Monthly Archives: July 2013

Away Message


For a number of reasons I will not be updating the blog with new posts until mid-September.

While you’re here, why not revisit some of the blog’s Greatest Hits:


Selfies and Selfiehood

Instagram Problems

The Poet’s Materials

Catweb, Dogweb


Yelp and Criticism


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“The face you have today won’t belong to you”











Q: How did you get into video performance?












Societies of Out of Control

Ryan Trecartin likes to play with language and a bit of wordplay that recurs in his work—sometimes in the words of the scripts, but more frequently in the way characters and scenarios are constructed—is a confusion of the corporate and the corporeal. It’s like a folk etymology or a pun in the way Trecartin exploits a superficial resemblance of two words to generate idiosyncratic connections between them. But there’s a real etymological connection at the words’ root, and Trecartin’s play animates the forgotten bond between the corporeal reality of a person and the social body of a corporation.

Vocabulary review: Corporeal means “of a body.” Corporate means “united in one body.” To incorporate is to “to put (something) into the body or substance of (something else).”

“Corporations are people.” The corporation is the instrument by which a group of people act together as one in order to to make money, to make things happen, to create changes and disturbances in the world and in the social world. How does the corporation do it? How does the corporation unite so many bodies in its one to achieve its ends? It does it with corporate culture, with human resource management, with guidelines of professionalism—all techniques for controlling behaviors and actions and bodies. Corporations are people but their bodies are huge and grotesque—its avatars have stunted bodies, their impulses and affects are subjugated to the fluid discourses of a brand identity, they speak the stilted business tongue of PowerPoint slides and memos. We live in the time of corporate personhood—when corporate bodies and perlocutionary corporate speech make the models of how a person should be.

Look at K-Corea INC.K (section a)—the title of Trecartin’s video is a corporate name, taken on as a collective name by a bevy of career girls. (What does K-Corea INC.K produce? Nothing, other than its own collective subjectivity.) Korea is a geographic entity; it is a place name—a word that transforms a mass of land into a concept, making the substance of Earth legible in discourse and politics—and it is a near homophone of career. Korea, career. A career is a social concept, a technique by which a person identifies as an avatar of his profession and obscures his individual body to merge with a corporate one.

All the Koreas—Argentian Korea, Iran@-itzerland Korea, French adaptation Korea, Post-Canadian Retriever Korea, Another Greek Korea, Mexico Korea—are dressed identically. They must have gone shopping together for ladies’ business casual at Kmart or T.J.Maxx: white blouses, dark skirts, blond wigs. The clothes and the white pancake makeup makes them identical, in a way, but the forced identity just makes the differences of the individual bodies pop out: this Korea has a moustache, that Korea has real female breasts; this Korea has big biceps, that Korea is paunchy. Traits of individual bodies betray the unity of the incorporated one. But they try their best not to let them! The Koreas are mostly silent, or their speech is an inaudible whispered conversation between co-Koreas. Global Korea is the boss; she’s played the charismatic Telfar Clemens, and she speaks for them all. “We had a meeting,” Global Korea says. “So Lets Have A Meeting!” And the avatars of K-Corea INC.K assembles around a picnic table, outdoors, at night. Having meetings is a habit of the corporation’s inner life, and the word “meeting” has accumulated an array of associations: the conference room, the conference table, the hierarchies of who sits where at this table, a water cooler, an agenda, items, goals, objectives, directives… (Etymology facts: The Old English metan meant to encounter or to find; the “meeting” became an assembly in the sixteenth century.) The way K-Corea INC.K has meetings evokes the contemporary corporate usage while returning the word to its most basic bodily meaning: the simultaneous presence of two or bodies in spatial and temporal proximity to each other. What’s more, at K-Corea INC.K the meeting never ends. This corporation is nothing but a meeting: “We had a meeting. So Lets Have A Meeting!” In the script, when it doesn’t matter which of the Koreas speak, or when many of the Koreas are to speak at the same time, the speaker of the line is given as “Meeting.”

Besides Global the company has a few other very important avatars, including Trecartin as USA Korea, who interviews a wannabe career-girl named Jessica. She’s dressed like the rest but she doesn’t have a Korea name. She’s an intern, an outsider on the inside. She’s a slut: interns are promiscuous, commingling with the corporate body for a limited time, unpaid. “Contemporary Slut!” Mexico Korea (Raul Nieves) rages at Jessica/Cindy. “Every Body’s’ Got the Agenda!” Note the split of “Every Body’s” and think about how a collective is named by indicating its constitution in all of its individuated bodies. And this is important to the business of K-Corea INC.K, which produces a group body that is mobile and communicative and regularly grooms itself by designating its avatars and its Others as hires and fires. This meeting of drag queens and their gofers incorporates—incarnates—corporate corporeality.

And what does “corporate corporeality” mean?? Incorporation is the realization of a dream of a body that can be bigger, more powerful, more durable than a human body—better than the gross animal vessel our spirits carry around. But with the new spirit of capitalism the corporation aspires to be flexible, mutable, and fluid, unlike the old kind of company, the generations-old family business, with its rigid mimicry of aristocracy and sturdily pious Protestant values, its emulation of king’s immortal body. In a time when corporations are people, the incorporated body is more like a real one—or at least the model it sets for how a person should be is gross. The corporate body (or its avatar) lives in a state of precarity, much like the real body is vulnerable to disease and mortality; it leaks, strains, and bulges. It screams at the world and it can’t make sense of itself. It is like K-Corea INC.K.

Look at another Ryan Trecartin video, Roamie View (History Enhancement), from the Re’Search Wait’S cycle. In this one, stock video is a stunt double for the idealized corporate body and it is cut with shots of the weird real thing. Glistening skylines and pristine office corridors of stock footage give way to the plain bodies and grotesquely made-up faces in Trecartin’s own footage. Pseudo-corporate business calls between Trecartin’s players are interposed with stock views of suited corporate employees in a brightly lit office corridor; the speech in the handheld devices gets implicitly compared to the bodies in the office, and both sets of footage are juxtaposed to a tracking shot of a big city’s waterfront, apparently shot from a boat: as the camera moves it shows the glass pavilions and twinkling lights around a port, the node of an international trade network. One thing that all of these pieces of footage share is the color blue. Blue is a soothing decorative element in the stock corporate corridor. Blue illuminates the buildings by the waterfront at night, and blue is the color of the water in front of them. Blue is in the streaky make-up and the cheap fabric of the attire on Trecartin’s players—like the white T-shirt emblazoned with a gridded blue globe that brands the body of the player who wears it with global aspirations. Blue represents water, a substance that enables vessels to be transported from one place to another, a substance that takes the shape of the vessels that it is in. Blue represents the values of fluidity and adaptability; it’s in the branding of Chase and Citibank and it’s the new spirit of capitalism.

So much mobility! And yet—have you ever noticed this?—bodies never move very much in Ryan Trecartin’s videos. (The Re’Search begins with a dance number by the pool—moving bodies, still water—but this is an exceptional scene, not a normal one.) Bodies are meat that sits around—but it sits around expressively! The physical movement in these videos is about gestures and facial expressions: grimaces, turning heads, cocking heads to the side, fidgeting in swivel chairs, waving arms, moving mouths to make words. If people are going somewhere, they’re sitting in cars—and sometimes they’re sitting in airplane seats that have been removed from an airplane, pretending to go somewhere but actually going nowhere, talking into their phones and at the camera lens the whole time. The absence of bodily mobility even applies to the stock footage that Trecartin uses in Roamie View. In one sequence, a man stands with a stoic look on his face; he doesn’t move as his colleagues’ bodies (which are depersonalized as a metonym of the bustle of office life) flow around him. In another sequence, the stock models are all frozen in place as the camera twists around them, exploring the corridor. Bodies don’t move much in Trecartin’s videos yet the videos are characterized by a feeling of constant movement. What makes the movement is editing. Movement is reserved for speech and for technology; bodies move thanks to these things, or as them.

“Neoliberal subjectivity,” the way that bodies behave (are handled) because of (by) the late spirit of capitalism is about subdividing the individual into nameable affinities (Facebook likes, dating profile stats) or competencies (the school assessment report, the HR office review), in order to incorporate bodies as other, more usable substances. Networked social being and bureaucratic procedure reify personal attributes and redefine subjecthood as situational and mobile—but the mobility is a characteristic of the attributes and the tools and technologies that move them, rather than of the bodies they came from.

Bodies become objects of operations. Trecartin, as J. J. Check in Roamie View: History Enhancement, says: “I thought it would be neat and cute if someone took out all the times they say ‘people’ or ‘humanity’ [in the U.S. Constitution] and replaced it with ‘situations.’” Meetings are situations (bodies meet because they are situated in the same area). Situations are states of people. Veronica Gelbaum, as North America Korea in K-Corea INC.K (section a), says: “The New Look for This Company, IS re-Thinking the Word |Humanity| as an Object with a (Goal).”

All of these innovations and disruptions, these subdivisions and operations, are related to everyday techniques of control, but their representation in Trecartin’s videos suggests obsessive-compulsive disorders or cases of borderline schizophrenia. When manifested in the corporate body they are normal and acceptable. But when they return to the individual body they appear as psychic maladies. Recall Melanie Klein’s observation that conditions like schizophrenia, narcissism, and so on are considered psychotic when they manifest in adults but the same conditions are normal stages of infant development. Thus the conditions that are normal to the corporate body appear as psychotic when embodied in Trecartin’s individual players. Trecartin often casts children and teens in his videos, as living reminders of how the body grows and changes—as as implicit suggestions of how the body might grow further, in incorporated bodies, and how all of these kinds of bodies have conditions that inhere in them, and look weird when transported to others, when people behave in a way that might not be suited to their bodies, in order to be part of a bigger one.

Does incorporation MAKE people the way they are? Or is incorporation a manifestation of how people ARE already—of their pull toward the whole? This is one of the antinomies that Trecartin presents, and of course there is no way to resolve it.

People like to say that Trecartin’s work is about contemporary networked technologies. OK fine. But only insofar as these technologies are integrated in the array of social techniques and habits characteristic of human life at this point in time. THIS IS ART ABOUT THE HUMAN CONDITION!! Trecartin’s players hold Blackberries—but they’re just as likely to be hold a sledgehammer, or a flute. Any object implies a use but it doesn’t have to be used in that way.

Any system has an organizing principle, and any organizing principle can be broken. It creates a system of control—and at the same it creates ways of how that control can be defied. (When J.J. Check reads the Constitution he gets talking about how the law can be adapted to suit situations.)

Trecartin’s world is a carnival and it shows everything as it could otherwise be. If a tool can be used to make something it can be used to break something. If a technique is applied to achieve an end it can be applied wrongly, to fail. If telecom technologies enable communication they can also be used to disrupt it. Every ideology opens itself to misinterpretation, abuse, and defiance by any individual. Where there are societies of control there are societies of out of control. Ryan Trecartin knows this and feels this; he likes to play with language and so he knows how any word that means one thing can be misheard, misread, misused, made to mean something else.

Tools, techniques, technologies, ideologies are like language. And in language where there’s a right syntax there’s a wrong syntax; grammar begets mistakes. (Look at how Trecartin tweets: “I publicly believe that cardio clot & your god ends with you.  Let’s go on a hike mudda cutta ,” he tweeted in September 2012.) Moreover: language is the medium of incorporation (and other types of transformation). Language provides the techniques by which one substance can be understood as another one. Even if bodies are separate from language and all the things that are like it—and I’m not sure that they are!—language opens up the possibility that they are not. There are languages and there are bodies, and Ryan Trecartin makes videos about how one makes the other, and the other way around.

What Is Art 3

Guess what. I have some ideas about Jay-Z rapping in the gallery, and I decided to blog about it.

First of all, the question that lots of people raised about this event—“is it art?”—seems irrelevant. Jay-Z is making a music video. He’s making entertainment. Yes, he spent six hours lip syncing his rap, but is it more of a “durational performance” than any Hollywood shoot? Making videos for the entertainment industry is always grueling work; setting this shoot up as a six-hour marathon, with extras and guest stars lined up to take turns in front of the camera, was a good way to get the most people involved while expending the least possible effort. The point of setting the video in a gallery was not to present it as a performance but because art is a theme of the song, “Picasso Baby”: “I just want a Picasso, in my casa/ No, my castle … I wanna Rothko, no I wanna brothel, No I want a wife that fuck me like a prostitute.” This is a standard pop-music wish-fantasy about having the immense wealth that allows private access to rare cultural artifacts among many other luxury items; the desire for ownership and the fact of ownership equal sexual desire and sexual satisfaction, etc.

So the people who counted Jay-Z among Tilda Swinton, Lady Gaga, and James Franco as another celebrity who claims status as an artist asks for respect as such from the art world are, I think, mistaken; I doubt that this was Jay-Z’s wish. But I’m interested in the reactions from these self-appointed gatekeepers. It expresses a vision of the art world as professionalized and quasi-corporate, a regulated environment where everyone occupies a well-defined position, where the bosses can decide who gets to do what, and where, and when. People get mad about celebrities encroaching on the art world–and yet they want the art world to be as rigid as the entertainment industry. Where were they when Kenneth Goldsmith invited poets to give readings alongside artworks at the Museum of Modern Art? Were they mad that the last Whitney Biennial devoted nearly an entire floor to choreographer Sarah Michelson? Poets and choreographers aren’t artists, in the professionalized art-world sense of a person who has exhibited in galleries and museums–the credentials one needs to get an artist’s membership card from a museum. But the art world thrives on ignoring these disciplinary boundaries, because art in the broader, anthropological sense (which includes poetry and choreography and other creative pursuits) is about identifying boundaries and ignoring them (cf. What Is Art 1).

But some boundaries are more interesting than others.

There was something art-like about Jay-Z’s appearance at Pace, and the images of it that circulated, and the opinions they generated. People felt invited to treat the event like art, and they could read it as such because of the ambiguities that the situation presented: art can be a “durational performance,” i.e. a unique and ephemeral experience, or it can be a set of objects to be desired and acquired; charisma can manifest itself in the smoothness of pop celebrity, or in the gravitas possessed by Marina Abramovic and Lawrence Weiner. If you approach the “Picasso Baby” shoot as art, then it is art about the power structures of the art world and the status of the art object–issues that William Powhida and Jayson Musson raise in their comics and comedy routines, respectively, although they address them from the position of outsiders, which makes it charming and sympathetic to art-world kids who identify with them. But Jay-Z and Pace and the other participants (if they can all be called the artists in this situation) address it as insiders, which makes it off-putting, and I think that’s largely what generated the negative feeling that launched a thousand Facebook posts.

I’m going to quote myself. This is from a review of Gagosian Gallery’s 24th St. location that I posted to Yelp, about the Richard Phillips show that was there in the fall of 2012 and featured the painted and recorded images of Sasha Grey and Lindsay Lohan: “At the end of the video the titles said ‘Lindsay Lohan [or Sasha Grey, in the Sasha Grey video],’ then ‘Gagosian Gallery,’ then ‘Richard Phillips.’ Maybe I got the order wrong but it was those three, fading from one to the next. So it was like a commercial but you couldn’t tell what the commercial was for. That’s what made it art, if not very good art.”

Likewise, anything that has a lot of people asking “is it art?” probably is art, or it could be art. But it’s not necessarily good art.

“I worry about reaching outside the camera frame”

Robby Rackleff makes video performances around fantasy gaming scenarios or everyday situations, sometimes both at once, and he plays all of the characters; some characters are more powerful than others, some characters do violence (physical or psychological) to the others, but all of them are played with a faint sadness. I wanted to talk to him about it. “When did you first turn the camera on yourself?” I asked him. “Had you worked with other actors before that? Or do you ever?”

“I think it was in the fall of 2007,” Robby said. “I got to the Mount Royal MFA program at MICA and had a rough start. I was doing a lot of drawing and collage that wasn’t really going anywhere and I decided that it would be a good idea to learn something new. Video was the obvious choice for me since a lot of the artists that I was around before MICA were going in that direction and turning out some great work. I started taping myself for a couple reasons. The first was that I was just trying to get the ball rolling and the idea of trying to schedule a bunch of other people to conform around each others’ free time to make a more complicated piece was too much of a hassle. The other thing was that I was still incredibly nervous performing around other people.”

He paused. “In other words I was impatient and shy and over time I just got used to working that way.”

“I have a feeling that for male artists, turning the camera on oneself is generally a gesture of self-abasement or self-deprecation,” I said. “It makes a kind of loser aesthetics. Does that sound like something you’re interested in?”

“Absolutely,” Robby said. “I am a huge loser.”

“OK,” I said. This made me feel kind of awkward… It was, I suppose, exactly what I wanted to hear, but the way he put it in those blunt terms made me feel bad for asking. Anyway, I kept going, turning it to the specifics of his work. “What interests me about your work in particular among loser videos is the theme of gaming subcultures and how you connect the figure of the gaming nerd to guys in offices, at Subway, or in other everyday situations. What does the gamer mean to you?”

“One set of my videos represents the fantasy, the world of supernatural science fiction,” Robby said “That’s Dark Fortress Occult Master of Space. That’s the adolescent fantasy of comic books and video games. The videos where I dress up in a button up, tie, and slacks are more a stylization of what I perceive to be adult reality: vague and oppressive visits to doctors, awkward forced reunions… They’re both fantasy of course. The fantasy of adult behavior is for me just as unrealistic as super heroes and space travel. That’s something I struggle with psychologically. I’m still playing video games and reading sci-fi comics, but I spend more time wondering about whether or not I should get an Amtrak credit card or buy a new suit than I do wishing I could summon lightning.”

He continued: “There was that article a year or two ago in the New York Times about people my age (early thirties) who are taking their sweet time to grow up… Another way of putting it is ‘redefining adulthood.’ I am absolutely stuck in that situation, but from my perspective I have trouble seeing it as positive or constructive. It feels like the by-product of political and economic largesse and going through puberty during the 90s when America was the unmatched world power. I had so many people telling me to follow my dreams and I did and it got me to the point where I am an adjunct college teacher with no job security and I deliver cakes on the weekends to make ends meet. I don’t blame anyone but myself.

“In this new reality, it’s impossible not to daydream about the world of something like Mad Men or The West Wing in the same way I once idolized Batman and the X-Men. Making videos that mimic these daydreams is really just catharsis. I can spend a long bus ride to work thinking about how great my breast pocket is for storing my MTA day pass and then turn that into Interview. It’s just a way of objectifying wandering adult thoughts.

“There is no one figure of the gamer because there are so many variations. There are those who play for sport, those who play for the social experience of co-operative gaming, those who are just casually gaming on the way to work… It’s like asking what the figure of the reader is. I can tell you this: I’m not personally drawn to the multi-player arena games like Call of Duty or to the more organized team-based games like World of Warcraft. I still respond best to the single-player video games. Part of that connection is based in the fact that single-player games are usually the ones that set technical benchmarks and create milestones for what games are expected to be… Think of Doom, Final Fantasy VII, Half Life, Resident Evil 4, Crysis, Skyrim… These all contributed to the advancement of what I think of as the soul of the gaming technology and its maturation as a medium. There are, of course milestones created by multi-player games—Mortal Kombat, Ultima Online, Second Life, etc.—but when gamers harp on video games as an art form, they usually point out a single player game like Shadow of the Colossus over World of Warcraft.

“This is a long way of explaining how I view myself as a gamer. I was 12 when Doom came out and I was 31 when Skyrim did. Part of me likes to think that the maturation of games paralleled my own rise to adulthood. Most likely, however, we (me and the games) are still stuck in a cycle of adolescent fantasy and coming up with images and situations that somehow validate that.

“I also wonder if you see the characters in your videos as avatars, or characters in games,” I said. “Or are they roles in the more traditional sense of theater? Do you even see any distinction between those two?”

“I see gameplay as more of a performance,” he replied. “I have a real knack for suspension of disbelief and I try and use it to the fullest when I’m playing a game. I try and play games as if I (as in the ‘I’ who is writing this) am in whatever fantastic situation the game sets up for me. In a game like Fallout 3 where you create a character and then make decisions that affect the story and place you somewhere on the good/evil spectrum, I always ask myself what I would actually do given the circumstances. I would like to point out again that I play only single-player games and so the performance of trying to squeeze my own conscience and politics into these rigid game rules is really done for no one else but myself.

“The end result is that I start to have these really intense feelings toward the action of playing a game that requires my decisions beyond where to jump or where to point a rifle. I like to think that the level of emotional involvement I have with my favorite games goes beyond nostalgia, competition, or irony. The characters and situations in videos like Dark Fortress and Guild are tools for communicating that involvement.

“Where do you get ideas for facial expressions and gestures?” I asked him. “Are there certain comedians/actors/cartoons you draw on?”

“When I was a young teenager I was overweight and I spent a lot of time in front of my bathroom mirror trying to make faces and poses that hid that fact,” Robby said. “If Facebook had existed in the early 90s there would probably be a very interesting historical record to back this up. Point is that I did a lot of weird stuff in front of that mirror and got into the habit of having these sessions with myself that, I am embarrassed to say, continue to this day.”

I tried to imagine him at the mirror, grimacing and frowning and looking surprised, but when I did I kept seeing him in one of his videos. That is, I could only picture him on a screen—not in a bathroom. I thought about myself in the bathroom, trying to make a selfie, but my actions in front of the mirror were more about getting the right angle and light than what was on my face. Meanwhile, Robby kept answering. “Those expressions and gestures are limited by the border of the mirror, however, and similarly they’re limited by the frame of my dinky camera (and the monitor that faces me when I’m shooting myself). I’m a big guy and so I worry about reaching outside the camera frame, over the edge of the small green screen I set up in my tiny living room… and that makes my movements tense and (somewhat accidentally) a little subtle. I think my favorite gesture I’ve come up with so far is in the video Interview when I tap my breast pocket. I basically have all my fingers spread except my middle finger is crossed over my pointer finger. Something about the way I hold my hand in that video has an effect on people watching it and I don’t have any constructive perspective on why that is…

“Whenever I watch Spalding Gray movies or videos I feel SO intense. His presence is like that of a superhuman. I am entranced by every gesture he makes and every time he stumbles over a line or stutters. The level of control he appears to exert in all these subtle half-seconds is spellbinding and he is probably the single most influential performer on my work.”

I don’t know who Spalding Gray is… something to look into. “Thanks for these great answers!” I said. That was all.

On Humanisms



