tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-343380732024-03-13T20:22:01.256+00:00Utopian ImpulseDan Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16966020716894989226noreply@blogger.comBlogger17125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34338073.post-44618454765406888962015-07-07T13:09:00.002+01:002015-07-07T13:25:15.798+01:00<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica;">
<b>My contributions to #Transacting: A Market of Values</b></div>
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For #Transacting: A Market of Values, brought to you by the tireless collective labour of <a href="http://www.criticalpracticechelsea.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page">Critical Practice</a>, I shall be making two contributions. The first will be a short talk at a Speakers’ Corner constructed for the day. I will be talking about my emergent thoughts on image economies at 12.45. </div>
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Throughout the day I will be running a stall titled Speculative values: Science Fiction Short Stories.</div>
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The event is in the Parade Ground on Saturday 11th July 2015, 1-5, at Chelsea College of Arts, next to Tate Britain, 16 John Islip Street SW1P 4JU.</div>
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<b>Speculative values: Science Fiction Short Stories</b></div>
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Value is so often determined according to the social and economic conditions of a seemingly continuous present. To question accepted notions of value, I will read a selection of science fiction short stories at hourly intervals throughout the duration of the Market. The stories have been chosen for their sense of cognitive estrangement, and for their engagement with ideas related to value. Value is offered as something contingent, that can be imagined as otherwise, as a set of alternatives not determined by the social and economic conditions of the present. The readings will be offered to an audience, but not for free. In return, the audience must listen, think and engage, providing reciprocity through discussion.</div>
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<b>Schedule</b></div>
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1.15pm - The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin</div>
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2.15pm - There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury</div>
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3.15pm - When it Changed by Joanna Russ</div>
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4.15pm - Branded by Lauren Beukes</div>
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If you would like to read the stories in advance of my readings, They are available here. </div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/[http://genius.com/Ursula-k-le-guin-the-ones-who-walk-away-from-omelas-annotated]">The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas</a></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/[https://2engom.wikispaces.com/file/view/'There+Will+Come+Soft+Rains'+story+and+poem+and+tasks+bklt.pdf]">There Will Come Soft Rains</a></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/[http://boblyman.net/englt392/texts/When%20It%20Changed.pdf]">When it Changed</a></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/[http://io9.com/5943053/a-brand-new-cyberpunk-story-by-lauren-beukes]" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Branded</a></div>
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Dan Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16966020716894989226noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34338073.post-32184044307284135622014-08-19T12:33:00.001+01:002014-08-19T12:33:41.711+01:00<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16px; min-height: 19px;">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Uncanny returns of the horror comic in the work of Hannah Berry and Gareth Brookes.</span></span></h2>
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<b><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span>A paper given at the 5th International Graphic Novels and Comics Conference, The British Library London. </b></div>
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A<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">s forms of genre horror become ever more mainstream in Western popular culture, there is an increasing move away from forms of disturbing estrangement in favour of either a playing out of anxieties and the reinforcement of normative attitudes and expectations, or towards ironic reflection. Clever and funny but not scary. These are generalisations, but nevertheless, these appear to be the dominant tendencies. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I won’t attempt a historical context of anglophone horror comics, but it is a tradition that I find engaging. I tend to imagine a historical trajectory in the US, from pre code horror, to the re-emergence of horror themes in mainstream Marvel and DC titles, and the in the Warren titles (<i>Creepy</i> and <i>Eerie</i>.) while we had <i>Misty</i> and <i>Scream</i> in the UK, through to recent explorations of horror themes in the work of artists such as Charles Burns and Becky Cloonan. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I belong to a generation that aged with the comics. I read comics for kids, which became increasing aimed at older audiences. So those horror comics aged too.I was 12 when I discovered <i>Swamp Thing</i>, with the headline “Sophisticated Suspense” above the title, and no Comics Code Authority stamp. It went on to carry the promising warning For Mature Readers on the cover. These elements certainly helped to hook me as a reader, although it was Alan Moore’s name that hooked me too, as I had long since been a <i>2000AD</i> and <i>Warrior</i> reader. </span>But those days of kids reading comics, the 70s and 80s, are long gone, <span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">and We can only revisit those supposedly subversive pre code days with imaginary nostalgia for the young audience who devoured them in the early 1950s. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">So, instead, I’d like to think about some things that might be thought of as contemporary horror comics, through <i>Adamtine</i> by Hannah Berry, and <i>The Black Project</i>, by Gareth Brookes. I’d like to talk about them as horror comics, and to think about what this might mean. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Berry and Brookes offer strange, powerful and affecting returns for the presence of horror within anglophone comics. They recover the ability to disrupt the smooth surfaces of social reality.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">So how do these books disrupt the surface of reality? How do they achieve a sense of discomfort, unease or dread? I would like to suggest that both <i>Adamtine</i> and <i>The</i> <i>Black Project </i>engage with what we can call the uncanny. These are distinct yet related manifestations of horror as something affecting, and as tied to forms of aesthetic experience, namely the uncanny, and connected to subversive possibilities of horror as a form of contemporary surrealism. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Berry plays on notions of doubling of the self, of the idea of the stranger, all taking place on that great space of modernity, the railway. </span>The uncanny is present in the familiar locations, in domestic settings, offices, train stations. These spaces form the background for the<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> carefully put together narrative, which demands attentive and close reading. It is very much in the tradition of powerful and concise short stories. Berry’s work is long enough to immerse readers into her world of dread and unease to which every panel adds, without diluting the narrative with unnecessary elements. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Anthony Vidler, in his book <i>The Architectural Uncanny</i>, writes “The contemporary sensibility that sees the uncanny erupt in empty parking lots around abandoned or run-down shopping malls, in the screened trompe l’oeil of simulated space, in, that is, the wasted margins and surface appearances of postindustrial culture, this sensibility has its roots and draws its commonplaces from a long but essentially modern tradition. Its apparently benign and utterly ordinary loci, its domestic and slightly tawdry settings, its ready exploitation as the <i>frisson</i> of an already jaded public, all mark it out clearly as the heir to a feeling of unease first identified in the late eighteenth century.” (Vidler p.3)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Vidler argues that this a domesticated outgrowth of the sublime, terror to be experienced in the comfort of the home. It is detectable in the tales of Poe and E.T.A. Hoffman. The motifs included the invasion of familiar spaces with alien presences and plays upon the doubling of the self. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Vidler discusses this in terms of class insecurity, a bourgeois kind of fear. The comfortable setting in which these stories take place is itself brought into a degree of insecurity. It is an urban form of fear, arising together with new metropolitan spaces, transformed and intensified in Western culture by the terrible destruction of the World Wars. It emerges within Avant Garde practices as an instrument of defamiliarization, “as if a (Vidler says) world estranged and distanced from its own nature could only be recalled to itself by shock, by the effects of things deliberately “made strange.” (Vidler 8) This is the uncanny as an aesthetic category, as the “sign of modernism’s propensity for shock and disturbance.” (Vidler 8)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Berry uses a consistent formal device to structure her narrative. The story’s present is made up of rows of four panels arranged on black pages. Flashbacks to the recent past are made up of three panels on a white page. Without this separation, we would be lost in the changes between then and now, the subtlety of the narrative would shift from unsettling ambiguity to illegibility. </span>Berry also makes use of the black of the page to indicate the presence of what we can think of as the book’s monster, a blackness that is a supernatural force of righteous and unyielding judgement. <span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
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We can also see here how <span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">the stable rows of panels are also occasionally disrupted. Such as this moment where one tall panel takes up all four rows in a flashback, a full length figure in a train toilet, staring down at the sink, ignoring his double in the mirror, then confronting it.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The image recurs towards the end of the book, when the identity of the protagonist, and his role in the overall story, is revealed. Over these two pages, we finally comprehend how he fits in to a cycle of bad decisions and unyielding punishment. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The contrast between the two full length images, each of which is dotted below by an image of a mobile phone, to form a giant exclamation mark, generates a feeling of panic and confusion. My eye is drawn across the page in a frenetic jumble. The panels are much smaller than we are used to on the other pages, and they run down in two vertical columns on either side of a large panel, which reads as tall. The images are fragmentary, generating a sense of shock in the reader, and convincingly associating our confusion with the shock of the protagonist as he takes in the scene before him, piecing together the meaning of these fragments as we do, while the tall panels allow us to piece together the meaning of his decision. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It is powerful and unsettling. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">These pages also</span> play on doubling. There is doubling through repetition, through reflection. Through realisation, clues, lingering presences. </div>
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The narrative of <i>The Black Project</i> is also set against banal and familiar spaces, but rendered in a very different formal approach. <span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The book has been made through a combination of lino prints and embroidery, achieving a unique visual sensibility.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span>These techniques are used to depict strange and resonant images of <span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">nostalgic spaces, reinforcing the sense that adult readers are immersed in a world of childhood. The setting could be many places in suburban Britain in the latter part of the twentieth century, in a time before mobile phones and the internet. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It is a world of net curtains and bad tv.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>The Black Project</i> focuses on Richard, a boy growing up in a dull suburban environment. His exact age is not disclosed, but he is somewhere between childhood and the more developed sexuality of an average teenager, in an uncomfortable hinterland where he is unable to talk openly about his desires. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Alienated from the boring world of adults and from his own peers, he turns to a self created world of comfort and intimacy by making a series of girlfriends. The story follows his attempts to create and preserve a companion in the face of constant adversity. The great adversity faced here is the risk of discovery.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In <i>The Black Project</i>, we recognise the presence of Hans Bellmer’s poupees. This associate of the Surrealists constructed sexualised life sized dolls that still have a power to unsettle and disturb. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The poupées were in part inspired by E.T.A Hoffman’s The Sandman, the story that is engaged with in some detail in Freud’s essay on the uncanny.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
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For Bellmer, these dolls <span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">were explicitly concerned with seduction and perversion, but also with the psychic shattering of the male subject. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The eroticism was not just located within himself, but in the dolls, as if they were thinking and feeling subjects.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This is the sense that is conveyed in the boy’s projection onto his dolls as actual girlfriends, not as dolls or substitutes. </span>(<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Brookes has also shown versions of some of the dolls that Richard builds at the London Print Studio (2013) which reinforce the connection to Bellmer’s Poupees. ) </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">For Belmer, these were representations for an adult to reflect upon nostalgia for adolescent desire. </span>However, his dolls are also sites of resistance. <span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In 1933, when the Nazi’s took power in Germany, he made the decision to give up any work that could be made useful to the state, however indirectly. This meant rejecting his background in engineering, and the beginnings of a career in design and illustration, which then led to his creation of the dolls. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The poupées were made of wood, metal and plaster, with large ball joints making them infinitely posable. The dolls were photographed, and</span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span> t<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">he original form of Bellmer’s doll work was a small self published book. The book contained ten photographs of the dolls, and a short text in which he speaks of his desire to recover “the enchanted garden” of childhood. (Foster 103) </span>(<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">He then published a set of eighteen images in the surrealist magazine Minotaure (Winter 1934-35) </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Foster then says that in a later text, “he locates desire specifically in the bodily detail, which is only real for him if desire renders it artificial - that is, if it is fetishised, sexually displaced and libidinally overvalued. Such is the “monstrous dictionary of the image”. (Foster 103) Foster argues that there is more to Bellmer than fetishism. These are not fixed but mobile configurations of desire. These are like sentences to be rearranged. Bellmer, he argues was making representations of mastery and control, but he also claimed he wanted to help people, to assist in their coming to terms with their instincts. Foster discusses this in relation to writings by Georges Bataille. (Foster 113) For Bataille, art’s origins in prehistory, and its childhood formations, are concerned not with resemblance, but by <i>altération</i>. This term refers to the formation of an image by its de-formation. </span>And perhaps this is what Brookes is concerned with, both in terms of narrative content and the pictorial forms he employs. Might <i>The Black Project</i> be a process of de-formation?</div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There is a specific historical context in which Bellmer’s dolls are situated. Foster looks at them as the embodiment of Bellmer’s rejection of the Nazis, his resistance to them. They are attacks on the state, and upon his authoritarian father who embraced Nazi rule. Foster argues that Bellmer attacks Nazism through contesting the construction of normative masculinity with elements that the regime despised. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The fascist body fears dissolution and otherness. Bellmer’s dolls posit a feminine with the construction of male desire. The fear of destruction and diffusion in fascist body imagery is manifested in the poupees. There are liberatory intentions in the critical exploitation of sexist fantasy and objectification. </span>The dolls in <i>The Black Project</i> lacks the oppressive context of Bellmer’s dolls. But <span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Foster argues that there is a primary surrealist politics: “to oppose to the capitalist rationalization of the objective world the capitalist <i>ir</i>rationationalization of the subjective world.” (Foster 130) What a simple and effective way to remind ourselves of the subversive value of horror. Horror comics oppose the rationalisation of society with the irrational world of the subject. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There emerges a potential for these new horror comics to attack the normative frameworks of the expectations and demands of liberal democracy and capitalism. Can the uncanny question conventional and oppressive structures that enable class distinction and inequality? </span>Does this kind of horror subvert <span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">social and economic repression? </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Bellmer’s take on uncanny figuration is also included in a project by the artist Mike Kelley, whose exhibition and book <i>The Uncanny</i> developed from the collaborative work </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Heidi: Midlife Crisis Trauma Centre and Negative Media Engram Abreaction Release Zone</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">, made with Paul McCarthy in Vienna in 1992.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Kelley began collecting images of figurative sculptures that possessed qualities he was interested in duplicating. When he was approached to make a work for the sculpture exhibition Sonsbeek 93 in Arnhem, Holland, he suggested an exhibition within the exhibition based on this collection of images. As the project developed, Kelley took his curatorial role seriously, leading to an accompanying catalogue, complete with his essay 'Playing with Dead Things: On the Uncanny', which was to become an influential text in the field of contemporary art. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The exhibition has since been remounted in a larger form at Tate Liverpool in 2004, and an expanded catalogue produced.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In his essay, he makes it clear that the “uncanny is apprehended as a physical sensation” (26) in the manner he associated with an experience of artworks. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">He thinks back to childhood, to unrecallable memories of a confrontation between a ‘me’ and an ’it’, where the distinction between the two becomes confused.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">He says that these feelings “are provoked by an object, a dead object that has a life of its own, a life that is somehow dependent on <i>you</i>, and is intimately connected in some secret manner to your life.” (26) </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">He discusses Freud’s essay of 1919, writing that Freud distinguishes between the uncanny and the fearful in that the uncanny is associated with the bringing to life of what was hidden, bringing us back to something familiar. Freud cites Ernst Jentsch’s location of the uncanny in doubts as to whether or not a thing is alive, the possibility that a lifeless thing in fact being animate. He lists wax works, dolls and automatons among the objects that produce uncanny feelings. Kelley describes being struck by this, and how it corresponded to trends in art at the time of his first reading of the essay in the mid 1980s. </span>And Among the images he compiles is<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> Oskar Kokoschka’s doll of Alma Mahler, a fetish object that for years served as the focus of his desire, before it was discarded by Kokoschka and torn apart by guests at a party. </span>However, Kelley tells his own version of the uncanny. He refers to, but deviates from Freud’s essay ‘<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The Uncanny’. </span>Freud’s uncanny is not about lifelike objects, but about the return of the repressed, which is more the territory of <i>Adamtine</i>. <span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Berry attacks a visual regime in which everything is depicted clearly, and fully explained, with no room for doubt or ambiguity, where we see everything constantly. Brookes is taking apart constructions of subjectivity and desire. <i>The Black Project</i> opposes stable forms of subjectivity often found in popular culture, while returning to the unstable manifestations of subjectivity often found within horror comics as a tradition. Just as Bellmer’s dolls expose fascist imagery, Brookes offers a similar exposure of our own culture of perfection and gendered fixity.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Both works are unflinching in forcing us to confront our own uncertain desires.</span> <span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">These reinventions of horror comics reposition horror as a source of critical and disruptive reading experiences. These are sites of powerful and engaging disturbances inhabited by readers. Might such disturbances be aligned to disruptions of normative subjectivity, moral certainty and the fixity of social order? </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In reconfiguring horror, they are able to disturb, performing a distancing and engaging form of alienation. <i>Adamtine</i> and <i>The Black Project </i>achieve their specific uncanny and disruptive power through an attentiveness to the narrative possibilities of the medium itself. </span>They work towards <span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">a subversive alienating of the reader that has replaced the now lost value of comics as a corrupting influence upon the young.</span></div>
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Dan Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16966020716894989226noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34338073.post-26511738219428074082011-04-26T18:35:00.182+01:002011-04-27T13:10:38.503+01:00Critical Surrealism in Nemesis The Warlock<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cqHU7bOQU-o/Tbe6-nSsklI/AAAAAAAAAJI/Sqo5-fkSPOM/s1600/sf+and+surrealism.001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="479" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cqHU7bOQU-o/Tbe6-nSsklI/AAAAAAAAAJI/Sqo5-fkSPOM/s640/sf+and+surrealism.001.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We begin with an image of violence. The page is highly stylized, beautifully rendered, and embroidered with details. Although the image is mannered and exaggerated, there is a solidity to the drawing, a consequential materiality. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There is a hardness to these lines, a severity which helps us to believe in the unrelenting cruelty of these villainous figures. </span></span><span style="font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">In the corner is an illuminated text, grotesque in form, narrating a future perspective of a distant and dark history.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We are shown a medieval future that has regressed into violence and dogma, into the worst that history has to offer: Intolerance, unthinking superstition, ignorance, brutality. However, I would like to suggest that the image also introduces an absorbed and reconfigured form of surrealism. It is given a new form within a space of mass culture. A powerful counternarrative within a branch of culture industry aimed at children. It is an uncanny reappearance of subversive and irrational forces that tap into a play of politicised aesthetics. The splash page that introduces Book 1 of Nemesis the Warlock, sets an intense tone that is to continue for the its entire run in the weekly anthology comic 2000AD over the course of the 1980s. 2000AD was a complicated site of escape for young readers. The future generally looked pretty bleak, but perhaps not much worse than the past or present. The origins of 2000AD are linked to the co-creator and writer of Nemesis the Warlock, Pat Mills. He was working in both an editorial and script writing role for the company IPC, who together with rival company D.C. Thomson, dominated the world of British comics in the 1970s. In 1976, prompted by the immanent release of a number of science fiction films, including Star Wars, Mills was instrumental in founding 2000AD and ensuring its initial survival at a time when the lifespan of a comic title was notoriously short. After abandoning his editorial role, he returned to the title as a writer, where he maintained a consistently adversarial and difficult relationship with paper’s management. While it is important to recognise that the commercial potential of science fiction, in the eyes of the publishers of the comic, was connected to the success of cinematic blockbusters, the terrain of science fiction that Mills and other creators responded to was one that had been transformed by the New Wave of British Science Fiction that had emerged from the pages of the magazine New Worlds in 1960s. This was an influence that I’d like to think was not limited to the textual content of the work that emerged from New Worlds, but that was also connected to emergent visual sensibilities.</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4JKfpmdOseI/Tbe6_pPWLFI/AAAAAAAAAJM/lXo0BeuzAcw/s1600/sf+and+surrealism.002.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="239" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4JKfpmdOseI/Tbe6_pPWLFI/AAAAAAAAAJM/lXo0BeuzAcw/s320/sf+and+surrealism.002.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></div><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In 1962, the traditional science fiction illustrations were dropped from the cover, opting instead for photographs of featured authors, </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and then in 1963 it lost cover images completely. </span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-S8Zsyot8DbU/Tbe7BPxorNI/AAAAAAAAAJQ/fnpN_Ap7Hj8/s1600/sf+and+surrealism.003.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="479" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-S8Zsyot8DbU/Tbe7BPxorNI/AAAAAAAAAJQ/fnpN_Ap7Hj8/s640/sf+and+surrealism.003.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Under Michael Moorcock, who became editor in 1964, not only was there a shift in the direction that the content took, towards the emerging experimental sensibilities of Aldiss Ballard and others. There was also a new graphic sensibility. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">By the turn of the 60s, this had further evolved into a form that was sensationalist, while retaining a critical edge that displayed borrowings from Pop and Surrealism.</span><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-pQlD-DIrGig/Tbe7CPrgd1I/AAAAAAAAAJU/Ds1DTmQs-iM/s1600/sf+and+surrealism.004.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="239" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-pQlD-DIrGig/Tbe7CPrgd1I/AAAAAAAAAJU/Ds1DTmQs-iM/s320/sf+and+surrealism.004.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What was happening to the covers on New Worlds also had a parallel in mainstream publishing. Earlier in the 1960s, under the art direction of Germano Facetti, Penguin introduced a new formula of reproducing a work of art on the cover of their Classics, Modern Classics, English Library and Science Fiction series. Upon his appointment as editor of the science fiction series in 1963, it was the suggestion of Brian Aldiss to use surrealist artists.</span></div></div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-o3Y-tKXWzn8/Tbe8RLLmRdI/AAAAAAAAAJY/uGpcIHCvLTM/s1600/sf+and+surrealism.005.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="299" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-o3Y-tKXWzn8/Tbe8RLLmRdI/AAAAAAAAAJY/uGpcIHCvLTM/s400/sf+and+surrealism.005.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Here we see James Blish, A Case of Conscience, from 1953. Using a detail from </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Eye of Silence (1943-44)</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> by Max Ernst. The Dragon in the Sea, Frank Herbert, had Underwater Garden (1939) by Paul Klee. The Day it Rained Forever, a collection of Ray Bradbury short stories, with a detail from Garden Aeroplane Trap (1935) by Ernst.</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pwuirZxlXJA/Tbe8Se7OmRI/AAAAAAAAAJc/1bzswvWJ1SY/s1600/sf+and+surrealism.006.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="296" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pwuirZxlXJA/Tbe8Se7OmRI/AAAAAAAAAJc/1bzswvWJ1SY/s400/sf+and+surrealism.006.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mission of Gravity, an work of ‘hard sf’, by Hal Clement, makes use of a detail from The Doubter (1937) by Yves Tanguy, and Olaf Stapledon’s </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sirius</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, shows </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the Land Called Precious Stone</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> by Paul Klee.</span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-44Dct5Z-o7c/Tbe8TQ4dqXI/AAAAAAAAAJg/rrQj1KJcVis/s1600/sf+and+surrealism.007.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="475" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-44Dct5Z-o7c/Tbe8TQ4dqXI/AAAAAAAAAJg/rrQj1KJcVis/s640/sf+and+surrealism.007.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Penguin paperback edition of Ballard’s </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Drowned World</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> used Yves Tanguy’s </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Le Palais aux Rochers (The Palace of Windowed Rocks)</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> (1942), the Crystal World Panther Edition of 1968 was given a cover by Ernst, a detail of The Eye of Silence (1944).</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oG3IeDAkQTA/Tbe8UK6OajI/AAAAAAAAAJk/y5Wf74Co9QM/s1600/sf+and+surrealism.008.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="479" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oG3IeDAkQTA/Tbe8UK6OajI/AAAAAAAAAJk/y5Wf74Co9QM/s640/sf+and+surrealism.008.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div></div></div><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">While the presence of Surrealism is explicitly alluded to by Ballard, and the presence of Surrealism in Ballard’s work has been explored in depth, notably by Jeanette Baxter</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, the Surrealist worlds of Aldiss have yet to be unpacked to the same extent. His short novel Earthworks (1965) , for example, is composed of an extraordinarily textured surrealist fabric. It begins with the image of a dead man floating across the sea, a spectre that is provided with a rational and materialist explanation, but that continues to haunt the protagonist as a series of neurotically produced visual ruptures in the surface of reality. The cadaver breaks up any remaining semblance of normativity that might sustain the psychic landscape, which is reflected in the breakdown of social and political order described in the near-future setting of the novel. Aldiss is as much a builder of surrealist tainted worlds as Ballard, with perhaps an even greater sense of the visual, and a recognition of the need to make the correlations explicit. His recognition of the importance of aligning science fiction with Surrealism was more than a cynical marketing strategy. It was an important part of manifesting the psychically and socially unstable terrain explored in science fiction.</span><br />
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The visual cultures of science fiction would continue to change. The use of Surrealist images in Britain gave way to a greater synthesis of elements in the generation of new imagery in line with pop-culture tendencies, with a convergence between book covers and album covers. </span> <br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The diffusion of surrealist tendencies was, of course, part of this broader set of trends. Covers such as this for Ballard’s The Wind from Nowhere, by Alan Aldridge, replaced appropriation with synthesis, modernist surrealism with a 60s graphic sensibility. </span></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We can see th</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">e emergence of new visual possibilities for science fiction.</span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-IKQcTUCa9iw/Tbe8V9LCOhI/AAAAAAAAAJo/Fnn-GXkKWfc/s1600/sf+and+surrealism.009.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="479" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-IKQcTUCa9iw/Tbe8V9LCOhI/AAAAAAAAAJo/Fnn-GXkKWfc/s640/sf+and+surrealism.009.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BfKqKXm6grY/Tbe8XAKqGtI/AAAAAAAAAJs/T_luilfBZYo/s1600/sf+and+surrealism.010.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="299" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BfKqKXm6grY/Tbe8XAKqGtI/AAAAAAAAAJs/T_luilfBZYo/s400/sf+and+surrealism.010.jpg" width="400" /></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In creating the universe of Nemesis the Warlock, Mills and O’Neill tapped into the current of Surrealism than ran through the emerging visual culture of science fiction.</span></div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mills also tapped into a current of Surrealism in the pages of the French science fiction comic Metal Hurlant, </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He saw that audiences can be pushed into expecting more, and demanding more, from comics. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">First published in 1974, and co-founded by Moebius, Metal Hurlant was a space for experimenting with non linear narratives, while openly obsessed with eroticism, of various degrees of explicitness and weirdness.</span></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-B-YNpFBSXk0/Tbe8Y9Q-3MI/AAAAAAAAAJw/4HohWzNygqg/s1600/sf+and+surrealism.011.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="479" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-B-YNpFBSXk0/Tbe8Y9Q-3MI/AAAAAAAAAJw/4HohWzNygqg/s640/sf+and+surrealism.011.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It is clear that French comics, and Metal Hurlant in particular had an enormous influence on Mills, that ran parallel in his scripts with his translation of </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">the dark and ambivalent tendencies of the New Wave of British Science Fiction. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The roots of Nemesis the Warlock c an be found in the final episodes of the series Ro-Busters. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">These panels offered a starting point for the one off story Terror Tube. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mills and O’Neill were intrigued in particular by the possibility of creating different worlds, of the look, feel and setting of a story changing regularly. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Implied here are forms of improvisation, of contrasting forms, of sensorial shocks. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This took shape in the form of a new series for 2000AD called Comic Rock, which would tell stories supposedly connected in some form to popular songs. Mills and O’Neill provided the first of these, which was linked to The Jam’s Going Underground, which had been at number 1 a few months earlier. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Comic Rock idea, was for Mills, an opportunity to learn from Metal Hurlant directly. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There is a deliberate leaning towards strangeness, towards pushing the boundaries of reader expectations and editorial instruction. </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The popularity of the world they created, and the mysterious, unseen character Nemesis, resulted in a two part-sequel, which was followed by the commissioning of a full series. </span></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The story focused on Earth in the distant future. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is a future that contains the outmoded, that appears disjointedly non-synchronous. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The surface of the planet was a wasteland. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Humanity had retreated within the Earth itself, carving out vast subterranean tunnels and caverns. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Humanity had also regressed into a state of fear, prejudice, intolerance and superstition, while focusing their irrational fears upon the other, the impure and unclean. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In short, the alien. </span></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div></div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Earth, renamed Termight, was ruled by masked fanatics known as Terminators, under the leadership of Torquemada. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Nemesis led the resistance against this genocidal regime, which was dedicated to stamping out all alien life in the galaxy. </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span> </span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Throughout Book 1, Mills and O’Neill test the boundaries of the episodic comic form. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The structuring of narrative episodes in Book 1 is unconventional for its context in a British anthology comic in the early 80s. The first two episodes are concerned with the slaughter of innocent aliens, and the return of Torquemada, who was believed dead but now exists as a phantom, capable of possessing bodies. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is followed by a three issue narrative arc focusing on a small human community on a remote planet who discover Nemesis, injured and apparently helpless after he is shot down in his craft, the Blitzsphere. </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He is captured, offering no resistance, beaten, humiliated and hanged by the locals who hope to receive a reward. The story unfolds with mysterious and gruesome deaths befalling the villagers who captured Nemesis, playing out as an unsettling gothic western. </span><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KZj8O0tgF38/Tbcq9VSGwPI/AAAAAAAAAI4/ow6Ne7bAXbQ/s1600/Scan10007.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KZj8O0tgF38/Tbcq9VSGwPI/AAAAAAAAAI4/ow6Ne7bAXbQ/s320/Scan10007.JPG" width="248" /></span></a><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-G9ItafdlTSI/TbcrUp-db0I/AAAAAAAAAI8/LusIK6vMzWw/s1600/Scan10008.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="188" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-G9ItafdlTSI/TbcrUp-db0I/AAAAAAAAAI8/LusIK6vMzWw/s320/Scan10008.JPG" width="320" /></span></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
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</span></div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The next issue offers another jolt, a convulsive shift in setting. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We are in the tunnels of Termight,where we are introduced to Purity Brown, one of the rare female characters in 2000AD at the time. She and a bizarre looking human called Googly, are running for their lives, pursued by Terminators. They run down vertical surfaces, and cross the void that intersects two huge subterranean cities - Mausoleum and Necropolis. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The two cities meet as opposing mirrored spires. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Skyscrapers have evolved into stalactites, with little regard for gravity. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">These panels play with vertiginous and confusing spaces, inverting the everyday life of Termight.</span></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QYAkzucGAzY/Tbe8y7LmXnI/AAAAAAAAAKE/cZHJl8phD0k/s1600/sf+and+surrealism.016.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="480" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QYAkzucGAzY/Tbe8y7LmXnI/AAAAAAAAAKE/cZHJl8phD0k/s640/sf+and+surrealism.016.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div></div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Then we have an entire week’s storyline relating a meeting between Nemesis and his Great Uncle Baal, an old sorcerer who has been banished to a remote fringe world for his unethical experiments on humans. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is a realm of magic. Not the superstition of the Terminators, but genuine magic, dark, chaotic. </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">After this, Book 1 follows a more conventional, action orientated path. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As the popularity of each issue and story was measured by readers’ polls, it is likely that the focus on action that follows is due to editorial pressure. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">However, while it may be more conventional in the orientation towards violence and action, the rest of Book 1 is determined by an unusual temporality. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Over 9 issues, the story focuses on the Feast of Zamarkand, the most important date in the ritualistic Termight calender, and the occasion for the ritual execution of their political prisoners. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The executions of aliens and traitors are therefore of great symbolic importance, and their escape is of great importance to Nemesis due to its potential symbolic value. He hopes that news of a mass escape will rally neutral planets towards resistance against Termight’s murderous empire. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But the setting of the Feast of Zamarkand also gives Mills and O’Neill license to develop the extreme and intoxicating strangeness of Termight. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As the ceremony begins, a panel shows a procession of terminators. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It is a twisted vision of a Spanish Samanta Santa procession, of brotherhoods in their penitential robes and hoods. </span></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-T9XrXVoBlNk/Tbe80nChw6I/AAAAAAAAAKI/njHnxqXZ0CQ/s1600/sf+and+surrealism.017.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="480" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-T9XrXVoBlNk/Tbe80nChw6I/AAAAAAAAAKI/njHnxqXZ0CQ/s640/sf+and+surrealism.017.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div></div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Temple of Terminus is the most bizarre element in all of this, a nightmarish underworld. It is hellish. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Architecture becomes figurative. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Towering over the scene, emerging from flames and smoke, the spectre of Torquemada. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Thanks to a spell cast by Nemesis, the flames of execution are transformed into a dimensional portal, allowing the prisoners to escape. </span></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5SzfOlVyQF8/Tbe82aqGJCI/AAAAAAAAAKM/BrhOXNnzrRY/s1600/sf+and+surrealism.018.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="480" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5SzfOlVyQF8/Tbe82aqGJCI/AAAAAAAAAKM/BrhOXNnzrRY/s640/sf+and+surrealism.018.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div></div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The architecture, if we can call it that, seems increasingly visceral. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Torquemada, inhabiting the bodies of recently dead terminators, also becomes more grotesque. </span></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yhgoi8QNT_U/Tbe838Z9AvI/AAAAAAAAAKQ/ly1dj5ngMY8/s1600/sf+and+surrealism.019.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="480" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yhgoi8QNT_U/Tbe838Z9AvI/AAAAAAAAAKQ/ly1dj5ngMY8/s640/sf+and+surrealism.019.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div></div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Book 1 was shocking and innovative, turning the world of future humans into something hellish, casting humanity as demonic. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It also established a solid connection with the theoretical readings of Surrealism offered by Hal Foster in Compulsive Beauty. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The satyrical nature of the script, the visual doublings and shocks, the reveling in uncanniness, in distortion and excess, resonate with Fosters readings of Surrealism as compulsive and convulsive repetition, as destabilising, and in terms of unsettling desires. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And at the end of Book 1, after Nemesis and the prisoners have escaped to a forbidden and forgotten subterranean level, we see another form of the outmoded and non-synchronous, identified as the ruins of Waterloo station, a relic from a long forgotten era. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The relationship to Surrealism established by Mills and O’Neill can also be looked at through </span></span><span style="font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> Walter Benjamin’s 1929 essay, Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia. </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In his text, he develops the term ‘profane illumination’. This is a perceptual transformation of the everyday into the uncanny and irrational. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What is of particular interest here is the correlation to estrangement, to disorientation, defamiliarisation. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In particular, profane illumination shares an affinity with Darko Suvin’s definition of science fiction as the literature of cognitive estrangement. </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The difference between Suvin’s Cognitive Estrangement and Benjamin’s Profane Illumination is one of the gap between criticism and action, between interpretation and agency. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For Benjamin, this is in terms of a revolutionary potential within surrealism, but perhaps it can be usefully translated into political agency, into actually affecting change in the reader, and the reader affecting change in the world. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And what we see play out in Book 1 is a politicized surrealism delivered to a mass audience of young readers.</span></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yxTvKC8E-Lk/Tbe86rgBgBI/AAAAAAAAAKU/oQAfIAC08RU/s1600/sf+and+surrealism.020.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yxTvKC8E-Lk/Tbe86rgBgBI/AAAAAAAAAKU/oQAfIAC08RU/s400/sf+and+surrealism.020.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Books 2 and 3 expand the universe and narrative possibilities of Nemesis the Warlock.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For book 2, drawing duties were taken over by Jesus Redondo. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The intensity of O’Neill’s approach to drawing had led to deadline problems, whereas Redondo’s far more immediate style was produced at a rate that fitted the weekly schedule. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">O’Neill returned for Book 3, which is most notable for showing the world of the Warlocks, introducing in particular his baby son Thoth. </span></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nVtFgupTxZ4/TbgCEvTnUYI/AAAAAAAAAKY/1lJDLaN230g/s1600/sf+and+surrealism.021.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="480" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nVtFgupTxZ4/TbgCEvTnUYI/AAAAAAAAAKY/1lJDLaN230g/s640/sf+and+surrealism.021.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And then came book 4, titled The Gothic Empire, which appeared to reinvent the visual and cognitive terrain of Nemesis of the Warlock. But the opening two issues are actually comprised of material that was originally created to be the first parts of Book 1. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This was what Mills and O’Neill came up with when first exploring Nemesis as an ongoing series, through a free play of ideas between them, that they describe as jamming, but that might also be thought of as free association, as games of chance, a kind of narrative exquisite corpse of imagery and ideas and story fragments. </span></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-38mIzgmKriw/TbgCHLdZNfI/AAAAAAAAAKc/3y5z5PrDBPM/s1600/sf+and+surrealism.022.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-38mIzgmKriw/TbgCHLdZNfI/AAAAAAAAAKc/3y5z5PrDBPM/s400/sf+and+surrealism.022.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But these early pages didn’t explain the universe of which they were a part, so they were put to one side until the story had caught up with them.</span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BGbYzjgD9IE/TbgCI27aLMI/AAAAAAAAAKg/k0EuuGeSOgw/s1600/sf+and+surrealism.023.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="480" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BGbYzjgD9IE/TbgCI27aLMI/AAAAAAAAAKg/k0EuuGeSOgw/s640/sf+and+surrealism.023.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div></div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Although the Gothic Empire had been created by Mills and O’Neill,</span><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">it was Bryan Talbot who really transformed these ideas into a narrative and carried Book 4 forward into new territory. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">These pages revel in a collapsed temporality.</span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SHjGGHrF0vY/TbgCK-dUH5I/AAAAAAAAAKk/8hhDf8fs2Vc/s1600/sf+and+surrealism.024.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="480" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SHjGGHrF0vY/TbgCK-dUH5I/AAAAAAAAAKk/8hhDf8fs2Vc/s640/sf+and+surrealism.024.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div></div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Gothic Empire focuses on an alien civilization who had been listening to Earth’s early radio broadcasts, which had radiated out into deep space. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">They recreate the British Empire in extreme detail, fixing their society upon a translated form of Victorian and Edwardian elements. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Their own bodies are also transformed, as these aliens have the ability to modify their outward forms, to make themselves look almost human, to the extent that they consider themselves to be human. </span></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mYXexxPJEM8/TbgCNL6pfsI/AAAAAAAAAKo/1LHyY1ifGAU/s1600/sf+and+surrealism.025.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="480" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mYXexxPJEM8/TbgCNL6pfsI/AAAAAAAAAKo/1LHyY1ifGAU/s640/sf+and+surrealism.025.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div></div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">They are now at war with the Termight Empire, fighting for survival, never expecting that they would be considered alien and be attacked. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The introduction of a these historical periods brings the future universe of Nemesis into a temporal intimacy with surrealism. </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We see the obsolescence of the Victorian. The bourgeois remnants of nineteenth century culture. </span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NXotkLWitP0/TbcleHjLaFI/AAAAAAAAAI0/KJsNc7AeH7c/s1600/Scan10007.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NXotkLWitP0/TbcleHjLaFI/AAAAAAAAAI0/KJsNc7AeH7c/s640/Scan10007.JPG" width="595" /></span></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span> </div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There is a tension between old and new brought out by the members of The Hellfire Club, a secret society who intend to overthrow the old regime in favour of progress, fashion and reform, who base their ideas on broadcasts from Earth later in the C20.</span><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5e_WwpbfKHA/TbckO8KjgOI/AAAAAAAAAIw/Ckf4rR4Zfz4/s1600/Scan10020.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5e_WwpbfKHA/TbckO8KjgOI/AAAAAAAAAIw/Ckf4rR4Zfz4/s640/Scan10020.JPG" width="506" /></span></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span> </div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Talbot’s imagery grows out of the worlds created by Grandville, a significant point of reference for Surrealists and for Walter Benjamin, </span><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.multipassionateproductivity.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Grandville-large.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="238" src="http://www.multipassionateproductivity.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Grandville-large.gif" width="400" /></span></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
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</span> </div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He also pays homage to the proto science fiction of Albert Robida, while</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> the use elaborate hatching and tone </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">suggest something of an engraved feel.</span></span><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--rMteiS-AXw/TbceZRze6xI/AAAAAAAAAIs/UW9AF-T3Q_4/s1600/Scan10010.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--rMteiS-AXw/TbceZRze6xI/AAAAAAAAAIs/UW9AF-T3Q_4/s640/Scan10010.JPG" width="470" /></span></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The outmoded forms of illustration evoked are reminiscent of the collage narratives of Ernst, as are the qualities of uncanniness present in Talbot’s work on The Gothic Empire. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Talbot continued working on Nemesis, producing some arresting imagery for Books 5 and 6, but </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">book 7, which began in October 1987, introduced the work of John Hicklenton. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He managed to follow O’Neill and Talbot with something unfamiliar, while somehow remaining consistent with what Mills had started at the beginning of the decade, with the unstable strangeness that lay at the core of these stories. </span></span><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2GkVeuyPgeM/TbcaFvVr6NI/AAAAAAAAAIo/Ro_gDOT03IY/s1600/Scan10001.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2GkVeuyPgeM/TbcaFvVr6NI/AAAAAAAAAIo/Ro_gDOT03IY/s640/Scan10001.JPG" width="478" /></span></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Book 7, is set in 15th Century Spain. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Thoth, the son of Nemesis, is travelling through time, killing all of the earlier incarnations of Torquemada, including Hitler, General Custer and Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General. He has arrived in Spain to kill the original Thomas de Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As a result of these assassinations, Torquemada, who now has a permanent body, has started to decay, to rot like a living corpse. The present is taken apart by removing pieces of history. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Hicklenton offers another take on the outmoded and contamination. He gives us a glimpse of the past, contaminated by the evil of the future, which of course is just a mere reflection of extant religious authority and fanaticism.</span></span><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-I6dIExcg1P4/TbcZVjLkXII/AAAAAAAAAIk/iCInDZqxvvM/s1600/Scan10004.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-I6dIExcg1P4/TbcZVjLkXII/AAAAAAAAAIk/iCInDZqxvvM/s640/Scan10004.JPG" width="478" /></span></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He also imbues Nemesis himself with a genuine sense of strangeness and alterity. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Hicklenton’s work on this period of Nemesis revitalised the strip while sustaining its core ideas. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The narrative setting in the past also expands the non synchronous, the conflation of unstable temporalities that had been present in the strip from its early stages. </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The surrealist interest in the non-synchronous is addressed by Hal Foster through a reading of Ernst Bloch, and his work Heritage of Our Times. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Foster cites Bloch’s discussion of the outmoded, and its contamination by fascist exploitation. The idea of a Now is an inconsistent now. There is no shared universal sense of Now. This is the essential factor of the nonsynchronous.</span></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QoWfpSsey4k/TbcYX9oO2lI/AAAAAAAAAIg/6B0XC7YFh9o/s1600/Scan10002.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QoWfpSsey4k/TbcYX9oO2lI/AAAAAAAAAIg/6B0XC7YFh9o/s640/Scan10002.JPG" width="480" /></span></a></div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Bloch warns against an incomplete past being exploited by fascism. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He interprets Fascism as praying on the fractioning of class, seducing with a mystique of participation and primitivism. It is an appeal to the archaic. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Surrealism offers a counterforce to this, a reclaiming of the non-synchronous. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In a parallel operation, Nemesis the Warlock does just this, using the nonsynchronous to destabilise the illusion of a constant and unchanging present. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It also shows readers what is at stake, giving us the brutal exploitation and violence of the Termight Empire, itself embodying values uncomfortably familiar to readers. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Non-synchronous temporality becomes a repository of possibilities, what is to be redeemed as well as what is to be avoided. </span></span><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cI-8zEtABcQ/TbcWoNaPdwI/AAAAAAAAAIc/yrNbRE0puyw/s1600/Scan10006.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cI-8zEtABcQ/TbcWoNaPdwI/AAAAAAAAAIc/yrNbRE0puyw/s640/Scan10006.JPG" width="476" /></span></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Nemesis the Warlock is constructed as entertainment, but also as political education. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We have explicit critiques of imperialism, of intolerance and racism, of religious fundamentalism and dogma. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There is a resistance to authority, to normative forms, a celebration of revolutionary energy that is not just about intoxicating the audience, but is itself subtly transformative. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And if we return to Walter Benjamin’s essay on Surrealism, he asks how can surrealist experiments be more than mere intoxication, how can they avoid becoming just mystical and reactionary, forms of play that idealise the irrational, taking away the potential for a politics within surrealism.</span></span><span style="font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span></span><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-SciYFwiNHDY/TbcVSPJgIWI/AAAAAAAAAIY/b7ZIymsXmsM/s1600/Scan10005.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-SciYFwiNHDY/TbcVSPJgIWI/AAAAAAAAAIY/b7ZIymsXmsM/s400/Scan10005.JPG" width="296" /></span></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"></div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To end, I’ll try to answer this question. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Within the Surrealist currents that circulate through the pages of Nemesis the Warlock, there is a reconfiguring of the limitations addressed by Benjamin. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Surrealism’s boundaries were far too limited for Benjamin. It was contained within the boundaries of an intelligentsia. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The realm of comics, particularly a comic as popular as 2000AD was in the 1980s, is not so limited. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It is a site of contemplative intoxication perhaps, but not limited to a narrow and bourgeois intelligentsia. It was mass culture for children and young adults. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The potential force of political awakening at work was formative and direct, yet exhilarating in its shocking visual and narrative pleasures. </span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div style="font: 14.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"></div><div style="font: 14.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></span></span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></span><br />
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</span></div></span></div></span>Dan Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16966020716894989226noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34338073.post-21872599244637467202011-03-15T08:58:00.002+00:002011-03-15T09:03:16.530+00:00The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas By Ursula K. Le Guin<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: tahoma, 'Trebuchet MS', lucida, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; ">"The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas"<br />By Ursula K. Le Guin<br /><br />With a clamour of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbour sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows' crossing flights over the music and the singing. All the processions wound towards the north side of the city, where on the great water-meadow called the Green Fields boys and girls, naked in the bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms, exercised their restive horses before the race. The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his own. Far off to the north and west the mountains stood up half encircling Omelas on her bay. The air of morning was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to make the banners that marked the racecourse snap and flutter now and then. In the silence of the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding through the city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air that from time to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells. Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas? They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children - though their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle! But I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all. For instance, how about technology? I think that there would be no cars or helicopters in and above the streets; this follows from the fact that the people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however - that of the unnecessary but indestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc. - they could perfectly well have central heating, subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds of marvellous devices not yet invented here, floating light-sources, fuelless power, a cure for the common cold. Or they could have none of that: it doesn't matter. As you like it. I incline to think that people from towns up and down the coast have been coming in to Omelas during the last days before the Festival on very fast little trains and double-decked trams, and that the train station of Omelas is actually the handsomest building in town, though plainer than the magnificent Farmers' Market. But even granted trains, I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don't hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples from which issue beautiful nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and ready to copulate with any man or woman, lover or stranger, who desires union with the deep godhead of the blood, although that was my first idea. But really it would be better not to have any temples in Omelas - at least, not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy no. Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like divine soufflés to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh. Let them join the processions. Let tambourines be struck above the copulations, and the glory of desire be proclaimed upon the gongs, and (a not unimportant point) let the offspring of these delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all. One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt. But what else should there be? I thought at first there were no drugs, but that is puritanical. For those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness of drooz may perfume the ways of the city, drooz which first brings a great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then after some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions at last of the very arcana and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as exciting the pleasure of sex beyond all belief; and it is not habit-forming. For more modest tastes I think there ought to be beer. What else, what else belongs in the joyous city? The sense of victory, surely, the celebration of courage. But as we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial. A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendour of the world's summer: this is what swells the hearts of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life. I really don't think many of them need to take drooz. Most of the processions have reached the Green Fields by now. A marvellous smell of cooking goes forth from the red and blue tents of the provisioners. The faces of small children are amiably sticky; in the benign grey beard of a man a couple of crumbs of rich pastry are entangled. The youths and girls have mounted their horses and are beginning to group around the starting line of the course. An old woman, small, fat, and laughing, is passing out flowers from a basket, and tall young men wear her flowers in their shining hair. A child of nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd, alone, playing on a wooden flute. People pause to listen, and they smile, but they do not speak to him, for he never ceases playing and never sees them, his dark eyes wholly rapt in the sweet, thin magic of the tune. He finishes, and slowly lowers his bands holding the wooden flute. As if that little private silence were the signal, all at once a trumpet sounds from the pavilion near the starting line: imperious, melancholy, piercing. The horses rear on their slender legs, and some of them neigh in answer. Sober-faced, the young riders stroke the horses' necks and soothe them, whispering, "Quiet, quiet, there my beauty, my hope . . . ." They begin to form in rank along the starting line. The crowds along the racecourse are like a field of grass and flowers in the wind. The Festival of Summer has begun. Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing. In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, second-hand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes - the child has no understanding of time or interval - sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes speaks. "I will be good," it says. "Please let me out. I will be good!" They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, "eh-haa, eh-haa," and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually. They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery. This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed. The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child. Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendour of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there snivelling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer. Now do you believe in them? Are they not more credible? But there is one more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible. At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Night falls; the traveller must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.</span>Dan Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16966020716894989226noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34338073.post-29151969872890103352010-07-11T14:46:00.022+01:002010-07-11T20:55:00.529+01:00Wells and Contemporary Art: Notes for a Presentation to the Annual H.G. Wells Conference 2010<div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#0000EE;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;"><br /></span></span></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#0000EE;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;"><br /></span></span></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#0000EE;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#0000EE;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=""><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"><br /></span></span></span></div><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDnMoUNjWTI/AAAAAAAAAC0/6aazXVApgyU/s400/slide.001.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492646213547415858" />The first thing to say about the relationship between H.G. Wells and contemporary art is that it is tenuous. At best, there is an uneasy relationship between Wells and what might be called aesthetic concerns. There are problems for Wells regarding what we might call ‘writing for its own sake’. Although it may be a simplification, something like this negative condition would be the position of Clement Greenberg, whose post-war formalism saw art as in need of defence from mass culture, to exist for its own sake, albeit as part of a policitised and leftist world view. However, this kind of separation does not exist as such in contemporary art practice, in which art’s role in society is constantly implicit, the relationship tested and rethought on a daily basis.<br />And Ironically, Wells’s dislike of ‘conscious artistry’, which he makes clear in <i>Experiment</i>, is generally echoed within contemporary art practice, in which technical prowess, skill, labour are not in themselves enough when it comes to critical evaluation. The complication of Wells’s indifference or hostility towards the realm of aesthetic concerns is also taken up by Kevin Swafford in an essay on <i>A Modern Utopia</i> in relation to Morris and Ruskin. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">(Science, technology, and the aesthetics of everyday life: H.G. Well's response to John Ruskin and William Morris in A Modern Utopia, Victorian Newsletter Spring 2008)</span><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:12px;"></span>According to Swafford, there is a kind of aesthetics of the everyday, constructed by Wells through social relationships to technology. So perhaps there is a hint of a radical aesthetics that breaks from the Victorian. There is a recognition there that the fundamental concerns of art need not rely upon technique and process. Today such dimensions may or may not be prioritised within a work, or may take unlikely, often social forms.<br />In short, Wells seems to be foreseeing a more conceptual turn in art practice, in addition to a demand for art to be part of the fabric of social transformation.<br /><br /><br /><div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDnObeznGEI/AAAAAAAAADM/fyTBWWjyeIw/s1600/slide.002.jpg"><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDnObeznGEI/AAAAAAAAADM/fyTBWWjyeIw/s400/slide.002.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492648192076355650" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a><br />Now, perhaps this is something of a perversion of Wells’s intention, but it is one I wish to sustain here. And it may also be instructive to imagine an alternative history in which Wells had rallied to the defence of Marcel Duchmamp’s fountain. This is a piece of work that Duchamp submitted to an open submission exhibition organised by the Society of Independent Artists in New York in 1917. It is a urinal, rotated on to its back and signed with the name R Mutt. Despite the premise that all work submitted would be exhibited, the board hid the piece behind a curtain. This simple act of naming an object as an artwork made it impossible for the modernist artwork to ever be quite the same. It was not just with the introduction of the readymade into the discourse of art, but the framing of institutional conditions. It also revealed the fetish character of artworks, as opposed to the idea that value is something inherent within them.<br /><br />Similarly, a Wells who embraced Dada and Surrealism would offer some real purchase here in considering how Wells might relate to artworks today. However, in our timeline, Wells managed to resist the allure of avant garde movements, even when close to home, such as with Vorticism.<br /><br />Yet I am interested in constructing relationships between Wells and contemporary art, and to do this, I would like think along the lines of an exhibition, or rather, the proposal for an exhibition, and the artists I might invite to take part. So I am going to talk about some recent work by artists I find interesting, that intersect, perhaps obliquely, with some Wellsian dimensions, particularly relating to the Scientific Romances and their science fiction legacy.<br /></div><div><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDoYIROKqkI/AAAAAAAAAEU/LQ68mhTmb0A/s1600/slide.003.jpg"><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDoYIROKqkI/AAAAAAAAAEU/LQ68mhTmb0A/s400/slide.003.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492729225872583234" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a></div><br />This fantasy proposal comes along after the prestigious White Cube gallery did a large show around Edgar Allen Poe in 2008. You dig the tunnel, I’ll hide the soil, curated by Harland Miller, who’s work we see here.<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDoYIsiVqXI/AAAAAAAAAEc/5c1UUnWO8ZE/s1600/slide.004.jpg"><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDoYIsiVqXI/AAAAAAAAAEc/5c1UUnWO8ZE/s400/slide.004.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492729233204947314" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a></div></div><div>Then earlier this year (2010), Ballard received a similar honour with Crash, held at Gagosian gallery. This had some concrete connections to draw upon. For one thing, unlike Wells, Ballard is regularly cited by contemporary artists, with a legacy that goes back to Robert Smithson in the late 1960s. Yet perhaps more importantly, Ballard was excited by the formation of British pop art, he was there as it was taking shape, contributed to it in his staging of an exhibition of car wrecks. And there is also his attachment to surrealism, most famously the work of Paul Delvaux.<br /><br />But on to the Wells show...<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDoYsPVMabI/AAAAAAAAAEk/CNEYfwZ93bA/s1600/slide.005.jpg"><img src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDoYsPVMabI/AAAAAAAAAEk/CNEYfwZ93bA/s400/slide.005.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492729843840477618" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a></div>The first work I want to look at is not one that can be included in my show, for practical reasons, but it may be instructive. The work, by Robert Wilson (and Hans-Peter Kuhn), is called, simply, <i>H.G</i>. It was shown in London 15 years ago, and was organised by Artangel, who specialise in facilitating large scale projects. The work was located in London’s Clink Street vaults in the Bankside Area. This medieval prison became the site for an immersive encounter, set within an expansive netherworld.<br /><br />The experience begins in a room that depicts a dinner scene, a moment extracted loosely from The Time Machine.<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDoYsddAV_I/AAAAAAAAAEs/BDqW8pJyNZY/s1600/slide.006.jpg"><img src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDoYsddAV_I/AAAAAAAAAEs/BDqW8pJyNZY/s400/slide.006.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492729847631337458" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a></div>From this starting point, the work establishes its own irrational logic, while maintaining some fleeting allusions to Wells. In an adjoining corridor, a copy of The Times dated 1895 reveals our temporal location.<br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDnr2Gun1wI/AAAAAAAAAEM/CsUvAUIjKSI/s1600/slide.007.jpg"><img src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDnr2Gun1wI/AAAAAAAAAEM/CsUvAUIjKSI/s400/slide.007.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492680535306655490" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a></div><div>While the initials H.G. recur at various points throughout the vaults. However, this is not some realisation of Wellsian narrative.<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDoYtFdSoLI/AAAAAAAAAE0/TzOALgbXLIw/s1600/slide.008.jpg"><img src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDoYtFdSoLI/AAAAAAAAAE0/TzOALgbXLIw/s400/slide.008.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492729858369953970" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a></div>Broken up into 21 rooms, often vast in scale, a viewer encounters fragments of narrative.<br />Within one darkened space, a figure is barely discernible, seated, then walking.<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDoZ8R4Uv2I/AAAAAAAAAE8/ul5-_SNQ0rU/s1600/slide.009.jpg" style="text-decoration: none;"><img src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDoZ8R4Uv2I/AAAAAAAAAE8/ul5-_SNQ0rU/s400/slide.009.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492731218914230114" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a></div></div><div>In another are rows of hospital beds, scattered documents littering the ground, making references to the influenza epidemic of 1919.<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDoZ8_fM9pI/AAAAAAAAAFE/VTWguiOIA2o/s1600/slide.010.jpg"><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDoZ8_fM9pI/AAAAAAAAAFE/VTWguiOIA2o/s400/slide.010.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492731231156893330" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a></div>There are odd reminiscences of The Time Machine, for example a temple, like the ruins of 802,701, or<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDoZ9brn4yI/AAAAAAAAAFM/3p7ShLI04KQ/s1600/slide.011.jpg"><img src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDoZ9brn4yI/AAAAAAAAAFM/3p7ShLI04KQ/s400/slide.011.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492731238725182242" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a>A sunlit glade suggested through bars, a cold threatening space from which to catch a glimpse of arcadia. Yet, as Artangel director James Lingwood says, the relationship to Wells is oblique:</div><div><br />“Precisely when H.G. Wells entered the equation is unclear. 1995 was the 100th anniversary of The Time Machine, but the relationship was always understated, even if the first room did create an explicit connection with the first chapter of the book. The space was the starting point, rather than the book..” (http://www.artangel.org.uk/projects/1995/h_g/the_making_of_h_g/the_making_of_h_g )<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDobA3XMrJI/AAAAAAAAAFc/n3zjiNzefYg/s1600/slide.012.jpg"><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDobA3XMrJI/AAAAAAAAAFc/n3zjiNzefYg/s400/slide.012.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492732397206940818" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a></div>There is a construction of narrative possibility through a utilisation of both understated fragments and grand theatrical gestures, but other than the recurring whisper-like appearances of the initials, the presence of Wells is obscured by cavernous vaults and dramatic scenography.<br /><br />It offered an enjoyable, accesible yet mysterious tableaux, perhaps reminiscent of the not to be realised collaboration between Wells and R W Paul?<br /><br />There is a resistance to specificity, to explication. Instead, a loose sense of time travel, anchored by Wellsian association, is allowed to play out.<br /><br />And perhaps it is the ambiguity that is interesting, together with a sense of spatial play.<br /><br /></div><div>So while it cant be included, there is a indirect and generative approach that is useful as a way of guiding the process of piecing together a Wells show.<br /><br />So, in terms of artists I would like to include, I will begin with Heather and Ivan Morison.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDobX3dKgZI/AAAAAAAAAFk/MPWfn89rlnM/s1600/slide.013.jpg"><img src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDobX3dKgZI/AAAAAAAAAFk/MPWfn89rlnM/s400/slide.013.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492732792368955794" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a>This is a work of theirs titled Foundation and Empire. (2003) Wild flowers collected from Mongolia jut out from the pages that have been used to press them. This work signifies the practice of which it is a part. In 2003 Heather and Ivan Morison wrote Divine Vessel, a 72,000-word science fiction novel, on a journey aboard a cargo ship travelling between Shanghai and Auckland. Asimov’s book was one that they had read in preparation for the task while photographing wild flowers in Mongolia. This whole period was encompassed by their pan-global voyage, itself a work titled Global Survey.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Helvetica, serif;font-size:100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:12px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Georgia, serif;font-size:130%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:16px;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div><div><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:Georgia, serif;font-size:16px;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDobYANDeWI/AAAAAAAAAFs/ocKvUQnUFz0/s1600/slide.014.jpg"><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDobYANDeWI/AAAAAAAAAFs/ocKvUQnUFz0/s400/slide.014.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492732794717305186" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a></span></p></div><div>In their 2004 work, Science Fiction Reference Bookcase (In Colour Order), a collection of novels is shown that provided source material for their research.</div><div>the Morisons describe the materials as ‘Books on Shelf (Only Partially Read)’.<br />Included amongst these is one text by Wells: Star Begotten.<br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDobYSV0PFI/AAAAAAAAAF0/QGfcX4BjtR0/s1600/slide.015.jpg"><img src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDobYSV0PFI/AAAAAAAAAF0/QGfcX4BjtR0/s400/slide.015.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492732799585893458" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a></div><div>‘Earthwalker’, their show at Danielle Arnaud gallery, continued to explore a particular relationship with science fiction. This is Starmaker, a projected work using medium-format slides and a soundtrack.This work aligns itself explicitly with science fiction. In part this is through the sounds culled from sci-fi cinema, but is also indicated in its named reference to Olaf Stapledon. Stapledon’s novel, a meditation on creation and complexity, perhaps illuminates the images.</div><div><br /></div><div>The photographs are of natural history dioramas,<br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDogy6G5vxI/AAAAAAAAAH0/TQ8X3C_2zcw/s1600/slide.016.jpg"><img src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDogy6G5vxI/AAAAAAAAAH0/TQ8X3C_2zcw/s400/slide.016.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492738754495495954" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a></div><div>There are scenes of Agricutlture and horticulture, as well as from the British Coastline.<br /></div><div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDogd2KEYyI/AAAAAAAAAHs/zkDDi0j29EE/s1600/slide.017.jpg"><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDogd2KEYyI/AAAAAAAAAHs/zkDDi0j29EE/s400/slide.017.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492738392657781538" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a>Whereas Stapledon’s narrator travels out of his body on Earth to become an observer of other worlds, the Morisons present home as if to an alien. The approach here resonates with Darko Suvin’s account of science fiction, as the literature of cognitive estrangement, which is firmly rooted by Suvin in the scientific romances.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDogRHRC4FI/AAAAAAAAAHk/Fkdi0qaR4w8/s1600/slide.018.jpg"><img src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDogRHRC4FI/AAAAAAAAAHk/Fkdi0qaR4w8/s400/slide.018.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492738173912146002" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a></div><div>The Morisons’ ongoing obsession with science fiction, reflected through natural history, is also evident in these two large kite-sculptures, which fuse an uncanny geometry of crystaline forms with flight enabling technology.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDofy1mAQ4I/AAAAAAAAAHU/SAzKEi14xKY/s1600/slide.019.jpg"><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDofy1mAQ4I/AAAAAAAAAHU/SAzKEi14xKY/s400/slide.019.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492737653772141442" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a></div><div>Their work Dark Star draws on their research into bizarre mineral samples. They visited a place called Quartzsite in Arizona, frequented for the purposes of collecting crystals. In Dark Star, house-trucks, artefacts of a new-age gypsy movement in the States, are depicted in the desert landscape. Above them, spinning crystals hover, ominous and unexplained presences against the luminous sky.<br />But to return to Wells... The Morison’s listing of Star Begotten is interesting regarding the evolutionary theme, which resonates with their own fascination with natural history as a discourse. But it is also important in terms of the idea of ambiguity, as emphasised by John Huntingdon in the introduction to the recent printing of the book. Around this kind of ambiguity and uncertainty, art might be held up as more resonant, not as the self regarding solipsism or formalism for which Wells had such a distaste, but as a space of contestation and dialogue, that is distinctly Wellsian. There is an illuminating affinity here.<br /><br /></div><div>I want to borrow Huntingdon’s reading of a legacy left, albeit indirectly by Star Begotten, to science fiction, which is taken up by artists who demonstrate an interest in the genre. Huntingdon says “in the 1950s in the United States (...) a dark existentialist comedy develops that, different as it may be from Wells’s socially explicit work, derives part of its generic heritage from Star Begotten. Delusion figures powerfully in this tradition. (...) On such a map of SF made after 1940 (...) Star Begotten (...) sappears as a crucial text. In a time of impending world crisis, it poses a fantasy that asks to be challenged as a fantasy even as it rallies the readership to the serious critical work that has to be done.” (Star Begotten P 27)<br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDnrDYlA7pI/AAAAAAAAAD8/dbBDn4TntH4/s1600/slide.020.jpg" style="text-decoration: none;"><img src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDnrDYlA7pI/AAAAAAAAAD8/dbBDn4TntH4/s400/slide.020.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492679663924866706" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a></div><div>This idea corresponds to the presence of science fiction in the work of Saskia Olde Wolbers. Visually, Wolbers constructs uncanny and strangely futuristic imagery using home-made special effects, models, miniature sets and simple optical tricks. Each video work is accompanied by a voice-over. These are narratives that fuse found and supposedly true stories with a sense of neurosis, estrangement and alienation reminiscent of the work of Philip K Dick. The sense of delusion that emerges in Star Begotten is played up here.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDnqjau2HRI/AAAAAAAAAD0/0rI8-HJ458I/s1600/slide.021.jpg"><img src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDnqjau2HRI/AAAAAAAAAD0/0rI8-HJ458I/s400/slide.021.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492679114747157778" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>Whereas, this work by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, called <i>What we see when we are dead</i>, evokes the technological sublime of artificially constructed worlds, corresponding to a more future orientated Wellsian dimension.<br /></div><div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDogCJLjm5I/AAAAAAAAAHc/JHnTd1arz_E/s1600/slide.022.jpg"><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDogCJLjm5I/AAAAAAAAAHc/JHnTd1arz_E/s400/slide.022.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492737916727958418" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a></div><div>While Andreas Gursky’s photographs move ever further towards spectacular and artificial views of the present as future. Here we see his manipulation of a giant particle accelerator.<br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDofO0rZRDI/AAAAAAAAAHE/fcMUDBbWF-0/s1600/slide.024.jpg"><img src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDofO0rZRDI/AAAAAAAAAHE/fcMUDBbWF-0/s400/slide.024.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492737035051025458" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a></div><div>And in the work of Gordon Cheung, a painter who make use of science fiction imagery, and who cites Wells directly as an interest, seductive painted surfaces act as a space of fantastic yet critical projection.<br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDofOzJvqlI/AAAAAAAAAHM/3zfznnknwPc/s1600/slide.023.jpg"><img src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDofOzJvqlI/AAAAAAAAAHM/3zfznnknwPc/s400/slide.023.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492737034641451602" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a></div><div>Listings of stock prices are incorporated into the surface of the paintings. For Cheung, these act as a metaphor for global networks of capital that circle the Earth. History, the present and the future are conflated in these paintings as both apocalyptic vision and hopeful image.</div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDnrfwvki5I/AAAAAAAAAEE/ougXw8Z1AnM/s1600/slide.026.jpg"><img src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDnrfwvki5I/AAAAAAAAAEE/ougXw8Z1AnM/s400/slide.026.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492680151447931794" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a><div style="text-align: left;">In this painting by Ged Quinn, (<i>Here is not the Place for Nostalgia</i>), the play of utopia, degeneration and temporality in The Time Machine are set in an arcadian landscape, in which the machine itself has been wheel clamped.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDoe9My7WdI/AAAAAAAAAG8/34a8xeNErhM/s1600/slide.027.jpg"><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDoe9My7WdI/AAAAAAAAAG8/34a8xeNErhM/s400/slide.027.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492736732287424978" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a></div><div>In a different register, the work <i>1984 and Beyond</i> by Gerard Byrne would be appropriate. While not focusing upon Wells directly, it does address some of his successors engaged in a discussion that is definitely Wellsian. Currently on show at Tate Britain, the work uses three monitors to present a re-enactment of a round table discussion published in Playboy in 1963. The 12 participants are all well known sf authors, including Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, who speculate on life in the year 1984.<br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDnqSBCK-gI/AAAAAAAAADs/xXI63OB1ESc/s1600/slide.028.jpg"><img src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDnqSBCK-gI/AAAAAAAAADs/xXI63OB1ESc/s400/slide.028.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492678815791118850" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>Part of what aligns the work with Wells is a confidence in the future that seems remarkable today. Yet this confidence becomes problematised by layers of temporality that are drawn out by work.<br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDoewlpYs3I/AAAAAAAAAG0/0-2E2DiSNGA/s1600/slide.029.jpg"><img src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDoewlpYs3I/AAAAAAAAAG0/0-2E2DiSNGA/s400/slide.029.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492736515619992434" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>Dominque Gonzales Foerster, who is drawn to elaborate spatial explorations of narrative, would be of interest here for a less optimistic dimension, and instead might suggest aspects of catastrophe.<br />Her work from (Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2008/2009,) <i>TH. 2058</i>. does two things with its title. Firstly, it references George Lucas’s dystopian film <i>THX1138</i>,<br />Secondly, it spells out that we are in the turbine hall of tate modern in the year 2058.</div><div>The turbine hall has become a refuge, a shelter for refugees hoping to escape from an endless deluge. Also within the Turbine Hall are public sculptures, which have started to mutate, to grow, as a result of the uncanny rain.<br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDodk10yJVI/AAAAAAAAAGc/NEhTbVjpmLU/s1600/slide.030.jpg"><img src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDodk10yJVI/AAAAAAAAAGc/NEhTbVjpmLU/s400/slide.030.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492735214292706642" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a></div><div>These rows of metal bunks evoke wartime bomb shelters, refugee camps, detention centres and ambiguous forms of communal living.</div><div><br /></div><div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDoefvHTdcI/AAAAAAAAAGs/ZpbCyW-KCrw/s1600/slide.031.jpg"><img src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDoefvHTdcI/AAAAAAAAAGs/ZpbCyW-KCrw/s400/slide.031.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492736226103621058" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a></div><div><br />And to make things more explicit, copies of science fiction novels are left upon the bare beds. Placed on one of the beds is a copy of War of the Worlds.<br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDodL4V_LiI/AAAAAAAAAGM/PxXQjOj94ak/s1600/slide.032.jpg"><img src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDodL4V_LiI/AAAAAAAAAGM/PxXQjOj94ak/s400/slide.032.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492734785472114210" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a></div><div>But I’d like to end with an artist who engages more directly with Wells.<br />The Canadian artist Kara Uzelman created an installation (in Sommer and Kohl gallery) in Berlin that took as its point of reference Wells’s Dr Cavor.<br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDoc59WtChI/AAAAAAAAAGE/pMMoQBQJ9fs/s1600/slide.033.jpg"><img src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDoc59WtChI/AAAAAAAAAGE/pMMoQBQJ9fs/s400/slide.033.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492734477579651602" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a></div><div>The central idea here is that it is an archival excavation of the work of those influenced by Cavor. Uzelman takes Cavor as a starting point for the writing of a history of a group known as the Cavorists. According to the narrative of this work, the group continued until the scientific advancements of the twentieth century led members to realise that their goals were unachievable, and in 1994 they officially disbanded.<br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDocjvSGt4I/AAAAAAAAAF8/VXBXFBkF4K8/s1600/slide.035.jpg"><img src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDocjvSGt4I/AAAAAAAAAF8/VXBXFBkF4K8/s400/slide.035.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492734095845144450" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a></div><div>There are sculptures here which take the form of crude apparatuses<br />as well as documentation, sound and video. For the most part, this is what remains of the Cavorists’ work. The exception seems to be a tape recording of an interview with Canadian inventor John Hutchison. Hutchinson makes claims to have successfully levitated objects using what he calls Zero Point Energy.</div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDnph1exZ-I/AAAAAAAAADc/T7BgC7jyD0E/s1600/slide.036.jpg"><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDnph1exZ-I/AAAAAAAAADc/T7BgC7jyD0E/s400/slide.036.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492677988056131554" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></a><div>His stories are of surveillance and interference from both military and state, yet he has been unable to substantiate the claims of his success, and the recording is ultimately overwhelmed by noise. Unlike the fictional Cavorists, Hutchinson seems to be a genuine phoney.<br />Uzelman is drawing a very wobbly line between the different registers of fiction and actuality here, resulting in a blurring of fictional and actual influences of Wells. I am here, myself, dealing with some kind of fictionalisation, perhaps even an alternative reality in which a connection between Wells and contemporary art can be established, like that which is so evident and recognised with Ballard.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/TDnorNI62DI/AAAAAAAAADU/jFfF8bM0d6I/s400/slide.041.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492677049514121266" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></div><div><div style="text-align: left;">It is a fantasy, but one rooted in concrete affinities. There is a shared interest in how forms of creative practice relate to the organisation of the social. Therefore, the influence of Wells on contemporary art may be less explicit than that of Ballard, but perhaps addressing this relationship is far more necessary.</div></div></div>Dan Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16966020716894989226noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34338073.post-81101852446930982362010-05-22T14:33:00.002+01:002010-05-22T14:38:07.806+01:00Utopics in Art and Architecture<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/S_feKh1FCfI/AAAAAAAAACs/Upa2UGVprgs/s1600/poster.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 283px; height: 400px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/S_feKh1FCfI/AAAAAAAAACs/Upa2UGVprgs/s400/poster.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5474088144553183730" /></a>Dan Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16966020716894989226noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34338073.post-7220693336752903872009-12-04T20:50:00.005+00:002009-12-04T20:55:32.496+00:00The Peckham ExperimentReview of 'The Peckham Experiment'. <br />Camberwell Space, 28 September to 7 November. <br /><br />As published in Art Monthly, December 2009/January 2010. <br /><br />Curated by Jo David and Rachael House, directors of Space Station Sixty-Five, ‘The Peckham Experiment’ takes its name and focus from the Pioneer Health Centre. This modernist expanse of glass opened in South East London in 1935. The architect, Owen Williams, specialised in the use of complex engineering techniques, which are shown off in this building’s open tracts of space, built around a central swimming pool. Its function was, however, as implicated in notions of engineering as it was in its form: action and observation become interchangable through an obsessive attention to visibility throughout the structure. <br /><br />The Health Centre was designed to provide a location for an ambitious social project, dating back to 1926. Founded by George Scott Williamson and Innes Hope Pierce, it was an attempt both to transform and observe behaviour relating to that most general of ideas – wellbeing. Health was not imagined in terms of diagnosis and medical treatment, but rather as an integrated sense of education, physical fitness, and an emotional connectedness to family and society. <br /><br />The findings of the experiment were intended not for clinical use, but for the active improvement of the community itself. There was no actual treatment on offer, neither was there any form of enforcement of lifestyle change. As a result of this unorthodox approach, the Centre was not absorbed into the state health system when it was established in the late 1940s, leading to the Centre’s closure in 1950.<br /><br />In 1935, as the Centre opened, a booklet was distributed to homes within a broad catchment area. The booklet offered, for the modest fee of a shilling per week, a chance to contribute and cooperate within the activities and facilities offered by the Centre. This was not offered up as some precursor of the leisure centre, but as an act of co-production in a social experiment. The activities and facilities on offer were diverse and numerous, including swimming, amateur dramatics, music, dancing, first aid classes, family planning discussions, a nursery, school, gymnasium, bikes and scooters, and a cafeteria offering far healthier alternatives to the regular diet of the community. Ideas and good health were envisaged as things that could be spread by contagion. <br /><br />Split between Camberwell Space and Space Station Sixty-Five, ‘The Peckham Experiment’ was sulemented by performances and events, including a day-long symposium. If nothing else, the symposium offered an audience two screenings of A Pool of Information, a documentary video by Jini Rawlings made in 1993. Rawlings interviewed people who had used the Centre and creates a narrative history with period footage in a conventional but informative work, which offers an effective insight into the background and context for ‘The Peckham Experiment’. The symposium brought together artists with an architect, a local community activist and a representative of the Pioneer Health Foundation, which seeks to continue the legacy of the original Centre. Situating the symposium as an integral element within the project led to a shift away from a reading of ‘The Peckham Experiment’ as an exhibition – an accumulation of autonomous works – in favour of prioritising the presence of the Centre itself. This was never reduced to theme, but allowed to exist as both a genuine context, and a simultaneously extant point of departure and destination.<br /><br />The exhibition components of the project manage to cover a lot of ground. Much of it has a playful dimension, such as Nicholas Cobb’s dioramas made from plastic containers and Gayle Chong Kwan’s constructed photographs. Dean Kenning’s Past Present Future ensures that the conversion of the Centre into luxury apartments, complete with oversized SUVs nestled behind security gates, does not escape attention. The question is one of property, a dramatic transition in both status and purpose from public to private. Kenning summarises efficiently through collaged image and polemical text. Other works are, understandably, less direct in their reference to the Health Foundation. Annie Whiles’ untitled embroidered banner, with its secondary narrative of the unhappy retirements of seaside donkeys, situates itself between the specific local history framing the show and an alternative terrain of social history. Yet despite the consistent presence of works that are, on their own, engaging, playful and of interest in the way that they may relate to societal concerns, the gallery-based elements overall are of less interest here. The harmonic cacophonies of the Strawberry Theives Socialist Choir performing at the opening set a tough precedent for the more static elements of the show to follow. Similarly, a reading group discussing Piers Anthony’s Macroscope, a science fiction novel with a focus on the Centre, does not need to skirt around discontinuities between artwork and social agency. Perhaps this is a simplistic distinction, but the excitement generated by the more discursive and participatory implications and acticitivities tended to leave the majority of the work here behind, despite the fact that none of it deserves any particularly negative criticism. <br /><br />Arguably the exception to a peceived gap between the project as a whole and the individual contributions to the exhibition comes from Freee. A large circular mirror is fixed to one of the walls of Camberwell Space, the words ‘Revolution is Sublime’ cut into the surface in a stencil-style typeface. The work suggests inclusion of the audience through reflection, as well as alluding to surveillance and an excess of visibility. However, the object is as much a prop for their billboard poster Revolution is Sublime as it is a work in its own right. In the poster Mel Jordan, Andy Hewitt and Dave Beech are seen so that sky and tree tops are reflected, an imaging of the picturesque as constructed posture. The image also serves as the cover for a manifesto, designed to be read aloud at one of the show’s many events by a participatory audience, with readers selecting passages that they agree with. It calls for a political engagement that needs to be earned. Drawing on Étienne Balibar, Jacques Rancier and Alain Badiou, they call for a transformative social action and discourse in which the aesthetic realm is an active and effective component. The claims are ambitious, to some perhaps verging on the absurd, but, alongside the legacy of the Centre itself, their demands need to be recognised in terms of realism and concreteness rather than impossibility and failure. <br /><br />The Peckham Health Centre was established during a period in which a new Britain was forged. This short-lived experiment in social organisation was a startling move towards self-regulatory structures, the widescale significance of which have yet to be realised. It is an overlooked element of a period of radical transformation that reshaped class boundaries, as new social posibilities were imagined and realised. Freee’s engagement with the spread of ideas, their belief in collectivity and action, living structures, social cohesion and agency over pure individualism, are well suited to the task of retrieval implied here. Freee is able to provide a determinant trajectory: the closure of the Health Centre is not to be conflated with failure. Rather, it offers configurations of hope not specific to the social field of art, but applicable at a larger scale of society and democratic process. Dan Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16966020716894989226noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34338073.post-23392754508932145842009-05-03T09:51:00.002+01:002009-05-03T09:53:33.336+01:00Science Fiction: A History of the PresentNotes for a lecture. <br /><br />Despite only having the opportunity to suggest some inroads into the terrain, I want to get across that sf is present in art, relates to theory, but is also, more generally, an important presence in culture, as a force that brings together past, present and future. So I’d like to begin with a reading of a review, published in frieze. (freize Issue 119 Nov-Dec 2008) It discusses a piece from a group show in Toronto, which took as its theme documentary and constructed photography. The author of the review, Benjamin Carlson, makes use of a statement made by Walter Benjamin’s from the essay A Small History of Photography from 1931. Walter Benjamin says that the mere reflection of reality tells us nothing about reality. Unmasking and construction are necessary to distance it from its functional role within fashion and advertising. Walter Benjamin refers to Brecht, who believed that photography had to be built up as obviously constructed or artificial in order to be a meaningful or valuable representation of the world. A photograph of a factory tells us nothing about that factory or its place within human relations. Something must be artificially posed and constructed to do that. <br />This review of a group show, called Not Quite How I Remember It, demonstrates how such thinking can be detected in contemporary art. <br />In particular, a work by Gerard Byrne, called 1984 and Beyond, is singled out. This is a work that is described as complicating realist documentary through formal disruptions that defamiliarized the past in order to reframe the present.<br />The work takes its title from a panel discussion printed in Playboy magazine in 1963. The discussion was between the most well known science fiction writers of the time, including Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury.<br />Byrne’s video installation uses actors to recite the discussions, the actors delivering predictions such as a permanent base on the moon by 1980.<br />The script is divided into 12 scenes, which are spread in non-sequential order across three large monitors. <br />The predictions of wishful thinking are set against a backdrop of outdated hallmarks of progress: Modernist architecture, and the monumental Unisphere built for the New York World’s Fair of 1964. <br /> In a review of Byrne’s work in Art Monthly, Rikke Hanson argues that ‘ 1984 and Beyond 'makes strange' the very process of historicisation itself.’ However, she posits this in contrast to science fiction itself, which she claims is comforting and nostalgic, viewing the present as stable, lingering on the past, not wanting the future or change. Yet I see this as a bizarre misreading. <br />It suggests that sf itself has little to offer as either critique of the present or means of looking forward, whereas an artwork can do something regarding the relationship between history, present and future that sf cannot. <br />I would refute this. Rather we need to return to sf’s ability to defamiliarize the present, to question notions of the real, and to throw into doubt the relentless appeal of the new. SF author Brian Aldiss puts this differently. He says: ‘Good SF does not necessarily traffic in reality; but it makes reality clearer to us.’ A work such as 1984 and Beyond has learnt from sf.<br /><br /> And it is easy to see the presence of science fiction in other recent practices. For example, we can look at Gordon Cheung, a painter who make use of science fiction imagery to both draw attention to art’s submersion in endless chains of signification, and the seduction of the painted surface as a space of fantastic projection. Listings of stock prices are incorporated into the surface of the paintings. For Cheung, these act as a metaphor for global networks of capital that circle the Earth. The toxic colours, myths of progress, a sense of technological sublime. History, the present and the future are conflated in these paintings as both apocalyptic vision and hopeful image. <br />There is also a strong leaning towards science fiction in the work of Saskia Olde Wolbers. Visually, Wolbers constructs uncanny and strangely futuristic imagery using home-made specially effects, models, miniature sets and simple optical tricks. Each work is accompanied by a voice-over. These are narratives that fuse found and supposedly true stories with a sense of neurosis, estrangement and alienation reminiscent of the work of Philip K Dick. Selfhood, desire and transformation are bound together in these evocative and experimental tales, as is an unstable temporality that is simultaneously future orientated and historical.<br /><br /> Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s What we see when we are dead, evokes the technological sublime of artificially constructed worlds, while Andreas Gursky moves ever further towards spectacular and artificial views of the present as future. Here we see his manipulation of a giant particle accelerator. But I want to go deeper, and explore some other relationships that make sf interesting in this context. One aspect of this is the idea of intertextual form. It is defined by precedents and responses. The term intertextuality comes from Julia Kristeva, from her book Desire in Language from 1980. This notion of intertextuality is fundamental here. Without this relationship, neither art or sf would be able to signify anything at all. Also important in thinking about science fiction in relation to art and culture more generally is the work of Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard’s work since the 1980s became an increasingly literary mode of thought and writing. And some of his favourite, most cited points of reference are the authors Borges, J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick and science fiction as a genre. For Baudrillard, the world was becoming increasingly fictionalized and science fiction writers anticipated the radical changes brought about by science and technology. Baudrillard’s work develops in a way that he describes as "theory fiction," He also uses the terms s "simulation theory" and "anticipatory theory." These theories are attempts to get to grips with, and anticipate, historical events, that for him, are outside of the realms of contemporary theory. The contemporary reality is more fantastic, for Baudrillard, harder to believe, than the most fanciful science fiction.Therefore theory must try to grasp the present and anticipate the future.<br /><br /> But to return to art, I’d like to look at some recent work by Heather and Ivan Morison. I spoke about in a previous lecture. An ongoing obsession with science fiction and how it can be bound to their explorations of representation and natural history . Their two large kite-sculptures fuse an uncanny geometry of crystaline forms with flight enabling technology. Their work Dark Star draws on their research for bizarre mineral samples. They visited a place called Quartzsite in Arizona, frequented for the purposes of collecting crystals. In Dark Star, house-trucks, artefacts of a new-age gypsy movement in the States, are depicted in the desert landscape. Above them, spinning crystals hover, ominous and unexplained presences against the luminous sky. <br />Typically for the Morisons, the title also connects us to a specific sf reference. In this case, the title refers to a 1974 film by John Carpenter. Instead of the clean ordered future of Kubick and Clarke’s 2001, this is a projection of US counter culture and disillusionment into deep space. <br /><br /> However, for the second part of the lecture, I’d like to look backwards, towards a shared period of historical origins which determined both the genre, forms and traditions of science fiction, and the development of art as a modernist form. I’d like to suggest that both contemporary art and science fiction originate in their current forms in the nineteenth century. Just as art becomes the form that we recognize it now, as a modernist form, so science fiction emerges out of various kinds of literatures of the fantastic. The genre comes together in these c19 formations. Even though it draws on stories that are much older, it is shaped, like the notion of the artwork, by the forces of modernity. The most significant figure in all of this is H.G.Wells, and the novels he wrote between 1895 and 1901: The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr Moreau and The First Men in the Moon - he described these as ‘Scientific Romances’. Wells takes existing elements of fiction and reconfigures them in the modern form of science fiction. In particular, Wells’s novels exploit that essential element that the critic Darko Suvin argues makes possible the ‘basis for a coherent poetics’ of science fiction: the aspect of strange newness, or novum. <br /><br /> Jules Verne offers an obvious precedent for Wells, even though there was objection from both authors to the comparison. The distinction Wells makes between their work is very specific. He says of his own early novels:<br />As a matter of fact there is no literary resemblance whatever between the anticipatory inventions of the great Frenchman and these fantasies. His work dealt almost always with actual possibilities of invention and discovery, and he made some remarkable forecasts. <br />In contrast, Wells describes the Scientific Romances as fantasies. Rather than projecting a conceivable possibility, their conviction is analogous to that of an dream. After reading one of these novels, one wakes up to its impossibility. These are dreams that may not relate to technological possibility, but certainly relate to social possibility. The dream is one that takes place within a recognised and politicised configuration of social reality, which it offers a contrast to.This correlates with Darko Suvin’s assertion that sf, as defined by Wells’s stories, can be described as the literature of cognitive estrangement.<br />In his own account of the scientific romances, Wells’s trick was to domesticate the impossible. A plausible illusion allows the story to play out, and science becomes a modern substitute for magic, which Wells thought had lost its narrative currency by the late nineteenth century: ‘I simply brought the fetish stuff up to date, and made it as near actual theory as possible’. <br />Wells sees the business of the fantasy writer as maintaining a sense of reality. Used in this precise way, fantasy holds the potential, in Wells’s argument, to provide a new and novel angle on telling stories which themselves might be discursively revealing. This is something that he takes from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Wells’s stories do not shy away from reflecting upon contemporary political and social discussions’. Writing soon after Wells’s death, Borges wrote that Wells ‘bestowed sociological parables with a lavish hand’. Such a compliment can be placed alongside Joseph Conrad’s description of Wells as the realist of the fantastic. And the ideas of lavishly inscribed sociological parables, put together as convincingly rendered material reflections of the present in the screen of the future, has haunted science fiction ever since Wells. Sometimes the message is explicit and directed, but sometimes, vaguer, more intuitive. <br /><br /> But, for the final part of the lecture, I want to look at the end of Wells’s career. in closeness to death he equates his own imminent demise with a sense of inescapable catastrophe; no less than the end of the world. In his essay Mind at the End of its Tether, written in 1946, the year of his death, the words are characterised by a disturbing sense of breakdown, which reflects a sense of physical and psychic breakdown, yet he captures an anxiety about present and future, together with an overwhelming sense of failure regarding a lifetime that is conflated with plans and hopes for all manner of utopian fulfilment. The breakdown in reality that his text constitutes may allow a breakdown of his own model of temporality, and suggest a model of time and history that is appropriate for my own enquiry here. This is not the idea of time as fourth dimension as set out in The Time Machine, a controllable or navigable medium. There is an abandoning of the technological model of time travel as the operation of machines. Time is trauma, memory, psychotic fantasy and delusion. Causality is replaced by an uncomfortable proximity between possibility and inevitability. Writing shortly before his death, Wells’s tone is apocalyptic. <br />It implies that things can no longer hold together according the same binding fabric that once seemed to make sense of events. The very sequence of events is untrustworthy. He speaks of himself, as was characteristic, in the third person:<br /><br />‘P45 He did his utmost to pursue the trends, that upward spiral, towards their converge in a new phase in the story of life, and the more he weighed the realities before him the less was he able to detect any convergence whatever. Changes had ceased to be systematic, and the further he estimated the course they were taking, the greater their divergence. Hitherto events had been held together by a certain logical consistency, as the heavenly bodies as we know them have been held together by the pull, the golden cord, of Gravitation. Now it is as if that cord had vanished and everything was driving anyhow to anywhere at a steadily increasing velocity.’<br /><br />Within this untrustworthy sequence Wells describes, we can recognise that although there is a failure of projects, of hopeful and didactic projections, there is an alarming success in predicting the extremity, or state of exception, he now faces at his death. The pattern of things to come has faded away (P46). . But as things fall apart, and gravity loses its hold, perhaps this chaos is not as hopeless as Wells depicts, a broken model of time that may prove useful. This temporality has some points of reference that suggest the terrain I want to allude to: The abrupt transitions of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 (1969), and also of J.G Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), both reflecting William Burrough’s own fractured temporality of Naked Lunch from a decade earlier (1959), while the reversed chronology of Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991) inverts a linear narrative of the Holocaust. <br /><br /> I’m drawn to the idea that trapped within the intersection between science fiction and utopia is a not-writing of the disaster, a facetious recalling of Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster (1980). Blanchot posits the Holocaust as a breakdown of history, memory and language, a rupture from which history cannot recover or escape. But it also posits a challenge to representation:<br /><br />The holocaust, the absolute event of history (…) that utter-burn where all history took fire, where the movement of Meaning was swallowed up,(…). How can it be preserved, even by thought? How can thought be made the keeper of the holocaust where all was lost, including guardian thought? (P47)<br /><br />The works of fiction that I am interested in interpreting in response to this include those that occupy a comfortable and central position as utopian narratives: Brave New World, 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and The Handmaid’s Tale are all central to the ideas I am discussing. But then I am drawn to narratives that skit around the boundaries, erode them, make possible a kind of pollution, a slippage between the science fiction genre and the rest of the world.<br /> <br /> Primo Levi’s short stories, recently published in the volume A Tranquil Star (2007 in English), serve as an interesting example of this. Levi is best known for his writings that reference the holocaust directly, in particular Survival in Auschwitz. But with these stories there are overlaps with science fiction – intersecting the genre without fully entering into it. In a letter to his publisher about his short stories, ‘Levi says that he is trying to give form to a perception he has of “an unravelling in the world, a breach, large or small, a ‘defect of form’ that annihilates one or another aspect of our civilization or our moral universe.” I only have time to briefly describe two of the stories from the collection. In ‘Censorship in Bitinia’, (1961) An authoritarian state seeks a resolution to a particular diffuclty – who is best suited for the reliable operation of censoring texts? P49 ‘, the work of censorship, which is damaging to the human brain, and is performed in far too rigid a manner by machines, could be profitably entrusted to animals trained for the purpose.’<br />‘The animal best adapted for the task is the common barnyard chicken. ‘They stick scrupulously to the prescribed mental programs, and, given their cold, calm nature, and their evanescent memory, they are not subject to distractions.’The second is his story ‘The Knall’ (Published 1971) , which examines bare life, and an ethics of easy killing.<br />The story is built around a pop-culture craze for a small cylindrical object called a knall. This is lethal but kitsch object taken to an extreme of its destructive capability.<br /><br /> Within these stories, Levi tells us that he is interested in emphasising ambiguity, Levi writes : (P16) “a story has as many meanings as there are keys in which it can be read, and so all interpretations are true, in fact that more interpretations a story can give, the more ambiguous it is. I insist on this word, ‘ambiguous’: a story must be ambiguous or else it is a news story, therefore everything is valid, rationality is valid, the science fiction world is valid, and even the sensation of dreams is (P17) valid.”’ This question of validity is one that I would like to sustain here. It brings us back to the challenge to representation created, or perhaps made explicit, by the Holocaust. And it is to Adorno’s response to this challenge that I would like to return now. Adorno states that a new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler on unfree mankind: we have to arrange our thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen. This, I would like to suggest, is the ethical and redemptive possibility that can be drawn from the bleakest or bitterest of intersections between utopia and science fiction. <br />Yet the question of validity also needs to be addressed in terms of both culture industry, and perhaps more importantly within the context of his discussion of the autonomous and committed work. <br />Adorno is motivated by a desire to see avant-garde works defy the homogenising effect of commercialisation, to resist the market, to protect something of subjectivity that may be embodied in an artwork, to protect it from the reduction of exchange value and the dominant ideologies of oppressive capitalism. <br /><br /> For Adorno, this will always be grimly inescapable.Yet I would argue that science fiction is able to articulate critical voices as counter narratives.<br />It can also be seen, as an intertextual genre, as something that has a degree of autonomy, of internal and referential abstractions. Value, or validty, for Adorno, must be found in resistance, and resistance must be achieved through a kind of difficulty of form. And perhaps this attention to form is precisely what needs to be articulated within the spaces of science fiction. <br />His objection to politically committed literature or art, which shows the pain and suffering of those who have been subject to the cruelty, injustice and horrors of the twentieth century, is that it turns suffering into consumable images. Adorno states, infamously, that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. In saying this, he is warning against a betrayal of suffering. To constructively write poetry after Auschwitz relies upon an internal radicalism.<br />To write explicitly about the horror of Auschwitz is to make genocide a part of cultural heritage, a theme of literature, which ultimately makes it easier to play along with the culture which gave birth to murder. If you remember, he says: “The so-called artistic representation of the sheer physical pain of people beaten to the ground by rifle butts contains, however remotely, the power to elicit enjoyment out of it.” Stylization makes the unthinkable appear to have meaning, and in this, there is a kind of injustice done to the victims. Committed art or literature appears to oppose society yet remains a part of it. The work appears to be saying ‘it should be otherwise’, but that to announce itself in this way can only lead to the degradation of this sentiment. <br />Rather the hidden form in the autonomous work is the wordless assertion of what cannot be said in politics. This is not just a characteristic of autonomous art, but is its burden. And science fiction, I would like to suggest, might offer forms of autonomous work. We have infinite variations of the it should be otherwise. And this is the burden of sf. <br /><br /> But how might this idea of burden relate to the figure of the survivor? <br />Saul Bellow offers a such a figure at the centre of his novel Mr Sammler’s Planet. Sammler is an old man observing social change in New York in the late 60s, a Holocaust survivor who had been friends with Wells. He is witnessing a liberal society in an apparent process of degeneration, fueling his own sense of disillusion. In one of the rare occasions he discusses Wells directly, Sammler positions his despair in relation to Wells:<br /><br />‘I would not swear that mankind was governable. But Wells was inclined to believe that it was. (…) But in World War Two he despaired. He compared humankind to rats in a sack, desperately struggling and biting.’<br /><br />Writing on Mr Sammler’s Planet, a critic called Kurt Dittmar recognises the obvious connection between Sammler and Wells’s Mind At the End of Its Tether, and comments on Sammler’s rejection of the possibility of the survival of the Enlightenment. Ditmar says:<br /> <br />‘He is authorised to do that as a survivor of the Holocaust, which finally demolished the Enlightenment and its conception of the human being as naturally good and thus at least potentially in control of his or her social morality. The work of H. G. Wells, (…) is presented as the utopian ultima ratio (which means Last Resort) of a foolish moral idealism founded on the irrational credo of enlightened humanity. Well’s last publication (…) has its symbolic equivalent in the confrontation of Sammler’s cultural ambitions with the ultimate destructiveness of the Holocaust. A close acquaintance and an admirer of H. G. Wells, Sammler had collected notes for an intimate biography; and in 1939, joined by his wife who has an inheritance case to attend to, he takes these notes to Poland, “expecting to have spare time for the memoir”. They are caught by the Nazi invaders; and although Sammler miraculously escapes, his wife is murdered; his notes on H. G. Wells are destroyed and leave no trace within “the geyser that rose a mile or two into the sky” when “the country exploded”. This deliberately non-specific way of referring to the Holocaust is typical of Bellow’s style, and the present context clearly demonstrates its function: (and here I think is Dittmars important point, and the point I am trying to make too) Bellow is not concerned with the historical particularity of the Holocaust as a specifically Jewish fate, but with the Holocaust as the final – i.e., quintessential – disruption of the Enlightenment and its moral optimism, whose last great representative was H. G. Wells.’<br /><br />This disruption of the Enlightenment that Dittmar articulates may also resonate with Hannah Arendt’s indictment, that this crime was different to the basic anti-Semitism that had existed before. This was the wish not just to have no Jews in Germany, but no jews. this is new. A crime against human status. (pp91-92)<br /><br /> However, Sammler’s rejection of the survival of Enlightenment intersects, albeit from the margins, the discursive spaces of utopia and science fiction. In this area of intersection, we may find passages between the autonomous and the committed form. We may find texts that are tied to ideological commodity status, yet as Bloch and Jameson have illuminated, these works can always be read in terms of counter-narrative and oppositional impulse. And what of Sammler himself, blinded in one eye after, exactly as Adorno describes, being beaten to the ground with a rifle butt. Are we left to complicitly enjoy this act of violence, as we may the image of the boot on face offered by Orwell’s 1984? Or perhaps Sammler’s despair, rather than being ossified as a theme of literature, may instead suggest a recovery of Enlightenment that could aim to be as universal as its destruction. <br />The imposition of a new categorical imperative, to arrange thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, is broken free of any lingering specificity and lurks within the spaces of utopia and science fiction. <br />Within such spaces, enlightenment is to be critiqued, like utopia, but not abandoned. Ultimately, we are left with an urgent need to retrieve enlightenment, and the world of science fiction might be just the place to do this.Dan Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16966020716894989226noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34338073.post-23919198374867836362008-12-29T14:43:00.006+00:002008-12-29T14:55:23.410+00:00Crisis in the Credit SystemAs appeared in Art Monthly November 2008<br /><br /><a href="http://www.crisisinthecreditsystem.org.uk"></a><br />Artangel Interaction, launched in 2006, commissions emerging artists to develop projects that can be realised outside of institutional spaces, and that can foster collaborative and participatory exchanges. Commissioned and produced by Rehana Zaman as part of this programme, Melanie Gilligan’s Crisis in the Credit System addresses these criteria in a number of ways. It is available to view online and, as a 40-minute video work, the video’s production is necessarily and ambitiously collaborative. Perhaps more significant is the fact it has developed complex ideas through discussions with experts in the field that it addresses, and evidences a substantial engagement with the economic tribulations that have dominated headlines in the past year or so. Crisis in the Credit System is structured in four parts to facilitate viewing online, also evoking both the idea of separate episodes, and the division of a single programme by advert breaks.<br />The first of these episodes opens in an ornate garden, introducing five employees of an investment bank taking part in a role-playing exercise. The tranquil setting and casual dress code implies that perhaps this is a residential workshop, the protagonists taken out of their workplace in a cynical attempt to further tweak creative efficiency. This at first seems to be similar territory to that occupied by Carey Young, who is known for her intersections of the world of corporate business with strategic recoveries of recognisable moments in the history of conceptual art. However, as the protagonists are assigned their roles, we are taken into their narrative reality, a heightened and stylised rendition of the world of bankers and hedge fund managers. The garden serves as a framing narrative for the story within a story, but the two realities slip into one another, emphasising a paranoiac dimension that ultimately brings the arrogant certainties of these players to a point of subjective crisis as Marxist critique enters into their thinking, and their realistic fantasies become more grotesque.<br />Like Mark Wallinger’s State Britain, this is a work that offers an extraordinary encounter that might be described, borrowing from Walter Benjamin, as a striking and exemplary act of the politicisation of aesthetics. It also shares with State Britain the ability to appear convincing. Just as State Britain was flawless in its obsessive attention to detail and meticulous rendering, Crisis demonstrates an impressively thoughtful and attentive process of construction. In particular, Gilligan’s script, the core of the work, is an extraordinary piece of writing. It is well researched, tight, funny, threatening, engaging and manages to fuse elements of fiction and theory, narrative and politics with the vertiginously arcane language of international finance.<br />The current financial situation has thrown into sharp relief another more general crisis of both politics and media representation. It seems that, no matter how the ongoing turmoil is depicted, there is within broadcast media and mainstream print no allowance for any questioning of our dependence on the precarious, irrational and destructive mechanisms that constitute global finance. This finds its ultimate manifestation in both the UK and US, where a choice of two variations of the same party continue to perpetuate and exacerbate these conditions. It has become anathema in mainstream politics to doubt the fundamental apparatus of capitalism, to see liberal democracy as something that may be flawed and that could benefit from some radical transformations. Instead, such ideas retreat into safe enclaves, such as academia and art. As Fredric Jameson puts it: ‘It seems easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; and perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imagination.’ With this in mind, Gilligan’s Crisis in the Credit System may not offer much hope for imagining the breakdown of late capitalism, but does offer late capitalism as breakdown. This is a rare and astonishingly insightful reflection on current economic conditions. It is critical and engaging, and is able to re-introduce Marx stealthily into an accessible form for a potentially large, even perhaps mainstream, audience. However, this work also deserves to be seen properly. The free availability of Crisis in the Credit System is commendable, but tiny windows on small screens, interrupted by bandwidth problems, fail to do this work justice. Yet to rely upon the gallery to view the work adequately is perhaps just another retreat back into the protective enclave.Dan Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16966020716894989226noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34338073.post-77682944164723897742008-04-07T09:20:00.002+01:002008-04-07T09:23:07.401+01:00HorizontalityFinal draft for print for April 2008 issue of Art Monthly.<br /><br />The theme of horizontality as a spatial alignment might seem to be the terrain of practices that could be described as sculpture. Indeed, horizontality can be found as an overt presence in work that ranges from Robert Morris and Carl Andre to Tomoko Takahashi and Jim Lambie. However, engagements with horizontality as a specific form of opposition to verticality appear to have been manifesting in other forms lately under discussion here is work by Paul Chan, Rodney Graham and Gustav Metzger. <br /> Firstly, though, I would like to address Anthony McCall’s recent show at the Serpentine Gallery. McCall has been exploring horizontality since the 1970s, but the bringing together of old and new work has proved to be particularly revealing. Horizontality is in part implicit in the nature of McCall’s projections in an artificially clouded atmosphere: as an apparatus they either intersect a space along a horizontal plane, or cut space vertically as towers of light to create moving drawings of light upon the floor, as seen in his two-part Between You and I at the Round Chapel in London in 2006. However, there was a significant difference between two of the projection works at the Serpentine that was partly a visualising of a difference between work of different periods, as well as a shift in medium from the analogue manipulation of film to the digital creation of animation and video projection. Yet it is around the idea of horizontal alignment that I would suggest the biggest shift takes place: Line Describing A Cone, 1973, focuses attention on the mesmerising progress of a dot of light and its trail as it slowly completes a circle. Despite the dramatic beauty of the cone as it is formed in the darkened room, that circle on the wall acts as the culmination of the entire apparatus of projector, film, light, space and the smoky haze. The cone formed is rooted in the upright axis, and while it traverses the actual space of the room, it is resolved into a flat image at one end. As suggested by its title, the emphasis of attention in You and I, Horizontal III, 2007, is qualitatively different. Here space is filled by luminous cuts which must be traversed by the audience. The lines drawn on the walls are almost incidental. Rather it is the tunnels of light, with their intersecting planes, and the physical immersion in that space, that demand attention. McCall creates a zone of total horizontality, into which observers are immersed into brief moments of disorientation and offered glimpses of something that resembles a visual sublime. The sense of a pure investigation of medium offered by Line Describing a Cone is gone, replaced by perceptual wonder. This is not necessarily a shift that is inherently problematic, but I would like to suggest that it raises the question of what might be at stake in such a dramatic realisation of horizontality. <br /> Among the conventions that define the institutional parameters of art, there are some received assumptions that not only still persevere but appear essential beyond any terms of negotiation. The upright vertical axis, with particular reference to gallery walls and their relative position to a standing observer, is one of these. It seems strange then, that more has not been said on the issue of horizontality as a plane opposed to this ubiquitous verticality. For the past decade, the critical discussion of horizontality in relation to recent art practice has been dominated by Rosalind Krauss’s essay on the subject (titled simply ‘Horizontality’) published in Formless: A User’s Guide, 1997. Co-authored with Yve-Alain Bois, the book was a companion to the exhibition ‘L’Informe: Mode d’emploi’, held at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 1996 (see AM199). Krauss and Bois present themselves in the act of revealing the operation of Georges Bataille’s notion of l’informe – of the formless – through nebulous associations that connect different moments of the 20th Century, from Surrealism to Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman and Mike Kelly. <br /> Having brought the issue so vividly to such wide attention, it is impossible to escape Krauss’s account of the term horizontality. Yet perhaps a re-reading is necessary. While I would suggest that the opposition of horizontality to a dominant and received understanding of verticality opens up questions that apply to all forms of artwork, Krauss’s argument seems to depend upon a mythic origin found within acts of painting, a kind of creation story for a form of subversive power in imagery. The central figure in this narrative is Jackson Pollock. He is described as a student making banners with Mexican revolutionary mural painter David Siqueiros: the floor is production site, as opposed to the vertical axis of the easel which is representative for Siqueiros of the walls of bourgeois apartments in need of decoration, or the institutional elitism of the museum. Yet the banners produced will be held aloft, thrust high into the air as messages and images. This tension is worked through in Pollock’s later paintings. What Krauss describes as the ‘baseness’ of a work like Full Fathom Five, 1947 – produced on the floor, its surface encrusted with coins, cigarette butts and other detritus – is retained beyond the lifting of the painting onto the wall from which it will be viewed.<br />Krauss’s reading of this is of Pollock staging an attack on the vertical axis, which is in itself an attack on the order of both the body and culture itself. The marks Pollock makes are material indexes of the horizontal’s resistance to the vertical. Krauss also makes use of Warhol’s Dance Diagrams, 1962, as a response to Pollock’s horizontality as choreography, as well as the ‘Oxidation’, 1978, series of paintings. Here, the surface of metallic paint is altered through the addition of urine applied in a direct manner. This is read as, among other things, a decoding of the machismo of action painting.<br />The vertical is also, she argues, the axis in which the image of woman is suspended, a phallic condition of the fetish. In Sherman’s images, Krauss sees a continuation of the presence of the formless, becoming a weapon of rotating the image out of the axis of the vertical and onto the horizontal of the formless. <br /> As well as drawing on Bataille’s notion of baseness as something that undermines the civilized rituals of verticality, Krauss draws on some other ideas. One is Leo Steinberg’s opposition of pictorial representation, allied with the world around us, to flatbeds, or printers’ forms as the field of written signs. Here can be found an accidental affinity with McCall’s horizontality, as he spent much of the period between Line Describing a Cone and You and I Horizontal III working as a graphic designer, specifically in the area of book design and typesetting. Krauss also briefly refers to Walter Benjamin’s short essay ‘Painting in the Graphic Arts’ of 1917. Benjamin’s argument here is to distinguish between drawing and painting. This can be thought of as two cuts through the world’s substance: painting is a longitudinal cut, the graphic can be aligned with a transversal cut. The longitudinal seems to be to do with representation and its ability to enclose, whereas the transversal is symbolic, it encloses signs. Esther Leslie’s recent book, Walter Benjamin, makes these implications clearer. Leslie emphasises how for Benjamin, drawings were mistakenly viewed as paintings in the vertical. In some cases this is acceptable, but ultimately it violates the plane of children’s drawing, whose meaning relies on horizontality. If drawing, in its showing of the world’s cross section as a flat plane, was symbolic, then it was composed of signs much in the way that writing is. To orientate this field of writing in an upright position is to make it like a headstone. <br /> Whereas Krauss falls short of making use of Benjamin’s distinction, with the horizontal cut and its potential as a symbolic plane, McCall’s use of light performs its own rendition of drawing as cut and cross section that goes beyond the limited terms of Krauss’s arguments. Similarly, Paul Chan’s use of downward projection reflects and reiterates Krauss’s version of how a conscious shift in orientation offers a form of resistance or challenge, but also move beyond Krauss’s terms. His animations of light and shadow projected onto the floor mimic the appearance of light cast from a window. Shoes interfere in the work, choices need to be made to walk around or through, alongside or on the images. There is a diverting of planes of attention, from a predominantly horizontal gaze to a diagonal or vertical one. In looking down, not across, there is a making conscious of the act of attention. Again, as in McCall’s offered experience of horizontality, the value or quality of the experience is not secure. In playing with horizontality so conspicuously, there is something questionable about the claims that seem to be presented in these situations, but such questions are valid in themselves.<br />Krauss’s take on horizontality is also questionable in the privileging of a few acts of painting as the fulcrum for a critical understanding of the term. However, the image of Pollock as source of a radical and subversive presence of horizontality in contemporary art could be replaced by the image provided by Rodney Graham’s three-part light box photograph The Gifted Amateur, Nov.10th, 1962, 2007. Graham stands in a pair of pyjamas, frozen in the act of painting, in a staged scene of modernist domesticity. He stands in what looks like the middle of the room, not at its periphery by a wall. Indeed, the wooden panelling of the wall echoes the blobs made on the canvas. The painting he is making looks backwards, towards postwar American abstraction. In particular, to the artists that Greenberg held up as heirs to Pollock: Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis. Graham’s staged act of painting also brings to mind other depictions of artists at work, such as Sam Taylor-Wood’s photograph A Gesture Towards Action Painting, 1992, and the images of Ian Davenport recorded in the book Technique Anglaise, 1991, which themselves look back as re-readings of Hans Namuth’s photos of Pollock, 1950. Over six pages we see a paint-covered studio, bearing the traces of numerous drips and spills, from above. Davenport, dressed in overalls, pours out the measured contents of one can of paint to form a glistening blob on the prepared canvas. The action is repeated to create a twin; the fourth image is the elevation of the canvas; the fifth frame sees the completion of ascension to the vertical plane and in the final image, Davenport has disappeared behind the now vertical canvas. It appears to stand on its own, as if fixed to the wall, but rather is suspended in a visual field of paint-covered floor and wall.<br />As well as engaging in the photographic terrain that dramatises and parodies the floor as space of production, Graham’s photograph is contextualised by his series Wet on Wet – My Late Early Styles, a body of paintings that accompanies the persona of his fictional painter. Those produced by the method shown in the photograph are hung upside down, inverted along the vertical axis to look as if they are dripping upwards. The drip itself is something that is excluded from Krauss’s version of horizontality. It is the lack of run-off that defines the pure horizontality of Pollock, but here she misses the act of raising the canvas from one plane to another as an equally significant gesture of the painting process. Yet Graham’s canvas is neither horizontal nor vertical. Rather, it is the newspaper which covers the floor that adopts the position of horizontality. The canvas is angled, propped up as a sloping surface. It is excluded from the mythic space conjured by Krauss, of a formless realm that opposes the vertical. There is no pure horizontality to retain here, but rather an ad hoc propping of the canvas on a chair. Graham’s take on horizontality runs counter to Krauss privileged ontology. It is instead an irreverent, reflexive, humorous and critical engagement with history, notions of medium and his own presence as author.<br />While Graham’s take on horizontality relies on a sense of polite irony, Gustav Metzger’s series Historic Photographs (1995 – ongoing) offers a very different and more explicit consideration of horizontality as a site of spatial alignment, critical engagement and embodied participation. Horizontality and verticality find themselves opposed in a very particular pairing of images: a suspended photograph of armed Israeli police standing over the figures of Arabs lying on the ground. Alongside, lying flat on the floor, is an image of Jews in Vienna being forced to scrub pavement. Each image is covered with a sheet. To see the photographs necessitates a demanding encounter: it requires the viewer to move between sheet and print, in standing and crawling positions respectively. Horizontality is explored here as a direct relationship between body and image, in a manner that seems to owe little to Krauss’s trajectory. For Metzger the change in alignment is made poignant not through a mythic origin in painting, but through a bodily renegotiation of the sphere of the visual as political.Dan Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16966020716894989226noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34338073.post-53666189328698932362007-11-20T12:03:00.000+00:002007-11-20T12:07:17.712+00:00Wish Image in Moominvalley<a href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/R0LN4YbT8yI/AAAAAAAAAAU/BTK6bqfCmTQ/s1600-h/Hannah+Pappa+1.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/R0LN4YbT8yI/AAAAAAAAAAU/BTK6bqfCmTQ/s320/Hannah+Pappa+1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5134892893669159714" /></a><br />Tove Jansson’s Finn Family Moomintroll is prefaced with the falling of snow. Moomintroll, a child, watches the valley that is his world nestle beneath its winter blanket. ‘Tonight’ he thinks, ‘we shall settle down for our long winter’s sleep.’<br />‘Outside the snow fell, thick and soft. It already covered the steps and hung heavily from the roofs and eaves. Soon Moominhouse would be nothing but a big, round snowball. The clocks stopped ticking one by one. Winter had come.’ For now, winter is a prelude to awakening. Chapter One begins with the coming of spring, and the arrival of the first cuckoo in the valley, perching briefly on the roof of Moominhouse at four o’clock in the morning. ‘Moomintroll woke up and lay a long time looking at the ceiling before he realized where he was. He had slept a hundred nights and a hundred days, and his dreams still thronged about his head trying to coax him back to sleep.’ If I am to privilege a single work for attention here, or for the sake of convenience isolate one as definitive, it would be Finn Family Moomintroll. If anything, it establishes the normative routines, patterns and structures for Jansson’s world against which other stories might deviate. <br /> There are nine Moomin books, all published originally in Swedish between 1945 and 1970. English translations appeared relative quickly. Finn Family Moomintroll, published originally in 1948, was the first to be translated into English in 1950, with its predecessor Comet in Moominland following soon after. The first book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, was not translated until 2005 and then only as a limited edition. As well as these books, Tove Jansson produced a comic strip for the London Evening News published in the 1950s, and carried on by her brother Lars until the 70s. She also wrote and drew four Moomin picture books for children. <br />The characters and stories have subsequently been adapted for a number of animation projects – notably the Polish made series from the late 70s/early 80s, which in its English version was my own first encounter with the stories. This series retains a great deal from the books, adding its own considerable charm and resonance through the use of almost flat stop-motion characters and haunting theme tune. It was an adaptation that Jansson was reportedly close to, and pleased with. The stories have in recent years become immensely popular in Japan, a transition that has perhaps retained less of Jansson’s original work. Yet the rights and creative control of the Moomins as a franchise are retained by Jansson’s neice, Sophia, whose father Lars had worked on the comic strips for over a decade. In Finland, while there is a rather Disney-like Moominworld theme park, it is also possible to visit the more authentic Moomin Valley Museum, with its collection of Janssons drawings, models and tableux and a sense of entertainment that is more in line with the stories themselves. <br />And this is the quality that I would like to address here, which for now means returning to Moomintroll’s act of awakening, coaxed back towards sleep by one hundred nights’ worth of dreams. Just as he settles back into slumber, he sees that the bed next to his is empty. This had been occupied by his best friend Snufkin, who had already climbed out through a window and down a rope ladder. By tracking footprints in the wet soil, and following the music of a mouth organ, Moomintroll finds Snufkin sitting by a river. The river, we learn, has been the site of many adventures, through which they have befriended others into the extended family that congregates in and around the Moominhouse. Snufkin and Moomintroll are not related. They are not even of the same species. Yet Snufkin, like the others they befriend, is welcomed by Moominmamma and Moominpappa into their house, by means of, we are told, ‘just adding another bed and putting another leaf in the dining room table.’ This is further described. ‘And so Moominhouse was rather full – a place where everyone did what they liked and seldom worried about tomorrow. Very often unexpected and disturbing things used to happen, but nobody ever had time to be bored, and that is always a good thing.’ <br /> Around this house, and the form of open-family within, is a loosely suggested form of kinship, of cooperation and freedom which in the importance of responsibility to self contains an ethical commitment to the other. It is possible to draw parallels between life in Moominhouse, and the fictionalised account of Jansson’s own lifestyle given in her short novel Fair Play. But while this is a novel with protagonists that have less days ahead of them than behind, and are preoccupied with a sense of time running out, the Moomin books are rendered, generally, from the perspective of youth and childhood.<br /> The narrative of the books is episodic in form, but these episodes constitute a diegetic and thematic whole. Finn Family Moomintrool is structured around the discovery of a hat by Moomintroll, Snufkin and their friend Sniff. It turns out that anything placed inside is magically transformed, randomly it seems, into something else: when used as a waste-paper bin, discarded eggshells are thrown into the hat, only to re-emerge as clouds upon which Moomintroll and his friend can ride. Afterwards Moomintroll, using the interior of the hat in a game of hide and seek, is temporarily transformed, all his fat parts having become thin, everything small grown big. When the hat is thrown into the river, it changes the water to raspberry juice. <br /> The hat is in fact the property of the mysterious but ultimately misunderstood Hobgoblin, who is considered sinister, powerful and dangerous. Yet the narrative concludes with the arrival of the Hobgoblin during a party attended by all of Moominvalley’s residents. He comes not for his hat, but in search of a giant ruby he has sought for three hundred years. The ruby has come into the possession of Thingumy and Bob, two residents of the Moominhouse. The Hobgoblin refuses to take the ruby by force, and Thingumy and Bob refuse to exchange it, as it is as precious to them as it is to the Hobgoblin. To cheer himself up in what looks like an unresolvable situation, the Hobgoblin decides to perform some magic in the form of granting wishes. When it comes to Thingumy and Bob’s turn, they wish for a ruby as beautiful as the one in their possession, a gift for the Hobgoblin. Yearning, wishing and hope, are met and completed in a spirit of mutual generosity. It is the happiest of endings, but one that is still coloured by a seasonal transition to autumn, the knowledge that once again the snow will fall. <br />I want to think about these books for children in relation to utopia, as a form of utopian fiction. Doing this requires thinking about a recent edited collection that situates itself as the significant work in the field right now. – it is called Utopian and dystopian writing for Children and Young Adults, edited by Carrie Hintz and Elaine Ostry, published by Routledge in 2003. In the foreword, Jack Zipes – who has written extensively on fairy stories - suggests that while it would be misleading to argue that all writing for young people is utopian, there is, he says, ‘a utopian tendency present in stories for children. <br />He says this stems from a general sense of lack in one’s life, and a yearning for a better world. Of course, this as an idea that comes from Ernst Bloch. And Zipes, who is a Bloch scholar, evokes Bloch’s understanding of utopia here: ‘The utopian tendency of art is what propels us to reshape and reform our personal and social lives.<br />This paraphrasing of Bloch by Zipes sums up what I consider the relationship between art and utopia to be – it is a reshaping of things, an attempt to reshape them.<br />And Zipes brings up another side of utopia – that specifically described as dystopian, as of a bad place. He says that ‘As we all know, there is a real and strong “dystopian” tendency in our consumer society to make “better” consumers out of our children.”<br />So the role of utopian and dystopian fiction here is to allow children to question their social conditions and to be allowed to hope for more. <br />More generally, the editors of this book – Hintz and Ostry - link children’s literature with ideas of utopia. They put forward an ur-form, an origin of modern children’s literature. This is Sarah Fielding’s The Governess or, Little Female Academy from 1749. With this, “children’s literature” they say “begins with a utopian vision of an all-girls’ school that teaches ideal social organization. The history of children’s and young adult literature is entwined with that of utopian writing from that moment on.” What happens in utopian writing for young readers, they say, is that these readers must grapple with ideas of social organization.<br />They say that “utopian works propose to teach the young reader about governance, the possibility of improving society, the role of the individual and the limits of freedom.” <br />“These writings may be a young person’s first encounter with texts that systematically explore collective social organisation” They also consider the role of children as a utopian projection, as romantic myth of freedom from adult conformity, and seek to address the ways in which utopian writing might intervene in children’s development. And while on the one hand, they include a definition of utopia from Fredric Jameson as ‘a space of self conscious reflection’ , Hintz and Ostry go on emphasise fiction that is concerned with developing social setting to form utopia as genre. “An awareness of social organization” they argue “is necessary for a work to be called utopian.”<br /> Therefore, the Moomin books are, in terms of predominant definitions, not eligible to be included in the category of utopian fiction for children. Specifically, the guidelines set by Hintz and Ostry are not sympathetic to Jansson’s world. These guideline emphasise works that develop their social settings in relation to an awareness of genre characteristics. The books are, not surprisingly, not included in Hintz and Ostry’s long bibliography of utopian works for children. <br /> So, an awareness of social organisation is necessary for a work to be called utopian. But how far might it be possible to stretch the interpretation of this idea? My interest here is on a different aspect of utopia in fiction; it is in utopian impulse and sentiments rather than genre definitions. However, I would also like to suggest an expanded understanding of utopian form, that takes impulse more into account and might consider a looser sense of social organisation, particularly when the looseness of that social organisation is, I would argue, part of the book’s utopian quality. The books certainly incorporate a general projection of children as utopian, free from the conformity of adults, allowed to be imaginative, critical. There is also the sense of these books reflecting on and potentially intervening in the development of children, encouraging a critical eye in the young reader, perhaps sensitising them to action.<br />But does this reveal the social foundations of our own world, or the cracks that form in them? No. There is nothing so direct in Jansson’s books. Yet, on the issue of the limits of freedom, there does seem to be a quiet engagement. Similarly, the books consider ethics, responsibility, issues relating to property, ownership and communal forms of coexistence as much as they do emotional growth and the complexities of friendship. And on the issue of utopian and dystopian fiction as a productive place to address cultural anxieties, threats and to contemplate the ideal, Moominvalley functions, to greater and lesser degrees, to do just this. But here the social order is more familial. Neighbourly rather than legible as a structured form of governance.<br />But rather than suggest that these books should be included in a bibliography like the one compiled by Hintz and Ostry, I would rather emphasise the point that work that is excluded might well have produced some subtle and resonant variations on utopian fiction. This is best defined as a shift in attention from programme to impulse. <br />Utopian impulse is the subject of Ernst Bloch’s work The Principle of Hope. As Douglas Kelner suggests, ‘Bloch provides a method for discerning and criticizing ideological content in theories, philosophies, and cultural artifacts whose ideological nature and effects are often overlooked.’<br />‘Bloch's practice of ideological criticism discerns emancipatory utopian dimensions even in ideological products, ferreting out those aspects that might be useful for radical theory and practice. Bloch therefore provides exciting methods of cultural criticism, a new approach to cultural history, and novel perspectives on culture and ideology.’<br />And hope is important here. ‘For Bloch, hope permeates everyday consciousness and its articulation in cultural forms, ranging from the fairy tale to the great philosophical and political utopias. For Bloch, individuals are unfinished, they are animated by "dreams of a better life," and by utopian longings for fulfillment. The "something better" for which people yearn is precisely the subject-matter of Bloch's massive The Principle of Hope, which provides a systematic examination of the ways that daydreams, fairy tales and myths, popular culture, literature,’ and all forms of art contain emanicipatory moments. They project visions of a better life. This projection is enough, as it puts into question the organisation and structure of the social context in which it is made. <br />This impulse can also be found in philosophy, religion and also forms of social and political utopias – these utopian programmes contain within them utopian impulse. <br />And while much critical theory, particularly Marxist critique, will often dismiss both stories and utopian plans as nothing more than ideology, serving the needs of the ruling system, Bloch’s reading allows for the presence of something else, of a profound form of questioning, desire and emancipation. <br />So, utopian desire could be interpreted as a fundamental impulse. Rather than lapse into the everyday misuse of the word as a fantasized and unattainable ‘good place’, it is possible to l return the origins of the term utopia as ‘no place’. <br />Bloch, argues that utopia, or rather utopian impulse, exists in every future-orientated thought and action. For Bloch, utopia can be found in the overstepping of boundaries, in acts of hope and a desire for change, and is potentially inherent in any creative act. <br /> Utopian impulse is certainly present in the comforting world of Moominvalley, there is yearning, hope, dreaming, wishing, longing, adventure, moments of fear, but ultimately protagonist and reader are comforted. In part, this is reinforced by a sense of distance, of nostalgia, an alterity that is perhaps temporal, perhaps evoking an imaginary past. So perhaps it is possible to think of Moominvalley as imbued with a loosely suggested sense of historical distance. More significantly, this is a world in miniature. And it is with temporal alterity, and the idea of a world in miniature in mind that I would like to start to consider Moominvalley in propinquity with Walter Benjamin. <br /> Childhood was always near the surface of Benjamin’s thought. This can be detected in his explorations into the depths of his own childhood, retold as object lessons in hermeneutics, as well as in his fascination with children’s books, revealed in his essay Unpacking My Library and elsewhere. But it is his Arcades Project that I want to draw attention to here: an unfinished collection of fragments, functioning as a double text. Both history and political education, a kind of doubling that is common to children’s literature. The decaying arcades of Paris were Benjamin’s worlds in miniature, sites of a complex engagement with history, dream, wish and what was essentially an emancipatory philosophical practice. To him the world in miniature of the arcade was like a city, and this space of the city is for Benjamin the space of his own childhood, analogous to the interior domestic spaces of Proust. As Susan Buckmorss describes, for Benjamin, the covered shopping arcades of the nineteenth century were a central image because they were the material replica of the internal consciousness, or rather, the unconscious of the dreaming collective. The dreaming collective refers to an entire generation of subjects in nineteenth century Europe, Paris in particular, during the first half of the century. All of the errors of bourgeois consciousness could be found there (commodity fetishism, refication, the world as “inwardness”).<br />Moreover, the arcades were the first international style of modern architecture, hence part of the lived experience of a worldwide, metropolitan generation. Benjamin’s original conception for a study of the arcades was as a politicized version of Sleeping Beauty as a fairy tale of awakening”. Retold along Marxist lines, it was intended to “set free the huge powers of history that are asleep within the ‘once upon a time’ of classical historical narration.” Although he dropped the title “A Dialectical Fairy Scene” pretty quickly, he maintained his fascination with the motifs of “dreamworld” and dream image,” and the understanding of dialectics as” awakening” from a dream. <br />For Benjamin, childhood and dream experience are hard to separate. His is a dream theory that is divided by the childhood of an epoch, and of a generation. An individual is then placed at the intersection between collective history and personal history, society’s dream and childhood dream. And it is this intersection, I would like to suggest, that characterises the utopian forces at play in Moominvalley. It is a childlike history, a childlike dream, but Benjamin’s notion of childhood is not an inherently passive receptacle for the historical unconscious, but rather contains the possibility of awakening. <br /> Susan Buckmorss’s reading of Benjamin here suggests that from the child’s position the whole span of history, from the most ancient to the most recent past, occurs in mythic time. No history recounts his or her lived experience. All of the past lies in an archaic realm.’ I’d like to think of Moominvalley as such an archaic realm, but what is made possible in this reading of Benjamin is that the cognitive experience of childhood reverses newness, progress and fashion: in short, the obfuscatory, ideological myths of capitalist modernity. The child can discover the new anew. ‘This discovery reinvests the objects with symbolic meaning and thus rescues for the collective memory their utopian signification.’<br /> Benjamin was fascinated by myth, but adamant in his opposition to mythic thinking, to thought that is obscured by oppressive and illusory forms of ideology. One technique of resisting such illusion, or of breaking it, is the dialectical image, an interruptive crossing of two parts of a language code – namely text and image. It is akin to Benjamin’s call to politicise aesthetics in order to oppose fascism’s aestheticisation of politics. Jansson’s books seem happy to play with such an idea, to allow images to interrupt the text. The images are sometimes contained within an outlined rectangular frame, sometimes form a rectangle themselves through the deliniation of drawn marks within the image, or might just be comprised of one or more figures unaccompanied on the space of the page. It recalls a somewhat simplistic differentiation between passive spectatorship and active reading, but nevertheless Janssons’s illustrations suggest a generative entanglement between text and image. <br /> These images have a quality of intimacy, or nearness. It is hard to place, but I would like to suggest this sense of nearness resonates with Ernst Bloch’s discussion of what he describes as ‘Still life composed of human beings (796). Bloch, whose accounts of utopia are shaped by a propinquity to Benjamin and the Arcades Project, evokes nearness in an image as an impression of being narrow, of the contraction of a small surface that makes a pleasantly comprehensible circle. An existence that could easily become musty in real life becomes strangely warm when presented as a painting, or in this case drawing. Bloch suggests that a content and pleasurable comfort can be found in this secure circle. Within this circle, maintained by our own efforts, life is not cramped but securely enclosed, exhibiting peaceful warmth. Bloch’s primary example is in Dutch interior painting. Nothing, he says, but everyday life is painted in the Dutch Genre picture, but for all its nearness it is also presented in just the same way as a sailor might see it from a distance when he thinks of home: as the small, sharp painting which bears homesickness within it. <br /> I would like to suggest that Jansson’s imagery functions in the same way, and that the Moomin stories are quotidian narratives of an elsewhere, of a dreamworld, which despite its alterity still succeeds in evoking a yearning for this place. There is a homesickness for somewhere that is both outside of lived experience, but perhaps simultaneously a no-place that is intimately familiar. And both no-places, and children’s literature, allow for a metaphoric space in which escape and criticism co-exist. In an influential work on children’s literature - Alice to the Lighthouse: Children’s Books and Radical Experiments in Art - Juliet Dusinberre argues that some of the most radical ideas about the structures of society and forms of change might be in books written for a new generation. Dusinberre describes an absence of pointed moral, linear narrative direction, the abdication of author as preacher or pedagogue, and a making use of words as play, as medium. These are qualities that emerge in the latter half of the nineteenth century, from Lewis Carroll and E. Nesbit, to become a quality of Woolf’s generation of modernist writing. Cultural change was both reflected and pioneered in the books which children read. Radical experiments in modernist literature began in the books which Lewis Carroll and his successors wrote for children.’ And the role of authorship is particularly significant here. Lewis Carroll, when asked about the meaning of the Alice books, replied that meaning was to be decided by the reader. Dusinberre claims that in 1865 such an overtly spoken challenge to authorial mastery in the children’s book was unprecedented. The relocation of power in reader rather than in writer has since then become a central tenet of modern critical theory. So I’d like to place the Moomins in this tradition of radical experiment, as a form of ambiguous but ultimately liberating pedagogy. Dusinberre reminds us that Roland Barthes says the refusal to assign ‘an ultimate meaning to the text… liberates what may be called an anti theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is in the end, to refuse God and his logic – reason, science, law. This is an act of critical refusal that we might find in both Janssen and Benjamin. <br /> But Ultimately, what I would like to put forward in discussing Benjamin and Jansson’s Moominvalley together is a resonant and generative affinity, rather than a convenient mapping of one upon the other. Jansson’s dreamworld is very much in the late-nineteenth century tradition described by Juliet Dusinberre, of radical experiment in which linear narrative direction, use of text and image as play emerge as medium. It is a tradition that, from a distance, Benjamin was also committed to. His is a philosophical, utopian form of discourse as experiment. Both were concerned with a concrete sense of pictorial and textual image as a tool for facilitating acts of awakening.Dan Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16966020716894989226noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34338073.post-71330476348299315132007-10-10T11:22:00.001+01:002007-10-10T11:30:53.699+01:00How to judge a book by its cover: Christopher Priest, The Separation<a href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/RwypMPLk20I/AAAAAAAAAAM/ac8IHI3F1Pg/s1600-h/41115.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_zV6oA-_IdVg/RwypMPLk20I/AAAAAAAAAAM/ac8IHI3F1Pg/s200/41115.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5119652904112020290" /></a><br /><br />Final Draft of Text Published in Financial Times Magazine 13/10/07<br /><br />The aeroplanes on the cover of Christopher Priest’s The Separation resemble a formation of meticulously-assembled Airfix kits. The <br />triangular arrangement is striking, deliberately and boldly artificial. The shapes are debossed – the opposite of embossed - pressed into unadorned matt card. Behind the iconography is a graphic referent – that of aircraft recognition silhouettes. These simple but accurate renderings of fighters and bombers were essential tools designed to familiarise service personnel and civilians alike with the shapes in the sky during times of war. These particular outlines are Wellingtons - bombers used by the RAF to strike at targets across Europe in the early years of the second world war. They date the action of the novel, which focuses on identical twins Joe and Jack Sawyer. One is a Wellington Pilot, the other a conscientious objector. Their estrangement from one another mirrors another divergence as the novel traces paths of actual and alternative history. Priest suggests a route by which the peace offer delivered Rudolf Hess might have been realised, bringing about an end to hostilities between Britain and Germany in 1941. Events are dependent upon circumstances in which the twins play subtle but decisive parts. The fate of these brothers decides which parallel reality holds sway. <br />This new edition of The Separation, first published in 2002, is one of eight reissues of recent science fiction novels published by Gollancz. All have striking text free covers, the work of in-house designer Emma Wallace. Marketed under the heading of ‘Future Classics’, these editions set out to seduce readers who might be put off by some of the more garish and futuristic imagery normally associated with the genre.Dan Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16966020716894989226noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34338073.post-1171039360837603442007-02-09T16:39:00.000+00:002007-02-09T16:42:40.856+00:00Scientific fictions: On Narrative and Intertextuality(Final Draft as published in Art Monthly March 2007)<br /><br />Several artists have recently made work that can be read as forms of archival practice that are not dependent on mimicking the operations or appearances of institutional forms of archive. Rather, they are archival in the sense that Hal Foster – in his essay ‘An Archival Impulse’ – refers to as the will to connect what cannot be connected. The appearance of order, and its alliance with state apparatuses, is replaced by an unstable and personalised ordering of the world. The apparent antinomies of fiction and documentary are exploited as narrative possibilities. In the work, for instance, of Jamie Shovlin, Suzanne Treister and Heather & Ivan Morison. A copy of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Empire constitutes the dominant material of Heather & Ivan Morison’s work of the same name, 2003. Within the pages of the battered and somewhat dated-looking book, wild flowers collected from Mongolia jut out from the pages that have been used to press and preserve them. There is something familiar about this object. It is surely a homage to Richard Wentworth’s Tract (From Boost to Wham), 1993 – a Pocket Oxford Dictionary crammed full of chocolate bar wrappers. These are inserted into the appropriate pages, alphabetically ordered by the correlation of brand name and lexical definition. As a student I remember attending a talk given by Wentworth in which he anecdotally related the genesis of the work. A cheeky assistant had apparently placed wrappers in a copy of the dictionary kept in Wentworth’s studio and waited to see how long it would take for the act to be discovered, thus determining how often the dictionary was actually referred to.<br />Of course this story need not be true, but such a serendipitous origin still has the ability to animate the play of material semiotics. Perhaps Tract operates as a metonym for Wentworth’s practice. There is a sense of humorous wonder in the manner in which quotidian and accidental elements intersect with formal concerns of arrangement and making. The affinities between these two altered books can be extended to say that Foundation and Empire operates similarly. It also signifies the practice of which it is a part. In 2003 Heather and Ivan Morison wrote Divine Vessel, a 72,000-word science fiction novel, on a journey aboard a cargo ship travelling between Shanghai and Auckland. Asimov’s book was one that they had read in preparation for the task while photographing wild flowers in Mongolia. This whole period was encompassed by their pan-global voyage Global Survey. Like Russian matryoshka dolls, one work reveals another. As they travelled and engaged in an idiosyncratic programme of recordings and interventions, they sent messages. To those on mailing lists, emails would arrive throughout 2003. More formally, updates could be read on an LED display unit fitted with a SIM card. These were sent as SMS messages from wherever on the planet Heather and Ivan happened to be.<br />This in itself is a continuation of the dispatches from Ivan’s Birmingham allotment, reports of the progress of his horticultural endeavours, triumphs and disasters alike (see Emma Safe, ‘Ivan Morison: Flower Power’, AM258). Between 2000 and 2002, dramatic gardening narratives were presented as telegraphic but evocative texts printed on square cards measuring 13.5 x 13.5cm: ‘Ivan Morison is concerned by a powdery mildew that has appeared on his Green Bush marrows.’ These functioned as both gallery objects and as posted communications. This format has been assimilated into the transformation of Ivan Morison’s practice into that of Mr and Mrs or Heather & Ivan Morison. Six of these cards form part of the material generated from their Global Survey journey, and are continued as an ongoing activity. While their use of narrative messages retains On Kawara’s affirmation of presence, activity and existence, these reports also suggest their own instability as documentary evidence. This tension between actuality and fiction permeates everything done in the Morison name. Even to the point of needing to ask whether or not these two individuals exist, let alone whether they really do what they do.<br />‘Earthwalker’, their recent show at Danielle Arnaud, further extended the binding of the narrative discourses of science fiction to natural history understood as a discursive narrative. Outside, beehives had been converted into architectural towers that resembled minimalist sculptural objects. The titling of these objects, Crystal Worlds, correlates the internal workings of these once functional devices with JG Ballard’s hallucinatory novel, The Crystal World. That this novel haunted Robert Smithson’s practice is no coincidence. Smithson is certainly present here. His narrated slideshow, Hotel Palenque, 1969-72, makes an uncanny return in the form of Starmaker, a projected work using medium-format slides and a soundtrack here split over two floors. This work also aligns itself explicitly with science fiction. In part this is through the sounds culled from sci-fi cinema, but is also indicated in its named reference to Olaf Stapledon’s novel Star Maker, published in 1937. Stapledon’s meditation on creation and complexity perhaps illuminates the images of natural history dioramas, industrial-scale horticulture and the British coastline. Whereas Stapledon’s narrator travels out of his body on Earth to become an observer of other worlds, the Morisons present home as if to an alien. Science fiction needs to be recognised as more than a stylistic preference. Literary critic Darko Suvin asserts that science fiction can be usefully thought of as the literature of cognitive estrangement, as opposed to unbridled fantasy or the stock elements of folk tales in which anything is possible. Rather, a different, but believable world with an internal logic, a world that has undergone transformation from our own, makes the possibility of other, especially social and political, transformations possible in the imagination of a reader or viewer. Science fiction retains that critical impulse Theodor Adorno identified in forms of autonomous avant-garde artworks – the possibility that things might be otherwise.<br />In their 2004 work, Science Fiction Reference Bookcase (In Colour Order), a collection of novels that includes those mentioned so far, the Morisons describe the materials as ‘Books on Shelf (Only Partially Read)’. This admission must also apply to Jamie Shovlin’s Fontana Modern Masters, 2005. Shovlin produced 58 watercolours that returned the abstract covers of these edifying volumes, published between 1970 and 1983, to the realm of painting. The work in Shovlin’s currently touring exhibition ‘Aggregate’ is an expanded return to in In Search of Perfect Harmony, the work seen in the Art Now space at Tate Britain in early 2006. There are three broadly identifiable elements here. The pages of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species have been excised from personalised and annotated copies in which readers have marked certain lines and passages as worthy of attention. In a parallel model of selection, all text not indicated by these means has been blacked out. All the Birds in her Garden dramatises an ordering of the natural world as internal, psychic constitution. The work is orientated around Shovlin’s own mother, Valerie, and the integration of garden birdlife into her own sense of selfhood. Valerie is also at the centre of In Search of Perfect Harmony. Shovlin has composed wax crayon rubbings from sections of jigsaws, displayed in the boxes in which they were once contained. The jigsaws belonged to Valerie. After completing one, she would put it back in the box, dismantling the image into fragments. Shovlin has recovered the largest of these fragments as the indexical source of these works. Each rubbing is produced from a combination of crayons determined by a colour wheel and a theory that complementary colours will produce a neutral grey when overlaid. Practice differs greatly from theory. These combinations are anything but grey.<br />Like the Morisons, Shovlin is interested in an explicit use of natural history as discourse, imagery and material substance. At times, his use of the gathered material overlaps with territory already mapped out and claimed by Mark Dion. Dion and Shovlin share not only interests in obsessive methodology but also the articulation of archival forms as narrative. Dion often favours installation as a staged tableau vivant, employing spatial relationships as a theatrical fiction paired with phenomenal and material actuality. Shovlin tends more towards a formal approach to space, informed by critical and attentive readings of Minimalism. However, while narrative is often an integral element for both artists, there is a spectral presence of fiction in ‘Aggregate’, a polluting element of doubt. The source of this is detectable in two other projects by Shovlin: Naomi V Jelish, 2004, and more recently, Lustfaust: A Folk Anthology, 2006. Both are elaborately constructed fictional archives. The first is a tribute to a gifted teenage girl who disappeared along with her family, a girl whose unusual name is an anagram of the artist’s. Lustfaust is also a tribute, paid to an influential and experimental underground band that never existed but could have, and indeed possibly should have.<br />Despite their polluting influence on all Shovlin’s archival practices, these fictions are generally plausible. While the works in ‘Aggregate’ are narrative, and correspond to literary worldmaking, they are not of an explicitly dubious veracity. The paranoid conspiracies that Suzanne Treister conjures are more obviously fabricated, but no less appealing as fantasies. Shovlin offers personalised systems, both epistemological and numerical, while Treister revels in paranoiac conspiracies. One adopts pseudo-scientific forms, the other fantasises a breakdown between science and superstition in a web of espionage and post-Cold War neurosis. If Shovlin has infected all his archive-inflected representations with the possibility of fiction, then Treister seems to thrive on its overt presence. Presented as theory, it depends on the integration of fiction and reality, but is, of course, mostly fiction. It would also be nice to believe in the paranoid fantasy world of Treister’s Hexen 2039 (reviewed by David Barrett in AM302). Conspiracy theories, like fantasy worlds, offer accountable world views that need not be bogged down with even uglier and disturbing realities. Hexen 2039 is framed as the work of a fictional character, Rosalind Brodsky, who makes delusional claims to be a time traveller, and spins out an elaborate conspiracy theory that implicates, among other elements, Hollywood cinema, British and US armed forces and intelligence agencies, witchcraft and occultism in an intricate web of affinities and correspondences. The work is composed of different elements – pencil drawings based on photographs, a pseudo-documentary, and most poetically in a series of ink drawings that manage to be simultaneously cursive and diagrammatic.<br />The Morisons, Shovlin and Treister evoke suggestive and timely reminders of a relationship to text and narrative that transformed both art’s conditions of interpretation and its objects. I am referring here to a general intersection of literary theory, philosophy and psychoanalytical thought with artworks and art history in the last four decades of the 20th century. Rosalind Krauss’s short essay ‘Poststructuralism and the Paraliterary’, written in 1981, described forms of academic theory, writing by Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida in particular, as a perceived threat to literature. This threat, perceived within North American academia, was seen as an undermining and corrosive attack on traditional forms of close reading. Krauss counters these reactionary positions and reads this poststructuralist criticism as something that can no longer sustain a distinction between literature and criticism: ‘Rather, criticism finds itself caught in a dramatic web of many voices, citations, asides.’ What is created is instead a kind of paraliterature. Paraliterary space, she argues, is the space of debate, quotation, betrayal, reconciliation. Absent are qualities of unity, coherence and resolution that were the traits that were cited as in need of protection from the onslaught of this foreign theory. Similarly, the presence of fiction in these overtly narrative practices of the Morisons, Shovlin and Treister blurs distinctions between literary object and artwork. The presence of active and reflective criticism within paraliterary discourses is also detectable. This integration of criticism enables an inward- and outward-looking criticality. The tension between this criticality and an obsessive and indulgent solipsism is exploited in these practices as a set of destabilising intertextual operations. These works not only operate within a set of interpretative conditions that match Krauss’s account, but construct paraliterary space as practice. This space is ordered, but according to internalised logic, personalised universes in which one element informs another. These artists articulate the archival impulse as literary construction, putting on hold any previous hostilities between literary object and artwork. Alliances with fiction pass beyond citation and into a recognition that it is perhaps inevitably the character of all archival forms.Dan Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16966020716894989226noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34338073.post-1168347408992077762007-01-09T12:56:00.000+00:002007-02-06T13:26:43.633+00:00End of the worldI recently came across a familiar sentence from Frederic Jameson, I cant remember where, which has been on my mind quite a bit. Frustratingly I couldn’t place it, so tried an interweb search. I typed in: easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. This turned up an endless list of hits, which generally seemed reluctant to actually cite the reference completely. One hit actually ascribed the term to Slavoj Zizek. If this is true, then the hairy fool has added plagiarism to his list of intellectual iniquities. Eventually I found a reference to a book of essays: The Seeds of Time. I don’t have this, so I checked my copy of another collection – The Cultural Turn. It turns out that the line comes from an essay called ‘The Antinomies of Postmodernism’, which is in both books. And it is slightly different in its actual configuration: “It seems easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; and perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imagination.” (The Cultural Turn, Verso, London and New York 1998 .p50)Dan Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16966020716894989226noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34338073.post-1159347364259700692006-09-27T09:53:00.000+01:002006-09-27T09:56:04.270+01:00Bibliography for Stg 1 Lecutre 'Socially Engaged Practice'The bibliography for my Stage 1 lecture, Socially Engaged Practice, in the Autumn term 2006/2007 is available here in its full, extended form. It is in part comprised of texts suggested by my colleague at Chelsea Andrew Chesher.<br /><br />Socially Engaged Practice. <br />To consider artworks as forms of socially engaged practice is to think about the limits and contexts for making art. Who is it for, what does it do, how does it relate to the world, does it have any functions and responsibilities? Should it initiate new relationships, or reflect on social relationships, allow people to take part, create a specific audience? Is it for a gallery, who is going to see it, what are the limits of an audience’s experience of an artwork? To consider these broad issues is not necessarily to think of art as implicated within political frameworks, but is an enquiry into how art fits into and interacts with the social structures that surround and define us.<br /><br />Claire Doherty (Editor), Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation, Black Dog Books 2004.<br />Helio Oiticica, ‘Appearance of the Supra-Sensorial’ in Art In Theory 1900-2000.<br />Dan Graham, ‘Presentation to an Open Hearing of the Art Workers’ Coalition’, in Art In Theory 1900-2000.<br />Mierle Laderman Ukeles, ‘Maintenance Art Manifesto’, in Art In Theory 1900-2000.<br />Artforum: from ‘The Artist and Politics: a Symposium’, in Art In Theory 1900-2000.<br />Claire Bishop, ‘On Collective Art’, Artforum February 2006. <br />Claire Bishop (Editor) Participation, Whitechapel/MIT 2006. <br />Carlos Basualdo, Bataille Monument, in Thomas Hirschhorn, Phaidon 2004.<br />Benjamin Buchlow, ‘Thomas Hirschhorn: Lay Out Sculpture and Display Diagrams, in Thomas Hirschhorn, Phaidon 2004.<br />Benjamin Buchloh (2001), 'Cargo and Cult: The Displays of Thomas Hirschhorn', Artforum, November 2001.<br />Okwui Enwezor (2000), 'Interview' (with Thomas Hirschhorn), in Thomas Hirschhorn (cat.), Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago.<br />Jeremy Deller (2002), The Battle of Orgreave, (film), The Uses of Literacy (book), Folk Archive (book).<br />David Beech (2001), ‘High on good Shit: Towards an Ethical Relation to Popular Culture’, in Jeremy Deller, Life is to Blame for Everything, Collected Works and Projects 1992-99 (cat.), Salon 3: London<br />Dan Smith, ‘Folk Art?’ in Art Monthly September 2006.<br />Jeffrey Kastner, ‘Center for Land use Interpretation’, Artforum, Summer 2005.<br />Daniel Birnbaum, ‘An experiment in art and community in Thailand’, Artforum, Summer 05.<br />Boris Groys (2002), ‘Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Art Documentation’, in Documenta11_Platform 5: Exhibition (cat.), Hatje Cantz, 2002.<br />Hans-Michael Herzog (2001), ‘An Unremitting Gaze’ (on Alfredo Jaar), in Nauman Kruger Jaar (cat.), Daros Services AG: Zürich.<br />Julian Stallabrass (2003), 'Free Trade/Free Art', in Cummings and Lewandowska, Free Trade (cat.), Manchester: Manchester Art Gallery.<br />Pierre Bourdieu (1990), The Logic of Practice, Cambridge, Polity.<br />Michel de Certeau (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California.Dan Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16966020716894989226noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34338073.post-1158754887255764542006-09-20T13:11:00.000+01:002006-09-20T13:25:06.326+01:00A list of my publicationsFor those who are curious, or in need of a particular reference, I am posting a CV that might prove useful for those interested in similar fields to myself.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Publications<br /><br />• Art Monthly, September 2006, Folk Art?, a feature on Deller and Kane’s Folk Archive.<br />• The Top Room, A Retropective, Catalogue of Show at Chelsea Space. <br />• Art Monthly, September 2005, Review of EAST and Art Out of Place, Norwich.<br />• Art Monthly, December 2004/January 2005, 'Size Matters', a feature on critical approaches to spectacle. <br />• Contemporary, No.68 2004, Review of 'I am the Wrath of God' at MOT.<br />• Art Review, November 2004, Review of Dee Ferris at Corvi Mora. <br />• Art Review, October 2004, Review of Shimabuku at Wilkinson Gallery.<br />• Art Review, May 2004, Review of Pearl C. Hsiung at MW Projects.<br />• Art Monthly, April 2004, Review of Conor Kelly at Peer.<br />• Art Monthly, March 2004, Review of 'Story of the Eye' at Mead Gallery.<br />• Art Monthly, November 2003, Review of Des Hughes at The Showroom.<br />• The Sculpture of the Grant Museum, (with Ann Byrne) October 2003.<br />• Art Monthly, October 2003, Review of Beyond the Endgame at Manchester Art Gallery.<br />• Art Monthly, September 2003, Review of EAST at Norwich Gallery.<br />• Art Monthly, July/August 2003, Review of books by Carsten Nicolai and Adam Chodzko.<br />• Art Monthly, June 2003, Review of Simon Callery at Dover Castle.<br />• Art Monthly, May 2003, Review of Langlands and Bell at the Imperial War Museum.<br />• Art Monthly, April 2003, Review of Giorgio Sadotti at Platform.<br />• Art Monthly, March 2003, Review of Gary Stevens at Matt's Gallery.<br />• Free Trade, February 2003, Catalogue Essay on Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska's 'Free Trade', Manchester Art Gallery.<br />• Art Monthly, February 2003. Review of Adam Chodzko at Cubitt.<br />• Art Monthly, November 2002. Review of 'Deliberate Regression' at Danielle Arnaud.<br />• Art Monthly, October 2002. Review of 'Die First' at One in the Other.<br />• Things, Summer 2002, 'Victorian values: The making of the Albert Memorial' and a review of 'The Glass Aquarium: The art of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka'.<br />• Art Monthly, September 2002. Review of 'Panting' at MOT.<br />• Art Monthly, July/August 2002. Review of John Russell at the Trade Apartment.<br />• Art Monthly, June 2002. Review of Hew Locke at the Chisenhale Gallery.<br />• Parachute, April/May/June 2002, 'The secret of the gift: The movement of value in Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska’s Capital'.<br />• Art Monthly, February 2002, Review of Roman Signer at Camden Arts Centre.<br />• Things, Winter 2001/2002, Review of Rachel Whiteread at the Serpentine Gallery.<br />• Art Monthly, December 2001/January 2002, Review of Matthew Ritchie at White Cube. <br />• Art Monthly, November 2001, Review of Doris Salcedo, Sophie Ristelhueber, Jose Davila at Camden Arts Centre.<br />• Art Monthly, October 2001. Review of 'Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2001'. <br />• Things, Summer 2001. 'The Pitt Rivers Museum: Evolution and Culture'.<br />• Things, Summer 2001. A review of Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska's book 'The Value of things'.<br />• Art Monthly, June 2001. Review of Tania Kovats at Asprey Jacques.<br />• Nightwaves (Broadcast on Radio 3), March 2001. Interviewed by Patrick Wright on the restoration of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs.<br />• Art Monthly, March 2001. Review of Hiroshi Sugimoto at White Cube 2.<br />• New Statesman, 26 February 2001, 'A site for saur eyes: The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs'.<br />• 4.28, January 2001. Review of Nils Norman at the Top Room.<br />• Things, Winter 2000/2001, 'Hopeful Monsters: The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs'.<br /><br />Conferences and talks<br /><br />• Reading Benjamin's Arcades, King Alfred's College, July 13 2002.<br />• Hiroshi Sugimoto, Gallery Talk, Serpentine Gallery, December 27 2003.<br />• Glenn Brown, Gallery Talk, Serpentine Gallery, September 18 2004. <br />• Faces in the Crowd, Gallery Talk, Whitechapel Gallery, March 2005.<br />• Exploring the Utopian Impulse, University of Limerick, March 12 2005.<br />• Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Gallery Talk, Serpentine Gallery, December 2005. <br />• Unpacking the Library, University of Westminster, 10th June 2006.<br /><br /><br /><br />Exhibitions and projects<br /><br />1994 University of Essex Graduate Symposium – Group show, Colchester.<br /><br />1995 2000 Square Feet – Group show at the Fridge Gallery, London.<br /><br />1997 Wonderland – Collaborative installation with Distant Relation, Chelsea College of Art, London. <br /><br />1998 Remote – A group show curated in collaboration with Ann Byrne, 13 Laburnum <br /> Lodge, London. <br /> Admit None - Collaborative installation with Distant Relation, Goldsmiths College, London. <br /><br />1999 The Lyrical Metropolitan - Collaborative installation with Jeremy Glogan, The Top Room, London<br /> Flesh and Stone – A group show at Fordham, London.<br /> Looking for Today - A showcase exhibition for artists working in the West Midlands, selected and arranged in collaboration with Ann Byrne at B16, Birmingham.<br /> Readymade Project – A curatorial project as Wunderkammer, at the Wunderkammer space, London. Work by more than 50 artists including Neil Cummings, Marysia Lewandowska, Graham Little, Simon Morely, Tom Sachs, D. J. Simpson, Julian Walker.<br /> Pre Millennial Tension – Participation in a group show as Wunderkammer, Capsule, Birmingham.<br /> Unreal City - Participation in a group show as Wunderkammer, Fordham, London.<br /><br />2000 The Great Exhibition - A project at the Wunderkammer space, London.<br /> 21st Gear - Participation in a group show as Wunderkammer, The Top Room, London.<br /> The Wolf That Never Sleeps - A curatorial project at the Wunderkammer space, in collaboration with Magnus Edensvard and Vita Zaman. <br /> The Ceramic Collection- A project at the Wunderkammer space, London.<br /><br />2001 The Donation Collection - A project as Wunderkammer, various locations, London.<br /> The Lake Monsters of Ireland - A project as Wunderkammer.<br /> <br />2002 Cornucopia - A group show at Mafuji Gallery, London.<br /><br />2002 The Wunderkammer Pound Pamphlet - An ongoing curatorial publication featuring work by artists and writers. <br /><br />2003 The Sculpture of the Grant Museum - An audioguide installed in the Grant Museum, London.<br /><br />2005 The Top Room: A Retrospective, Featuring a Newly Presented Work By Mel Bochner, Chelsea Space, London. <br /><br />Selected Reviews<br />Art Monthly, December 1999/January 2000 - The Readymade Project.<br />Hampstead and Highgate Express, March 2000 - The Great Exhibition.<br />Time Out, October 2000 - The Ceramic Collection.Dan Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16966020716894989226noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34338073.post-1158157224073851522006-09-13T15:17:00.000+01:002006-09-18T16:01:37.050+01:00Folk Art?Text of Feature in Art Monthly September 2006. Version of text before print.<br /><br />Within the collection of images and objects that constitutes Jeremy Deller & Alan Kane’s Folk Archive is a recurring emphasis on local festivals, rituals, and contests. Generally orientated around forms of performance, these annual events, often hundreds of years old, evoke the most obvious sense of ‘folk’ within this visual anthology: gurning, pipe-smoking, traditional wrestling, burning barrels, hobby horses, a straw bear, a green man, processions and seasonal rituals. These strangely exotic forms are somewhat hard to dissociate from the 1973 horror film The Wicker Man, – the cinematic apotheosis of an imagined fantasy of Britain’s folk imagery. However, these practices are collated here as forms that predate capitalist modernity, performed by and for those that the archive casts as ordinary. This nucleus of traditional fairs and ceremonies is evocative of notions of continuity, creative practice and social engagement that might cut through the alienating and normative fabric of contemporary Britain. <br />Although only making up a small proportion of Folk Archive, these activities contextualise the rest of the material as contemporary updates of traditional forms of social practice. The archive manages to hold forms of small-scale (non-corporate) commercial signage together with visual props and techniques of social protest – itself a diverse category that includes handmade banners, a Tony Blair scarecrow and fake parking tickets to embarrass and criticise the drivers of 4-wheel drive cars in London. There are also varied examples of impromptu public display – such as a face scrawled on the back of a dirty van – practical jokes, garden design, Christmas decorations, personal tributes and notices in public spaces, customised cars and bikes, art by prisoners including drawings and paintings, but also tattoos and their bricolaged technical means of production. The copious diversity of the archive also includes fancy dress, graffiti, websites, the Notting Hill Carnival and a church service held for clowns in Dalston, where the clowns have their own archive of their individual face make-up recorded on eggs.<br />Folk Archive has spent the past year and a half touring: beginning at Barbican’s Curve Gallery, it has travelled to Milton Keynes Gallery, Spacex in Exeter, Basel Kunsthalle, Aberystwyth Arts Centre and The Lowry, Salford. It has also been collated as a book – not merely a catalogue but a lasting, autonomous and intimate manifestation of the project, published in 2005 by Book Works. In their preface to the book, Deller & Kane give a brief account of their archive as a celebration of quotidian creativity in Britain and Northern Ireland. It is also framed as an attempt to consider what constitutes present day folk art – a kind of popular form of practice that can be opposed to the corporate and banal forms of representation embodied within the Millennium Dome.<br />That the activities represented in Folk Archive are described as art, albeit of a popular or folk variety, seems odd. It is incongruous with even the most casual acknowledgement that art is constituted through its institutions, discourses and histories. Things are sought out for the collection that were intended for public display, but not in a gallery, by authors who do not consider themselves artists. But to insist on this homogenisation of all creativity as art masks some of the problematic aspects of Folk Archive. Deller & Kane claim that they simply transpose the works from one form of public display to another, this being what they call the more traditional presentation of art in a gallery. This act of transposing is presented without any sense of how this might be problematic or even complex as a process. It seems to ignore wilfully any sense of representation as a contested discourse, and is obtuse in its negation of anthropological and ethnographic forms of investigation and debate, reflexive or not. This is combined with a slightly disconcerting affirmation of art as something neutral and ahistorical in its constitutive definitions.<br />That the opposition between art and documentary is an artificial one was a fundamental principle underlying the recent ‘Making History’ at Tate Liverpool and, to some extent, Documenta XI. Rather, art and documentary have mutually informed each practice for a century. Even so, Deller & Kane still could be seen as taking a somewhat leisurely approach to the representation of others. It is perhaps exploitative, both of the accepted propinquity of art and documentary, and of the subjects represented. Sarah James’s recent critique of ‘Making History’ (AM295) made clear a failure of the Tate Liverpool show to explore what she described as ‘the more difficult depths of documentary’. The same could be said of Folk Archive. Although the book does contain a short interpretative essay by Jeremy Millar, this is a problem compounded as well as illustrated by the absence of either a sustained and reflective account of their project, or any critical and reflexive formal mechanism within the display of the archive.<br />In contrast, Martha Rosler’s The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, 1974-75, addresses itself as a problematic form of representation through the use of two forms of signifier: text and image. It is also contextualised by Rosler’s own writing around her practice. She has argued that documentary photography belongs to the New Deal sense of progressive and liberal sensitivity in the United States, and she is critical of a justification for documentary that advocates a disengagement from a social cause. Documentary cannot precede or transcend activism. A similar impulse is present in Stephen Willats’ work from the early 70s, including The West London Social Resource Project, collated in the book Art and Social Function (1976 – reissued in 2000). He describes the book as a manual for artists wanting to intervene in the broader fabric of society. Willats positioned his projects as attempts to expand the concerns of art practice together with the social territory in which it functioned, and combined documentary tendencies with forms of sociological fieldwork. Intention, context and audience are not only addressed by Willats, but explicated in stifling detail.<br />Within Deller’s own practice, complex and varied forms of social engagement are the primary concerns of the work. Perhaps not activism, but certainly a set of intriguing and active engagements that explore documentary in relation to art and social responsibility. However, Rosler also problematises the everyday as a theme within documentary. The representation of the commonplace is only justifiable if adequately theorised. This is to counteract the possibility of such practices becoming purely exploitative – either ethically or commercially. Within and around Folk Archive is a sense of resistance to the historical and theoretical discourses that it might evoke. Such an escape from documentary accountability is taken further in Peter Fischli & David Weiss’s book Fotografias, 2005. This concedes no explanation for their collection of underexposed photographs of found paintings. Yet these images, found in locations from restaurants to ghost trains, are isolated and detached from their contexts to form a collected sense of gothic drama. The documentary status of this archive is fictionalised and fetishised beyond exploitation to the extent that these images are given a new life as haunting fragments of narrative. Yet the readability of their facture and materiality within the photographs are always visible reminders that the original images exist within social reality.<br />The distorted paintings of Fotografias evoke a set of intentions and preferences that distinguish it from the more conventional documentary feel of Folk Archive. Similarly, Neil Cummings & Marysia Lewandowska devised a framing device for Enthusiasm, 2005. Their archive of films, made by workers’ cooperatives in communist Poland, was screened within evocatively themed and theatrical environments. The conscious manipulation of presentation offered something more than an apparently transparent process of institutional re-presentation of the material. However, by taking a more straightforward approach, and by artificially homogenising the contents of Folk Archive, Deller & Kane risk aligning themselves with the wordless power of institutional authority. John Tagg, in The Burden of Representation, 1988, argues that photography, the principle medium of Folk Archive, is granted its authority by its relationships with institutional spaces. The power of photography is not the power of the camera, but of the apparatuses which deploy it. As authors of an artwork displayed in public spaces, and now owned by the British Council, Deller & Kane are implicated in this alignment. It is the artists who wield authority, with the legitimacy of state apparatuses, over those they represent.<br />Closely aligned to Tagg’s positions on photography, and similarly influenced by Marx, Barthes and Foucault, is Allan Sekula – known equally for his documentary practice and his critical writings. In his essay ‘Photography Between Labour and Capital’, 1986, he argues that archives by their very structure maintain a hidden connection between knowledge and power. Archives are not neutral, rather they appeal to institutions of modernity for their authority and embody the power inherent in accumulation, as well as the power inherent in the command of language. An artwork in an archival and documentary form must be interrupted by criticism if it is not to reinforce the naturalisation of the cultural: ‘Any discourse that appeals without scepticism to archival standards of truth might well be viewed with suspicion.’ That Folk Archive seems to not to interrupt itself, or be critically contextualised, is perhaps what is troubling about it.<br />Sekula also raises the problem of a refined sensibility, the look of a sophisticated viewer constructed in relation to a preceding inferior one. The images in the archive become objects of a secondary voyeurism, which preys upon, and claims superiority to, a more naïve and primary act of looking. Sekula’s solution to the taint of ‘intellectual and aesthetic arrogance’ that might permeate an archive such as this is that it must be read from below, from a position of solidarity with those who have suffered from the machineries of progress. It is this possibility of a form of solidarity, some kind of sense of shared participation, that characterises much of Deller’s own practice, but is less obvious in Folk Archive. In defence of Deller & Kane, Millar’s essay on Folk Archive suggests that the lack of methodological rigour gives the work both a freedom of representation, and a closeness to that being represented. While failing to acknowledge the inescapable authority invoked by archive, Millar recognises the presence of a simultaneous alternative within it.<br />Characterised by a disturbing ambivalence, there is an enabling tension that brings about a meditation on the act of recording and presenting this material. Folk Archive can operate exterior to either a social science context, social history display or mainstream form of entertainment; it also demonstrates a resistance to any easily satisfying relationship with textual, or theoretical, discourse. This is both what might be wrong with Folk Archive, and what is most essential to it. The challenge to relationships between theory and practice enacted here is discomforting but necessary in order to prevent one becoming a stagnant and tautological account of the other.<br />This collection is also subject to an interpretative metaphor in the form of the library. My own argument has been, after all, as much an account of books as of galleries. The model of the library here is borrowed from Walter Benjamin, whose short essay ‘Unpacking My Library’, 1931, reflected upon the reunion with his book collection after two years apart. He describes the chaotic mess of books spilling out from open crates, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order or rather that the order of the collection, held in place by the passion of the collector, is intuitive and irrational. Within the (private) library, it is not the objects of the collection that come to life in the collector but the collector who lives in them, disappearing in an edifice built from the archive. Benjamin reveals a personal, rather than purely institutional, aspect of representation in which it is the artists who inhabit the collection.<br />It is hard to reject outright the suggestion that Deller & Kane are engaging in a troubling form of exploitative fetishism, a romantic objectification of both people and practices, or positioning a sophisticated look in relation to a crude one. Yet they have put together a form of reflection on archival holdings and documentary practices. Theirs is a point of constitutive beginning, rather than a completed form of interpretation or representation. The illusion of transparency is reduced to personal and idiosyncratic preference, echoing Benjamin’s selfishly activated library in what, through the accountability of the library’s owner, he described in terms of an ethical and redemptive practice.Dan Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16966020716894989226noreply@blogger.com0