spy toaster

Hamilton's Interior containing Thatcher's TV image gazing upon a seedy NHS space moves out of the interior and swiftly mutates into the ubiquitous Toaster; we, the viewer now gaze at the shiny, metallic structure; it reflects our faces and other faces merging our identities. It is a surveillance rather than a consumerist aesthetic. The job of the Toaster  (breakfast) is forgotten and a new principle of usage arises; we use our shiny appliances and the people at GCHQ  use that use. Hamilton wished to investigate the epic in everyday objects; he was re-examining Toaster as late as 2008; Toaster de luxe 1 is both epic and secret expressing Government's insatiable desire for machines that can can capture all information irregardless of its value.

Wei Wei at 5000 feet

Since Edward Snowden we should be talking about surveillance: not so; either it is accepted as inevitable or desirable or OK up to a point. Artists don't see it like that. Certainly not Wei Wei whose Disposition allows the viewer to gaze into boxes within which he is gazed at by Chinese guards while he sleeps or sits on the toilet. Richard Hamilton's Treatment room shows us a seedy, institutional interior evoking NSA/GCHQ's surveillance of Yahoo user's  intimate, shared photos.
 But Art can deal with surveillance in many ways: Arnall's Robot Readable World goes inside the  black box and represents the CCTV material as 'found footage'. The Bureau of Inverse Technology (BIT) fly their own drone and can look down on the watchers (NSA and GCHQ). Or what about collaboration? In Luksch's The Eye dancers run through Busby Berkeley routines under CCTV and then request the footage from the data companies. Another form of collaboration is to deconstruct the 'found footage' and reflect on the 'uncanny- is the figure on the footage really there or is it a doppelganger? Omer Fast's Better at 5000 feet talks to the drone operators as they wax lyrical about the 'white blossom' or heat signature of potential targets. It has been noted that drone operators come from the X Box generation. Two forms of drone-operator- playfulness exist: the aesthetic appreciation of  'white blossoms' or X Box frenzy. Figures dodging behind boulders in the Yemeni desert must hope for the former and can request the found footage from the CIA.
Wei Wei shows us the way: he follows the secret police in his car even snatching the agent's ash tray complete with fag ends and relocating it in an art exhibition as found object.  But how do we reclaim the digital traces of us that GCHQ routinely hoover up, turn them into refound footage and display as art? Well:  Arnall and Luksch have made a start.

• in Elmgreen and Dragset's Phone Home visitors to the installation can connect with friends and family worldwide (free) while other visitors can monitor their calls in an adjacent room.
• Jud and Wachter in Berlin set up a wifi network (can you hear me) on the Swiss embassy to relay their own messages to NSA/GCHQ posts on nearby embassies.
• Simon Denny's Secret Power looks in detail at the visual style that went into the power point slides that Snowden took from the NSA. Although the viewer cannot 'phone home' we can follow the same interpretive steps as the NSA analysts.
• Take another look at the slides in Secret Power specifically the GCHQ slides depicting Online Covert Action; imagine the mental states of the analysts who create this Tower of Babel; to reverse this algorithmic damage they need to use Taryn Simon's Image Atlas. Here is a drill for using the Atlas: take each term from each box in the Snowden slide ACNO-key skills strand and feed them one by one into the Image Atlas search engine.
• Paglen has deconstructed the Facebook algorithm which scans our images for dress style and repurposed it so only images relevant to Freud and Marx are selected, He also is planning an orbiting satellite which has no use or purpose (ie spying); it will be an aesthetic object-simply to look at.

alfred jarry's bike

Look carefully at Duchamp's Bride stripped bare by her batchelors . The work represents uperinteractions among unseen, abstract forces; it is also a machine of suffering. In the top part is what is known as 'the glider'; this is not a glider; it is a bicycle.Duchamp is here referencing Alfred Jarry's Clement Luxe machine purchased in 1896 (we know of course of Duchamp's interest in cycle wheels). Jarry's biographer (Brotchie) by way of some cod algebra assesses Jarry's gear ratio to be 36/9. This ratio will just work. BMX fanatics say it would be like leg pressing 1500 pounds maybe even breaking the chain. Andre Raffray painted the shadow of Duchamp's bicycle wheel onto a wall. He is commenting on Jarry's dream of a fusion between humanity and bicycle mechanics-the shadow reiterates Duchamp's thoughts on such a union-he invites the viewer to spin the wheel: to spin on an upside down unicycle-a more interesting comment than Ballard's 'assassination of Kennedy as a downhill motor race'; look at the detail in Jarry's 'crucifixion as an uphill bicycle race'; instead of crucifixion nails there are 'jiffies' or tyre levers; Jesus even rides lying flat to combat air resistance. How bland by comparison is Ballard's race.
Lance Armstrong should take a leaf out of Jarry's book; before or during a ride he might consume 2 litres of white wine plus a few absinthes followed by coffee and brandy; he called alcohol superfood-the source of all power. Using this as a template Lance can redescribe his endeavours as 'had some great superfood', 'had much better EPO in training this winter', 'check out this synthetic testosterone'.
Lance is the supermale. Jarry would have been. impressed at the range of superfood that Armstrong consumed-far more efficacious than alcohol; 10.000 mile race against a train-no problem

refuges 2

 











lives of writers have a performance aspect: nothing wrong with living in North London and going to book festivals: not necessary to live like Kerouac nor to act like Marina Abramovic using yourself as an object of art. But Bernhard saw his life in dramatic terms elaborately staging his funeral, will and legacy-all mini performances.
Bernhard's 'life performances' are hardly riveting. Think of Alfred Jarry, another writer/performer: androgynous ephebe with a punchinello voice dressed in hooded cape and Louis XV heels-associate of Bonnard, Lautrec and Apollinaire-interchangeable with Ubu.
Specifically: contrast the habitats of Bernhard and Jarry: Bernhard's farmhouse/castle at Obernathal full of empty rooms and galleries with shuttered windows; Bernhard acting as Hapsburg- farmer- manque, astride his tractor, dressed in lederhosen or posing in Vienna coffee houses. Better if he had watched visionary artistic personas like Beuys or Filiou  on Youtube-imagine Bernhard on Youtube! Think further of Jarry's 'tripod', 'horrific tower' by the Seine, 3.33 x 3.67 , one room with earth floor-bit like a beach hut plus live owls for company; the only photograph of the 'Tripod' captures goats looking in the door. Ubus's cave versus  Heideggers Todtnauberg.
Jarry was a precursor of Dadaism, Duchamp and performance art etc: the idea of the artist setting out to deconstruct his own play during the first night (Ubu) is a century before its time. But who are Jarry's precursors?
If artists are to be performers as well as artists perhaps they should be shamen in which case they may as well be good at it (Beuys and Kudo) rather than poseurs like Bernhard.
Thinking of Beuys, Jonathan Jones (Damien Hirst acolyte) described him in The Guardian recently as a bullshitter. Presumably Jones is thinking of Beuys' war time 'saved by felt and fat' experience. It troubles Jones that Beuys made it up; isn't that what 'performance' is?
Beuys worked with energy rich materials like felt, fat, honey and batteries-materials that nourish, warm and protect. Abramovic explains that the energy is retained in these materials so that Beuys doesn't need to be there anymore. Jones refers to these materials as 'turd like excresences' . If this energy is lost to the viewer as in Jones's case all that remains is bullshit and turds

beyond bernhard

Bernhard could have made better use of his lengthy hospital visits: he speaks of the 'death ward' or the 'theatre'-not operating theatre but one where the patients are marionettes connected to machines by strings not tubes. From these experiences he develops a system of pointlessness-getting up in the morning to face a pointless task, then setting to work and thinking oneself into bitter pointlessness'-something his grandfather had done each day starting at 3.0am. He should have further developed the idea of 'theatre' and gone in the direction of Kafka's Burrow and there encountered calculated pointlessness.The burrower richly pays for his underground castle keep by  pounding the loose sand with his forehead thousands and thousands of times to harden it; Bernhard never got to the bottom of pointlessness.

the whole equation

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Brecht, in a letter during the war, describes American soldiers on a train talking to each other;  no country, he says, has made itself familiar as this one, through the cinema. David Thomson develops this simple idea in his discussion of Chinatown; if you live in the US you can't help dropping into some of the dialogue from the film-'well nobody's perfect' and so on. Further, as time goes by, LA themes in the film (exploitation, greed etc) come to look like 'real' LA This is his idea of 'the whole equation'-we see ourselves as if in a film. This notion has obvious appeal for J G Ballard. Does our world view, he wonders, come from Disney or Canterbury Cathedral. Or, he goes on, how would the equation work in Japan or Sweden-psychotic stares or glacial silences?  Or what about the UK? -Passport to Pimlico or Brief Encounter? 

Brecht concludes, re the train episode, that 'maybe the movies don't tell the whole story'. So film and life don't equate? They don't have to: consider Jan Nemec's Late Night Talks with My Mother. There is a connection between this film and Oratorio for Prague  together with The Ferrari Dino Girl  but it is up to us to work out what the equation is or make up our own equation from elements like Skvorevsky, jazz, east european jazz, Boruvka etc.

children on a country road

In Kaurismaki's Le Havre Elina Salo reads to Kati Outinen, while she is ill in hospital, from an unusual text: Kafka's Children on a Country Road. Specifically she reads the concluding lines 'just think they never sleep...because they are fools'. Now Kaurismaki's work abounds in references to writers, often French; eg Micheaux and Prevert; but does the Kafka quote denote more than referentiality?  Benjamin discusses a clan of sleepless types who occur through Kafka: students, assistants, waiters, residents of the city in the south. About the faces of these figures he notes that Kafka says 'they seem to be those of grown ups, perhaps even students'. Kaurismaki does not derive films from Kafka but the 'grown up' look of the students may be very similar to Kati Outinen's persistent unblinking stare.