Don't Network. the Avant Garde After Networks
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Omnia sunt communia! Support Minor Compositions / Purchasing Books The PDF you are reading is an electronic version of a physical book that can be purchased through booksellers (including online stores), through the normal book supply channels, or Minor Compositions directly. Please support this open access publication by requesting that your university or local library purchase a physical printed copy of this book, or by purchasing a copy yourself. If you have any questions please contact the publisher: [email protected]. DON’T NETWORK THE AVANT GARDE AFTER NETWORKS MARC JAMES LÉGER Don’t Network: Te Avant Garde after Networks Marc James Léger ISBN 978-1-57027-339-1 Cover image: Class Wargames (Richard Barbrook and Ilze Black) play Guy Debord’s Game of War, London, September 2008. Xenograph by Alexander Veness. Cover design by Haduhi Szukis Interior design by Margaret Killjoy Released by Minor Compositions 2018 Colchester / New York / Port Watson Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life. Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia www.minorcompositions.info | [email protected] Distributed by Autonomedia PO Box 568 Williamsburgh Station Brooklyn, NY 11211 www.autonomedia.org [email protected] CONTENTs Introduction: Prosthetic Gods ........................ 1 One: On Networks and Vulgarity . 33 Two: Against Cybernanthropy ......................... 71 Three: The Avant Garde as Capitalist Realism............ 109 Four: Sociality and the New Organizations .............. 139 Five: A Networked Avant Garde? .......................177 Six: There Is No Inside .............................. 205 Seven: Gaming the Class War........................ 243 Conclusion: Pokémon Gods ........................ 291 Notes............................................ 305 ACKNOWlEDgEmENTs This book was written with the support of a Canada Council for the Arts Project Grant to Curators and Critics in Visual Arts. Preliminary research was presented at the conference Networked Art Histories, 1960s to the Present (In Canada and Elsewhere) at Concordia University, October 20-22, 2016, and at the Universities Art Association of Canada conference, Concordia University, October 29, 2016, on the panel “Art, Connectivity and Social Movements.” A few lines of thought from this book are included in my essay, “Good,” for the 2017 exhibition catalogue, Good Efort, co-edited by Geir Haraldseth and Michael Birchall for the Rogaland Kunstsenter in Norway, as well as in my es- say, “Te Avant-Garde After Networks: Strike Art against Cybercapitalism,” in Benjamin Halligan and Alexei Penzin’s edited book Post-Multitude: Concepts, Politics and Cultures. Tanks to Richard Barbrook and Geert Lovink for useful research material, and to Gregory Sholette for inviting me to participate in the e-fux discussion on Yates McKee’s Strike Art. A few lines are drawn from my review of McKee’s book on the Marx & Philosophy Review of Books. I am grateful to Stevphen Shukaitis for his helpful comments on the manuscript and for his support of this project. Tanks also to Leo Zausen for his work on the book and to the artists who provided images. Special thanks go to my good comrade, Cayley Sorochan. I not only owe her a debt of gratitude for many of the references included in this study, but for a decade of conversations that no doubt shaped my thinking on the subjects addressed here. Postcard showing Guy Debord’s 1953 gaffto ‘Ne travaillez jamais’ (Never work) on the Rue de Seine, published in the Internationale Situationniste. The slogan was revived during May 1968. INTRODUCTION PROsThETiC gODs One of the quintessential YouTube memes is a 2006 speech by U.S. Senator Ted Stevens discussing a Net Neutrality Bill. In the audio track we can hear him explain that the Internet is a series of local-to-local connections that is immune to distance, he explains, and is available to the consumer “for mas- sive commercial purposes.” Stevens then says: “Te Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be flled, and if they’re flled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s gonna be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.”1 Te Senator’s speech has been derided for showing a limited understanding of what he is discussing. One of the reasons I mention it here is the fact that I understand Internet technology less than he does. Regardless, my argument in this book is that society, like the Internet, is not simply a se- ries of tubes. For Marxists like me the question of social relations is not easily separated from the notion of the forces of production. In today’s discussion about networks, it is typical for the mode of production to be confated with new social relations and the consequent ideologies that are said to refect ma- terial conditions. For example, Geert Lovink, one of the prominent scholars of network cultures, defnes twenty-frst century society as “a special efect of technological procedures written into protocols.”2 Similarly, information de- signer Zhenia Vasilev argues that now that all agents, human and non-human, are part of an electronic and biological meta-body construction, it is no longer possible to distinguish between technology and the body politic.3 In the world of art it is in fact possible to represent society as a series of tubes. Tink for example of Francis Picabia’s mechanomorphic portraits or 1 Ǭt%ÿþĄ/õĄćÿĂû the oddly shaped metallic fgures in Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass. More lit- erally, there is the Cubo-Futurism of Kazimir Malevich’s soon-to-be-industri- alized peasant fgures, the stylish deco “Tubism” of Fernand Léger’s subjects, or the umbilically interconnected anthropological and sci-f characters in the drawings of Kim Moodie. In West Coast indigenous art ovoid lines connect human, animal and spirit fgures, but in Moodie’s drawings one gets the im- pression of less transcendent kinds of relationships. Carolee Schneemann’s 1964 performance Meat Joy allowed audience members to cavort on stage with naked members of her Kinetic Teater group as well as raw chickens. In a work like Nam June Paik’s 1995 Electronic Superhighway the United States is a series of synchronized television monitors. Yukinori Yanagi’s 1996 installation, Pacifc, is made of a series of national fags in plexiglass boxes that are flled with coloured sand. Resin tubes connect the boxes and allow ants to move back and forth across the countries, disturbing the visual patterns of the fags. REPOhistory’s 2000 project Circulation uses representational and real time devices to involve New York City residents in thinking about the circulation of blood as both a commodity and a life-giving substance. In more formalist work, Tomás Saraceno’s installation environments create oversize spider webs that complicate Buckminster Fuller’s rationally patterned geodesic domes and that recall the informalism of Yayoi Kusama. Closer to the network idea are the maps of both Mark Lombardi and Bureau d’Études, which detail the trans- national links between diferent kinds of networks, from corporate scandals and conspiracies to the transnational organizations of the European Union, with links between think tanks, fnancial frms, intelligence agencies, weapons makers and media groups. Te line drawings of Lombardi were so conceptual- ly simple that it became a trend in the 2000s for artists and curators to make wall displays with lines between almost anything they deemed interconnected. At an event in New York City in 2014, an art critic asked me to explain why it is that there seems to be nothing new or culturally interesting coming from Toronto. Te question missed the obvious fact that in the last twenty years, outside of socially engaged art, nothing particularly new or signifcant seems to be coming out of anywhere, whether we are talking about art, fashion, flm or music.