Now
Comme des Garçons F/W 1983: Gloves, Skirts, Quilted Big Coats (Performance ephemera)
2018-
Merino wool, plastic vacuum sealable bag
Dimensions variableComme des Garçons F/W 1983: Gloves, Skirts, Quilted Big Coats (Performance ephemera)
2018-
Merino wool, plastic vacuum sealable bag
Dimensions variableUntitled (Figure with Backpack)
2020
Watercolor on paper
65 x 36-3/4 inchesUntitled (Figure with Backpack)
2020
Watercolor on paper
65 x 36-3/4 inchesHow is Art History Made? by Seth Siegelaub
2025
Digital print
33.11 x 46.81 inchesHow is Art History Made? by Seth Siegelaub
2025
Digital print
33.11 x 46.81 inchesTools for Kogetsudai/Moon Viewing Platform
2019
Verawood, screws
7.56 x 3.5 x 11.93 in
Edition of 4Tools for Kogetsudai/Moon Viewing Platform
2019
Verawood, screws
7.56 x 3.5 x 11.93 in
Edition of 4Tools for Kogetsudai/Moon Viewing Platform
2019
Verawood, screws
7.56 x 3.5 x 11.93 in
Edition of 4Moon High School
2025
8.5 x 11 inches, 320 pagesMoon High School
2025
8.5 x 11 inches, 320 pagesMoon High School
2025
8.5 x 11 inches, 320 pagesMoon High School
2025
8.5 x 11 inches, 320 pagesWritings 1973-1983 on Works 1969-1979 by Michael Asher and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh
2016
PUR glued book
8.5 x 0.9 x 12 inches, 229 pages
Edition of 200Writings 1973-1983 on Works 1969-1979 by Michael Asher and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh
2016
PUR glued book
8.5 x 0.9 x 12 inches, 229 pages
Edition of 200It is a luxury to be understood
2022
Digital print
8.35 x 5.79 inches
edition of 200It is a luxury to be understood (verso)
2022
Digital print
8.35 x 5.79 inches
edition of 200Self-portrait at 31
2023
Digital print
8.35 x 5.79 inches
edition of 100Self-portrait at 31 (verso)
2023
Digital print
8.35 x 5.79 inches
edition of 100
Exhibition
Christian Alborz Oldham
Having no talent is not enough
August 23 - November 15, 2025
Opening reception August 23, 5-7pm
Closing party with the artist November 15, 5-7pm
Press release PDF
Soon
Event
Joel Sutherland
I am Sitting in a RT60=0.161V/A
Thursday, October 23, 7pm
A talk concerning the doubling of artificial reverberation with an interest in the history of audio delay/reverberation/echo devices in recording technology. Sutherland is a PhD candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. On Zoom and in person.
Event
Alix Vollum
The Flower Facing Away
Tuesday, November 11, 2025
7pm
A talk on Vollum's research. In person and on Zoom. Vollum has shown at Kimberly Klark, AliasBooks, and VI Dancer. She co-founded Sleepy Hollow Fine Art in Portland, Oregon.x
Event
Sarah Faulk
Sturtevant
Tuesday, December 15, 2025
7pm
Sturtevant is primarily known for making the work of other artists in the form of painting and sculpture (Warhol’s Flowers, Claes Oldenburg’s Store, Jasper John’s Flags), but in the last phase of her career, she began to make video, and write lectures. This talk exhumes the role of language in the Sturtevant’s practice in order to map her explorations in repetition, cybernetics, and the “understructure” of art.
Sarah Grace Faulk holds a BA from the University of Washington and is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of California Riverside. Her dissertation on the work of artists Sturtevant and Lutz Bacher is titled Sex is Not Safe, Speech is Not Free, Images Are Not Innocent.
Discourse
Review
Dancing for people who sit
Madison Brookshire Number Series
Cinema Project
PICA TBA Festival
Ido Radon
We sit in rows in the half-dark. The man with the biggest hair sits in front of me.
The projectionist clicks the projector on on its high stand, and the lights fade out. An almost rectangle of colored light appears with rounded corners, edges blurred. He turns on a second projector and a slightly smaller quadrilateral in a paler color is projected within the first. The projectionist adjusts the position of the projector to position this second within the other.
The sound of the projectors clattering is emphatic, mechanical. I think that in addition to the sound of the projectors themselves, one hears a recording of same, a doubling, but one can’t be sure.
We wait. For the title maybe. For something to happen. But nothing does. Or almost nothing. And when the almost nothing happens, it’s almost hard to ascertain whether or not it did, happening as it does in such a very incremental manner.
Very very slowly one color has turned into another. And you have to check your recent memory to be sure you aren’t making it up. Like watching Santa Cruz quicksilver Pacific on a windless evening where it meets the bluegrey cloudless sky at the horizon after the sun has set. It was peach-tinged lavender moments ago.
Visually, you can call to mind a simplified Joseph Albers Homage to the Square meets a Rothko. But skewed a bit, fuzzy, and in which the color fields are ever so slightly dynamic…minute variations of color over time that we can ascribe to the nature of the material of film itself.
I think of the effects of the nothing of John Cage’s 4:33. The reduction in entertainment or action emphasizing the every-other-sound that is not the piece. Or the similar effects Robert Morris’ 1964 Green Gallery show might have had on a viewer looking for the art and then looking at the rest everything else in the room in context of these bodily-scaled rectilinear forms in painted plywood.
Sometimes there is a very dark grey rectangle within another even darker.
In Godard’s King Lear, the director’s character holds a cardboard box with light bulb installed in one end, a rectangular hole opposite. He says, “No, from the back.” He unscrews the lightbulb to move it, and the screen goes dark. And this is film at the base of it, light shining through and onto something.
What does it mean to make work of this nature in 2022-2024, some 50+ years after structural film works such as Tony Conrad’s The Flicker which calls attention to the frame-nature of film? It similarly uses economy of means to produce effect if the effect could be said to be gentler and more lovely (free of seizure-induction possibilities). It is related, certainly, drawing attention to color rather than form and the fact that color after all is just light. But rather than the structure of film, it perhaps demands attention to phenomena and perception, not unlike Robert Irwin’s scrim installations.
Walter Benjamin writes about simultaneous collective reception made possible by the medium of film. I thought of this ritual of sitting in the dark together in the theater, our faces illuminated by the reflection off the screen. A communal experience with no talking. With nothing to receive. I thought of the other small rectangles of light with rounded corners we had left black in our pockets during this time. I thought of going out dancing for people who sit.
Finally, it’s all manual, analog. The projectionist is the artist it turns out. This work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility is indeed not a screening but a performance. See the descriptions of the works:
No. 1 (2022)
One 16mm film on six reels, overlapping projection, color, sound, about 12 minutes.
or
No. 8 (2024)
One 16mm film on two reels, overlapping projection, color, sound, about 18 minutes.
Interesting that color is listed as a material independent of the 16mm film.
Godard’s character speaks lines about image and the real world and the difference between them. In the darkness, Godard’s character says “Something is missing.”
The following intertitle reads: “NO THING.”
Review
Merideth Hillbrand, F Scale North
at Escolar, Santa Rosa, CA
Daniel J Glendening
Photos: Perry Doane
A pair of objects (Clock, 2025) rest on the floor, near to a wall. Each consists of two discs held some distance from one another by twelve rods roughly 40 inches long. The rods and discs form a cage; the rods intersect with the discs at equidistant points around the circles, like the points of a clock (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12). One is made of aluminum, the other is made of oiled cedar and red oak. The discs of the wood object are not flat, but contoured — they look like they could have been constructed out of pieces of the seat of a chair, though the contours are incongruous. These two objects lie on the floor like twelve-axled wheels, aligned with one another, disc to disc: material reflections.
Beyond are seven objects resembling lit candles (Candelabrum (weekly), 2025): metal discs set on the floor, each with a rod extending up from its center, topped with an illuminated red tapered night light bulb. Yellow lamp cords snake across the floor, large plugs connecting them to extension cords. These objects are of varying heights. The light they emit is a faint orange-red glow.
Propped against the walls are five arrangements of mirrors: square, rectangular, some tinted darker than others, none larger than, say, 12 inches (Untitled, 2025). The mirrors rest in aluminum channels, a low lip to catch and hold the light. Fragmented, the reflection of my ankles splits across surfaces. A mirror reverses our image — we see ourselves not as others see us, but inverted and delayed in time and light as both bend and move between body, surface, and eye.
On the walls are three shallow boxes formed out of bent metal with a face and four sides, each etched with text in a trembling hand, arranged as a list: one enameled white (dusk; enters; mowed; lawns) (Untitled (dusk), 2025), one brass hued (above; light; blue; hue) (Untitled (light), 2025), one a metallic green tint (falls; on trees; planted; square) (Untitled (trees), 2025). Each is the size of a small paperback book, or a portable harddrive.
This exhibition, F Scale North, is also one of a pair: F Scale South opened at Gene's Dispensary in Los Angeles a week prior. The two are mirror images, or inversions: objects there include translucent plastic spheres containing ball bearings and fitted with night light bulbs. There is a chair; a table with a surface of two interlocking wood circles holding a stack of books (We by Chales A. Lindburgh, How Things Work: The Universal Encyclopedia of Machines; Welk McGeehan's My America, Your America), topped by a sculpted gargoyle. There is a striped bag emblazoned with the word "Famous" hanging from a doorknob, a postcard poking from the top with text that reads "Get your coat. We're on strike." On the walls are three engraved bent-metal boxes.
The exhibitions take their titles from the California F-scale, a 1947 "personality test on identifying and measuring traits associated with authoritarianism," as described in the exhibition materials. The "F" here stands for "fascist." The F-scale is a flawed artifact of its era — an era that echoes repeatedly, pulsing, in the present.
If it weren't for the curvature of the Earth, the many obstructions, and the scattering effects of atmosphere and dust, the light from those bulbs in Los Angeles would reach and perhaps align with that from the bulbs in Santa Rosa — this could be understood as an exhibition split or fractured across space and time.
The writer Boris Groys sometimes refers to philosopher Nikolay Federov's project of the "common cause," which called upon the state to make immortal all who had ever lived. If only future generations benefit from the progress of a socialist society, that society is built upon the exploitation of the past for the benefit of the future (inverting or reflecting capitalism's sacrifice of the future for the benefit of the present). As Groys summarizes in The Immortal Bodies, "the only truly just society is a society that extends care through time, in all directions: "Before it can be considered just, a society must be not only international (that is, reaching across space) but also inter-generational (reaching across time)."
"All future thinking requires a grounded material reality," Hillbrand writes in the exhibition materials. The future cannot be built without an understanding of the present: its forms, structures, and material. From here and now we connect points — points as in places, people, communities, conversations — across time and across space. We reach through the mirror and grasp that reflected other in order to bridge the gap of history.
Journal
SOCIETY Issue 1.5
On such a winter’s day
2024
A reader. Richard Barbrook, Andy Cameron, Mark Fisher, Fredric Jameson, Herbert Marcuse. Design: Oskar Radon
Review
Tasting Notes
Sol Hashemi
May 6 – July 9, 2023
Western Front
Tim McCall
Mass production thrives on essence. Essence extracted and concentrated from raw material so that only the most useful qualities remain. Waste more, want more. No thing acting out: the world’s exuberant heterogeneity schematized and purified into discrete predictable elements. No thing out of sync: the geologic ferment of ancient ferns or the biotic adventures of yeast betrayed to the thermodynamic bludgeon of distillation that feeds the engine of the Now. Drunker, higher, faster, more precarious, fragmented, and siloed than ever, plodding along in the hard, reified world of materialized and regulated essence. Everything behaving just as it should, performing its specific task under the law of contradistinction.
// Intermezzo 1: under rot
The holiness of Catholic persons, especially those under consideration of beatification or canonization, can be determined in part by the extent of bodily decomposition after death. Miraculous events or visionary experiences provide the pre-mortem basis for a nomination to saint status, but post-mortem preservation yields confirmation. Observed putrefaction is inversely proportional to sanctity; a qualitative analysis of a person’s body measures their closeness to God. Moral corruption begets physical corruption. To assist the process of verification, viewing windows are sometimes incorporated into the caskets of pious and righteous members of the church. The ecclesiastical higher-ups authorize canonization by disinterring and examining maybe-holy bodies of would-be saints. The sweet fragrance of incorruptible, saintly flesh contrasts with the rancid odor the rest of us produce. The bodies of some saints are kept on permanent public display as a testament to their holy status. In short, what is stable and unchanging, a body that miraculously defies deathly decomposition is a holy one. Countless political figureheads have their preserved bodies on display as “auto-icons” to use Jeremy Bethem’s phrase, signaling the ease with which the notion of incorruptibility can be politicized. God is materialized in that which does not degrade, mutate, or malform. Truth resides in matter impossibly disinterested in the temptations of time. The chaos of putrescence threatens the invention of natural order.
“This old authority and truth pretend to be absolute, to have extratemporal importance… they strut majestically, consider their foes the enemies of eternal truth, and threaten them with eternal punishment.” [Bahktin, Rabelais and His World, pp. 212-213]
In Tasting Notes, the logic of isolation that undergirds the performance of mass production becomes self-conscious and self-reflexive. The desire for empirical knowledge, which depends on successive abstraction of essence from material, is spatialized and rendered in the gallery space, the very format and imperatives of display undermining the capacity to create the focal beverages to be distributed in the foyer. You can’t know your beer and drink it too. The disconnection that scatters components of a complex processes—growth, harvest, fermentation—through the gallery is visually doubled by lapidary blockages. (Untitled Brew Sculpture (Kettle) 2023 and various Tri-Clover Caps 2022) O-ring gaskets lining the stonework seem to emphasize the hermetic seal of the vessels, a total isolation. A liquid re-circulates water in isolation uttering a splashy hymn of self-sufficiency (Untitled Brew Sculpture (Selenite Fountain) 2023). Indeed, the bathing selenite is only partially soluble at neutral pH and room temperature. It becomes even less so in solutions made alkaline by sanitizer as in Brew Sculpture. If indeed selenite is “eager to return to its oceanic origin”, as it is characterized by the gallery guide, this chunk sulks in sterilized and saturated solution, its passage into liquidity foreclosed by a closed and conditioned system. If selenite’s supposed yearning for a release from crystallinity (desire to pass into a liquid state) is an allegory for social alienation and reification under late capitalism, then the only way to accomplish this is to breach the closed system.
Yes, production sacrifices itself to its own logic like a snake swallowing its own tail, but are we condemned to a circular negation? While the photographs at first seem to offer little more than forensic evidence of a distant step of the process of selection, they nod toward escape hatches and trap doors. Apparently appalling apples, refused from the harvest on account of their blemishes are dissected in autopsy-like fashion to reveal hollowed out cores and tunnels dug out by coddling moth larvae. In another photograph, a squadron of ants intrudes on the rhubarb, leaving trails of chemical signals to invite their companions to the forbidden feast. If these photos resemble crime scene photography, they depict the scene of trespassing and sabotage, time theft and tampering. Althusser calls the invisible “a field’s forbidden vision… carrying within itself the finitude of its definition, which, by excluding what it is not, makes it what it is.” Residual evidence of invisible and clandestine activity on one hand, coordinated movements arranged by invisible messaging systems on the other. Supple tactics subvert rigid strategies. Boundaries fold and productivity wanes, parasites outnumber the hosts and define the system, doing their work out of sight and out of step. Even under the unblinking glare of audience, camera, and brewmaster, uninvited guests find their way in and back out.
If production runs on essence, extracting and aligning human and non-human resources with the goal of mass production, pruning the branches of interacting systems to put their stalks in parallel with supply lines, we are offered an alternative: putrescence. Sentient and non-sentient left to their own time and space, multiplying and expanding the horizons of misuse, tracing out transversal relationships. Even the hypochlorite sanitizer used in the fountain invites a speciation: aqueous complexes of foreign minerals (therandite, portlandite) appear. A thermodynamic model of selenite dissolution that more fully grasps the complexity of mineral speciation finds the solubility of selenite to be at least three times higher than a simplified analytical model. (molecular imposters)
// Intermezzo 2: uninvited ion
Both analytic and thermodynamic calculations were utilized to investigate the solubility of selenite (CaSO4•2H2O) in Brew Fountain.The equilibrium constant (pKsp) for selenite in water was found to be 4.58, which resulted in a saturation concentration of 5.12 mM. While the total volume of water in Brew Fountain is unknown, it was estimated at 4 liters. The total mass of selenite predicted to dissolve in this case is 2.6 grams. These calculations frequently underpredict dissolution as they fail to incorporate the full gamut of possible molecular and ionic interactions that can occur in solution. Isolation cloaks the full potential of these furtive exchanges.
Thermodynamic dissolution modelling for selenite in a solution of varying concentrations of NaOCl (sodium hypochlorite) was carried out with Visual Minteq. NaOCl is often used as a sterilizing agent in brewing equipment and has a moderately basic character. Models were run with no NaOCl present in addition to 10 mM and 100 mM concentrations. The table below gives total mass loss of selenite to dissolution.
| [NaOCl] | 0 mM | 10 mM | 100 mM |
| delta Selenite (g) | -32.36 | -32.63 | -32.86 |
When a more complete range of ion activity is taken into account, the dissolution of selenite increases by an order of magnitude. The idealized system of selenite giving itself away for nothing misses the exchanges taking place, all those secondary collisions, trace occurrences, and ephemeral rendezvous. This is to say nothing of the spontaneous emergence of species that emerge from these oblique interactions: portlandite, thenardite, mirabilite pass in and out of formation in the crystal clear stew, circulating between real and potential just as the water itself is cycled through the fountain. The physical system is completely redefined and reconstituted by these uninvited species that come marching in and redefine it and its outcomes in their entirety. This parable of dissolution replaces the simple communication of essences for the noisy banter of badly behaved matter. If there is some kind of mineral desire here, it is toward complexity and creation, speciation and speculation. This supposedly closed system, sanitized and excluded, is still generative.
“We saw this shadow a short while back: we don’t know what belongs to the system, what makes it up, and what is against this system, interrupting it and endangering it.” [Michel Serres, The Parasite, pp. 16]
Sipping the beer while flowing from piece to piece recalled the magician who performs her trick and then allows you to examine the deck. Scrutinize all you want, the marvelous experience (of taste or trickery) will not succumb to rational alignment with the materials that spawned it. Belief is conditioned by invisibility and confirmed by taste. The logic of mass production folds under its own exhaustive procedures of isolation while being mocked by its antithesis, bad actors that operate intractably outside the confines of schematics and predictions. Putrescence, material flows of entropy, sidelines the extraction of essence and performance of mass production. Hashemi doesn’t make sense, he makes beer.
Journal
SOCIETY Issue 1
2023
Contributors: Eleanor Ford, Sarv Iraji, Molly Erika Radon Kimball, Tim McCall, Kitt Peacock, Julia Trojanowski, Laurie White, and Ozan Yildiz.
Design: Oskar Radon
Review
Plausible Data
Amber Frid-Jimenez
V XXXX – something slips, passes, is transmitted, from stage to stage
May 11- June 10, 2023
Mónica Reyes Gallery
Ido Radon
I will call it the cover image. This first work one comes upon, V XXXX #266, is a seductively warm-toned painterly image with large blurred forms at the top that my mind resolves easily into bright red letters that feel quite familiar. The print is framed curiously in black with a sharp, floating mat as if to say something about this image is not business as usual. And indeed it’s not. If chatter about artificial intelligence has shark jumped, V XXXX – something slips, passes, is transmitted, from stage to stage, an exhibition of work by Amber Frid-Jimenez curated by T’ai Smith that recently closed at Mónica Reyes Gallery, gets at something larger than taking machine learning for a run around the paddock.
The conceit of the show, the process that led to the artist book entitled V and the set of prints excerpted from it, is that, as the press release tells us, the artist trained a generative adversarial network on “130 thousand images—representing seventy years of monthly magazine spreads, from 1950 to 2020.”
We need not be coy about just which publication Frid-Jimenez has mined for this body of work. V, the case-bound artist’s book at the center of the project, echoes the dimensions of Vogue’s massive September issue a bit nostalgically, throwing back to when print was a thing and the drop of the fall fashion bible was eagerly anticipated. (In its crimson cover, it also echoes longtime Vogue editor Diana Vreeland’s book, Allure.)
According to Google:
A generative adversarial network (GAN) has two parts:
- The generator learns to generate plausible data. The generated instances become negative training examples for the discriminator.
- The discriminator learns to distinguish the generator’s fake data from real data. The discriminator penalizes the generator for producing implausible results.
When training begins, the generator produces obviously fake data, and the discriminator quickly learns to tell that it’s fake. As training progresses, the generator gets closer to producing output that can fool the discriminator.
What we are looking at in these beautiful, hazy, richly colored images, are “plausible data.” Given every page of Vogue, can the generator produce plausible pages of the venerable magazine? Perhaps, through a looking glass darkly, but it also produces images Frid-Jimenez has turned into prints that draw to mind art historical threads of experimental photography (Man Ray) as in V XXXX #165 and minimalist painting (Agnes Martin) as in V XXXX #442/443 (verso and recto). When the color is drained out of them, the resulting images are evocative and mysterious.
My friend Julia had told me that the online image doesn’t capture what these prints are doing when you stand in front of them, and she was right. Printed on cotton paper, aspects of the images imitate texture of brush stroke or pastel. Printed on Hahnemühle paper with its metallic cast, some of the images invoke the aluminum that likely formed the case of the machine that ran the GAN. And the blown up texture of V XXXX #20, presented in a lightbox, does something else entirely, something that unfortunately feels like lobby decor.
But maybe that’s part of what the show is doing. Yes, among the arresting images that vibrate just out of the corner of comprehension, there are many others, as one flips through the desk copy of the artist’s book, that are the kind of generic blurred abstract form that becomes the visual background noise of corporate lobbies and hallways everywhere. Machine images for the machine.
What’s most interesting here are the threads of fashion, art, and the new that these images and the process that generated them bring to mind.
What is fashion? Whatever else it is, it’s what keeps factories at full production. (Hat-tip to curator and art historian T’ai Smith.) Wearing out the elbow of your favorite sweater isn’t going to do it. But trend will. Take the path of Kelly greenscreen green from Bottega Veneta house color to H&M handbag color of the season to over. In her essay accompanying the show, T’ai Smith notes that planned obsolescence, drawing on the movement of fashion trends, was invented in the midst of the Great Depression by an ad man to force the retirement of goods and generate new wants and thus, sales. The style GAN generator as generator of new but similar automagically and analogously performs fashion’s micro-progression of form, texture, color.
V XXXX #307, if one looks at it long enough and has a relationship with such machines, resolves into a distorted and blurred image of a sewing machine, an image refusing to resolve into what it clearly wants to be. Almost appearing to melt. #307 draws into the conversation the labor that produces fashion, the people that sit at these machines trading their labor power/time for wages to survive. And from there, we might be reminded of other labor: the social production of inflated value of items of clothing or accessories. It is a process, we recall, standing in an art gallery, that is not unlike the ways that value of artworks is socially produced. V, Frid-Jimenez’s artist book, vibrates at the nexus of these overlapping processes of fetishization of garment and art object.
And what’s the warp for the weave of these related threads of labor, spectacle, value, machine? The show opens a side window into a conversation about how capitalism invisibly structures the structures including your day and mine and the machines that run the algorithms to produce inexorably more of the same that only looks only a little different in its repetition.
Review
White Cube :: Black Box
14 Notes Adjacent to the Work of Sarv Iraji
Ido Radon
Destituere in Latin means: to place standing separate, raise up in isolation; to abandon; put aside, let drop, knock down; to let down, deceive. Whereas constituent logic crashes against the power apparatus it means to take control of, a destituent potential is concerned instead with escaping from it, with removing any hold on it which the apparatus might have, as it increases its hold on the world in the separate space that it forms. Its characteristic gesture exiting….1
The Invisible Committee
Flee, but while fleeing, pick up a weapon.2
Sadie Plant
ONE A strike is a radical gesture: a withholding, a blow, a redaction, an excision.
TWO The moment of insurrection tears the scar tissue of history which would overwrite/erase both wrongs and wounds and any possibility that anything could now or ever have been otherwise. It rends a hole in the fabric of reality, revealing all that is ostensibly neutral, all that is business-as-usual, all that is “just the way things are,” for the construct that it is.
THREE In the moment of insurrection, the social mask is removed to reveal the black mask beneath. Bloc is a tactic, the black boxing of the predicate-laden subject in favour of a temporary operative collective composition.
FOUR Black box is to theatre as white cube is to gallery. The purportedly neutral space with the potential to produce any space in a space outside of the world. But of course, that which structures the world infuses every atom of white cube and black box. These spaces are anything but neutral.
FIVE A black box is also any system that can only be perceived in terms of inputs and outputs. What goes on within it is inaccessible, occluded, hidden from view. Machine, algorithm, government.
SIX The real itself may be said to be inaccessible, locked away in the black box of ideologically determined and socially reproduced reality.
SEVEN Now picture here in the white cube a black box, a void struck from the immediately perceivable. Picture the absence of Dr. Who’s phone booth, the monolith in 2001 Space Odyssey, any black cuboid work of Minimalism, say a glossy John McCracken, an Anne Truitt.
Iraji refers to this monolithic box as a “kiosk,” a word derived from the Persian kūshk. In common usage, a kiosk is a site of exchange, of vending, of distribution of information on a street corner, in a mall.
This dislocated kiosk, however, is at least externally rendered inoperative, a site of exclusion, its contents black-boxed.
EIGHT Marcel Broodthaers Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance) foregrounds the all-important structure of Mallarmé’s poem of the same name by meticulously redacting or black-boxing each typographically exuberant line.
The scene framed by the intertitle, “A picture shot in the back,” in Godard’s King Lear is situated in a cinema to consider the conditions of collective reception of the projected image. The reflected light of the screen offering the only illumination.
Iraji’s microcinema, this kiosk/booth/monolith, demands a consideration of that which structures presentation, participation, and reception… a consideration, that is, of the conditions under which the event of the work takes place. These conditions themselves may be said to be black-boxed, taking place as they do “behind the backs of men.”
NINE “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”3
In Iraji’s play, Chronicles of an Escape, the space of the stage is permeable. Players repeatedly move through a stage door to the outside world where insurrection stirs the streets. The audience invades the space of the stage. History and legend weigh upon the players, intrude upon and shape action and reception.
TEN A cinema for one, Iraji’s black box negates the possibility of collective simultaneous reception.4
It structures the approach, demands a stepping into, a stepping out of. It isolates, limits options for movement and alternative modes of perception. It makes evident the modulations that structure any reception.
ELEVEN It folds the subject into its sculptural form, transforms subject into an invisible object contained within.
TWELVE In the common use of the term, subject paradoxically is used to mean both “a free subjectivity, a centre of initiatives, author of and responsible for its actions” AND a subjected being, “who submits to a higher authority, and is therefore stripped of all freedom except that of freely accepting his submission.”5
THIRTEEN Stepping into the black box is to step into what Marcuse calls the aesthetic dimension. Though it may be conventionally designated as “unreal” in the ordinary sense of the word,
it is “unreal” not because it is less, but because it is more as well as qualitatively “other” than the established reality. As fictitious world, as illusion, it contains more truth than does everyday reality. For the latter is mystified in its institutions and relationships, which make necessity into choice, and alienation into self-realization. Only in the “illusory world” do things appear as what they are and what they can be.6
It offers, that is, an inversion of the world. He writes that it is a place in which one can call things by their name.
FOURTEEN “The destituent gesture does not oppose the institution. It doesn’t even mount a frontal fight, it neutralizes it, empties it of its substance, then steps to the side and watches it expire.”7
- The Invisible Committee, Now, tr. Robert Hurley(Los Angeles: Semiotext(e): 2017): 78-9.
- Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture, The Situationist International in a Post-Modern Age, (London: Routledge, 150). This is a version of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari quoting George Jackson saying, “I may take flight, but all the while I am fleeing, I will be looking for a weapon,” in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 277. The footnote for Deleuze and Guattari’s quote of Jackson is blank.
- Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1851-52),” Die Revolution (New York), 1852. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm
- Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” Grey Room 39 (Spring 2010): 11-38.
- Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1971),” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (TK: Monthly Review Press, 2001): 121-176.
- Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Communications and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 54.
- The Invisible Committee, Now, 81-82.
Essay
Never Judge a Network by its Cover
Laurie White
Time to grasp the handles, he said to himself, and crossed the living room to the black empathy box.
When he turned it on the usual faint smell of negative ions surged from the power supply; he breathed in eagerly, already buoyed up. Then the cathode-ray tube glowed like an imitation, feeble TV image; a collage formed, made of apparently random colors, trails, and configurations which, until the handles were grasped, amounted to nothing.
Phillip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, 1964.
In “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” Frederic Jameson observes that despite contemporary culture’s reliance on networked computer technologies, the external appearance of the machinery itself does not adequately represent the new types of subjectivity they enable. Unlike the older industrial forms, such as grain elevators, smokestacks, or the streamlined profile of the railroad train, “all vehicles of speed still concentrated at rest,” new technologies like the television or desktop computer “whose outer shell has no emblematic or visual power” instead articulates “nothing but rather implodes, carrying its flattened image surface within itself.”1 Yet for Jameson, this representational lack paradoxically offers a visual shorthand “for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp—namely the whole new decentred global network of the third stage of capital itself.”2
In Philip K. Dick’s 1964 novel, alienated users on an irradiated planet gain solace through the ‘empathy box.’ Uninspiring to look at, when its twin handles are grasped the box transports its user into a collective networked experience, where the joys and sorrows of one become the joys and sorrows of all. Patrick Jagoda notes the paradox of this networked sublime as “crisis lived within ordinariness,” in which the disruptive events of systemic injustice or financial collapse are intermingled with the “thick atmosphere of affects that opens up as soon as one picks up a smartphone.”3
McKenzie Wark suggests that, as the transition to digitally networked technologies renders information into a commodity, subject to the laws of private property, this generates a new producing class, “the hacker class, producers of the new, of what is captured by intellectual property” and a new ruling class, “the vectoralist class, which owns the means of realizing the value of what the hacker class produces.”4 In this culture of databases, David Joselit argues, the logic of art gives way to “the logic of networks [in which] links can cross space, time, genre, and scale in surprising and multiple ways.”5 What gives an image its value is its capacity to connect, “not only to messages, but to other social currencies like capital, real estate, politics, and so on.”6 Under these conditions, private consumption appears “active, touted as a form of production in its own right.” For Lane Relyea, this form of consumption, when framed as liberatory bricolage, “helps erase what is at base the social nature of production, not by treating culture as a means of passive and private consumption, as with spectacle, but by diverting attention away from the massive investment and profit taking generated by increasingly corporate owned libraries, warehouses, and databanks, which too often are portrayed as themselves passive, like natural resources waiting to be mined and exploited by trailblazing, innovative bricoleurs.”7
The cultural bricoleur might be considered a sub-genre of Wark’s hacker class, one who is able to navigate the overproduction of information and images and to make new cultural products from this heap of fragments and ruins. Within this context, sculptural bricolage re-appears in contemporary art, but as Relyea notes, its constituent parts have undergone a change in status: “trash goes from being the marked term—that which is excluded, a threat—to being that whose value is underdetermined, in flux, mobile. Like other kinds of databases, the spaces of trashcan and storage bin … become sites not of prohibition and exclusion so much as flexibility and conversion … where emptied-out signifiers can wait their turn to be filled anew.”8 As such, for Relyea, bricolage sculptures using found, salvaged, re-valued items begin to appear as anthropomorphic “portraits of the trader, the consultant, the networker or multitasker, the free agent or proximate manager.”9 The salvaged computer shell, which at first failed to represent the networked realities it housed, paradoxically comes full circle as marker of contemporary networked subjectivity. Thus Relyea continues, “A type of artwork, or any entity for that matter, that is entirely makeshift, that is nothing but fragments and temporary solutions, seems surprisingly well suited to negotiate today’s entrepreneurial and communicational mandates, in which supreme value is placed on flexibility, on the ability to improvise identities and relationships, to relentlessly search and capture, to connect and extend, to point-and-click things in and out of existence—in short, to cast the widest informational net possible and ad lib the most novel conjunctions out of whatever happens to wash up in the mesh.”10
If Relyea’s position on the new bricoleur as one who can, to use Simon Critchley’s words, “ride the surf of late capitalism”11 has a cold ambivalence to it, Wark maintains a more hopeful outlook premised on the fact that information, liberated from its material substrate by the digital revolution, wants to be free. “Information, unlike land or capital, knows no scarcity. The property form has become so abstract that its ambition is to encompass the very thing that escapes it.”12 The new terrain of class conflict engendered by this transformation creates the possibility for the production of a new kind of information commodity, but it also creates the possibility for something other than the commodity economy. “The challenge is not only to think what else it could be, but to practice the production and reproduction of information otherwise.”13
LAURIE WHITE (she/her) is a curator and writer whose research explores ecological methodologies in art and theory. Laurie has curated exhibitions and programs for The Or Gallery, grunt gallery, Griffin Art Projects, the fifty fifty arts collective, and Documenta 14. Recent publications include “Every Being is a Score for Another” in Wetland Project: Explorations in Sound, Ecology and Post-Geographical Art (2022). Laurie currently lives in Vancouver, unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. She holds an MA in Critical and Curatorial Studies from the University of British Columbia, where she is pursuing doctoral studies in Art History.
- Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review, no. 146 (July-August, 1984), 78.
- Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review, no. 146 (July-August, 1984), 78.
- Patrick Jagoda, Network Aesthetics, (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 222.
- McKenzie Wark, “Information Wants to be Free (But is Everywhere in Chains),” Cultural Studies, 20:2-3, (2006), 180.
- David Joselit, After Art, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 89.
- Joselit, After Art, 56.
- Lane Relyea, Your Everyday Art World, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013),192. Just as Jameson notes that the offensive features of postmodernism no longer scandalize anyone and have been fully institutionalized and incorporated into the official culture of Western society (56), Relyea observes that the figure of the bricoleur, hailed as liberatory since Levi-Strauss’s articulation of the concept, has also been absorbed and the techniques made not only ubiquitous but necessary for cultural survival and cache.
- Relyea, Your Everyday Art World, 195.
- Relyea, Your Everyday Art World, 197.
- Relyea, Your Everyday Art World, 200.
- Simon Critchley, Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity, (London: Verso, 1999), 139. Cited in Wark, “Information Wants to be Free,” 177.
- Wark, “Information Wants to be Free,” 181.
- Wark, “Information Wants to be Free,” 174.
“Never Judge a Network by its Cover” was written on the occasion of SOCIETY, an exhibition by Ido Radon at Veronica. It was previously published in the first print issue of SOCIETY, 2023.