of Ecstasy, Gnosis Magazine, Fall 1994.
3. Ibid.
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THINGS FALL APART
by Mark Adair
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PLACE
I live in and work in Toronto, a medium size, medium wealthy, medium
security city that is home to several million people spread out over a few
hundred square miles on the coast of Lake Ontario. The pressures of
increasing population have driven the price of real estate so high that
development has sprawled out onto the lake itself. Long fingers of
lakefill, busted up chunks of earlier incarnations of the city, now allow
for new buildings where there was once only fish and water. Sound familiar?
Toronto and its shoreline are near to being in the middle of North America
(in all senses of the word) and whereas I have been known to kick about
Toronto and the sticks around it, I have to admit that it's my home only by
circumstance and not particularly by choice.
What I want to say is that I live in a regional town, one of many, could be
better, could be worse.
I have not traveled as much as I would have liked. Things interfere --
money's scarce these days. I can't comment on other places but I'll bet
it's the same where ever you go -- just people living in places they one
morning find themselves in. It's not as if we particularly know where we
are, I mean you can't claim to know a place just because it's familiar,
because you can find your way around, not really. Really knowing a place
takes on a kind of horrid objectivity -- I digress. The reason I'm going on
about sense of place is that it is becoming such a pervasive idea. The
sense of place in general seems to have changed in my lifetime -- forty-one
years -- from being general to being specific. When I say 'in general' I
mean that there used to be this universal notion of place: I live in Canada
as opposed to something more specific. They say now that more and more
people define themselves more precisely: I live in Toronto for example --
even the notion of being an Ontarian is too much for me -- I'm not the same
as people up north. They are different, and proud of it, and this
difference is a compound of practices. The aggregate of things that people
do in the place that they do them is called culture and while for most
people this is an unusual use of the term, it's time we recognize that the
old, familiar idea of culture is distorted.
Somewhere along the imaginary line of history culture became something
special as opposed to something ordinary. It became something that select
and talented individuals were called away to practice someplace else. The
majority of us, even if we hated it, worked to support the rarefied
pursuits of the chosen few. You know the routine: art almost has to be
bewildering to be of any good and if it is any good it must absolutely be
useless. If it's useful, it's something other-than-art, arguments about
craft aside. It seems ridiculous to me but some other people still think
that art can be dislocated from its place, its culture. There used to be a
kind of cultural hierarchy starting at the centre and radiating out to the
hinterlands, or the provinces, or whatever and if you lived in the centre
it was deemed the best and if you didn't it was, and you were, deemed
parochial, or worse, charming -- inconsequential. This specific sense of
place I mentioned is a new sense of regional -- a sense of the regional as
distinct, and distinct with its own culture and culture practices, and this
includes a sense of there being no centre, or at least of there being
centres all over the place, and you know where that leads because once the
sense of radiant authority is known to be relative it is really dead in the
water because relative authority can, and will, be supplanted as
opportunity or the need of the moment requires.
There used to be just a handful of centres, London, Rome, Paris, you get it
-- all the old capitals from the days when colonialism meant going out
there into the world for stuff when you intended to bring it back again for
the good of the empire. New York City was a New World centre but for all I
know the notion of economic colonialism had already changed by the then and
it might not belong in the same list. Unless you're an artist of course and
then you would interject quickly, well, what about cultural colonialism?
What has all this to do with being an artist in Toronto?
Everything. I would hazard a guess that monolithic cultural colonialism
fell victim to the increase in information. It's not that what's going on
in New York isn't exciting anymore, it's just that it isn't as exciting as
what's everywhere else. I mean, think about it. Art in New York isn't New
York art anyway -- it just ends up there because there's heaps of money
there. Most of the art I've seen in New York came from every place but New
York. New York is about as exciting culturally as a department store. If it
ever was a cultural centre we should admit those days are over.
Culture no longer disseminates from any place in particular. Turn on the
TV, go to the museum, attend an art opening, read a magazine, etc.,
information comes pouring in from all over the place. It's not so much that
we have to look for it now as that we have to look out for it or it will
bowl us over -- overload. If we tend to see the same old stuff from the
same old places it's probably more a case of cowardice, exhaustion,
withdrawal to the comfortable and known.
The decline of the notion of the centre puts a lot of weight on the artist
that did not have to be there previously. Previously, there were guidelines
-- there was authority. There were trends, debates, issues and commercial
cues that were centrally established and centrally disseminated. There were
claims of 'Zeitgeist' and everybody would get excited and act accordingly
and if you didn't you were out of it and if you did you were mannered
because I don't believe for a second that there can be a general sense of
Zeitgeist unless it's manufactured and made to appear as substantial in the
same way automotive manufacturers produce new models and hawk them on the
market as the greatest thing since sliced bread. It is a difficult thing to
get a hold but anything can and will be marketed if it suits enough people
with enough money and people like you and I will buy it because we're told
we want to. You can do the same with art, plain and simple, and if it
behooves a centrally controlled art market to do it so it is well within
their means to succeed. But with the dissolution of the centre all of those
commercial cues become particular to the individual, particular to where
ever that individual exists. I mentioned earlier that money is scarce these
days. (I can remember when things were different). Economic change occurs
as a centre dissolves. This is not to say that the change is a bad thing or
even that the relocation of funds is necessarily bad -- it can cut both
ways depending on your point of view, micro or macro. As an artist it can
cut either way. It used to be that all the money went to white males in
urban centres or to the agents of white males but now, as they have been
deposed, or pushed aside, or as they have been integrated into the general
condition, more and more people -- women, people of colour, rural people,
people subscribing to religious beliefs not commonly held -- are finding it
possible to get a hold of what is turning out to be a limited pot of money
available for art. The only reason I bring up art and money at the same
time is by way of the idea of the dissolution of centres of power --
artists are not politically neutral, and there are a great many of them
that will, the moment they get their hands on some of that limited pot of
money, spend it making art that will tear everything down.
It stands to reason that if a lot of money is passing through your hands it
will sooner or later dawn on you that some of it might stick. In a
capitalist economy where this sort of behaviour is all right and proper
there is a rush of people striving to insert themselves into the sphincters
through which things flow. Really clever people actually create these
openings around themselves and struggle to maintain their position. In the
area north of Toronto there is a sweet water marine organism that has
evolved to be its own sphincter: it makes itself into a kind of windsock or
sea anchor -- funnel shaped -- at the head of a waterfall, which, when you
think of it is another kind of sphincter -- a landmass that constricts
around a flow of water that causes a cold fluid extrusion -- and the
micro-organisms in this extrusion get nabbed up by the little funnel shaped
animal and eaten. You have to understand that there isn't an animal inside
the funnel but that the funnel itself is the animal.
Well the parallels to art are clear enough. In a major centre there are
many of these funnel shaped people that accumulate wealth and some invest
in art. If you destroy the habit that these creatures thrive in they go
elsewhere and your art market goes with them. Some artists are clever
enough to become funnel shaped themselves but it is an unrealistic to
demand all artists to do so because, I suspect, mutability is a gift
similar to that received by painters or choreographers, and as such can
never be learned. Another thing is that this funnel shaped animal can be
collective in nature such that we all work together to be a membranous
sphincter that works to draw things in so that they become consumed for the
comment good -- you could say that Smith's free flowing trade works to
increase wealth generally by providing a flow of goods through a number of
such societies -- but when the collective fails or when, for example, the
aggregate funnel shape of Toronto fails, the artists within it will go
mighty hungry. We do not need to worry about rich people here because when
things tough, they get going. Borders for the rich are no obstacle. It's
different for artists however, borders are a very real problem and besides,
there is always, for some, a positive sense of place or commitment to
people in that place.
Our funnel failed at the time of economic restructuring. It might fail
later anyway when our resources finish running out but they haven't to date
and all we've done is sign them over to the good of the few as opposed to
the good of the many. Maybe artists shouldn't care about economic
restructuring, or the decline of our centres, or the decline of the west as
centre, because the onus of culture has been dropped back into the laps of
the people. And anyway, artists wouldn't mind the rich getting richer
(another aspect of this current bout of economic restructuring) if they
would only exercise their noblesse oblige to a greater extent but they
aren't doing so and artists can't bum off the poor and the shrinking middle
class that never cared about art anyway (unless it can be proven to be of
value).
Art is a funny thing. People mostly only care about old art. Old art tends
to be valuable. All the people that were around when that art was made are
dead. Long dead. They took with them any clear idea of what that art meant.
We don't know what all these valuable old things mean -- not really. We can
speculate, but really, who does? We look at them for reasons particular to
the instant, and if it's the instant that wins the day why not look at new
art? Probably because it hasn't yet been threshed and winnowed. Possibly
because its got nothing to do with culture.
Now that the notion of the centre has lost credibility it won't help us to
sort through the eternal problems of the qualitative in art. Artists are
great innovators -- it is fundamental to the business of making art, of
creating, that new things will be tried. Not all new things are positive or
exciting or even very interesting. This is not meant as an attack on any
individual artist. It's not as if dumb people make dumb art and smart
people make smart art. It often works the other way around and art has even
been known to make itself despite how occult that might sound. At any rate,
who's to judge? Up until recently that was always done for us but we now
know, or should, that it's up to us. If we don't know what we're doing we
should at least clue into the suspicion that no-one else does either. This
is no surprise to artists but it's not good news for the paying collectors
of art for whom resale value is a constant concern. This is where central
authority is sorely missed.
Anxiety is something few people care to admit to, and if you're in a
position to exercise power over people's lives, (and we all are) you'd best
be dam cool about it -- nobody wants some flake calling the shots when the
winds of change are blowing. Well, they're blowing now, and, to stretch the
metaphor, people have battened down the hatches. As an artist, I feel
distinctly outside. I feel anxious. The art market has closed its doors and
the public funding agencies are 'under review'. I feel more anxious
already. But I refuse to become desperate.
Nobody knows what's going on -- nobody knows what good art is or at least
there are so many divergent opinions as to make debate ridiculous. Even
fewer people have any notion about where art should be, or where it should
be going. (I fervently hope that the last 'ism' is spinning in its goddamn
grave.) Nobody knows about how to deal with the artists themselves: are
they entrepreneurs, employees of the rich (patrons), workers, welfare
leaches, or a criminal class unto themselves?
My childhood had two parts:
a) growing up in a small, southwestern Ontario town in a working class
neighbourhood.
b) moving from that place to the rural-agricultural countryside with my
parents commuting to town to work while some of the parents of my
schoolmates ran the (now generically extinct) family farm.
It would be difficult to convey the distance between those two lives even
though they were geographically within walking distance.
When I lived out in the country, the local town, Woodstock, was the county
centre. For Woodstock, the city of Toronto was the centre. Not
surprisingly, there was always animosity. When I grew up and moved to
Toronto, New York was the centre. When I went to New York on work
assignments I couldn't see what the fuss was all about. It could be that by
the time I finally got to New York the whole notion of centre had finally
had its day, or at least had its day in North America. Maybe things just
moved on.
I've always insisted that there are two kinds of dogs: city dogs and
country dogs. Chances are you've only met city dogs. The latter type are
different. The family dog when I grew up was a killer. He'd kill anything
and was known to move against men two and three times his size. My father
typified that dog as a brute and I'd have to agree except for one extremely
significant fact: that dog had an uncanny capacity to learn. He was still
learning, I'm certain, when the lights flickered out in his brain at the
time of his death. He was not a smart puppy but he built daily on what he
did know and by the time he was old he exhibited a strange cognizance,
shrewd and often perverse.
Old dogs learn new tricks.
My point is obvious but the bit about the dog's killer nature may be an
important supplement: the animal didn't have a passive bone in his body. He
was your standard pro-active, motivated, learning and living (and virile)
old dog that learned new tricks.
It's no different for artists.
Just outside of Albany N.Y. there is some graffiti spraybombed on the back
wall of some building that you can clearly read from the wrong side of the
tracks and it tells you to " GO NOWHERE DO NOTHING ". I'd bet fifty bucks
that it was an admonishment against insufficient ambition but there's a
slim outside chance that it was intended by the author as a recommendation
that there is no better place to go and nothing better to do than be where
you are and enjoy the nuts and berries at hand.
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CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE
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MARK ADAIR - is a Toronto artist/sculptor who has a BFA from York
University and an MFA from University of Victoria. His most recent show was
Torontoniesis. Mark can be reached through TAF.
MARK DERY is a cultural critic whose writings have appeared in Rolling
Stone, Elle, Interview, The New York Times, Wired, and Mondo 2000. His
column "Guerrilla Semiotics" appears in Adbusters, he edited Flame Wars:
The Discourse of Cyberculture (Duke University Press), and his latest book
Escape Velocity has received rave reviews.
PAUL LAURENDEAU is an associate professor in linguistics at the department
of French Studies, York University. Influenced by the thought of Spinoza,
Diderot, and Marx, he is currently working on a book titled MATERIALISM AND
RATIONALITY (PHILOSOPHY FOR THE SOCIAL ACTIVIST). Describing himself as a
materialist rationalist atheist, Laurendeau formulates the religious debate
in philosophical terms in the tradition of the progressive struggle against
the mystical and irrationalist tendancies of philosophical idealism.
"THE PUFFIN" is a magical creature who comes up for air when the moon is
full or there is a good Formula 1 race on the television. S/he/it can
reached c/o TAF.
NEIL MACKAY is the editor of TAF, a Mass Communications student at York
University and an employee of the Admissions/Liaison Office of same.
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The Annihilation Fountain & TAF Copyright c 1997-99 Neil MacKay
http://www.capnasty.org/taf/
the_annihilation_fountain@iname.com
