still from August and After

Nathaniel Dorsky’s films are the opposite of language, and don’t need it. He talks about poetry, but only because he is talking about what’s ineffable, about what is beheld by the eyes, but also held inside of the body. His camera stares, and when, in the dark of the theater, the slow, silent images are illuminated by light, looking is doubled. What happens to duration in the act of staring, happens here. “Simultaneously, what is beautiful prompts the mind to move chronologically back in search of precedents and parallels, to move forward into new acts of creation, to move conceptually over, to bring things into relation,” says Elaine Scarry.

Benjamin Fondane’s ciné-poèmes create this space inside one’s head. These films are made to be read. Here are the first eight parts of the 180-part ciné-poème Paupières mûres, from 1928.

1  a short shadow runs along an ominously lit wall
a sign with a pointing white hand runs alongside it

2  another shadow on the same wall
the hand briefly points in the opposite direction

3  the globe of a streetlamp with two candles, its two flames like human eyes

4  patches of light surrounded by darkness illuminate dull shapes left and right like a moving reflector
shop windows hover above

5  a large patch of sidewalk on which

6  a hat rolls

7  a fist punches

8  a white-gloved hand flails

The movement happens in the disjunction between what is supposed to be there, pictures, and what is really there, words. The experience becomes uncanny, we are tickled by our own participation, which somehow overthrows the authority of the auteur. Even as the pieces deal with representation, they are radically open. That is because the images project onto imaginative space, and the light that shines behind them is the infinitude of language.

ONE QUART EXTERIOR GREEN INDUSTRIAL ENAMEL THROWN ON A BRICK WALL

Lawrence Weiner’s work is complicated, glamorized by its rendering in language. “Art is the relationship of human beings to objects and objects to human beings,” while literature is “what human beings feel about other human beings,” the artist said in 1982. Words here do not mean something large and wonderful, or mean anything outside the objects they stand in for. Slate indicates nothing more than a slab of stone, water signifies the element itself.

Weiner’s language describes one-to-one correspondences with things in the world. Language here is a denotation system for the aforementioned relationships. It is interchangeable and usable. Language is physical, marking. “Language was the best carrier, it could go all around the world,” the artist said in a talk during his 2007 Whitney retrospective. “Slate in the U.S. is the same as slate in Norway. This way of using language is democratic.”

Statements was his pivotal bookwork, the first piece to be composed entirely of language. He describes each statement as a receipt of bill (like the gas bill) occurring after the action. If this insistence on the correspondence between a thing and its name seems familiar, charming or naive, this might be because Piaget identifies this view of the world as a primary stage of childhood language development: “The name of the apple is written down inside the apple.”

Despite this use of language, the feeling of communication is in the room. It’s just one paradox among many. Language is used like a currency, a thing of definite and exchangeable value in the service of de-commodifying the art object. The authority of the logos is borrowed to insist on the primacy of physicality, the inscrutability of the object. Words are pure abstraction, yet their material presence hangs there like a fact. The artist intends to use words as mere placeholders, but the artworks produced are radically indeterminate. As with Benjamin Fondane, words have an absolute reference, yet one prismed through the infinitude of language.

A RUBBER BALL THROWN ON THE SEA displayed at the Hirshhorn Museum

As short narratives flash onto the screen in black letters, then off just as quickly, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries simultaneously produces the pleasure of looking and the pleasure of reading. The two could be said to be distinct pleasures. Looking happens all at once. It bears the trace of the original look, the trace of love. Its duration is radically different from the duration of reading, which, in Western alphabets, unfolds in a line through time. Here, language ludically breaks into hallowed gallery space. The letters are geometric and black, usually against a modernist white background. Direct, chatty narrative breaks through those graphic choices. That which is always present in the gallery but not often talked about, the personality of the artwork, is inflated here. Other artworks suddenly seem coy in comparison.

In a recent lecture, Johanna Drucker defended “aesthetics,” or as she put it, “aesthesis as a producer of experience,” without which, we cannot think (as we need experience to do so), à la John Dewey. She posited that all objects and events are “transactional,” a peculiar choice of word defined tertiarily as “a communicative action or activity involving two parties or things that reciprocally affect or influence each other.” Her aim was to uncouple art from politics, or at least defend a space in which they could be so. Her reason for this was to avoid closure, since “a positive agenda for an artwork affects closure upon the viewer.”

Even if looking does not exactly stand in for communicating, the viewer and the artwork are in the room as physical presences, affecting one another. The moment is always a social one. Against the backdrop of the way the other artists here use language, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries seem to be making a closing down gesture, one that collapses the infinitude of language. Yet, they redirect that same potential outward from the screen in a seemingly social act. The work feels subversive for the way it’s directly, and subjectively, communicating. That which cannot be resolved into closure, for Young Hae-Chang Heavy Industries, is its social face.

Two films by Nathaniel Dorsky recently screened at SFMOMA.

Young-Hae Chang‘s Pacific Limn recently closed at Kadist.

Johanna Drucker closed the Graduate Lecture Series at SFAI and has a solo show opening at the Center for the Book on May 24.

Screenshot from the _New Republic_

I almost spilled coffee on myself yesterday when I read this bombastic headline in the New Republic: “How Occupy Changed Contemporary Art.” Then I laughed out loud.

It’s just that I die inside a little bit more each time when I read yet another “art review” written by someone purporting to be an authority on the subject. While I understand the impulse to write sensational headlines to promote someone, it’s just too much to take when that gets mixed together with the Occupy Wall Street rhetoric.

Somehow the article, which was supposed to be a review about New York illustrator Molly Crabapple, morphed into an attempt to elevate her as an example of a new “vanguard” of Occupy artists who favor vague things like democracy, fairness, and sharing. The reviewer goes on to claim that her using Etsy and Kickstarter is proof she is the real deal.

Sure, I can understand the author’s enthusiasm for Crabapple, an attractive former nude model and illustrator, but it’s hardly necessary to oversell her by claiming she is an avant-garde artist. By doing so the author inadvertently seeks false validation, implying it’s not OK for a woman to work as a nude model and that an attractive woman can’t get respect unless such lavish claims are made on her behalf.

Molly Crabapple surpassed her Kickstarter goal by $34,799.

Besides, according to Fastcompany, she hardly needs such blustery advocacy, noting that “at 29, Crabapple is making six figures a year — and she has for the past three years.”

Not to mention the fact she already raised almost $65,000 through Kickstarter for the show being reviewed, and it all went to her, because it’s her project — not to “the cause,” whatever that is. Yet the conflation of her and Occupy implies that by supporting Crabapple, you are supporting Occupy.

But sadly, it looks like yet another blatant marketing scheme capitalizing on the brand built by anticapitalists. How’s that for irony?

Of course she perpetuates all this artspeak nonsense on her Kickstarter page: “Your support in this project will help me cover the cost of creating spectacular art that’s meant for everyone to enjoy. And help me do it without asking the permission of rich people. Because art is awesome. And big, splashy, gold-encrusted, glittering things are awesome. But so is populism. I want to see how they look together. ….While I’m making Shell Game, I want you with me.”

Shell Game? Is this a con? Forgive me if I am not impressed. Since when did rich people need to give anyone permission to make art? She’s raised $65,000, AND she’s selling these paintings for thousands of dollars each. No joke. This is a SHELL GAME!

And then there’s this praise-filled article (complete with photo spread) from a style blog about her that deserves to be quoted at length:
“… Molly lives a post-impressionist fantasy as a successful artist herself in a loft in NYC, that is replete with chandeliers, paper lanterns, burlesque postures, plumes, and art everywhere. When Molly is home painting and sketching her ‘hyper-detailed surrealist Victorian pictures,’ she is in an embroidered silk robe, gold and pearl Rococo slippers, and might be obsessing over a pair of Alexander McQueen Gilly booties etched with almost medieval knot-work. But when out and about, like a 19th-century painting, Molly is in hourglass silhouettes, crinolines, crocheted gloves, veiled head pieces and other arcane accessories.”

Before Zuccotti Park was raided and Occupy Wall Street was pushed out of Lower Manhattan, hundreds of posters and signs were made by anonymous artists, few of whom ever got any kind of compensation for their time or artwork.

While I would never begrudge another artist making a living or having success, the New Republic article never thought to question the obvious contradictory elements of this whole marketing strategy. While she is getting her moment in the sun (see the Rolling Stone article + flattering photo here), the truth is that she lives in Lower Manhattan and her career was well under way long before the Occupy movement began. Fastcompany also quotes her saying, “What you get in this world doesn’t come from how much you ‘cultivate your talent’ but how much you ‘cultivate your name.’”

So come on, New Republic, be honest, is she really an example of someone who has “changed contemporary art” by fighting for “the cause”? I just don’t see it. If anything, the artist is just reinforcing the idea that financial success = artistic success.

In reality I’d say 99% of the “art” that came out of Occupy is agitprop. There’s nothing wrong with that, but why not call it what it is?

Filmmaker Jean-Gabriel Périot reuses photographs and bits of old film already set tightly inside the grammar of history. He stacks or lists the sequences of archival pictures into new rhythms and velocities. The films are inflected by the aging body of media; the familiar grain of film stock; or smudgy, blown-out color. Sense is common here, we all know the story.

The weightiest of pieces, almost mammalian, is Nijuman no borei (200000 Phantoms), thousands of stills of the Atomic Bomb Dome overlaid upon one another. There are children, then there are not, there are bicycles, gatherings, stock photos, a shot of architectural repair. While Hiroshima moves around it, the dome stays in the center of the frame, a synecdoche for historical tragedy. The music’s heartsick crooner wrenches the moment’s unimaginable emotion loose with maudlin piano and tragic lyric. This counterpoint keeps historical emotion at subjective range. It enlarges it, too: “the artifact can provoke the emergence of layered memories, and thus the senses contained within it,” says C. Nadia Seremetakis, and through the voice we feel emotion simply for the old photograph.

I want to think about this work in terms of language, a sorted alphabetics of image. The first part of The Barbarians uses something like visual phasing to interrupt one photo of a group pose with another. A row of soldiers slides in over a group of smiling heads of state at ever increasing speeds. The formal similarities of the shots seem to suggest democratic equivalences — each citizen standing in his social role, erect and representative. As the photos begin to move faster over one another, the effect becomes frenetic, as if the equivalences are consuming the differences. Then the geometry of the screen space gets interrupted by a flash of a handkercheifed face, a face shouting, carrying a gun. The group shots cede finally into full-screen photographs of street protest and riot. First the social face, then its underside — the face who is not equivalent.

What effect does the picture have in protest, what does the riot picture do? Can a photograph of social action be more than the sign of action? I keep going back to something Fulvia Carnevale of the collective Claire Fountaine said in a recent lecture, “An object cannot be moral.” Conversely, writing is never not moral, for its concurrence with the law, its coincidence with the body. This paratactic work comes close. Says poet Martha Ronk, “I am not interested in single words set in white space, but joinery.” It’s what goes between the words that makes a language, more like a ribbon than a series of equivalences. Here, images are shaped in a series, but the interstices remain — small, silent spaces that one enters with one’s own sense. What appears in the joinery seems like common sense, a sensus communis. It is not new meaning Périot creates, the meanings in his material are set. Rather, new rhythms are shaped out of the too-muchness of the archive. They create resonances, and thus, the films become active in time.

In Even If She Had Been a Criminal, the grand music and accelerated clips of civic pageantry set up the spectacle of war. Conversely, tight angles let us linger on the information of the human face, which is the most powerful of images. Slowed for our examination: gleeful, youthful men. We watch them with nostalgia. Then the cropping disappears and lets us see a public humiliation, the capture of a French woman accused of sleeping with Nazi men. The same faces our eyes lingered on before now slap, grab, and humiliate a woman, or cheer in the background. It seems that this is what war means, actually. The cruelty of concepts shines through the human face in black-and-white.

Jean-Gabriel Périot recently showed nine films at ATA as part of his U.S. tour. Nijuman no borei (200000 Phantoms), The Barbarians, and Even If She Had Been a Criminal have screened widely and won numerous awards.

First, during the Boston manhunt, CNN’s John King breathlessly reported the bomber was a dark-skinned male who had just been arrested. Of course, that went viral immediately. Unfortunately he was wrong — no arrests had been made at all, and the suspect was not dark-skinned.

Next up, the New York Post didn’t merely identify the wrong men as the bombers, it put them on the cover! The “BAG MEN” became instantly famous. But again, neither of them was the bomber. In fact one of the guys, Salah Barhoun, was actually a high school student who wasn’t even from Boston.

So whatever happened to fact-checking, getting multiple sources to confirm information — oh, and journalistic ethics? Don’t those things matter anymore?

Apparently not when it comes to scooping the competition. Shortly after the Post cover, the New York Daily News ran a cover showing a street awash with blood, but it Photoshopped out the gash on the woman’s leg where the blood was coming from. Supposedly it was OK to show the person’s agony, the violence, the horror, but not the wound? Talkingpointsmemo.com reported that, when “reached for comment this morning, a News spokesperson would only say: ‘The Daily News does not comment on its editorial decision-making.’ ” How’s that for integrity?

These are major news outlets, and they should know better than to alter news photographs.

According to the LA Times, “forums like Reddit and 4chan were alive with speculation — based on little or no evidence — that the culprits were Muslim fundamentalists or perhaps right-wing extremists.” But who needs proof when you are on Facebook or Twitter? There’s no law against gossip and rumor.

And there was also the case of a Brown University student, Sunil Tripathi, who was the focus of speculation after Reddit users misidentified him as the potential bomber in the white baseball cap.

For days everyone in the known universe was searching their Twitter feeds and scanning Facebook pages thinking that a friend of a friend of a friend might be the bomber. More importantly people wanted to feel they were getting the news first!

Worst of all, there were so many conflicting leaks by so many overlapping law enforcement agencies, it should have been obvious that bad information was getting out. For example, for about 24 hours police had been claiming the actual alleged bombers had robbed a 7-Eleven store. They had pictures. Well, it turns out they didn’t rob the store. Did anybody think to follow up to see if there was an actual robbery or who it was that committed it?

It’s no secret that the police will deliberately mislead the media if they feel it helps their cause. They do it as a matter of policy. If anyone paid attention to all of the intentional falsehoods spread about Occupy Wall Street activists, it’s clear enough it’s no accident that willful mistruths are fed to the media.

While it’s right to vigorously report on major events like the search for mad bombers, terrorists, murderers, and the like, it’s also crucial that news media reports are accurate. Is that too much to ask?

It’s just that I had worked with him at the San Francisco Art Institute and saw how he had been a role model and father figure for so many students in the Bay Area and not saying something about that doesn’t seem right.

Also – it’s worth noting that while a cast of colorful characters came and went, he somehow managed to stay in the game at SFAI for 43 long years.

He was there getting his BFA in 1961 and was active in the art version of the counterculture revolution via the Funk Art movement. Many of his friends and fellow classmates (William T. Wiley, Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, etc.) were deeply involved in it.

He was also at SFAI in 1978 when the devastating news came that Jim Jones had initiated his “White Nights” plan in Guyana that killed over 900 members of the Peoples Temple. Everyone in San Francisco back then knew at least one person that had died in that tragedy. A week later later Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone were assassinated in City Hall by Dan White.

Poster from the Carlos Villa show held at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in 2011,“Manongs, Some Doors, and a Bouquet of Crates,” curated by Maurizzio Hector Pineda, with a photograph by Jerry Burchard.

In a supreme irony, just a year earlier, it was Jim Jones who, as appointed Chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority Commission, voted to acquire the International Hotel on Kearny Street, using $1.3 million in federal funds and wanted to turn it over to tenants rights groups. When a court rejected that plan and ordered evictions in January 1977, the Peoples Temple provided two thousand of the five thousand people that surrounded the building, barricaded the doors and chanted “No, no, no evictions!” (from wiki) The I Hotel, of course, was the last holdout of Manilatown, a largely Filipino neighborhood along Kearny Street that had been gentrified by the late 1970′s.

In that way Carlos’ own personal history was reflected in the city’s history. He was around to witness multiple tragedies – how entire ethnic communities were effaced through urban renewal (Manilatown, the Fillmore, etc), how low-income housing was bought by banks for pennies on the dollar and turned into condos, and of course he saw the shabby treatment of the elderly that always lived in North Beach, scraping by on fixed-incomes. All of this must have informed his art practice and his teaching.

He was also at SFAI when the FBI’s formerly Most Wanted fugitive, Angela Davis, taught there. She had been hunted around the country by the FBI and became the most famous prisoner in the United States for a while. Her autobiographical book caused shock waves when it was published for its brutal honesty and depictions of law enforcement. Her emphasis on the importance of ethnic studies and prisoner’s rights couldn’t have gone unnoticed at SFAI. I always wondered if Carlos knew her, but never got around asking him.

But even Davis, like so many other teachers and students, came and went.

Once when we were eating lunch together at Pete’s Cafe, he told me if there was any way possible, that I should stay working at SFAI. He said that in his opinion, all of the drama at art school was worth it.

Carlos remained.

Putting up with the bureaucracy, the crazy students, the banality of school politics – it was all worth it. To me that said he really, deeply, cared for the school and all the potential it represented.

Perhaps all of these experiences came together, inspiring him to start the first curriculum based on multiculturalism at SFAI? That curriculum, Worlds in Collision, also became a book and is an articulation of what many people felt about race and identity but had never put down on paper. In fact, it’s not too far-fetched to say he exposed a lot of people to the concept of multiculturalism in art for the first time.

Even if you didn’t know him – just talking with him a few minutes you could tell Carlos was playing the long game. His insight, wit and sly smile will be missed.

Before:

Cannot believe that within a few short hours I’ll be seeing Vertigo, the greatest film ever made, for the first time… How can that be, you ask? The first movie theater to employ me was playing the surprise revival of Hitch’s masterpiece when I started in 1984, and I saw the film then in its unitary form repeatedly, and even more frequently in fragments glimpsed while I was working, amid screenings. Many video and theatrical viewings followed. The sound was fine for these, but the image always dull, a sad stand-in for the original IB Technicolor. Then, in the 90s, came that monstrosity, the souped-up Harris & Katz version, which provided a beautiful (tho non-Technicolor) image with a soundtrack tricked-out to compete with James Bond and Schwarzenegger, complete with additional surround-sound effects the film’s script specifically rejected (“No birds sing,” in a scene where H&K give us a prehear for The Birds). But now — Tonight — the real thing, a true-blue original IB Technicolor print at the PFA… I’d heard of it playing recently in Chicago, and wondered why, WHY could we not have it here in its home of SF, or at least somewhere in the Bay Area? Berkeley will have to do, that’s fine. Berkeley is my birthplace, therefore an appropriate site (at least for me) for this matrix of modern cinema, and the PFA features the best projection this projectionist has ever seen. So excited, it feels like Madeleine is taking a nap in my bedroom… Can’t wait…

Artist Alfred Hitchcock creates _Vertigo_ (1958) with collaborator Kim Novak.

After:

Where to begin? My in-a-sense “first” viewing — via its original IB Technicolor form — of Vertigo, one of my three or four favorite films, was certainly an experience. Perhaps it was due to the years I worked at Kayo Books, riffling through the pages of ’50s magazines, and their exquisitely evocative color ads, but the indexicality — my physical connection to the images of Vertigo — was never so intense as seeing it in IB Tech. Perhaps this was also due to not having seen it for some time, and having my visceral connection to San Francisco amplified by the many months spent in the pounding-the-streets type research that went into my and Brian Darr’s project to document the locations of Christopher Maclaine’s Great work The End (1953) in the intervening years. At any rate, while I’ve always felt deeply connected to Hitchcock’s film, I’ve never had a viewing more intense… When a friend saw the film in IB Tech some months ago in Chicago, he gave the impression of being struck by its garishness, almost vulgarity. Was it this that led me to experience the opposite response? It was like most other IB Tech prints I’ve seen; wherein the color is more intense, but darker, and the blacks are especially rich… Comparisons with the complex flavors of deeply colored fruits, such as the slightly bitter but fantastically sweet pomegranate come to mind… All the colors & rich textures felt of the period, but paradoxically, all the more vivid, and sprung to life out of its time and into ours… A film, therefore less “in quotes,” in evoking its period, than a bit of that period alive, and less easily digestible, within current time. One image in particular squared with my Chicago friend’s description: the shot of Judy in her fuchsia dress against the lime green neon light of her hotel’s sign bathing her thru her window… Did this contribute to my tearing up throughout this portion of the film? Or my feeling ever more intensely the tragic implications of Scottie in love with Madeleine/Judy in love with Scottie, & their horrific equation/conundrum from which there will be no way out? You bet… And maybe part of the intensity of my response was the growing realization that an Eastman print of this film would now just be an interim step between the “reality” of the film as I was coming to know it, and whatever horrific digital version we’ll be presented with in the future,  but which won’t be Vertigo anymore than Judy can be Madeleine, or Madeleine, as alluring as she is, can have the warmth and humanity of Judy, and which Scottie, often judged harshly for his failure to appreciate it, experienced too late to value properly. This is a long, convoluted train of thought, I know… but my experience of Vertigo in IB Tech has led me to wonder (not for the first time, I admit): will humanity only appreciate cinema (that is, projected celluloid film) after it’s gone? We are a fickle species. There are those of us, however, who will not let it die, despite the predations of pop/industrial culture. Work akin to the real IB Tech Vertigo — in spirit, if not ultimate value — must continue to exist. My own personal tragedy may be the rejection of a “perfect” Madeleine (sterile digital video) for the organic richness of a celluloid Judy. But I embrace my fate, for I embrace love.

Although almost entirely discontinued in the Western world in 1974, the IB Technicolor dye transfer process continued to be used in China until the early 90s, and was revived in the US from 1997-2002. I hope to discuss in future posts why I believe celluloid filmmaking will continue in various forms into the foreseeable future, despite the deluge of mass-media obituaries. 

This is part two of a two-part essay on “Until the Quiet Comes”- a film by Kahlil Joseph that recently won the Sundance Film Festival’s Short Film Special Jury Award. Part one of the essay covered the film’s opening sequences and their relationship to African cosmology. This concluding part of the essay focuses on what I perceive to be the central moment in Joseph’s stunningly brilliant film and it completes a deeper explication of this contemporary Black film viewed through a critical lens informed by African philosophy.

The oblique narrative created by this film sequence underlines how closely death dwells with life – and tragedy with ecstatic joy – under the constant reminder of police helicopters as ubiquitous as the summer sky over L.A.’s Nickerson Gardens projects. Boys running through a wide-open field with the type of abandon that you only have when you’re too young to think about the end of summer. What image could more depict the ecstatic vibrancy of life than that?

“Until the Quiet Comes” filmed in the Nickerson Gardens Projects. Los Angeles California

At this point in the film we see that there is a connection between the boy shown in the beginning of the film and the man portrayed by the Afriscape kinesthesia genius –aptly named – Storyboard. But although their interaction is a loving one, the nature of that connection is left unexplained. And as paradoxically as joy resides with pain, in this community loving interaction resides alongside a lethal self-hatred evidenced by Storyboard’s body lying dead from a gunshot. The disorienting emotional vertigo caused by the sight of the body is compounded by filmmaker Joseph playing with time and narrative by showing a scene in reverse of a man running past the dead body. Is he the shooter? Is he running before or after the gunshot? The water image appears again with a body motionlessly floating in it and again with just the empty blue water. The water signifier in Kongo cosmology reminds us that we are born in water and that Kalunga – the barrier between the living and the dead – is also a body of water.

Kongo cosmology has a specific acuity for the concept of time. The Bantu-Kongo have four types of time that are categorized as cosmic, social, natural and vital.  Kalunga -the supreme force of the universe – manifests cosmic time by the creation of events ad infinitum.[i] I read Kahlil Joseph’s treatment of time in “Until the Quiet Comes” to be in keeping with the Bantu-Kongo notion of cosmic time. He confounds the paradigm of a beginning, middle and end narrative – instead concentrating on the poetics of a moment. That central moment in “Until the Quiet Comes” is the instance when we see a community frozen in stasis after a murder. In that moment –not a measurable minute or second- but subjective time defined by an event, we see Storyboard lying on a concrete pathway – dead. He begins to move in reverse much like the runner in the previous scene. No, it’s not reverse. It’s something different. It is the uncontrollable spasmodic movement of a wakening soul. Muscle spasms make his soul/body pop up like the shouters in Black sanctified holiness churches when they “get happy” or are possessed by the holy spirit- his soul/body jumping while the community of living souls look on in frozen mute silence.[ii] Normally I would call him a dancer but Storyboard describes what he does with his body as being very much influenced by time-based mediums such as stop-motion animation and film. He exhibits a hyper awareness about his body creating a series of pictures that he “blurs together” in creative ways that play with time. Storyboard is the center of gravity for this film. He enables the film narrative to freeze the moment of death and allow us to watch the wordless language of a soul as it realizes that it is leaving this world. What he does is so poignant that I hesitate to call it performance and am more inclined to say that he is expressing the language of spirit possession written in his body.

Storyboard P in “Until the Quiet Comes”

Each set of bodily manifested pictures that Storyboard creates in collaboration with filmmaker Joseph for this sequence illustrates the soul awakening to its condition of death. He leans back in an ambivalent posture as he is being uncontrollably drawn down the concrete pathway. The realization of what has happened to him sets in with the revelation of a bullet entry wound as he rends and tears at his blood stained t-shirt in an effort to dance his way out of his constrictions. His soul/body jumps up, finally eases down to submit to its condition and – in a moment of revelation- discovers how to move down the path in this new frozen cosmic time. Before he leaves this world he bows in a gesture of respect to one brotha leaning against a wall in upright repose. Storyboard’s genius with using his body for making what he calls “…pictures to music…” presents us with an image of his body/soul in an effortlessly masterful and fluid drift towards its destiny. And, along that way we see him becoming more comfortable with the revelation as his swimming flight brings him closer to his transition to the other side.

Film Still from “Until the Quiet Comes” Storyboard P in Prayer

He rises with head to the sky and hands clasped in supplicant prayer on his way to meet the ancestors. Having done that – he saunters, spins (counter-clockwise of course.) and moves in a willful manner towards his transport to the other side below the Kalunga line. Those gestures seem to acknowledge that he’s been freed from something because all semblance of a struggle has left him as he moves towards the lower side where the ancestors dwell.

What better vehicle to take you to the low side than a low-rider? The sweet chariot bows and swings low to take him home. The elegance of its craft and motion makes us think of how the genius of vernacular art and urban engineering has turned the automobile into a vehicle that dances. In Oakland, illegal car/street party events have birthed a cultural phenomenon called ‘the Sideshow’ that marries hip hop, dance and car culture in an inter-disciplinary visual event where bodily dance movement is often mirrored by the wavelike car motions created by a skilled driver. The car in this film seems to bow for its momentary dance partner and in so doing becomes both signifier for transport and transcendence.  The improvisational genius of Storyboard emerges again as he enters the vehicle in a reverse birth-like movement through the car window that creatively avoids the more banal entry through an open car door. In so doing he underlines again the paradox of birth and death in Kongo cosmology. ‘Ghost ridin’ the whip’ indeed.[iii]

Film still from “Until the Quiet Comes” Storyboard P reverse birth entering the low rider/whip

Afriscape sensibilities entail identifying the overlaps and commonalties in African cultural expression to locate them in an African and African diasporic cultural continuum. These sensibilities provide us with the insight to answer the question, where are African ways of being made visible in the contemporary expressions of African diasporic peoples? With “Until the Quiet Comes” Khalil Joseph has presented us with images of contemporary African diasporic people in a way that explicates Kongo cosmology and tacitly connects the metaphysical spaces of Kalunga to the everyday spaces of urban Black communities. His attention to making the image of water appear in the moment of death and having the film begin its narrative in stark summer daylight, transition to the setting sun and end with twilight is in keeping with Kongo cosmogenic notions. The Ki-Kongo cosmogram is often times called the “Four Moments of the Sun”[iv] and the left hand point on that circular ideogram represents the sun setting in the west. The moment of transition to the world of the ancestors is symbolized by the sunset and Joseph appropriately ends his film with moments that follow the sun setting in the far west Black Los Angeles California community of the Nickerson Gardens housing projects. Whether Joseph willfully creates these images as an intentional call and response to Bantu-Kongo cosmology or whether they have manifested innately from the imagination of an artist cognizant of Afridiasporic cultural phenomenon is moot. It is still the mission of the Afriscape cartographer to identify and explicate them whenever they are present.

I’m still looking at Kahlil Joseph’s film “Until the Quiet Comes.” Released in September of 2012 and more recently the 2013 recipient of the Sundance Film Festival’s Short Film Special Jury Award – it is presently my favorite piece of art. The consensus of opinion amongst my peer group is that Joseph’s short film is pure genius. But beyond that, it seems to have touched and strummed a chord of emotion in some of us that is beyond the words that we normally use to describe a film. So, what I’m about to do with this essay is -partially – to publicly work through my current obsession with its magnetic imagery and to provide an explanatory legend for the part of the Afriscape that it maps with those images. This is part one of a two part essay.

“Until the Quiet Comes” – with music by Flying Lotus – is the latest of filmmaker Khalil Joseph’s collaborative work with contemporary musicians. They’re not music videos as much as short films enhanced by contemporary music. Joseph’s past collaborations have been with progressive hip hop artist Shabbazz Palaces and the Afri-Brazilian musician Seu Jorge. We can safely say that he is somewhat aware of African diasporic spiritual practices and cosmology because he titled one of his previous films starring Seu Jorge, “Oshun and the Dream.” “Oshun…” being a prominent feminine African/Yoruba deity found throughout African diasporic spiritual traditions in Brazil, Cuba and the U.S.

In Oakland, musician/filmmaker Adimu Madyun AKA Wolfhawk Jaguar has produced several impressive films that more explicitly use African diasporic religious themes for his recent album titled “Hunter Poetry.” Not only do his films access African diasporic Yoruba religious content and imagery, they also oftentimes profoundly utilize the words and services of local Yoruba religious priests and priestesses. There may very well be a renaissance of Afri-diasporic spiritual consciousness emerging from contemporary Black music, its dance performers and its attendant films. Another of the engaging additions to this renaissance is the series of films produced by YAK utilizing the talents of the dance group Turf Feinz.  This Oakland dance group turns abandoned houses in Black neighborhoods into temporary performance spaces dedicated to fallen community members. The film that they dedicated to Kenneth “211″ Ross who was gunned down by Police in Oakland is a primary example. If there is one major identifiable common denominator present in these films it is the notion of ancestor veneration or respect for the dead.

As we will see, the film “Until the Quiet Comes” also has this respect for the dead but is unique because of its brevity. Clocking in at just 3 minutes and 50 seconds – it reminds me of the profoundly epic experience that a few unique AM radio broadcast era singles could deliver in just a few minutes. Some of us can remember the first time that we heard “When Doves Cry” by Prince or Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City.” They created a narrative Odyssey in just under 4 minutes that could take you on an epic journey far away from the spot near a radio that you had just heard it. “Until the Quiet Comes” does the same thing in the visual field.

If we examine the narrative spaces depicted in this film with what I call an “Afriscape” critical lens, then we can interpret the images presented to us in a way that makes clear their affinity with African metaphysics.  A short definition for the Afriscape would be the deterritorialized cultural presence of Black/African people anywhere in the world.  The Afriscape is a contiguity of African cultures that acknowledges commonality viewed from varying subjective critical lenses and sensibilities. These Afriscape sensibilities give us the ability to map meaning in these images – gradually unpacking the deceptively simple and oblique narrative to reveal the cosmic scope of their implications. Those implications are present with the very first image in Joseph’s film.

Still from Khalil Joseph’s film “Until the Quiet Comes” Water/Kalunga

The image of water that opens the film to the voice of singer Erykah Badu – and that recurs in several places – seemed inscrutable before several viewings. After its first appearance it began to speak volumes by the way that it recurs in the beginning, middle and end of this film. In a film that so poignantly depicts death and life, an Afriscape understanding of the body of water as an image reveals things that take on cosmogenic proportions. When we apply an understanding of traditional central African cosmology to Joseph’s film (A perfectly appropriate approach when used to describe cultural expression in the Black-Atlantic diaspora.) we know that the image of water symbolizes the barrier between the living and the dead. Kalunga is what the Bantu-Kongo of central Africa call the barrier between the world of living and the world of the ancestors. [i]The image of Kalunga is graphically depicted in a circular cosmogram with a cross in its middle that is found in so many Kongolese sculptures and religious objects as well as ground drawings used in ritual practice throughout the African diaspora. The horizontal line that divides the top of the circle from the bottom is the Kalunga line and it is often characterized as a body of water. The four points at each end of the cross designate the cycle of a soul’s existence starting with the bottom side that represents all beginnings. Next is the right side representing birth – moving in a counter-clockwise motion to the top point that indicates maturity, and then (not finally) to the left side that indicates death. The bottom point below the Kalunga line also indicates dwelling in the land of the ancestors. And so, the cycle is continuous.

A diagram of the KiKongo Cosmogram found in Central Africa

These points on the Kongo cosmogram are important to remember as we map the Afriscape narrative spaces in this film – beginning with the opening scene of an empty round swimming pool and a young boy standing in the right hand (birth) side of the circle motioning with his finger as if to fire a gun parallel to the Kalunga line and striking the left hand (death) side of the pool’s circumference. His action seems to instantaneously bring on his own death by being felled with his own imaginary bullet. This scene is one reason that at least two of my fellow artists are not capable of repeated viewings of this film precisely because it hits too close to the home where real life tragic memories dwell. [ii]The place where seeing a child bleeding on the sidewalk stays with you forever and the sound of a mother screaming at the sight of it will never leave you.

Still from Kahlil Joseph’s film “Until the Quiet Comes”

Still from Marker’s La Jetee

Ever since seeing Chris Marker’s La Jetee decades ago, I’ve loved movies about time travel. My addiction to Turner Classic Movies delivers a subtle kind of time travel movie every night. Take for example Van Dyke’s San Francisco, made in 1936 about an event in 1906. Seen from my position in 2012, the nuances of time echoes are enough to get my head spinning. The earthquake was for them a relatively recent phenomenon–thirty years previous. However, those thirty years were tumultuous–World War One, Prohibition, the Depression. Victorian San Francisco of 1906 must’ve seen very quaint to these hardened people. We are seventy-six years displaced from that Clark Gable film, more than double the time between the film and the earthquake. We could never know some of the ’06 details that they recalled in 1936–like the climactic scene when the quake strikes in the middle of a citywide talent show cum auction competition called a Chicken Ball, a social event unknown to us now. Thirty years ago for us was the surfacing of AIDS, for example; could a filmmaker in 2040 get those period details right, let alone in 2080?

Installation of When Attitude Becomes Form 1969

The current show at the Wattis Institute is a recapitulation of the seminal Harald Szeeman show When Attitude Becomes Form which took place in Switzerland in 1969. Curator Jens Hoffman has asked dozens of international artists to make work in response to the original exhibition. The simultaneous telescoping and collapse of our lived experience of time is one of the essences of contemporary life, and conceptual practice as well, and this project flips me around in exactly that way. That is, the organization that I was first associated with, 80 Langton Street/New Langton Arts, was in large part founded in 1975 (37 years ago)  in the wave that Szeeman began six years earlier and half a world away.

Hoffman synthesizes in his wall text seven themes of this kind of art making: 1. use of research; 2. interest in process as much as product; 3. attention to the minutia of objects and gestures; 4. attention to the complexity of the world; 5. interest in time; 6. interest in art history; and 7. interest in cultural and political shifts. I would add to that list the following: 8. interest in language; 9. work that documents art actions, especially ones that critically engage commerce; 9. use of found objects; 10. assigning oneself tasks, often repetitive, laborious and absurd; 11. use of jokes; 12. use of electronic and digital media; 13. interventions in architecture and everyday life; 14. international point of view; 15. use of opaque content; 16. interest in science and measurement; 17. use of correspondence; 18. defeating or engaging sensory information other than the visual; 19. playing with communication systems; 20. taking oblique stances on politics; 21. making drawings without the use of the hand; 22. do-it-yourself strategies; 23. use of real risk and danger; 24. embrace of theatricality.

Jane Farver, who curated the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Politics of Origin 1950s to 1980s, in 1999, made the argument that conceptual practice was neither a Western European nor a New York invention, but rather that the “moments of rupture” from object-based to idea-based art were neither sudden nor geographically confined and happened on every continent starting some fifteen years before Szeeman’s show. When I entered the art world in the mid-seventies such practices were already common among many local artists, many of whom who had been my teachers, and their first major public expression was at SF MOMA in 1981, when curator Suzanne Foley organized the landmark exhibition Space Time Sound, conceptual work by 21 Bay Area artists and teams. Eight years later Nayland Blake curated a show titled Bay Area Conceptualism: Two Generations [!] for Hallwalls, an alternative space in Buffalo, NY.  This show took place twenty years after Szeeman’s show, and twenty-three years ago.

Here’s what Blake had to say, in part: “This exhibition was conceived as a way of commemorating two moments, the first in the beginning of the 1970s, and the second beginning in 1985. While most of the artists in this exhibition have produced bodies of work that span the last two decades, there have been certain points at which their work has reached critical mass–when their varied practices have come together to enter into discourse and to have an impact beyond their immediate environment….They participate in the reformulation and expansion of the parameters of the legacy of conceptual art practice…the dissemination, in the late 1970s, of a variety of theories engaging issues of textuality, sexual politics and psychology.” I wrote in that same catalog: “The earliest works of Paul Kos, Tom Marioni and Terry Fox in the late sixties was contemporaneous with the explosion of work being done in Europe and New York….What was being discussed on the East Coast and in Europe then had substantial impact here, but was also ameliorated by distance and inclination…and by Bay Area influences as diverse as the radicalism associated with resistance to the Vietnam War, The Beat era and its subsequent Hippie and drug cultures, Bay Area Funk school attitudes, Fluxus West, and Asian influences, among others.”

Martin Myers skyscraper sculpture/painting 1975 in storage at Oakland Museum

Conceptual practice was established enough at this time for there to be notions of generational change, and specific language embedded in how we thought about work. And it is amazing how these texts and exhibitions and influences leapfrog around through recent art history. In conclusion, I’ll mention a few examples of the language used in documentation of 80 Langton’s first year, published in 1976 as a collection of postcards. The cover image of the space says on the back: “Events and exhibits focus on time- and non-object-oriented art forms such as performance, video, music, dance and film, as well as other experimental and multidisciplinary situations. [italics mine].” Linda Montano says of her performance (with Nina Wise): “[we] played drums for six hours a day for six days in order to change, transform our minds….” Ina Evans said, “I am exploring the ability of a photograph to isolate an image and transform it into a ritual object.” Martin Myers said of his painted sculptures, “To diminish the importance of the image, I have chosen images that are visual cliches without inherent meaning or value….” John Gillen wrote, “My film image writes incomplete letters on the wall. My real image completes the letters. At the conclusion of the performance, a ‘hieroglyphic’ text remains on the wall.”

_Field Conditions_ installation view, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2012; photo: Matthew Millman

_Field Conditions_ installation view, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2012; photo: Matthew Millman

Joseph Becker

Can there be architecture without buildings? What if a wall or a floor went on forever? The works in our current show, Field Conditions, pose these questions and more about the construction, experience, and representation of space. In an attempt to expand our general interpretation of architectural ideas, its focus is on an array of projects by both artists and architects that redefine the relationships between invisible and visible, figure and ground, finite and infinite. As an exhibition, Field Conditions feels like the tip of the iceberg to me, a leaping-off point for further investigation and analysis on these intersections between art and architecture practice and the abstract concept of “space” as a subject. The SFMOMA presentation, with 13 projects by 11 artists and architects, is of course limited by the physical factors of the gallery and as such cannot begin to be a complete and comprehensive analysis of the topic and theory that interests me here. Of course, neither can a singular essay devoted to the subject, although I did map out a semi-comprehensive 15-page outline as a beginning. Suzanne asked me to publish this, incomplete and as-is, on Open Space, and in this age of attention deficit and information over-saturation, I was excited to re-imagine the essay format for the space of the web. The great advantage of web-publishing —  the possibility of immediate derailment, disorientation, or adventure down the rabbit hole. So, with that in mind, please scan, peruse, click, enjoy.

I’d also like to call out an invaluable collaborator on this project: my research assistant Aviva Rubin. Her dedication and energy behind both the exhibition and this post has been beyond incredible and has made everything possible.

_Field Conditions_ installation view, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2012; photo: Matthew Millman

• Introduction

o Systems, chaos theory, movements, processes, generative instructions – all are employed in the works included in SFMOMA’s new exhibition, Field Conditions.

o The ‘field’ emerges from a diverse array of disciplines and influences, beginning in the 1950s.

o Defining the field condition, architect and theorist Stan Allen describes it as “any formal or spatial matrix capable of unifying diverse elements while respecting the identity of each. Field configurations are loosely bounded aggregates characterized by porosity and local interconnectivity…What is intended here is a close attention to the production of difference at the local scale, even while maintaining a relative indifference to the form of the whole.” [Stan Allen, “Stan Allen: Distributions, Combinations, Fields – Preliminary Notes,” in A+U: Architecture + Urbanism 08, no.335 (Aug 1998): 4]

o Separation between viewing subject, viewed object, and space between (aka the environment) is dissolved.

Hans Namuth, <em>Jackson Pollock</em>, 1950; ©Estate of Hans Namuth

• Field Theory’s Emergence – Art

o 1950-51 – Jackson Pollock’s ‘drip pictures’

• Immense canvases filled with dripped and thrown paint, “weaving colored lines into one another in such a way as never to permit the bounding of an individual shape and thus the formation of a contour. The effect, as the critic Michael Fried expressed it, was to bound or delimit ‘nothing except, in a sense, your eyesight.” [Foster, Buchloh, Krauss, Bois, Art Since 1900, p.650]

• Foster et al make connection to Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings of the 60s

o 1956 – Jackson Pollock dies

• He ushered in an era of ‘action painting,’ which performed art making and expressed an ‘event’.

 o Art critic Clement Greenberg’s famous essays, “Modernist Painting” and “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” shape the debates in art in the 1960s

• The term ‘allover’ describes the uniformity of surface and the difference and repetitions in Jackson Pollock in contrast to the flatness and frontality of traditional painting up until then.

• “All-over, ‘decentralized,’ ‘polyphonic’ picture relies on a surface knit together of identical or closely similar elements which repeat themselves without marked variation from one edge of the picture to the other.” [Greenberg, “The Crisis,” p.155]

• “The dissolution of the pictorial into sheer texture” [Greenberg, “The Crisis,” p.157]

• “The ‘all-over’ may answer the feeling that all hierarchical distinctions have been, literally, exhausted and invalidated” [Greenberg, “The Crisis,” p.157]

• Replacing easel picture with mural painting, which portrays the wall as an impermeable surface that is continuous. His focus shifts (between 50s and 60s) from material properties to perceptual experience (vision and sight) of surface.

• “What is possible, Greenberg maintains, is a special kind of spatiality which, like flatness, denies the viewer imagined physical entry, as though he or she were able to walk through the depicted space.” [Foster et al, p.442]

Rosalind E. Krauss, <em>Sculpture in the Expanded Field</em>, figure 1 in October, no. 8, MIT Press, 1979, pp. 30-44

o 1966 – Art critic Rosalind Krauss’ famous essay, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’

• Dissolving of the pedestal of sculpture links object to actual site or space. Sculpture goes from being seen as a physically bounded, 3D object to being shaped by its cultural conditions and contexts.

• “The expanded field is thus generated by problematizing the set of oppositions[, landscape and non-landscape, architecture and non-architecture,] between which… sculpture is suspended.” [Krauss, October, 1979, p.38]

• “Thus the field provides…an expanded but finite set of related positions for a given artist to occupy and explore, for an organization of work that is not dictated by the conditions of a particular medium.” [Krauss, p.42-3]

• [Krauss’ Expanded Field Diagram]

o Minimalist and Process Art of the 1960s

• 1962 – Viennese Actionism

• 1965 – Donald Judd publishes ‘Specific Objects,’ theorizing on Minimalism along with Robert Morris’

• 1960-1968 – Francois Morellet joins GRAV, a group of visual artists that established principles and systems of visual experimentation prior to beginning an art work, thus working against Pollack’s ‘all-over’ method

• 1966 – ‘Eccentric Abstraction’ exhibition with Eva Hesse and others, showing alternative expression of Minimalism – Post-Minimalism

o Process Art – throughout both movements

• Art object expands, art becomes immersive, time-based, processional

• Late 1960s – Barry Le Va’s Distributions

• “Whether ‘random’ or ‘orderly,’ a distribution is defined as ‘relationships of points and configurations to each other, “ or, concomitantly, ‘sequences of events.’” [Jane Livingston, “Barry Le Va,” p.53]

• “The works are not meant to be shuffled around or placed with by the spectator; but neither are they intended to be physically inaccessible to him….The more significant issues are to what degree each work is rearrangeable by the artist each time it is set up, and how nearly the pieces in a set work must remain as originally positioned by the artist, in order to still constitute the work of art he intended.” [Livingston, “Barry Le Va,” p.54]

Archizoom,<em> No Stop City</em>, in Domus, no. 496, March 3, 1971, pp. 49-54

o Post-Minimalism and Process Art of the 1970s

• 1968-9 – ‘9 at Leo Castelli’ exhibition of Post-Minimalism in London + exhibition of Process Art in NY – both focused on Richard Serra, Robert Morris, and Eva Hesse

• Early 1970s brought a broad range of practices that challenged the formal logic of Minimalism – a mood of ‘anything goes’

o Shift from Minimalism to Post-Minimalism + Process Art

•  The shift from Minimalism to Post-Minimalism maintains the existence of Process Art through both movements.

•  Minimalism sought to bring to light the essence and purity of forms and concepts, removing all extraneous elements to an artwork and employing methods such as grids or seriality.

•  Post-minimalism attempted to push beyond the aesthetic rigor of minimalism. Not quite a movement but more an ‘artistic tendency,’ post-minimalism used unconventional, simple, and hand-made materials and objects to reveal a human element to the art’s construction. Minimalism still holds as its reference point. Post-minimalist artists are diverse.

• Process Art focuses on the making and doing of art – the gathering, collating, and patterning of the art process. The objet d’art becomes diminished in importance for the heightened value of the creative process.

o [reference: Foster, Buchloh, Krauss, Bois, Art Since 1900]

Zaha Hadid, _The Peak — Night, Hong Kong_, 1990; Collection SFMOMA, Agnes E. Meyer and Elise S. Haas Fund and Accessions Committee Fund purchase; © Zaha Hadid

•Field Theory’s Emergence – Music

o John Cage

•  American composer, music theorist, and artist that developed indeterminate and aleatoric music [video of ‘Indeterminacy’]

• 1952 – Cage composes 4’33” which performed the absence of deliberate music in four minutes and 33 seconds.

•  As a professor at Wesleyan, he established ‘happenings’ with his students – a performance or event that is acontextual and non-linear

o Iannis Xenakis [website]

•  Greek composer, music theorist, and architect/engineer

•  He used mathematical models, like game theory and set theory, to structure his music

•  He created spaces for music as well as created music for existing spaces

•  1953-54 – Xenakis composes Metastaseis where each orchestra member (61 in total) had their own distinct part

o SFMOMA Public Program / Events

•  Julie Lazar on John Cage and screenings of ‘Circle of Circuses’ at SFMOMA’s Phyllis Wattis Theater in afternoon of 09/04/2012

• Electronic Music Festival begins at SFMOMA’s Phyllis Wattis Theater on evening of 09/06/2012

• ‘A Tribute to John Cage’ on view at SFMOMA’s Koret Visitor Education Center from 09/17/2012 – 10/30/2012

• Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Seth Horvitz at SFMOMA’s Phyllis Wattis Theater on evening of 11/01/2012

• Seth Horvitz

o American composer and artist of electronic and experimental works

o He deals with dynamics between nature, machine, and human perception.

o 2010 – Eight Studies for Automatic Piano uses computer processing to compose pieces that distort, iterate, and complexify over time [Study no.4 for Automatic Piano]

Ryuji Nakamura, _cornfield_ (angled view), 2010; Courtesy the artist

o Paper Architecture of the 1960s and 70s

•  ‘Paper Architecture’ employs concepts of the ‘field’ to imagine new potential spaces and impacts for and of architecture. Designing utopias, these architects take influence from art praxes of the same period, which focus on concepts and essences through formal techniques.

•  As proposals that aim to remain unrealized, paper architecture put forth radical experiments for the future of the built environment. The work of avant-garde pioneers like Constant, Archigram, Superstudio, and Archizoom illustrated abstract architectural worlds unable to exist just yet.

• Constant’s ‘New Babylon’ elevates the space of inhabitation so that it floats above the existing world.

• Archigram proposes megastructures with various systems for new built environments to grow – like mobile architectures.

• Superstudio puts forth a monumental structure that moves around, through, and above the earth.

• Archizoom expands on the ‘field,’ beyond their fellow paper architects. Their design moves past its utopic potentials and criticisms, amplifying its surface value. They designed homogenous living spaces without boundaries.

•  Drawing offered a liberating and political mode of architecture praxis. Through the medium of drawing and painting, these architects could allude to new ways of living.

Ryuji Nakamura, _cornfield_ (front view), 2010; Courtesy the artist

o 1966-74 – Archizoom – No-Stop City [Archizoom link]

•  Archizoom – radical architecture movement in Italy in 60s and 70s

• Merging the academy’s interest in radical politics (‘68) + pop art

• Created ‘superarchitecture’ as “the architecture of superproduction, of superconsumption, of superinducement to consumption, of the supermarket, of Superman, of super-high-test gasoline. Superarchitecture accepts the logic of production and consumption and makes an effort to demystify it.” [Varnelis, “Programming After Program,” footnote 20]

• Approach to Architecture

• “The praxis of architecture was envisioned as an expanded field, surpassing the act of simply making buildings” [Varnelis, “Programming After Program,” p.87]

• Architecture as free expression, as research project

• Researching environment, pop-culture, and the city

•No-Stop City

• First published in Casabella in 1970 as “City, assembly line of social issues, ideology and theory of the metropolis” and then in Domus in 1971

• “Archizoom developed No-Stop City, like Superstudio’s contemporary Continuous Monument, as ‘purely cognitive,’ aiming for ‘a level of clarity beyond that of reality itself.’ For Archizoom, No-Stop City performed a scientific analysis of the contemporary urban condition, simultaneously utopian and dystopian, that is, beyond good and evil, employing the ‘abstract, theoretical, and conjectural’ tools of architectural representation.” [Varnelis, footnote 28]

• Design – Merging Urbanism and Architecture

o Their design of ‘No-Stop City’ proposed an endless city that integrated architecture with consumer goods.

o Repetitive elements, multiple centers, quality-less city, open and unbroken, catatonic environment, organized like a factory or supermarket, free space.

• Factory and supermarket were models of “structures, potentially limitless, where human functions are arranged spontaneously in a free field, made uniform by a system of micro-acclimatization and optimal circulation of information. Inside it there exist no hierarchies.” [Varnelis, footnote 39]

o Interior spaces, artificially air-conditioned and lit offer new living environments, communities, and territories.

o “Considering architecture as an intermediate stage of urban organization that has to be overstepped, No-Stop City establishes a direct link between metropolis and furnishing objects: the city becomes a series of beds, tables chairs and cupboards; the domestic and urban furniture fully coincide. To qualitative utopias, we oppose the only possible utopia: that of Quantity”[Branzi of Archizoom]

o The city no longer required concentration to function; electronic media enabled the connectivity previously established by the city. Total dispersal was now possible, dissolving rural and urban, inside and outside. The infinite and undifferentiated interior system that could now “encompass the earth” [Varnelis, 88]

• Critique

o Modernism hadn’t worked – flexible spaces, outmoded technologies had not produced the future or an avant-garde compliant with its ideals

• Archizoom introduced an expanded role for the architect – no longer was he just a constructor of objects but now a “technocratic ‘coordinator of human and technical resources’” in “the new trans-urban condition” [Varnelis, footnote 45]

Sol LeWitt, _Incomplete Open Cubes_, 1974; Collection SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund; © The LeWitt Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

• Influencing Contemporary ‘Field’ work

o Architecture

• Like their predecessors in Superstudio and Archizoom, architects of the 1980s and 90s created spaces of seemingly objective proportions. Systemized and infinitely extendable, their possible worlds appear to lack subjective experience and take on a ubiquitous scale. Lebbeus Woods, Daniel Libeskind, Stan Allen, Zaha Hadid, and others, reinstated ‘paper architecture’ into the discourse of architecture. Transcending the disciplines of architecture and art, they explored ideal and imaginary spaces.

• Woods on Libeskind’s Micromegas

o Voltaire – Science Fiction – the unknowable – Small/Large – Distanced self-reflection – perspective

• Woods on Woods

• [SEE: Stan Allen, ‘Field Conditions’, Points + Lines: Diagrams and projects for the city (1999), pp. 92-103]

o Field conditions as a system of rules that generate infinite resultants

• The Expanded Field of Architecture – Landscape and Urbanism

• Where site and non-site mediate

• “The realm of architectural engagement [has been] conditioned by the realization that landscape design and architecture are no longer inhibited by outmoded site contextualities. A way had been opened by contemporary artists and sculptors to liberate space, in terms of an ‘expanded field.’ As early as 1970 Robert Morris effectively redefined minimalist sculpture in his Notes on Sculpture II, in which he ‘disposed once and for all with the object as such varying conditions of light and spatial context.’ Site-specifics, was it became known, was equally relevant to architecture and landscape, in both public and private spaces, purusing a clear minimalism. What was surprising was the amount of time it took for such concepts from art to take root in the associated areas of architecture and landscape.” [Michael Spens, “Site/Non-Site” 2003, p.8]

o Flows

• “Another challenge to architecture emerged, namely the rising preeminence of networks over built structures. The microcomputer, telecommunications, and pervasive computing combine with the bureaucratic landscape of what Ulrich Beck calls ‘second modernity’ to shape a formless and immaterial shadow world” [Kazys Varnelis “Programming After Program,” Praxis 8, p.83]

• Manuel Castells calls it ‘the Space of Flows’ created by invisible forces

• Cellular Automata

• A model of micro-structuring in mathematics, physics, biology, comprised of homogeneous and tessellated parts that change over time. Cells exist in a grid with each working within a fixed rule (a mathematical function) and responding to neighboring cells, which both determine the possible states the cells can change into. The rules apply iteratively.

• Concept discovered in 1940s, though expanded beyond academia in the 1980s

• Comparing Works – Art, Architecture, Then, Now, In the Exhibition, and Not Included

o Archizoom [No Stop City] + Ryuji Nakamura [Cornfield] + Stan Allen [The First 2500…] + Marsha Cottrell [Black Powder]

• Infinite and Objective space

• “A bleak, infinite grid of featureless structures extending to the vanishing point and beyond.” [Varnelis “Programming After Program,” p.87]

• Abstracted Language

• Cottrell and Archizoom both use punctuation and letters to signify a dispersed environment of abstract objects that creates a ‘swatch’ of the ‘field.’

• “Initially, No-Stop City took the form of Homogenous Living Diagrams, typewriter generated fields of periods punctuated with a point grid of Xs that demonstrate the quantitative origin of No-Stop City” [Varnelis, p.88-89]

• Employing a similar systemization of lines + marks as LeWitt

• [Archizoom link]or [‘Blog Images’ folder]

• [Marsha Cottrell video link]

• Cottrell’s Black Powder… comes from an Arthur Rimbauld poem, Phrases

• [Ryuji Nakamura link]

Marsha Cottrell, _A Black Powder Rains Down Gently On My Sleepless Night_ (detail), 2012; iron oxide on mulberry paper; Courtesy the artist; © Marsha Cottrell

Sol LeWitt, _Wall Drawing #761_, 1994; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Robert L. Beal, Enid L. and Bruce A. Beal Acquisition Fund, Catherine and Paul Buttenwieser Fund, with additional funds donated by Charlene Engelhard Troy; © The LeWitt Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

o Tauba Auerbach [50/50 Floor] + Sol LeWitt [Wall Drawing]

• Random

• Tauba Auerbach [website]

o Via ‘information theory’ – branch of mathematical philosophy. Maximum information and minimum meaning (like static from a TV set). No deliberate message

o TV snow is a visible expression of randomness

• “They are images of the constant flux of information in which we are immersed every day but which, lacking the relevant sense organs, we can only access through technological translations.” [Will Bradley “The Woods Are White or Black – We Will Never Sleep” Chaos: Tauba Auerbach, p.54]

• Her Static works freeze the endless ‘storm’ of TV snow into beautiful moments that the viewer can extensively ‘read.’

• Seen as one of the few sources of randomness but, as Auerbach discovered, there are patterns.

o Auerbach is interested in the phenomenon of randomness. It dissolves origins, clear causes to the effect of its random resultant.

• Sol LeWitt

o He invented a system to make decisions, structured by illogical (or random) conditions

• Anti-expressionist device

o “Nearly impossible for a human being to act randomly…The use of the idea of random s meant to preclude the conscious placement of elements to form a pattern” [Andrea Miller-Keller + Sol LeWitt interview]

Tauba Auerbach, _Static 6_, 2008; © Tauba Auerbach

• Indeterminacy

• Tauba Auerbach’s product is unknown and unpredictable – based only on rules and follows limitations.

• Sol LeWitt seeks a finite set of possibilities, as potential combinations of elements. He doesn’t see the infinite as having a place in his art

• Role of the Artist

• “The artist’s intervention [is] understood as a trigger for a controlled series of unpredictable effects” [Bradley p.55]

• Sol LeWitt

o Similar to Pollock, LeWitt developed a matrix of lines that dissolved decipherable form. LeWitt’s matrix abstracted the ‘art object.’ Executed by assistants through instructions. “Demonstration of the obsolescence of drawing” – industrialization of drawing and representation [Foster et al, p.651]

o Title is obscured instruction – “These are ways of using language to describe a precise location, like geography. I think of them as my poetry.” [Sol LeWitt]

o Musical score that could be redone by anyone – can exist in multiple places at the same time

o The wall drawings are ‘portable’ in a sense

o “The artist must allow various interpretations of his plan” [Sol LeWitt quote: Alexander van Grevenstein, Wall Drawings 1968-1984, endnote 8]

o Co-existence of meanings – plurality

• Chaos v. Order

• “The interface between the imagined but unresolved mathematical order and the chaotic surface of our understanding” [Bradley p.55]

• Tauba Auerbach

o Mathematical definition of ‘chaos’ describes “the tendency of certain systems to exhibit extreme sensitivity to miniscule factors and to amplify the impact of those factors with breathtaking speed and consequence…Chaos is unpredictable but is never random or indeterministic” [Chris Jennings, “Strange and Quiet Noise” p.56]

o Entropy – “the inevitable decline of order” [Jennings p.56]

o Chaos theory – ‘deterministic chaos’

• Finding organized systems in conditions difficult to discern as organized

• Butterfly effect (1961 – meteorologist Edward Lorenz)

o Defined in Auerbach’s book as (quoted):

• 1 – complete disorder

• 2 – the infinity of space or formless matter from which the cosmos evolved

• 3 – behavior so unpredictable as to appear random, owing to acute sensitivity to initial conditions or small changes

• 4 – Ancient Greek – a vast chasm, a void, an abyss

• Tauba Auerbach

• [Chaos by Brian Sholis]

• Auerbach is “concerned with dissonance and our attempts to resolve it” [Bradley, p.54]

• Static pieces “might seem like the final condensation of John Cage’s famous assertion that ‘I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry’” [Bradley, p.54]

• 50/50 pieces

o Binary principle

o Perfect balance of light and dark tones

Richard Barnes, _Murmur 1 November 15, 2005_, 2006; Collection SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund purchase; © Richard Barnes

o “These gray zones extend to gray matter: the human brain itself appears to occasionally move toward the edge of anarchy.” [Brian Sholis, “Random Rules” p.59]

• Sol LeWitt

• At SFMOMA

o Sol LeWitt Video of Wall Drawing at SFMOMA (July 5 – August 17. 1975) by Skip Sweeney + Bob Klein of Video Free America [see video in SFMOMA Library]

• Each individual wall drawing can be read together

• Idea v. Realization

o “He uncouples the Idea from the material realization by conceptualizing it in another medium (language) which differs essentially from that used for its embodiment in a drawing” [Jan Debbaut, “The Words and the Drawings,” Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings 1968-1984]

o Idea becomes more important – its materialization as able to be repeated (thinking to Walter Benjamin)

o “Renders superfluous the cult of the ‘objet d’art’” [Debbaut]

• Language

o “A given system of signs must make it possible to analyze things right down to their simplest elements; it must be able to unravel things back to their origin. But it must also show how the combinations of those elements become possible and how the complexity of things has sprung from one idea” [Michel Foucault, The Order of Things]

o “Conceptual art is an art in which language dominates” [Bernice Rose quote: Alexander van Grevenstein, Wall Drawings 1968-1984, endnote 15]

• Scale of the room

o Physical properties of a wall – theatrical, decorative purposes

Peter Jellitsch, _STB/S16 (12 Fragments of 3 Moments in a Horizontal Formation)_, drawings in progress, 2012; Courtesy the artist

o Peter Jellitsch [STB…] + Rafael Lozano-Hemmer [Homographies]

• Quantifiable + Programmed

• Peter Jellitsch

o Uses motion algorithm to analyze wind directions and air forces that occur around high-rise buildings

• Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

o Programming without teleology – non-linear

• Relational

• Produces the seemingly natural and the ambiguous

• Vectors moving in relation to surrounding movement

• Peter Jellitsch

o Each work performs as a sequence in a series of drawings

o Vectors act as an intertwined flow, moving together

• Rafael Lozano-Hemmer [R L-H]

o ‘Relational Architecture’

o Against the term ‘collective’ and instead for ‘connective’

o Collective presupposes one interpretation when R L-H supports many readings, perceptions

o “’Relational’ emphasizes the dematerialization of the real environment and asks us to question the dissimulation” [Jose Luis Barrios interview with R L-H in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Subsculptures, p.16]

o ‘Subsculptures’ are different than Relational Architecture but he doesn’t have a specific definition

o “it has to do with contagion matrices” [R L-H, p.16]

o Chaos Theory – fractal pattern – non-linear phenomena

o “Multi-perspectival flow that unfolds in various dimensions…’possibility’ as a form of construction” [R L-H, p.16]

• Disruptions, imperfections, errors, defects

• Jellitsch and Lozano-Hemmer both exploit their works’ imperfections – Jellitsch through the use of his hand drawing and Lozano-Hemmer through human interaction.

• Produces the unexpected

• Peter Jellitsch

o Translating digitally generated information into analog drawings in order to extract differences between the digital and analog outcomes as well as the repetitions of movements in its reproduction.

• Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

o “The resulting effect are patterns of interference very similar to those that can be seen, for example in a tank of water into which various drops fall” [R L-H, p.16]

o “I like discrepancies, the remainder in a division, and rounding errors. I find modularization boring and homogenizing” [R L-H, p.16]

• Not based on Chance

• R L-H sees John Cage and Marcel Duchamp as pioneers of chance but he argues that random cannot be created from mathematics or technology and therefore he deems it uninteresting. Uncertainty or unexpected processes is where he focuses and suggests others focus

_Field Conditions_ installation view, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2012; photo: Matthew Millman

• Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

• “Foucaultian concept of technologies for the gaze” [R L-H, p.5]

o “My installations almost always ‘watch the watchers,’ as Daniel Garcia Andujar would say” [R L-H, p.16]

o Panoptic – predatory – surveillance cameras

o Art can listen and see its viewers – it has a life – autonomy

o “Pieces listen to us, they see us, they sense our presence and wait for us to inspire them, and not the other way around…The work is a platform and yes the platform has an authorship, but it also has its points of entry, its loose ends, its tangents, its empty spaces and its eccentricities.” [R L-H, p.6]

o “Exploring the culture of paranoia” [R L-H, p.27]

o Scott Snibbe + Gravilux [iphone, ipad app] + Semiconductor [20Hz] + Reas [Process 7] + Katie Paterson [History of Darkness] + Tauba Auerbach [Static 6]

• Contemporary techniques – data processing, sensors, etc.

• Scott Snibbe

o Gravilux: interactive deformations on a gravitational field

• Data Visualization

o [Ben Fry Interview]

• Representation of instant within infinite processes

• “Deleuze offers the term ‘perplication’ to describe…the visualization of concurrent ideas that appear to be the same yet different at the same time. As ideas mature in time, they can be represented as instantiations – blips on the radar screen. They are developments of a theme, self-intersecting prominences and subversions occurring at different times in any muse while maintaining a common thread. In other words, the visual representation is a pictorialisation of our mental space. Rather than regard our thoughts and theories as part of a linear continuum, we might regard them as forming a landscape of turmoil where subconscious and conscious ideals and desires interweave. In rendering this landscape as a perplication, I am positing this as a continuum having no lateral boundaries, in which subconscious thoughts interweave through each other, emerging as the conscious anywhere that it becomes uncovered. This rendering is therefore an extracted section from this landscape, a liminal representation of a state of mind not necessarily calm at any particular time.” [Mark Burry, “Between Surface and Substance,” AD: Surface Consciousness, 2003, p.14]

• Visualizing the invisible / incomprehensible

• Semiconductor

o 20Hz

• See “Inaudible Cities” or “Brilliant Noise” from Semiconductor: Worlds In Flux DVD for more

o Earth’s magnetic activity displayed

o Considering what lies beyond our inhabitable space

Katie Paterson, _History of Darkness_, 2010; © Katie Paterson

• Katie Paterson

o [Paterson show currently at Bawag Contemporary]

o ‘History of Darkness’ project shows images of darkness from different moments and places in the universe. They are completely black and are arranged according to distance from the Earth – from 1 to infinity.

• Tauba Auerbach

o Picking up electromagnetic waves from atmospheric interference and electronic signals

o Exposes the field of invisible and inaudible noise that constantly surrounds us in all directions.

• Swarm Theory [National Geographic Article on Swarm Theory]

• The intelligence and complex systems of groups and group-making

• Richard Barnes [Murmur] [website]

o [SFMOMA Collection]

o [‘246 and Counting Exhibition’ at SFMOMA]

• Reas

o [Link to Project with Aranda/Lasch + Yeasayer]

• Aranda/Lasch [‘Tooling’ Pamphlet Architecture 27][website]

o Programming codes and scripts that ‘make’ architecture

o [Link to iconeye.com interview]

Lebbeus Woods, _Conflict Space 2_, 2006; Collection SFMOMA, Gift of Aleksandra Wagner; © Lebbeus Woods

Lebbeus Woods and Dwayne Oyler, _Terrain (earthquake architecture)_, 1999; © Lebbeus Woods and Dwayne Oyler

o Lebbeus Woods [Conflict Space] + other Woods projects…[like piece with Dwayne Oyler - Terrain (earthquake architecture) – 1999] + Zaha Hadid [The Peak – 1983]

• Floating element jutting and moving through space

• Lebbeus Woods

• Zaha Hadid

o Competition for Hong Kong Peak – intensity in the 1980s British colony

• Reduced to abstract elements

• Reconceiving of the architectural landscape

• Lebbeus Woods [Woods on Woods]

o “In our contemporary urban world, with its aggregates of buildings that become in themselves artificial landscapes and contexts—entirely displacing the natural—the architect’s role would seem to inevitably expand beyond designing built single objects. Also, in our contemporary world of environmental and global ecological concerns, it is clear that even the design of single buildings has broad consequences and must be framed in those terms by their designers.” [LW blog]

• Zaha Hadid [Zaha Hadid link]

o “Hadid sees her competition-winning design and other recent results, notably Bernard Tschumi’s La Villette scheme, as emblematic of a far-reaching change sweeping through architecture today: ‘A lot of juries have begun to feel, with a lot of architects, that we cannot end the 20th century with this increasing pessimism, this incredible nostalgia of postmodernism. Something has to be restored in terms of enthusiasm and optimism” [Lance Knobel, “At the Peak of Optimism,” Domus 642 (Sept 1983) p.7]

• Archizoom

• Accumulation of elements and objects as the creation of the built environment as well as blurring the distinction between furniture, architecture, and urban space. Archizoom did this; Woods and Hadid appropriate this method.

_Field Conditions_ installation view, (Lebbeus Woods) San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2012; photo: Matthew Millman

• Conclusion

o What are the implications of ‘field theory’ today? In the future? In Art? In Architecture?

• ‘Field theory’ engages questions of singularity, of interconnectivity, of immediacy, and of contingency.

• Their exponential rise over the past 50 years

• Are individuals, architectures, or objects isolated (or no longer isolated) from their environments and contexts?

• What are the implications of constant connectivity?

o What forms of connectivity are emerging?

o What forms of connectivity are receding?

o How is the built environment changing because of this?

• Network theory [Article on Network Theory]

• Structure or pattern of relationships between entities

• Lozano-Hemmer pointing out his dislike for ‘collectivity’ term and his use of ‘connectivity’ instead

o Group becomes less important, relationships and dynamics between entities becomes more important

• Art

• Interconnectivity of art pieces, whether medium, reference, or time differs

• Referential

• Site, scope, and parameters of art piece is exploding – urban space, online, performative, in-between mediums (or multiple)

o Nick Cave (photo, wearable, costume itself)

o Public Art projects

• Mierle Laderman Ukeles – Touch Sanitation projects (art, urban space, social issues)

o ‘Bodies in Urban Space’ collective

• Architecture

• Site, scope, and parameters of architecture is exploding – new kinds of practices that merge architecture, urbanism, and landscape, more emphasis on research, phd’s in architecture is more popular, interest in larger impact of architecture on social, political, theoretical, ecological, material issues

o Interboro

o MASS Design

o Landscape Urbanism

o Teddy Cruz – border between countries as architectural issue

o Design-Build firms

o Design-Developer firms

o Action-Network Theory

• Bruno Latour, Arjun Appadurai, and other anthropologists intermingling with architects about concept that inanimate objects hold a history of experiences, peoples, cultures, etc. in its making and being

o Why is SFMOMA Architecture + Design department is putting together this exhibition?

• Exposing the interrelation between art and architectural representation

• Inventive, imaginative, explorative

• Limitlessness of architecture and art

• SFMOMA is an institution that pushes the boundaries of the creative fields, extracts cultural trends persistent in these fields, and provokes us to consider their potential implications.

Tauba Auerbach, _50/50 Floor_ (detail) installed in _Field Conditions_, 2012; © Tauba Auerbach; photo: Matthew Millman

Joseph Becker is SFMOMA assistant curator of architecture and design. Field Conditions is on view now through January 6. This Thursday night, November 1, join us for a conversation with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer on radio technology and other subjects, followed by a performance by experimental composer Seth Horvitz. Details.