IMAGINING ALTERNATIVES
Gazing at the Contemporary World through Figurations of the Outmoded
Kylie Banyard University of NSW | COFA PhD Fine Arts 2013 CONTENTS Acknowledgements 3 Abstract 4 List of illustrations 6
Introduction 20
Chapter One The Turn to Obsolescence 57
Chapter Two Examining Visuality and Renewing Wonder 108
Chapter Three The Countercultural Mode 172
Conclusion 265
Bibliography 275
2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My gratitude goes to my two supervisors, the wonderful Dr Toni Ross for her tremendous assistance, support, wisdom and her many close readings of my many drafts. Dr Noelene Lucas for her fantastic support, assistance and encouragement. My appreciation also extends to my dear friend Amber McCullouch for her preliminary edits, as well as other supportive staff and colleagues from COFA, particularly Gary Carsley for his endless belief in me. Thankyou also to Nicole Ellis, David Eastwood, Peter Sharp, Dr Sally Clarke, Kurt Schranzer, Anna Kristensen and Associate Professor Paul Thomas, amongst many others for their support and encouragement.
This thesis is dedicated to four special people: my mum and dad, as well as my son Wes Banyard-Coyte and my loving and incredibly patient and talented partner Leo Coyte. Without the four of you I wouldn’t have been able to get this done.
3 ABSTRACT This thesis explains the reasoning behind the convergence of two cases of the outmoded in my art practice. The two instances of obsolescence are old fashioned, pre-cinematic optical devices and the social model of the counterculture commune. My thesis investigates the theoretical, socio-cultural and formal issues associated with my interest in these outmoded phenomena. It will also examine the role of obsolete technologies and ways of living in other contemporary art, asking whether the rekindling of anachronistic forms possess critical agency in the present.
Detailed analysis of the twin foci of my research will elaborate how and why I incorporate and reconfigure outmoded forms in my art practice, and through this contribute new knowledge to the contemporary art field. I argue that the outmoded forms given new life in my art hark back to times in the past when it seemed easier to imagine a space and a thinking outside the dominant socio-economic system of modern Western culture; when faith in inventing alternative visions of the world via utopian imagination seemed more vital.
My studio-based and written research draws on theoretical resources allied with the tradition of Marxist critical theory, which locate socially critical potential within phenomena considered obsolete within the context of capitalism. The key early proponent of this way of thinking is Walter Benjamin who figures prominently in my research project. My project also builds on the findings of contemporary theorists of Neo-Marxist persuasion who address the social, subjective and ecological shortcomings of the current phase of global capitalism. These thinkers include Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Źižek, Felix Guattari and Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi among others.
Regardless of the current challenges to imagining alternatives to prevailing modes of capitalist production and consumption, my project sets out a politics of the outmoded, which seeks inspiration in technical and social experiments of the past,
4 which, while relegated to the dustbin of history by the techno-teleological drive of capitalism, offer glimmers of hope for alternative futures.
5 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS TITLE PAGE Figure 1: Kylie Banyard, Pattern Thinking Inversion (colour), 2013, watercolour on paper with digital manipulation, 52.5 x 39 cm, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
INTRODUCTION Figure 2: Melancholia, Dir. Lars von Trier, 2011 Nordisk Film / Les films du losange, film.
Figures 3, 4: Left: Zoetrope, nineteenth century, photograph from the collection at the Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin. Photograph: Kylie Banyard. Right: Drop City, Colorado USA, viewed on 5 February 2009, http://www.lawrence.com/photos/galleries/2009/aug/02/drop-city-history-pictures/
Figures 5, 6: Left: Kylie Banyard, Pattern Thinking I, 2012, watercolour on paper, 52.5 x 39 cm, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney. Right: Kylie Banyard, Winter Romance I, 2012, watercolour on paper, 40 x 48 cm, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figure 7: Kylie Banyard, Andrea and Mike’s Place, 2012, oil on canvas, found kaleidoscope, steel, enamel paint, 76 x 92 cm, stand height 150 cm, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figure 8: Kylie Banyard, Andrea and Mike’s Place (detail), 2012, oil on canvas, found kaleidoscope, steel, enamel paint, 76 x 92 cm, stand height 150 cm, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figure 9: Whole Earth Catalog, ed. Stewart Brand, first edition, Fall, 1968.
6 Figure 10: Kylie Banyard, Imagining Alternatives, 2013, View-Master with custom reel containing images of seven oil paintings, red cedar shelf, dimensions varied, (edition of 5), image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figure 11: Kylie Banyard, Imagining Alternatives (install detail), 2013, View-Master with custom reel containing images of seven oil paintings, red cedar shelf, dimensions varied, (edition of 5), image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figure 12: Kylie Banyard, Village Entrance, 2012, oil on canvas, 40 x 46 cm, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figures 13,14: (both) Kylie Banyard, Daydreamer II, install views, 2013, Oregon timber, plywood, acrylic, turntable, Dreamachine, cushions, ELO record, dimensions varied, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figure 15: Family portrait inside Daydreamer II, 2013.
Figures 16, 17: Left: Drop City, Rhizome, 2013, viewed on August 2013, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/jul/25/under-dome-drop-city-rockaway-beach/. Right: View-Master, viewed on 3 January 2010, http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/View- Master_Model_E.JPG.
Figures 18, 19: Top: Kylie Banyard, Cosmic Tudor, 2011, oil on canvas, 38 x 31 cm, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney. Bottom: Zoe Leonard, Lens, 453 West 17th Street, 2012, lens and darkened room, © the artist, courtesy Murray Guy Gallery.
Figure 20: Andrea Zittel, Wagon Station in situ at A-Z West, Joshua Tree, CA, 2003, powder-coated steel, mdf, aluminum, lexan, 60 x 70 x 60 inches,
7 ©Andrea Zittel.
Figure 21: Kylie Banyard, Dwelling (install), image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figure 22: Kylie Banyard, DOMESCOPE II, 2013, cardboard, yellow fishing line, found kaleidoscope, steel, enamel paint, ball: 55 x 55 x 55 cm, stand height 150 cm, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figure 23: Vegetables growing in my garden, 2012–2013. Photograph: Kylie Banyard.
Figure 24: Slavoj Źižek at Occupy Wall Street, 2011, New York City, Impose Magazine, viewed on 30 November 2011, http://www.imposemagazine.com/bytes/slavoj-zizek-speaks-at-occupy-wall-street- qa-transcript.
CHAPTER ONE Figure 25: Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920, oil transfer and watercolour on paper, 31.8 x 24.2 cm, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem Collection.
Figure 26: Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, Lifespan, 2009, VHS videocassette tapes, photograph © Ella Condon, image courtesy of the artists.
Figure 27: Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, Lifespan (detail), 2009, VHS videocassette tapes, photograph © Ella Condon, image courtesy of the artists.
Figure 28: Andre Breton’s 42 Rue Fontaine Atelier, at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Photograph: Kylie Banyard.
8 Figure 29: Zoe Leonard, Analogue (detail), 1998–2007, C-prints and gelatin silver prints, dimensions unknown, © the artist, courtesy Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.
Figure 30: Zoe Leonard, Analogue (detail), 1998–2007, C-print, dimensions unknown, © the artist, courtesy Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.
Figure 31: Zoe Leonard, Analogue (detail), 1998–2007, C-print, dimensions unknown, © the artist, courtesy Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.
Figure 32: Eugène Atget, Porte d’Asniéres, Cité Valmy, 1913, black & white silver print, Paris, Musée Carnavalet, © Eugène Atget / Musée Carnavalet / Roger- Viollet.
Figure 33: Kylie Banyard, Peering into a Bucky Ball, 2010, Ikea table, Perspex, salt crystal, plastic, mirrored Perspex and acrylic paint, overall dimensions vary, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figures 34, 35: Left: Richard Buckminster Fuller, Untitled, 1972, © RIBA Library Drawings and Archives Collections. Right: Peepshow, historical illustration, German Museum of Technology, Berlin, 2012. Photograph: Kylie Banyard.
Figure 36: Kylie Banyard, Staged Alternatives, 2011, oil on canvas, plywood, pine, customised faceted lens, overall dimensions vary, Grantpirrie Gallery Project Space, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figure 37: Kylie Banyard, Staged Alternatives, 2011, oil on canvas, 122 x 168 cm, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney. Figure 38: Drop City, Trinadad, Colorado, founded 1965, Clark Rickert, viewed on 10 March 2008, http://www.clarkrichert.com/node/33
9 Figure 39: Kylie Banyard, Staged Alternatives (detail), 2011, oil on canvas, plywood, pine, customised faceted lens, overall dimensions vary, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figure 40: Todd McMillian, After the Deluge, 2008, projector, projecto plinth, HD video, media player, image courtesy of the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney.
CHAPTER TWO Figure 41: View-Master, circa 1980, viewed on 8 April 2009, http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2010/08/my-first-3d-the-story-of-view-master/
Figure 42: View-Master reel, Charlie Brown, circa 1980, viewed on 8 April 2009, http://www.flickr.com/photos/scrubbles/2885793176/
Figure 43: Stereoscopes in use, nineteenth century, Techniques of the Observer, Jonathon Crary.
Figure 44: Wes looking through a kaleidoscope. Photograph: Kylie Banyard.
Figure 45: Historical etching depicting the basic operation of a camera obscura, circa 1646, Techniques of the Observer, Jonathon Crary.
Figure 46: Camera obscura, historical etching, date unknown, Techniques of the Observer, Jonathon Crary.
Figure 47: Zoe Leonard, Lens, 453 West 17th Street, 2012, lens and darkened room, © the artist, courtesy Murray Guy Gallery.
Figure 48: Zoe Leonard, Lens, 453 West 17th Street, 2012, lens and darkened room, © the artist, courtesy Murray Guy Gallery.
10 Figure 49: Zoe Leonard, Lens, Arkwright Road, 2012. Installation view at Camden Arts Centre, © the artist, courtesy Murray Guy Gallery.
Figure 50: Zoe Leonard, Lens, Arkwright Road, 2012. Installation view at Camden Arts Centre, © the artist, courtesy Murray Guy Gallery.
Figure 51: Jan Purkinje, Afterimages, 1823, Techniques of the Observer, Jonathon Crary.
Figure 52: Mass manufacturing of stereographs, Paris, late 1850s, Techniques of the Observer, Jonathon Crary.
Figure 53: SAME (Marian Tubbs, Jack Jeweller, Robert Milne and Eleanor Weber), viewed on 2 September 2012, http://www.mariantubbs.com/SAME-55-Sydenham- Rd-March-Feltspace-Adelaide-January-2013.
Figure 54: Thaumatrope, circa 1825, from Techniques of the Observer, Jonathon Crary.
Figure 55: Phenakistiscope, circa nineteenth century, Techniques of the Observer, Jonathon Crary.
Figure 56: Diagram of the operation of the Wheatstone stereoscope, Techniques of the Observer, Jonathon Crary.
Figure 57: David Brewster’s stereoscope, 1849, Techniques of the Observer, Jonathon Crary.
Figures 58, 59: Left: View-Master, viewed on 18 March 2008, http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/view%20master. Right: View-Master reel, circa 1980, viewed on 18 March 2008, http://www.sunecho.com/orderinfo/vm.htm,
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Figures 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65: From top left: Kylie Banyard, So This is Freetown, 2012, oil on linen, 60 x 76 cm. Kylie Banyard, Looking for Alternatives, 2010, oil on canvas, 40 x 46 cm. Kylie Banyard, Homage to Drop City, 2011, oil on canvas, 40 x 45 cm. Kylie Banyard, Cosmic Tudor, 2011, oil on canvas, 38 x 31 cm. Kylie Banyard, Chromatic Yurt, 2012, oil on canvas, 40 x 46 cm. Kylie Banyard, Village Entrance, 2011, oil on canvas, 40 x 46 cm. All images courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figure 66: Adolph Glasbrenner, Guckkatner̈ , 1835, ink and watercolour, dimensions unknown, Techniques of the Observer, Jonathon Crary.
Figure 67: Two different types of kaleidoscope, nineteenth century, Techniques of the Observer, Jonathon Crary.
Figure 68: Kylie Banyard, Andrea and Mike’s Place, 2012, oil on canvas, found kaleidoscope, steel, 76 x 92 cm, viewing stand 150 cm, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figure 69: Kylie Banyard, So This is Freetown, 2012, oil on linen, 60 x 76 cm, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figure 70: Kylie Banyard, Chrisitiania Studies, photomontage. Photograph: Kylie Banyard.
Figure 71: Kylie Banyard, So This is Freetown, 2012, oil on linen, found kaleidoscope, steel, 60 x 76 cm, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figure 72: Kylie Banyard, All Tomorrow’s Communes, 2010, digital image, 20 x 20 cm, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
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Figure 73: David Eastwood, CASA MORANDI, 2012, paper, cardboard, foam core, wood, plastic, wire, glue, ink and paint, 25 × 32.2 × 36.8 cm, viewed on 14 July 2013, http://robingibson.net/exhibitions/speculative-spaces#sthash.neI85yjx.dpuf
Figure 74: Kylie Banyard, Village Entrance (install view), 2012–2013, mixed media, dimensions varied, courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figure 75: Kylie Banyard, Village Entrance (detail), 2012–2013, mixed media, dimensions varied, courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figure 76: J. F. Cazenave, L’optique, circa 1790, engraving, 79 x 63.6 cm, Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, Werner Nekes Collection.
Figure 77: Kylie Banyard, Village Entrance, 2012, oil on canvas, 51 x 41 cm, courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figures 78, 79: Left: Kylie Banyard, model for Propositional Freetown Hut, 2012. Right: Kylie Banyard, Propositional Freetown Hut, 2012, oil on canvas, 36 x 51 cm, courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figure 80: Kylie Banyard, Chromatic Yurt, 2012, oil on canvas, 40 x 46 cm, courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figure 81: Kylie Banyard, Village Entrance, 2013, Lambda Print, 96.5 x 66 cm. Photography: Brett East, courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
CHAPTER THREE Figure 82: Earth Garden and Grassroots Magazine. Collection: Kylie Banyard.
13 Figure 83: Documentation of my travels through the Pilbara Desert in 1998. Photograph: Kylie Banyard.
Figures 84, 85: David Holmgren and his permaculture small-hold, Melliodora in Central Victoria, viewed on 6 September 2010, http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/david%20holmgren.
Figures 86, 87: Left and right: Leo and Wes working in our first large scale vegetable garden 2012–2013. Photograph: Kylie Banyard.
Figure 88: Arthur Okamura, Septic Tank Practices by Peter Warshall, date unknown, courtesy Arthur Okamura.
Figure 89: Stewart Brand, 28 years old, 1966, courtesy Ted Streshinsky / CORBIS.
Figure 90: Whole Earth Catalog, Fall, 1968. Collection: Kylie Banyard.
Figure 91: John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men, viewed on 30 August 2009, http://classic-literature.findthedata.org/l/89/Of-Mice-and-Men.
Figure 92: Drop City, Trinidad, Colorado, 1965–1972, viewed on 5 April 2009, http://philosophyforchange.wordpress.com/2013/06/18/lines-of-flight-deleuze- and-nomadic-creativity/
Figure 93: Sunset, August 1912, viewed on 8 July 2011, http://www.owensvalleyhistory.com/el_camino_sierra/page76b.html.
Figure 94: Whole Earth Catalog, editor Stewart Brand, Fall 1968. Collection: Kylie Banyard.
14 Figure 95: Thomas Hart Benton, Threshing, 1939, oil on board, 9 ¾ x 13 inches, viewed on 14 August 2012, http://www.thecityreview.com/s12samp.html.
Figure 96: Front and back cover of the Whole Earth Epilog, 1974. Collection: Kylie Banyard.
Figure 97: Whole Earth Catalog (excerpt), Fall, 1968. Collection: Kylie Banyard.
Figure 98: Whole Earth Catalog (excerpt), Fall 1968. Collection: Kylie Banyard.
Figure 99: Kylie Banyard, Mapping Community, 2009, charcoal and gouache on paper, two panels each 56 x 76 cm, courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figure 100: Kylie Banyard, Whole Earth Wallpaper and Daydreamer II (concept plan), 2013.
Figure 101: Kylie Banyard, Whole Earth Wallpaper (concept plan), 2013.
Figure 102: Whole Earth Catalog (excerpt), Fall, 1968. Collection: Kylie Banyard.
Figure 103: Whole Earth Catalog (excerpt), Fall, 1968. Collection: Kylie Banyard.
Figure 104: Buckminster Fuller, Geodesic dome, the American pavilion, 1967 World’s Fair, viewed on 7 December 2012, http://designkultur.wordpress.com/2010/06/11/exhibitions-«126-–-in-study- model-wonderland-from-halifax-to-vancouver»-richard-henriquezs-doomed- observation-tower/buckminster-fuller-in-front-of-dome/
Figure 105: Whole Earth Catalog (excerpt), Fall, 1968. Collection: Kylie Banyard.
15 Figure 106: Buckminster Fuller, 4D Tower: Time Interval 1 Meter, 1928, gouache and graphite over positive photostat on paper, 14 x 10 7/8 inches, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University in the City of New York, image courtesy Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.
Figure 107: R. Buckminster Fuller, Dymaxion House, project plan, 1927, graphite, watercolour and metallic ink on tracing paper, 27.3 x 25.4 cm, collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Figure 108: Kylie Banyard, Pattern Thinking Positive/Negative I, 2013, watercolour on paper with digital manipulation, (each) 50 x 40 cm, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figure 109: Kylie Banyard, Pattern Thinking Positive/Negative I, 2013, watercolour on paper with digital manipulation, (each) 52.5 x 39 cm, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figures 110, 111: Left: Anne Hewlett Fuller, The Third Dymaxion House, 1932, dimensions unknown, viewed on 9 June 2010, http://b2dymaxionhouse.blogspot.com.au/p/morphology.html. Right: Anne Hewlett Fuller, Dymaxion House, 1932, dimensions unknown, viewed on 9 June 2010, http://b2dymaxionhouse.blogspot.com.au/p/morphology.html.
Figure 112: Steve Baer, DIY Dome Cookbook, 1967, Lama Foundation, viewed on 13 May 2012, http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/AccesstoTools/.
Figure 113: Kylie Banyard, A Pair For Bucky, 2012, cardboard, 30 x 50 x 50 cm, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
16 Figure 114: The Mushroom Dome, Alto California, 2011. Photograph: Kylie Banyard.
Figure 115: Reviews in Cultural Theory (cover), ‘On the Commons’, issue 2.3, 2012. Photograph: Pedro Reyes, Dodecahedron, ©Pedro Reyes.
Figure 116: Drop City, feature length documentary, dir. Joan Grossman, 2012, Pinball Films.
Figure 117: Drop City, Trinidad, Colorado, 1969, viewed on 6 December 2009, http://usenv.weebly.com/drop-city.html
Figures 118, 119, 120: From top to bottom: Kylie Banyard, Staged Alternatives, 2010, oil on canvas, 40 x 46 cm; Kylie Banyard, Winter Romance I, 2011, watercolour on paper, 40 x 48 cm; Kylie Banyard, Homage to Drop City, 2012, oil on canvas, 40 x 45 cm, images courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figure 121, 122: Top: Kylie Banyard, DOMESCOPE (install), 2013, paper, found kaleidoscope, steel, 55 x 55 x 55 cm, stand 150 cm, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney. Bottom: Dome of Silence, 2013, cardboard, turntable, plywood plinth, 50 x 60 x 40 cm, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figure 123: Kylie Banyard, DOMESCOPE (install), 2013, paper, found kaleidoscope, steel, 55 x 55 x 55 cm, stand 150 cm, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figure 124: Kylie Banyard, DOMESCOPE (detail viewed through kaleidoscope), 2013, paper, found kaleidoscope, steel, 55 x 55 x 55 cm, stand 150 cm, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
17 Figures 125, 126: Both: Andrea Zittel at A-Z West, 2011, image © the artist.
Figure 127: Andrea Zittel, sfnwvlei (Something from Nothing with Very Little Effort Involoved) Note#3, 2002, gouache and pen on birch, 61 x 91 cm, courtesy of the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery.
Figure 128: Andrea Zittel, A-Z The Regeneration Field, 2002, galvanised steel frame, galvanised steel post and vacuum formed styrene trays, 61 x 65 x 95 cm each, overall dimensions vary, image © the artist.
Figure 129: Andrea Zittel, A-Z Wagon Station on site at A-Z West, 2012, image © the artist.
Figure 130: Andrea Zittel, customised A-Z Wagon Station (for Carolyn Castano) at A-Z West, 2005, image © the artist and Carolyn Castano.
Figure 131: Andrea Zittel, A-Z Encampment at A-Z West, 2011, image © the artist.
Figure 132: Andrea Zittel, High Desert Test Sites, promotional poster, 2013, © HDTS.
Figure 133: Andrea Zittel, A-Z Uniforms, 1991–2011, image © the artist.
Figures 134, 135: Kylie Banyard, DIY dome building workshop, held at the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre in 2012. Photograph: Kylie Banyard.
Figure 136: Kylie Banyard, DIY dome building workshop, held at the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre in 2013. Photograph: Kylie Banyard.
Figure 137: Kylie Banyard, Daydreamer II (plan drawings and photographic documentation), 2013.
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Figure 138: Brion Gysin & Ian Sommerville, Dreamachine, (photograph features Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs), 1962, viewed on 22 March 2012, http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/dreamachine.
Figure 139: Kylie Banyard, Daydreamer I (detail), 2013, oil on canvas, Dreamachine, turntable, plywood, overall dimensions vary, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figure 140: Kylie Banyard, Daydreamer I (detail), 2013, oil on canvas, Dreamachine, turntable, plywood, overall dimensions vary, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.
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INTRODUCTION
20 Central to this thesis is a practice-based exploration that since its genesis has been concerned with fantasy-driven notions of ‘imagining alternatives’ to prevalent ways of life: searching for other ways of seeing and being in the world. In 1994 influential Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson claimed that, “it seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations”.1
Figure 2: A still from the final scene in Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011).
The mainspring for this research comes into sharp focus when considering Jameson’s contention that, due to some weakness in our imaginations, we lack the capacity to visualise the future as anything other than apocalyptic (Fig. 2). In light of this situation, I will argue that the largely mass media-perpetuated end-of-days fantasy, whilst still a popular one, cannot continue as our only speculative vision of the future, because quite frankly it has started to feel too close to reality – there have to be alternatives.
It is in this regard that the notions of ‘imagining alternatives’, as well as ‘looking for alternatives’, have become the central premise for both my studio-based and written
1 F. Jameson, The Seeds of Time, Columbia University Press, USA, 1994, p. 7.
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Figures 3, 4: Right: Dome from Drop City, Colorado USA, circa 1969. Left: Zoetrope, nineteenth century. research. Jameson’s concern for our imaginative lack regarding visions of the future has contributed in motivating me to foster and assert other ways of seeing and being within my studio practice.
In navigating the studio-based task of imagining the world as it might be otherwise, I have been able to cultivate a future-fantasy, without casting judgement or claiming to provide concrete solutions. What I aim to do in this process is produce hopeful, contemplative spaces that do not subscribe to the usual doomsday scenario. Notably, my method of imagining better ways of being in the world differs from the futurism of the early avant-gardes in that I seek out the seeds of alternative ways of living from the past, specifically from cultural phenomena that might be considered anachronistic or historically superseded in the present.
The concerns of this project were first conceived in relation to my interest in two seemingly disparate forms, namely: out-of-date optical devices and the communes that we commonly associate with the early counterculture of the late 1960s (Figs 2, 3). My research has consistently focused on what I have come to define as these obsolete and anachronistic forms. As the project progressed, it came to light that, rather then being entirely unrelated, these forms might be brought together in the studio. Through my process-based experiments in the studio, ‘the optical device’
22 and ‘the countercultural dwelling’ began to evolve into intertwined metaphorical vehicles and fantasy mechanisms, through which I enact my ideas about alternative visions of the future. It is within the detail of this convergence, in the experiments made in the studio, as well as within the body of this thesis, that I propose to contribute new knowledge to the field of practice-based research.
The research method and intention has been one of identification, followed by focused convergence, utilising these anachronistic forms through a cycle of assemblage, deconstruction, reconstruction and fabrication. Although in a concrete sense this methodology explains my process in the studio, it is also representative of a more abstract modality – to some extent illuminating how I have negotiated my approach to the written research. The chapters are structured in the following way:
Assemblage: In Chapter One, the outmoded forms of optical devices and early counterculture communes will be introduced and thoroughly contextualised, theoretically and historically, in terms of their outmoded and anachronistic status. This chapter will form a genealogy of obsolescence, questioning if the utopian and redemptive energies previously attributed to outmoded and anachronistic forms might have a renewed critical purchase in a contemporary context.
Deconstruction, Reconstruction and Fabrication: In Chapters Two and Three, each of the outmoded and anachronistic forms will be examined separately. This in- depth process will detail a historically and culturally informed account, as well as case studies concerning the work of two contemporary artists who inscribe facets of the aforementioned anachronistic forms within their practice. Threaded throughout these chapters will be a discussion of what happens conceptually and figuratively when the optical device and the commune merge in my practice.
I will argue that when combined within the context of my practice, these forms are reinterpreted as speculative propositions about alternative ways of living (Figs 4, 5). The aim here has been to create evocative sites that illuminate a fantastic vision and,
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Figures 5, 6: Kylie Banyard, Pattern Thinking I, 2012; Kylie Banyard, Winter Romance I, 2012. like the practice of several other artists of my generation, my works often choose to relinquish the quotidian for the construction of neo-romantic counter-worlds. For example, this romantic tendency may be evidenced in a major survey exhibition at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in 2005 called Ideal Worlds: New Romanticism in Contemporary Art, which consisted of a group of painters and sculptors whose practice explored the construction of romantic counter-worlds. The exhibition included work by Peter Doig, Kaye Donachie, Christian Ward, David Thrope and Hernam Bas amongst others.
For several of the artworks produced for my research project, unusual dwellings are sourced from countercultural communes from around the world. These structures are often deposited into idealised, somewhat amped-up, psychedelic painted landscapes. The images portrayed are intentionally devoid of people and suspended in perfect scenic isolation. Important to these images is the way that I propose the viewer sees them, by introducing a mediated interplay between painting and viewer (Fig. 7). The manual viewing devices that accompany the paintings offer the viewer the option to take an alternative view of the work before them. And it is optional – you don’t have to look into the viewing device, but almost everybody does. The viewer encounters the painting as one normally would on the gallery wall, they then
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Figure 7: Kylie Banyard, Andrea and Mike’s Place, 2012.
Figure 8: Kylie Banyard, Andrea and Mike’s Place (detail), 2012. have the choice to look through the optical device, to encounter the painting again and see it differently. This other view offers an enhancement or distortion of the
25 painting by breaking and abstracting the representational plan of the painting into a kaleidoscope of paint work. The shift in view refers directly to the notion of finding other ways of seeing. In this sense, the reconfigured optical device, coupled with the painted depiction of alternative housing, becomes a visual signifier of as well as a direct play on one of my initial conceptual premises, to ‘look for alternatives’. In a sense, the viewer acts out my central proposition through their experiential engagement with the work by navigating the alternative view. In my works, Pattern Thinking I and Winter Romance I (both 2012) (Figs 4, 5), a dome projects a golden beam of light onto a wintery stage. The beam of light angles towards the adjacent frame signalling a large geometric pattern. In this work, the viewer is invited into a harmonious scene in which the chromatic effects are subdued and the composition tranquil. In the 2012 catalogue essay for my exhibition titled Dwelling, Marian Tubbs noted that we may “want in” to the alluring scenes the works depict and this desire is very romantic until we remember that, of course, we’re not actually invited.2 As we know the flat pictorial space of a typical landscape painting offers us a window onto another world and in this sense allows for a measure of illusory absorption, but not immersion – of course, we cannot ‘enter’ the paintings. Again, a kaleidoscopic viewing device accompanies this work. The apparatus enacts a certain physicality, in that the viewer’s physical contact with the viewing device creates an unusually embodied and tactile viewing experience; it also destabilises the viewer with its abstract distortion, thus allowing for an even deeper absorption. When viewed through the kaleidoscope, the paintings fracture and their pictorial organisation, which provides their former representational logic, is destroyed and replaced by a swirling multi-faceted abstraction (Fig. 6). The colours in the paintings merge to form new relationships, playing off each other in new ways. The hypnotic patterning that the kaleidoscope offers is as ‘far in’ as we can go. The viewer will always be an outsider, and this is the point. We can never get inside the magical fantasy world that the paintings portray; instead we have to imagine ourselves there. It is here that the utopian imagination resonates as the works allow the observer to play with the image and project their own lofty daydreams, or,
2 M. Tubbs, Dwelling, catalogue essay, Galerie pompom, Sydney, 2012, p. 2.
26 conversely, their possible anxieties upon the surface of the work. In the spirit of renewing utopian thought, the artworks produced for this project encourage the act of imagining, but never realising, life within these otherworldly visions.
The idealised and otherworldly scenes my paintings depict do not claim to provide answers about betters ways of living or being in the world. Instead, I’m engaged in examining examples from both the recent past and the present, examples of places where people have come together to experiment with other possibilities, with the idea of forming alternative communities. These communities are often rural and represent innovative testing grounds, which, from an urban perspective, we have the luxury to reflect on from a distance. There is an undeniable romanticism in my approach to these places and towards this history. A sense of utopian yearning and romanticism is integral to their fantastic reconstruction.
Here it is crucial to establish that within the structure of my romantic tendency are important characteristics separating it from previous artistic romanticisms. In the first instance, my research negotiates a path through a number of technological advancements and examines the rhetoric of futuristic progress in the context of capitalist modernity. In this regard, my position differs to previous currents of nineteenth century artistic romanticism, in which modern civilisation was considered an alienating force, separating humanity from nature. In this context, an antimodern attitude was geared towards expelling the machine, emblematic of the technological drive so characteristic of modern societies, from ‘the garden’ of nature. In contrast to this, my position acknowledges rather than simply negating my contemporary surroundings – my suburbanised/urbanised and deeply modernised reality.
Although the optical device and the commune seem to stem from disparate and incongruent pasts, in the context of my practice their union marks something emblematic of the present. The significance implicit to this coupling is synergistic with my examination of the history and ideas of the early counterculture, where new
27 pragmatic forms of environmentalism, untroubled by technological innovation, began to transform the practice and perception of modern environmentalism. The rejection of antimodern notions that formerly sought to rescue a primal nature from the impingement of modern culture occurred in the 60s and 70s in the pragmatic countercultural branch of environmentalism, thereby challenging the declensionist narrative of romantic wilderness based environmentalism, which until then had positioned humankind’s advanced technological society against nature. This represents a critical moment, indeed a paradigm shift, in the history of modern environmentalism.
The rejection of philosophies that simply oppose nature and culture informs this thesis, and draws on the pragmatic version of counterculture environmentalism that is the focus of my study, as well as more recent ecological philosophical thought – such as that of French philosopher Felix Guattari. I wish to stress this important shift in environmental thinking within my art by interweaving simple, manual, human-scale technological devices with images of ‘hippy’ dwellings (symbolic of sustainable rural and urban small-scale agriculture). The mediated play between the optical device and the countercultural dwelling, the way you look through the device to see the dwelling, enunciates my allegiance to a pragmatic countercultural mode, which embraces human-scale technologies in the figuring of ecologically sensitive ways of living, and thus rejects a simple separation of nature from culture. According to Guattari, “now more than ever, nature cannot be separated from culture; in order to comprehend the interactions between ecosystems, the mecanosphere and the social and individual Universes of reference, we must learn to think transversally”.3 I will argue that previous countercultural practices may be brought in connection to Guattari’s theories of ‘ecosophy’. In his influential book The Three Ecologies (2000). Guattari conceptualises far more than an analysis of modern ecological degradation caused by industrial pollution and so on. The tenets of his philosophy, which he terms ‘ecosophy’, extend beyond an environmental
3 F. Guattari, The Three Ecologies, The Athlone Press, London & New York, 2000, p. 43.
28 register towards a consideration of three inter-related domains: mental ecology, social ecology and environmental ecology.
My practice brings the past into the present insofar as it acknowledges earlier countercultural pioneers such as the self-proclaimed ‘ecopragmatist’ Stuart Brand, who sought to negotiate a place for the industrial machine in the ‘prelapsarian garden’ of romanticism.4 According to Guattari and Brand, the threat of climate change has not only thrust us all into a planet stewardship role, it demands that society at large must start to reconcile how nature is unequivocally connected to modern culture. 5 Guattari extends our perception of the often exclusively environmental domain of ecology to include three registers – mental, social and environmental – stating “it is quite wrong to make the distinction between action on the psyche, the socius and the environment”.6 Guattari contends that a “refusal to face up to the erosion of all these areas” risks not only the continued health of the planet, but also, through a sort of standardisation of behaviour engendered by the mass media, human subjectivity in all its uniqueness is as “endangered as those rare species that are disappearing from the planet every day”.7
My research is critical of the contemporary ultra-positive attitude towards the relentless logic of capitalism and technocratic modernity – the overly positive attitude similarly adopted by various early twentieth-century art movements, such as the Futurists and the Russian avant-garde. In contrast to this uncritical enthusiasm for the latest technologies shown by artists from earlier modernist periods, I have spent the past four years examining and reconstructing some of the discarded forms and propositional futures that have been left by the wayside of historical narratives of modernity.
4 S. Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, USA, Viking Penguin 2009, p. 1. 5 S. Brand, Whole Earth Discipline, p. 1. 6 F. Guattari, The Three Ecologies, Continuum International Publishing Group, London & New York, 2000, p. 28. 7 F. Guattari, The Three Ecologies, p. 4.
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Figure 9: Whole Earth Catalog, ed. Stewart Brand, first edition, Fall, 1968.
I have come to realise that such forms, because of their obsolescence, provide confronting, timely reminders of the relentless and inevitably destructive cycle of production and consumption at the heart of the seemingly unstoppable capitalist machine. Again, the experiments of the early counterculturalists, as is particularly evident on the pages of the Whole Earth Catalog (1968–1972) (Fig. 9), offered an alternative to large-scale technocratic systems. The Whole Earth Catalog enthusiastically promoted a revival of the self-determinism of amateur craft traditions and innovative human-scale “appropriate technologies”. 8 In my examination of the counterculture in Chapter Three, I will pay particular attention
8 “Appropriate technology” is a term that derives from “intermediate technology” by the economist Dr Ernst Friedrich Schumacher in his influential book from 1973, Small is Beautiful. It is generally recognised as encompassing technological choice and application that is small-scale, decentralised, labour-intensive, energy-efficient, environmentally sound, and locally controlled.
30 to the Whole Earth Catalog, arguing that it presents a comprehensive archive of ecologically sensitive, human-centric technological possibilities.
Moreover, the otherworldly spaces I depict in my painted and sculptural spaces operate on a number of levels. For me personally, they are exploratory expressions, in that they represent a method of seeking safe-havens. In this way, they provide me with a cathartic sense of relief, a balance to my tendency towards a cynical worldview; in other words, the process helps me to cope with my acute awareness of the dire state of the planet. In a wider context, beyond my own relationship with the works, this imaginative and speculative mode connects with an ecological turn in contemporary society. Visual culture theorist Jill Bennett refers to the present age as “life in the anthropocene”, where it is no longer possible to exist without an awareness of the effects of human activity on the planet.9 She believes that this change in our understanding of the world has brought about a paradigm shift, affecting how most of us (in the developed world) conduct some of our daily activities – how we eat and shop, for example.10
In addition, Bennett claims that this anthroposcenic condition “offers the potential for inventions in the socio-ecological systems: when ecological thinking begins to influence our ways of working”.11 In light of this, the body of work developed for this research has produced outcomes that assist me in defining my social role as a creative practitioner and forced me to consider my working methodologies. Through my anthroposcenic awareness, a shift in perspective has pointed to some of the inherent contradictions and problems associated with making object-based works (particularly those containing poisonous chemicals, such as paint), in a world already full of too many toxic products. This issue has been partially addressed in my recourse to outmoded and anachronistic forms and technologies that exist on the fringes of contemporary life and in the relatively invisible realm of the habitual and familiar.
9 J. Bennett, Living in the Anthropocene, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Germany, 2012, p. 1. 10 J. Bennett, Living in the Anthropocene, p. 1. 11 J. Bennett, Living in the Anthropocene, p. 1.
31
Further to this, one of the aims of this research has been to cultivate and perpetuate a positive ecological imagination, understood in the Guattarian sense as working towards an expression of mental ecology. Guattari’s writing on three ecological registers will be revisited in Chapter Three. I will refer to Guattari’s formulations to build a case for my practice (object-based and largely associated with the traditional mediums of painting and sculpture). I will develop a line of enquiry demonstrating how my practice possesses the necessary socio-ecological ‘latitude’ described in Bennett’s concept of ‘ecological thinking’ and how it can be read as transdisciplinary, rather than being based on medium specific doctrines or traditions still privileged in many quarters of the art market. 12
Because my interest in ‘imagining alternatives’ to contemporary realities implies a critical tendency, my questioning of currently prevalent social formations requires a clear articulation of why the existing neo-liberal capitalist system fails to provide an adequate blueprint for the continued wellbeing of the planet and its inhabitants. My arguments on this issue will be further contextualised and elucidated in Chapter Three, where I will draw on the critical theories of Slavoj Žižek , Fredric Jameson and Felix Guattari.
I commenced this research in 2008, seven years after the traumatic events of 9/11, one year after the onset of the 2007 Global Economic Crisis, in the midst of the global recession and just before the former Australian Labor government announced plans to introduce a tax on carbon dioxide emissions. Within this shifting, yet uncertain political and cultural context, the world has begun to feel like a different place to that which I inhabited before I began my research. In the history of modern art and Western society more broadly, criticism of capitalist modernity has always run counter and parallel to the system itself. The itemisation of this long and turbulent history is not the focus of my research; however, I do wish to suggest that a current feeling of dissatisfaction with the dominant system of globalised
12 J. Bennet, ‘What is Experimental Art?’ (Editorial), Studies in Material Thinking, April, 2007, p. 2.
32 capitalism is more widespread today than it was just a decade ago. Today it is common knowledge amongst the general public that the troubling effects of an out- of-control economic system have caused continued disintegration of the earth’s ecosystems and natural resources, as well as undermining wellbeing and fairness amongst individuals in a broad social context. At the same time, some individuals and political groups still contest these facts and continue to deny climate science, refusing to accept that human activity has led to climate change.
Visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff points to our anthroposcenic situation in an entry on his Occupy 2012 blog titled ‘Autoimmune Climate-Changing Capitalism Syndrome: AICCCS’. He concludes that it is clear “industrial capitalism is not simply harmful to human life, as we long knew, but has created its own geological era that affects everything from the lithosphere to the upper atmosphere and all biota in-between”.13
My research engages with this knowledge by developing positive imaginative narratives countering the sense of uncertainty that often accompanies an awareness of the destructive effects of our current ways of life upon the Earth’s environment. Building on Guattari’s analysis of this situation in The Three Ecologies and Jameson’s remarks about our lack of imaginative scenarios for the future, this thesis constructs an argument that suggests it is precisely because of our seemingly hopeless situation that hopeful narratives need to be established anew.
In an article titled ‘Ecology and Ideology: In Search of an Antidote in Contemporary Art’ (2010), curators and theorists Maja and Reuben Fowkes refer to the third register of human subjectivity in The Three Ecologies – mental ecology. The Fowkes highlight Guattari’s assertion that, in order to confront capitalism’s effects in the domain of the mental ecology of everyday life, society should look to the working methods of artists and their patterns of reinvention and experimentation.
13 N. Mirzoeff, ‘Autoimmune Climate-Changing Capitalism Syndrome: AICCCS’, Occupy 2012, viewed on 5 September 2012, http://www.nicholasmirzoeff.com/O2012/2012/08/25/autoimmune- climate-changing-syndrome-aicccs/
33 They contend that it is in the sphere of mental ecology that art has the potential to “offer an antidote to the mental pollution that is arguably as important an ecological factor as the poisoning of the rivers or the consumption of carbon”.14
Guattari’s conception of mental ecology provides a theoretical lens for my concerns regarding the widespread mass media-perpetuated fantasy that sees us travelling towards our own oblivion. This tragic frame of acceptance, according to Jameson, proliferates and dominates due to our inability to create positive and individualistic narratives or fantasies of our own. An assumption further substantiated by Guattari’s theory regarding our acceptance of being spoon-fed ill-fated fantasies about the future as relative to our addiction to mass media induced sedative consumption. Guattari asserts that in order to ‘kick the habit’ of mass media subjectivity, we need to learn to become active participants in the production of our own subjectivity, through self-construction and self-organisation and by experimenting with the creation of new styles of living. My practice-based convergence of simple human-scale viewing devices and images that make reference to alternative settlements attempts to provide a glimpse of something other, a kind of heterogeneous daydream or imagining.
DEFINING THE CRITICALITY OF IMAGINATION What is a contemporary definition of imagination? How is the criticality of imagination defined within the context of this research? These are questions at the heart of my argument which will be addressed through a brief historical and philosophical analysis to ground subsequent claims as I mobilise imagination in a critical sense throughout the breadth of the thesis.
When philosopher of mind Susan Stewart was recently asked by BBC radio to define imagination, she chose to start her discussion by recalling her understanding of Immanuel Kant’s renowned philosophical formulations from the late eighteenth
14 M. and R. Fowkes, ‘Ecology and Ideology: In Search of an Antidote in Contemporary Art’, Verge, February, 2010, p. 3.
34 century. According to Stewart, Kant defined imagination in two basic ways: first, relatively straightforwardly where imagination brings to mind something that is not wholly present. Second, a comparatively complex definition describes imagination as a mental process that pieces together the bombardment of one’s sensory experiences, otherwise known as a flood of sense data to which one applies concepts from one’s understanding. For Kant, the sensory material organised by the imagination is then synthesised to make judgments and produce propositions.15
According to the Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind, scholarship concerning imagination shifted with the rise of the Romantic movement in the latter part of the eighteenth century.16 At the height of the Romantic period the main focus for discussion concerned imagination being moved away from a previous focus on cognitive theory and epistemology towards its role in creative thinking and especially in the arts.17 Moreover, the same dictionary charts a brief genealogy of the usage and understanding of the concept of imagination over several centuries, citing theories developed by such thinkers as Aristotle, David Hume and Edmund Husserl, to modern day formulations where it is noted that twentieth century philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote two books specifically focusing on the imagination: The Imagination (1936) and The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination (1940). According to the Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind, most mid twentieth century analytical philosophers, if they showed interest at all, seem to have come to doubt whether the imagination even exists. Nonetheless, in many scholarly accounts imagination remained a phenomenon of
15 S. Stewart, In Our Time: Melvyn Bragg investigates the creative forces of the imagination, BBC radio podcast, viewed on 3 January 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/player/p00548lc. 1616 See N. Thomas, ‘Imagination’, in Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind, viewed on 4 February 2014, https://sites.google.com/site/minddict/imagination. This role had been acknowledged at least as far back as the work of Flavius Philostratus (c. 3rd century A.D.). Also, unsurprisingly, imagination had a long-standing place in discussions of the nature of dreams and visions. In Romantic aesthetic discourse the imagination was not so much reconceptualised as re-evaluated in terms of concepts that had been long associated with the term. Originality, passion, the unreal, and non-rational thought, all generally deprecated in the Age of Reason, suddenly achieved a new, strongly positive evaluation. 17 N. Thomas, ‘Imagination’, in Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind.
35 cultural significance, but one whose primary association was with aesthetic theory rather than epistemology.18
Common dismissals of Kantian aesthetics in the art-theoretical context of the late twentieth century may be traced back to Clement Greenberg’s use (or, for some philosophers of aesthetics, misuse) of Kant to theorise formalism. According to art theorist Diarmuid Costello, since the 1960s art theorists have often rejected Kantian thought as a viable “discourse about art after modernism based on a [Greenbergian] distortion”.19 Kantian aesthetic theory has been further questioned (especially in the context of postmodernism) for its connection to theories of the individualistic talent constituting artistic genius. In the Critique of Judgment Kant states: “genius is the talent (natural endowment) which gives the rule to art… The mental powers whose union in a certain relation constitutes genius are imagination and understanding.”20 Despite the rejection of such ideas during the height of postmodern theory, current scholarly discourse addressing the concept of imagination is often indebted to Kant due to his emphasis on the creative force of the imagination, regardless of unfavourable associations between Kant and both Greenbergian formalism and notions of artistic genius.
In our time, the technologies we use in everyday life have altered and expanded the pool from which we collect sensory data, yet our general understanding of how that information is received and then synthesised to create thoughts and produce propositions appears to operate in much the same way as Kant previously proposed. In this regard, it is possible to conclude that theories governing the functioning of imagination have not shifted significantly since Kant’s major treatise on aesthetic experience in the Critique of Judgment (1790).
18 N. Thomas, ‘Imagination’, in Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind. 19 D. Costello, ‘Greenberg’s Kant and the Fate of Aesthetics in Contemporary Art’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65: 2 Spring 2007, p. 222. 20 I. Kant, The Critique of Judgment, Wilder Publications, USA, 2008, p. 99.
36 Susan Stewart’s previous definition of imagination offers a simplistic overview of the role imagination plays in conjunction with understanding as a type of cognitive process that ultimately leads towards the formation of determinate concepts. However, Kant also speaks of the imagination extending beyond rationalising cognitive capacities; he speaks of the imagination used in its freedom when the aim is aesthetic, and not restricted to the representation of a given concept. For Kant, “aesthetic ideas” produce such a multiplicity of partial representations that no expression indicating a definite concept can be found for it, yielding an abundance of sensory material in excess of determined content.21 As he writes in Critique of Judgment:
When the imagination is used for cognition, then it is under the constraint of the understanding and is subject to the restriction of adequacy to the understanding’s concept. But when the aim is aesthetic, then the imagination is free, so that over and above the harmony with the concept, it [the imagination] may supply, in an unstudied way a wealth of undeveloped material for the understanding, which the latter disregarded in its concept.22
In the above passage the aesthetic idea can be thought of as a cognitive experience without a determined or singular conceptual end. The aesthetic idea attaches specifically to fine art for Kant. He describes fine art as “getting its rule through aesthetic ideas” and in this sense it represents a counterpart to rational ideas and systematic knowledge based on determinate purposes.23 Kant has written:
… [through these attributes] something that prompts the imagination to spread over a multitude of kindred presentations that arouse more thought than can be expressed in a concept determined by words. These aesthetic attributes yield an aesthetic idea… its proper function is to quicken [beleben]
21 I. Kant, Critique of Judgment, p. 185. 22 I. Kant, Critique of Judgment, p. 185. 23 I. Kant, Critique of Judgment, pg 225.
37 the mind by opening up for it a view into an immense realm of kindred presentations. Fine art does this…24
Kant suggests the work of art’s ability to manufacture aesthetic ideas produces an abundance of sensory information and thus resists the reduction of the work’s meaning or affect to singular concepts. Conceived in these terms, the aesthetic idea represents a space opening out onto the possibility of a multiplicity of interpretive responses in the reception of the artwork; stopping short of a unification of sensory material and symbolic meaning, resisting the simplistic representation of a given concept in favour of a critical ambiguity gained through an excess of sensory material and potential conceptualisations.
Art historian Michael Podro re-evaluates Kantian aesthetics in his essay ‘Kant and the Aesthetic Imagination’ (2003), eschewing the negative reception of Kantian aesthetics and considering how it might contribute a productive approach for art theoretical discourse today. Podro emphasises art’s continued ability to push the imagination beyond our rational strictures, he speaks of, “art reaching beyond the limits of our cognitive range”.25 Podro’s account of imaginative freedom recalls Kant’s formulation of art’s capacity to manufacture ‘aesthetic ideas’. He emphasises how Kant speaks of the inventive fertility of the imagination in relation to the way a work of art can gesture towards our experiences of the world without those ways being definitive.
In this Podro claims we may posit the continued imaginativeness of an artwork and its capacity to foster the imaginative powers of those who encounter it. 26
24 I. Kant, Critique of Judgment, pg 225. 25 M. Podro, D. Arnold & M. Iveren (ed.), ‘Kant and the Aesthetic Imagination’, Art and Thought, Blackwell Publishing, USA, UK, Berlin, 2003, p. 55. 26 M. Podro, ‘Kant and the Aesthetic Imagination’, Art and Thought, p. 55.
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Figure 10: Kylie Banyard, Imagining Alternatives, 2013, customised View-Master reel.
Kant’s thinking surrounding the freedom of the imagination in specific relation to art’s ability to manufacture aesthetic ideas describes a pluralistic space rather than a conclusive, rational one, and it might contribute a viable way for me to think through my approach to the artworks I make – in particular, the works that figure imaginary, alternative counter-spaces for living to those everyday realities which constitute the current status quo. For example, Imagining Alternatives (2013) is a customised View-Master reel (Fig. 10), containing seven images viewed in analogue 3-D. The images inside the reel were selected from a series of small oil paintings I created. In this work, I offer the viewer an intensified stereoscopic view through the relatively simple and naïve optical apparatus of the View-Master (Fig. 11). My choice of old technology that is largely considered a children’s toy is intentional. I want the viewer to make childhood affiliations with it. I do this to draw attention to the creative act of imaginative play. I want to push the viewer into a space that actively echoes the way we all played in a state of imaginative openness as children.
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Figure 11: Kylie Banyard, Imagining Alternatives, 2013, View-Master.
I am suggesting that, in this context, the View-Master presents a space populated by images that generate fantastic associations. Viewing the paintings in this way, without the ambient space of the gallery detracting from the images, ensures that aesthetic experience becomes an intensified illusory one as the eyes traverse the picture plan, moving through a crude virtual and three-dimensional terrain the way the feet would move in actual space. Within a gallery context, the View-Master becomes a tiny theatre, an intimate and focused space for presentation of the series of paintings that can be changed with the click of a button.
The spaces depicted in the paintings are not real, they are loosely derived from found images of experimental countercultural (hippie) settlements. These are places I have never visited – in some cases they no longer exist. They are the type of otherworldly space I often imagine; they appear like a series of daydreams. In keeping with Kant’s formulation of the aesthetic idea, I wish to suggest that my artworks might be considered a means of representation that operates in a space beyond empirical understanding or factual consolidation. The painted images appear as uncertain forms, derived from studies consisting of part dioramic
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Figure 12: Kylie Banyard, Village Entrance, 2012. construction and crude photomontage, where small dwellings and structures sit awkwardly amongst gestural backgrounds.
Explosions of swirled colour and geometric shapes replace detailed precise representations of the landscape, describing spaces that are unfixed, ephemeral and hazy – like scenes from a child’s story-book (Fig. 12). The scenes are not complete; they are partial representations and, like a daydream or fantasy, resist precise location in reality or in historical time. In these senses the ambiguity of the paintings open out onto possible interpretive responses and might be conceived in relation to Kant’s aesthetic idea.
A further shift occurs in the perception of the series of painted images once they become part of a View-Master reel. The distinctly cut-out separation of the layers within the picture plan looks immediately artificial, possessing a specific tension by simultaneously flattening out or condensing the picture plane through a stacking of layers, while at the same time focusing the viewer’s eyes on a real, yet crudely
41 confected sense of three-dimensionality. This produces a contradictory sense of spatiality, evoking simultaneous flatness and depth that disorientates the viewer. In this we may identify another aspect of the work that can be associated with Kant’s conception of the aesthetic idea, that is, an embrace of ambiguity; resisting certainty in favour of an abundance of possibilities through uncertain or contradictory spatial co-ordinates. As philosopher Joseph J. Tanke suggests in his recent discussion of Kantian aesthetics: “the kingdom of the imagination is the domain of possibility, and it continually prompts itself with the simple thought of what might be”. 27
The positioning of Imagining Alternatives (the View-Master work) within the larger spatial organisation of the exhibition in which the work appears implies an additional engagement with what Tanke describes as the critical potential of the imagination when understood as a social capacity, rather than simply an individual one owned by the artist or individual beholders. In the final chapter of Jacques Ranciére: An Introduction, Tanke builds a case for a reappraisal of the imagination, by advocating what he considers its previously undervalued central role in relation to Ranciére’s readings of the aesthetic regime of modern art. Putting his discussion of Ranciére to one side and focusing solely on Tanke’s account of the imagination as a social capacity, I will discuss a second artwork, titled Daydreamer II (2013) (Figs 13, 14), to be installed in close proximity to Imagining Alternatives.
Daydreamer II seeks to extend beyond the conventional dynamic of artist (producer), artwork (object) and the viewer (consumer), proposing, in this case, that the artist is not the sole producer of aesthetic ideas. The viewer is encouraged to enter the artwork, provoking their own imaginative exploration through the use of an optical apparatus known as a Dreamachine. The Dreamachine was conceived of by surrealist artist Brian Gysin after travelling in the back of a car with his eyes closed.
27 J. J. Tanke, Jacques Ranciére: An Introduction, Continuum Books, London, New York, 2011, p. 155.
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Figures 13, 14: Kylie Banyard, Daydreamer II, install views, 2013.
As the flickering sunlight hit his eyelids, and after a period of time, Gysin claims he started to see patterns and undulating colours. He wanted to recreate optical effects similar to this experience of flickering sunlight, and after teaming up with mathematician Ian Sommerville they invented the Dreamachine (1960). The Dreamachine is said to encourage the imagination and expand consciousness through the flickering effects of light. According to Gysin and Sommerville, “when flickering
43 light synchs up with the brain’s alpha rhythms the flashes can cause individuals to ‘see’ colours, visions, or even entire three dimensional landscapes with their eyes closed”.28 In Daydreamer II, the viewer is invited to experience his or her own subjective inner visions through an encounter with the Dreamachine and each person’s internal phenomena will be inextricably shaped by their imaginative capacity. In this way, the creative potential of the imagination is also bestowed upon the viewer as a producer and not just consumer or witness to the artist’s elaboration of aesthetic ideas.
In Imagining Alternatives, the viewer is invited to experience images generated through an evocation of alternative realities in the form of an optical apparatus containing painted images (aesthetic ideas in this case are created by the artist). Analogously, Daydreamer II provides a comfortable almost nurturing womb-like space for the viewer to sit down and partake in a process triggered by an interplay between the painted landscapes previously seen within Imagining Alternatives and those that the viewer may conjure or ‘see’ through their own subjective experience of the Dreamachine. Such an undertaking, I propose, contributes a criticality different to notions of artistic genius. I am suggesting that Daydreamer II can be perceived as an artwork that stimulates the creative potential of imagination in a democratic way, instigating a move away from ‘individual genius’ previously bestowed upon the gifted artist. In this regard, I attempted to break down, or at least shrink, the pre- existing partitions separating the artist from the viewer, or producer from consumer, by instigating a space of critical imaginative freedom. I do this through creating a setting for shared access to imaginative free play, where everyone who enters Daydreamer II is offered the chance to produce their own aesthetic experience (Fig. 15). When Tanke formulates an account of the imagination as a social capacity, he states it is necessary to connect our imaginative capacities to the enactment of equality.29 This he explains does not mean imagination makes social interaction possible. Similarly, it is not social through the establishment of inter-subjective
28 L. Hoptman, Brion Gysin Dream Machine, New Museum New York, 2010, p. 120. 29 J. J. Tanke, Jacques Ranciére: An Introduction, p. 156.
44 relationships or group fantasies. Tanke explains, “The position I am advocating begins with the realisation that the imagination cannot be understood simply as a power of the [genius] subject.”30 Rather, in art’s address to its audience, equality is enacted, in Tanke’s opinion, from the assumption that we all possess the ability to mobilise our imaginative capacities; a premise in which each person experiencing a work of art is assumed from the start as able to engage imaginarily and critically with the artwork rather than simply following interpretive directives from the artist.
For Tanke the imagination is not just individualistic, it belongs to everyone and it involves what he terms “a transgression of the habitual boundaries of experience and the paradoxical identification of the self through experiences with that which is other than the self”.31 He argues the imagination is in full force when it takes flight outside the self. His point is that the imagination functions through contact with someone or something different: “individuals can not dream, create, imagine, or produce without this paradoxical identification with others”. 32 He defines imagination as a trans-subjective capacity, whose productive creative potential is realised when one can locate their becoming in shared concerns, collective emotive responses, conversations and unspoken complicities. 33 I would suggest that Daydreamer II puts forward the proposition that we all share a desire to imagine the world as it might be otherwise, yet, however shared this desire might be, undoubtedly we would all imagine the world in different ways. The Dreamachine experience provides everyone with the same optical stimuli, which provokes in the onlooker, as Tanke suggests, contact with the imagination through something different – in this case, the intense appearance of uncontrollable imagery with the eyes closed. Everyone shares the capacity to see internal phenomena but ultimately everyone will see something different. The conversations that may open up in response to these experiences of Daydreamer II evoke Tanke’s notion of trans- subjectivity – with the possibility of realising shared concerns and collective emotive
30 J. J. Tanke, Jacques Ranciére: An Introduction, p. 157. 31 J. J. Tanke, Jacques Ranciére: An Introduction, p. 158. 32 J. J. Tanke, Jacques Ranciére: An Introduction, p. 159. 33 J. J. Tanke, Jacques Ranciére: An Introduction, p. 159.
45 responses. Critically, Daydreamer II should not be perceived as just promoting an individual phenomenological experience for those who engage with the work. Contrary to this, the four cushions placed around the Dreamachine accommodate the occurrence of collective sessions. Although the aesthetic experience of those who engage with the work will consist of individual internal phenomena, the collective environment promotes discussion of what it feels like to, as Tanke suggests, allow the imagination to take flight outside the self – beyond rational control. In other words, when engaging with the artwork, individuals might start to identify the potential collective force of imaginative activity taking place within the dome structure at any one time, or even throughout the course of the exhibition. That is not to say that individuals will share the same collective imaginings, but instead they may identify with others at the point of imagining individually. I envisage a two-stage process for experiencing the artwork. The first involves people clustered around the apparatus with eyes closed, where each is separated from the other through their focus on internal experience. The second occurs when eyes are opened and conversations about the experience might ensue. This is where Tanke locates the critical potential of the imagination when understood as a social capacity, and connects, as he states, our imaginative capacities to the enactment of equality. Daydreamer II allows individuals to be in a collective space and conceive of the world as it might be otherwise; as Tanke states, the full power of the imagination “enables subjectivities to create connections, affirm equality and depart from the overall sensory logic of the day”.34
Finally, Fredric Jameson has written on the topic of utopia for over two decades. If the concept of utopia is widely understood as any imaginary society, place or state, considered perfect or ideal, then the utopian imagination focuses intently on formations of the world as it might be otherwise, by imagining how these alternative counter-worlds might appear.
34 J. J. Tanke, Jacques Ranciére: An Introduction, p. 159.
46
Figure 15: Family portrait inside Daydreamer II, 2013.
In The Seeds of Time (1994), Jameson offers his perspective on the direction our globalised society is taking. He argues that if we are to have any hope for radical emancipatory change in the future, we need to renew our historical and utopian imaginations and develop the critical and imaginative ability to form a sketch of the un-representable exterior of late capitalism. 35 According to Jameson, our imaginative limitations, understood in his terms as postmodernist and characteristic of our experience within the totalising interior of globalisation in the West, must be recognised as such and surpassed. He determines that our continued ability to imagine an alternate space to current circumstances as the locus of a better future depends on overcoming contemporary society’s resistance to or scepticism about ideas pertaining to utopia and the potential for radical change.36
35 F. Jameson, The Seeds of Time, p. 12 36 F. Jameson, from keynote lecture, the Jackman Humanities Institute.
47 In this sense, Jameson charges our imaginative capacities with a specifically critical task if we are to overcome our resistance to the potential for radical change. This is a motivation I share with Jameson. I take the task of imagining alternative futures, which nonetheless invoke utopian aspirations of the past, seriously through the artworks I produce. This is precisely how I define the criticality of imagination within the context of this research and specifically within my art practice. I present my own utopian imaginings of the world, as it might be otherwise, evidenced in Imagining Alternatives. I then invite the viewer to enter an artistic environment where they are able to collectively activate their own imaginations (Daydreamer II, Figs 13, 14, 15). This is where I locate the critical potential of outmoded forms.
CHAPTER STRUCTURE Given that my research explores the convergence of two figurations of the outmoded, namely, specific optical devices and the commune, this thesis draws out the implicit theoretical, cultural and formal issues associated with my recourse to these particular anachronistic forms (Figs 16, 17). Positioning the stereoscope, kaleidoscope and peep-show alongside representations of unusual dwellings, typical of communal settlements and symbolic of early pragmatic countercultural environmentalism, demands an explanation of why and how I plan to re-configure and incorporate these seemingly disparate domains within my art practice. This research questions whether the rekindling of specific outmoded and non- synchronous forms continues to possess critical agency in a contemporary art context.
Chapter One, Rekindling the Past: The Turn to Obsolescence develops a case for this decisive turn to outmodedness. I focus on three points of reference: first, the observations made by German Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin in relation to his theories of obsolescence from the early twentieth century; second, a special ‘Obsolescence’ issue of the October journal of 2002; and third, a PhD thesis completed in 2007 by Joel Burges titled The Uses of Obsolescence: Historical Change
48
Figures 16, 17: Top: Drop City, circa 1969. Bottom: View-Master, circa 1970. and the Politics of the Outmoded in American Postmodernity. In this chapter, I argue for a re-contextualised engagement with Walter Benjamin’s theories concerning obsolescence as a way of discovering renewed critical agency in outmoded forms. I will develop a discussion of my own practice and examine corresponding works by other artists (Figs 18, 19). The following two chapters elaborate on the specific outmoded forms incorporated in my studio practice.
Chapter Two: Examining Visuality and Renewing Wonder focuses on art historian and visual culture theorist Jonathan Crary’s book Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (1992) and film scholar Tom Gunning’s essay ‘Re-Newing Old Technologies: Astonishment, Second Nature and the Uncanny in Technology from the Previous Turn-of-the-Century’ (1998). Crary’s book presents a genealogy tracing the historical construction of vision and the modernisation of the observer in the nineteenth century. His analysis focuses on various optical technologies of this period. My own research into obsolete optical devices and the concepts of human vision associated with them is indebted to many of Crary’s claims. I will also draw on Gunning’s analysis of the critical potential of examining emergent technologies of visual representation when they are considered novel and innovative, that is, before they slip into the invisibility of everyday utility.
49
Figures 18, 19: Top: Zoe Leonard, Lens, 453 West 17th Street, 2012, Murray Guy Gallery. Bottom: Kylie Banyard, Cosmic Tudor, 2011.
50 Also included in this chapter is a case study focusing on the recent series of installations utilising the archaic technology of the camera obscura by influential contemporary artist Zoe Leonard (Fig. 19).
Chapter Three: The Countercultural Mode develops a condensed account of the influential, albeit brief, counterculture period of the late 1960s and early 1970s, with a particular focus on the North American context. The chapter will analyse the thinking and activities of co-founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand. This period represents a time widely accepted as the first wave and historical locus for the North American counterculture movement, and a time when communes proliferated widely. I will focus on one specific facet of the counterculture that Andrew G. Kirk refers to as “pragmatic counterculture environmentalism”.37 This section of the study will also draw on Guattari’s ecosophical theory to detail how pragmatic forms of environmentalism inherent to the early counterculture were not phobic about human-scale technological innovation.38 The aim here is to explain why the relatively recent rejection of antimodernist notions that formerly separated nature from culture represents a critical moment, not only in the history of modern environmentalism, but also beyond the realms of environmentalism, as Guattari concedes, across “relations with the socius, the psyche and nature”.39 Additionally, an examination of the Whole Earth Catalog assesses the publication’s current critical import as a unique countercultural case study, providing historical insights into the evolution of the pragmatic branch of counterculture environmentalism.
Finally, I conclude the chapter with an investigation of the practice of American contemporary artist Andrea Zittel (Fig. 20). I identify affinities between the emergence of a new Western regionalism, doctrines developed in the Whole Earth
37 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism, University Press of Kanas, USA, 2007, p. 6. 38 According to Guattarian scholar John Tinnell, ‘ecosophy’ is not to be understood as a type of eco- philosophy, in that it is not a redirection of the philosophical tradition towards ecological concerns. He contends that within a Guarattian framework “to think ecosophically is to rethink philosophy in our contemporary moment defined by the convergence of nature and culture, ecological crises, globalisation and the Internet”. (see p. 361). 39 F. Guattari, The Three Ecologies, p. 28.
51 Catalog and Zittel’s art practice. Zittel’s practice, like the Whole Earth Catalog, will be shown to connect to Guattari’s project in The Three Ecologies.
Figure 20: Andrea Zittel, A-Z Wagon Station in situ at A-Z West, Joshua Tree, CA, 2003
The case study examines specific examples from Zittel’s oeuvre, specifically in relation to A-Z West, her living and working environment in the Mojave Desert outside of Los Angeles.
Discussion of my practice will be woven throughout the argument in each of the chapters, spanning early studio experimentation to the works to be presented in my final exhibition (Fig. 21). I will reflect on the genesis of these works, paying attention to what actually happened in a formal and conceptual sense, when the optical device and the commune merged in the studio. While the artwork I have produced may not appear immediately political, my philosophical world-view is embedded within the work. The work also functions as a type of artist’s archive, simultaneously recollecting, emulating and fabricating elements of early countercultural life, gathering, deconstructing and rebuilding out-of-date optical
52
Figure 21: Kylie Banyard, Dwelling (install), Galerie pompom, Sydney.
Figure 22: Kylie Banyard, DOMESCOPE II, 2013.
Devices and experimenting with what happens in the studio when these forms merge (Fig. 22). My everyday actions, such as developing a large domestic edible garden and greatly reducing household waste (Fig. 23), provide evidence of my engagement with positive pragmatic environmental thinking and action.
53
Figure 23: Vegetables growing in my garden, 2012–2013.
However, in the studio, another operation is at work, a reconstructive strategy geared towards a positive ecological imagination. Here, manual devices provide a hopeful view, a different and decidedly non-apocalyptic future-fantasy. In a Guattarian sense, I am actively producing my own subjectivity through the imaginative creation of different styles of living, different to the overwhelming cultural homogeny of our society. The dwellings I have referenced are intentionally sourced from previous moments in history when people were brave enough to self- organise and create radically heterogeneous ways of living. I showcase and revive these previous models in an attempt to pay homage to them and, most importantly, to learn from them.
54
Figure 24: Slavoj Źižek at Occupy Wall Street, 2011, New York City.
To recall Slavoj Źižek’s address to the protestors at Occupy Wall Street in 2011 (Fig. 24), “the taboo has been broken, we do not live in the best possible world; we are allowed, obliged even, to think about the alternatives”.40 My research project exemplifies this obligation.
Another interesting point raised by Źižek at the end of his recent book, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (2012), pertains to how in the French language there are two words for ‘future’ that cannot be directly translated into English. They are futur and avenir.41 Źižek proclaims:
Futur stands for future as the continuation of the present, as the full actualisation of tendencies already in existence; while avenir points more towards a radical break, a discontinuity with the present – avenir is what is to come, not just what will be.42
40 S. Źižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, Verso, New York, 2012, p. 77. 41 S. Źižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, p. 134. 42 S. Źižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, p. 134.
55 Źižek mentions this semantic distinction in light of “today’s apocalyptic global situation”, where the ultimate horizon of the future is often thought of as the dystopian ‘fixed-point’ or the zero-point of ecological breakdown, of global social and economic chaos.43 He says that, “even if it is indefinitely postponed, this zero- point is the virtual attractor towards which our reality, left to itself, tends”.44 His next point is significant to my research, particularly my proposition to look for and stage alternatives. He contends that, “the way to combat the catastrophe is through acts that interrupt this drifting towards the catastrophic ‘fixed point’ and take upon themselves the risk of giving birth to some radical Otherness ‘to come’”. 45 In many ways, the experiments of the counterculture environmentalists of the 1960s and ’70s are representative of explorations into the type of ‘radical Otherness’ that Źižek encourages. The work I’ve produced for this project also attempts to break with the drift towards the catastrophic ‘fixed point’ by at least trying to imagine, or daydream, another world, an alternative to the “zero-point of ecological breakdown”.46
According to Walter Benjamin, in the early modernist period, outmoded technology became powerfully symbolic of the possibility of imagining an outside of the capitalist system of commodity exchange. Although it is almost impossible to imagine an outside to our total-market-culture today, it does remain possible to find alternatives within the system. In my studio practice and in the spirit of Benjamin, I am proposing that in the process of reconfiguring outmoded optical devices, I construct a metaphorical apparatus whose reflexive lenses angle towards possible alternatives. Not aligned with a temporality of current fashion (preoccupied with endless pseudo-novelty), my works operate in a speculative realm where the past is reinscribed in the present to gesture towards possible alternative futures.
43 S. Źižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, p. 134. 44 S. Źižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, p. 134. 45 S. Źižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, p. 134. 46 S. Źižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, p. 134.
56
CHAPTER ONE THE TURN TO OBSOLESCENCE
57
Figure 25: Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920.
There is a painting by [Paul] Klee called Angelus Novus [Fig. 25]. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees a single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. What we call progress is this storm.47
47 W. Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ in Illuminations, H. Arendt (ed), Schocken Books, New York, 1968, p. 257.
58 INTRODUCTION This chapter contemplates Walter Benjamin’s wreckage – his pile of debris – by bringing back into play his predicative early-twentieth-century analogy of progress as an unstoppable modernising storm, a phenomenon driven by a mandate, whose guiding light is to “make it new!”48 Benjamin’s analogy provides a powerful lens through which to re-evaluate this storm from a current perspective. In our times, discourse about the present often revolves around a sense we are living in a charged historical moment, a time pregnant with uncertain transitory axioms, such as the end of temporality, the end of history, the end of the fossil fuel age, late capitalism and the post-industrial era. With so much discourse alluding to some kind of endpoint, Benjamin’s analogy resonates, charged like a haunting afterimage. His critique of the rhetoric of progress should, with any luck, warn us of the associated dangers, as we advance headlong into another future, another new era, that is, the ever expanding and exponential horizon of the digital age.
Inflected by the inheritance of Walter Benjamin’s critical analogy and, therefore, running counter to the chronological flow of modernity’s developmental telos, my practice-based research has instead opted to ‘lift’ certain objects and ideas from the past, in order to re-configure their use and symbolic significance. Through this non-linear process, I have come to the realisation that, if obsolete technologies and social phenomena are taken up again, they become super-charged historical reminders and markers of historical time, underscoring the wasteful and inevitably destructive cycle of production and consumption at the heart of the capitalist system.49
48 P. Mann, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1991, p. 69. 49 See Reinhart Koelleck’s Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, in which Koelleck hypotheses that in differentiating past and future, or experience and expectation, it is possible to grasp something like historical time. He states that if the concept of historical time has a specific meaning it is bound up with social and political actions. For Koelleck, historical time is many forms of time superimposed one upon the other. In this sense, every thing has within it the measure of its time and no two worldly things have the same measure of time. In seeking an impression of historical time in everyday life we may notice the wrinkles of an old man, or the scars in which a former fate is preserved. The conjunction of ruins and rebuilt states can be recalled, noting the
59 In the Communist Manifesto (1848), Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels proclaim that “all that is solid melts into air”.50 However, in his PhD thesis titled The Uses of Obsolescence: Historical Change and the Politics of the Outmoded in American Postmodernity (2007), scholar Joel Burges shows how in Marx this situation should read as, “all that is solid does not melt into air. By refusing to melt into air, this stuff dogs contemporary life”.51 Burges adds:
Everywhere we look in capitalist formations past and present, there are solid objects which build up around us, in second hand stores, landfills, junkyards… also in the sphere of culture, especially literature, and, as we have seen through the multi-generational embrace of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘ready-made,’ so too in the realm of visual art.52
The collaborative practice of Australian artists Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro provides an example of how this multi-generational embrace of discarded everyday objects is articulated in a current context. Indicative of much of their oeuvre is a bower-birdequse ‘sort and stack’ methodology, a tendency evidenced in their installation titled Lifespan (2009) (Fig. 26).
The large-scale work formed part of Once Removed, a project curated by Felicity Fenner for the 53rd Venice Biennale of 2009. For Lifespan, the artists collected 175,218 VHS videocassettes, which they arranged to form a solid tower in the deconsecrated chapel of a former nunnery. From a distance, the tower’s black plastic surface is sporadically flecked with fragmented dashes of saturated red, blue and yellow, recalling Piet Mondrian’s gridded paintings of the 1920s.
obvious shifts in styles, the coexistence, connectedness and hierarchy of various modernising forms. R. Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical time, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1985, p. 2. 50 K. Marx & F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Verso, London, 1998, p. 38. 51 J. Burges, The Uses of Obsolescence: Historical Change and the Politics of the Outmoded in American Postmodernity, Stanford University, USA, 2007, p. 7. 52 J. Burges, The Uses of Obsolescence, p. 7.
60
Figure 26: Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, Lifespan, 2009.
Beyond recognising these art historical associations, and after circumnavigating the structure, the viewer discovers that two whole sides expose thousands of cassette spines with hand-written and faded labels. At this point, it becomes evident that the artists want viewers to consider the tapes as more than a wall of plastic surfaces. The notation on the spines reminds us that these cassettes have reels of tape encased within them, the contents of which are moving images, or archived stories, but in addition to this, the tapes can also be understood as symbolic of the passing of time. In this regard, it may also be said that the use of VHS tapes, given their
61 now obsolete status, points towards the limited lifespan of all technological media once they are surpassed by the next round of technological innovation. The term ‘lifespan’ also suggests the typical human lifespan. In the first and most obvious instance, the play between these dual associations is evidenced in the title of the work. In the second instance, by highlighting the running time of the combined cassettes in the customary list of details describing the work, the artists make a symbolic connection between the VHS tapes and the tapes’ users. On the artists’ website the accompanying description of the work explains: “The combined running time of these cassettes, if played consecutively, would be 60.1 years, the average human life span in 1976 – the year that the VHS was released.”53 Further to this point, in the conscious act of revealing the tapes’ spines, the artists allude to the notion of a home video library, which, when considered en masse, might also be taken to represent all the videos viewed by an individual throughout their lifetime.
The VHS cassette, long since past its prime was rendered obsolete when DVDs entered the market in the mid 1990s. Since then, videocassettes, like dozens of other obsolete technological inventions build-up on the shelves of thrift shops and amongst landfill. More domestically, tapes are often found hiding in the back of cupboards, adding to life’s typical clutter. In Lifespan, however, this medium is transformed and it demands attention. A patchwork of fonts scatter across the spines of the tapes to reveal each tape’s contents and, for most viewers, these labels conjure a host of memories. Individually, each tape represents the passing of just a couple of hours, but collectively, as the title of the work suggests, they embody a significant passing of time, indeed the passing of a human life (Fig. 27).
Lifespan points to the consumer product lifecycle and the immanent succession of all technological formats. For both the artists and myself (these artists are my peers) the death of the VHS represents the passing of a medium with which we grew-up.
53 C. Healy & S. Cordeiro, Life Span, viewed on 1 March 2011, http://www.claireandsean.com/works_Frameset.html
62
Figure 27: Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, Lifespan (detail), 2009.
In this sense, the work reads like a huge technological memento, offering VHS tapes a now uncharacteristically heroic status in nostalgic remembrance of time spent watching movies as a child, marking not only the passing of time, but also the passing of youth. In my opinion, this is where the works affective charge lies.
Moreover, Lifespan amounts to a huge block of plastic ‘stuff’, particularly apparent if we contemplate the possibility that, before the artists reclaimed them, these tapes may well have been destined for the ‘tip-face’. The column of tapes, a great block of non-biodegradable matter, forces us to consider the ecological consequences of a dying technological format and the profound way changing modes of production contributes to the exponential scale of waste within our society.
On the one hand, it is fair to assume that through the artists’ process of aesthetic recycling the orphaned commodities of consumer culture are mined, and refashioned into newly aestheticised and highly valorised art objects. In doing so,
63 they too become complicit actors, playing their part in the cycle of commodity fetishism. In her Artforum essay from 2012 titled ‘Digital Divide: What Ever Happened to Digital Art’, art critic Claire Bishop discusses what she considers (mainstream) contemporary art’s repressed relationship to the digital in an examination of artists’ engagements with analogue technologies and outmoded ideas, contending that the fascination with analogue media today says less about revolutionary aesthetics than it does about commercial viability. Bishop believes art’s recourse to obsolescence today, through Walter Benjamin’s argument from the early twentieth century, should be subject to scrutiny. Benjamin developed his critique of capitalist culture based on the cycle of production and consumption to question the positive narrative of progress typical of the industrial capitalist mode. Hinged to his critiques of capitalist modernity in general, the outmoded was conceived as a redemptive force field. For Benjamin, these marginalised, disregarded forms became symbolic of the possibility of imagining an alternative to the prevailing socio-economic system of Western modernity. Benjamin’s thinking, so closely tied to the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, in Bishop’s opinion, sounds almost nostalgic today and rather than cutting against the grain the current attraction to analogue technologies amongst a generation of younger artists is problematic – stripped of critical agency and reads merely as fashionable pastiche.54
However, Bishop’s critical opinion is just one amongst many. A host of influential thinkers have expressed different perspectives on the critical potential embedded within outmoded forms. For example, sociologist of modern science Bruno Latour examines the potency of obsolete and outmoded forms as retroactive memory banks. Latour states:
Even in our grandmothers’ attics, in the flea market, in town dumps, in scrap heaps, in rusted factories, in the Smithsonian Institution, objects still
54 C. Bishop, ‘The Digital Divide: Contemporary Art and New Media’, Artforum, September 2012, p. 426.
64 appear quite full of use, of memories, of instructions. A few steps away there is always someone who can take possession of them to pad those whitened bones with new flesh.55
Similarly, art critic Amelia Groom investigates how:
The early 21st century has seen a rising concern with re-present-ing the past. Many artists are embracing obsolete technologies, abandoned places and outmoded materials; resuscitating unfinished ideas; revisiting documents and testimonies; and restaging down trodden possibilities. Rather than a winking postmodern pastiche of appropriated styles, or an earnest nostalgic immersion in a fixed absent past, these new engagements with the remnants of previous times mark a thickening of the present to acknowledge its multiple, interwoven temporalities.56
In my opinion, contrary to Bishop’s view – and arguably this is a difficult and somewhat paradoxical position to take in light of today’s total-market-culture – there are other less didactic ways to perceive artists’ aesthetic attraction to discarded or residual forms. I will argue that access to these other ways may continue through returning to Walter Benjamin’s formulations concerning the liberating potential of the outmoded in the early twentieth century. The obstacles that need to be negotiated when attempting to navigate this territory today pertain to whether the outmoded can offer contemporary artists some retrieval, no matter how vestigial, of the utopian dimension first formulated by Benjamin, particularly in light of changes to modes of production and consumption in the latter half of the twentieth and early twenty-first century, when the world span of the late capitalist marketplace appears all-encompassing. In what follows I will demonstrate how the symbolic function of obsolete forms continues to possess a redemptive critical quality in
55 B. Latour & P. M. Graves-Brown (ed), Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, Routledge, London, 2000, p. 10. 56 A. Groom, ‘We’re five hundred years before the man we just robbed’, Time: Documents of Contemporary Art (ed. A. Groom), MIT Press and Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2013, p. 16.
65 contemporary art. My research has revealed that this is made possible through the mnemonic quality of the outmoded to trigger our re-engagement with alternative historical potentialities and temporalities in the present. Furthermore, I am suggesting that a renewed willingness to re-engage with the past and historical time in general, as previously implied by both Latour and Groom, might signal a paradigm shift in our attitudes concerning the remnants of previous times, signalling a contemporary openness towards the revival of the utopian imagination in a move away from the empty pastiche of postmodernist apathy.
In an essay by Joel Burges titled ‘The Television and the Teapot: Obsolescence, All that Heaven Allows, and a Sense of Historical Time in Contemporary Life’ (2010), the author pays special attention to the critical way obsolescence is figured in contemporary culture, beyond Bishop’s implication of the faddish trends governing artists’ use of analogue technology being linked to commercial viability. Burges’s essay, as well as his previously mentioned PhD thesis, has been instrumental in the construction of a theoretical framework for this research. In particular, Burges questions what critical agency outmoded forms could possibly possess in recalling Benjamin’s early formulations from 1929 in 2010. He provides a genealogical account of obsolescence as it moved through the successive modes of capitalist production, from modernity to postmodernity. Moreover, he offers further insights that are of significance to this research which stem from two assertions addressing the way outmoded forms are figured in contemporary culture. I will utilise these observations as I attempt to articulate how and why it remains critically viable to rekindle outmoded forms in contemporary art practice. Burges explains the way that every historical advancement is also met by things and structures, which are all considered obsolete, as are the cultural values, social relations, political hopes and personal desires they embody. However, this does not mean that any of these things vanish. 57 For Burges, the obsolete persists as a reminder that “life was once different, even that life might have turned out differently,” through transformations that persist as the mnemonic “night-side” that darkens the prism through which we
57J. Burges, ‘The Television and the Teapot: Obsolescence, p. 201.
66 see history progressing teleologically.58
Burges’s conception of “figurations of the outmoded” and his formulations concerning “the mnemonic sense of historical time” obsolete forms give rise to, contribute an original dimension to an underdeveloped area in most scholarly accounts of contemporary life.59
Burges states that his usage of the term “figurations of the outmoded” draws on Erich Auerbach’s essay on the word figura.60 In his examination of Douglas Sirk’s film All that Heaven Allows (1955), he claims the film both allegorises the process of obsolescence and represents obsolete objects. Following Auerbach, Burges describes a figuration of the outmoded as having a specifically temporal dimension, in that it refers “simultaneously to a concrete historical object or person from the past in addition to the promises that object or person embodies in the present”.61 In the case of Burges’s analysis of All that Heaven Allows, the promise is associated with an alternative or better modernity. It is not the aim of this research to extrapolate the detail of Burges’s analysis of All that Heaven Allows; rather, in the paragraphs that follow I will attempt to demonstrate how Burges’s idea of figurations of the outmoded can be applied to the artworks I will discuss and, most specifically, as a way of situating the role of outmoded form in my artworks.
The mnemonic possibilities Burges speaks of stem from his claim that many objects and structures endure despite the superseding force of constant modernisation and in doing so they are visible evidence of another time. Burges writes:
Figurations of the outmoded thus constellate then and now, with the former becoming a resource – one that has been abandoned as obsolete – that can
58 J. Burges, ‘The Television and the Teapot’, p. 201. 59 J. Burges, The Uses of Obsolescence, p. 5. 60 J. Burges, ‘The Television and the Teapot’, p. 209. 61 J. Burges, ‘The Television and the Teapot’, p. 209.
67 be fulfilled in the latter. As such they reveal how obsolescence, at least when it assumes this figural form, possesses mnemonic possibilities in contemporary culture.62
This claim stands in direct opposition to the thinking of theorists like Jameson who define contemporary life as so standardised and homogenous that the present is a period that marks the end of historical temporality.63 Burges highlights how for Jameson commercial practices like planned obsolescence express the sheer force of constant quasi-revolution in consumer culture.64 For Jameson then, obsolescence is central to late capitalist culture and is a material force of amnesia and atrophy, working against our sense of historical time, fuelling what cultural theorist Andreas Huyssen refers to as “late capitalist amnesia”.65 However, Burges challenges this notion, highlighting how, on their own, outmoded forms may not do much other than gather dust, but when recomposed within the realm of contemporary culture they assume a figural form, and perform “mnemonic work, that invites us both to imagine historical change and to think the tensions between past and present within capitalist modernity”.66
Burges’s notion of figurations of the outmoded, based on the way obsolete forms might refer simultaneously to a concrete historical object or person from the past in addition to the promises that object or person embodies in the present, is reminiscent of Fredric Jameson’s description of “existential historicisim” in his essay ‘Marxism and Historicism’ (1979).67 Jameson defines existential historicism as a relatively subjective path, which does not seek a linear or evolutionary reconstruction of history (in the sense of the teleological schemas that have dominated Western art history and the modernist rhetoric of progress).68 Instead
62 J. Burges, ‘The Television and the Teapot’, p. 209. 63 J. Burges, ‘The Television and the Teapot’, p. 205. 64 J. Burges, ‘The Television and the Teapot’, p. 203. 65 A. Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Stanford University Press, California, 2003, p. 21. 66 J. Burges, ‘The Television and the Teapot’, p. 205. 67 F. Jameson, ‘Marxism and Historicism’, New Literary History 11, no. 1, 1979, pp. 41-73. 68 F. Jameson, ‘Marxism and Historicism’, p. 51.
68 designating what he deems a “transhistorical event”, existential historicity is manifest by means of contact between the “historian’s mind in the present and a given synchronic complex from the past”.69 That is to say that existential historicism derives from contact between an individual subject in the present and a cultural object from the past. For existential historicism the past has vital urgency in the present. I wish to highlight the emphasis Jameson attributes to acts of existential historicism as similar to Burges’s concept of figurations of the outmoded. In a sense, Burges’s figurations of the outmoded may be understood as a form of existential historicism.
In light of this contention, Burges’s scholarship might be understood as extending the reach of critical discourse to the role of obsolescence in contemporary life, providing a suitable framework for developing an understanding of how figurations of the outmoded are employed in contemporary art. What is more, his is a distinctly different position to Bishop's, given that she suggests outmoded analogue technologies are utilised amongst a generation of younger artists as an ahistorical misrepresentation and fashionable pastiche of Benjamin’s theories from the early twentieth century.
It is important to note that I do not intend to filter an account of Benjamin’s original formulations through Burges’s analysis. Instead, I will demonstrate how Burges’s research forms a critical new chapter in the genealogy of theories of the outmoded for which Benjamin set the precedent. Burges’s original contribution regarding the uses of obsolescence in early twenty-first century culture is significant and my research attempts to demonstrate how it forms a useful framework for thinking through how and why outmoded forms continue to be employed by contemporary artists.
For the remainder of this chapter, I will develop my argument in a number of
69 F. Jameson, ‘Marxism and Historicism’, p. 51.
69 interrelated ways. First, I will provide an account of Benjamin’s original formulations about obsolescence in ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intellegentisa’ (1929). I will then present a brief genealogical sketch of obsolescence and its gradual evolution in the economic order of early industrialised capitalism towards what is generally referred to as our post-industrial or globalised late- capitalist present. I view this as a necessary historical contextualisation of obsolescence, particularly if my examination is to determine the continued critical agency of outmoded forms in a contemporary context. I will then weave a reflexive account into the argument, discussing the way artworks and related art theoretical discourse have employed figurations of the outmoded through a discussion of October journal’s 2002 special issue on obsolescence, as well as Rosalind Krauss’s invocation of Benjamin’s theories to contextualise the use of analogue media in the work of Irish artist James Coleman.
Moreover, I will discuss examples of specific contemporary artworks, including my own, which I believe mobilise outmoded forms in a way that demonstrates – regardless of our current distance from Benjamin’s original theories – critical agency in relation to our current experience of late capitalist modernity. Burges’s formulations regarding figurations of the outmoded, and the mnemonic work outmoded forms perform, provide the theoretical lens through which I address this possibility.
BENJAMIN AND THE OUTMODED Walter Benjamin developed his theories in the early stages of industrial modernity, ideas that are clearly evidenced on the pages of his essay ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intellegentisa’. The following quote details part of Benjamin’s original account of the Surrealists, where he singles out figurehead
70
Figure 28: Andre Breton’s 42 Rue Fontaine Atelier, Centre Georges Pompidou, France.
André Breton as being able to perceive “the revolutionary energies that appear in the outmoded”.70 The excerpt is reproduced here in full because, in many ways, this is Benjamin’s most direct articulation of his attitude towards the outmoded. In addition to this, it is a passage of writing that has continued to spark significant critical enquiry.
So too for Breton… Nothing could reveal more about Surrealism than their canon… He was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the outmoded, in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb and flow from them (Fig. 28). The relation of these things to
70 W. Benjamin, Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (ed), ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intellegentisa’, Walter Benjamin: Select Writing, 1898–1940, Fellows of Harvard College, USA, 2003, p. 229.
71 revolution – no one can have a more exact concept of it than these authors. No one before these visionaries and augurs perceived how destitution – not only social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors, enslaved and enslaving objects – can suddenly be transformed into revolutionary nihilism… They bring the immense force of atmosphere concealed in these things to the point of explosion.71
The items listed in Benjamin’s account of outmoded forms, such as the first iron constructions, the first factories, the earliest photographs and the fashions of five years ago collectively signal the passing of the first wave of industrialisation. These are the iconic structures of early modernity and they mark the burgeoning progress of nineteenth century industrial society. In relation to Benjamin’s linking of these now outmoded forms to revolution, he identified the Surrealists as visionaries who were uniquely capable of identifying the immense atmosphere concealed in these things.
Rosalind Krauss has referred to Benjamin’s perspective in a number of essays in an attempt to re-examine the critically utopian uses of obsolescence. She believes a liberating potential “frees” outmoded forms “from the grip of utility”; when objects are decommissioned they no longer possess exchange value as commodities in the cycle of production and consumption. This she claims brings about a critical shift in their use value.72 Her intention here is to justify her theoretical framing of the art of William Kentridge, James Coleman and Marcel Broodthaers. As explained by Krauss:
Benjamin believed at the birth of a given social form or technological process the utopian dimension was present and, furthermore, that it is precisely at the moment of obsolescence of that technology that it once more released that utopian dimension, like the last gleam of a dying star. For
71 W. Benjamin, Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (ed),, ‘Surrealism’, p. 229. 72 R. Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Mediun Condition, Thames and Hudson, New York, 1999, p. 41.
72 obsolescence the very law of commodity production both frees the outmoded object from the grip of utility and reveals the hollow promise of that law.73
In his thesis, Burges draws on claims made by art historians Hal Foster and Miriam Hansen to articulate why the outmoded matters to Benjamin. I have simplified the structure of Benjamin’s argument by also citing Foster’s and Hansen’s arguments. In the first instance, Benjamin develops a critique of historical progress when he conceives of the allure of the obsolescent in the work of Surrealist art and literature. This relationship, Foster argues, is said to empower “a revolutionary nihilism”, 74 enabling Benjamin to insist, as Hansen highlights, that “capitalism destroys as much as it develops”, a view running counter to the positivist narrative of progress within capitalist modernity.75 In this respect, Benjamin followed Marx, who insisted that the capitalist system was defined by both creative and destructive tendencies. According to Foster, this is what makes Benjamin’s nihilistic view revolutionary: “it is a two-fold immanent critique of high capitalist culture”.76 He explains:
On the one hand, the capitalist outmoded relativizes bourgeois culture, denies its pretense to the natural and eternal... opens it up to its own history, indeed its own historicity... On the other hand, the capitalist outmoded challenges this culture with its own forfeited dreams, tests it against its own compromised values of political emancipation, technological progress, cultural access, and the like.77
Through Foster’s and Hansen’s conjectures we see how the obsolescent contains remnants of revolutionary and utopian aspiration in Benjamin’s thought because, as Hansen asserts, it contains all those “forgotten futures” supposedly promised by
73 R. Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea, p. 41. 74 H. Foster, Compulsive Beauty, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 1993, p. 162. 75 M. Hansen, ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology’, New German Critique, 40, 1987, p. 192. 76 J. Burges, The Uses of Obsolescence, p. 69. 77 H. Foster, Compulsive Beauty, p. 162.
73 capitalism itself.78 This echoes Burges’s claim that in Benjamin, “utopia, usually associated with the future, is now located in the stuff of yesterday rather than the not yet of a transcendent tomorrow: in this vision, the obsolete and outmoded contain unfinished business still worth realizing”.79
A second horizon of interpretation stresses the devalued position of obsolete cultural and technological forms within the capitalist market. For example, Krauss says of Benjamin’s approach:
By patterning his own attitudes towards the outmoded on that of the surrealists, [Benjamin] conceived of a category of objects over which commodity logic no longer has any sway; having dropped out of the logic of capitalism, these objects become powerfully symbolic of the possibility of imagining an outside of the commodity system, an outside of exchange.80
For Benjamin, outmoded forms or objects become symbolic of the possibility of imagining an outside of the commodity system, and, as posited by Burges, a useful lens for imagining the world as it might be otherwise.81 The very notion that it was once thought possible to find in outmoded forms access to an imagined outside to the commodity system, an outside of exchange, is precisely where I locate my initial point of interest in Benjamin’s formulations. To me this notion is fascinating and today it seems like such a far-fetched and utopian gesture.
THE PROBLEMS ASSOCIATED WITH THE CONTINUED CRITICALITY OF THE OUTMODED The onset of planned obsolescence in capitalist industrial production in the 1950s poses problems for the continued criticality of Benjamin’s observations regarding the outmoded. Planned obsolescence became a business philosophy and industrial
78 M. Hansen, ‘Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street’, Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2, 1999, p. 343. 79 J. Burges, The Uses of Obsolescence, p. 69. 80 R. Krauss, ‘Nostalgie de la Boue’, October 56, 1991, pp. 118-119. 81 J. Burges, The Uses of Obsolescence, p. 70.
74 practice in the postwar period in the early 1950s. In his text, Burges explains how “the planned obsolescence of consumer goods is a capitalist institution worth billions annually, talk of an old format’s death will inevitably help sales of a new format”.82 In his account Burges draws attention to the deliberate strategic nature of this practice:
By subjecting an increasing number of products to cycles of fashion, industrial designers such as Brooks Stevens accelerated the rate at which any and all commodities were outmoded as a result of style instead of a fundamental shift in social use or the genuine emergence of a technological advance. In the 1950s, a figure such as Stevens not only designed products whose style became quickly outmoded, often as a result of his own next set of designs, but corporations also promoted planned obsolescence by introducing goods that broke down easily.83
Today, corporations such as Apple and Microsoft have turned this cyclical logic between technological advancement and rapid redundancy into a massively profitable business strategy. Burges points to criticism of this industrial practice in his reference to Vance Packard’s book from 1960 called The Waste Makers. He highlights portions of Packard’s text, which attacks both consumers and producers for embracing an economy that lets deliberate outmoding predominate as a principle of profit, not human progress. Burges shows how “undue devotion to planned obsolescence, risks a society in which waste is perilously everywhere, overflowing at all levels of the mode of production until the mode turns against itself, depleting its – and the world’s – natural resources”. 84 Packard’s cautionary tale prophetically warns of a situation easily identifiable within our hyper- consumerist society today, and the ecological degradation that many now recognise as resulting from its excesses.
82 J. Burges, The Uses of Obsolescence, p. 14. 83 J. Burges, The Uses of Obsolescence, pp. 81-82. 84 J. Burges quoting Packard, The Uses of Obsolescence, p. 82.
75 The key characteristic of planned obsolescence is its deliberateness. Prior to the advent of planned obsolescence, the point of obsolescence was unpredictable given the uncertainty determining when goods may or may not ‘die out’. The industrial practice of planned obsolescence tempers the anxiety producers may have previously felt by bringing the point of obsolescence under the control of the market. Burges explains how, as a result, the problematic point of unpredictable historical change is placed under the control of capitalist production.85
Burges portrays planned obsolescence as a practice that is emblematic of the total market culture we know today and as synonymous with an experience of the postmodern condition and economic globalisation.86 In the context of Benjamin’s theories, the continued critical status of the outmoded, specifically in relation to it being representative of a symbolic outside to capitalist systems of production and consumption. Burges describes planned obsolescence as an indication of historical change in the epochal transition from modernism to postmodernism. He explains how “this change drags along with it – or rather, is dragged along by – the mode of production that Fredric Jameson famously calls late capitalism, in which all of human activity becomes immanent to a market increasingly total, flexible, and global in its operations”.87
According to Burges:
If in an earlier moment there were areas of life, even points in the cycle of production and consumption, still exterior to the market, then in a later moment, the postmodernist one, more and more of those areas and points belong to the interior of capitalist modernity.88
In order to illustrate the problems associated with drawing on Benjamin’s utopian
85 J. Burges, The Uses of Obsolescence, p. 90. 86 J. Burges, The Uses of Obsolescence, p. 157. 87 J. Burges, The Uses of Obsolescence, p. 86. 88 J. Burges, The Uses of Obsolescence, p. 86.
76 dimension of the outmoded in a late capitalist context, Burges turns to the writings of Krauss. He highlights how she suggests that Benjamin’s ideas regarding the redemptive power of the outmoded explain why particular artists continuously pursue the utopian promise of obsolete media within their work. Krauss adopts Benjamin’s ideas regarding outmodedness in a range of publications, including ‘Reinventing the Medium’ (1999) and A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post Medium Condition (1997).
Throughout the early phase of my research, my encounters with Krauss’s writings on the subject of obsolescence prompted my thinking on the role of the outmoded forms I utilise within my practice. However, as Burges’s own responses to Krauss’s formulations indicate, perhaps she does not acknowledge enough the historical shifts that have occurred since Benjamin penned his thoughts on this matter.
Burges’s analysis of Krauss’s thinking evidences his difficultly in accepting what he regards as her ahistorical mobilisation of Benjamin’s writing from the 1920s and ‘30s in her account of visual art of the 1960s, ‘70s and beyond. He finds this problematic because of the significant historical shift that occurred within capitalist modernity in the 1950s with the onset of planned obsolescence. He believes that this shift needs to be taken into account when referencing Benjamin’s observations concerning the outmoded, specifically in consideration of how well it translates within the current cultural context. Burges states, for example that, “for critical inquiry about obsolescence to remain [critical], then, we must historicize Benjamin’s understanding of the outmoded before we import it wholesale to the interpretation of culture since 1945”.89
Burges further substantiates his position by recalling Hal Foster’s question from his essay ‘The ABCs of Contemporary Design’ (2002) as to whether “[the Benjaminian idea of] the mnemonic dimension of the outmoded [can] still be mined today, or is
89 J. Burges, The Uses of Obsolescence, p. 20.
77 the outmoded now outmoded too – another device of fashion?”90 Is its critical potential exhausted? Burges charges that Krauss’s engagement with Benjamin’s speculation on the redemptive potential of the outmoded is ahistorical, taking no account of changes within capitalism. However, I consider this to be a simplification of the different steps in her argument.
Krauss is clearly concerned with situating photography historically and culturally and she employs facets of Benjamin’s theories to illuminate photography’s passage through time. Her fashioning of Benjamin’s thought is, in this sense, not ahistoricial as Burges suggests. In ‘Reinventing the Medium’ Krauss forges a historical account of the relation between art and photography over several decades and she claims that part of photography’s passage through time, in a cultural sense and as an aesthetic medium, is subject to the so-called liberating potential of its own obsolescence, “due to its very passage from mass use to obsolescence”.91 Krauss’s recollection of Benjaminian thought is particularly relevant given her own engagement with the history of photography in earlier moments of the twentieth century.92 Krauss uses Benjamin’s theorisation of the outmoded in her account of photography’s trajectory from the 1960s through to the 1990s as it became the preferred “zero-point of style” for conceptual artists.93 In ‘Reinventing the Medium’ she describes the way several strands braid together as this transformation gradually unfolds:
The first could be called photography’s emergence as a theoretical object. The second could be identified as photography’s destruction of the conditions of the aesthetic medium in a transformative operation that would affect all the arts. The third could be named the relationship between
90 H. Foster, ‘The ABCs of Contemporary Design’, October 100, 2002, p. 196. 91 R. Krauss, ‘Reinventing the Medium’, Critical Inquiry, 25, Winter 1999, p. 269. 92 See W. Benjamin, ‘A Short History of Photography’, Screen, 1972, 13 (1), pp. 5-26. W. Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Hardcourt: Brace & World, 1968. 93 R. Krauss, ‘Reinventing the Medium’, p. 295.
78 obsolescence and the redemptive possibilities enfolded within the outmoded itself.94
Krauss develops an historical account of photoconceptualism to set the scene for her examination of James Coleman’s Slide Piece (1972–73). She writes:
Indeed the magic lantern functions in Benjamin’s thought as one of those outmoded optical devices, like the stereopticon slide (Benjamin’s model of the dialectic image), which can brush the phantasmagorical against its own grain to produce an outside to the totality of technologized space… For Coleman as well, this resource of the magic lantern show, lodged within the commercial slide tape as a kind of genetic marker, is central to his project. It tells of an imaginative capacity stored within this technical support and made suddenly retrievable at the moment when the armoring of technology breaks down under the force of its own obsolescence.95
As this and the previous quoted passage from Krauss’s essay suggests, her discussion of Coleman’s Slide Piece is simultaneously placed within art historical developments such as post-seventies photoconceptualism, Benjamin’s account of outmoded optical devices such as the stereopticon, and commercial uses of the slide show, which these days might be associated with PowerPoint presentations.
JAMESON, HISTORICISM AND THE UTOPIAN IMAGINATION There is no question that Burges’s persistent notion of contemporary capitalism as ‘totalising’ finds its origin in the influential thinking of Fredric Jameson. For several decades, Jameson has argued that late capitalism has a totalising quality, as all aspects of life are drawn into the marketplace of the capitalist world, which has become “so standardized, that the stream of human, social and historical
94 R. Krauss, ‘Reinventing the Medium’, p. 290. 95 R. Krauss, ‘Reinventing the Medium’, p. 304.
79 temporality has never flowed quite so homogenously”.96 The basis of Jameson’s argument is that globalisation, and our perception of temporality itself, is symptomatic of a market that attempts to “refuse major change through a relentless commitment to minor change. A commitment to the next rather than the new”, like a constant, diluted, quasi-revolution.97
Jameson’s long-standing claim about what he calls “the end of temporality” is difficult to deny.98 In the introductory lines of Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), postmodernism is defined as “an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place”. 99 In this context he distinguishes between postmodernism and its predecessor modernism. He states, like modernism, postmodern consciousness thinks about “the New”.100 The difference, in his judgement, is that postmodernism looks for breaks, for one-off rupturing events, rather than new worlds. The moderns, in his opinion, were interested in irrevocable changes and what was likely to come of such changes. He describes this interest as utopian or essentialist. Alternatively, postmodernism only registers historical variations in a distracted way. For Jameson, this amounts to a superficial, short-sighted utopian impulse, a common yearning that can be found everywhere in today’s image-saturated society, which is entranced by both the material and immaterial (digital) consumable present. As a result, today, the utopian impulse is often manifest in our desire for merely “a little newer, a little better, a little sooner”.101 In this sense, our dreams, our imaginings are derived from and limited to the interior horizon of the capitalist marketplace. In postmodernism there is no outside of capitalism or any other ideology; according to Jameson, postmodern theory questions any claim to ‘truth’ outside of culture, and Jameson sees this situation as a symptom of the age, which
96 F. Jameson, The Seeds of Time, p. 17. 97 F. Jameson, The Seeds of Time, p. 16. 98 F. Jameson, ‘The End of Temporality’, p. 695. 99 F. Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press, USA, 1991, p. 1. 100 F. Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 2. 101 J. Burges, The Uses of Obsolescence, p. 81.
80 in turn plays into the hands of capitalism.102 In present day terms, this highly aestheticised and image-based marketplace also transcends physical space to include cyberspace. As consumers we now dwell both online and offline, a way of functioning that has been named, by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, as “Semiocapitalism”.103 Jameson argues that our society has lost its sense of historicity, its conscious experience of the past and its relation to the future. Here, he argues that spatial distance is now translated into a virtual temporal simultaneity; in other words, space abolishes time. He believes that the newer digital communication technologies have accelerated this process to the point where the passage of time has been virtually eliminated. Because what is sought now is an intensity of the present, the before and after tends to disappear. This, he says, is something that also happens to our sense of history. No previous societies have had as little functional memory, as little sense of the historical past as this one. Significantly for Jameson, any disappearance of the past also entails the disappearance of the future as well.104
Jameson has written on this topic for over two decades. In The Seeds of Time (1994), he offered his perspective on the direction our globalised society is taking. He argues that if we are to have any hope for radical emancipatory change in the future, we need to renew our historical and utopian imaginations and develop the critical and imaginative ability to form a sketch of the un-representable exterior of late capitalism.105 According to Jameson, our imaginative limitations, as understood in his terms, as postmodernist and characteristic of our experience within the totalising interior of globalisation in the West, must be recognised as such and surpassed. He determines our continued ability to imagine a space that is outside or alternate to current circumstances as the locus of the future, if we are to overcome contemporary
102 F. Jameson, Postmodernism, p. xii. 103 Semiocapitalism is a termed coined by Italian Marxist philosopher Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi. It describes the fusion of media and capital also known as cognitive capitalism. Berardi was a student of Felix Guattari. See F. Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post- alpha Generation, Minor Compositions, London, 2009. 104 F. Jameson, taken from a keynote lecture given at the Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto, YouTube, post 2007, viewed 2 June 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxtUgTLqMAk. 105 F. Jameson, The Seeds of Time, p. 12
81 society’s resistance to ideas concerning utopia and the potential for radical change.106
This point brings me back to the reference I made to Jameson in the opening paragraphs of the thesis. Here I cited his now oft-quoted statement, “it is easier for us to imagine the end of the world and the thoroughgoing deterioration of nature, than the end of capitalism”.107
In both Burges’s and Jameson’s thinking, the point in history when there were areas of life, even points in the cycle of production and consumption still exterior to the market, are long gone, and a return to such freedom is near impossible in our contemporary world, especially in the developed West. That said, Benjamin’s writings on the outmoded, published in 1929, may now appear immaterial given the historical onset of both planned obsolescence and the total-market-culture that has emerged in recent decades. It is here in the crosshairs of paradox that Jameson reveals a powerful way to negotiate the problematic issues, which appear to compromise contemporary recontextualisations of Benjamin’s observations regarding the outmoded. In a ‘call-to-arms’, Jameson challenges us to recognise the contradictory yet critical importance of continuing to imagine a space outside our globalised total market culture, even if such a space seems even less possible to imagine than it may have seemed in the past.
As noted previously, Burges argues that historical change remains an imaginative and representational possibility in contemporary life, through the critical use of outmoded forms. Burges develops his response to the question of a politics of the outmoded in postmodernism and, to follow on from Jameson, his position becomes a turning point in my research. Burges writes:
106 F. Jameson, from keynote lecture, the Jackman Humanities Institute. 107 F. Jameson, The Seeds of Time, p. 12.
82 If the future, as critics have suggested, is no longer available as a space on which to project utopian desires for change, then might not the past become just such a site? And a potentially supercharged one at that – catalyzed as a locus of critical energies in the wake of the future being reduced to a tendency in which producers and consumers alike anticipate only the next good instead of the new advance? Answering these questions in the affirmative would allow us to posit a politics of the outmoded as precisely such a locus, and enable us to locate utopian possibilities not in a transcendent gesture of futurity, but in an immanent representation of historicity.108
In this statement, Burges provides a workable approach to a politics of the outmoded in a contemporary art context. He suggests locating utopian possibilities for the future in a retrieval of the seeds of a utopian past, embodied as they are in the energies of outmoded forms. In their use of obsolete technologies and anachronistic forms, artists will always, as Benjamin first claimed, bring the immense force and atmosphere concealed within these things to the surface once again. Artists enact what might now be understood as a contemporarily critical exercise in existential historicism and an example of Burges’s figurations of the outmoded. This, I propose, might be perceived as a theoretical framework for how one locates the historical purchase of the outmoded in a contemporary art context.
OCTOBER’S OBSOLESCENCE ISSUE The obsolescent, the outmoded, the nonsynchronous, discarded forms, marginal mediums: all of these seem to be resources of special interest to many of the most interesting artistic projects today. How does obsolescence figure in your work? Do you mobilise it for critical purposes primarily? What is the critical purchase of obsolescence? Or does it serve constructive purposes in your work – i.e. the making of a new sort of medium or form? Is obsolescence a site of resistance? Why? How?
108 J. Burges, The Uses of Obsolescence, pp. 100-101.
83 Does it provide a model for accessing dimensions of memory and/or history for you? In what ways? How do you see obsolescence being deployed in artistic projects other than yours? Why is there interest in this today?109
The previous extract details questions put forward in an artist’s questionnaire included in a special ‘Obsolescence’ issue of October journal in 2002, which provided me with a useful starting point in my investigation. If October touched on the combination of contemporary art and the outmoded, then the intention of my research is to build upon those foundations and construct a more in-depth account. This chapter and those that follow propose a response, from an artist’s perspective, to some of the questions posed by October, determining why a re-engagement with obsolete forms is of contemporary relevance; issues parallel to those alluded to by Burges and Jameson in the previous section.
It is clear from the rhetoric of October’s questionnaire that Walter Benjamin’s now famous Angel of History informs the journal’s investigation into obsolescence, with full awareness of the backward-facing lens of Benjamin’s critical writings on photography, his comments on Surrealism and in support of his critique of the positivist rhetoric of modern ideologies of progress. The large selection of artists’ responses to the questionnaire are, for the greater part, ambiguous and rather insubstantial, indicating that there is room for further investigation, especially from an artist’s perspective, of how outmoded forms function in contemporary art practice.
Of the 21 artists who participated in the questionnaire, the substantiality of Zoe Leonard’s response was an exception. She spoke of a critical engagement with outmoded forms that corresponds directly with the art she makes. Her opening
109 G. Baker (ed), ‘Artist Questionnaire: 21 Responses’, October. 100, Obsolescence, Spring 2002, p. 6.
84 comment summarises the premise behind her work titled Analogue (1998–2007) (Fig. 29):
It occurs to me that obsolescence is less about time and more about context. About what makes sense in a given circumstance. Our ways of doing things, or making things, reflect the larger direction our society is taking. New technology is usually pitched to us as an improvement. An attachment to old
Figure 29: Zoe Leonard, Analogue (detail), 1998–2007.
things is often seen as regressive: nostalgic or sentimental. But progress is always an exchange. We gain something, we give something else up. I’m interested in looking at some of what we are losing.110
Produced over a 10-year period (1998–2007) and shot on an ‘old’ Rolleiflex camera, the Analogue series consists of over 400 photographs presented as large groups of grids, often spread across the entire gallery. In the passage above, Leonard refers to
110 Z. Leonard, ‘Artist’s Questionnaire’, October 100, 2002, p. 90.
85 “our ways of doing things as being a reflection of the larger direction our society is taking”.111 This statement hints that Leonard is concerned with the societal shift towards economic globalisation, a phenomenon that functions as the impetus for her thorough documentation of local storefronts around her neighbourhood on the Lower East Side of New York. Leonard has been a resident of the Lower East Side for more than 20 years. She has witnessed sweeping gentrification in the area and as a result began documenting her surrounds in an attempt to record the small local businesses that existed before large corporations moved in to replace them (Figs 29, 30, 31).
Figure 30: Zoe Leonard, (detail), Analogue, 1998–2007.
111 Z. Leonard, ‘Artist’s Questionnaire’, p. 60.
86
Figure 31: Zoe Leonard, (detail), Analogue, 1998–2007.
Leonard states:
My own neighborhood is filled with the signs of a local economy being replaced by a global one; small businesses being replaced by large corporations, multinationals taking over. The deeper I look, the more I realise that in looking into these shop windows, I am also looking out at the rest of the world. I think this is a unique moment to document, and an important one to archive. I know the world will never look quite this way again, and I feel that I want to look closely, to hold it near.112
Leonard’s images document the patchwork of hand-drawn signage and idiosyncratic collections of mixed goods and services, which contribute towards making these ‘mom-and-pop businesses’ the heterogeneous and very human zones that they are; she recognises that her local neighbourhood, the world that surrounds her, will never, as she states, look quite this way again and her efforts to document it photographically are her way of holding it near. In this way, Leonard’s Analogue
112 Z Leonard, ‘Artist’s Questionnaire’, p. 90.
87 series demonstrates what Burges identifies as the mnemonic dimension within outmoded forms, which have the critical ability to evoke a sense of historical time. In my opinion, this is precisely how figurations of the outmoded possess critical agency in a contemporary art context. According to Leonard, heterogeneous places like those pictured in her photographs are “some of what we are losing” as our world becomes increasingly homogenised and standardised by the chain stores of large corporations.113
In one work (Fig. 31), for example, she captures the character of the humble corner store. The makeshift display of brooms standing upright in sacks of sand typifies the simple, idiosyncratic and ad-hoc character of goods displays in these iconic old stores. The Coke advertisement in the window has probably been there since the 1950s, but it leaves you wondering if, over time, corporate giants like Coke will completely colonise these spaces with standardised slogans and commercial branding. Will a multinational franchise like 7-Eleven eventually transform the face of this store? The subjects within Leonard’s work are loaded with a sense of historical time materialised, recalling Koselleck’s formulations of ruins and rebuilt states highlighting obvious shifts in styles. Additionally, her choice of medium, her old Rolleiflex camera, allows her to embalm a view of the world through the uniquely square dimensions of a medium-format lens. This almost obsolete way of making photographic images echoes the threat of obsolescence hovering over most of the small businesses shown in her images. Each of the square photographs reveal the black edge of the negative and in this way it becomes a symbolic marker of the old analogue process. The negative itself has been subsumed in a world dominated by digital photography, given that today images often travel straight from camera to computer screen. These works are as much about the threat to analogue technologies and the transformation of the photographic image itself as they are about the vanishing sites and realities they depict.
113 Z Leonard, ‘Artist’s Questionnaire’, p. 90.
88 Analogue, as the title suggests, is a heartfelt meditation, an act of remembrance of the fading force of analogue photography, as well as the world the artist views on her own doorstep, through her old-style cameras lens. Recalling Eugene Atget’s (Fig. 32) extensive documentation of Paris in late-nineteenth-century, Leonard’s images archive her view of the world as it transitioned from the twentieth to the twenty-first century, tracking the transformative forces of a globalised economy and the gentrified urban landscape.
Figure 32: Eugène Atget, Porte d’Asniéres, Cité Valmy, 1913.
Through her acute awareness of how and why the world is changing, Leonard appears determined to employ her out-of-date, technological tools to emphasise the prevailing wave of digital formats, to solidify and capture her analogue memory and preserve its historicity. Leonard’s Analogue series registers historical time and offers us a last flash of the world as it might never appear again at a time when, as Jameson claims, our society has lost its sense of historicity, its conscious experience of the past and its relation to the future. In these artworks figurations of the outmoded are played out as a having the specifically temporal dimension Burges describes, in that they refer simultaneously to a concrete historical object or person
89 from the past in addition to the promises that object or person embodies in the present. In this case, Leonard tries to hold near some of the distinctly human and heterogeneous zones within her neighbourhood and one gets the sense that through her meticulous archiving process a sense of hope for the future prevails in her attempt to preserve the past.
I first encountered the ‘Obsolescence’ issue of October in 2009, one year into my research and some seven years after the issue first went to print. At the time, I was intrigued by a range of old pre-cinematic optical viewing devices, as well as a range of found images of strange countercultural dwellings. At this point, I had no sense of firm direction as to where these concurrent interests might take me, just a hunch that they might lead somewhere, and that I wanted to make work that incorporated these elements. Prior to encountering the October issue, I had read Benjamin’s relevant essays, in particular, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’ (1929) and ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940). For this reason, encountering the special issue of October was particularly instrumental in the early development of my research, insofar as it applied Benjamin’s formulations from the early modernist period to a contemporary art context. In this way, October assisted me in starting to glean a potential context for my interest in outmoded technological and cultural forms. According to Burges, current research into the role of obsolescence and outmodedness is an underdeveloped area in most scholarly accounts of contemporary life. Burges writes:
Obsolescence and outmodedness vitally shape the experience of contemporary life in ways not yet fully acknowledged, much less fully explored, by critics, theorists, and historians of the modern and postmodern.114
Additionally, the special issue of October confirmed evidence of a vigorous interest amongst art critics and historians in addressing how and why artists persistently
114 J. Burges, The Uses of Obsolescence, p. 5.
90 engage with the obsolete. Moreover, the ‘Obsolescence’ issue offered further validation of the still-authoritative association Walter Benjamin’s writings have for understanding uses of the outmoded in an art historical context.
OUTMODED FORMS DO MNEMONIC WORK THAT ALLOW US TO IMAGINE ALTERNATIVES TO THE PRESENT WORLD Every object has its own history, as well as a relation to the wider cultural context or tradition from which it originated. As previously demonstrated, my understanding of how outmoded forms do mnemonic work that allow us to imagine utopian alternatives to prevalent ways of life derived from the past is informed by a synthesis of Fredric Jameson’s and Joel Burges’s formulations. Following Jameson’s focus on historicity, which stems from his concern for our connection to history being subsumed by our fascination for the present, my art making process demonstrates a direct attempt to engage with the specific history of the particular outmoded forms that interest me. This consciousness is expressed through my reconfiguration of objects and ideas from the past, specifically those associated with, in the first instance, certain simple manual optical viewing devices from the pre-cinematic era, and in the second, early counterculture communes of the late 1960s. Jameson argues that postmodernity has emptied out the political significance of the historical past and transformed it into a commodifiable and consumable pastiche. I have become acutely aware of the postmodernist tendency for empty parody that both Jameson and Claire Bishop refer to, and as a result have been mindful in my utilisation of objects and ideas from the past.
My awareness of the social and political history of these chosen forms is integral to my desire to re-engage with them. In this way, the methodology of my practice- based research recalls Jameson’s definition of existential historicism, where the individual subject in the present finds aesthetic and socially critical value in their need to explore, reconfigure and re-present cultural objects and ways of thinking from the past.
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Figure 33: Kylie Banyard, Peering into a Bucky Ball, 2010.
Peering into a Bucky Ball (2010) (Fig. 33) is an example of an experimental work I developed in the early stages of my candidacy to test the potential outcomes of integrating the two outmoded forms I was interested in. The sculptural form on the left is a hand painted Perspex dome. Protruding from the central point at the top of the dome a small peephole is positioned to allow a birds-eye view of the scene within. When the viewer peers through the tiny hole they see illuminated an isolated miniature landscape. The Perspex dome recalls Buckminster Fuller’s early geodesic dome designs (Fig. 34), while the small diorama and peephole device offers my version of the peepshow, a common fairground attraction in the late nineteenth century (Fig. 35). The artwork was a failed experiment and will not be exhibited as part of my PhD exhibition because I was not happy with the generic appearance of the scene inside the dome. I want the spaces I depict to be a little more specific and have a particular historical point of reference. As noted earlier, Chapters Two and Three will offer detailed historical and cultural analysis of both specific pre-cinematic optical devices and elements of the 1960s counterculture. What I am highlighting here is my engagement with the historicity of these forms, as critical to how these figurations of the outmoded play-out in my artwork.
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Figures 34, 35: Top: Richard Buckminster Fuller, Untitled sketch, 1972. Bottom: Peepshow historical illustration, German Museum of Technology, 2012.
In simple terms, I have lifted these forms and ideas out of their time, but not without consideration of the time and place from whence they emerged. Integral to my fascination with them, as well as my use of them, is my concurrent theoretical investigation into the history that defines their passage through time. As Burges suggests in his analysis of Krauss, we must first historicise in order to assert a contemporary politics of the outmoded.
93 In line with Burges’s notion of figurations of the outmoded and in light of my desire to reconfigure certain outmoded forms within my artworks, I wish to suggest that this approach might be framed as a contemporary renewal of Jamesonian utopian thinking and imagination – a critical yet fleeting fantasy – a way to capture a glimpse of spaces outside the totality of the globalised capitalist present before the fantasy itself is re-absorbed back into the vortex of contemporary consumer culture. Following Jameson’s belief that the locus for the future of our society lies in the renewal of radical utopian thinking and imagination, critical to this strategy, he argues, is that we continue to crave and imagine a space outside of globalised late capitalism. The mnemonic work of outmoded forms in a contemporary art context can enable symbolic, imaginative possibilities in this direction, thus enabling a contemporary politics of the outmoded that locates renewed critical agency in outmoded forms.
The contention that the outmoded contains unfinished business still worth realising is a proposal that holds particular relevance for my studio-based research. One of the central questions for this research interrogates if the seeds of utopian imagination, located in the stuff of yesterday, can be retrieved to critical effect today, rather than acting as a hollow fetish or pastiche pandering to the market driven demands of commercial viability as Bishop has suggested.
In my opinion, these forms do contain unfinished business, laden with symbolic potential when reinserted into a contemporary context. My rekindling of Benjamin’s formulations regarding the critical and utopian potentials of outmoded forms enacts a poetic and metaphorical search for alternatives to currently prevailing ways of living. Similarly, it shares the drive of Burges’s operation, proposing figurations of the outmoded as possessing a specifically temporal dimension that refers simultaneously to an object or person from the past in addition to the promises that object or person embodies in the present; in this case, my specific interest manifests in an artist’s commune from the early 1960s that no longer exists called Drop City in South Colorado, which is widely considered one of the first
94 counterculture communes of North America. The commune is a historical object that has become an icon of the early counterculture period and, for me, signifies a radically alternative way of living offering utopian promise in the present.
Staged Alternatives (2011) (Fig. 36) is a work I originally developed for the former Grantpirrie Project Space in response to my burgeoning interest in the early countercultural community known as Drop City. Upon first encountering this work, the viewer registers a large painting and a plywood-viewing box with a lens protruding from its front. The large painting (Fig. 37) portrays a staged scenario with a platform-like structure situated as the focal point of the picture plane.
Figure 36: Kylie Banyard, Staged Alternatives, 2011.
Here, a pair of dome-shaped dwellings sit atop a strange slice of lush green landscape. The horizon line of the staged terrain offers perspective to an otherwise horizon-less and comparatively desolate non-space, like a little piece of utopia plonked in the midst of a dystopian wasteland. In many ways, this is how the earliest communes were perceived; they’d pop up in harsh arid landscapes because
95 the least desirable land was often the cheapest and, for this reason, the most feasible place to develop an experimental community. The strange miniature form pictured underneath the stage-like structure, a projector, emits a yellowish beam of light that appears to illuminate an orb, pushing the image one step further into the realm of fantasy (Fig. 37). The painting is intended to portray a speculative place that,
Figure 37: Kylie Banyard, Staged Alternatives, 2011.
Figure 38: Drop City, Trinidad, Colorado, founded 1965.
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Figure 39: Kylie Banyard, Staged Alternatives (detail), 2011. beyond my online image searching, started to grow within my imagination like a counter-world, but only as a fragment taken from historical records. The found image of Drop City (Fig. 38) served as one of the entry points into my PhD research. From here, I started to investigate the early counterculture communes in North America of the 1960s and, more specifically, the link between communes and geodesic domes. My research uncovered that the dome, an inexpensive and radically unconventional style of dwelling, became a popular phenomenon amongst the first wave of counterculture communities.
Next to the painting, the accompanying box features a faceted lens protruding from its front, which appears as though it was illuminated from within (Fig. 39). The box was partially open on top to let the light in. When first encountering the work, the viewer is unable to see what is inside the box until they are literally up against the glass and peering over the top of the box. This strategy of ‘conceal and reveal’ was intended to draw the viewer closer to the window and invite them to peer through the lens into the intimate universe of the miniature. Upon approaching the window, if they first peered over the top to see inside the half-open box, it became clear to the viewer that inside the box was a smaller version of the same painting – in fact, it was the original study for the picture.
Alternatively, if the viewer didn’t look over the top of the box and instead went straight for the illuminated lens, their experience differed. By this, I mean that they
97 were instead presented with an image corresponding to the large painting yet in fractured and flickering form. For this viewer, the scale of the image wasn’t clear. Several viewers thought the work was orchestrated through a more complex technological trick and many people thought that there were digital cameras and mirrors involved.
Visuality today is largely characterised by our experience of a world where the unprecedented fluidity and intensity of media imagery saturates our field of vision. Added to this is our fetishistic desire for and continuous connection to the latest sleek and unobtrusive digital devices – we have evolved into a world of hyper-visual observers and we expect sensory immersion at every turn. With this situation in mind, and as a counter-model, I have become interested in assessing the imaginative and speculative agency of comparatively bulky, hand-made, manual, and low-tech optical devices in the hope that they might provoke an unexpected sense of surprise within resolutely tech-savvy contemporary viewers. The intention of Staged Alternatives was to challenge what Australian art theorist Andrew McNamara criticises as a teleological inclination in ‘new media’ circles and contemporary societies more generally, to instead “look again without the lens of techno-teleological seduction”, that is, to play with the power of simple manual devices as an alternative way of mediating and tempting the contemporary observer’s view.115
Staged Alternatives was one of the first works made for my research project, which converged the two anachronistic forms central to my project. In doing so, I found critical synergy between ‘the device’ and ‘the dwelling’. The dome shaped dwellings
115 The teleological inclination fosters the assumption that new media transforms, then surpasses and eventually subsumes all previous technical-media possibilities (including all previous thought as well as all previous ways of doing art). The implication is that new technology instantly renders all prior media redundant along with their associated assumptions and worldviews. At its worst, this tacit teleological orientation assumes that contemporary technological advances only now permit thinking about virtuality, immersion and multi-media..In short, this techno-determinist discourse presumes that currently available communications technologies allow us to consider these possibilities today as if for the first time. See A. McNamara, The Myth of New Media, NMC Media-N: Journal of New Media Caucus, 2(3): online, 2006, viewed January 2013, http://eprints.qut.edu.au
98 became symbolic for other ways of living, and the viewing box, a starkly rudimentary optical device, became symbolic of other ways of seeing. Together they fulfilled the conceptual premise of my research: to establish fantasy-driven notions of looking for alternatives to currently prevailing ways of living: searching for other ways of seeing and being in the world. The work constructed a space for the viewer to gaze at the world through figurations of the outmoded.
My way of imagining other ways of being in the contemporary world contemplates ideas about the future by seeking out, investigating and re-imagining alternative ways of living in the past, and specifically by embracing cultural phenomena that might be considered historically superseded in the present.
I am not resistant to technological innovation; however, I agree with Andrew McNamara that sometimes we need to look beyond the seduction of the latest technology to “seek more complex amalgamations between the old and the new that appear far more equivocal”. 116 The shortcomings of dominant technological seduction were at the centre of a paper delivered by McNamara in 2006 at a conference at Queensland University themed Art in the Age of Technological Seduction. In his paper titled ‘The Myth of New Media’ (2006), McNamara states:
The teleological inclination fosters the assumption that new media transforms, then surpasses and eventually subsumes all previous technical- media possibilities (including all previous thought as well as all previous ways of doing art). The implication is that new technology instantly renders all prior media redundant along with their associated assumptions and worldviews.117
McNamara concludes that innovation and vanguardism in contemporary art can no longer be based simply on a fascination with the technologically up-to-date. In his
116 A. McNamara, ‘The Myth of New Media’, p. 5. 117 A. McNamara, ‘The Myth of New Media’, pp. 1-5.
99 view, it is the intersection and amalgamation of old and new that will lead to the most interesting ideas and practices in the sphere of politics and culture. He contends that we need to look again at the world without the “lens of techno- teleological seduction”.118
McNamara goes on:
We need to heed legacies for failures as much as successes and we also heed them to take account of how the vanguard stance in art persists today only in its transmutation. By this, I mean that it can no longer be identified simply with a fascination for the new, the up-to-date and the position of the ‘advanced force.’ Instead vanguardism in art has turned into a concern for the defunct, the by-passed, and the redundant (and perhaps to some extent this was true from the beginning, but we need to look again without the lens of techno-teleological seduction). This suggests a concern to seek more complex amalgamations between the old and the new that appear far more equivocal, far more ambiguous, fraught and perplexing. It is at the point of these incongruous amalgamations where contemporary art and new media practices and discourses will most fruitfully intersect.119
In present-day terms, our contemporary condition is overwhelmingly defined by the apparent difficulty of finding spaces that are outside the semiocapitalistic marketplace of late capitalism. The artwork I make and the studio-based research I am developing grapples with this situation by experimenting with the convergence of discarded forms from the past. In other words, I engage with forms and ideas that persist on the margins as history moves forward.
The outmoded forms I combine in the studio each belong to a time in the past when it seemed easier to imagine a space outside the dominant socio-economic
118 A. McNamara, ‘The Myth of New Media’, p. 5. 119 A. McNamara, ‘The Myth of New Media’, p. 5.
100 system, when faith in developing alternative visions of the world and the utopian imagination seemed more vital. I seek to historicise and combine these utopian pasts within my studio-based research, in an attempt to concretise in artistic form Benjamin’s politics of the outmoded as an “anti-productive symbolic form for imagining postmodernity otherwise”. 120 I engage in this operation for critical reasons, because regardless of the seeming impossibility of finding or reaching a space outside our globally networked commercial systems, our modes of production and consumption, and the all pervasive presence of multinational corporations, the fact remains that the simple desire to imagine such a place, to look for alternatives, remains critical – in Jamesonian terms – to the impulse driving any hope we have for rekindling our sense of utopian imagination for the future.
CONCLUSION In a recent article for Frieze Masters, titled ‘This is so Contemporary!’, Amelia Groom speaks of growing adjustments to “new thinking” in the discipline of art history on the subject of non-linear time.121 In her essay, which focuses on art’s relation to and perception of anachronism, she cites critical debates on issues of temporality in “this thing we precariously name contemporary art”. 122 Groom determines how discussions are now embracing readings of art history variously termed “polychronic, heterochronic and anachronic”.123 She also draws attention to a wave of recent exhibitions that have done away with chronological sequencing, “in order to suggest that the time and place in which a thing was made should not shut it off from other times and places”.124
Such a curatorial strategy has been embraced by David Walsh, the famously irreverent ‘overlord’ of Tasmania’s MONA (Museum of Old and New Art).125
120 J. Burges, The Uses of Obsolescence, p. 228. 121 A Groom, ‘This is so Contemporary’, Frieze Masters, issue 1, October 2012, viewed on 28/12/12, http://ameliagroom.com/?p=1200, p. 1. 122 A Groom, ‘This is so Contemporary’, p. 1. 123 A Groom, ‘This is so Contemporary’, p. 1. 124 A. Groom, ‘This is so Contemporary’, p. 2. 125 A. Groom, ‘This is so Contemporary’, p. 2.
101 Additionally, Groom refers to the curator of Documenta XIII, Carolyn Christov- Bakargiev, and reminds us how in speaking about Documenta XIII she implied that “all things in the visual field can be treated as con-temporary (literally ‘together with time’)”. 126 Finally, Groom turns to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations (1874), which stressed “the capacity to feel unhistorically”.127 Following this line of thinking, Groom refers to Giorgio Agamben, who in his text What is an Apparatus? (2009) riffs on Nietzsche’s ideas about who is deserving of being described as contemporary:
Those who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands… precisely through this disconnection and this anachronism, they are more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their own time.128
From here Groom suggests that Agamben has been particularly “lucid on the instabilities of chronology and the multiplicity of disjunctive times that make up the present”.129 Particularly poignant here is Groom’s final point, where she refers to Agamben as “finding unrealised potential in the archaic and obsolete, suggesting that old objects, techniques and ideas might just be waiting, unsatisfied with the limits of their epochs”.130 This is the kind of thinking that has informed my research project.
It is surprising, however, how little Groom’s essay acknowledges the philosophical precedents of Walter Benjamin. All of Groom’s assertions and citations suggest that a current tendency relative to the way cultural and aesthetic value is placed on things from the past is shifting, that is, at least within the contemporary art world. She hints at the possibility that consumer contempt towards ‘old stuff’ may have
126 A. Groom, ‘This is so Contemporary’, p. 2. 127 G. Agamben quoting F. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997, p. 60. 128 G. Agamben quoting Nietzsche, p. 60. 129 A. Groom, ‘This is so Contemporary’, p. 1. 130 A. Groom, ‘This is so Contemporary’, p. 1.
102 lessened. Her contention that a wave of recent exhibitions have done away with chronological sequencing and specific cultural context raises the question of the typically postmodern predicament Frederic Jameson speaks of – is this just another symptom of the end of temporality and our lack of historicity? Or, on the contrary, can this ‘new thinking’ be read as the opposite, perhaps an antidote to Jameson’s predicament; is this the emergence of a new way of thinking through history and indicative of a move towards historicity in new considerations of temporality? Is this retrieval, this recontextualisation of objects and ideas from the past, imbued as they are with memories and affective energies, evidence of what Burges describes as their ability to mark a sense of historical time?
As previously mentioned in the introductory chapter, the outmoded forms I examine and work with in the studio are, for me, distinct carriers of memory, both personal and cultural. In the following chapters I will delve into these repositories of memory and elaborate on my subjective connection to the aforementioned forms. From there I will expand the scope of my investigation to examine the larger cultural and historical value of these forms. In a recent publication titled Trash Culture: Objects and Obsolescence in Cultural perspective (2010), editor Gillian Pye draws on Benjamin’s impression of the obsolete in burgeoning consumer capitalism. Benjamin, she says, “described the immense force of atmosphere contained in the outmoded, revealing revolutionary energies emanating from the past”.131 She adds:
Benjamin’s notion of the value of the rags and scraps of society as evidence of another, alternative history, lies at the heart of debates about the place of material things in our understanding of time, and the relationship between memory and forgetting.132
In outlining the potency of things as “memory-banks”, Pye then refers to the writings of Bruno Latour and recounts his observations about “old things… still
131 G. Pye, Trash Culture: Objects and Obsolescence in Cultural perspective, Germany, Peter Lang AG, 2010, p. 2. 132 G. Pye, Trash Culture, p. 2.
103 appear quite full of use… of instructions”.133
According to Pye, in the late twentieth century and, in the context of environmental awareness, our attitude towards trash and waste, shifted, which she cites as different to the ideals of earlier industrialised society based on “heightened awareness that being wasteful in the ways we live is encouraged, expected and in many ways impossible to avoid”. 134 Pye claims that in present-day terms waste has been revalued and recoded from “rubbish to recyclable resource, it has moved from the bin to the compost heap, it has insinuated itself into our lives in different ways and with different effects”. 135 She goes on to associate this shift in value with an understanding of discards that is flexible, with real life impacts on our notions of innovation, creativity and social status. She reveals that studies in material culture in the last decades have offered insights into our understanding of trash as a resource of cultural and social practice. 136 I wish to suggest this underlying shift, re- evaluation and recodification of discarded forms must have some bearing on Burges’s figurations of the outmoded. Have we become more open as a society to the potentialities hidden within material and ideas that are apparently out-of-date? Does this openness have any bearing on the way we feel about revisiting obsolete ideas and reusing outmoded devices? Does this acceptance signal a new horizon of possibility for the utopian energies that Benjamin once ascribed to outmoded forms? If consumers no longer feel such contempt towards the outmoded, can they continue to possess critical fecundity? Or as Hal Foster remarked, ‘is the outmoded now outmoded too?’137
In this chapter I have demonstrated how, in a current context, the critical uses of outmoded forms are unlike they once were for Benjamin. It can be said that the utopian force field that he first attributed to obsolescence no longer resides in the ability of outmoded cultural forms to signal an outside to what has become the all-
133 B. Latour & P. M. Graves-Brown (ed), Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, p. 10. 134 G. Pye, Trash Culture, p. 4. 135 G. Pye, Trash Culture, p. 4. 136 G. Pye, Trash Culture, p. 4. 137 H. Foster, ‘The ABCs of Contemporary Design’, p. 198.
104 pervading interior of late capitalism. My summary of Burges’s analysis demonstrates how the onset of planned obsolescence caused a shift in the redemptive utopian energies Benjamin first attributed to the outmoded. I questioned whether, in a postmodern context, the criticality Benjamin first attributed to the outmoded had finally lost its critical relevance. I examined how Burges’s determines that the utopian spark originally attributed to outmoded forms might now be found in their mnemonic ability to give rise to a sense of historical time, signalling the possibility of historical change, amidst a current cultural climate which is largely described as overwhelmingly ahistorical. In this regard, it becomes possible to perceive of outmoded forms as representing an exception to the ahistorical rule, with their strongly imbued sense of historicity. In simple terms, outmoded forms today are embalmed with a powerful historically charged sense. Through their anti- productive status and in the instrumental process of being surpassed by new forms, obsolete forms inevitably remain as history moves forward. Obsolete forms do not disappear; they accumulate as indexes for historical change. Residual forms contour a sense of historical time through a mnemonic dimension and this is precisely how the outmoded still possesses critical agency. What I have argued in this chapter, and wish to further demonstrate in the chapters that follow, is how this recursive turn to outmodedness stresses a mode of representation indicative of a tendency that finds continually renewed critical purchase in art, and especially insofar as it is inherent in a logic that I have recognised in my own art practice.
The use of the videotape in Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro’s Lifespan served as an initial example of this propensity in contemporary art. I explored how en masse the tower of tapes marks a strong sense of historical time through a specifically mnemonic quality. Finally, as suggested by Bishop in her essay ‘Digital Divide’, there does appear to be a fashion amongst many contemporary artists to employ analogue or obsolete media because of an attraction to the materiality of pre-digital technology.
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Figure 40: Todd McMillian, After the Deluge, 2008.
Australian artist Todd McMillian’s use of overhead projectors in the series No More Light (2011) (Fig. 40) and Tacita Dean’s large-scale homage to processes of Celluloid cinema titled FILM (2012) are just two examples amongst a very long list who fall into this category. But unlike Bishop’s cynicism toward artist’s so-called repressed relationship to the digital, my understanding of artists working in this way and with these forms is more closely aligned with that of Groom, Latour and Burges. I make reference to these thinkers as a way of providing a counter- argument to Bishop’s, as each claim the appeal of remnants of previous times illuminates artists-argument to Bishop’s, as each claim the appeal of enc
106 temporalities and not just the allure of the new. Additionally, I would suggest that embedded within these discarded objects is a mnemonic charge and a utopian energy full of promise and symbolic alternative possibilities. To ‘write-off’ the contemporary artistic turn to obsolescence as just an aesthetic trend governed by commercial viability, as Bishop has, is to overlook the strong sense of poetry belonging to these older forms.
My aim throughout this chapter has been to lay the theoretical groundwork for the chapters to come by focusing on how a retrieval of the utopian Benjaminian notion of the outmoded might continue to offer exciting possibilities for artists as fertile ground for positing alternatives to the present and imagining the contemporary world as it might be otherwise in our apparent ‘post-memory present’, and amidst our time of capitalist totalisation.
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CHAPTER TWO EXAMINING VISUALITY AND RENEWING WONDER
108 A young girl sits quietly in her bedroom sorting carefully through her favourite collection. She is alone and she is very busy. As she lays the reels out one by one in perfectly aligned rows of three she notices that each one has a ring of small shiny square windows, each numbered, corners rounded, with writing under each slide. When she first started her collection, she was very young, so she’d ask her mother to read her the descriptions complementing each image. She’d hold the discs up to the light and peek at their contents before putting them inside the magic machine. But now that she’s a little older she wouldn’t dare go about it like that, the very thought of doing it that way horrified her, it’s just not the way it’s done.
All she cares for is the surprise inside, because this is where the little worlds live. So, she closes her eyes and with a dreamy steadiness she runs her tiny fingers over the equally tiny windows, she giggles to herself and quickly inserts the disc into the viewer and lifts it to her eyes and angles her head towards the sunny window. She pauses so as to savour the moment. Now she is ready to start the magic show. She opens her eyes.
This is a world that is just for her. It is silent, yet saturated in the wildest swirls and loops of colour – it is tiny, nevertheless it feels incredibly vast. It’s like looking at a dramatic sunset or a gigantic star-soaked night sky, though somehow it’s all neatly packed inside the most magic of little machines.
There is always a process and it is always the same. Only a couple of the little worlds have that magical effect on her now, but it’s important that she journey through the whole collection each time and at some stage, unknowingly, she’ll stumble across the good ones, the marvellous ones. She always knows the wonder that is coming, yet each time it does, it is just as beautiful because she’s always happy to absorb herself in the ritual, no matter how contrived.
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Figure 41: View-Master circa 1980.
INTRODUCTION The previous passage recalls a particularly vivid memory I associate with being a young child happily playing alone, sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor with a View-Master in hand (Fig. 41).138 This memory came to light in the early stages of my research as I considered the subjective imperative feeding my preoccupation with obsolete viewing devices.
This chapter will pay specific attention to the optical device, one of the two outmoded forms at the core of my research. My interest in optical devices is specific and does not span the entire history of optical media, nor does it encompass the whole period commonly known as ‘pre-cinematic’. The particular devices that have
138 The View-Master is a modern interpretation of the stereoscope. It is an inexpensive plastic device that is usually marketed as either a children’s toy or a kitsch tourist souvenir – in line with the Snow Dome. The View-Master has been a popular toy and curio since the 1950s.
110 captivated my imagination and consequentially led to deeper historical examination, theoretical analysis and practical experimentation are the stereoscope, the kaleidoscope and the peepshow.
In an essay written in 2004 titled ‘Renewing Old Technologies: Astonishment, Second Nature, and the Uncanny in Technology from the Previous Turn of the Century’ (2004), art historian Tom Gunning asks what can be learnt from a cultural history of technology. 139 In his account he examines how technologies in the modern age have a direct relation to what he calls “the phenomenon of innovation and novelty”.140 Gunning outlines the general tendencies in historical modernism that have described the discourse of modernity as “not only one of innovation, but precisely one of novelty, maximizing the dazzling experience of the new”.141 From here he goes on to investigate a specific scenario: “[imagining] an old technology as something that was once new means, therefore, to recapture a quality it has lost”.142 Gunning believes the line from amazement to habit, that is, when technology becomes part of everyday routine, is, in his opinion, not as stable a forward-moving trajectory as we think.143 Gunning proposes that an examination of this move from “dazzling appearance to nearly invisible utility” allows us to interrogate this transition as expressing “the cultural myths of modernity it assumes and creates”.144 He also points to the instability of this path from amazement to habit as explaining our fascination with rediscovering technology at its point of novelty, as a way of trying to renew its lost sense of wonder.145 In a sense, Gunning is referring to an examination of the path towards obsolescence in a similar light to Joel Burges’s previously noted exploration of the uses of obsolescence.
139 T. Gunning, ‘Renewing Old Technologies: Astonishment, Second Nature, and the Uncanny in Technology from the Previous Turn of the Century’, Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, editors D. Thorburn and H. Jenkins, MIT Press, USA, 2004, p. 39. 140 T. Gunning, ‘Renewing Old Technologies’, p. 39. 141 T. Gunning, ‘Renewing Old Technologies’, p. 43. 142 T. Gunning, ‘Renewing Old Technologies’, p. 39. 143 T. Gunning, ‘Renewing Old Technologies’, p. 39. 144 T. Gunning, ‘Renewing Old Technologies’, p. 39. 145 T. Gunning, ‘Renewing Old Technologies’, p. 39.
111 Gunning’s essay is detailed and addresses a broad range of issues, which are neither possible nor appropriate for me to investigate in detail here. There is, however, one specific facet of his argument of relevance to my line of inquiry. Gunning develops a theory describing the “uncanny route to return”, in which he addresses the proposition of searching for the novelty of old technology and questions if the sense of lost wonder might be renewed. 146 Gunning follows Sigmund Freud’s theories of uncanny experience, touching on the notion of the repression of infantile complexes, which might be revived by some subsequent impression.147 He then moves towards Freud’s notion of primitive beliefs, referring to magical and superstitious ideas, of which he states, “Freud as a rationalist felt mankind had properly discarded, but which, as a psychologist, he acknowledged remained preserved under a thin disguise.”148 For Gunning, “Freud’s primitive beliefs recall the discourse of wonder that marks the introduction of new technology, picturing them as magical creations.”149 Gunning reveals that the uncanny understood by Freud “harks back to childhood beliefs of animism and the omnipotence of thoughts”.150 He highlights the way many of us first experience technology through the lens of manufactured fairy tales and childlike myth.151 For Gunning, there is a connection here, between childhood wonder and technology, residing underneath what he terms “a later learned rationality”.152 Gunning concludes:
In other words, new technologies evoke not only a short-lived wonder based on unfamiliarity which greater and constant exposure will overcome, but also a possibly less dramatic but more enduring sense of the uncanny, a feeling that they involve magical operations which with greater familiarity or habituation might cover over, but not totally destroy. It crouches there
146 T. Gunning, ‘Renewing Old Technologies’, p. 43. 147 T. Gunning, ‘Renewing Old Technologies’, p. 47. 148 T. Gunning, ‘Renewing Old Technologies’, p. 47. 149 T. Gunning, ‘Renewing Old Technologies’, p. 47. 150 T. Gunning, ‘Renewing Old Technologies’, p. 47. 151 T. Gunning, ‘Renewing Old Technologies’, p. 47. Gunning’s point here is relevant to my first experience of technology. My independent visual exploration, aided by my View-Master machine, recalls this sense of wonder and is one of my earliest and most vivid childhood memories. 152 T. Gunning, ‘Renewing Old Technologies’, p. 47.
112 beneath rational cover, ready to spring out again.153
In this sense, Gunning’s passage from wonder to habit will not always run one way. He claims three methods for the uncanny route to return or for the re-enchantment of old technology. The first is re-enchantment through aesthetic de-familiarisation; the second, the traumatic surfacing of allayed fears and anxieties; and the third category (most relevant to my experience and attraction to the stereoscope), which Gunning describes as “the uncanny re-emergence of earlier stages of magical thinking”.154
Figure 42: Detail from View-Master slide, Charlie Brown, circa 1980.
The View-Master holds particular poignancy for me, insofar as it activates my earliest and most vivid memories of image-based reverie as a child. In this regard, I feel an affinity with Gunning’s theories concerning the uncanny re-emergence of earlier stages of magical thinking. The pictured Charlie Brown slides are reproductions of some of the View-Master images that I have a particularly strong association with (Fig. 42). In retrospect, I can now see why, at the earliest point of my research project, the View-Master was the first optical device I became interested in working with in the studio. Later in the chapter, I will provide an account detailing how the View-Master has been utilised within my practice-based
153 T. Gunning, Renewing Old Technologies’ p. 47. 154 T. Gunning, Renewing Old Technologies’ p. 47.
113 experiments, eventually becoming an integral mode of display for a series of small- scale paintings for my final exhibition.
THE STEREOSCOPE, KALEIDOSCOPE AND PEEPSHOW: A PECULIAR WAY OF SEEING The stereoscope, kaleidoscope and peep-box, in particular, each offer the observer an experience that draws attention to the physiological nature of vision. By this I mean the very act of looking through a lens or viewing portal is often peculiar and sometimes frustratingly restricted. The eyes strain when looking through a lens or viewfinder and this experience prompts an awareness of the way our eyes focus and shift as they navigate their way through an internalised image. This type of ocular experience causes the eyes to suddenly feel more sensitive as we consider their physicality – an awareness we usually take for granted.
The view through a stereoscope provides a controlled and intensified style of vision. In this way, it differs to the conventional modes for viewing images we have become largely accustomed to in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such as the large- scale projections of cinema, or images seen on the computer screen or television, those found in books and magazines, on advertising billboards, or on the art gallery wall. In each of these instances, the image is generally at a comfortable distance from the eyes and ambient space allows it to ‘breathe’ and rest. This level of optical comfort means the viewer is capable of forgetting that the eyes are actively at work in the act of looking. Cinema, in particular, is often considered immersive because it allows for a relatively disembodied and passive experience – pleasant seating, surround sound and low lighting create an accommodating environment in which to forget one’s self and become lost in narrative and audio-visual atmospherics. In stark contrast, the phenomenology of viewing imagery through a stereoscope is marked by the physical contact the observer has with the actual device: the stereoscopic apparatus is always felt, held in the observer’s hands and pressed up to the eyes in order to see the interior image (Fig. 43). In this way, it is hard to suspend belief in the same way we do in the cinema.
114
Figure 43: Stereoscopes in use, nineteenth century.
The ‘in-your-face’ proximity of the stereoscopic image blocks out all peripheral vision and places unusual stress on the eyes, and for this reason it has often been described as a type of tunnel vision. No matter how visually seductive an image seen through the lens of a stereoscope, the physical demands imposed by this mode of viewing, as well as the separation it instigates between the observer and the image, indicates this is a viewing device that does not enable immersion akin to that of the cinema.155 Moreover, we are always aware of our bodies in viewing this way because of the physical and haptic demands of the device.
155 Virtual reality technologies that combine elements of cinema and stereoscopy (with the use of a mask-like optical device) have in a sense successfully combined the immersive aspects of cinema with facets of the stereoscope through the close proximity of the image inside the viewing mask worn in virtual reality scenarios. However, it is not the objective of my thesis to investigate this type of immersive experience, as will become clear in the latter stages of this chapter. Instead I wish to show how the ‘lure and block’ dynamic of these older optical devices, coupled with images derived from countercultural dwellings, satisfies the conceptual and experiential function of my central thesis proposition.
115 The two other optical devices I am working with provide a similar viewing experience. It is true that, once a viewer peers into a lens or a viewing portal, it quickly becomes apparent that their view is restricted by a type of managed focus; to be tempted by the promise of illusory absorption of this kind is bittersweet because total immersion is ultimately denied. I wish to suggest that this way of observing imagery (through a lens or viewing portal) might then be understood as simultaneously absorptive and obstructive. Taking this line of inquiry further, the experience of being seduced into looking at an image through a lens may also be defined by a unique ‘lure and block’ dynamic. Primarily, it was through my practice- based engagement with these now out-of-date devices, as well as my research into their social and epistemological history, that the basic ‘lure and block’ dynamic – that is, the simultaneity of absorption and obstruction, between the observer and their access to the interior image – was first realised and then explored. It was my initial realisation that this ‘lure and block’ dynamic was a distinct characteristic belonging to the stereoscopic viewing experience that led me to explore Jonathan Crary’s theories regarding vision and its historical construction in his book Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (1990). From here, I became interested in exploring which other optical viewing devices satisfy the same ‘lure and block’ criteria. As mentioned previously, it is for this reason that the kaleidoscope and peepshow became the viewing devices I decided to experiment with in the studio (Fig. 44). These devices each possessed a related ‘lure and block’ experience constructing a very specific dynamic for the observer. Later in the chapter, I will explain in detail why this experiential aspect is important in terms of communicating my central thesis proposition.
116
Figure 44: Wes looking through a kaleidoscope.
It is useful to reiterate here that the outmoded forms I combine in the studio each belong to a time in the past when it seemed easier to imagine a space outside the dominant system, when faith in developing alternative visions of the world and the utopian imagination seemed more vital. I seek to historicise and combine these utopian pasts within my studio-based research in an attempt to concretise in artistic mode Benjamin’s politics of the outmoded as “an anti-productive symbolic form for imagining postmodernity otherwise”. 156 I will further elaborate on the nuanced articulation of my adoption of optical devices – in particular, in relation to my construction of a contemporary politics of the outmoded – later in the chapter.
In what follows, I will investigate the optical devices of relevance to my practice- based interests. I will situate historical and cultural analysis alongside a discussion concerning the findings of my written research and how it relates to the way my practice has evolved. I will also provide a discussion of a recent work by Zoe Leonard, examining how she has employed facets of largely superseded optical media within her practice. I will assess whether Leonard adopts these forms as a
156 J. Burges, The Uses of Obsolesence, p. 228.
117 way of negotiating a contemporary politics of the outmoded, as I have, or if she instead taps into outmoded forms for other reasons.
A CRARYIAN APPROACH TO THE CONSTRUCTION OF MODERN VISION The study of physiological optics was an extensive field of scholarship within the empirical sciences of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary draws our attention to the stereoscope and kaleidoscope, amongst a variety of other optical media. He develops an historical account focusing on the emergence of these devices as they transitioned from objects of scientific research to popular amusements of early mass-culture. For Crary, these devices point to the onset of a new condition, through a freeing up of the unyielding structure of the camera obscura as the prevailing philosophical model of human vision, in what he refers to as ‘a falling-away of the rigid structures that had shaped it’. 157 In simple terms, Crary aligns the invention of the stereoscope and the kaleidoscope alongside a host of other optically based inventions, as experimental by-products of the study of physiological optics. Crary reveals this as a facet of their history often overlooked. Crary demonstrates how these scientific inventions, assimilated into mass-visual culture, contributed a modernisation and abstraction of vision in the nineteenth century, enacting “the uprooting of vision from the more inflexible representational system of the camera obscura”.158
The next portion of this chapter will extrapolate a Craryian construction of modern vision in an attempt to frame the historically transformative significance of now obsolete optical technologies. A critical aspect of my discussion operates under a proviso put forward by Crary in the opening paragraph of Techniques of the Observer. Here, he considers the current abstraction and overwhelming immanence of the visual today, largely defined by the exponential proliferation of digital and informational technologies, which are, according to Crary, “relocating vision to a
157 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 1990, p. 24. 158 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 113.
118 plane severed from a human observer”.159 This he argues marks another epochal transformation in the nature of visuality. For Crary, this current transformation is as profound as the nineteenth century one that forms the crux of his research. Moreover, he suggests that, in order to engage questions concerning current transformations of visuality and the observing subject, it is important to reconstruct part of the historical background that gave way to the abstraction characterising visuality today. From Crary’s perspective, some of the events and forces that took place in the nineteenth century produced a new type of observing subject, which he regards as “crucial preconditions for the ongoing abstraction of vision”.160
Regardless of the fact that these devices were invented hundreds of years ago, and countless technological advancements have arguably rendered their original and once unique function obsolete, I wish to suggest one significant characteristic remains – they persist as a form of simple technological mediation, providing the viewer with an optical aid for seeing images. In what follows, I will demonstrate how these largely outmoded devices continue to offer enticing ways to see and engage with imagery. In addition to this, my examination of Crary’s thesis evidences my active historicising methodology as I attempt to incorporate these specific optical devices into my practice. Reiterating the argument I sought to establish in the previous chapter, I have lifted these forms and ideas out of their time, but not without a consideration of the time and place from whence they emerged. Integral to my fascination with them, as well as my use of them, is my concurrent theoretical investigation into the genealogy of their passage through time. As I have previously shown through my examination of Burges’s thesis, and as he suggests in his critical analysis of Krauss, it is crucial that we must first historicise in order to discover a contemporary politics of the outmoded.
To substantiate my claim that a re-engagement with these types of visual technologies continues to appeal to the contemporary viewer, despite the plethora
159 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 1. 160 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, pp. 1-3.
119 of digital alternatives available, I will provide an analysis of the history and cultural context of these early technologies. The key texts that have formed the central axis along which my theoretical framework is formed are Crary’s Techniques of the Observer (1990), Rosalind Krauss’s The Optical Unconscious (1993), along with several other essays by these two theorists. I have chosen Crary and Krauss for their unconventional perspective on the early nineteenth-century development of visuality within modern society, as well as their respective arguments addressing the idea of subjective vision, that is, vision produced within the body, regarded as autonomous and separate from any external referent. But what is contentious about both Crary and Krauss’s viewpoints is their shared position of diametrically opposing Clement Greenberg’s historical construction of autonomous vision. Crary and Krauss contest the Greenbergian account of artistic modernism, which defines abstract painting of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as manifestating disembodied and autonomous vision.
Through Clement Greenberg’s conception of abstract expressionism the promotion of an isolation of vision from the other senses was born out of a hierarchical agenda to elevate and purify the sense of sight from the body. The ‘cleansing of sight’ is part of a broader argument that characterises the binary thinking of form verses content that informed Greenberg’s theory of late modernist painting.
Alternatively, Krauss reconfigures the field of twentieth-century art in The Optical Unconscious and in a collaborative work with Yves-Alain Bois titled Formless: A Users Guide (1997), in which it is suggested that there is a third and historically overlooked field of vision – that of the formless.161 Formlessness stands outside of the binary thinking of Greenbergian formalism. Formlessness is a concept developed out of the philosophical theories of George Bataille’s Informe, from 1929. According to Krauss and Bois, Bataille described the formless as subversive of the
161 Y. A. Bios & R. E. Krauss, Formless: A Users Guide, Zone Books, New York and Cambridge, 1997.
120 traditional duality of form and content.162 They adopt Bataille’s theory and apply it to their reinterpretation of twentieth century modernist art. They characterise the formless as horizontal, non-hierarchical – a base materialism. In The Optical Unconscious Krauss refers to particular art practices spanning the 1920s to the 1950s as embodying a disruptive, yet largely repressed, force, overlooked in formalist frameworks of twentieth-century modernism. Amongst those artists she refers to are Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Eva Hesse and Jackson Pollock.163
Furthermore, both Crary and Krauss offer an alternative and broader view of the modernisation of vision through an examination of philosophy, science and an emerging mass visual culture, rather than focusing solely on modernist art (particularly painting). Both theorists challenge the Greenbergian notion of modernism through their elaboration of a paradigmatic shift that relocates vision within the visceral thickness of the body. The association of vision and corporality reflects the idea of base materialism that Krauss defines as formlessness. Thus, when I refer to subjective or autonomous vision within this chapter I do so from a Craryian and Kraussian perspective.
In Techniques of the Observer, Crary focuses on the historical construction of the observer and visual culture in the nineteenth century. His study is unconventional because it challenges dominant theories of Western visuality that emphasise a continuous Western visual tradition, wherein technological determinism is the driving force responsible for the camera obscura’s gradual evolution towards photography and cinema. Contrary to this dominant historical narrative (often associated with ‘Cartesian perspectivalism’), Crary outlines certain discontinuities that the majority of studies of modernity have overlooked.
Because I am working from a Craryian model of vision, the following paragraphs will echo the chapter format of Crary’s text. Through this process, I will touch on
162 Y. A. Bios & R. Krauss, Formless: A Users Guide, p. 14. 163 Y. A. Bios & R. Krauss, Formless: A Users Guide.
121 the major points of relevance to my line of inquiry, developing a condensed account of Crary’s historical construction of vision. I will then refer to facets of Crary’s findings to validate my subsequent engagement with the range of optical devices experimented with in the studio, elucidating how my written and practice based outcomes have come together in this facet of my research.
A synopsis of Crary’s argument is broken up into three sections. The first describes a camera obscura model of vision, the second highlights the camera obscura’s decline and outlines the key findings in the third chapter of Techniques of the Observer, called ‘Subjective Vision and the Separations of the Senses’. The third will focus on the stereoscope, extrapolating Crary’s positioning of the device’s potential to construct a modern observer.
From here, I will broaden the scope of the discussion to investigate the other devices of relevance to my research: the kaleidoscope and peepshow, paying particular attention to how they figure in my practice.
THE CAMERA OBSCURA
Figure 45: Historical etching depicting the basic operation of a camera obscura, circa 1646.
122 In its simplest form, the camera obscura consists of a dark chamber or room with a small circular hole in one wall (Fig. 45). Light travels through the hole from the outside and shines onto the opposite wall projecting an inverted mirror image of the scene outside. To reveal how significant the shift in the nineteenth-century regime of vision was, it is crucial to establish an understanding of the model of vision that preceded it. What Crary calls the “camera obscura model”, with its structural and optical principles, determined the status of an observer for some two hundred years (1500s to 1700s). 164 This model of vision is also broadly known as Cartesian perspectivalism or geometrical optics. In his analysis, Crary places emphasis on how the camera obscura should not be thought of as merely a technological device, but as connected to a broader organisation of knowledge.
Figure 46: Historical etching depicting a range of different types of camera obscurae.
164 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 8.
123 He suggests this highly problematic object was far more than simply an optical device. For over two hundred years it subsisted as a philosophical metaphor, a model in the science of physical optics, and was also a technical apparatus used in a large range of cultural activities.165
The key characteristics Crary focuses on in his account of the apparatus draw on the relation it generates between an interiorised observer and an external world. The observer of the camera obscura era enjoyed the illuminated, transparent projection of images of the outside world. When the camera obscura first came into prominence, the observer’s experience would have been of an ephemeral spectacle because images of the world seen were not fixed on a surface, but disappeared as soon as the light was extinguished. Crary cites the early sixteenth century as the time when the camera obscura started to define relations between observer and world.166 He describes this as a process in which:
The camera obscura performs an operation of individuation; that is, it necessarily defines an observer as isolated, enclosed, and autonomous within its dark confine. It impels a kind of askesis, or withdrawal from the world, in order to regulate and purify one’s relation to the manifold contents of the now exterior.167
Here Crary demonstrates how, at the same time another related and, in his words “decisive”, function of the camera was:
To sunder the act of seeing from the physical body of the observer, to decorporealize vision. The monadic viewpoint of the individual is authenticated and legitimised by the camera obscura, but the observer’s
165 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 29. 166 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 38. 167 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 39.
124 physical and sensory experience is supplanted by the relations between a mechanical apparatus and a pre-given world of objective truth.168
Crary refers to Sir Issac Newton’s Opicks, or a Treatie of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light (1730), as well as John Locke’s essay ‘Concerning Human Understanding’ (1690), as two texts in which the camera is positioned in terms of its formation of the interiorised and disembodied subject. In this respect Crary explains, the body becomes a problem that the camera obscura could not reconcile because it is not a physical part of the representation. To support his claim, he invokes Locke’s treatise noting that “an important feature of Locke’s text here is how the metaphor of the dark room effectively distances us from the apparatus he describes… The eye of the observer is completely separate from the apparatus that allows the entrance and formation of pictures or resemblances.”169
Crary understands thought and scholarship surrounding human vision in the 1700s as focused on the awkwardness of human vision in its binocular capacities, which apparently rendered human vision unreliable, especially when compared to the monocular aperture of the camera obscura. In this way, the camera obscura represented a truth the human body was not capable of accessing without an apparatus. In simple terms, under this regime, the human eye could not be trusted. Crary refers to thinkers of the eighteenth century as having an anti-optical notion of sight.170 When comparing eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century notions of vision and sense perception, he talks about the earlier century as a field of knowledge that’s contents were organised as stable positions within an extensive terrain. However, in the nineteenth century, the fixed nature of knowledge in the earlier era became incompatible with a field classified by exchange, flux and commodities that were essentially optical, such as the stereoscope. Central to Crary’s argument is the way the collapse of the camera obscura as a model for the condition of an observer was part of the process of modernisation.
168 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 40. 169 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 42. 170 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 62.
125 In her most recent series of exhibitions, artist Zoe Leonard has sought to reactivate the now long-since-outmoded camera obscura. 171 Art critic Wes Hill reviewed Available Light, one in this series of camera obscura exhibitions in Cologne at Galerie Gisela Captain in 2011. Hill describes Leonard’s practice as “fascinated by what is overlooked by cultures under the spell of progress”. 172 Notably, Hill’s assertion echoes Leonard’s own response in the October survey, as cited in the previous chapter. Leonard declares, “Progress is always an exchange. We gain something, we give something else up. I’m interested in looking at some of what we are losing.”173 In this series of camera obscura works, Leonard uses the historical device to cast our attention towards a conversation about photography in which she, as a photographer and teacher, has inevitably become involved. Leonard is concerned with what photography is today and what it does, in what she refers to as an attempt to think about it in a more expansive way.174
In an interview for Art in America in June 2012, Courtney Fiske describes her experience of the exhibition:
For her first show at Murray Guy in New York, Zoe Leonard turned half the gallery into a camera obscura in order to consider photography anew (Fig. 46). The fourth installation in an ongoing series, Leonard's Lens, 453 West 17th Street (2012), cast an inverted panorama of the street outside, complete with a lustrous high-rise, across the gallery's dimmed interior. As their eyes adjusted to the low lighting, viewers found themselves immersed in an uncanny image. Glass-and-steel geometries spread across the floor and walls, while pedestrians, taxis, and trucks traversed the ceiling's beams.
171 Since 2010 Zoe Leonard has staged a number of exhibitions using the camera obscura in conjunction with images of the sun. To date, she exhibited this series in Cologne, London and New York. 172 W. Hill, ‘Zoe Leonard’, Frieze, 24/10/11, viewed on 12 April 2013, http://murrayguy.com/wpcontent/uploads/2013/01/Hill_Frieze_2_20111.pdf 173 Z. Leonard, ‘Artist’s Questionnaire’, October 100, 2002, p. 90. 174 Z. Leonard, ‘500 Words’, Art Forum, 04/05/12, viewed on 20 April 2013, http://artforum.com/words/id=30700
126 Never resolving into a coherent scene, the street's shifting forms demanded decelerated, sustained viewing.175
In an adjacent room, five selections from Leonard’s series of sun photographs (2011–12) imaged the solar surface in a spectrum of aquarelle greys (Fig. 48). Nailed directly to the wall without protective glass, each print betrayed traces of process – grain, scratches, and other subtle imperfections – framed by the negative’s black border. Fiske writes, “The pairing of these series produced two divergent visions of what photography can be: the first, durational and unfixed; the second, bound to paper and resolutely analog.176
In an accompanying interview with Fiske, Leonard explains combining the camera obscura and images of the sun as a way for her to start over – to step back and think about the process of producing and looking at images. 177 Fiske asks Leonard questions relating to the way in which many of today’s artists and critics consider analogue photography as a mode of resistance to the totalising regime of the digital; she also highlights how others criticise it for its nostalgia or preciousness. 178 Leonard admits that she mostly shoots analogue and that she finds a specific beauty in the way film registers light and takes on a grainy look due to the process of light transposing to film and then from film to paper. However, Leonard also acknowledges that analogue photography is becoming fetishised in our society. Leonard’s particular position as an established photographer is interesting because she has seen first-hand the technological changes of photography during the past few decades. She started as a photographer in the 1970s, when analogue was standard and wasn’t perceived as precious, nor did it seem to be heading towards the obsolete status it occupies today. Leonard claims that she does not consider
175 C. Fiske, ‘In-Camera: Q+A with Zoe Leonard’, Art in America, 06/11/12, viewed on 4 January 2013, http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/conversations/2012-11-06/zoe- leonard-murray-guy/ 176 C. Fiske, ‘In-Camera: Q+A with Zoe Leonard’, Art in America, 06/11/12. 177 C. Fiske in conversation with Leonard, p. 2. 178 C. Fiske, in conversation with Leonard, p. 2.
127
Figure 47: Zoe Leonard, Lens, 453 West 17th Street, 2012, Murray Guy Gallery.
Figure 48: Zoe Leonard, Lens, 453 West 17th Street, 2012, Murray Guy Gallery.
128 analogue better than digital or vice-versa; rather, she sees them as different image- making processes.179 She explains her position in detail, articulating how she does not:
… see photography as a set of binaries: analog versus digital, material versus subject or abstraction versus representation. I've been trying to find ways to pose a more expansive set of questions: How do we see? Why do we depict? What do we want out of this terrain of picture making? The sun photographs and the camera obscurae offer a way for me to engage with these questions visually. They're an effort to work through the process of being a person who looks and makes images – and by that I don't only mean myself. I mean us as a society. Why take pictures? Why show each other these things?180
Leonard’s choice to step back from current debates surrounding the binary logic of analogue versus digital stems from a desire to investigate, as she states, a more expansive set of questions beyond those dominated by issues of progress versus nostalgia, old versus new. For Leonard, there are bigger issues at hand as an artist working with photography today. This, she states, is an emotional moment for us as a society. She declares:
… we have strong feelings about photographs, and I don't think we know what the status of the image is right now. The lines between information, art and personal snapshots – whether captured on phones or posted on Facebook – are completely fluid. It's a fascinating moment to try to take a picture.181
179 C. Fiske in conversation with Leonard, p. 2. 180 C. Fiske in conversation with Leonard, p. 2. 181 C. Fiske in conversation with Leonard, p. 2.
129
Figure 49: Zoe Leonard, Arkwright Road, 2012. Installation view at Camden Arts Centre.
Figure 50: Zoe Leonard, Arkwright Road, 2012. Installation view at Camden Arts Centre.
130 Leonard’s camera obscura series is particularly relevant to the central questions posed by my research, because it offers an example of a contemporary artist revisiting outmoded and anachronistic technologies of vision.
Leonard’s choice to ‘lift’ the camera obscura out of its historic time and place and restage it for a contemporary audience shows us how, in her opinion, its unique and deeply archaic way of imaging the world might hold some clues in negotiating some of the current questions surrounding what photography is and what it can be today. Moreover, Leonard’s gallery-sized camera obscura challenges contemporary notions of perception and visual experience (Figs 49, 50).
I wish to suggest that Leonard’s discussion of the current unstable and shifting nature of photographic imagery – our relationship with photography and visual perception at large – indicates that she has made recourse to the camera obscura for its historical purchase. Her recursive turn to outmodedness, through her reuse of the camera obscura, stresses a mode of historical representation indicative of a critical tendency that finds renewed currency in contemporary visual art. What is more, the way Leonard reconstructs the unique viewing experience of the camera obscura illustrates how the retrieval of the utopian dimension of Benjamin’s notion of outmodedness can open up unexpected channels and conversations towards imagining alternatives to currently prevailing realities. Similar to Jonathan Crary’s methodology in Techniques of the Observer, Leonard navigates her way through the current shifts concerning visuality and perception by looking back at earlier anachronistic pre-photographic ways of seeing. Not only has Leonard restaged a largely outmoded way of seeing the world, she has, in a sense, reinvented it.
Traditionally, the image of the outside world produced by the camera obscura was projected onto a flat wall or sheet of paper to capture the image on a flattened and organised plane. Following Crary’s theories about the camera obscura, the containment and formalisation of the image onto a sheet of paper or corresponding wall might be associated with the scientific order and logical doctrine of the camera
131 obscura model of vision, as a rationalising instrument portraying a pre-given world of objective truth. Here, vision is decorporealised and the act of seeing the world is separated from the physical body of the observer and supplanted by an apparently ‘objective’ mechanical lens and projected onto an ordered planar surface.
However, in Leonard’s camera obscura the image produced subverts this notion of objective and ordered truth, as well as challenging what Crary described as the decorporealisation of vision by bathing her audience in the image, literally covering their bodies in the camera’s projection. Rather than capturing a flattened and ordered impression of the world beyond the gallery walls onto a screen or wall, she creates the opposite effect. As they move through the space, viewers have to look up to see traffic moving across the ceiling, the architecture from across the street merging with that of the gallery space, the clouds gliding across the gallery floor.
Leonard’s camera obscura evokes an experience that is beyond the binary issues dominating discourse about photography and image-making; she describes the work as concerned instead with making visible the mechanics of sight, to evoke a reconsideration of ways of seeing. In her artist’s statement, she says, “what happens inside resembles what transpires in one’s eye”.182 And further she concludes, “as visitors to the gallery move between the two rooms – one light and one dark, each the inversion of the other – their pupils will dilate and contract, re-calibrating their vision like the aperture of the camera’s lens”.183 In this way, upon visiting the exhibition the viewer is required to spend time with the works as they move from the light space into the dark space, as their eyes re-adjust to dramatically changed lighting effects. The shift in lighting demanded that the typically fast-tracked and hyper-stimulated contemporary observer break their usual pace to let the dappled images slowly unfold.
182 Z. Leonard, artist statement on the occasion of her solo exhibition, 453 West 17th Street, Lens and Darkened Room, Murray Guy Gallery, New York, 2012. Viewed on 4 January 2013, http://murrayguy.com/exhibitions/zoe-leonard/, p. 1. 183 Z. Leonard, artist statement, p. 1.
132 Recalling Tom Gunning’s formulations regarding the uncanny return of redundant technologies, the camera obscura evokes the sense of wonder that ephemeral images of this kind, no matter how anachronistic, continue to transmit. Upon its re- emergence within a contemporary art context, the camera obscura is understood as an outmoded form, yet it is imbued with a powerful historically charged sense and uncanny affect. With its pre-analogue, pre-photographic, pre-digital simplicity, the camera obscura reminds us anew of how vision is a constructed process.
THE END OF THE CAMERA OBSCURA MODEL AND THE BIRTH OF SUBJECTIVE VISION By the early nineteenth century the camera obscura ceased to be the dominant model for vision. Crary refers to the image of the dark room of the camera obscura as a space suddenly abandoned. His discussion of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s influential book Theory of Colors (1840) illustrates this new attitude towards visual experience. Crary refers to the opening paragraphs of Goethe’s text, in which he describes an individual inside a camera obscura when the opening that once let the light through is dramatically closed off. In this critical act of ‘closing off’ a new discovery is made and, as a result, an ephemeral display of merging colours appears before the viewer. The following description of Goethe’s seminal formulation, his ‘closing off’ the opening of the camera obscura, further clarifies Crary’s claim regarding this new regime of vision. I have included it here in its entirety in an attempt to convey the full impact of the epistemological shift identified by Crary:
Goethe’s instruction to seal the hole announces a disordering and negation of the camera obscura as both an optical system and epistemological figure. The closing off of the opening dissolves the distinction between inner and outer space on which the very functioning of the camera (as apparatus and paradigm) depended. But it is now not simply a question of an observer repositioned in a sealed interior to view its particular contents; the optical experience described here by Goethe presents a notion of vision that the classical model was incapable of encompassing. The coloured circles that
133 seem to float, undulate, and undergo a sequence of chromatic transformations have no correlative either within or without the dark room; as Goethe explains at length, “they are ‘physiological’ colours belonging entirely to the body of the observer and are necessary conditions of vision”.184
Goethe’s compulsion to abandon the order of the camera obscura and seal the hole is described by Crary as a rapturous shift – a critical paradigmatic moment negating the camera obscura’s standing as both an optical system and epistemological template. As was noted previously, Crary’s thesis demonstrates how, in the camera obscura model of vision, the human eye could not be trusted. But all of this was changing, dramatically, in the nineteenth century when the body became an exciting domain for physiological research, feeding new knowledge about the eye and the process of vision. These developments are examined in great detail in
Figure 51: Jan Purkinje, Afterimages, 1823.
184 J. Crary, Techniques of Observer, p. 68.
134 Techniques of the Observer, with Crary declaring that they “signal how the [human] body was becoming the site of both power and truth”. 185 According to Crary, Goethe’s experiments mark the early stages of a subjective theory of vision. ‘Subjective vision’ refers to a view of the body as ceasing to look toward the outside world to gather information or knowledge. Instead, “the viewing body and its objects begin to constitute a single field on which inside and outside are confounded”.186
Goethe’s experiments with colour, wherein chromatic phenomena are found to take place within the body and, as a result, the body becomes an active producer of optical experience, led to this collapsing of interior and exterior, which was eventually qualified in Goethe’s study of the retinal afterimage. Crary explains how afterimages had been recorded since antiquity, even though they were treated with suspicion and relegated to the category of the spectral and not truthful. Not until the nineteenth century did the afterimage gain the status of optical truth. Crary defines the afterimage as “the presence of sensation in the absence of a stimulus – and its subsequent modulations posed a theoretical and empirical demonstration of autonomous vision, of an optical experience that was produced by and within the subject” (Fig. 51).187
Crary pinpoints the mid-1820s as the time when the experimental study of afterimages led to the invention of related optical devices, initially developed for scientific observation that quickly became forms of mass entertainment. These devices include the thaumatrope, the phenakistiscope and the zoetrope, and the stereoscope.
In many respects, this onset of optically based commodities is not only symptomatic of the beginning of industrialisation; for Crary, it also signifies the pre-history of spectacle culture. Crary characterises the nineteenth century as a time when the
185 J. Crary, Techniques of Observer, p. 79. 186 J. Crary, Techniques of Observer, p. 80. 187 J. Crary, Techniques of Observer, p. 98.
135 reproduction of the image, through the process of industrialisation, first became accessible to the masses. He draws our attention to the stereoscope, which, in his opinion, embodies this epochal shift towards what has become known as spectacle culture.
Guy Debord’s philosophical critique of modern society, as elaborated in his book The Society of the Spectacle (1967), describes the conditions for spectacular society as evident in societies dominated by modern conditions of production, proposing that
Figure 52: Mass manufacturing of stereographs, Paris, late 1850s.
“life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.”188 Debord’s notion of burgeoning spectacle culture is evident in references often made to early photographic documentation of the nineteenth century petit bourgeoisie, gathered in small groups
188 G. Debord, Society of the Spectacle and Other Films, Rebel, London, 1992, p. 7.
136 lounging in sitting rooms and enjoying the sites of new exotic locations through the stereoscope. This historically significant scenario shows us that the photographic image was in the process of becoming domesticated. As people began to collect mass-produced photographic stereo cards (Fig. 52) and look at exotic images in this way, the actual practice of looking at images became a form of leisure-time entertainment – similar to the domestic role of television throughout the later half of the twentieth century and our experience of the Internet today. Why travel the world at such great expense when you can experience it through inexpensive representations?
Figure 53: left: SAME publication. Right: Marian Tubbs, SAME launch, 2013.
As a way of measuring how far spectacle society has come and how entrenched within the representation of lived experience we find ourselves today, a quick glance at the current generation of young artists reveals a wave of art being produced using images sourced purely from the Internet. Often born into, or at least on the cusp of, the digital age, these young artists produce work that mirrors the digestion of online images streaming ubiquitously within the social landscape at large. SAME are a
137 Sydney-based collective, consisting of Marian Tubbs, Jack Jeweller, Robert Milne and Eleanor Weber. In 2012, the group came together to produce a print publication and two corresponding exhibitions after being invited to participate in a residency at Feltspace in Adelaide. They claim the project provides a consolidated site for “collecting the whirlwind of jpegs, pngs and tifs available”.189 SAME, they say, “masticates and vomits them back out. It articulates a desire to distort and reflect on the world cloaked in itself.” 190 The publication is compiled as an assemblage of images, trading on what the artists refer to as “the blogging and re- blogging of someone else’s moment”, an image-based currency derived from “a semiocapitalist experience-economy”. 191 SAME produce artwork through the reappropriation of anonymous representations of other people’s moments, other people’s social life. Their reference to a semiocapitalistic experience-economy refers to the way we dwell online, consuming images, trading in the representation of lived moments. SAME’s artwork amplifies the reciprocal and parasitic nature of the image-based domain of current human–computer interaction, now synonymous with everyday life (Fig. 53). They describe their process as “a meshing of things experienced online”, and their process highlights the meandering and uncontrolled flow characteristic of the way we currently experience online images.192 For SAME, “one is in control of this experience as much as she is in control of the direction of a dream. Surfing a labyrinth. This is an ultimate simulation.”193
In relation to Debord’s theories about spectacle society and the problematic he associated with human subjects’ experience of the world receding into representation over that of lived experience, all of this begs the question, does the type of ‘net-based’ artwork produced by the likes of SAME signify that Debord’s theories about spectacle culture have found their deepest expression? In present-day
189 SAME (Marian Tubbs, Jack Jeweller, Robert Milne and Eleanor Weber), artist’s statement, viewed on 2 September 2012, http://www.mariantubbs.com/SAME-55-Sydenham-Rd-March- Feltspace-Adelaide-January-2013. 190 SAME, artist’s statement. 191 SAME, artist’s statement. 192 SAME, artist’s statement. 193 SAME, artist’s statement.
138 terms, have we receded so far into representation and away from previous notions of authentic social life that we might now need to redefine an authentic social life?
Italian Marxist theorist and activist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi has written extensively about what he refers to as “the new techno-social framework of contemporary subjectivation”.194 Amongst a host of philosophical and social concerns, Berardi addresses the contradiction that arises as ‘cyberspace’ (a now ubiquitous term for the global network of information technologies and networks where online communication occurs) overloads cybertime:
Because cyberspace is an unbounded sphere whose speed can accelerate without limits, while cybertime (the organic time of attention, memory, imagination) cannot be sped up beyond a certain point or it cracks. And it actually is cracking, collapsing under the stress of hyper-activity. An epidemic of panic and depression is now spreading throughout the circuits of the social brain.195
In light of Berardi’s contention, the ability to experience low-tech and comparatively slow media, I argue, might contribute a somewhat therapeutic social function for the contemporary viewer. It is not, however, the aim of my research to address these issues. Nonetheless, I do wish to suggest that a re-engagement with out-of-date optical devices, derived from a genealogy of early and comparatively naïve forms of spectacle culture, can play a role in reassessing how we negotiate current shifts redefining authentic social life today. My decision to incorporate overtly manual and distinctly analogue technologies into my practice provides the viewer with a comparatively protracted and rudimentary form of spectacle-based representation, urging a decelerated, sustained style of viewing – a forced slow- down. This is similar to the way Zoe Leonard’s camera obscura series requires the viewer to spend time with her work as the eyes adjust and the image slowly unfolds
194 F. Berardi, ‘Cognitarian Subjectivation’, E-flux Journal: Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labour of Art, Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2011, p. 135. 195 F. Berardi, ‘Cognitarian Subjectivation’, p. 135.
139 in real-time. Furthermore, while I am not averse to net-based and digital technologies, it is my opinion that there is a distinct social advantage in offering alternatives to them, as a counterbalance. Artwork that provides another way of looking at images, specifically via older technological media, such as those Leonard and I are each engaged with, offers a different style of augmentation and a shift in perception to the immanence of digital screen-based technologies. This, I wish to suggest, allows the contemporary viewer another way of seeing outside what has become the dominant system for doing so.
This proposition echoes the central, overarching aim of my research – to illustrate how a retrieval of the utopian Benjaminian notion of the outmoded does continue to offer exciting possibilities for contemporary artists; as a fertile ground for positing alternatives and imagining the world as it might be otherwise in our apparent post- memory present; amidst our time of capitalist totalisation; as we become aware of the impact of the excesses resultant of our eagerness for the new. In other words, I am proposing that those older optical devices I am rekindling within my studio practice are powerful conduits for the testing of my hypothesis, that is, for gauging whether the use of outmoded forms continues to possess critical agency in a contemporary art context. My adaptation of viewing devices such as the stereoscope (View-Master) within my art practice presents a contemporary art audience with an unfamiliar viewing experience and offers an alternative mode of viewing that signals an outside to the totality of today’s digital screen-based technologies. I will return to this point later in the chapter by providing specific examples of my artwork.
THE LEGACY OF A NEW REGIME AND STEREOSCOPIC SPACE In Techniques of the Observer, Crary described the new regime of vision in the early nineteenth century as “a moment when the visible escapes the rigidity of the camera obscura to become lodged within the unstable and far less reliable apparatus of the human body”.196 Crary recognised the way that this shift coincides with a field of knowledge organised around a market where commodities, such as the stereoscope,
196 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 70.
140 are entirely optical and mass produced in an unprecedented way.197 One of the significant aspects of these simultaneous developments is the way this allowed the exchange and mobility of visual representation to develop, because, as Crary demonstrates, “it no longer depended on the rigidity and exclusivity of the camera obscura, as apparatus and paradigm”.198
Figure 54: Thaumatrope, circa 1825.
The majority of historical accounts that mention the stereoscope do so in relation to the device’s association with photography. However, Crary describes the invention of the stereoscope as historically and conceptually linked to the thaumatrope (a basic animation device that uses two images, usually on a round disc that when flipped combine to give a slightly animated effect) (Fig. 54), as well as the phenakistiscope (Fig. 55) and the zoetrope. Each of these devices produce an
197 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 70. 198 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 70.
141 illusion of motion from the rapid succession of static pictures produced through the spinning of a disk.
Figure 55: Phenakistiscope, circa nineteenth century.
The stereoscope, however, does not depict the illusion of movement like these other devices, but it does find its origins within the field of nineteenth century physiological science in a similar way to the aforementioned devices. The stereoscope was initially invented to quantify and formalise the physiological operations of binocular vision.
Crary cites Charles Wheatstone and Sir David Brewster as the two figures associated with the invention of the stereoscope. Each of these individuals had previously written on afterimages and other visual phenomena. Wheatstone’s research concerned the visual experience of objects placed relatively close to the eye.
142
Figure 56: Diagram of the operation of the Wheatstone stereoscope.
He experimented with objects that were so close to the observer that the optical axes had different angles; it was at this point that the stereoscopic image had its greatest effect (Fig. 56). What Wheatstone achieved was hugely symbolic. Wheatstone’s stereoscopic research, according to Crary, demonstrates that:
The stereoscope, provided a form of vividness of effect that increased with the apparent proximity of the object to the viewer, and the impression of three-dimensional solidity became greater as the optic axes of each diverged. Thus the desired effect of the stereoscope was not simply likeness but immediate, apparent tangibility.199
Following Crary’s lead, in an essay titled ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View’ (1982), Rosalind Krauss exclaimed, “nothing could more effectively shatter the idea projected by the camera obscura model, in which the
199 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 122.
143 relationship between viewer and world is pictured as fundamentally scenic, than this literal dispersal of the stimulus field. The stereoscopic spectator.”200
Figure 57: David Brewster’s stereoscope, 1849.
Francis Terpak provides a concise historical overview of the invention of the stereoscope in her series of essays for Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to
200 R. Krauss, ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View’, Art Journal, Vol. 42, No. 4, The Crisis of the Discipline, Winter, 1982, p. 317.
144 Images on the Screen (2002).201 Terpak explains that it wasn’t until David Brewster (the inventor of the kaleidoscope) became involved in stereoscopy, some time after Wheatstone, that a compact, accessible version of the device was developed (Fig. 57). In 1849, Brewster perfected a simplified device. This, Terpak contends, “would transform stereopsis from a scientific fact into an instrument of popular entertainment”.202
Crary details the disparity of the “reality effect” of the stereoscope as variable, depending on the composition of the image.203 He explains that pronounced effects occur when objects or forms protrude near the middle ground, and the most intense experiences of the stereoscopic image occur when objects fill the composition. The sense of depth in a stereoscopic image differs from that of a painting or photograph. Crary states, “When we look head-on at a photograph or painting our eyes remain at a single angle of convergence, thus endowing the image surface with an optical unity.”204 In addition to this, when looking at a painting or photograph in a gallery, or any space where it may be hung on the wall in a conventional way, the observer is surrounded by ambient space and their peripheral vision allows unrelated imagery to creep into view. We are accustomed to seeing the world as a montage of shifting images. In contrast, when viewing a stereoscopic image where the close proximity of the isolated image demands our attention, something peculiar occurs. Our eyes are forced to traverse the image field, in a way that our feet can not. Crary describes this as “a choppy and erratic path into its depth: it is an assemblage of local zones of three-dimensionality, zones imbued with a hallucinatory clarity, but which when taken together never coalesce into a homogenous field”.205
201 See Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on the Screen, a book that accompanied a large-scale survey exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2002. 202 F. Terpak, ‘Objects and Contents’, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on the Screen, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2002, p. 357. 203 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 124. 204 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p.125. 205 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 126.
145 In ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View’, Rosalind Krauss describes the phenomenology of the stereoscope as not unlike that of looking at cinema, in that “the pleasure derives from the experience of the simulacrum”.206 Krauss draws a parallel between the sense of illusory absorption that a contemporary audience commonly associates with the cinematic experience and the less familiar optical experience of stereography. She goes on to describe this experience as a real effect, wherein the optical illusion of the stereoscope and the associated vastness of space that opens out before the eyes cause the eyes to readjust from plane to plane within the stereoscopic field. This comes to represent through one part of the body (the eyes) what another part of the body (the feet) would do when passing through actual space – the appearance of reality through which any physical testing, such as actually moving through the scene, is denied. The viewer is isolated in a constructed darkened environment denying any peripheral view. The viewer is transported optically while their body remains stationary.207
Like Crary, Krauss highlights the popularity of stereography that led to its status as a truly mass medium. She cites figures stating that in 1857, the London Stereoscopic company had sold 500,000 stereoscopes. 208 The popularity of the stereoscope was symbolic of a new type of observer that had developed a taste for spectacular consumption, for a new type of consumption of images. As noted previously, this we have come to associate with the now normative twentieth- century onslaught of spectacle culture.
Krauss’s description of stereoscopic space emphasises a sense of “deep recession”, which engages the viewer in a way that requires an intensely absorptive momentum. she states:
Organized as a kind of tunnel vision, the experience of deep recession is insistent and inescapable. This experience is all the more heightened by the
206 R. Krauss, ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces’, p. 314. 207 R. Krauss, ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces’, p. 314. 208 R. Krauss, ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces’, p. 314.
146 fact that the viewer’s own ambient space is masked out by the optical instrument he must hold before his eyes. As he views the image in an ideal isolation, his own surrounds, with their walls and floors, are banished from sight.’209
Krauss cites Oliver Wendell-Holmes, an avid enthusiast of the stereoscope, whose encounter with the apparatus recalls “a dream-like exaltation in which we seem to leave the body behind us and sail away into one strange scene after another, like disembodied spirits.”210
However, it is equally true that, when looking into a stereoscope, we feel our eyes refocus on the multi-layered planes of the stereographic image. We hold a device in our hands and press our faces up to binocular lenses. The very act of looking through two lenses at once, at two images with slightly differently angles, makes our eyes feel peculiar and this unfamiliarity draws our attention to the very physicality of our eyes. In this way, the proximity of our body with the mechanical apparatus enacts an embodied experience through a physical connection. Krauss stresses the way that the stereoscope gives an engrossed and isolated viewer the sensation of periodically refocusing their eyes as they look from plane to plane. By this means, the movement of the eyes and the movement of the entire body are made synonymous.
When considering Krauss and Crary’s descriptions of the stereoscopic view, a double-sided question emerges: is this an embodied or disembodied experience? Through the course of my research, I have come across several critical discussions that address this conundrum. In particular, an article by Geoffrey Batchen published in The Australian Journal of Media and Culture entitled ‘Enslaved Sovereign, Observed Spectator: On Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer’ (1993) examines this apparent confusion over the issue of embodiment. Batchen
209 R. Krauss, ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces’, p. 314. 210 R. Krauss, ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces’, p. 314.
147 explains that, “to put it another way, in a single act of looking, the observer is moved back and forth between two separate but conjoined embodiments”.211 Thus, Batchen introduces a unique kind of instantaneous disembodiment and re- embodiment. The idea of a conjoined embodiment and disembodiment is also present through elements of Crary’s account of the modernisation of vision in Techniques of the Observer. Here Crary argues, “The pre-history of the spectacle and the ‘pure perception’ of modernism are lodged in the newly discovered territory of a fully embodied viewer, but the eventual triumph of both depends on the denial of the body, its pulsings and phantoms, as the ground for vision.”212
The inherent elaboration of a dual disembodiment and re-embodiment clarifies an aspect of the historical discourse surrounding the stereoscope that had eluded me for some time. Batchen’s discussion of Crary’s Techniques of the Observer uncovers an experience central to the stereoscope, according to Batchen, “through the undisguised nature of the stereoscope’s operational structure: even through they provide access to the real, they make no claim that the real is anything other than a mechanical production”.213 For Crary, this new condition transformed each observer into “simultaneously the magician and the deceived”. 214 This type of machinic mediation between subject and image, Batchen reveals, “produces a being that Crary calls a decentred observer”.215 For this observer, Crary emphasises a “new assemblage of binocular body, optical apparatus and multiplied image [is] conjoined on a single immanent field”.216
From a relatively personal artistic perspective, the stereoscope’s operational structure is both conceptually engaging and aesthetically alluring. I recognise direct affiliations between my childhood experience with the device and Crary’s assertion
211 G. Batchen, ‘Enslaved Sovereign, Observed Spectator: On Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 6.2, 1993, p. 3. Viewed on 6 March 2009, http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/6.2/Batchen.html 212 J. Crary, Techniques of Observer, p. 136. 213 G. Batchen, ‘Enslaved Sovereign, Observed Spectator’, p. 3. 214 J. Crary, Techniques of Observer, p. 84. 215 G. Batchen, ‘Enslaved Sovereign, Observed Spectator’, p. 5. 216 J. Crary, Techniques of Observer, p. 84.
148 regarding the way the device positions the observer as simultaneously the magician and the deceived.
In a broader sense, my examination of the cultural impact of the device contours critical implications for the anachronistic device in a contemporary context. Here I refer to the way Batchen draws our attention towards Crary’s argument recognising the historical dissolution in the nineteenth century of the Cartesian mode of seeing. Batchen refers to such boundaries as those between “observer and observed, subject and object, self and other, virtual and actual, representation and real – a dissolution that is, as Crary argues, one of the fundamental conditions of modernity itself”.217 Batchen believes it is important to acknowledge this history in the midst of contemporary discussions regarding the “ramifications of computer technologies that produce so-called virtual reality”.218 Batchen cites recent lamentations over the apparent attack made by proliferating virtual reality systems on both accepted notions of reality and on the autonomous subject.219 Batchen’s argument here is that those engaged in discourse surrounding virtual reality failed to “recognise they were mourning a Cartesian reality and subject that have already been under erasure for nigh on 200 years”.220According to Crary, the optical devices he focuses on in his book (such as the stereoscope and kaleidoscope) were the result of the sudden and thorough collapse of the Cartesian camera obscura paradigm in the early nineteenth century.221
Following Batchen and Crary’s arguments, and Andrew McNamara’s ‘The Myth of New Media’, my recourse to the stereoscope is hinged on my interest in pursuing its renewed historical purchase, in both a personal and cultural sense. As McNamara has argued, sometimes we need to look beyond the seduction of the latest technology to seek more complex amalgamations between the old and the new. As previously noted, the historical purchase of the stereoscope today might be
217 G. Batchen, ‘Enslaved Sovereign, Observed Spectator’, p. 4 218 G. Batchen, ‘Enslaved Sovereign, Observed Spectator’, p. 4. 219 G. Batchen, ‘Enslaved Sovereign, Observed Spectator’, p. 4. 220 G. Batchen, ‘Enslaved Sovereign, Observed Spectator’, p. 4. 221 G. Batchen, ‘Enslaved Sovereign, Observed Spectator’, p. 2.
149 associated with its precursory links to current debates about virtual reality. In this regard, McNamara, like Batchen, has drawn our attention to oversights in new media circles and society in general:
Yes, virtuality, immersion and a multi-media approach are very important to how new media characterizes itself today, but it is equally true that such ambitions also possess a ‘pre-history.’ This pinpoints one of the glaring shortcomings of new media discourse: despite its best efforts, it tends to gravitate to teleological justifications and the denial of legacies and debts (whether artistic, intellectual, historical or technological).222
In light of this, I recognise the importance of the outmoded optical devices I investigate within my research. I historicise them, making links to the pre-history of spectacle culture, as well as the significant earlier moment Crary defines as the nineteenth century construction of vision and the modern observer. In a contemporary art context, these devices now signal previous and comparatively alternative ways of seeing; I have rekindled them within my artistic experiments in the hope that I will uncover what McNamara purports are potential innovative and complex amalgamations. What is more, I utilise these forms in order to establish a contemporary politics of the outmoded.
Figures 58, 59: An example of a typical View-Master and a View-Master reel.
222 A. McNamara, ‘The Myth of New Media’, p. 5.
150 My plan to integrate a stereoscopic element within the final body of artwork I present has been a consistent and unwavering desire throughout the entire course of my research. The idea became evident quite early on and, given my specific childhood connection to the View-Master (Fig. 58), I realised it was critical that I attempt to either make or commission a customised View-Master reel. I eventually sourced a company who specialises in making them and they manufactured an edition of reels for me (Fig. 59). The reel, like all View-Master reels, contains seven stereoscopic images, a title and captions underneath each of the slides. The images I have had made into a View-Master reel consist of a selection of seven small oil paintings. They have been carefully selected from the body of work developed over the duration of my candidacy (Figs 60–66) As noted previously, Crary outlines the way pronounced stereoscopic effects occur when objects or forms protrude near the middle ground of the picture plain, with the most intense three dimensional effects occurring when the object represented fills the composition. The series of works chosen for conversion were each composed with these characteristics in mind.
Given my previously articulated childhood attraction to the View-Master, having reels made by a commercial View-Master manufacturer will propel the images further into the realm of fantasy, akin to Tom Gunning’s formulation of the uncanny re-emergence of earlier stages of magical thinking. This aspect is important to the images because they need to provoke a heightened imaginative response in the viewer. The experience of looking into the View-Master and losing all peripheral vision, of being completely surrounded, consumed visually by the image, recalls the all encompassing world of make-believe an imaginatively enchanted child might occupy in the midst of play. By having the illuminated reproductions of my paintings so uncharacteristically close to the eyes, my intention is to provide the viewer with a space of sensory intoxication – there will be no denying the intensity of the image once the machine is placed in front of the eyes. The viewer is lured into a journey as they pull the lever at the side of the machine; they travel each of my paintings as though they are crossing otherworldly and unfamiliar terrain.
151
Figures 60-65: Six of the seven oil paintings included in 3D View-Master reel.
Krauss described this experience as “a real-effect where the optical illusion of the stereoscope and the associated vastness of space that opens out before the eyes,
152 cause the eyes to readjust from plane to plane within the stereoscopic field”.223 As noted previously, Krauss examined the way this comes to represent through one part of the body (the eyes) what another part of the body (the feet) would do when passing through actual space.224 In this way, the viewer will peer through my View- Master device and move through a range of painted speculative spaces.
The convergence of ‘the optical device’ and ‘the counterculture dwelling’ is significant within this work. When combined, they fulfilled the conceptual premise of my research. In the first instance, the device (View-Master) provides the observer with an instrument for seeing and in this sense it represents a uniquely alternative way of looking, particularly in a gallery context where images are generally surrounded by ambient space and bounce off the other images around them. Added to this are the images of unusual dwellings inside the View-Master, which symbolise alternative ways of being in the world to currently prevalent ways of living. These utopian images are saturated fantastic propositions for the future that find inspiration in a utopian past. Critical to the utopian aspect of the work is the previously examined ‘lure and block’ dynamic. The stereoscope invites the viewer into the illusion but ultimately never lets them feel like anything more than an outsider, peering in, attempting to traverse and penetrate the landscape with their eyes. As was proposed by Geoffery Batchen, in a single act of looking, the observer is moved back and forth between two separate but conjoined embodiments, visually absorbed while always separated through a physical reminder of the viewing apparatus pressed against the face. Like all utopian yearning, the image is unattainable; the closer you try to get the further it slips away.
In this work, a miniature installation of sorts, the viewer is paradoxically required to look inside to see the outside. Taken as a whole, the View-Master work attempts to contour what Jameson refers to as the development of the critical and imaginative ability to form a sketch of the un-representable exterior of late capitalism. My
223 R. Krauss, ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces’, p. 314. 224 R. Krauss, ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces’, p. 314.
153 consideration of Jameson’s allusive and unattainable ‘outside’ is what defines this work. It depicts my effort to imagine a space that is outside or alternate to current circumstances, to renew the historical and utopian imaginary. Jameson’s concern for our imaginative lack regarding visions of the future has contributed in motivating me to foster and assert other ways of seeing and being.
OTHER VIEWING MECHANISMS: THE KALEIDOSCOPE AND PEEPSHOW
Figure 66: Adolph Glasbrenner, Guckkatner̈ , 1835.
For the remainder of the chapter, I will discuss the other optical devices I have utilised within my practice. First, I will concentrate on the kaleidoscope before
154 finally discussing the peepshow (Fig. 66). In each instance, I will provide a historical and cultural overview followed by an elaboration of my studio-based experiments.
Figure 67: Two different types of kaleidoscope, nineteenth century.
155 The kaleidoscope is a simple device that generally consists of two or three long narrow mirrors touching along a common edge concealed within a tube (Fig. 67). Some have clear lenses at the end, producing multi-faceted, and ever shifting versions of the view they are directed at. Others produce striking geometric effects caused by fragments of glass and beads concealed within the device’s body. Unlike the stereoscope, the kaleidoscope doesn’t occupy as pervasive a place in Crary’s Techniques of the Observer. In 1815, when David Brewster invented the device, he saw it as a mechanical means for the reformation of art according to an industrial paradigm.225 Crary says of Brewster’s motivation, “since symmetry was the basis of beauty in nature and visual art, he declared, the kaleidoscope was aptly suited to produce art through the inversion and multiplication of simple forms”.226
Barbara Maria Stafford describes the magical effects of the kaleidoscope in her essay titled ‘Revealing Technologies / Magical Domains’ (2002). For Stafford, the device produced “striking repetitive designs from reflected light and colours”.227 She adds, “with each twist of the cylinder a succession of coloured abstracted shapes, almost musically harmonized according to the principles of complementarity, delightfully show themselves”.228 Accordingly, the kaleidoscope was contrived to “destabilize rational vision and estrange the senses”.229 Stafford contends, at the time of its emergence the kaleidoscope was viewed as “a metaphoric tube, [which] has the magical power of focussing the viewer intently on the present as well as on an ideal vision distant from harsh reality”.230
225 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 116. 226 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 116. 227 B. M. Stafford, ‘Revealing Technologies / Magical Domains’, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on the Screen, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2002, p. 25. 228 B. M. Stafford, ‘Revealing Technologies / Magical Domains’, p. 25. 229 B. M. Stafford, ‘Revealing Technologies / Magical Domains’, p. 25. 230 B. M. Stafford, ‘Revealing Technologies / Magical Domains’, p. 25.
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Figure 68: Kylie Banyard, Andrea and Mike’s Place, 2012.
In Chapter One, I introduced my work Andrea and Mike’s Place (Fig. 68). I return to this work here with Stafford’s assertion regarding the kaleidoscope’s power to focus the viewer on ideal visions. As previously mentioned, I instigate a mediated interplay between painting and viewer by placing a kaleidoscopic viewing stand in front of a painting. The device provides the viewer an alternative view of the work before them. The viewer encounters the painting in the conventional way on the gallery wall and they also have the choice to look through the optical device, to look at the painting again and see it differently. This other view offers an enhancement of the painting by breaking and abstracting the representational plain of the painting into a kaleidoscope of patterned paintwork. It also recalls Stafford’s observation, in which the device destabilises rational vision and estranges the senses. In this case, the destabilisation occurs through an abstraction of a previously representational painting. Furthermore, Stafford’s research insists that the view through a kaleidoscope has the ‘magical’ power of focusing the viewer intently on the present as well as on an ideal vision distant from harsh reality.
In this sense, I have adopted the mediating function of the kaleidoscope to focus the viewer intently, through the presentation of an alternative view, prompting them to consider an ideal vision distant from harsh realities. The fracturing and scattering of the image, as seen through the kaleidoscope, amps up the dreamlike potential of this ideal alternative vision, reminding us that this is not an image
157 grounded in reality, it is a utopian and fantastic vision. In this way, the reconfigured optical device coupled with the painting of an example of alternative housing, becomes a visual signifier of my initial conceptual premise, of ‘looking for alternatives’. In a sense, the viewer acts out my central proposition through their experiential engagement with the work – the viewer navigates the alternative view. Put simply, the viewer ‘looks’ through the viewing lens to see the ‘alternative’.
Figure 69: Kylie Banyard, So This is Freetown, 2012.
Figure 70: Kylie Banyard, Chrisitiania Studies, 2012.
In So This is Freetown (2012) (Fig. 69), the same visual scenario is constructed with a painting and the kaleidoscopic stand. However, this time the painting itself also features a kaleidoscopic background. For this painting, I composed the image
158 working from two composite images, forming a photomontage (Fig. 70). In the foreground, I used images found online from a famous anarchist community in Copenhagen called Christiania. Established in 1971, Christiania is one of the two communes I have been fascinated with throughout the course of my research and I hope to continue researching the community beyond the completion of my PhD.
Figure 71: Kylie Banyard, So This is Freetown, 2012, oil on canvas and kaleidoscopic stand.
Christiania continues as a functioning commune, with roughly 500 inhabitants. One of the unique characteristics of Christiania is that it is located in the centre of Copenhagen and manages to exist relatively autonomously alongside the rest of the city. The background of the photomontage consists of a photograph from a series I shot through my kaleidoscope. In a sense, within this painting the use of the kaleidoscope is two-fold and turns back in on itsself – multiplying and repeating, abstracting and layering, mimicking the machination of the optical device (Fig. 71).
The final device I will discuss in this chapter is the peepshow (as well as, to a lesser degree, its relationship to my use of the diorama). Over the course of my research I have made several small models. Although those I have made recall elements of the diorama format, such as the creation of miniature dwellings within scenic terrain, I
159 do not consider the diorama to warrant detailed analysis here. In some instances, I have placed miniature table-top models inside specifically designed viewing boxes with a single peephole, but I have not attempted to make a completely scenic surround for my models. I have not painted backdrops for my models, like those dioramas found in natural history museums or model train displays. Certainly, there are diorama-like characteristics to the models I make, but I am generally more interested in what happens when these sculptural forms are placed within a box as the centrepiece for a peepshow. The diorama is, in itself, a diverse cultural and historical phenomenon, worthy of an entire thesis focused on its origins, as well as an examination of how contemporary artists continue to utilise it as subject and mode of display. But a thorough investigation of this line of inquiry is not the concern of my research. Rather, my examination of the stereoscope, the kaleidoscope and the peepshow have each consistently held my interest and provided an overarching historical framework, via Jonathan Crary, for my recourse to outmoded optical devices.
Figure 72: Kylie Banyard, All Tomorrow’s Communes, 2010.
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Figure 73: David Eastwood, CASA MORANDI, 2012.
The first peepshow work I made in 2010 combined the model making of a diorama. In All Tomorrow’s Communes (Fig. 72), I had intended to produce a sculptural work consisting of a large-scale diorama inside a viewing box, complete with starry night sky. I photographed the work to document the process and consequentially decided the photographs were more interesting than the diorama itself. I eventually abandoned the sculptural form. In a host of other works, I have created small models and placed them within environments ambiguously suggestive of the landscape, but never directly descriptive in the same way a conventional diorama would be. Several of these model constructions have either been used as photographic sets or as subjects to painted from.
The current widespread attraction to model-making and diorama formats amongst contemporary artists was recently evidenced in a large-scale international survey exhibition titled Otherwordly: Optical Delusions and Small Realites, curated by David Revere McFadden for New York’s Museum of Art and Design in 2011. Similarly, in 2013, Sydney based artist and academic David Eastwood (Fig. 73) curated an exhibition consisting of a group of artists from across Australia under the exhibition title Speculative Spaces (Eastwood invited me to be part of this exhibition).
161 Eastwood was interested in assessing how each individual engaged with the miniature, model and diorama in their respective practices.
Figure 74: Kylie Banyard, Village Entrance, 2013.
Figure 75: Kylie Banyard, Village Entrance (detail), 2013.
For Speculative Spaces, I decided on a work with three distinct elements, one sculptural, one painted and the third photographic. Titled Village Entrance (2013)
162 (Fig. 75), the series of works began as a small sculptural model made some years earlier. For the exhibition, said model was encased within a plywood box – essentially a peepshow. The box contained a single round viewing portal fitted with a convex lens, and it sat atop a white timber stand at a comfortable height for the
Figure 76: J. F. Cazenave, L’optique, circa 1790. average viewer. The peep-box had a thick, white Perspex lid, the opacity of which prevented the viewer from being able to see inside from above. The only way to see
163 inside was through the peephole at the front. The Perspex lid let the light in and when viewed from the peephole it suggested a white sky, vast and airy. Village Entrance (Object) represents my version of the peepshow, it takes elements from a range of those I’ve encountered throughout my historical research.
Historical accounts of the peepshow or optical box date back as early as the fifteenth century. In her essay from 2001 titled ‘Objects and Contexts’, Francis Terpak describes the French version, vues d’optique (perspective views) as an attraction of the eighteenth century that only the most ‘well-to-do’ could afford.231 One variation of the vues d’optique, she explains, functioned through a simple use of a convex lens and a mirror as depicted in J. F. Cazenave’s eighteenth century engraving titled L’optique. Terpak speculates as to how the young boy in the etching (Fig. 76) would have used the perspective viewing device. She observes, “when the boy peered through the lens at the print lying flat on the table, he would see the scene in the print, reversed and seemingly in three dimensions, reflected in the inclined mirror”.232
My Villiage Entrance (Object) used a convex lens like those of the original vues d’optique of the eighteenth century. I also incorporated a mirror inside the box, as with the vues d’optique, but in this case the mirror acted as the ground for the small model, reflecting the form back up at itself (in the original device, the mirror was mounted at an inclined angle reflecting an image sitting flat within the interior of the box). By taking elements from the original design of optical boxes and reconfiguring them, I have attempted to reinvent this obsolete form of domestic entertainment to tempt the contemporary viewer. People responded strongly to the work. Many were uncertain as to how the optical effect was achieved. Many viewers thought I had adopted the traditional method and thought they might be looking at a two-dimensional image adhered to the roof of the box, rather than a three- dimensional form sitting flat on a mirrored surface at the base of the box. One
231 F. Terpak, ‘Objects and Contents’, p. 344. 232 F. Terpak, ‘Objects and Contents’, p. 344.
164 important aspect of the piece was the way the convex lens appeared to push the small model further away from the viewer. The viewer was required to find a ‘sweet spot’ – this allowed them to see the view inside clearly and in-focus.
If they stood with their eyes about two centimetres back from the lens, their view was sharp, but if they got too close it would go out of focus and slip out of view. In this regard, the work plays with my interest in imagining alternatives and the renewal of the utopian imaginary on a metaphorical level.
Terpak describes the subject of the etchings the peepshow boxes contained as either precisely rendered urban views, or imaginary depictions of foreign lands. The Italian name for the peepshow was mono nuovo, which translates as ‘new world’. Historical accounts of these optical boxes often recall the mesmerised awe of observers, enchanted by images of faraway lands. The view inside Village Entrance is suitably fantasy-based, just like those in the original peepshows and optical box. My peepshow also offered access to the luminous and fantastical interior of things and, recalling those from the Italian tradition, it alludes to the fantasy of mono nuovo, of new worlds. The problem is, like any utopian image, the closer you try to get, the more likely it is to slip out of focus. The little utopia my peepbox offers, with its welcoming image of a rustic village gateway, pulls you in, inviting you to imaginatively pass through its gates, and then, as you get to a certain point, that is, when you get too close, the work reminds you that utopia, itself, is unattainable.
Returning again to the ‘lure and block’ dynamic I previously mentioned as inherent in the experience of the stereoscope and the kaleidoscope, here I wish to suggest that the peepbox has the same simultaneously absorptive and obstructive potential. Taking this line of argument further, the dynamic this work sets up between the view and the viewer also depends on the previously articulated notion of paradoxically needing to look inside to see the outside. Working in a similar way to the stereoscope and the kaleidoscope, my adaptation of the peepbox constructs a viewing experience that also points to what Jameson refers to as the development of
165 the critical and imaginative ability to form a sketch of the un-representable exterior of late capitalism. Here, too, my consideration of Jameson’s elusive and unattainable ‘outside’ is what defines this work. I invite the viewer to imagine a fantasy space that is outside or alternate to current circumstances, in an attempt to renew the historical and utopian imagination.
Figure 77: Kylie Banyard, Village Entrance (paint), 2013, oil on canvas.
The other two elements for my Speculative Spaces work were a small painting and a large photographic print. In the painting, Village Entrance (paint), I worked directly from the small model. My method for this piece was different to the peepbox. Rather than create a sculptural atmosphere around the work, this time I introduced the atmosphere in the process of painting the model into a scene (Fig. 77), somewhat like depositing a still life into an imaginary landscape. This work forms one of the images that has been made into a View-Master slide, to be exhibited and viewed stereoscopically through a View-Master device. Similarly, Proposition
166 Freetown Hut and Chromatic Yurt (Fig. 78, 79) (some of the other paintings in my View-Master project) were made from small sculptural models.
Figure 78, 79: Left: Kylie Banyard, model for Propositional Freetown Hut, 2012. Right: Kylie Banyard, Propositional Freetown Hut, 2012.
Figure 80: Kylie Banyard, Chromatic Yurt, 2012, oil on canvas
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Figure 81: Kylie Banyard, Village Entrance (photo), 2013.
The final element of my work for Speculative Spaces, Village Entrance (photo) is an enlarged photographic image printed on metallic paper stock. For this image, the model is scaled-up to three times its actual size (Fig. 82). This work celebrates the model, transforming what was formerly a dusty little sculpture into a crisp, metallic image. Here, the model’s naivety appears as an optimistic almost luminous fairy-tale apparition. The photograph stands as a counterpart to the other elements in the exhibition, fuelling the fantasy and adding a dimension of science fiction to the scenario.
In curator David Eastwood’s catalogue essay for Speculative Spaces, he refers to the model as “a surrogate reality”. 233 He also points to the way “models are often understood as a prototype, proposing yet-to-be-realised ideas”.234 Couched within each of these claims is a sense that artists who work with miniatures and models might be considered romantics, optimists, looking for an alternative to humdrum
233 D. Eastwood, Speculative Spaces, Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney, 2–26 March 2013, p. 1. 234 D. Eastwood, Speculative Spaces, p. 1.
168 reality. From here he speaks of architects and sculptors who use models as a precursor for larger structures. The point Eastwood is making is that the artists in Speculative Spaces build models of a modest scale because they are not constrained by a regard for the feasibility of large-scale construction.235 Indeed, here, they have no interest in translating forms into large-scale construction, per se. What is of greater concern, in my opinion, is that the modest and manageable scale of miniature models allows, as Eastwood contends, “for speculation beyond our immediate reality, providing a stimulus for images and ideas about how the world could be, asking ‘what if’ questions, rather than describing the world as we know it”. 236 Eastwood’s statement echoes my central thesis proposition, that is, my interest in looking for alternatives. He confirms my contention that sculptural models placed inside peepboxes, as well as miniaturised worlds encapsulated within the tiny, yet vast, screen of the View-Master, and the contained repetitive patterning revealed within the confines of a simple yet complex image produced through the kaleidoscope, each provide an intensive viewing platform for images and ideas about how the world could be, about other ways of seeing and being.
At this juncture, and in light of the points Eastwood raised in his essay, I reiterate a proposal made in the introductory chapter of this thesis. The paragraph I cite highlights my desire to offer opportunities for speculation beyond our immediate reality, providing a stimulus for images and ideas about how the world could be, asking ‘what if’ questions, rather than describing the world as we know it.237
In the introductory chapter, I first touched on Walter Benjamin’s precepts regarding outmodedness. For Benjamin, in the early modernist period, outmoded technology became powerfully symbolic of the possibility of imagining an outside of the capitalist system of exchange. However, in my consideration of Benjamin’s formulations, within a contemporary context, I have concluded that, although it is almost impossible to imagine an outside to our total market culture today, it does
235 D. Eastwood, Speculative Spaces, p. 1. 236 D. Eastwood, Speculative Spaces, p. 1. 237 D. Eastwood, Speculative Spaces, p. 2.
169 remain possible to find alternatives within the system. Within the context of my studio practice, and in the spirit of Benjamin, I am proposing that in the process of reconfiguring outmoded optical devices, I am constructing metaphorical configurations whose reflexive lens is angled towards possible alternatives. These configurations reject the temporality of current fashion, simultaneously gesturing to the past and the future: a speculative fabricated realm that draws on aspects of what might exist just out-of-view, an avenir – of what is to come.
CONCLUSION This chapter has provided a detailed analysis of the optical devices at the core of both my studio and written research. My decision to follow Jonathan Crary’s theories regarding the construction of vision in the nineteenth century stem from my initial interest and aesthetic attraction, based on strong childhood memories, to the twentieth-century ‘Disney’ version of the stereoscope, the View-Master. Upon examining Crary’s account of the stereoscope, I discovered its critical precursory role within the field of physiological optics, as well as the onset of today’s ubiquitous over-consuming spectacle culture. In Techniques of the Observer, Crary frames his investigation of the nineteenth century reorganisation of visuality in relation to observations based on the mass reorganisation and abstraction of the visual taking place at the time of writing his book. He establishes a lineage from those changes that occurred in the nineteenth century and draws genealogical links to those occurring late in the twentieth century. Crary’s influential book was published in 1992, some 21 years ago. The technological transformations he then saw himself being “in the midst of” have now taken hold in the social field.238 In 2013, we are thoroughly immersed in the world of ‘computer-generated imagery’ and the “implantation of fabricated visual spaces” Crary foresaw in the early 1990s.239 My research seeks to pay attention to the often bypassed devices belonging to the prehistory of our current technologically advanced, image-saturated condition within contemporary capitalism as totalising and world-encompassing. I have made
238 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 1. 239 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 1.
170 a conscious and, in effect, political choice to reinvigorate naïve forms of imaging machines within a current art context. In doing so, I demonstrate my commitment to retrieving Benjamin’s formulations regarding the critical and utopian potential of outmoded forms; enacting a historicised search for alternatives to currently prevalent ways of living – proposing a contemporary politics of the outmoded and the anachronistic. What I am highlighting here is my engagement with the historicity of these devices as critical to my navigation of a contemporary politics of the outmoded. I also seek to challenge what Andrew McNamara criticises as a teleological inclination in new media circles and contemporary societies more generally, to instead look again without the lens of techno-teleological seduction. 240 My impetus has been to play with the power of simple manual devices, those apparently defunct technologies that linger by the wayside in mounting piles, as an alternative way of mediating and tempting the contemporary observer’s view.
Finally, in this chapter, I have provided a detailed examination of several of the artworks I have produced with this overarching conceptual premise, always at the core of my process. I have attempted to mindfully and critically access what happens in the studio when the two outmoded forms I am concerned with – the optical device and the counterculture commune – merge. In this chapter, I have focused on the role that optical devices have played within the artworks I have produced. I have critically analysed the nexus of the two outmoded forms at the centre of my research, employing optical devices as a launching pad for my discussion. In the chapter following, I will shift my focus and pay close attention to the other focus of my research – the countercultural commune.
240 The teleological inclination fosters the assumption that new media transforms, then surpasses and eventually subsumes. The teleological inclination measures all previous technical-media possibilities (including all previous thought as well as all previous ways of doing art). The implication is that new technology instantly renders all prior media redundant along with their associated assumptions and worldviews. At its worst, this tacit teleological orientation assumes that contempoary technological advances only now permit thinking about virtuality, immersion and multi-media. (It is the great virtue of Margaret Wertheim’s ‘The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace’, despite its shortcomings, that it traces virtuality in art back as far as Giotto.) In short, this techno-determinist discourse presumes that currently available communications technologies allow us to consider these possibilities today as if for the first time. See A. McNamara, ‘The Myth of New Media’, NMC Media-N: Journal of New Media Caucus, 2(3): online, 2006, viewed January 2013, http://eprints.qut.edu.au
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CHAPTER THREE THE COUNTERCULTURAL MODE
172 INTRODUCTION As stated in the introductory chapter, my thesis draws on the commune for its affiliations with early counterculture environmentalism of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when many individuals experimented with alternative ways of living. This chapter will trace the evolution of counterculture environmentalism and demonstrate how it represents a critical moment – indeed, a paradigm shift – in the history of the modern environmental movement, marked by the rejection of antimodern notions prevalent within previous forms of romantic wilderness-based environmentalism that formerly separated nature from culture
I draw on this important historical moment within my research in order to reclaim the seeds of pragmatic hope, experimentation and self-determinism born of these past events. Additionally, within the context of my overarching thesis proposition, the communes of the countercultural ’60s form one of two figurations of the outmoded and anachronistic at the core of my thesis. Through the nexus of these two forms (the optical device and the commune), I propose a contemporary politics of the outmoded. I seek to demonstrate how a retrieval of the utopian Benjaminian notion of the outmoded does continue to offer exciting possibilities for visual artists as a fertile ground for imagining the contemporary world as it might be otherwise in our apparent ‘post-memory present’ amid our time of capitalist totalisation.
My research brings the countercultural past into the present, insofar as it recognises historical precedents and acknowledges earlier countercultural pioneers as important historical actors. I view these earlier pragmatic forms of counterculture environmentalism as radical and vital experimental models we can reflect on and learn from today. I am not suggesting the often crude methods and outcomes of earlier counterculture pioneers are suitable as a blueprint to be transposed wholesale in present times. In many ways, those previous experiments are no longer applicable as solutions to our contemporary problems. Rather, I draw on these experiments for their symbolic agency, especially potent today in light of our need to cultivate anew a sense of social contestation and our own subjective responses to the current set of
173 global ecological crises. The countercultural model is significant today in relation to the development of self-reliant attitudes necessary if new heterogeneous styles of living are to emerge, particularly in the face of the increasing sedative consumption of today’s mass-media subjectivity. As was articulated in Chapter One, Retrieving the Past: The Turn to Obsolescence, my recourse to obsolete and anachronistic forms emanates from a redressing of Benjamin’s formulations concerning the utopian energies embedded within the outmoded. In a contemporary context, my investigation points to larger questions of the continuation of the outmoded as a site of resistance, enabling creative practice that runs counter to the chronological flow of modernisations’ developmental telos.
To properly establish my claim that early countercultural pragmatism should be retrieved from the dustbin of history, it is critical that I begin by pinpointing my first moments of interest in alternative ways of living. I do this in an attempt to articulate a subjective imperative and, from the outset, admit to my early attraction to the counterculture. In the first pages of this chapter, I will provide a brief personal narrative in order to sketch this growing interest, revealing a series of key moments in my life spanning an eight-year period from the age of 14 through to 22. Each vignette will be itemised under the following subheadings: Dad; Permaculture; Pragmatism; The Road.
Once I’ve established this personal perspective, I will then widen the focus, offering an historical sketch of the influential, albeit brief, period of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This approach will at times follow key figure and co-founder of the Whole Earth Catalog – Stewart Brand. This period represents a time widely accepted as the first wave and historical locus for the North American counterculture movement and a time when communes are said to have proliferated widely. I will focus on one specific facet of the counterculture that countercultural historian Andrew G. Kirk refers to as “pragmatic counterculture environmentalism”. 241 My examination utilises Kirk’s recent book, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and
241A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 6.
174 American Environmentalism (2007), as a primary point of reference, wherein Kirk provides a cultural and historical overview of this particular branch of the counterculture. Drawing on Felix Guattari’s ecosophical theories in The Three Ecologies, this chapter will also provide evidence of the evolution of pragmatic forms of environmentalism within the early counterculture that emerged as a new type of environmental thinking. This thinking was not phobic about human-scale technological innovation, thus explaining why this relatively recent rejection of antimodern notions that formerly separated nature from culture represents a critical moment, not only in the history of environmentalism, but also beyond the realms of environmentalism, as Guattari claims, across “relations with the socius, the psyche and nature”.242
I will conduct a case study of the Whole Earth Catalog, examining the publication’s current critical import, uncovering how it exemplifies the characteristics of the countercultural mode. Finally, I will investigate the practice of contemporary artist Andrea Zittel. Here, I develop links between the communalism and new Western regionalism expressed in Whole Earth Catalog and Zittel’s current art practice. Zittel’s art, like the Whole Earth Catalog, will also be shown to bear a relationship to Guattari’s thesis in The Three Ecologies. Of particular significance to both case studies is Guattari’s suggested reconstruction of ‘modalities of group-being’, as well as the importance of understanding the political dimension of both the Whole Earth Catalog and Zittel’s art.243 The connections I have forged between the Whole Earth Catalog, Zittel and Guattari form a triangulated structure of meaning for my research into the countercultural mode.
242 J. C. Tinnell, ‘Tranversalising the Ecological Turn: Four Components of Félix Guattari’s Ecosophical Perspective’, Deleuze Studies, Vol. 6.3, August 2012, pp. 357-388. According to Guattarian scholar, John C. Tinnell, ‘ecosophy’ is not to be understood as a type of eco-philosophy, in that it is not a redirection of the philosophical tradition towards ecological concerns. He contends that within a Guarattian framework “to think ecosophically is to rethink philosophy in our contemporary moment defined by the convergence of nature and culture, ecological crises, globalization and the Internet”. See F. Guattari, The Three Ecologies, p. 28. 243 F. Guattari, The Three Ecologies, p. 24.
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Figure 82: Covers from my collection of Earth Garden and Grassroots Magazine.
DAD In present-day terms, it is not unusual to encounter discourse that examines the relations between ecology and society or nature and culture. Indeed, my consideration of these domains may be perceived of as symptomatic of our times. My ecological concerns are indicative of the current global conversation regarding our twenty-first century reality, forcing us to acknowledge the manifold ecological and economic crises we face – to come to terms with “life in the anthroposcene” as
176 Jill Bennett describes it.244 According to countercultural figurehead Stewart Brand, whether we like it or not, “all humanity is now stuck with a planet stewardship role”.245
Nonetheless, what I am interested in identifying here is not my relationship to our twenty-first century atmosphere of global ecological awareness, but the establishment of an earlier, essentially twentieth-century ‘coming-of-age’ story which provides context for my current interest in countercultural thought and praxis. Unlike current trends in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was not fashionable to grow your own food, compost household waste, or shop at thrift stores. Environmentalism had not yet infiltrated the mainstream – it was still countercultural – and many of the most radical forms of experimentation continued to take place on the fringes of contemporary life, on the rural commune and even in the far-reaching sprawl of the suburbs. David Holmgren, ecologist and author of a recent book titled Permaculture Principals and Pathways Beyond Sustainability (2006), describes the 1990s as the second great countercultural wave. In the second wave communes became better known as intentional communities and some of the previously pioneering experiments became accepted mainstream practice.246
I refer to this ecological prehistory not out of a desire to feel more ‘green’ than the next person; rather, I am navigating a path that illuminates the significance of my first contact with ‘environmentalism’, ‘hippies’ and ‘communes’ because it derives from a cultural climate that differs to the one we inhabit today. My germinal connection to environmentalism stems from familial relationships. For as long as I can remember, my dad fostered an attraction to rural communes and pragmatic forms of environmentalism, often referred to today as ‘alternative lifestyles’. For him this interest was typically manifest in a banal and purely fantastic fashion, through regular trips to the local suburban newsagency to purchase a Lotto ticket and the
244 J. Bennett, Living in the Anthropocene, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Germany, 2012, p. 1. 245 S. Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, Viking, New York, 2009, p. 275. 246 D. Holmgren, Permaculture Principals and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, Holmgren Design Services, Australia, 2006. In this publication Holmgren describes the nineties as the second great countercultural wave.
177 latest Earth Garden magazine (Fig. 82). This escapist ritual never led him ‘back-to- the-land’ – in fact it never led him anywhere. 247 What it did do, however, is reflect his curiosity for something else, for other ways of being – it provided a distant ‘what-if’ fantasy, the value of which I am certain helped him endure the rigors of his harsh working-class reality. 248 At approximately 14 years of age, I recall noticing dad buying the Earth Garden magazines. I loved reading them with him and together we would talk about the possibility of finding other ways to live, we would discuss self-sufficiency and growing our own food – which in the late ’80s, in the suburbs, was a somewhat radical concept. On the pages of those magazines, we found our idealised world, where happy families on beautiful rural outposts worked together surrounded by free-ranging chickens and farm dogs, knee deep in the mud, making the bricks to build their own home. We wondered about how the lives of these ‘other’ families actually functioned; do these people have day jobs, televisions? Do they just live and work on the land? Have they withdrawn from the modern world, or do they exist in a relatively parallel universe, on the fringe of modern life? From our perspective, the lifestyle of the families depicted in Earth Garden magazine embodied ‘another world’ a magical otherworldly place. Whilst we never left ‘our world’, not even to visit ‘their world’, we did like to daydream together about this other way of living.
To this day, my dad still lives the same way he always has. Perhaps he has given up on his Earth Garden dream and I guess he has not won the Lotto. As he has grown older, the fire in his belly has faded as has his utopian yearning for another way of living. Perhaps he now sees it brewing in me and is happy to simply pass it on.
247 My reference to the back-to-the-land movement is centered on the social phenomenon amongst largely developed Western countries of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which saw a migration from cities to rural areas. Whilst I acknowledge earlier iterations of the movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, within the scope of this research the latter is of particular relevance. 248 Dad left school at 14 and was forced into the kitchen by his father. He eventually became a chef only to later leave the kitchen and become a coalminer. After years in the mines he was almost killed in a serious accident. After his accident he left the mines and worked a number of equally labour- intensive jobs, he eventually went back to the kitchen. He doesn’t like cooking commercially but it’s all he can do to earn a living. He is still working in kitchens at 62.
178 PERMACULTURE PRAGMATISM I value the optimism and idealism that my dad passed on to me, but I have since realised that optimism can only become transformative praxis when coupled with pragmatism. In my late teens, I took the hopeful idealism I had learnt from my dad and decided to accompany an equally idealistic friend to a permaculture design course. I was finally going to visit this ‘other’ world I had speculated about with my dad. Teaching the course was David Holmgren, the internationally recognised ecologist and widely published co-founder of permaculture.249 Since its conception in Tasmania in the early 1970s, permaculture has become a rapidly proliferating global movement. Because two ecologists developed permaculture, like ecology, and unlike most other scientific disciplines, it is often described as holistic as opposed to reductionist.250 According to David Holmgren:
Permaculture is applied science in that it is essentially concerned with improving the long-term material wellbeing of people. In drawing together strategies and techniques from modern and traditional cultures, permaculture seeks holistic integration of utilitarian values. By using an ecological perspective, permaculture sees a much broader canvas of utility than the more reductionist perspectives.251
In previous times, ecology was largely a small and undernourished sphere of teaching and research within larger scientific schools in universities. According to Andrew G. Kirk in Counterculture Green, mainstream acceptance of ecology and ecological design’s multifaceted applications with regard to the built environment is
249 Bill Mollison is the other co-founder of permaculture. He was Holgren’s teacher and mentor in the early stages of their working relationship. Mollison is often considered to be the figurehead of the permaculture movement; most people within the movement believe this is due to Mollison being more engaged in acts of self-promotion. Holmgren on the other hand has lived relatively quietly on his permaculture farm in Hepburn in Victoria, Australia. 250 David Suzuki, Felix Guattari and Richard Buckminster-Fuller have each expressed similar concerns about scientific methodologies that focus on reductionism. The shared concern is that it negates the analysis of a wider and longer view, often missing the systemic significance of connections between things/object/subjects, and this in turn reduces an understanding of complexity and difference. 251 D. Holmgren, Permaculture Principals, p. 2.
179 relatively recent. Additionally, in the 1970s, Holmgren and Mollison opposed the role that university-based research played in contributing to large-scale technocratic development of food production. Counter to the type of research culture they viewed as complicit within technocratic development, Holmgren and Mollison committed themselves to the development of human-scale agricultural technologies and taught permaculture design courses around the world, outside of any conventional institutional structure. 252 As a result of their work, the world is now full of permaculture enthusiasts who implement their own interpretation of the principles of permaculture design in their daily lives. 253
For me, returning to everyday life after ten days on a sustainable small-holding was a jarring experience; it left me grappling with challenges – how do I apply this new knowledge and experience to my everyday life as a young art student living in a cheap rental property in suburban Wollongong? I now had the tools (knowledge) to alter my world, but I didn’t necessarily have the will to do so – not yet, anyway.
THE ROAD When I was 22 years old, I lived on the road for six months as part of a convoy (Fig. 83). I travelled in a 1978 Holden Panel Van; three vans carried eight people (six adults and two children). We all travelled together like a family, we ate together, we shared everything; looking back, I guess that made us a small mobile commune. We started in Hobart and ended up in Broome. We traversed many coastlines and deserts, we headed across the Nullarbor and up the west coast of Australia, stopping where we liked, for as long as we liked.
My dad kept those Earth Garden magazines for a couple of decades and then he eventually passed them on to me. They now sit on my bookshelf amongst a
252 Mahatma Gandhi believed in small, local, village-based technology to help India's villages become self-reliant. Appropriate technology is often described as human-centred and advocates technological choice that meets human needs while preserving the environment for future generations. As time has passed the ‘ecological design movement’ has become the more prominent turn of phrase used. 253 D. Holmgren, Permaculture Principals, p. 16.
180
Figure 83: Documentation of my travels through the Pilbara Desert in 1998. selection of recent ‘green’ publications. Compared to the slick appearance of most ‘green’ publications today they seem dated and a little daggy; nonetheless, they exist as an important historical marker for several reasons. Beyond their dated visual appearance, Earth Garden continues to offer a compendium of DIY instruction, practical knowledge, tools, information and methods to implement any number of ecologically sound alternatives. In a current context, environmentalism has become a mainstream concern and, like all other aspects of our lives within our globalised total-market culture ‘green capitalism’ offers us an apparently ‘guilt-free’ consumer choice. However, back in the late eighties and early nineties, this type of ecological information was only available in marginal publications like Earth Garden.
In retrospect, a recurring significance, which defines each of the previously identified events, came to light. The simple Earth Garden ritual practised with my dad, the permaculture course I attended and my travels across the desert as a young woman thread together to critically inform my entry-point into this field of
181 research. Whilst other possible events could be drawn upon to extend this lineage, I cite these events as the first points of interest. In a way, I began my research into communes and the counterculture when I was just 14, and although since my youth substantial interest has percolated under the surface, it has come to bear once again so that now, more than ever, I find myself attracted to the counterculture – imagining alternative ways of being.
A REFUSAL TO CONFORM When contemplating the various emergent trajectories and resurgent waves of the counterculture across society, a single fundamental characteristic, which I will refer to as the notion of ‘looking for alternatives’, offers some unity to a cultural phenomenon that may otherwise present as a dispersed series of social or historic moments. In the broadest sense, the counterculture encompasses a wide range of social upheavals and disillusionments that came to a head in technologically advanced Western societies in the 1960s. Some of these include the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-War Movement (Vietnam), Feminism and Environmentalism.
The aim of this research is not to articulate a broad genealogy of the many faces of the counterculture. Oppositional undercurrents are evident in most modern societies when placed under scrutiny. What I do wish to trace here are some of the multifaceted conditions that have sparked the countercultural impulse. What is it about modern society that provokes a significant continued disillusionment and the refusal to conform amongst some of its citizens? Some of the central tensions within the global capitalist system since the second half of the twentieth century, which might be described as contributing factors sparking the countercultural impulse, are: in the first instance, global capitalism’s emphasis on free market ideology and unrestricted competition has resulted in the widespread plunder of natural resources. Our dominant political economy, often described as neoliberal, tends to favour free-market capitalism and continued economic growth. Often perceived as a condition of globalisation, as a political philosophy it advocates free
182 trade, open markets, privatisation and deregulation. Those critical of neoliberalism claim that its focus on economic growth sees it work in favour of large corporations and the wealthy elite gaining more control and wealth from the deregulation of free-market capitalism, while the plunder of natural resources, brought on by these corporate interests, pushes us towards environmental crisis. Additionally, the shrinking of the public sector in favour of privatisation causes the breakdown of welfare systems, forcing more citizens into poverty, seeing a deepening divide between the wealthy and the poor. Second, this free-market ideology typically has a flow-on effect, which occurs as poorer countries are forced to sell their labour cheaply just to compete in the global marketplace. This leads not only to further exploitation of natural resources but also to the exploitation of human subjects. Finally, mental manipulation of populations by the mass media, which Guattari refers to as the IWC’s (Intergrated World Capitalism) ideological arm, produces a highly standardised and apathetic society of sedative mass consumption.254 Political activist and linguist Noam Chomsky has referred to this phenomenon as the propaganda model within democratic society, which he believes results in “the manufacturing of consent”.255
A Marxist framework shapes my critique, highlighting the antagonism inherent within the current economic and social system. Here, I have largely followed influential cultural theorists and Marxist philosophers such as Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Žižek and Félix Guattari.
Both permaculture and the Whole Earth Catalog grew out of the first wave of the counterculture, between 1966 and 1974. The practical innovative approach that Brand promoted in the Whole Earth Catalog parallels the principles of permaculture. Whole Earth Catalog may also be perceived as a predecessor of the Australian Earth Garden magazine. My focused attention on Kirk’s text Counterculture Green, The
254 F. Guattari refers to the global capitalist system as the IWC, which stands for Intergrated World Capitalism. See I. Pindar & P. Sutton, ‘Translators Introduction’, The Three Ecologies, Continuum International Publishing Group, New York, London, 2000, p. 4. 255 N. Chomsky & H. Edward, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Random House, United Kingdom, 2008.
183 Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism develops a lineage that extends beyond the specificity of an Australian context and branches out into a parallel historic account of the early counterculture in North America. I have pursued a transnational approach in an attempt to express a wider historical context, particularly as I’ve struggled to find scholarly documentation of this period in an Australian context. The telling of Australian countercultural history is not the central aim of this research, especially because the images I collect and reconfigure represent a fantasy-vision inspired by found images of earlier forms of communal life that often occurred across the other side of the globe.
Moreover, the communes that have captured my imagination and have filtered through as subjects in my practice become merged with each other – they are not derivative of any one place. As previously mentioned, the images of communes I generally find online are not hinged to any notion of reality or localism, and for this reason my research has eschewed a specific examination of communes and counterculture situated in a context actually accessible to me. Synonymous with the nature of our decentralised and delocalised global society, the information and images I have collected are generally sourced from similarly decentred points of reference, mostly, though not exclusively, from across the Internet’s global network. In this regard my method typifies what Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi has come to define as the semiocapitalistic way we collect and consume information in our highly visual globalised world, from blended sources – real and virtual, material and immaterial.256
Keith Meville’s book titled Communes in the Counterculture: Origins, Theories and Styles of Life (1972) speaks of the ‘youth movement’ as being opposed to everything that mainstream America valued. Meville declared, “this is indeed a counter culture, not just different from the mainstream culture but in many ways fundamentally
256 Semiocapitalism, also known as cognitive capitalism, is a term coined by Italian Marxist philosopher Franco ‘Bifo’ Beradi, a student of Felix Guattari; in simple terms it is understood as the blending of media by the real and virtual. See F. Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-alpha Generation, Minor Compositions, London, 2009.
184 opposed to it”.257 Unlike the class affiliations and proletarian uprising that Marx predicted, this revolution entailed a rejection of middle-class culture by the youth of the middle-class. Meville refers to the political activists and the apolitical radicals (generally referred to as ‘bohemians’ or ‘hippies’) as sharing an idealistic interest in building an alternative society, but having very different agendas on how to achieve this change. The political activists rallied against institutional power and staged sit- ins within universities and other forms of government establishment. They attempted to incite top-down change through methods of collective protest and opposition. The apolitical radicals focused on the freedom of the individual through bottom-up activism focused on the exploration of experimental alternative lifestyles and self-organisation, as indicated by the proliferation of communes at the time.258
The refusal to conform appeared in a variety of ways. In my opinion, Meville’s concept of the political activist and the apolitical radical is problematic because it suggests an unwarranted distinction between those who were politically motivated and those who apparently weren’t (the apolitical radicals). In the case of the so- called apolitical radical, to walk away from the modern convenience of middle-class urban/suburban society and start an experimental community in an often isolated rural area was clearly a politically motivated decision. Although it was essentially a privileged position, to make the conscious choice to walk away from the comforts of a middle-class lifestyle, it was nonetheless, not an easy path to take. Some of the most productive outcomes in this domain can be traced back to individuals like Stewart Brand and David Holmgren, who were immersed in all aspects of the countercultural phenomenon, respectively, as the political activist and the apolitical radical. They each used their experience to take their activism in a uniquely positive direction, developing a pioneering way of thinking and living that focused on what can be done, in a practical sense, rather than simply opposing what currently existed.
257 K. Meville, Communes in the Counterculture: Origins, Theories and Styles of Life, William Morrow & Company, New York, 1972, p. 233. 258 K. Meville, Communes in the Counterculture, p. 54.
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Figures 84, 85: Left: David Holmgren. Right: Holmgren’s permaculture small-hold, Australia.
Through the politically motivated pragmatic work of individuals like Brand and Holmgren (Fig. 84), a new positive approach, or different way of thinking about, social and environmental problems began to form. Similarly, the pioneering experiments made by the back-to-the-landers on the communal outpost eventually cycled back into an urban context, as evidenced through current interest in permaculture, community gardening and urban farming (Fig. 86) The search for alternatives or the desire for change has shifted and morphed over time, with (or rather, against) the political and social milieu of the day. In this regard, our contemporary understanding of political activism is expansive and may include a wide range of activities, not just mass-protesting and marching against something. For example, micro-political actions, such as planting an edible garden in the common verge space outside your home, is a pragmatic form of activism – it
Figure 86, 87: Leo and Wes working in our first large scale vegetable garden, 2012–13. demonstrates a self-determined reclaiming of (often neglected) civic space, at the same time as being a gift to the rest of the community. The instructional pragmatism published on the pages of the Whole Earth Catalog represents a
186 precursory model for this style of day-to-day micro-political action, which has become a widespread, almost normative practice in many contemporary cities. In addition to this, the network of online communities sharing user generated information – tools and knowledge – shows some resemblance to the early culture of self-education promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.
The cultural contribution and social impact of the Whole Earth Catalog was, and to this day remains, widespread. Founded in 1968 by Stewart Brand, the publication illustrates what was a new holism: an all-encompassing technologically enthusiastic and pragmatically driven iteration of modern environmentalism in the late ’60s. Today both the Whole Earth Catalog and permaculture have developed into large social networks. The collective aim of these networks is to equip individuals with an expansive set of life-skills that focus on knowledge and tools. This skills-set based on ideas of ‘post-scarcity’ is intended to encourage individual agency and autonomous zones of self-organisation as a form of resistance, in order to better negotiate the homogenisation of a post-industrial society marked by the underlying threat of a changing climate. The concept of post-scarcity revolves around the idea that we have all we need for a sustainable society if we focus on ecologically managing and developing renewable and cleaner energy sources. In its most radical form this shift would also require non-capitalist domains of value. As Guattari argues, “financial and prestige-based rewards for human social activities” are not the most appropriate means for measuring “social and aesthetic profitability and the value of desire”.259 All of this describes a very different social formation to our current one – indeed, it is the antithesis of it. In contrast to the post-scarcity model, globalised capitalism or neoliberalism in its current form persists with unsustainable, heavy polluting methods of continued mining of finite natural resources, such as coal and gas, coupled with the slavish adherence to the untenable economic model we have now, which seeks the perpetual growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
259 F. Guattari, The Three Ecologies, p. 42.
187 As a society, it has taken half a century for us to reconcile the full scope of environmentalism and to comprehend that it means much more than wilderness conservation. The realisation that the separation of nature and culture is essentially destructive is a relatively recent phenomenon. Similarly, the idea that modern cities can work towards becoming dynamic ‘green’ spaces is a popular contemporary notion. It has become widely accepted now (though by no means acted upon), more than a decade into the twenty-first century, that any move towards a sustainable future needs to combine technological innovation with our desire for a healthy environment. Kirk illustrates in his book Counterculture Green that in the late ’60s the majority of people who called themselves environmentalists were inherently suspicious of technology. According to Kirk, “The post-war period was a time of unprecedented technological growth spawning much ambivalence about the power of our tools to remake the world and resolve concerns about resource scarcity.”260
According to Kirk, Stewart Brand once referred to the team of like minded individuals who worked with him on the Whole Earth Catalog, and the practical yet comparatively radical developments the publication reviewed and promoted, such as Septic Tank Practices (Fig. 88), as equally as revolutionary as the ideas of Karl Marx in Das Kapital (1867). 261 In his examination, Kirk develops a narrative that pinpoints Brand and his collaborators as key players in the historical development of an ecological awakening and to the fact that technology need not be a threat to the natural world. According to Kirk, the Whole Earth Catalog was fundamental in fostering this positive attitude through the widespread circulation of tools, awareness and knowledge in the late ’60s.
260 A. Kirk, p. 9. 261 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 52.
188
Figure 88: Septic Tank Practices, by Peter Warshall.
He writes, “For a generation coming of age in the 1960s, Whole Earth became a forum for the re-evaluation of the tangled and shifting relationship among design, science, consumption, and ecology in post war America.”262 Kirk claims:
262 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 9.
189 In a manner so subtle it is easy to miss, Steward Brand [Fig. 85] and his collaborators incubated an environmental paradigm shift of critical importance to the goal of a sustainable future… A closer look at the environmental thinking conveyed through Whole Earth does not provide an easy road map to a technologically enthusiastic environmental pragmatism or a program for a post-industrial environmentalism, but it does demonstrate some of the best efforts in this direction – efforts that deserve closer scrutiny and acknowledgement.263
STEWART BRAND: ECOPRAGMATIST In his book Kirk conducts an historical account of Stewart Brand’s life (Fig. 89); he thoroughly acknowledges the efforts that Brand and his Whole Earth Catalog cohort made in reshaping and incubating an environmental paradigm shift of critical importance. Kirk describes Stewart Brand as one of those perceptive individuals whose life uncannily intersected with many of the seminal issues of his time. Individuals like Brand, he says, “tend to be iconoclasts, amateurs, dropouts, and eccentrics free to pursue their passion outside of the mainstream, Stewart Brand was one of these rare people”.264
Kirk declares that in order to understand the Whole Earth Catalog and its unique contribution to American counterculture environmentalism, it is important to understand details of Brand’s life. The following provides a brief overview and situates Brand as instrumental in the evolution of the counterculture, the back-to- the-land and commune movement, the evolution of the Appropriate Technology and Ecological Design movements and the modern environmental movement in general.265
Brand was born in the Midwest of America and although through his adult life he surrounded himself with thinkers who spent time working on the practical
263 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 9. 264 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 31. 265 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 31.
190
Figure 89: Stewart Brand, 28 years old. application of ideas rather than teaching and publishing through academic channels, his parents were academics, educated at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Vassar.266 According to family friend Dick Raymond, Brand got his iconoclastic worldview at home. In 1956, he travelled to California to study biology at Stanford University, where Brand worked alongside young biologists and ecologists who started uncovering disturbing findings regarding overpopulation and its implications
266 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 31.
191 for the future of the planet – in particular the depletion of natural resources.267 An overwhelmingly negative view of the future permeated the academic community undertaking this research and these views contributed to an overarching pessimism within the broader community of environmentalists at the time. Although Brand was one of the biologists studying at Stanford at the time, his outlook towards the findings was very different to that of his peers. He maintained a more optimistic view, rejecting the antimodernity and technophobia common to environmental thinking of the period.268
To say that Brand has always been a controversial character is to understate how contentious he was and remains to this day. His ideas have been subject to much critical scrutiny over the decades. For example, Brand has continued to openly advocate for nuclear power and bio-genetics. The irony is, it was precisely his enthusiasm for technology, and his eagerness to surround himself with others who share this enthusiasm, that offended other environmentalists and yet, eventually, challenged and shifted antimodernising attitudes within the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
According to Kirk, despite the centrality of environmental issues to his work, Brand rarely defined himself as an environmentalist and, when he did, he did so with caution. Brand was, and is, apprehensive about using environmentalism as a label and ideology. He was not comfortable with political categories and, most importantly, he was not interested in apocalyptic and romantic wilderness-based environmentalism.269 As evidenced through the editorial choices he and his cohorts made for the Whole Earth Catalog, readers were presented with a mix of practical human-centric ideas and new technologies for ecological living. Brand has always been interested in innovation and individual agency and Kirk connects this focus to the traditions of pragmatism and libertarian thinking. He references influential American pragmatist John Dewey as an important influence on Brand.
267 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 33. 268 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 35. 269 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 36.
192 American pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that originated in the United States around 1870. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) regards the most important of the ‘classical pragmatists’ as Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), William James (1842–1910) and John Dewey (1859–1952). According to the SEP, the influence of pragmatism declined during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, but was revived in the 1970s as new thinkers re-evaluated and began using the writings and ideas of the classical pragmatists. The core of pragmatism was the pragmatist maxim, a rule for clarifying the contents of hypotheses by stressing their “practical consequences”.270
In the extract below, Kirk reaffirms the revival of this practical epistemological outlook as evident in the pages of the Whole Earth Catalog:
American Pragmatists like John Dewey and William James pointed to a practical, problem solving, tool-using, environment-transforming strain of American culture… Like the pragmatists who preceded him, Stewart Brand provided readers with a captivatingly optimistic vision of the future and sources and suggestions about how to travel a different road towards sustainability and ecological equilibrium.271
Another example of Brand’s unorthodox stance, considering his notorious role as a figurehead for the countercultural movement, was his early participation in the Reserve Officer’s Training Corps and later the United States Army. Kirk retells Brand’s recollection of his appreciation for his time in the military and reveals how the military reflected his intellectual pragmatism and libertarian-leaning conservatism. In his youth, Brand’s libertarian conservatism is clearly expressed through his strong anti-communist views. He viewed communism as a threat to liberty, in particular his own personal freedom. Brand was posted as a photojournalist out of the Pentagon, and for this he received technical training that
270 C. Hookway, ‘Pragmatism’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, E. N. Zalta (ed.), Spring 2010 edition, viewed 03/08/2011, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2010/entries/pragmatism/. 271 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 11.
193 later served him well in publishing.272 As kirk writes, “Despite his [conservative] concerns and his enthusiasm for his military career, a key component of his personal philosophy involved an avoidance of organised politics in favour of individual action.” 273 In this way, Kirk refers to Brand’s individualistic philosophy as an amalgamation of pragmatic Western regionalism merged with libertarian values.
After his time in the military, Brand returned to San Francisco with a newly sparked interest in photography that, ironically, led him in a direction almost as far removed from military service as was possible – to art school. Between 1962 and 1968, Kirk describes Brand as someone who “rode the cresting wave of the counterculture like few in his generation”.274
According to Kirk, Brand often found himself moving between San Francisco and New York and, during this time, he became involved in multi-media happenings and staged festivals – experimenting with new technologies. Brand was a member of the art collective, U.S.C.O, known primarily for its experimental light and sound environments and film projections mounted in museums, dance clubs and universities. He also spent time skirting around the edges of the New York art scene, networking at Allan Kaprow and Fluxus happenings. Sociologist Ronald Burt, cited by Fred Turner in his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006), refers to Brand as a “network entrepreneur”.275 Burt adds, “[Brand] began to migrate from one intellectual community to another and, in the process, to knit together formerly separate intellectual and social networks.” 276 Turner refers to the way Brand networked as an example of how he applied his early investigations into cybernetics, and through his readings of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics and Society (1948) Brand developed a cybernetic vision of the world in which material reality
272 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 37. 273 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 37. 274 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 37. 275 F. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, The University of Chicago Press, USA, 2006, p. 5. 276 F. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, p. 5.
194 could be perceived as an “information system”.277 In the Whole Earth Catalog era, the networks that Brand embraced straddled the worlds of “scientific research, hippie homesteading, ecology and mainstream consumer culture”.278 Turner adds:
To a generation that had grown up in a world beset by massive armies and by the threat of nuclear holocaust, the cybernetic notion of the globe as a single, interlinked pattern of information was deeply comforting: in the invisible play of information, many thought they could see the possibility of global harmony.279
In 1966, while under the influence of mind-altering chemicals and his interest in cybernetics, Brand came to the realisation there had not yet been an image published publicly of the Whole Earth. Through this realisation, he was convinced, if we, as a society were able to see an image of the whole of the Earth, then we might be moved to perceive our environment holistically. From here, Brand developed his first environmental advocacy campaign. Kirk contends that the publication of the first distant photographs of the globe in the Whole Earth Catalog and Life magazine in 1968 helped shape a burgeoning public awareness of the modern ecology movement. Kirk’s argument is supported by historian Neil Maher’s contention that “Brand’s advocacy of a view of the whole planet represented a significant shift in thinking about the relationship between nature and technology.”280
In 1969, Theodore Roszak popularised the counterculture with the best-selling title The Making of a Counter Culture. Here Roszak concluded that within the counterculture there were two often-conflicting factions – the “reversionaries” and the “technophiles”. The reversionaries, as defined by Roszak, were interested in moving beyond the post-industrial age by returning to a simpler life. The commune
277 F. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, p. 5. 278 F. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, p. 5. 279 F. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, p. 5. 280 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 41.
195 and back-to-the-land movements initially subscribed to this ideal. Alternatively, Roszak’s technophiles were technological utopians, “enthused by technological invention and disenchanted with the decline of craft and individual agency within the technocratic world of mid-twentieth-century industrial capitalism”. 281 Kirk claims that by 1966, Stewart Brand was “straddling the line between the reversionaries and the technophiles”.282 What is more, when Brand and his Whole Earth collaborators managed to convince people of the necessary synthesis of these often-diametric positions, the environmental paradigm began to shift.
Kirk’s investigation of the history of the pragmatic branch of environmentalism that the Whole Earth Catalog represents comes into sharper focus now in the twenty-first century, as we attempt to act on what we have learnt. In Kirk’s opinion, “The challenge for environmental advocates in the next century will be to move forward with the efforts of the past half-century and reconcile notions of technological progress, consumerism, and economy with environmentalism to create sustainable economics.”283 My research draws attention to this history and pays homage to the technological innovators and the pioneers of early communal settlements, whether rural or urban, and to countercultural pioneers like Brand and Holmgren for their part as important historical actors and cultural facilitators.
NEW TWENTIETH CENTURY WESTERN REGIONALISM In the early phase of developing the Whole Earth Catalog (Fig. 90), Brand’s initial idea was to coordinate a type of educational fair that travelled to far reaching communes. In preparation, he set about collecting diverse books with innovative titles and practical information. Eventually, he realised the scale of his project was too grand and, as a result, he developed a mobile information unit. In 1968, he headed off with his wife, Lois Jennings, in his Dodge truck full of useful tools and
281 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 40. 282 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 40. 283 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 217.
196 information for the people who needed it most, the back-to-the-landers, particularly those experimenting in radical communal settlements in New Mexico.
Figure 90: The cover of the first Whole Earth Catalog, 1968.
197
Figure 91: John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men.
By getting out into these remote communities, he investigated how the experiments were taking shape and began making connections and building networks between separate communal settlements. His truck store was not financially lucrative but it made enough to keep running. Kirk concludes that Brand’s contact with community-orientated living was beneficial to the next print phase of his creative endeavour.284 Through his experience with the truck store/library, Brand realised the demand for a print publication (Fig. 90). Once up and running, the Whole Earth Catalog quickly became a cultural phenomenon, chronicling the experiments and interests of the countercultural generation. In 1970, it received the National Book Prize, selling a million copies; it has since become widely referred to as the unofficial handbook of the counterculture. Within the tradition of American Western regionalism is a strongly embedded sense of place that defines a struggle towards the development of an array of collective and individual regional cultural identities which, since the nineteenth century, have emerged in the diverse regions and states located on the western side of the United States.
284 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 42.
198 Western regionalism has long been a popular form of historical emulation in art and literature. From Steinbeck to Stegner (Fig. 91), myths of the west have captured the popular imagination harking back to the ‘cowboys and Indians-style’ retelling of early colonial conquest and settlement of the American frontier.
Figure 92: Drop City artists commune, Trinidad, Colorado, 1965–1972.
A return to Western regionalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries evokes a particular sensibility that characterises a cyclical cultural-shift towards a simplification of life. Regionalism has deep roots in American history, often referred to as an early influence on the countercultural tendency, which witnessed a number of groups heading back to the land in the 1960s and 1970s, such as the iconic pioneering artists’ community Drop City in Trinidad, Colorado (Fig. 92). Images of Drop City have informed several of my works; later in the chapter, I will discuss the commune in further detail.
At the time, the Whole Earth Catalog was one of the few popular American lifestyle magazines on the market and the best-known of the publications that catered to back-to-the-land commune dwellers. Although Kirk defines the later issues of the catalog as moving away from the commune project, towards a nuanced focus on appropriate technology and urban/suburban ecological innovation, the fact remains that the early commune participants were Brand’s first target audience.
199
Figure 93: Sunset, August 1912.
A publication originating in the late nineteenth century titled Sunset (Fig. 93) also promoted a version of Western regionalism, which, according to Kirk, was clearly geared towards a different type of reader, but nonetheless played its part in Stewart Brand’s vision for the Whole Earth Catalog. He writes, “Whole Earth and Sunset shared a fundamental desire to link regional traditions to modern design while celebrating the authenticity of Western Nature.” 285
285 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 5.
200
Figure 94: Whole Earth Catalogue, fall 1968, pages 20 and 21.
Kirk argues that in the past 20 years a growing number of scholars have concluded that, “since the first Whole Earth Catalog there has been an evolution in the American style of living”.286 In Counterculture Green, Kirk builds a case justifying his study of the Whole Earth Catalog because he believes that “there is a direct link between the catalog and the rise of a particularly western pragmatic environmental sensibility, with a special emphasis on the union of technology and nature”.287 Figure 94 details pages 20 and 21 of the first Whole Earth Catalog, offering an example of the typical juxtaposition of nature and technology in the pages of the publication. Furthermore, Kirk maps a nexus between technology and nature operative in American culture, making reference to Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964), wherein Marx “depicts one of the central tensions in American culture – the desire to reconcile our technological prowess with our love of the
286 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 7. 287 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 8.
201 extraordinary nature”.288 Kirk reveals how “He (Marx) pays special attention to the goal of several generations of American writers and thinkers who fostered hope for a middle landscape where tools and nature harmoniously united” (Fig. 95).289
Figure 95: Thomas Hart Benton, Threshing, 1939.
Kirk highlights how after World War I the hope of a “middle landscape” faded due to the widespread technological devastation of the war. 290 Historian Thomas Hughes has identified a continued interest and faith amongst the American population regarding the ability of technological innovation to solve the problems of the future. Yet, Hughes notes, in the 1960s (post-World War II), the “temper of
288 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 8. 289 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 8. 290 L. Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, Oxford University Press, USA, 1964. Leo Marx addresses the underlining tensions and contradictions within preindustrial American culture between a pastoral ideal and the transformation of the landscape brought about by technological and industrial development. He speaks of a persistent urge within society to find a middle landscape where technological enthusiasm and the pastoral life each thrive. Marx believed it was the role of literature to expose the contradiction of this desire.
202 the times began to change markedly”. 291 As the scale of technological systems started to grow with industrialised society, so too did the physical and economic scale of technology. By the end of World War II, people had started to grow fearful of the scale of technology, its potential for destruction (atomic energy), as well as the growing bureaucratic and technocratic structures that had developed around new technologies. Amid a fearful climate generated by large-scale technology, the pioneering Whole Earth Catalog community began exploring and promoting an alternative approach to technological innovation and this saw the gradual development of the ‘appropriate technology’ movement (AT). “By reclaiming an amateur tradition of invention and technological development and celebrating an ecological focus to technological research, Whole Earth provided moral support for young optimists working to map a brighter future free from flaws of technocratic thinking but not free from technology”.292
The Western regionalist tradition is also important to American artist Andrea Zittel’s way of life and, by extension, her investigation into the social construction of needs within her art. As previously mentioned, in Counterculture Green, Kirk maps the historical nexus between technology and nature operative in American culture. Zittel’s great grandparents were ranchers, and in interviews she often talks about her strong connection to the desert, having spent much of her childhood at the family ranch. For her, the sparse high desert region of Imperial Valley, a couple of hours south of Joshua Tree towards the border of Mexico, was paradise.293 Zittel’s engagement with the tradition of American Western regionalism and specifically the pioneer spirit filters through her practice. Later in this chapter, I will build a case that shows how her practice represents a contemporary reiteration of a highly individualised and critically aware brand of new western regionalism.
291 T. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870–1970, Penguin, New York, 1989, p. 443. 292 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 9. 293 A. Zittel, Lay of My Land, Prestel Publishing, Munich, London & New York, 2011, p. 11.
203
Figure 96: The front and back cover of the Whole Earth Epilog, 1974.
THE CATALOG As mentioned previously, here I will conduct an examination of the Whole Earth Catalog (Fig. 96). I will describe pages from the catalogue in order to highlight both the impact of the catalogue in its day, as an important information device, as well as considering how we might utilise it today. At times, what follows identifies significant ties to Guattari’s thinking and the Whole Earth adventure. Guattari’s renowned role as radical environmentalist and activist in France in the mid to late twentieth century confirms his role within the French countercultural movement; numerous scholars have conducted significant scholarly documentation of this history. Rather than mapping this well-trodden ground, my reference to Guattari’s writings concentrates on the concerns of his later thinking, particularly that of The Three Ecologies. It is not surprising that a conceptual synchronicity exists between Guattarian thought and the Whole Earth Catalog, given that the 1960s was a period of global social upheavals and resultantly a time when ecologically orientated ideas were gestating for both the Whole Earth Catalog community and Guattari and his collegues. The use of Guattarian thought is helpful in knitting together critical observations and offers theoretical backbone to my contentions.
204 In The Three Ecologies, Guattari speaks of a crucial interrelation between human subjectivity, social relations and the environment, “the relationship between subjectivity and its exteriority”.294 He outlines a threat to human subjectivity in all its uniqueness, from “a homogeneous production of collective mass-media subjectivity” arising from capitalist globalisation. 295 Guattari contends that integrated world capitalism is not only destroying the natural environment and eroding social relations, it is also engaged in a far more insidious penetration of peoples’ attitudes, sensibilities and minds.296 Guattari adds, “Catastropic or not, negative developments [évolutions] are simply accepted without question.”297 He points to postmodernism informed by structuralist premises as working to “accustom us to a vision of the world drained of the significance of human interventions, embodied as they are in politics and micropolitics”.298 The notion of a “fatalistic passivity” towards human intervention represents a tragic frame of acceptance echoed in my earlier reference made to Jameson’s claim that “due to some weakness in our imaginations” we lack the capacity to visualise the future as anything other than apocalyptic. 299 In light of this conjecture, I wish to illustrate how this proposed erosion of subjective agency was challenged in the pages of the Whole Earth Catlog, through investment in the significance of human intervention, innovation and self-reliance, particularly on a micro-political scale – some 30 years prior to The Three Ecologies being published. I will argue that the catalogue achieved this re-engagement through the active production and promotion of heterogeneous forms, benefiting the development of what Guattari might deem the “resingularation” of human subjectivity. Furthermore, these activities were taking place simultaneous to formations of postmodern apathy as it began to swell, suggesting that whilst the majority of society was growing “fatalistically passive”, there were a relatively small but growing number of resistant individuals looking for alternatives. I believe this claim to be evidenced on the pages of the catalogue at
294 F. Guattari, The Three Ecologies, p. 19. 295 F. Gauttari, The Three Ecologies, p. 4. 296 F. Guattari, The Three Ecologies, p. 4. 297 F. Guattari, The Three Ecologies, p. 28. 298 F. Guattari, The Three Ecologies, p. 28. 299 F. Jameson, The Seeds of Time, p. 7.
205 every turn; for example, on the first page of each issue the ‘purpose’ of the catalogue is outlined to its readers (Fig. 97).
Figure 97: Excerpt from the first Whole Earth Catalog, 1968.
The ‘purpose’ paragraph sets the tone of the Whole Earth Catalog towards positive self-determination. The reader is encouraged to use the catalogue as a tool, helpful in the development of personal power through self-education and a conscious shaping by individuals of their own environment. The forms of personal power encouraged by the catalogue recalls Guattari’s call to arms “to resist this mass-media homogenization… and instead invent new ways to achieve the resingularization of existence”. 300 As has been previously evidenced, Brand’s aim with the catalogue was to provide information on emerging ideas about “appropriate technologies and common-sense advice for individuals who wanted to participate in the process of invention he hoped might lead to a new environmental culture in sync with the technological enthusiasm of one wing of the counterculture”. 301 The catalogue encouraged people to consider the agency of growing your own food, of harnessing the power of the sun to produce your own electricity, of making your own bread,
300 F. Guattari, The Three Ecologies, p. 5. 301 A. Kirk, The Three Ecologies, p. 1.
206 becoming computer literate, learning about systems theory, new media, cybernetics, global warming, over-population, cosmology and psychedelics.
Figure 98: Whole Earth Catalog (excerpt), Fall 1968.
The above extract from the catalogue (Fig. 98) provides a typical example of the human-scale ecologically sensitive technology enthusiastically promoted in the catalogue. In this review Steve Baer (co-founder of renowned artists’ commune Drop City and regular writer for Whole Earth) attempts to demystify the scientific complexity readers may attribute to solar power. Baer encourages readers to investigate, for themselves, different ways to use the sun’s light to harness energy. The simple hand drawn diagrams on the top right of the page give the impression that do-it-yourself solar power is an achievable goal.
207 At the time of publication and circulation, the catalogue was perceived as a powerful device, or, as described by Kirk, “one highly evolved tool box”. 302 It enabled individuals to readily access the type of information they needed in order to find alternative ways of learning, doing and being. The catalogue also served to inspire those with countercultural aspirations who hadn’t necessarily made the radical move back to the land, but were equally interested self-educators, who may have wanted to adapt new models and human-centric technologies to their urban/suburban lives.
If the catalogue was as instrumental to the evolution of the counterculture as historians are now suggesting, what then does the Whole Earth Catalog signify today, for the contemporary reader and in this case the contemporary artist? In the following paragraphs, I will examine the Whole Earth Catalog from a current, and at times subjective perspective, utilising Guattarian thought as a theoretical framework.
MODALITIES OF GROUP BEING According to Guattari, social ecosophy consists of developing specific practices that will modify and reinvent the ways in which we live as couples or in the family in an urban context or at work, etc. Obviously it would be inconceivable to try to go back to old formulas, which relate to periods when the planet was far less densely populated and when social relations were much stronger than they are today. But it will be a question of literally reconstructing the modalities of group-being [l’ étreen- groupe], not only through communicational interventions but through existential mutations driven by the motor of subjectivity. Instead of clinging to general recommendations we would be implementing effective practices of experimentation, as much on a micro-social level as on a larger institutional scale.303
302 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 1. 303 F. Guattari, The Three Ecologies, p. 24.
208 In the above extract from The Three Ecologies, Guattari proposes a reconstructive approach to new ways of living, mirroring the intention of communes, the counterculture, as well as my approach to examining the Whole Earth Catalog. He questions conventional modalities of ‘group-being’, such as the nuclear family. His questioning of conventional family structures correlates with the underlying principle defining the countercultural commune, which ultimately asks the same questions and, in the process, experiments with alternative communalist models.304 Guattari proposes the implementation of effective practices of experimentation at micro-social levels; he refers to reinventing the ways in which we live.305 Each of these notions possesses a utopian dimension, corresponding with the way the experiments undertaken by the typical counterculture environmentalist are portrayed in the Whole Earth Catalog. In his reference to communalism (modalities of group-being), Guattari asserts that it would be inconceivable to try to go back to old formulas, hinting at a reconstruction and re-evaluation of previous forms in an attempt to prefigure how to move towards possible new models, or as he implies, existential mutations driven by the motor of subjectivity.306 In a sense, this re- evaluative outlook reflects how I have approached my research of early communalist settlements, describing a reflective stance that examines how previous groups have tried to break with the “general recommendations” of our “increasingly homogenised society”307 in order to find other ways of living. In the case of my studio research, I realise that the communes I reference within my practice are reduced to the level of symbolic forms, and in this context, they exist for me as evidence of these previous experiments concerning alternative ways of living. I agree with Guattari, it is inconceivable to go back to these old formulae. But, in re- evaluating the way they looked, the way they functioned and even the way they failed, we might start to discover anew how to formulate or “reinvent the ways in which we live” today.308
304 F. Guattari, The Three Ecologies, p. 24. 305 F. Guattari, The Three Ecologies, p. 24. 306 F. Guattari, The Three Ecologies, p. 24. 307 F. Guattari, The Three Ecologies, p. 24. 308 F. Guattari, The Three Ecologies, p. 24.
209 This re-evaluative mode explains the way I have approached the Whole Earth Catalog. For the contemporary reader, the Whole Earth Catalog serves as an archive – it chronicles the early counterculture period, providing a sense of the vibrant network of active and creatively engaged individuals who collectively formed and worked as part of the Whole Earth Catalog community. It also provides a snap-shot of what the commune dweller of the late ’60s needed to know in order to expand their knowledge for surviving almost any aspect of their idealistic self-reliant way of life, and the production of their own subjectivity. Additionally, Whole Earth presents images of dwellings built by commune participants, and the work of the most radical architectural innovators of the day, most notably Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic domes.
In this re-evaluative context, the Whole Earth Catalog is one of the most engaging, spirited counterculture documents of the period, specifically in its illumination of alternative ‘modalities of group-being’. The catalogue demonstrates how, against popular belief, many of the early commune dwellers were not reclusive technophobes. On the contrary, my research has revealed their embrace of the information within the catalogue. Communards were often the pioneering groups enthusiastic about experimenting with the radical design solutions of Buckminster Fuller and small-scale ecologically sensitive technologies. More often than not, the communes of the early ’60 and ’70s were the initial testing-grounds for what would later become a global ecological design movement.
A large charcoal and gouache drawing I made in the initial stages of my candidacy called Mapping Community (2009) (Fig. 99) demonstrates the early methodology of my practice-based process. In making this drawing I took small sections from images found online of several renowned communes from around the globe, some still in existence and some since dissolved. I was interested in re-evaluating the way these places looked, and in doing so my research led me towards a deeper consideration of the way they functioned. This process uncovered research into a number of communities, from Christiania, a long running anarchist community in
210 Copenhagen (1971 to the present), to a shelter dug into a mountainside called The Hobbit House, belonging to a community called The Lamas in Wales. Although Mapping Community will not be included in my final exhibition, it does evidence my early research methodology. It demonstrates how I developed artworks based on the images I sourced online. The intention of this process was to find a symbolic way to advance Guattari’s suggested reconstruction of the modalities of group-being through a creative subjective process, in this case via the artistic practice of collage and drawing.
Figure 99: Kylie Banyard, Mapping Community, 2009.
At the time, working this way seemed productive, and in retrospect it was, and although it did not lead to a series of related works, it did give rise to a series of small-scale oil paintings of individual dwellings. These works became the series I developed into a View-Master reel. The View-Master series fulfils my desire to produce a series of artworks derived from my accumulation of online images of communes and countercultural dwellings. For my PhD exhibition it seems superfluous to show paintings of dwellings in addition to those housed within the View-Master work. For this reason, rather than producing artworks similar to Mapping Community, I have instead decided to use my found images of unusual dwellings in conjunction with my original print copies of the Whole Earth Catalog to create a large photographic wall piece intended to act like a visual essay and photomontage (Fig. 100). Titled Whole Earth Wallpaper the piece will be installed at
211 Firstdraft gallery for my PhD exhibition and will cover, from floor to ceiling, one of the ten-metre-long gallery walls.
Figure 100: Kylie Banyard, Whole Earth Wallpaper and Daydreamer II (concept plan), 2013.
The wall piece consists of a selection of images of unusual ‘hippy houses’ from my digital archive. Composed using Photoshop, the found images are integrated with select scanned pages of the original Whole Earth Catalog to mirror the aesthetic appearance of the publication’s original layout. The pages will be adhered to the gallery wall like wallpaper and printed on newsprint to preserve the raw unbleached look of the original publication. The marriage of this information and imagery
212 actively compresses time and history, bringing documents from the past into the present, positioning contemporary iterations of countercultural communalism alongside their historical precedents. The wall is intended to encourage people to reconsider or even discover for the first time the historical legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog. Consisting of text and photographic imagery, the informational
Figure 101: Kylie Banyard, Whole Earth Wallpaper (concept plan), 2013. nature of the wall piece provides a social space for learning and reflection within a gallery context. That is, the wall is intended to point to social agency within the historical act of remembering and engaging with this facet of countercultural history. Additionally, the wall piece is the site where a small shelf containing the View-Master work will be displayed. In this way, the wallpaper will provide context
213 and insight into the genesis of the paintings housed within the View-Master. The close proximity of the View-Master work to the wallpaper also provides another example of the convergence of the outmoded forms at the core of my research.
Recently, several cultural institutions and curatorial initiatives have developed projects focused on the significant cultural contribution of the Whole Earth Catalog, reaffirming the timeliness of my research. In 2012, the Library at the Museum of Modern Art in New York staged a survey of print material generated by the Whole Earth community. Titled Access to Tools the exhibition described the publication as an innovative and now historically significant community meeting place, which quickly became an influential cultural phenomenon.309 Similarly, in June 2013 the German Museum Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin held an exhibition and conference entitled The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside. The event forms part of a twelve-month program (2013–2014) at the museum titled The Anthropocene Project. The project cites the Whole Earth Catalog as a central historical document of the counterculture and as responsible for playing a key role in “mediating and popularising” images and concepts of new notions of the planetary and the earth as a global system. 310 According to the organisers of the conference, artistic interrogation of the cultural history of the Whole Earth Catalog has an important role to play in understanding current positions within our society, politics and aesthetics.
The first catalogue was 63 pages long and, like those that followed, it covered an expansive range of subjects. The contents page alone provides some sense of the immense scope of the publication (Fig. 102). Each of the regular subheadings – Understanding Whole Systems, Shelter and Land Use, Industry and Craft, Communications, Community, Nomadics and Learning – contained up to 30 sub- sections. A subsection of the Community section called The Modern Utopian (Fig.
309 MoMA.org, Access to Tools: Publications from the Whole Earth Catalog, 1968–1974, viewed December 2011, http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/AccesstoTools/ 310 The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, viewed April 2013, http://www.hkw.de/en/programm/2013/the_whole_earth/the_whole_earth_83124.php
214 104) illustrates how the typically hand-assembled layout looks like a cross between a scrap-book and a mail-order catalogue, and in my opinion it recalls the proliferation of hand-made ‘zines’ which have regained popularity in recent years amongst artist- run-initiatives and independent publishing collectives.
Figure 102: Whole Earth Catalog (excerpt), Fall, 1968.
215
Figure 103: Whole Earth Catalog (excerpt), Fall, 1968.
The content jumps from book review, to letter, to poem, presenting the reader with a number of perspectives on commune living, some more optimistic than others. Of significant note is the intentional absence of advertising; Brand is renowned for claiming that the catalogue owed nothing to the suppliers and everything to its users.311As a reader, the ability to scan sprawling information recalls the way we now experience a website, without the streamlined digital platform a database provides to neatly contain, conceal and reveal the information. In 2005, speaking to graduates at Stanford University, Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Inc, cited Whole Earth as a kind of Google of the ’60s. Jobs remarked, “this was in the late 60s, before personal computers and desktop publishing… It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and
311 Kirk quoting Brand, Counterculture Green, p. 1.
216 overflowing with neat tools and great notions.”312 The analogy Jobs draws between Whole Earth and Google indicates an awareness of how the ‘revolutionary’ potential secreted within earlier inventions (in this case the Whole Earth phenomenon) is not simply extinguished with the historical demise of this countercultural project. Whatever Jobs’s motivations in finding echoes of the Whole Earth Catalog in the more contemporary invention of Google, from the perspective of my research it demonstrates how the socially transformative potential of so-called outmoded forms may be revived and revisited in the present.
I want to conclude my discussion of the catalogue with an analysis of Buckminster Fuller’s critical and defining role within the catalogue’s output and history. Fuller is particularly relevant to my research because his geodesic structures have often figured within my practice.
RICHARD BUCKMINSTER FULLER AND THE GEODESIC DOME ‘The insights of Buckminster Fuller are what initiated this catalog.’313
Stewart Brand described the “whole systems thinking” of inventor, architect, designer, systems theorist and futurist Richard Buckminster Fuller in glowing terms. 314 Fuller’s notion that everything in the universe is interconnected encapsulates the basic premise of whole systems thinking in the Whole Earth Catalog. In the context of Brand’s understanding of whole systems, the relationship between species and their place within broader ecosystems derives from the study of ecology. Ideas about interrelation and the connection between things, once taken out of a purely scientific context, were part of Richard Buckminster Fuller’s (Fig. 104) methodology in whole systems thinking.
312 D. Colman quoting Steve Jobs, Open Culture, 2006–2012, 09/12/12, http://www.openculture.com/2011/10/the_whole_earth_catalog_online_the_bible_of_steve_jobs_ge neration.html 313 S. Brand (ed.), Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools, Portola Institiute, 1968, p. 3. 314 R. Buckminster Fuller, The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller, Anchor, New York, 1973.
217
Figure 104: Buckminster Fuller, Geodesic dome, the American pavilion, 1967 World’s Fair.
When placed in an even broader social and specifically design context, as is evident on the pages of Whole Earth Catalog, whole systems thinking presented an innovative and unfamiliar perspective to readers in the late 1960s. The expansive nature of inter-relational systems also contradicted the longstanding academic pedagogical model of reductionism and specialisation. In stark contrast to the convention of specialisation, Buckminster Fuller insisted that his students be more than multidisciplinary, he wanted them to become “omidisciplinary”.315
In this way, Fuller’s ideas appealed to young individuals like Stewart Brand, who at the time were rejecting academia and looking for alternative learning opportunities. Brand was interested in Fuller’s notion of comprehensive design science, as firstly focused on the large patterns that unite all things, and secondly realising that the connections that unite things are as important as single objects of our attention.
315 Kirk quoting Fuller, Counterculture Green, p. 67.
218 Fuller’s method of seeing systems whole, rather than through specialist isolation, served as a perfect foundation for Brand and his developing ideas for Whole Earth Catalog.316 Brand and the cohort of individuals who worked on the publication became “omidisciplanary” in their approach to magazine content.
Figure 105: Whole Earth Catalog (excerpt), Fall, 1968.
Kirk talks about the ‘Understanding Whole Systems’ section of the first issue of the catalogue (Fig. 105), describing several pages that jump from dense blocks of text by Fuller, to earth photograph collections, cosmology, anatomical and geological images, as well as Tantra Art, information about John Cage, Christopher Alexander and Norbert Weiner’s Cybernetics (1965). The idea behind the conflation of all this information was to provide ordinary people with an overview – a wide lens – for thinking through problems and propositions, expansive methodologies for understanding complexity and interconnectedness as seen by the Whole Earth Catalog team. 317 Realising Buckminster Fuller played a critical role as a countercultural figurehead led me to examine a selection of his designs.
316 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 58. 317 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 62.
219
Figure 106: R. Buckminster Fuller, 4D Tower: Time Interval 1 Meter, 1928.
As a result, I have become particularly interested in his drawings. Fuller’s colourful watercolour sketches such as 4D Tower: Time Interval 1 Metre from 1928 (Fig. 106) and Dymaxion House, project plan from 1927 (Fig. 107) each represent typical examples of his preliminary concept sketches.
220
Figure 107: R. Buckminster Fuller, Dymaxion House, project plan, 1927.
Contextualised alongside his theories about whole systems thinking, Fuller’s drawings have contributed to the development of my own series of delicately designed geometric works. For example, Pattern Thinking Positive/Negative I and Pattern Thinking Positive/Negative II (2013) (Figs 108, 109) refers to my interest in whole systems thinking, particularly in light of Fuller’s philosophy concerning both the large patterns that unite all things, as well as realising that the smaller-scale connections that unite those things are as important as larger objects of attention.
221
Figure 108: Kylie Banyard, Pattern Thinking Positive/Negative I, 2013.
For these works I developed a methodology focused on connections and repetition, like the cyclical formation of a natural system. The marks I made and colours I chose flowed and accumulated through a process of unfolding relations. My Pattern Thinking works point to the ecology of these connections while also being reminiscent of the human-centric craft-based practice of patchwork quilting, which manifests a network of patterns and relations within a system.
Brand and his collaborators quickly became Fuller’s keenest promoters, publishing dozens of articles by and about him. Fuller was best known for his geodesic domes, as well as his ‘Dymaxion’ design.318 The Dymaxion house (1929–45) was the first design to use the dome structure and it is also considered one of the earliest modern autonomous (self-sufficient) building designs (Figs 110, 111). Kirk defines the concept of Dymaxion as “doing the most with least”.319 The Dymaxion house was a prefabricated design and Fuller intended it to be widely available and easily
318 The term Dymaxion is more of a brand name than a design per se and Fuller often used it to brand his inventions and designs. Figures 106 and 107 are paintings by Anne Hewlett Fuller (Buckminster Fuller’s wife), which imaginatively situate Fuller’s designs in the landscape. 319 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 58.
222
Figure 109: Kylie Banyard, Pattern Thinking Positive/Negative II, 2013. constructed at any site. It used a central vertical stainless-steel strut on a single foundation and support structures similar to the spokes of a bicycle-wheel hung
223
Figures 110, 111: Left and right: paintings of two different Dymaxion house designs by Anne Hewlett Fuller, 1932. down supporting the roof. Lengths of sheet metal aluminum formed the roof, ceiling and floor. In its day, the Dymaxion house design was incredibly futuristic looking. In present day terms, like many of Fuller’s designs, it has a retro-futuristic appearance. The design was never developed into a mass-produced kit home. By contrast, it was the popularity of Fuller’s geodesic dome design, for its potential homespun adaptation, that was popular amongst many commune dwellers. Kirk asserts that the dome was so popular in the earlier stages of the counterculture movement because it tapped into the continuation of a technologically driven, futuristic dream in the 1950s of the “home for tomorrow”.320
Kirk attributes the popularity of the dome in the early commune movement to its simplicity; he asserts, “based on complex mathematics and design principles, the geodesic dome was a structure so uncomplicated that almost anyone could build one from materials at hand”.321
There are many ways to build a geodesic dome, and a quick YouTube search uncovers an expanding universe of dome enthusiasts offering their various dome- building methods. Steve Baer’s Dome Cookbook (1970) (Fig. 112) was one of the first widely disseminated dome publications amongst commune dwellers. Baer, like Brand, had been a keen student of Fuller’s and later went on to become an occasional resident of artists’ commune Drop City in Colorado. Baer’s Dome
320 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 85. 321 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 58.
224
Figure 112: Steve Baer’s DIY Dome Cookbook from 1970.
Cookbook documents and explains some the construction processes for the dwellings in the Drop City community. He adopted a slightly different technique to Fuller and for this reason he termed his structures “Zomes”. 322
322 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 76.
225
Figure 113: Kylie Banyard, A Pair For Bucky, 2012.
Domes consist of two types of triangle, the isometric and the equilateral. Five isometric triangles are joined together to form a hexagon, depending on the scale of the triangles and the size of the dome. The hexagonal forms are assembled from the ground-up; they join together using the equilateral triangles to eventually form a complete dome. Domes are renowned as strong structures, not only do they incorporate the strength of a strong arch shape, but are also supported by the strength inherent to the triangles’ fixed angles. The other unique design feature of the dome is that its structural strength is not dependent on its being built from sturdy or dense materials. In the 1960s, people built domes from whatever materials were close at hand; for example, the now iconic domes from Drop City were constructed from a combination of timber, plywood and recycled sheet metal from the roofs of cars. I have made domes from materials as flimsy as light-weight card and the structural integrity of these prototypes is almost alarming (Fig. 113).
Fuller’s domes litter the west coast of the United States (Fig. 114). In 2011, my family and I rented a dwelling with a dome-shaped roof, called The Mushroom Dome
226
Figure 114: The Mushroom Dome, near Santa Cruz, 2011. on a small commune near Santa Cruz, California. It was intriguing to actually inhabit a geodesic space after researching its history for a significant period. The geodesic dome became the preferred domicile for counterculture communes because they were cheap to build, and appealed to owner-builders who lacked conventional or refined building skills.
227
Figure 115: Front cover of Reviews in Cultural Theory, ‘On the Commons’, issue 2.3, 2012.
However, today the geodesic dome represents more than a cheap alternative for shelter, it has become a historical countercultural icon, a claim evidenced by the cover of Reviews in Cultural Theory (2012) (Fig. 115), which pictures an interactive sculptural artwork titled Capula Expanded Dodecahedron by Pedro Reyes (2009– 2010). This choice for the cover of the journal evidences the historical legacy of the dome. Here we see the dome’s symbolic resonance used to evoke the issue’s theme: ‘The Commons’, recalling notions of previous forms of communal living.
228 In relation to my practice, the geodesic dome has become an important symbolic form and dwelling. I make use of the well-known fact that domes were popular in commune settlements, and in this sense I primarily locate my investigation within the early phase of the countercultural period, employing the dome for its historical significance. I also regard the dome as inherently utopian, for its retro-futuristic and radical DIY aesthetic.
Figure 116: Drop City, feature length documentary directed by Joan Grossman, released 2012.
Drop City has become central in my exploration of geodesic domes; the renowned artists’ commune was formed in 1965, located on rugged ‘goat country’ near Trinidad, Colorado (Fig. 116). A wealth of available information about the community has been published online, but very few scholarly accounts exist. Andrew Kirk touches on Drop City in relation to the embrace of Buckminster Fuller’s dome amongst early counterculture communes.
229 Since Drop City is regarded one of the first artists’ communes of the 1960s, its utopian idealism might render it an actual example of what Benjamin envisioned when he spoke of the symbolic ‘outside’ that the outmoded and anachronistic represents. By carving a new society of their own making, the residents of Drop City intended to position themselves outside the status quo. As naïve as this now seems, especially considering that their growing notoriety meant the world eventually came looking for them and as short lived as it was, Drop City was a pioneering experiment. Looking back at this history, I wish to suggest that ‘The Droppers’ might now symbolise a figuration of the outmoded, because, for a relatively brief moment, they managed to live outside of the dominant capitalist system. Indeed, it is a moment that is increasingly mythologised and romanticised. Drop City now represents a spirited, self-determined idea, followed by radical action, not so much based on nostalgia, but rather on hope, hope that historical change remains an imaginative and representational possibility in contemporary life.
Figure, 117: Drop City, circa 1966..
Photographic documentation of Drop City (Fig. 117) often depicts sweeping grassland littered with uniquely designed, multi-coloured and textured geodesic domes; it is a vision that possesses a radical Science-Fiction appearance.
230
Figures 118, 119, 120: From top to bottom: Kylie Banyard, Staged Alternatives, 2010. Kylie Banyard, Winter Romance I, 2011. Kylie Banyard, Homage to Drop City, 2012.
231 The community looked barren and unlike many bountiful self-sufficient contemporary settlements, Drop City lacked vegetable gardens and basic infrastructure, like water-storage tanks. Judging from the documentation, it appears the so-called ‘Droppers’ had had little to no experience living on the land.
Several of the paintings I have made over the past four years have focused on the dome, often sourced from images of Drop City (Figs 118, 119, 120). I have selected three specific dome images to be incorporated into my custom designed View- Master work. I have selected these particular works because, as noted previously, they fulfil the compositional requirements for a successful stereoscopic image.
Figures 121, 122: Left: Kylie Banyard, Domescope, 2013. Right: Kylie Banyard, Dome of Silence, 2013.
In addition to my investigation of the historical correlation between geodesic domes, Drop City and the counterculture, I am growing increasingly intrigued by the formal qualities of geodesic domes, particularly the geometry of the form and the way their structure lends itself to explorations of colour relativity. I have explored this formalist exercise, the play of colour and form, by building model domes and balls with coloured cardboard (Fig. 121). In this sense, my interest in domes covers two interrelated concerns, that of the historical symbolism of the dome in early counterculture communes, as well as consideration of the dome as a form in its own right. In other words, I have sought to understand the dome from a cultural, historical, structural and sculptural perspective.
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Figure 123: Kylie Banyard, DOMESCOPE, 2013.
The sculptural works titled DOMESCOPE and Dome of Silence (Figs 121, 122) (2013) explore the patterning and ornamental possibilities of the geodesic dome. For these works, I stripped the dome structure of function as a space of habitation. I decided to experiment with its purely formal geometric and optical qualities. In DOMESCOPE, I transformed the dome shape into a single ball (referencing Buckminster Fuller’s early experiments commonly known as Buckyballs). Suspended from the ceiling on a rotating mechanism, the ball slowly turned in front of a pair of kaleidoscopic stands. Together the corresponding objects performed a kind of automated psychedelic dance. For this piece, the viewer is invited to watch the proliferating patterning unfold through the viewing lens of the kaleidoscopes.
Initially the work was developed for a collaborative exhibition with Ron Adams at Alaska Projects in Sydney in 2013. Through one of the two kaleidoscopes, the viewing field was completely filled by the undulating of slowing shifting patterning provided by the Bucky ball. However, the view through the second scope was different. Adams and I carefully positioned the kaleidoscope to offer a view
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Figure 124: Kylie Banyard, DOMESCOPE (view through the kaleidoscope), 2013. providing a conflation of our works, as well as enveloping that of the surrounding gallery space. It was here, through the second kaleidoscope that we claimed to locate the manifestation of our collaboration. When looking through this scope, the viewer was presented with a rotating slice of my Buckyball, some of the red tube of the fluorescent light split into a glowing V-shape and the fracturation of Adam’s black and white paintings, as well as a flash of whoever was crossing the gallery floor at the time. This view was simultaneously moving and strangely static. Most importantly, this view was intended to create a new conversation between our works.
For this exhibition we wanted to explore the combined optical potential of the geometric forms we were each attracted to (Fig. 124). The works glowed and vibrated in the space, the flare from one piece bouncing off another. The exhibition recalled the early Op Art experiments of the 1960s, paying homage to the iconic works from The Responsive Eye exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1965.323
323 The Responsive Eye was the first large-scale survey exhibition of optical art or “Op Art” in 1965 at MOMA (Museum of Modern Art, New York).
234 Considering again Stafford’s claim about the kaleidoscope and its ability to entice the onlooker, focusing the viewer intently on the present, I wish to suggest that DOMESCOPE encourages a slowly unravelling sense of present-ness, a type of cathartic and hypnotic viewing. With a tongue-in cheek awareness of obvious ‘new- age’ connotations, the work operates like a tool for optical meditation, slowing the mind, whilst stimulating the cultivation of imagination, preparing the viewer to open their mind to the possibility of imaging alternatives. For this very reason, when entering my PhD exhibition, a version of DOMESCOPE will be the first work the viewer encounters as they enter the gallery space, the intention being that DOMESCOPE will set a slower, absorptive and contemplative pace for what is to follow.
ANDREA ZITTEL’S TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY COMMUNITY For the remainder of this chapter I turn to the work of artist Andrea Zittel, which I approach as extending the countercultural mode and show how it is given new life in contemporary art. To demonstrate how facets of the pragmatic countercultural mode are inherently embedded with Zittel’s work, I will examine specific examples from her oeuvre, specifically her A-Z West project, her living and working environment in the Mojave Desert just outside of Los Angeles.
AN INSTITUTE OF INVESTIGATIVE LIVING: The A-Z enterprise encompasses all aspects of day-to-day living. Home furniture, clothing, food all become the sites of investigation in an ongoing endeavor to better understand human nature and the social construction of needs. (Fig. 126)324
324 A. Zittel, Andrea Zittel, 1991–2012, date accessed 10/03/10, http://www.zittel.org/index.php
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Figures 125, 126: Andrea Zittel at A-Z West, 2011.
My examination of Zittel’s practice draws on essays and interviews with the artist that address some of the central themes of the early counterculture and, specifically, the Whole Earth Catalog. In the collection of catalogue essays for Zittel’s exhibition entitled Critical Space (2006-07), each of the essayists make reference to her work as
236 counter-capitalist, communalist or evoking homesteading and DIY enthusiasm. As I evidenced earlier in this chapter, these were also predominate areas of interest for the Whole Earth Catalog and countercultural environmentalists in general. 325 However, in each instance, the essayists locate Zittel’s practice within other cultural histories, such as American pragmatism and frontier-style or 1970s feminism. I previously noted that the back-to-the-land communards of the counterculture were also informed by American pragmatism, specifically Stewart Brand’s influential pragmatic sensibility as promoted in the Whole Earth Catalog. Yet previous accounts of Zittel’s practice have not made any link between the counterculture environmentalism described on the pages of Whole Earth Catalog and Zittel’s practice. I suspect that if Zittel had been experimenting with her “sufficient-self” lifestyle at A-Z West in the late 1960s, Stewart Brand might have stopped by to visit her in his Whole Earth truck store; especially given their shared enthusiasm for both self-reliance and technological innovation. 326 Zittel would have been an obvious choice to make an appearance in the Whole Earth Catalog.
Zittel’s self-proclaimed “somewhat experimental life” has been the subject of many articles and essays since she first began her professional career in the early 1990s. 327 Her practice has consistently revolved around designing and building prototypes answering to her longstanding fascination with the social construction of human needs and personal liberties. Her investigations have resulted in a diverse range of structures and forms, such as portable homesteads, campers, clothing, modular home furniture, human waste disposal units, animal breeding units, paintings on paper and wooden panels, drawings and branded advertising-like material. Zittel’s output is expansive and her methodology is as ‘omidisciplinary’ as the previously
325 Critical Space was a significant international travelling survey exhibition of Zittel’s art, spanning works from the early nineties to the time of the exhibition. The exhibition travelled around a range of major institutions in Houston, New York, Los Angeles and British Columbia, Canada. 326 A. Zittel, Lay of my Land, curator, R. Julin, Prestel Verlag, Munich, London, New York, 2011, p. 64. 327 A. Zittel, Lay of my Land, p. 13.
237 mentioned whole-systems way of thinking devised by Buckminster Fuller and adopted by the Whole Earth Catalog community. 328
With the exception of her career-spanning project, A-Z Personal Uniforms (2000– present), the works I discuss focus on her practice after her move from New York to Joshua Tree in the Mojave Desert in the year 2000. In an essay titled ‘Material Thinking: The Aesthetic Philosophy of Jacques Ranciére and the Design Art of Andrea Zittel’, art theorist Toni Ross points to the critical intention of Zittel’s practice as sited between art and life. Ross states, “From the early years of her career, Zittel’s design solutions for her own living environments, as well as her exercises in DIY self-sufficiency have become exhibition components of her art.”329 In the early stages of her career, Zittel lived in New York and her concerns centred on the personalisation of small urban spaces within the impersonal limitations of rental accommodation. At the time, much of her practice revolved around the production of modular living units and ultra-compact personal grooming stations; as Ross suggests, this work was made as design “solutions to her own living environments”.330 It was at this point that Zittel started inviting gallerists, curators and other artists into her living space and the intimate cross-over between her designs for her daily living became the locus of her practice.
Apparent within her work since the move away from A-Z East in New York to A-Z West in Joshua Tree is a strong western regionalist turn – a echo of the American pioneering spirit. In Something For Nothing with Very Little Effort Involved Note #3 (2002) (Fig. 127), a poster-like ‘flat-work’ portrays an ambiguous self-portrait of a heroically poised figure gazing out across the desert landscape with her back turned and a tray slung confidently over her shoulder, the portrait of Zittel, wears her trademark hand-felted open backed vest. 331
328 A. Kirk, Counterculture Green, p. 67. 329 T. Ross, ‘Material Thinking: The Aesthetic Philosophy of Jacques Ranciére and the Design Art of Andrea Zittel’, Studies in Material Thinking, Vol. 1, No. 2 (April 2008), p. 8. 330 T. Ross, ‘Material Thinking’, p. 8. 331 M. Oeri, ‘Andrea Zittel: A Word of Welcome’ (introductory essay), Steidl, Germany, 2008, p. 7.
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Figure 127: Andrea Zittel, sfnwvlei (Something from Nothing with Very Little Effort Involoved) Note#3, 2002.
In an ironic twist, Zittel depicts herself farming art. The tray she holds is full of paper pulp and, in the distance, a whole field of pulp is being processed (dried) in the hot desert sun. The painting portrays Zittel surveying the land as she stands on the edge of her A-Z Regeneration Field; it is a narrative that recalls many classic regionalist images.
The regeneration field sits directly behind the main homestead and at first glance it looks like a field of solar panels, but then on closer inspection they reveal themselves as a type of ‘art farm’ – a field of ambiguous sculptural prototypes (Fig. 128). In an essay titled ‘The Rules of Her Game: A-Z work and Play’ (2006), Trevor Smith discusses Zittel’s painting of the regeneration field as an hallucinatory image of her back-to-the-earth, do-it-your-self activity, “her work being an exploration of forms of sociability – the self in relation to the greater whole”.332
332 T. Smith, ‘The Rules of Her Game: A-Z work and Play’, Critical Space, curators, T. Smith & P. Morsiani, Prestel Verlag, Munich, London, New York, 2005, p. 38.
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Figure 128: Andrea Zittel, A-Z The Regeneration Field, 2002.
In this sense, we might assume that Zittel sees herself in relation to her desert home (nature) and its interconnection with the homespun technological innovations with which she experiments. She embodies a pragmatic countercultural union of human- scale, ecologically sensitive technology and nature. According to Smith, Zittel enjoys inverting the conventional separation of work and leisure that defines modern consumer culture. I contend that in this work she also enjoys subverting the traditionally ‘male’ role of the farmer as hard working family provider, as she somewhat ironically works the land in the production of art.
As previously mentioned, in Counterculture Green, Kirk maps the historical nexus between technology and nature operative in American culture. Recalling Leo Marx’s notion of a ‘middle landscape’, Zittel has established a relatively ecologically sensitive, technologically innovative, highly individualised, site responsive place to live and work. Like the self-determined actions of the back-to-the-land communards of the 1970s, she has chosen to inhabit the margins; in this instance,
240 the area where the garden (high-desert wilderness) sits at the edge of the machine (the extremely large-scale suburban sprawl of Los Angeles).
When Zittel first moved to A-Z West in Joshua Tree, she had previously established her practice in Brooklyn in New York and gathered around her a dynamic group of artists and collectors. Although she kept her A-Z East property in Brooklyn and is now fortunate enough to divide her time between the east and west coast, Zittel claims her return to the west was driven by a need to return to the desert because of a lifelong connection. She says, “I knew I would end up in the desert living a somewhat experimental life, more than I knew I would end up being an artist”.333
Reportedly, Zittel’s initial intention to move to the desert was part of a fanciful desire to seek out an unencumbered lifestyle. In one of the catalogue essays for Critical Space, titled ‘Live/Work Space’ (2005), Cornelia Butler refers to this “ultimately thwarted fantasy as hiding in plain sight complicated by her gathering of artists around her, creating a kind of collective compound from which she can create art”.334 Despite her longing for the romantic solitude of the desert, Zittel has set up her desert outpost as a social configuration built around her artistic practice – she pulls other artists out of their urban environments to come and collaborate on her property, as well as accepting interested members of the public who come to experience her practice in its ‘native’ context.
It is obvious that part of this collectivism comes with Zittel’s success as an artist; she also speaks about her life becoming more social once her son was born.335 By the time she moved back to California, she’d become a successful and highly collectable artist and with the momentum that her practice gained the demand to produce must have been substantial. Like many successful contemporary artists, Zittel has built a small workforce around her practice. Although her highly individualised
333 A. Zittel, Lay of My Land p. 13. 334 C. Butler, ‘Live/Work Space’, Critical Space, curators, T. Smith & P. Morsiani, Prestel Verlag, Munich, London, New York, 2005, p. 60. 335 A. Zittel, Lay of My Land, p. 64.
241 works are pointedly not mass-produced, nonetheless I imagine she employs a sizable production team.
According to Zittel’s website, A-Z West “structures and projects include two original homestead cabins that serve as Zittel's primary residence and guest house, a studio/shop facility, a shipping container compound, Regenerating Field, and the Wagon Station Encampment”.336 All of her designs, such as the Wagon Stations, are pointedly not mass-produced and, although Zittel has had many offers to mass- produce her designs, she refuses to do so as she feels it would compromise their experimental nature. It is important to note, also, that to mass-produce Zittel’s designs would undeniably compromise their value as highly collectable art commodities.
My reading of the ongoing projects A-Z Wagon Stations and High Desert Test Sites, focuses on a corresponding sense of self-empowerment, enthusiasm for simple human-scale technologies and experimentation with alternative ways of living that shares points of interest with early countercultural environmentalism. I cannot find a direct historical reference to the counterculture or the Whole Earth Catalog in interviews with the artist, although in Lay of My Land she does mention a fondness for the bell-factory at Paolo Soleri’s experimental community, Arcosanti, in Arizona. 337 However, I just can’t help but wonder if Zittel might have an impeccably organised stack of Whole Earth Catalogs sitting on a A-Z Raugh bookshelf at A-Z West.338
The A-Z Wagon Stations (Fig. 129), spanning from 2003 to the present, function as personal shelters, with just enough room for two people to eat, sleep and contemplate. Inspired by camping, station wagon cars and old-fashioned Wild- West covered wagons, each structure has the same exterior shell shape, with a curved powder-coated steel front hatch, which doubles as a large door and opening.
336 A. Zittel, Andrea Zittel, 1991–2012, date accessed 10/03/10, http://www.zittel.org/index.php 337 A. Zittel, Lay of My Land p. 135. 338 A-Z Raugh is one of Zittel’s artworks in the form of multifunctional furniture.
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Figure 129: Andrea Zittel, A-Z Wagon Station on site at A-Z West, 2012.
Part of the face of the structure is transparent to provide a view outside when the hatch is closed. The small structure sits on short metal legs with a straight right- angled steel frame and wooden back. Wagons are spread across the settlement at Joshua Tree and every now and then they are pulled apart and sent to galleries and museums for exhibition. The wagons litter the property at A-Z West called the A-Z Encampment. Zittel explains the layout as follows:
The A-Z Encampment is located at the Western edge of A-Z West, adjacent to B.L.M (Bureau of Land Management) lands, with a hiking trail that leads into Joshua Tree National Park. Some of the prototype structures that make up this encampment include A-Z Wagon Stations, a communal outdoor kitchen, composting toilets and open air showers – all providing minimal self contained amenities for off the grid living.339
339 A. Zittel, Andrea Zittel, 1991–2012, viewed on 10 March 2010, http://www.zittel.org/index.php
243 Zittel describes her A-Z Wagon Stations as a project that encourages people to engage with her works in an active way once they own them. She was worried people were buying her works and not using them as functional art objects, so when it came to the wagons, rather than sell them, she give them to friends to own and customise. They also became somewhere to stay when they came to visit her. The customisation resulted in a scatter of similar shaped structures across the land adorned with idiosyncratic decorations – one wagon has even been customised to look like a hot-rod car, with red and yellow flames licking the outside of the structure, another has been customised for meditation (Fig. 130).
All of the wagons’ interiors start minimal, with a small set of corner shelves prompting owners to fill them with objects of their choosing. It is also up to the owner to introduce simple comforts, such as seating mats and sleeping surfaces. The ongoing development of the wagon project has given rise to an incredible looking camping ground where Zittel’s friends and collaborators spend time. In Lay of My Land, Zittel explains that she plans to increase the number of wagons on the property so they can also become accessible for more members of the art community to come and spend time at A-Z West (Fig. 130).
Reminiscent of communal live/work situations both constructed by and adapted by feminists in the ’70s, Zittel’s version of a kind of political and aesthetic safe haven nestled in the off-world and conservative population of Joshua Tree comprises a central radical part of her practice. She has indeed initiated an alternative living system that is both conceptual project and new century commune for the world- weary cultural producer.340
Zittel’s addition of the wagon stations contributes to the property’s function of artists’ community. In the quote above, Butler addresses the idea of A-Z West as a commune, especially designed to lure the world-weary artist away from their urban
340 C. Butler, ‘Live/Work Space’, p. 60.
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Figure 130: Andrea Zittel, customised A-Z Wagon Station, 2005. routine to experience a different way of living and making. Butler defines the dual identity of A-Z West as a conceptual art project and a new-century commune and this allows us to conceive of Zittel as another pioneer in a lineage leading back to earlier countercultural experiments, investigating and enacting an alternative way of living and a different way of exhibiting her art.
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Figure 131: Andrea Zittel, A-Z Encampment, 2011.
A-Z West is reminiscent of the community of artists who moved to Colorado in the 1970s to establish Drop City, but, instead of ad-hoc geodesic domes scattered across the rugged landscape, at A-Z West an encampment of beautifully designed wagons provide shelter. On the one hand, A-Z West differs from Drop City because it is a one-woman show and technically this means it is not actually a commune. Zittel
246 owns the land and employs and invites others onto the property to work for her in the production of her artwork; nonetheless aspects of it echo the commune model. On the other hand, it is conceivable that because Zittel owns the land and her highly successful art practice sustains the running of A-Z West, unlike supposedly democratically organised artists communities like Drop City, which was in the end a short lived experiment, A-Z West might have an increased chance of a longer and more sustainable future. Additionally, because of the social collectivism that has evolved over time at A-Z West, Zittel often talks about the future of the property becoming more of an arts-based education and community facility, at which stage she sees herself moving to another homestead.
Zittel’s practice bears a relationship to Guattari’s project in The Three Ecologies. Instructive here is Guattari’s previously noted proposal of ‘reconstructing modalities of group-being’, through practices of experimentation, instead of clinging to general recommendations, such as the predetermined homogeny and standardised behaviour characteristic of consumer society. 341 Again, as was evidenced in the previous chapter, the innovative experiments promoted on the pages of the Whole Earth Catalog correlate with the community Zittel has founded. The A-Z West community has “develop[ed] specific practices that modify and reinvent the ways in which we live as couples or in the family in an urban context or at work, etc.”342 Zittel has facilitated an alternative family structure through the professional demands of her practice. Her intensely productive ‘art farm’ attracts younger artists who, whilst working with and for her, often spend time living with her. It appears that Zittel is an intensely private person who craves isolation, yet paradoxically her lifestyle is a central component of her practice and thus has become an object of public display. In interviews she often waxes lyrical about taking off in a camper to live like a hermit, or moving to a more isolated homestead further out in the desert. But Zittel is an internationally recognised artist, an art world celebrity whose willingness to share her private space with others has seen many devotees of her
341 F. Guattari, The Three Ecologies, p. 24. 342 F. Guattari, The Three Ecologies, p. 24.
247 work happily drive for hours to her property to observe her experimental art/lifestyle. Moreover, Zittel’s way of living and working constructs a unique environment, partly driven by her position within the contemporary art world and partly inspired by her connection to the desert. Despite herself, and possibly as a counterbalance to her need for solitude, Zittel and the network of friends and family that surround her experiment with a very open and public way of living – providing a unique example of a new modality of “group-being”. It is in this regard that Zittel’s experimental community offers an interesting perspective on Guattari’s ideas about “social ecosophy”.343
The world-weary cultural producer may also make contact with Zittel’s new-century commune by submitting an application to participate in High Desert Test Sites (HDTS). 344 HDTS is an event Zittel and a group of like-minded friends, curators, collectors and artists founded in 2002 (Fig. 132). Since then, they’ve hosted the event almost every year. Zittel explains that HDTS came out of her interest in putting art into the world at large. She became interested in exploring other ways she could facilitate this by sharing her experience of life as an artist in the desert with others. On the HDTS website one of the aims of the program is outlined as follows:
To create a ‘center’ outside of any pre-existing centers. We are inspired by individuals and groups working outside of existing cultural capitals, who are able to make intellectually rigorous and culturally relevant work in whatever location they happen to be in.345
Zittel’s continued investigation into personal freedoms and the social construction of human needs always manifests in the artist first experimenting on herself, monitoring her own needs and designing systems in response to observations made.
343 F. Guattari, The Three Ecologies, p. 24. 344 C. Butler, ‘Live/Work Space’, p. 60. 345A Zittel, Andrea Zittel, 1991–2012, date accessed 07/10/12, http://www.zittel.org/index.php
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Figure 132: Promotional poster for High Desert Test Sites, 2013.
The final body of work I will discuss is Zittel’s A-Z Personal Uniforms (Fig. 133). Her longest-running experiment, these works illustrate the way she enjoys creating her own rules to live by. The uniforms also reveal the unexpected freedom of self- imposed limitations. She enjoys the freedom and liberation that a flipping of socially conditioned ideas about rules and labour can provide. I can relate to this notion: almost two years ago my partner and I decided not to connect our television to the aerial upon moving into a new house. As a result we no longer have access to free-to-air television and no longer feel tempted to waste time watching unstimulating programmes. Through this limitation, we both feel a sense of personal freedom and liberation.
249 Trevor Smith refers to Zittel’s practice as a model that “refuses the segregation of work and play so central to the consumer marketing of leisure lifestyle”.346 This counter-capitalist critique and inversion of notions of segregated leisure-based freedoms or work-based freedoms is exemplified in A-Z Personal Uniforms. Over the course of her career she has chosen to wear a single hand-made garment (uniform) every day for six months as a way of relieving herself of the time and money spent worrying about what to wear and also to avoid having to shop for clothes. These days so many of us are encouraged by society to associate shopping with freedom and leisure. While a young art student in New York, Zittel worked in a gallery and realised that she couldn’t present as well as a gallerist was expected to because she didn’t have the income to purchase designer clothes. She decided to make one impeccable outfit and wear it for the whole season. Like most of her projects, this one started out as a real-life experiment that she then realised could crossover into an ongoing series of artworks. Zittel’s commitment to the making of uniforms for each season spans the length of her career. She has taken the idea to such extremes that at one stage she exclusively wore garments made from a single strand construction, made with her bare hands (she taught herself to crochet without an needle, with just her fingers) (Fig. 133). Her uniforms have progressed through many phases, from the early A-Z Personal Uniform (1991–1994), to the A- Z Panel Uniform (1995–1998) made from a single square of fabric and inspired by Russian Constructivism. A-Z Raugh Uniform (1999) was an adaptation of the panel design, the A-Z Single Strand Uniform, made from a single strand of hand- crocheted wool, and finally the most recent, her A-Z Fiber Form, a hand-felted construction, made of earthy tones complete with imperfect holes. Zittel’s determined refusal to conform via her refusal to wear different store-bought clothes every day is inherently countercultural and, what is more, her dedication to designing and making all her own clothes by hand is undeniably reminiscent of the
346 T. Smith, ‘The Rules of Her Game: A-Z work and Play’, p. 39.
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Figure 133: Andrea Zittel, A-Z Uniforms, 1991–2011. do-it-yourself practice of early ‘hippies’. But her motivations do not appear to be based on an ideological stance so much as a uniquely individualistic way of living by her own rules. Her self-reliance and determination reminds me of Stewart Brand and his fiercely libertarian style of pragmatism.
Zittel’s practice embodies the continuation of the American pragmatic tradition on the Western Frontier, but she does it in a way that is undeniably her own. There is a utopian romanticism I find alluring within much of Zittel’s art, particularly concerning the A-Z Wagons and their absolute simplicity – ‘the freedom of the intimate universe’.347 Whenever I see images of the wagons in the landscape I have to fight the urge not to paint them.
I have often fought the urge to label Zittel a ‘hippie’, particularly through a resistance to the stigma associated with the term. Hippies are often considered lazy drop-outs – yet there is nothing lazy about Zittel. On the contrary, she appears to
347A. Zittel, Andrea Zittel, 1991–2012, date accessed 08/12/11, http://www.zittel.org/index.php
251 never stop making; interviewers have implied she possesses an obsessive creativity – she has been reported to have been making things whilst being interviewed. Stigma aside, in many ways, Zittel might be the ultimate twenty-first century ‘hippie’. She represents a new type of self-determined and deeply experimental pioneer, exploring a uniquely alternative way of living, particularly attuned to contemporary times. Zittel has, in fact, built a new century artists’ community that represents a type of new western regionalism, one which might be perceived as neo-countercultural.
Finally, in regard to the structure and function of A-Z West, the following passage from Zittel’s website illuminates, in her own words, a critical political dimension embedded within the overarching ethos of the A-Z West community:
The function of A-Z West, and the encampment area in particular is to lead participants outside of the normal range of their everyday living situations, and to allow them to reevaluate common assumptions about needs, values, and social norms. Living with such minimal means allows small details to take on heightened focus as part of a larger life practice.348
In an essay titled ‘Academy: The Production of Subjectivity’ (2012), Simon O’Sullivan refers to the importance of understanding political art practice as not just being about institutional and ideological critique, but as also involving the active production of our own subjectivity. 349 Zittel’s eccentric practice demonstrates how to be actively engaged in the production of your own subjectivity, and in a similar way to how the Whole Earth Catalog provided individuals with the access to tools to do so for themselves. Additionally, the collectivism her practice perpetuates and depends upon envelops others into the subjective realm of her art practice, pointing to larger questions about the agency of art in the social. O’Sullivan highlights the importance of “creative pedagogy” methods that involve student participation
348A. Zittel, Andrea Zittel, 1991–2012, date accessed 03/12/11, http://www.zittel.org/index.php 349 S. O’Sullivan, ‘Academy: The Production of Subjectivity’, p. 1, viewed on 19 April 2011, http://simonosullivan.net/art-writings/production-of-subjectivities.pdf Although these forms of critique may be read into Zittel’s work through her interest in putting art into the world at large.
252 through workshops or laboratories, models that do not mimic top-down structures in “existence elsewhere”. 350 For O’Sullivan, “such pedagogical practices can contribute to the affective and practical involvement of individuals in determining their own intellectual and creative projects, and indeed their wider lives”.351 Zittel’s carefully constructed community fosters this model of creative pedagogy – of skills and experiential sharing. Whilst she requires many hands to help produce her artworks, she appears to incorporate artist interns into the A-Z West working and living environment, rather than solely employing paid staff or artist’s assistants. The stream of enthusiastic artists coming into the community at A-Z West fosters an atmosphere that reflects Guattari’s conception of “processual creativity”. 352 O’Sullivan states, “to become involved in our own production of subjectivity, to move from passive spectator to become active participants, to take what we need… in our own project of ‘processual creativity’; [is to] precisely to treat our lives as a work of art”.353
The final facet of my practice that I will discuss also relates to O’Sullivan’s theories about creative pedagogy. Throughout the duration of my research, I have conducted a number of geodesic dome-making workshops within institutions that operate outside of the conventional education system. As a casual university lecturer in the early stages of my career, running these workshops outside of the university system offers me a different, more community-based, pedagogical experience. The workshops provide a local example of fun, experimental environments that simultaneously point to larger questions about the agency of art within the social sphere. Within the informal environment of a workshop, participants are often keen to engage in a dialogue about my research. For example, members of the community have engaged me in discussion of the history of the dome and the counterculture in general.
350 S. O’Sullivan, ‘Academy: The Production of Subjectivity’, p. 1. 351 S. O’Sullivan, ‘Academy: The Production of Subjectivity’, p. 1. 352 F. Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm. Indiana University Press, USA, 1995, p. 13. 353 S. O’Sullivan, ‘Academy: The Production of Subjectivity’, p. 4.
253
Figures 134, 135: Participants of DIY dome building workshop, Blue Mountains Cultural Centre in 2013.
Figure 136: Participants of my DIY dome building workshop, 2012.
My workshops foster teaching methods that involve student participation through models that do not mimic top-down structures in existence elsewhere. Cultural institutions such as the Chippendale Arts Festival and the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre have facilitated previous workshops (Figs 134, 135, 136). Additionally, a final series of workshops are planned at the Firstdraft Depot in late 2013. Part of my Firstdraft Emerging Artist Studio Residency involves the instigation of a series of DIY dome-building workshops, which will operate in much the same way as the other workshops I have conducted in that members of the local community, as well as the art community, will come together to learn how to make model domes. A
254 second advanced workshop is designed for those who have a further interest in dome-building and would like to help me construct a life-sized dome, approximately three metres wide by two metres high. This dome is to be installed as a central component of my culminating PhD exhibition and will be titled Daydreamer II.
The workshops are integral to the project on several levels. In the first instance, they will open my studio door to other emerging artists and members of the local community, encouraging a sense of communal congeniality, in a similar way to how Zittel invites other artists to work with her at A-Z West. The workshops will also become a skills-sharing opportunity with potentially exciting outcomes, transforming the conventional instructor–student dynamic typical of a workshop context into a socially invested, collaborative building project that will see the community become directly involved in the final exhibition output. In light of the final exhibition, the human-scaled dome we make will provide a space for the viewer to enter, sit down and encounter a psychedelic sensorial site.
It is possible that some of the individuals who will initially help make the dome will visit the exhibition and encounter it in its newly transformed exhibition context. Within the gallery, the interior of the dome will be darkened with a single flickering light source. Floor cushions will comfortably seat approximately four people, placed either side of a central piece – the Dreamachine. The Dreamachine is intended to admit a flickering sensorial light display that will entice the viewer by encouraging them to sit facing it with their eyes closed – an unusual way to experience visual art. Artist Brion Gysin and mathematician Ian Sommerville invented and patented the Dreamachine in 1960. Gysin and Sommerville believed it to encourage the imagination and expand consciousness through the flickering effects of light. According to Gysin and Sommerville, “When flickering light synchs up with the
255 brain’s alpha rhythms the flashes can cause individuals to ‘see’ colours, visions, or even entire three dimensional landscapes with their eyes closed.”354
Figure 137: Top: Kylie Banyard, plan drawings and photographic documentation for Daydreamer II, 2013. Bottom: Brian Gysin & Ian Sommerville, The Dream Machine, 1960.
Gysin and Sommerville published a template and instructions for the Dreamachine (Fig. 138) in the utopian hope that the device might be disseminated amongst the masses and bring about a shift in consciousness through an awakening of imagination and creativity. In my opinion, a synchronicity exists between the Dreamachine and the counterculture. The Dreamachine is the final optical device I examined and, although it was invented much later than the other devices I researched, it does form critical links to those earlier devices of the nineteenth century, such as the kaleidoscope and stereoscope, as well as having a relationship to the counterculture of the mid to late 1960s.
By referring back to Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer, the connection between the Dreamachine and the optical devices I researched in Chapter Two becomes evident. Crary’s discussion of the phenomenon of subjective vision refers to Goethe’s experiments with colour, as previously mentioned, where chromatic phenomena are found to take place within the body without external stimulus and, as a result, the body becomes an active producer of optical experience.
354 L. Hoptman, Brion Gysin Dream Machine, New Museum New York, 2010, p. 120.
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Figure 138: Brion Gysin & Ian Sommerville, Dreamachine (photograph features Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs), 1962.
The effects of the Dreamachine offer an experience with colour and light similar to Goethe’s earlier experiments and, even though the Dreamachine provides external stimulus, it depends on the viewer closing their eyes and ceasing to see the things of the outside world to gather information or knowledge. According to Crary, Goethe’s experiments mark the early stages of a subjective theory of vision. Crary proclaims, “the viewing body and its objects begin to constitute a single field on which inside and outside are confounded”.355
The Dreamachine was conceived of by surrealist artist Brian Gysin after travelling in the back of a car with his eyes closed. As the flickering sunlight hit his eyelids, and after a period of time, Gysin claims he started to see patterns and undulating colours. He wanted to recreate the optical effects created by the flickering sun and after teaming up with mathematician Ian Sommerville they invented the
355 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 80.
257 Dreamachine.356 As noted previously, the Dreamachine is said to encourage the imagination and expand consciousness through the flickering effects of light and in this sense it makes a suitably poetic counterpart to the geodesic dome.
In early 2012 I was curated into an exhibition at Craft Victoria. Debbie Pryor, the exhibition curator, asked me a question: “If you had the opportunity to design a small scale hut or cubby house structure for an exhibition, how would it look and what would you put inside of it?” At this point I had already planned and proposed my large-scale geodesic dome work at Firstdraft gallery. I told Debbie about my idea of the dome and the Dreamachine and she commissioned me to stage an early smaller version of it at Craft Victoria.
The following excerpt is taken from the catalogue for the exhibition (Fig. 139):
Daydreamer I: Kylie Banyard’s work for Magic Mountain is an installation consisting of three small oil paintings that adorn the walls of the small cubbyhouse structure. The interior of the intimate space will be illuminated with only a single flickering light-source – a Dreamachine. As a result, at no stage will the paintings be fully lit, this visual disturbance will allow the viewer only erratic glimpses of the scenes depicted – an unstable vision – like a daydream. The centre piece, the Dreamachine, is intended to admit a sensorial light display that will entice the viewer by encouraging them to sitfacing it with their eyes closed – indeed an unusual way to experience art.
356 L. Hoptman, Brion Gysin Dream Machine, p. 120.
258
Figure 139: Kylie Banyard, Daydreamer I, 2013.
259 In this work Banyard explores the interplay between the painted landscapes hung on the interior walls of the hut and those that the viewer may conjure or ‘see’ through their own subjective experience with the Dreamachine.357
The opportunity to create an earlier version of Daydreamer at Craft Victoria (Fig. 140) was an invaluable experience. It allowed me to test what will eventually become the central large-scale work for my PhD exhibition.
Figure 140: Kylie Banyard, Daydreamer I, 2013.
It is important to me that at the final stage of my practice-based research I experience a collective building experience, as a way of acknowledging the historical precedent of the counterculture communes I have referenced and researched, particularly Drop City. Drop City’s domes from the 1960s inspired not only the large dome installation Daydreamer II, but also a significant portion of my research in a broader sense. In this way, the communal construction of my geodesic dome at Firstdraft gallery will be reminiscent of the collective and creative way the original
357 D. Pryor & K. Banyard, Magic Mountain, Craft Victoria, 2012.
260 domes were built at Drop City back in 1965, as well as recalling the collective working environment at Zittel’s A-Z West.
To conclude my examination of the work of Andrea Zittel, I would like to draw attention to particular outmoded and anachronistic countercultural practices within Zittel’s work, particularly her decision to return to a communalist style of living in a remote rural area, as well as the longstanding decision to make her own clothes and wear the same hand-made ‘uniform’ for a whole season. I wish to suggest that these actions function as an act of resistance, in which Zittel finds liberation through the subversion of expected social conventions, critiquing the consumerist drive to own and acquire more and more material possessions. Zittel’s practice, when read through a Benjaminian lens, possesses a utopian impulse through her experimental methodology. In this sense, Zittel’s practice, I argue, demonstrates the central proposition of this thesis – to establish a ‘contemporary politics of the outmoded’. Additionally, my investigation into Zittel’s practice provides me with inspiration regarding how I might approach my practice in the future. I would like the opportunity to visit A-Z West and work with Zittel. My research into Zittel has fed my own drive towards Guattari’s ‘processual creativity’ and encapsulates the statement of intention at the core of this thesis – to imagine alternatives and gaze at the world through figurations of the outmoded. Zittel lives with her work and often designs it in response to her everyday needs. Unlike me, Zittel left her urban reality, moved to a relatively isolated place in order to create a community around her work. Where I imagine alternatives to currently prevailing ways of living, Zittel acts on her impulses for other ways of living and makes that fantasy a reality.
Throughout this chapter, I have discussed the commune for its symbolic affiliations with early counterculture environmentalism. First, I determined my subjective affiliations, I then broadened the scope of my investigation by illuminating the evolution of counterculture environmentalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s from a cultural and historical perspective, with particular emphasis on events that took place in North America. I have touched on how this period represented an
261 often underestimated critical moment, indeed a paradigm shift, in the history of modern environmentalism, demonstrating the active rejection by the counterculture of antimodern notions formerly separating nature from culture, within previous romantic wilderness-based environmentalism. Furthermore, Guattarian tenets of ecosophy, and the recent critical attention ascribed to his thinking, suggest the basis of a theoretical framework for the construction of my account of pragmatic countercultural environmentalism pointing to the growing relevance of this position today. In an article from 2012, titled ‘Transversalising the Ecological Turn: Four Components of Félix Guattari’s Ecosophical Perspective’, author John C. Tinnell gestures towards a range of ways that Guattari’s precepts of ecosophy conflict with more popular appropriations of ecology within both the realms of environmental science and ecocriticism. Tinnell’s article confirms that Guattari’s ecosophical doctrine is still considered ‘radical ecology’ amongst most scholars in the eco- humanities, and, unlike the nature appreciating tenor of earlier ecological thought, for Guattari the ecological point of view is not determined by “nature’s pure harmonious balance” but “a dance between chaos and complexity”.358 Again, in this chapter, I have attempted to demonstrate how complexity, changes in production, new ways of living and the re-evaluation of axes of value are evidenced as central points of interest for the early counterculture environmentalists, particularly those involved in the Whole Earth project. Moreover, I have made links between Guattari’s ecosophical thinking, the Whole Earth Catalog and the countercultural mode more broadly, in an attempt to strengthen my claim that a reconsideration of early countercultural pragmatism should be retrieved from the dustbin of history.
In its day, the catalogue was a catalyst, it offered readers examples of how to experiment with the creation of new styles of living and promoted the efforts and self-organisation of individuals who sought self-reliance and difference from the prevailing culture in an increasingly standardised society. Within the scope of this research and in a current context, the Whole Earth Catalog has emerged as emblematic of the movement. I have drawn attention to specific pages of the
358 J. Tinnell, ‘Transversalising the Ecological Turn’, p. 361.
262 catalogue in order to demonstrate how this countercultural shift first took shape. In other words, one of the aims of this chapter has been to revisit the Whole Earth Catalog from a contemporary perspective, thereby revealing the catalogue as a site where ideas about alternative ways of living in the 1960s and 1970s were aired, ideas that might find new purchase in the present, and that even connect in some ways to the formulations of more recent ecological philosophies, such as that of Guattari’s Ecosophy. Consequently, noteworthy here is the recent attention attributed to Guattari’s ecosophical perspective amongst cultural theorists and artists. Several Guattarian scholars, such as Gary Genkso, Janell Watson and Paul Elliot, have described Guattri’s ecosophy as providing a theoretical framework for the construction of workable relations between subjectivity, the ecological and the digital. Elliot describes Guattari as a predictive revolutionary and a revolutionary for the twenty-first century.
Renewed assessments of Guattarian thought are emerging in the twenty-first century. Guattari’s ethio-aesthetic paradigm makes sense amongst artists and cultural theorists because it derives from the fundamental structure of the artist’s creative process-based methodology. O’Sullivan points to Guattari’s move from the reductive scientific paradigm where “subjectivity is the ‘object’ of ‘study’ towards an ethico-aesthetic one, where subjectivity is always in process”.359 Tinnell addresses this “ethico-aesthetic paradigm”, claiming that Guattari doesn’t necessarily deal with art as we might conventionally perceive it; rather, he seeks to incorporate an aesthetic order, “an artist’s way of assuming their existence – into the existential territories of everyday life, within and beyond the studio or museum”; as such, Guattari defines this anti-teleological method as “processual creativity”. 360 Moreover, in O’Sullivan’s reading, the advantage of Guattari’s processual creativity is that it invites us to become involved in “our own production of subjectivity, to move from passive spectators to become active participants. In this way, we can take what we need from Guattari – or indeed from elsewhere – in our own project of
359 J. Tinnell, ‘Transversalising the Ecological Turn’, p. 362. 360 F. Guattari, The Guattari Reader, ed. G. Gensko, Cambridge, 1996, p. 196.
263 processual creativity, precisely to treat our own lives as a work of art.”361 Throughout this chapter I have put forward an ecosophical reading of Andrea Zittel’s art, highlighting the processual creativity of her practice, as she treats her own life as a work of art and as a site for public display.
As was outlined in the introductory chapter, the underlining hypothesis for this thesis calls for a re-contextualisation of Walter Benjamin’s modernist politics of the outmoded and seeks the possible emergence of a contemporary politics of the outmoded within both my practice and contemporary art at large. In Benjamin’s earlier twentieth-century formulations surrounding the utopian promise embedded within the outmoded, he regarded outmoded forms as powerfully symbolic of an ‘outside’ to the system of capital and the cycle of commodity culture. Apparent though in today’s totalising global capitalist society, it no longer seems possible to find an ‘outside’ to the system and, as a result, it might appear that the utopian spark Benjamin first attributed to the outmoded may have finally lost any purchase. Throughout both this and the previous chapter my intention has been to test my thesis proposition, with the aim of uncovering an in-depth series of findings. Here, I have calibrated a complexity of historical and cultural detail, which has contributed in determining that the retrieval of outmoded and anachronistic forms do indeed possess renewed critical agency in a contemporary art context. As was determined in Chapter One, in the crosshairs of paradox I uncovered how Jameson reveals a powerful way to negotiate the problematic issues, which appeared to cripple Burges’s account of Benjamin’s politics of the outmoded. In a call to arms, Jameson challenges us to recognise the contradictory yet critical importance of continuing to imagine a space outside our globalised total-market-culture, even if and perhaps specifically because the reality of finding such a space seems even less possible than it may have seemed in the past.
361 S. O’Sullivan, Academy: The Production of Subjectivity, p. 4, viewed on 19 April 2011, URL= http://simonosullivan.net/art-writings/production-of-subjectivities.pdf
264
CONCLUSION
265 Central to this practice-based research are two seemingly disparate forms, namely: ‘old’ optical devices and the communes and dwellings commonly associated with the counterculture of the late 1960s. My research has consistently focused on what I have come to define as these outmoded and anachronistic forms.
I have argued my case through a historically framed discussion of Walter Benjamin’s theories on outmodedness, derived from the early modernist period. For Benjamin, outmoded technology was powerfully symbolic of the possibility of imagining an outside to the capitalist system of exchange. This thesis has questioned whether, in a current context, a rekindling of outmoded and anachronistic forms can recover aspects of the utopian dimension Benjamin once ascribed to them.
Contoured by a discussion of specific contemporary art, including an analysis of my own practice, I have explored figurations of the outmoded and the anachronistic as sites that continue to possess a sense of critical agency in a contemporary art context. I have argued that these forms exist as an alternative way of mediating and tempting the technologically-savvy contemporary observer’s view.
Moreover, from an ecological standpoint, I have spent the past four years excavating and reconstructing some of the discarded technologies and propositional futures left by the wayside as a result of our often overly enthusiastic techno-determinist discourse. I look to the past, not because I believe it to be any better than the now, but as a way of negotiating alternative ways of thinking about the challenges we face in the present. I have sought ways of seeing and being that are not based on the teleological inclination of the modern and capitalistic master-narratives of progress. As I articulated in Chapter One, I am not resistant to technological innovation, but I do agree with the critical view of Andrew McNamara: sometimes we need to look beyond the seduction of the latest technology to seek more complex, equivocal amalgamations of the old and the new. Through a revisionist look at what theorist Anne Ring Peterson has described as “things we have grown accustomed to and
266 take for granted”, my non-linear genealogical approach has allowed me to realise significant cultural and social value in these apparently redundant forms. 362 And it is precisely because of their obsolescence that these forms have become potent timely reminders, offering a critique of the relentless and inevitably destructive cycle of production and consumption at the heart of the seemingly unstoppable capitalist machine.
The critical obstacles that needed to be negotiated when navigating this territory pertained to whether the outmoded and the anachronistic can continue to offer contemporary artists a retrieval of this utopian dimension, originally formulated by Benjamin. I have retrieved these earlier modes of thinking in light of changes to modes of production in the later half of the twentieth century, with the onset of postmodernism, planned obsolescence, and the all-encompassing span of the global capitalist marketplace.
In Chapter One: Rekindling the Past – The Turn to Obsolescence in Contemporary Art, I built a case for this turn to outmodedness. I focused on three points of reference. First, Walter Benjamin’s theorisations of obsolescence from the early twentieth century; second, an ‘Obsolescence’ issue of the October journal of 2002; and third, a PhD thesis completed in 2007 by Joel Burges titled The Uses of Obsolescence: Historical Change and the Politics of the Outmoded in American Postmodernity. Throughout this chapter, I argued for a re-engagement with Benjamin’s politics of the outmoded as a way of discovering renewed critical agency in outmoded forms. I simultaneously developed a discussion of my own practice and examined corresponding works by other artists to substantiate my position.
My close examination of Joel Burges’s thesis demonstrated how the onset of planned obsolescence has caused a shift in the redemptive utopian energies Benjamin first attributed to the outmoded. I itemised the crux of Burges’s argument
362 A. Ring Petersen, ‘The Transdisciplinary Potential of Remediated Painting’, New Imaging: Transdisciplinary Strategies for Art Beyond the New Media, Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference, Sydney, 2010, p. 124.
267 and extrapolated upon how, in his opinion, the utopian spark originally attributed to outmoded forms can now be found in their ability to signify historical time. For Burges, figurations of the outmoded have become a way of imagining and representing historical change, at a time when history is said to have reached its end, and society at large has become increasingly apprehensive about the continued wellbeing of the planet and all of its inhabitants, amidst an atmosphere of impending ecological and economic uncertainty. In this sense, it becomes possible to perceive of outmoded forms as representing an exception to the ahistorical rule, with their strongly imbued sense of historicity. What I have argued is how this recursive turn to outmodedness stresses a mode of historical representation indicative of a critical tendency that finds continually renewed purchase in the contemporary visual arts. What is more, I have shown through a discussion of my art practice how the retrieval of the utopian dimension of Benjamin and notion of outmodeness opens up unexpected channels towards praxis that imagines alternatives to currently prevailing realities, especially insofar as it is inherent in a logic that I have recognised in my own practice, as well as that of a number of other contemporary artists such as Claire Healy, Sean Cordeiro and Zoe Leonard.
Here, the findings of my research determined that, even though over time economic, social and industrial transformations have resulted in a changed historical context for such a critical inquiry, outmoded forms may nonetheless continue to be read as negative signs of progress. It is in this regard, through their assumed anti- productive status and as an index for historical change that I have argued for the outmoded and the anachronistic as continuing to possess remnants of the utopian dimension previously ascribed to them by Benjamin. In this regard, I have demonstrated how, in a contemporary art context, comparatively bulky, hand-made, manual, and low-tech media can provoke the interest of resolutely tech-savvy contemporary viewers.
My research into obsolete optical devices and the concepts of human vision associated with them is indebted to many of Jonathan Crary’s claims. Chapter Two:
268 Examining Visuality and Renewing Wonder focused on the specific optical media I utilised within the artwork made for this research project. Here I focused on Crary’s analysis in his book Techniques of the Observer, as well as film scholar Tom Gunning’s essay ‘Re-Newing Old Technologies’. Crary’s book offered a genealogy tracing the historical construction of vision, whereas Tom Gunning’s essay was discussed in order to understand and articulate my fascination with rediscovering older technologies. In his essay, Gunning discusses the instability of what he describes as technology’s path from amazement to habit. He proposes that an examination of this move from dazzling new appearance to nearly invisible utility, allows us to interrogate the transition and see it for the cultural myths of modernity it assumes and creates (progressivism’s relationship with the novelty of newness). He also points to the instability of this line from amazement to habit and determines it might not only run one way. This, he attests, explains our fascination with rediscovering technology at its point of novelty, as a way of trying to renew its lost sense of wonder. Gunning’s essay covers a broad range of assertions, most notably one of his precepts is relevant to my childhood attraction to the stereoscope, in which he describes our experience of certain technologies as related to the child- like and uncanny re-emergence of earlier stages of magical thinking. Woven throughout this chapter, and placed in careful relation to the historical and theoretical contexts raised by both Crary and Gunning, is a discussion focusing on a recent series of installations utilising the archaic technology of the camera obscura by Zoe Leonard, as well as an analysis of several examples of my own work.
In Chapter Three: The Countercultural Mode I developed a condensed historical account of the influential albeit brief counterculture period of the late 1960s and early 1970s, with a particular focus on the North American context. The chapter examined the thinking and activities of co-founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand. This period represents a time widely accepted as the first wave and historical locus for the North American counterculture movement, and a time when communes proliferated widely. Here, I focused on one specific facet of the counterculture, which Andrew G. Kirk refers to as pragmatic counterculture
269 environmentalism. This facet of the research drew on Felix Guattari’s ecosophical theories in The Three Ecologies to highlight how these early pragmatic countercultural forms of environmentalism were not phobic about human-scale technological innovation.
The aim here was to show how this relatively recent rejection of antimodern notions that formerly separated nature from culture represents a critical moment, not only in the history of modern environmentalism, but also beyond the realms of environmentalism, as Felix Guattari purports, across “relations with the socius, the psyche and nature”.363
I examined the Whole Earth Catalog, demonstrating the publication’s current critical import as a unique countercultural case study, providing crucial historical insights into the evolution of the pragmatic branch of counterculture environmentalism. Throughout this chapter, I endeavoured to unpack, historicise and contextualise my position in relation to the countercultural mode. What is more, I sought to historicise and combine the two utopian pasts central to my research (the optical device and the counterculture dwelling) in an attempt to exemplify in artistic mode Benjamin and politics of the outmoded in order to imagine contemporary life otherwise. Finally, the chapter concluded with an examination of the practice of American contemporary artist Andrea Zittel. Here, I identified the emergence of a new western regionalism, as a shared doctrine developed in the Whole Earth Catalog and Zittel’s art practice. Zittel’s practice, like the Whole Earth Catalog, was analysised in relation to facets of Guattari’s theories in The Three Ecologies. The chapter examined specific examples from Zittel’s oeuvre, specifically in relation to A-Z West, her living and working environment in the Mojave Desert outside of Los Angeles.
In my examination of the work of Zittel, I drew attention to particular outmoded and anachronistic countercultural practices within her work. For example, her
363 F. Guattari, The Three Ecologies, p. 28.
270 decision to return to a communalist style of living in a remote rural area, as well as her longstanding commitment to making her own clothes and wearing the same hand-made ‘uniform’ for a whole season. I argued that these conscious choices function as an act of resistance. Zittel finds liberation through the subversion of expected social conventions, critiquing the consumerist drive to own and acquire more and more material possessions. Zittel’s practice, when read through a Benjaminian lens, possess a utopian dimension, especially evident through her experimental methodology, which constantly interrogates and tests other ways of living. In this sense, Zittel’s practice has contributed, from a practice-based perspective, to the realisation of the central proposition for this thesis – to establish a contemporary politics of the outmoded.
My research into Zittel’s work has provided insights into how I might approach my practice in the future. I am currently pursuing an opportunity to visit A-Z West and work as an intern with Zittel. My research into Zittel’s working methods has fed my own drive towards what Guattari calls “processual creativity” and encapsulates the statement of intention central to this thesis – to imagine alternatives by gazing at the world through figurations of the outmoded and the anachronistic.
At the core of this research is a desire to deal with the grim awareness of our anthroposcenic situation by cultivating a positive ecological imagination and response to the sense of uncertainty that often accompanies awareness of the destructive effects of our current ways of life upon the earth’s environment. By building on Guattari’s analysis of this situation in his The Three Ecologies, as well as Jameson’s remarks about our inability to imagine the future, my research operates through a reconstructive strategy geared towards a positive ecological imagination. Here, optical manual devices have become a through-line from which to provide a hopeful view, a different and decidedly non-apocalyptic future-fantasy. In a Guattarian sense, through the artwork I make, I am actively working on the production of my own subjectivity through the imaginative visualisation of other ways of living, different to the overwhelming cultural homogeny that dominates
271 society today. I showcase and revive the pioneering experiments of the early counterculture in an attempt to pay homage to them, to historicise them, but most importantly to learn from them.
This project argues that it is precisely because of our apparently hopeless anthroposcenic situation, as well as – in Jamesonian terms – our collective inability to imagine the future, that hopeful narratives must be established anew across the entire spectrum of contemporary practice. In other words, inclusive of all forms of technology – old and new, digital and analogue. The choice of medium used to imaginatively visualise alternatives is not as important as the socially vital need for creative practitioners to continue to do so.
Finally, characteristic of the ever-evolving nature of all scholarly research, this thesis necessarily has its limitations. I continued to find new connections, which consequentially opened-out onto further zones of interest and relevance right up to the final moments of the project. As the dissertation drew to a close, it came to my attention that the central thrust of my research shares theoretical and cultural affiliations with the emergent field of media-archaeology. This connection is particularly evident in my desire to establish a contemporary politics of the outmoded. After reading a recently published PhD thesis entitled Transversal Media Practices: Media Archaeology, Art and Technological Development (2013), by academic Kristoffer Gansing of K3 Malmo University, I became aware of the archaeological aspects of my research, with its inherent resistance towards progressivist, teleological history. Gansing describes his use of the media- archaeological method as a possible form of transversal analysis resulting in a set of conceptual tools for artists and media theorists. Often concerned with ‘residual’ or forgotten technologies and cultural frameworks, media archaeologists generally try to conceptualise technological development in non-linear, anti-determinist ways. This is a view to expose the problematic of situations where, as Gansing states, “a
272 standardised and capitalist logic of technological development holds sway”.364 Media archaeology is interventionist and strives to increase historical awareness of what came before, actively acknowledging precedents in an attempt to undermine universal preoccupations with the newness of technology.365 By drawing attention to what Gansing refers to as “the residual, the imaginary and the renewable” within the history of technology, he hopes to equip contemporary artists and researchers with methods to dispel the polarisation between the old and the new.366 Gansing draws attention to the way several influential media theorists see media-archaeology as “a political artistic practice that challenges the production of obsolescence taking place in the capitalist consumer society.”367 I am interested in determining whether my line of practice-based research can contribute to this emergent field.
I am enthusiastic and somewhat reassured by this late discovery, and as a result I have started to formulate the direction of future research. Uncovering the relevance of media-archaelolgy reaffirms that my PhD research is just the first step towards what I hope to be a lifetime of practiced-based research. The advantage of concluding this project with the realisation that my research might belong to a wider emergent community of scholars has unfolded a new pathway for me, signalling an exciting future direction, giving rise to a host of new questions.
Gansing refers to residual media as capable of evoking “the imaginary dimensions of media”.368 This assertion echoes several of the findings in my research. He also mentions the way “reverse-remediation turns against the idea that the old always
364 K. Gangsing, Transversal Media Practices: Media Archaeology, Art and Technological Development, Malmo University, 2013, viewed on 20th May 2013, http://dspace.mah.se/handle/2043/15246 365 In an article from the Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, titled ‘Excavating the Future: Taking an Archaeological Approach to Technology’ (2011), author James G. R. Cronin attributes the concept of “the archaeological” in the context of critical theory as hugely indebted to Michel Foucault’s formulations in The Order of Things, from 2002. However, with the onset of network capitalism and the now global reach of the Internet, since the late twentieth century the scholarly community of media theorists taking the archaeological approach has rapidly increased. See J. Cronin, ‘Excavating the Future: Taking an Archaeological Approach to Technology’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Vol.36, No. 1, March 2011, pp. 83-89. 366 K. Gangsing, Transversal Media Practices, p. 301. 367 K. Gangsing, Transversal Media Practices, p. 64. 368 K. Gangsing, Transversal Media Practices, p. 283.
273 feeds into the new, and instead makes the old remediate the new and thus creates a hybrid medium of transversal relations between the old and the new”.369 Gansing’s project makes some mention of obsolescence; however, he overlooks the potential use-value of outmoded forms within the archaeological approach. I am interested in undertaking future research that explores the possible contribution my line of inquiry might make to the emergent field of media-archaeology.
369 K. Gangsing, Transversal Media Practices, p. 293.
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