Published on Rhizome, September 30, 2009

For anyone who has found pleasure in the dancing, drinking, and melancholy of Mark Leckey’s collage films—or the witty lyrics of his bands, JackTooJack and the defunct donAteller—it was a surprise when the British press labeled his work esoteric and over-intellectualized following his receipt of the Turner Prize last year. Perhaps the work featured in the exhibition of nominees, Cinema in the Round, lost something in the translation from a performance to a gallery installation. Leckey’s staged lecture wove Felix the Cat, Philip Guston, and The Titanic into an idiosyncratic history of art and film. Mark Leckey in the Long Tail, a new talk that premiered at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London earlier this year, takes the same approach and extends his argument into the twenty-first century, using examples and props to visualize how an internet-based economy has changed distribution, demand, and creativity. Its U.S. premiere, organized by the Museum of Modern Art, will take place at the Abron Arts Center on Oct. 1, 2, and 3. – Brian Droitcour

You’re a professor of film studies at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt. Is preparing lectures for students anything like researching The Long Tail?

The school is the reason I started doing these lectures—Cinema in the Round was the first one—because I was in this intense, information-gathering environment and needed to find an outlet for its excesses. I was thinking too much about the why and what for of art.

Do the histories you tell in your performative lectures intersect? Felix the Cat makes an appearance in The Long Tail as he did in Cinema in the Round, but is his role in the history the same?

All the stuff I make is cumulative, in that sense it’s like The Long Tail itself. It’s an aggregation, a body of work. Part of The Long Tail takes place in my flat, which has always been in my work as my stand-in. Felix is a stand-in for my fascination with moving images. For me, he embodies the magical properties of technology. Felix was the first image broadcast by television in an experimental transmission in 1929. The Long Tail talk started with a photo of a small wooden Felix the Cat doll surrounded by machinery, which I found on a site about the history of television. The talk is an investigation of that image.

It seems like it wasn’t as common for artists to talk about research as a part of their work ten years ago, when you made Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, as it is today. How do you feel about its increased importance?

I am ambivalent about it. I think there is a tendency that’s developed out of “relational aesthetics” to approach art as this adjunct of social or political studies, gathering information into a kind of visual essay. Saying that, it’s exactly what I do.

The internet has made working with found footage more common, not only among artists but also among amateurs and hobbyists who just want to make something funny for themselves and their friends. How has the internet changed the way you conduct research? Do you spend more time browsing?

That’s all I do. That’s why I started thinking about The Long Tail because I’ve became increasingly doubtful about me gathering materials online and alchemically transmuting them into objects or editions in a gallery, into artworks. And like I said, it’s an increasingly common practice among artists and, yes, a lot of those “amateur” found-footage gags are much, much better. The second episode of “Autotune the News” blew me away when I saw it, more than anything I’ve seen in a gallery this year.

The Long Tail is the title of a 2006 book by Wired editor Chris Anderson, in which he uses the term to describe the situation in which distributors like Amazon and Netflix can cater to all niches without operating at a loss. Does your lecture enter a dialogue with Anderson’s book or did you take his imagery and metaphor and spin off in a different direction?

You’ve said it—it’s a dialogue with the concept of The Long Tail. I’ve used it as a very extended metaphor. The “long tail” for me is the means of production to broadcast yourself, and what happens when everyone’s a potential broadcaster, transmitting their innermost thoughts around the world. At the same time you’ve got spokesmen like Anderson and Clay Shirky talking—sometimes directly—about love, as a means of production, a congregation of amateurs building the Tail from within. So I see it as a long tail of desire.

Parts of Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore can now be found on video-sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo. Did you have anything to do with this? Do you believe in making your work freely available to leverage the value of your live performance?

The art world doesn’t work like that. It has no concept of free. Value is inherent in the artwork. Being online probably devalues Fiorucci as an edition. I don’t know yet. It took me a couple of years of forging personal relations to get all the footage to make it—and now the best clips I used are up online, freely available. So I have a different relation to found footage now, actually I have a different relationship to any material now, because whatever I want is magically always there, online. I got asked if I minded before they put it on Ubuweb but I have nicked so much off them it would seem churlish of me to refuse to say the least. I like this idea of stigmergy—of contributing to marks already made—and I think of myself as being in a continuum.

Published on Rhizome, June 24, 2009

Shane Hope’s sprawling prints can’t be processed with one or two looks. They are built on thousands of tiny details, rather than around a single focal point, and as the eye travels across the picture field, it sees lines and pieces accumulating in recognizable bodies and then collapsing into chaos, or maybe an order that can’t be discerned by the naked eye. Hope calls them Molecular Modeling prints, or “Mol Mods,” and they are informed by his belief that “the molecule is the brushstroke of the future”—that nanotechnology, the manipulation of matter on a molecular scale, will transform industry sometime soon. For now, Hope’s tools are coding languages Python and Perl. Because of the Mol Mods’ size he can only work on one screen-sized swath at a time, and because of their complexity, that is all that can be rendered even on Hope’s homemade desktop, which he proudly calls “faster than any factory-built Mac on the planet.”

“Your Mom Is Open Source,” an exhibition of Hope’s work at Winkelman Gallery that opens Friday, features Mol Mods as well as the series “Compile-A-Child,” imagined school assignments by artificial kids (only the latter are reproduced here, because the Mol Mods lose too much when shrunk to bloggable dimensions). Hope’s art is a visual analogy to hard science fiction, a genre where authors base their narratives on projected technologies rather than transposing contemporary dramas to a fantasized, futuristic stage. For viewers poorly versed in hard sci-fi, the conceptual platform of Hope’s work can be opaque; the announcement for “Your Mom Is Open Source” concludes with a mystifying list of keywords, both of his own coinage and borrowed from the fields of his interest. Hope agreed to discuss some of them here.

Singularitarianism
In an analogy to the breakdown of modern physics near a gravitational singularity, Vernor Vinge defined the Singularity as a theoretical future point which takes place during a period of accelerating change sometime after the creation of a superintelligence, an artificial brain more intelligent and creative than the human mind. Hard sci-fi authors, as well as professional forecasters, realized some two decades ago that nobody could realistically write about anything occurring past this Singularity. Far-flinging extrapolations could be flung no further. Simply put, they realized that we were inching toward inventing the next inventors and couldn’t presume to imagine their imaginings. Futurological films and other envisionings became sort of mostly doomed to deploy dystopic dramatic drivel—a.k.a. disasterbation—because it’s plainly more possible, however implausible, to picture a future having fallen into decay than having been sustainably built. An exponentially divergent Posthuman technocracy couldn’t necessarily be pictured as a trompe-l’œil, for it was as likely that everything would be powderized into fuzzy storms of computational matter as it was that advanced augmentations would invisibly piggy-back upon what looked no different from the current everyday reality.

Transhumanism
A Transhumanist actively trend-spots technological trajectories with special emphasis upon feasible applications toward radical yet relatively safe human enhancements. A Transhuman proper accelerates artificial selection by early-adopting resultant enhancements, thereby willfully functioning as bio/non-bio sub-species set on transitioning into a Posthuman. A Posthuman is post, that is to say no longer strictly human… i.e. Homo evolutis. A vitally important take-away assumption of all this: Clearly, we go from growing ourselves to building ourselves.

Nanofacture
Nanofacture, aka Molecular Manufacturing / Assembly, is atomic-scaled precise fabrication of, well, ultimately just about anything. Rapid dissemination of this capability could catapult our kind into post-scarcity, i.e. by printing printers. Basically, by developing nanofacturing, we teeter toward twisting objects (and life) into existence at ever smaller scales. The precision placement of atoms is poised to become the new pen, conflating or at the very least problematizing pictorial representation and objecthood.

Compile-A-Child
If you know where/how to look, you’ll discover that some of the more awe-inspiring contemporary hard-sci-fi speculations regarding superintelligences involve not so much disasterbatory apocalypses nor runaway self-replicating molecular machines, but rather accounts of augmented children. Additionally, AI field experts now posit that the first artificial general intelligences will aptly be raised in online virtual worlds. And of course, there’s Marvin Minsky’s answer to whether AIs will inherit the earth: “Yes, but they will be our children.” True, we routinely will all to our descendants. The more important latent point here to consider is that we ought to take great care in birthing/building these mind-children. AIs will arise in any case. The good news is that, in the wake of this understood eventuality, plenty of investigations now underway aim to proactively explore issues of machine morality in order to precautionarily engineer friendly AIs.

Transubstrational
Not certain I’ve coined the term “transubstrational,” but I use it to concisely communicate the likelihood of living/thinking/existing in or across substrates. By substrate, I mean the material within or upon which our default, for now human, general intelligence system operates, i.e. biology. As we technologically augment ourselves, we’ll ontologically wiggle our way out of the current default substrate of biology and into/across novel material structures. Most are warily familiar with the concept of uploading, that is, the transfer of a personality from the biological human brain to a suitable synthetic computing device in order to allow easier upgrading of intelligence, self-modification, and backup of the self. To counteract the reactionary yet somewhat justifiable concern over what could be considered an essentialization of our ridiculously complex human personalities, some amend that uploading will be gradual, almost unnoticeable, proceeding update by update, right up until we upgrade. Personally, I prefer to explain it in this willful way: We will think our way across.

LINK

Meredith Monk

Published on Artforum.com, February 13, 2009

Composer and performer Meredith Monk became the first artist to engage the Guggenheim Museum’s entire rotunda in a single work with the premier of Juice in 1969. A new work, Ascension Variations, incorporates visual and musical material from both Juice and Songs of Ascension, a performance that has been touring the country since its premiere at Stanford University last October. Here Monk speaks about her involvement with Buddhism, as well as her experience preparing Ascension Variations from fragments of two other works.

I was exposed to Buddhism in 1975, when I was asked to teach and perform at the Naropa Institute. I responded immediately to the respect art was given in that spiritual context. At that time, Naropa was a very lively creative community—it had the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics; Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman were there. I had already made a lot of work by then, and I felt affinity to Buddhist principles of silence, space, and fluid time. Those were already the aesthetic values in my work. I continued to study Buddhism, but I didn’t really commit to the practice until about ten years later because I felt I needed to work on some things in the “life” part of my life. Buddhism made me much more conscious of my aspirations as an artist and as a human being.

Ascension Variations is quite a complex project. The music and the movement from Songs of Ascension are the overall material, but I’m also weaving in some elements from Juice as a kind of echo. I’m also following the spatial structure of Juice, where the audience starts downstairs and then moves upward and passes small events that are going on throughout the spiral. At the end, the performers are at the bottom and the audience is at the top, looking down, so the space is turned inside out.

Songs of Ascension also has a surprise ending, with a reversal of the audience’s point of view. We did a version of it in October in Ann Hamilton’s tower in Alexandra Valley, California. Her building is eight stories high, but it’s a narrow double helix, with the audience on one strand and the performers on the other. It was very intimate. The Guggenheim allows me a bit more freedom in terms of entrances and exits, because getting people into and out of the tower before was a major operation.

Both Songs of Ascension and Juice have their own integrity, and I’m trying to weave in elements from the two pieces. Interestingly, the color palette of Songs of Ascension is the same that I used for Juice, dominated by shades of red, with white, black, and gray. The choice of that palette just came naturally, before I started thinking about Ascension Variations. Also, I was working in my archives and found an element for Juice that I had never used, because the violinist whom I had written it for died a few months before the performance. It has a very earthy quality, and when I listened to it I thought it would be interesting to include it in Songs of Ascension, which is very airy. I like that contrast between visceral music and more spacious material. Ascension Variations contrasts the raw quality of Juice with the more refined Songs of Ascension. Performing this weave at the Guggenheim will bring the past and the present full circle.

LINK

Published on Rhizome, February 4, 2009

“The boys from Sweden are not really interested in Kate’s habits, her lifestyle, the clothes she wears; they’re interested in Headless Ltd., a company they want to know more about. And they’re interested in a book which they think Kate is writing about them, a book called Looking for Headless.”

These lines are from the first chapter of Looking for Headless, a serial novel that artists Goldin+Senneby commissioned from author K.D. The chapter was originally published as the work of Kate Dent, an employee at the offshore consultancy Sovereign Trust, but Goldin+Senneby retracted their claim about the author’s identity after some prodding from Sovereign’s lawyers. By chapter three, the legal confrontation had already become part of the story, and the lawyers’ communication was just another of the many real-world facts woven into the fabric of the novel.

Goldin+Senneby’s project Headless (2007-ongoing) uses the idea of investigating the Bahamas-based company Headless Ltd as the basis for a wide-ranging study of how events are remembered, created, and communicated in the production of narrative. The seedy glamour of offshore finance provides an effective context; it is fertile for plots of mystery and intrigue, and the huge sums of virtual money floating offshore make an apt metaphor for the symbols and ideas that compel people to action and set events in motion. Goldin+Senneby further extend the financial trope by adopting corporate practices to make Headless, outsourcing the project’s many texts, events, and performances to specialists. For their exhibition at the Power Plant in Toronto, on view through February 22, Goldin+Senneby commissioned documentary filmmakers to interview an investigative journalist about how to make a documentary about investigating Headless Ltd. They also hired a curator and a set designer to devise a didactic display introducing viewers to the characters of the novel Looking for Headless.

A system as rich and recursive as Headless simultaneously generates both questions and answers to them. In previous interviews the artists have responded to questions about the project exclusively in the form of quotes from its various parts. For the interview below, however, they produced some new statements, perhaps mindful of the opportunity to recycle them in future incarnations of Headless.

Brian Droitcour: Now that collapsing markets have heightened public awareness of simulation in the financial world, do you feel like your investigation of Headless Ltd has been vindicated?

Goldin+Senneby: The recent financial crisis has not made anything more or less clear regarding our investigation into Headless Ltd, nor regarding our wider research into strategies of withdrawal and displacement.

As for the virtual aspect of money, we have more than five hundred years of history to look back at. We’d like to quote our spokesperson, Angus Cameron, who noted in a lecture at the Power Plant that virtual money emerges in the 1450s, with the development of particularly double-entry bookkeeping.

Another historical moment of some importance to our work could be the year 1957, when money “goes offshore,” through the setting up of the first “eurodollar” account (what Brian Rotman calls “xenomoney,” or money of the outside) in the Soviet-owned British bank, Moscow Narodny Bank. Again quoting Angus Cameron’s lecture:
“This dislocation of money from normal space (or from familiar space) takes place almost by accident in 1957. Faced with a liquidity crisis in the world economy, which is hindering reconstruction in post-war Europe, the Bank of England allows US dollars to be traded in London banks without reference to the Federal Reserve Board. Because of a peculiarity of English law, what no longer happens in the US system, doesn’t become British. Because it is no longer considered to be regulated by the US, because it’s outside of the reach of the Federal Reserve Board, it goes… nowhere. It leaves regulatory space. Money actually escapes!”

Goldin, you studied management at the Stockholm School of Economics. Has your business education affected the way you have handled group dynamics in Goldin+Senneby projects?

Although we met at art school, both of us had other backgrounds and interests. Senneby worked for several years developing internal marketing strategies for large corporations and Goldin was the editor of a monetary reform journal sponsored by an interest-free, member-owned bank. Goldin’s subsequent studies at the Stockholm School of Economics came out of a desire to complement parts of the artistic inquiry.

Looking back at the work we’ve been doing together over the last four and a half years, it’s quite easy to see how these interests and backgrounds have influenced not only our subject matter–such as our interest in juridical, financial and spatial constructs–but also, and more importantly, the way we think of our practice as the staging of certain modes of production. In the case of the ongoing Headless project, our artistic proposal is not the texts, sceneries, objects, images, videos, or live events produced, but the outsourced structuring of this production. G+S’s practice thereby attempts to locate itself at the same level of abstraction and displacement as the corporate strategies we are investigating. Similarly, during our work with The Port (2004-2006) in Second Life, it was important to function within the production logic of “social software,” which was the context we were confronting at that time.

Your journal Flack Attack, which came out of The Port, was a wiki, with open online editorial meetings. In the grand tradition of artist-initiated journals, it never yielded a second issue. Headless appears to have a more hierarchical structure, with the two of you managing the work of several contractors. Does this shift in the structure of your practice indicate frustration with working in the loose environment of Flack Attack?
Although Flack Attack was conceptualized as a magazine, our interest was never so much in the finished magazine (or its periodical publishing…who knows when the second issue will come?) but rather in the process of producing it.

Flack Attack, which addressed issues of autonomy in relation to social code and specifically community-based production, operated according to the ambiguously liberating “free labor” paradigm. Flack Attack was just as much a critique of/ reflection on our own work with setting up The Port as it was a critique of/ reflection on the more general logic of social softwares.

In Headless we are looking at strategies of withdrawal and displacement–specifically through the procedures and operations of offshore incorporations. Here the milieu is no longer the (contested) openness of a Web 2.0 platform. So, we need to employ other performative tools to stage a meaningful production in this context.

We’d like to quote the writer John Barlow, whom we commission within the Headless project and sent to the Bahamas last year to look for Headless Ltd. In an “Data Recovery” at GAMeC in Bergamo, Italy, he says:

“I’m not the artist here. I’m just the writer. I think that’s something which is characteristic of the work of Goldin+Senneby, that they use writers, and artists, and designers like artisans. We’re not really artists, we’re doing the job which the artists tell us to do. I feel a bit more like a carpenter, or like a painter… You know in the great artistic workshops they would have apprentices who would do the backgrounds to the painting. I feel like one of those young guys doing the background, and then Goldin+Senneby are doing the really detailed work. And in this particular project I know they are using a variety of other people. A book designer, a graphic designer… [pause]. In some ways I’m not quite sure what Goldin+Senneby actually do.”

While it’s common for artists to enlist the help of assistants or “artisans” (to use Barlow’s word) in the production of an artwork, they rarely feature them as prominently as you have chosen to. As Headless developed, did you encourage its various participants to interact or share notes as they completed different modules of the project? Or do you keep them in isolation?

The Power Plant exhibition has three distinct perspectives on the ongoing project, which developed independently of each other: the pedagogical display, the documentary in the making, and the “artist talk.” As for the more general question of how we work with our contractors, we’d like to quote an interview by Kim Einarsson with a G+S “spokesperson” in Geist magazine:

Kim Einarsson: An aspect of G+S’s working method that I feel is worth commenting on is that they, like businesses, outsource certain parts of their project. They pay others to carry out pieces of research, to be co-creators of the work and sometimes to present the project. I’m thinking of the detective bureau that is helping them to find material about Headless, the ghost writer who plots out the novel, the actor playing the role of the fictional author at the book reading of Looking for Headless and so on, and so on.

Spokesperson: Well, in other art projects, one might pay an editor to edit a film, an assistant to glue your collage and so on. That’s not so very different from this way of working…

KE: But it strikes me that they give other people a lot of space to maneuvre within their project, which in one way of course is generous and allows for many co-creators of the project. But couldn’t it also be a facade, an attempt to conceal fears or laziness – that it’s actually comfortable to let others formulate one’s project?

SP: You could say that about any collaborative project. Sometimes you need outside expertise and sometimes you need to borrow someone else’s voice.

KE: Is Headless a collaborative project?

SP: Yes, a collaboration between Goldin and Senneby. I see everyone else as a mixture of audience, fellow travellers, external consultants, distributors and expertise.

KE: And what roles do you and I play in this?

SP: It’s up to us to formulate ourselves. What role do you believe you will play? For instance, what will you do with the outcome of this interview?”

I’m not sure you are concerned with giving closure to Headless, yet when you sent me a copy of the novel Looking for Headless by K.D. you described it as “unfinished,” which made me wonder how it will end. Do you or your contractors already have an ending (or endings) in mind?

As characters in the novel Looking for Headless, we can only quote the final words of author K.D. at her public talk at the Bienal de Sao Paulo on November 2, 2008:

“Guimarães Rosa, through his character Riobaldo, says: ‘I know I almost don’t know anything, but I suspect a lot.’”

LINK

Published on Rhizome, December 17, 2008

Now that progress is as predictable as an automatic software update or higher resolution in a camera phone, the idea that technological advancement holds the key to a better future — and the fear that it could be abused as a tool of world domination — seem like quaint relics of the 1950s and ’60s. Lisi Raskin’s exaggeratedly ragged, hand-crafted reconstructions of military command centers evoke the thrall such spaces held over the public imagination during the Cold War even as they reinforce the contemporary viewer’s distance from that feeling of awe. Over the past year, Raskin’s installations on this topic have surfaced in several locations as stages of an ongoing project titled Mobile Observation. This year’s incarnations began with Command and Control, an installation at the Park Avenue Armory in February, and continued with Mobile Observation (Transmitting and Receiving) Station at Bard College’s Hessel Museum of Art, for which she embarked on a road trip to military sites across the United States and sent back materials to be exhibited. Mobile Observation will peak this Friday with Tipping Point, a performance at the opening of “Soft Manipulation” at Casino Luxembourg, where the resulting debris will remain on view through the exhibition’s run. Here Raskin, who works at studios in Brooklyn and Oakland, California, discusses her newest work and how it represents a change in her perception of Cold War mythology. – Brian Droitcour

Could you describe Tipping Point and how it continues Mobile Observation?

The event relies heavily on the contributions of Nina Hoffmann and Jens Lind. Jens will play a security guard or border patrolman before the speech begins. His presence at Casino’s entrance is meant to present an immediate psychic obstacle to those entering the space. Once Nina begins her lecture, Jens will assume the position of her bodyguard, acting like a secret service agent while a government VIP is on stage. Nina’s character started her career as someone who was just doing what she was told, but soon became entranced and seduced by the ideas and the power she could access. Her text started out as a straightforward lecture that I compiled from various internet sources and has evolved into a long poem about game theory, which explains in wiki-depth some of the theoretical aspects of nuclear strategy like Mutual Assured Destruction. In the performance, Nina will use tropes like former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s hand gestures to evoke his essence during her reading, the way one might evoke a spirit during a séance. I imagine the extreme range of Nina’s character to span a fervent enthusiasm for American military might, sexual fetish of some of the more phallic components of the arsenal, like missiles and submarines, and then this quasi-mystical and trance-like relationship with the Cold War application of game theory. I will also perform as a member of the fringe element — a character who may cause a disruption or erupt into cheers of reverence in response to the more intense moments of Nina’s reading. My character may even get on stage at some point.

I don’t feel that a description of the performance would be complete without a description of the surrounding architecture, drawings and sculptures as these elements play an important part in the overall ethos of the work. Imagine the structure as a barbed-wire and chain-link fence about 15 feet tall, the likes of which one might find at a maximum security penitentiary, a structure suggesting something wrong is bound to happen or anticipating a disruption or imminent violence. But my structure will be made from found and collaged wood, which refers to the way I have used that material throughout Mobile Observation. I will hang two large, handmade American-flag collages stretching about 15 feet across the structure, as a symbol capable of summoning the power of the state. In an effort to provide some sort of weapon for the viewer, I will scatter papier-mâché sticks about the space. While these sculptures take the form of sticks, they function like inverted piñatas; if one were to actually use them to strike another, denser object, they would rupture. I will also install a speakeasy at the back of the structure, where we will wantonly provide social lubrication. So these are the variables of the experiment. I am looking forward to seeing how they will function in real time.

When Mobile Observation (Transmitting and Receiving) Station was shown at CCS Bard earlier this year, the work was produced remotely and transmitted to the exhibition site. Now the action all happens in one place, in an installation designed to accommodate both a performance and its audience. What informed your reconceptualization of space?

I think that the most startling difference in the way that I am conceptualizing the space of this artwork has to do with both the nature of the narrative and the fact it is going to be enacted in front of a live audience. See, during my research trip to the Titan Missile Museum in Tucson I interviewed three missileers about their experiences on crew duty in the silo, and their responses to my questions pretty much blew my mind. In the earlier work, I had been absorbed in the process of creating and projecting a fairly romantic narrative onto the works. The same was true for how I constructed Command and Control, the installation at the Park Avenue Armory that preceded the road trip component of Mobile Observation. This installation relied heavily on the romance of the secret chamber and how it functioned specifically during the Cold War. But my actual visit to the Titan silo revealed several things that I hadn’t previously considered. For example, there were women working in the silo as commanders of the alert crews. And as the interviews wore on, I began to realize that what was actually going on in the missile silo and command center had more to do with bureaucracy than romance. The crew on alert was inundated with tasks and checklists; they were under pressure to perform their duties to the fullest, or else they risked being severely reprimanded or relieved of duty. What I hadn’t understood prior to my trip was that the local pressure that Strategic Air Command was putting on each individual actually loomed larger than the overall pressure of the Cold War and nuclear annihilation.

As I moved forward in my thoughts about bureaucratic time, I began to really think about how this power relationship might have functioned and how the architecture I make could be informed by this discovery even further. For the last several months I have been playing these discoveries over and over in my mind, and the other day I had one of those strange and infrequent moments when everything comes together in the studio. Earlier in the day, I had a conversation with my partner, Allison Smith, and she asked me why I was doing this particular performance at this particular historical moment. I didn’t have a very good answer for her. So I thought, Who can I ask about this? Immediately I thought, I need Foucault, but quickly realized that I had sent my Foucault to California. Then I thought, OK, how about Bataille? But then realized that the Bataille book was on its way to California as well. In a frustrated moment I began to scan the theory section of my bookshelves and found myself staring directly at Michael Taussig’s book, The Magic of the State. I opened the book to a chapter called “Art Adrift in the Crowd” and found a quote about defacement of monuments and the quasi-religious power of the state, how these ideas get exorcised. I thought, Holy shit, that’s it! There was even a small black-and-white rendering of a town square with a military memorial in it, which was just another way of conceiving of the space that I had been drawing for weeks. So thanks Allison and Michael, I owe you both one…

Why do you think the mythology of the Cold War remains so potent today?

We are living the sordid legacy of the Atomic Age. We have no idea who our enemies are or how they might strike, and, unfortunately, we also have loose nukes — unsecure elements of the former Soviet nuclear arsenal. Elder statesmen like Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn are calling for nuclear disarmament. And you know that the global security situation has gone from bad to worse when the hawks are scared. It is frightening to hear those who know the intimate details of the state of global security confess that they long for the Cold War, but I have heard the confessions, the longing for a simpler time. They long for the days of the one-front wars, the polemic of them against us, of good and evil.

I think that today it is no longer possible to make these kinds of distinctions because, just as the nature of the conflict has changed, so has the theoretical framework we use to analyze the conflict. By this I mean that maybe now the political elite can interpret how the Cold War has influenced the growth of radical fundamentalism both inside and outside of the United States. I think this type of self-awareness and the possibility that it might influence policy is really a recent development, which of course only complicates things further.

On another level, it is important to understand that the Cold War was a global condition for over 60 years. With respect to the individuals who experienced the Cold War firsthand, I could hardly reduce the residual potency of the Cold War solely to its mythology. Collectively, we have internalized the Cold War. It lives within us, and it has shaped the thinking of many adults on the planet. I do think that there are behavioral cycles and governmental tactics that started during the Cold War and still resonate today. For example, one can draw a fairly apt analogy between the McCarthy era’s witch hunts for communists and the Bush administration’s witch hunt for terrorists here in the United States. Would this type of manipulation be so successful if we had not internalized McCarthyism?

Also, it is no coincidence that the Department of Defense and various other governmental agencies are still lying to the general public about the health risks associated with radioactivity. It is also true that the military-industrial complex has been running the show ever since Ronald Reagan’s tenure in office, and most importantly, there are more than 60,000 nuclear weapons in the world of various yields and in various forms, still ready to be used at a moments notice. Regarding the nuclear arms security situation, whatever stasis existed during the Cold War has swung off the (real or perceived) binary into an untenable situation. Russia and NATO have both explicitly stated that they would use nuclear weapons preemptively. If the Cold War was good for anything, it was the promise and struggle for no first use of atomic weapons.

How did you arrive at your decision to recreate high-tech equipment in a do-it-yourself, handcrafted aesthetic?

Well, my aesthetic explorations over the last 10 years have evolved mostly through a process of trial and error, punctuated by two prominent incidents that I have understood as definite readings of my objects in the “real world,” as opposed to an “art world” context. One of these events happened while I was a grad student at Columbia. I was part of a group show with a provocative title, something like “Power and Violence,” and I had lent an assemblage called Bomb. Its components consisted of a safety can for oily rags (as is customarily used in painting class) and some soda bottles with blue colored water in them. I had glued these soda bottles to the can and run a set of wires through some crayons, also glued to the soda bottles. The wires were ultimately attached to some modeling clay on the top of the can. This modeling clay was meant to resemble a C-4 explosive. At the time, I was exploring the connection between the aesthetics of bricolage and the aesthetics of terrorism, and I found that certain kinds of art objects and certain improvised explosive devices had a lot in common once both objects were removed from their intended contexts. I lent the object to the show with this in mind. However, when the university’s weekend security guard came by on his usual rounds and saw the sculpture through the gallery window, when he was alone with it in the dark, it scared him so badly that he called the NYPD bomb squad.

I found out about the incident because a classmate of mine was attending a makeup printmaking workshop when the entire building had to be evacuated because of the bomb scare. Keep in mind that this was the fall of 2002, so everyone was still a bit on edge. It was also after normal business hours so none of the usual individuals who work at the university were present. There were no administrative assistants to reassure this fellow.

As students of art and art theory, we are taught that if something like the aforementioned scenario transpires and art “shocks” the viewer, the piece in question is successfully “avant-garde.” But for me there were some serious questions that came up after the incident. For example, did the weekend security guard actually fall into the category of the viewer? This question spiraled into larger questions about the way that the aesthetics of simulation actually function during a moment when an object passes for its “real-world” counterpart. In the mind of the security guard, my sculpture caused a response that could be attributed to a much larger and more ubiquitous fear campaign being waged on the American people by the Bush administration. The weekend security guard was not on a leisurely stroll around town deciding that he might look at some art. He was not having a flaneur moment. He had not entered a consensual situation where he was suspending his disbelief upon entering an art installation. In fact, he had confused my sculpture for the real thing. I could empathize with the mechanics of his experience and response because I often mistake someone’s momentarily abandoned shopping bags on the subway platform for some packages that could contain explosives. So why did this happen? What had I taken for granted? Had my gesture been reckless?

Probably the most important guide for me through this dilemma was my best friend, the painter Marc Handelman. We would have these great conversations about fiction in sculpture and the difficulties implicit in engaging the space that the real world also inhabits, which is the predicament of sculpture. How could I make objects that would lure you in because you think they are fakes? Was this also a way to intelligently contribute to the existing discourse of critique that had employed simulation as an aesthetic device? Could this new strategy work? Marc kept saying that drawing and painting always signal a more fictive space to the viewer, and a representation of Bomb would not have incited the same questions of fear, violence, and terrorism. The problem for me became how to collapse the space of sculpture into a space that would immediately signal fiction to the viewer, and maybe even bring the initial level of anxiety down a notch so that a more prolonged relationship with the object could be possible.

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