luiza brenner / texts

  “Ideas improve. The meaning of words plays a role in that improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress depends on it. It sticks close to an author’s phrasing, exploits his expressions, deletes a false idea, and replaces with the right one.”

   Hello little flowers!

Today on our little blog, instead of posting about my day (and the feather-leather diet), I decided to do something more intellectual and talk to you about something SPECTACULAR that I found online. Hope you guys don’t think I’m too nerdy XD XD

The other night, while zapping through channels, I got ahold of this incredible movie that I haven’t seen in so long: Moulin Rouge; a beautiful love story about a Parisian prostitute that meets the man of her life, who happens to be this handsome writer (hello, Ewan McGregor!) and incredible singer. (If you never saw it, rent it! Totally worth, I swear! )

The soundtrack of this movie is truly amazing. I keep replaying all the time on my iPod. But there’s this one annoying song that just got stuck in my head, and made me go to all this trouble trying to decipher it’s meaning. Youtube it: Spectacular Spectacular. The lyrics starts like this:

“It will be... Spectacular, spectacular! No words of the vernacular can describe this great event. You'll be dumb with wonderment. So exciting the audience will stomp and cheer; so delighting, it will run for fifty years” 

Well, I don’t really know if it will run for fifty years, but it’s definitely replaying on my mind way over fifty times by now.

The point is: we don’t usually think much about the things we sing. We just dance through the tune, without even knowing what we are dancing to. So, in order not to be shaking around about some random stuff, I decided to do research on the word ‘spectacle’ (if you don’t know, that’s where the word ‘spectacular’ comes from) to get a grasp of what it really means, and share it with you guys.

 After some googling, I found this SPECTACULAR text about this guy Debord. He wrote a lot about this ‘spectacle’ thing, and I selected a few excerpts of his essays to explain to you what he’s all about: 

“In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification.”

Yes, one could say that the society we live in is, indeed, spectacular! With the advent of technology, and mass media, we evolved into a world full of amazing theatres, musicals, shows, and a whole new set of different spectacles – have you seen the latest Lady Gaga concert?! Talk about spectacle, girl!

Since the Ancient Rome (Italy), the ruling classes make use of spectacle to bring its population close together: people gathered watching gladiators (oh! There’s a movie about it as well, with Russell Crowe and Joaquin Phoenix shirtless – a must!) fight to death; or in Spain, people cheering in those bullfighting events; and even now, with the World Cup or the Olympic Games. Those big spectacles are a noble and efficient way to unify our population. 

“The spectacle is both the result and the goal of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real society’s unreality. In all of its particular manifestations – news, propaganda, advertising, and entertainment – the spectacle represents the dominant model of life.”

As I said, we live in a spectacular society, indeed: Hollywood movies, and celebrities, and reality TV shows. What more can a person ask for?

The spectacle is an affirmation of appearances and an identification of all human social life with appearances. With the technology, and those amazing workers from China (‘made in China’) now everybody have access to all sorts of new, amazing, products – and, amen, we are prettier than ever!

The spectacle is both the meaning and the agenda of our particular socio-economic formation. We all want to go out and about, and enjoy all the spectacles that we are surrounded. Specially living in a city like New York, with Broadway and its musicals. We have to fill our agendas with these amazing social events, which give meaning to our existence!

Human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed. Amen! Now, we can stop once and for all to worry so much about this overrated school-college-university thing, and focus on what is important: moneymaking.  The world doesn’t need more philosophers or ‘thinkers’. We need to give jobs to our children, so they can afford all the amazing things technology has brought us. Is not fair to spend all our money on this egocentric ‘self educating’ stuff, and leaving the kids with no good presents on their birthdays.

One last thing: The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself. So it is good to take the spectacle as role model and life inspiration. You don’t have to try to be something that you’re not. Just be your amazing little self!

Well, I hope you guys now understand where this entire SPECTACULAR thing comes from, and really give some thought about the world we live in. We have so many beautiful things to be grateful for!

Love you all!

Have a SPECTACULAR day, my little flowers.

            Xoxoxoxoxo

M.L.B <3

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[1] to take in consideration after reading this essay

The aim of this text (clearly, I hope!) is to put in practice Guy Debord’s concept of Détournement by parodying his concept of spectacle.

Here, some useful quotes on it:

“It goes without saying that one is not limited to correcting a work or to integrating diverse fragments of out-of-date works into a new one; one can also alter the meaning of those fragments in any appropriate way, leaving the imbeciles to their slavish preservation of ‘citations’”

“Such parodic methods have often been used to obtain comical effects”

“Détournement is the opposite of quotation, of appealing to a theoretical authority that is inevitably tainted by the very fact that it has become a quotation.”

“Détournement is the flexible language of anti-ideology.”

“Détournement serves as a reminder that theory is nothing in itself, that it can realize itself only through historical action and through the historical correction that is its true allegiance”

What did you had for lunch yesterday? What was the vocalist wearing in the last concert you’ve been? Can you recall where were you six days ago? Try answering any of these questions without reaching for your cellphone. 

Facebook timelines, old Instagram photographs, ‘cloud storage’, back-up disks, hardware disks, and the constant fear/anxiety of losing data. Why does our generation have this obsession of keeping every-single-thing archived?

Before trying to answer this question, and relating to essays of authors like Allan Sekula, Ilya Kabakov, and Tom McDonough, it is important that we sort the term ‘archives’ clear. Paul Ricoeur cleverly begins his essay “Archives, Documents, traces” giving two definitions for the expression:

According to the Encyclopaedia Universalis “archives are constituted by the set of documents that result from the activity of an institution or of a physical or moral person”; and, as Encyclopaedia Britannica puts,“the term archives designates the organized body of records produced or received by a public, semi-public, institutional, business or private entity in the transaction of its affairs and preserved by it, its successors or authorized repository through extension of its original meaning as the repository for such materials”.  

As Ricoeur stresses in his text, both definition ensure three main characteristics for the term ‘archives’: 1.the reference to the notion of a document (or ‘record’); 2. the relationship to an institution; and 3. it has the goal of conserving or preserving documents.

Document, still in Ricoeur’s essay, is defined “as information, the warrant a document provides for a history, a narrative, or an argument. This role of being a warrant constitutes material proof; evidence. If history is a true narrative, documents constitute its ultimate means of proof.”

As the habit of keeping journals and sending letters died long ago, the main ‘documents’ of our generation is, undoubtedly, photographs. And, as any trace left by the past becomes a document for historians, what will the future generations going to inherit from us?

In Allan Sekula’s “The Body and the Archive,” we read:

“For nineteenth-century positivists, photography doubly fulfilled the Enlightenment dream of an universal language: the universal mimetic language of the camera yielded up a higher, more cerebral truth, a truth that could be uttered in the universal abstract language of mathematics.”

Indeed, one can argue that photography is a universal language. But unfortunately, apparently, we don’t have many interesting things to say: Do people really care about ‘self-portraits’ (aka ‘selfies’), random food plates, and cute cats pictures that much?

We have such an uncontrollable urge to document every-single-thing that we don’t stop to think beforehand what is worth documenting. Do we really need to remember every single meal we had on the past year? Who cares if on Tuesday, the 9th of July the weather was horrific, or if you had a bad haircut?

And it gets worse: we storage events for further remembrance and forget to really experience these moments, while they are actually happening. How many concerts have we attended and made a huge effort to photograph/film every single minute of it – instead of just lifting our eyes out of the screen and actually looking at it? How many dinner parties did we spend taking pictures and ‘instagraming’ it and not even talked with the people who were there? This necessity of keeping track of everything blurred the line between what is really important to, in fact, keep.

In Ilya Kabakov essay, “The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away”,we see the compulsive need of a man to keep and organize everything. At a first glance, it seems an exaggeration; but, after a few minutes of consideration, this anecdote is a clear picture of our society nowadays - even thought it was written almost 40 years ago.

As said, the contemporary documents are no longer scraps of paper. We live in a mainly visual/pictorial society. The advent of technology and the popularization of digital photography made our ‘archives’ exponentially bigger. As now we can easily take 500 pictures/minute without really thinking about it, we lost our critical ability to pick and choose what is worth registering.

As Sekula stresses, “The early promise of photography had faded in the face of a massive and chaotic archive of images; the problem of classification”. If in the early nineteenth century classification was a problem, multiply that for a gazillion and you get close to the size of the twenty-first century photograph archives.

But, as Kabakov character, along with the documentation obsession we acquired the organizational fixation: we have a social network (Pinterest), with over 70 million users, dedicated to the classification of images; mega-stores specialized in providing the right type of container to specific little things (The Container Store). We have label makers, post-its, classifying folders and all sorts of apparatus to feed our insatiable appetite for putting things in boxes.

And it is not only in our daily lives that the organizational-freak-monster appears. Beside what many tend to think, artists are humans just like us - and some of them cultivate the ‘hoarder’ instinct as well: “Against this widely noted crisis in the mechanism of social memory, artists have deployed what Hal Foster calls ‘ an archival impulse’ as a means to construct alternative histories and forms of knowledge” (McDonough’s essay, The Anarchive). The Brazilian Vik Muniz, with his realistic garbage portraits; Mike Kelley with his carefully arranged color-coordinated assemblages; and, more extremely, Christian Boltanski’s works, like ‘the heart archive’ (originally titled ‘les archives du coeur’): a collection of heartbeat recordings captured since 2005 from thousands of people who visited his exhibition, permanently installed on the island of Eshima, in the Seto Inland sea; and his ‘Reserve: The Dead Swiss’, that consists in 1,168 boxes and photographs making an analogy to people who died in the holocaust.

  As Sekula poses, in the beginning, photography was used by the police to document and classify criminals, in order to prevent them from committing atrocities again. In that sense, photography was considered a socially ameliorative. But, at the same time, it was considered a socially repressive instrument, as the State was not only using it to ‘repress’ criminals, but to ‘keep an eye’ on society in general.

Nowadays, it got exponentially worse: we are under constant surveillance and we don’t even care anymore. It is George Orwell’s 1984 on the 21st century – and we abide to it, by registering (and geo-tagging) pictures of ourselves; giving personal information to random websites, and allowing organizations to have our fingerprints taken.

  Today, photograph portraits ‘classifications’ are now being made by ordinary people, who think they have the authority to judge people according to their looks. The ‘eugenicists’ are now the bullies, the fashion magazines and the tabloids. People constantly suffer with the pressure to look taller, leaner, blonder – or whatever the supermodels or Hollywood actresses are looking like now.

The question “Why does our generation have this obsession of keeping every-single-thing archived?” remains unanswered – but, after all, a guess can be made: the contemporary Enlightment project is the ‘Spotlight’ project, as people tend to think that they are the center of the show, and everything thing about them – like what they are wearing, what they are eating, where they are, etc’ it is a ultimately relevant thing.

In a society like ours – with Photoshoped people, Instagram filters, and ‘reality’ television – it hardly makes sense to discuss concepts like ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ anymore, but one can try. Taking Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulations, and Jacques Rancière’s The Future of the Image as foundations, this essay aims to discuss the notions of truth, reality and image in our contemporary world.

First things first, it is important to clarify some dubious (and crucial) terms that Baudrillard discusses at length in his text: In a very basic sense, simulacra (the plural of simulacrum) are copies that depict things that either had no reality to begin with, or that no longer have an original; while simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time.

Baudrillard claims that our society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that human experience is of a simulation of reality; and that simulacra are not merely mediations of reality (nor even deceptive mediations of reality); they are not based in a reality nor do they hide a reality:  they simply hide that anything like reality is relevant to our current understanding of our lives:

“It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. (…) The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models – and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. (…) It is a hyperreal: the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere. (…) The age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials.”

To clarify his ideas, Baudrillard gives the very-American example of Disneyland – that is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that all the rest outside it is real when, in fact, all America surrounding it is no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation - and this lack of reality is not restricted only to this country: we live in a world that is all make-believe to entertain a mass of longtime numb and lazy people. What else can explain the proliferation of places like Las Vegas (where you can go from Paris to ancient Rome to Hollywood just by walking down the street) or Dubai – where you can snowboard, in the middle of the desert, inside a shopping mall?

We don’t even need to leave our couch to get a grasp of this: What about ‘reality television’? We have this obsession in perceiving the so-called-‘reality’ so much that it only ends up blinding us: some of us bluntly-stupidly believe that the people and problems portrayed in these TV shows are actually somewhat true; and some just don’t even bother to question that anymore. The exponential multiplying of The Real Housewives of Anywhere, the 8th season (aka year) of the Kardashian’s show, and Big Brother Brazil in its edition #14 (aka year) are all proof of this long new ‘reality’. It is no longer a matter of a false representation of reality, but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.

To be fair to a small portion of humanity, not everybody actually believes in everything they see on TV – but, still, in order to keep on with our lives, we have to be oblivious to the fact that the world that we live in is a simulation - and the younger the generation, the worst. To exemplify, a speech by a ‘modern thinker’, Dave Grohl (ex-Nirvana drummer, current Foo Fighters vocalist):

“When I think about kids watching a TV show like American Idol or The Voice, then they think, ‘Oh, OK, that’s how you become a musician, you stand in line for eight fucking hours with 800 people at a convention center and… then you sing your heart out for someone and then they tell you it’s not fuckin’ good enough.’ Can you imagine? It’s destroying the next generation of musicians! Musicians should go to a yard sale and buy and old fucking drum set and get in their garage and just suck. And get their friends to come in and they’ll suck, too. And then they’ll fucking start playing and they’ll have the best time they’ve ever had in their lives and then all of a sudden they’ll become Nirvana. Because that’s exactly what happened with Nirvana. Just a bunch of guys that had some shitty old instruments and they got together and started playing some noisy-ass shit, and they became the biggest band in the world. That can happen again! You don’t need a fucking computer or the internet or The Voice or American Idol.” 

Well, it is easy to say when your garage band actually turned out to be Nirvana but, not getting to attached to that fact, the point is that our generation believes that, to be a musician, you just have to sign up for a reality show; to find love, you just need to download an app or join a dating website; and to be an artist you just have to draw or paint or Photoshop something and sell it on Etsy. There is no real effort anymore. With everything at a button-click distance away, we tend to believe that success is easy – and for everybody - but it is not. That is why the ‘generation Y’ has this chronic permanent dissatisfaction with what they do; there is no ‘hard work’ anymore.

An article called “Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy", published by the Huffington Post in September of 2013 that had a million likes and almost 4 thousand shares, explains (ironically) with drawings this modern phenomenon through the not-so-lovely story of ‘Lucy’ (that can, actually, be anybody). Summing up the narrative:

“Lucy is part of Generation Y (born between the late 1970s and the mid 1990s) and she’s kind of unhappy – kind of like everybody else at her age, because reality turns out to be worse than the expectations. Lucy's Depression Era grandparents were obsessed with economic security and raised her parents to build practical, secure careers. They were taught that there was nothing stopping them from getting to that lush, green lawn of a career, but that they'd need to put in years of hard work to make it happen. A few years late, Baby Boomers all around the world told their Gen Y kids that they could be whatever they wanted to be, instilling the special protagonist identity deep within their psyches. So on top of the generation as a whole having the bold goal of a flowery career lawn, each individual GY thinks that he or she is destined for something even better. A second delusion comes into play once they enter the job market: while Lucy's parents' expectation was that many years of hard work would eventually lead to a great career, Lucy considers a great career an obvious given for someone as exceptional as she, and for her it's just a matter of time and choosing which way to go. Unfortunately, the funny thing about the world is that it turns out to not be that easy of a place, and the weird thing about careers is that they're actually quite hard. Great careers take years of blood, sweat and tears to build and even the most successful people are rarely doing anything that great in their early or mid-20s.”

Paul Harvey, a University of New Hampshire professor and GY expert, found that Gen Y has "unrealistic expectations and a strong resistance toward accepting negative feedback," and "an inflated view of oneself." He says "a great source of frustration for people with a strong sense of entitlement is unmet expectations. They often feel entitled to a level of respect and rewards that aren't in line with their actual ability and effort levels, and so they might not get the level of respect and rewards they are expecting."

Jacques Rancière ideas can also be related to these concept, as he states that “there is no longer any reality, but only images, and there are no more images but only a reality incessantly representing itself to itself”. Thus, “if there is now nothing but images, there is nothing other than the image. And if there is nothing other than the image, the very notion of the image becomes devoid of content.”

The images that are produced by us and for us, spread all over social media portraying our oh-so-marvelous ‘reality’, when added to “Lucy’s Parents” and the already mentioned ‘reality TV’ phenomenon equals disaster. We have a whole generation of delusional people feeling ‘superior’ and frustrated because the rest of the world doesn’t recognize them as special.

“Why video has attracted a growing set of practitioners and collectors?” After a few pages discussing the notions of narcissism, video art, and its relations to psychology in the essay “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism”, Rosalind Krauss presents this question – but leave the answer open to be discussed in a future moment. Borrowing a Krauss insight and making it a starting point, the aim of this essay is to discuss the problem of narcissism within the wider context of our culture.

Victor Burgin’s “Possessive, Pensive and Possessed; Susanne Gaensheimer’s “Moments in Time”; Laura Mulvey’s “Stillness in the Moving Image: Ways of Visualizing Time and its Passing”; and, as said, Rosalind Krauss’s “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism” will be used as foundations to the development of the main arguments in this text.

Narcissus, in Greek mythology, was a man distinguished for his beauty. To make a long story, short:  He fell in love with his own reflection in the waters of a river and drowned trying to reach the object of his adoration (himself). Some believe that the story may have derived from the ancient Greek superstition that it was unlucky or even fatal to see one’s own reflection."

The French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan, in The Language of the Self, uses the example of a therapy session to paint a picture of narcissism by characterizing the space of the therapeutic transaction as an extraordinary void created by the silence of the analyst. Into this void, the patient projects the monologue of his own recitation, which Lacan calls “the monumental construct of his narcissism”.

 “(…) In this labor which he [the patient] undertakes to reconstruct his construct for another, he finds again the fundamental alienation which made hum construct it like another one, and which has always destined it to be stripped from him by another.”

 And, further:

“I would say that the analysis consists precisely in distinguishing the person lying on the analyst’s couch from the person who is speaking. With the person listening [the analyst], that makes three persons present in the analytical situation, among whom it is the rule that the question… be put: Where is the moi of the subject?”

To bring the concept of narcissism to a more contemporary context, we can draw a parallel to Krauss ideas. In “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism”, written in 1976, while questioning the sudden interest of practitioners and collectors in video art, Rosalind Krauss assesses the effects that mass media had on the art world, in general:

In the last fifteen years [1960s] the art world has been deeply and disastrously affected by its relation to mass media. That an artist’s work be published, reproduced and disseminated through the media has become, for the generation that has matured in the course of the last decade, virtually the only means of verifying its existence as art. The demand for instant replay in the media finds its obvious correlative in an aesthetic mode by which the self is created through the electronic device of feedback.                 

Today, we may say that in the last fifteen years (2000s) the art – and the whole – world has been deeply and disastrously affected by its relation to social media. Mass media surely had its effects in our society (as we see in Krauss – and hundreds of other readings) but today we can say that the ‘new’ phenomenon of the so-called social media is the current plague.

In “Possessive, Pensive and Possessed”, Victor Burgin writes:

“a ‘film’ may be encountered through posters, blurbs, and other advertisements, such as trailers and television clips; it may be encountered through newspaper reviews, reference work synopses and theoretical articles (with their ‘film-strip’ assemblages of still images); through production photographs, frame enlargements, memorabilia, and so on. Collecting such metonymic fragments in memory, we may come to feel familiar with a film we have not actually seen. Clearly this ‘film’ – a heterogeneous psychical object, constructed from image scraps scattered in space and time – is a very different object from that encountered in the context of ‘film studies" 

This excerpt portraits a perfect example to a very contemporary theory that serve as a background to our discussion. Proposed by Henry Jenkins, the Media Convergence theory, in summation, says that “we are seeing a movement to a world where every story, every brand, every sound, every image, every relationship plays itself off across the maximum number of media channels. The information system is converged, integrated, so we carry pieces of media with us all through the system”.

Jenkins also argues that everyone is potentially a producer of media – as well as a consumer of media. In that sense, we see a shift in the production of content. Before, the public agenda was set by the great mass media (television, newspapers, radio networks, etc.). Now, with the emergence social media, everybody has the ‘authority’ (or autonomy) to create and publish their own ideas. The once passive spectator, is now the artist, producer, director – all at the same time and at a click-of-a-button distance.

A parallel with the notion of the pensive viewer can be draw from Jenkins ideas. In “Stillness in the Moving Image: Ways of Visualizing Time and its Passing”, Laura Mulvey writes:

“All these inflections depend, above all, on the viewer’s new command over viewing technology and, most of all, the freedom given by the technology over the pace and order of a film. New technologies allow the spectator time to stop, look and think. (…) The still image both makes the moment of registration comparatively visible and creates a new space of time for the ‘pensive’ spectator to reflect and experience the kind of reverie that Barthes had associated only with the photograph.”

And in his text, Burgin completes it:

“The arrival of the domestic videocassette recorder, and the distribution of industrially produced films on videotape, put the material substrate of the narrative into the hands of the audience. The order of narrative could now be routinely countermanded. For example, control of the film by means of a VCR introduced such symptomatic freedoms as the repetition of a favorite sequence, or fixation upon an obsessional image.”

Although the two excerpts refer specifically to the medium of film, it is easy to see that the advent of technology had an impact in all aspects of our contemporary culture. Getting back to the social media phenomenon: It is really ironic that these new technologies, that have ‘social’ in their name, creates deeply isolated individuals. They give a false sense of sociability – that seizes to leave the virtual world.

As nowadays we are constantly in camera/video surveillance all the time, we perform the role of the actor 24/7. The social mask is glued so tight to our faces (the real ones and the facebook ones) that it is almost impossible to discern, in a Lacanian perspective, who is the person talking and the real person. Our ‘social’ persona has to be prettier, cuter, smarter, cooler than our real selves. We cover up in make up, or photo-edit our image with all sorts of ‘filters’ in order to portray a better-looking image that often doesn’t match reality. With camera in our cellphones and the ‘share’ button, the concept of narcissism just blew up right at our faces. The whole  ‘hype’ concept of ‘selfie’ itself is a good example of it. If you’re blessed enough to not know what a selfie is,

A selfie is a type of self-portrait photograph, typically taken with a hand-held digital camera or camera phone. Selfies are often associated with social networking, like Instagram. They are often casual, are typically taken either with a camera held at arm's length or in a mirror, and typically include either only the photographer or the photographer and as many people as can be in focus, which is more commonly known as a 'group selfie'

The Wikipedia page (not surprisingly, Wikipedia is the only place – for now – that we can find a ‘serious’ definition of a selfie) is still not updated enough with the new ‘trends’ in the selfie world. Hollywood stars posting pictures of themselves with the hashtag #nomakeupselfie to raise awareness to cancer (how the fact that those women without make up relate in any way to cancer patients is beyond any sense, but still) and, in just 48 hour, upraised over £2m for Cancer Research UK.

While, in on hand, selfies apparently have the power to cure (or at lest attempt to) cancer, they have other sorts of collateral damages. Not just ‘selfies’ itself, but the whole range of pictures and posts shared online contribute to an overall effect of low self-esteem and envy. When typing “facebook causes” on a Google search, the first results:

[facebook causes depression / anxiety / relationship problems] 

Exploring the ‘depression’ related articles, we find dozens of studies from all-over-the-world universities and, in great majority, the results are more or less the same:

"On the surface, Facebook provides an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic human need for social connection," said U-M social psychologist Ethan Kross, lead author of the article and a faculty associate at the U-M Institute for Social Research. "But rather than enhance well-being, we found that Facebook use predicts the opposite result—it undermines it."

The same people that are promoting the fake-social-persona culture are left feeling miserable when looking at other people profiles. In Freudian psychiatry and psychoanalysis, the term narcissism denotes ‘an excessive degree of self-esteem or self-involvement, a condition that is usually a form of emotional immaturity.'

Today, the apparently narcissistic-over-sharers on social medias are getting backfired. As they pretend to have ‘an excessive degree of self-esteem’, their emotional immaturity makes them all the more vulnerable to the ‘side effects’ of social media. In our modern mythology, narcissuses are daily drowning in virtual mirrors that reflect nothing but their fake selves.

                       Encyclopedia Britannica - http://www.britannica.com/, consulted on 4/6/14. Web.

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. Print.

Before digging deep in three very different articles, it is important to underline that this essay does not mean to make a direct relation of cause/effect amid O’Doherty’s ‘White Cube’; Krauss’s “Sculpture/Monument” concept, and Tucker’s PheNAUMANology themes; and it neither proposes a necessary historical link between them. The aim of this text is to find a connection amongst the main arguments presented in those articles, and invite the reader to reflect on where contemporary institutions and artists stands today.   

In Inside the White Cube, Brian O’Doherty investigates what the context of the modern gallery does to the art object; to the viewing subject; and how the context ultimately overcomes the object, and end up becoming content itself. He opens the third chapter of his book, Context as Content, with metaphors of different art movements with interior spaces particular to each time; until he finally arrives at the starting point of this whole book: the White Cube.

O’Doherty describes the modern gallery space as “constructed along laws as rigorous as those for building medieval church”. The basic principle behind these laws, he notes, is that “The outside world must no come in, so windows are usually sealed off. Walls are painted white. The ceiling becomes the source of light… The art is free, as the saying used to go, ‘to take in its own life’”. (Thomas McEvilley Introduction, NYC, 1986)

 In other words, the modern galleries dismissed all the luxury and pompous ornaments of past times and became, literally, white cubes. A building composed exclusive by white walls - and preferably with no windows. Although, compared to Renaissance and Baroque times, a place like this tends to evoke ‘simplicity’ and ‘humility’; in fact, it is nothing like it: 

“For many of us, the gallery space still gives off negative vibrations when we wander in. Esthetics are turned into a kind of social elitism – the gallery space is exclusive” (O’Doherty)

Despite being written on the 1970s, after 40 years, this perception of the white cubes still remains precisely true - and, maybe as consequence of that, the image presented by contemporary is very much the same, as they are often perceived as being some kind of ‘genius’, ‘touched by the hand of God’ in a religious or shamanic way.

 Going back a few decades, in the late 1910s, Duchamp tried to break the ‘sacredness’ of art by questioning the concept ‘artwork’ by sending a standard urinal, laid flat on its back, signed ‘R. Mutt 1917’ to be exhibited in a group show organized by the Society of Independent Artists. Instantly, a scandal took place in the institutional system, and the board of directors rejected the artwork. In protest Duchamp, who was a member of the Board, resigned immediately.

A few years later, in 1938, Marcel shocked the art world again, by questioning, this time, not the artwork itself, but the context where it was presented:

“In one of those bad puns he loved, Duchamp turned the exhibition topsy-turvy and ‘stood you on your head’. The ceiling is the floor and the floor, to drive home the point, is the ceiling”

In a group show on Galerie Beaux-Arts, Duchamp hanged 1,200 bags of coal in the ceiling and “this inversion was the first time an artist subsumed and entire gallery in a single gesture – and managed to do so while it was full of other art”.

In his article, O’Doherty puts the question on why did Duchamp ‘got away’ with doing 1,200 Bags of Coal. My guess is, basically, that it was because he was the first. People didn’t know how to react to such a disruption and, maybe, that was the reason that they went along with it:

“This inside-outside confusion is consistent with tilting the gallery on its axis. By exposing the effect of context on art, of the container on the contained, Duchamp recognizes an are of art that hadn’t yet been invented”

Years later, on 1971, when Daniel Buren attempted to do a similar thing on a group exhibition – to transform the museum’s architecture and the way that it functions by hanging a huge piece of stripped cotton canvas on the rotunda of the Guggenheim–, the day before the opening, Buren was censored by fellow artists Dan Flavin and Donald Judd, arguing that he was ‘hiding’ their artworks.

As Buren questionings were more directed to the institutional’s system themselves, the ‘Duchampian’ questioning of the context’s effects on art, and the issue of ‘the container on the contained’ had a direct involvement with the spectators.  As O’Doherty notes, with Mile of String (1942)

 “Every bit of space is marked. Duchamp develops the modernist monad: the spectator in his gallery box” and “Boxing up the space (or spacing up the box is part of the central formal theme on Duchamp’s art: containment/inside/outside”

And, further:

“Duchamp keeps the spectator, whose presence is always voluntary, hung up on his own etiquette, thus preventing him/her from disapproving of his/her own harassment – a source of further annoyance. Hostility to the audience is one of the key coordinates of modernism, and artists may be classified according to its wit, style and depth.”

In other words, as O’Doherty sees it, one of the goals of modernist artists was to hostiles their spectator. But this seemingly cruel pleasure ended up turning towards art itself. To most people, Art (with a capital A) was perceived as something elitist and incomprehensible; seeming as ‘high culture’, since it was made by few genius (artists), placed in a sacred temple (white cube), for the nobles (high class and connoisseurs) to appreciate it.

 In that scenario, there’s no place for the mere mortal to interact with those kinds of entities. The whole art world is closed, exclusive, guarded to a mystified high-cultured elite. O’Doherty ends this chapter by mentioning post-modernism attempts to break the uberimposition of the white cube: 

With postmodernism, the gallery space is no longer ‘neutral’. The wall becomes a membrane through which esthetic and commercial values osmotically exchange. (…) Context provides a large part of late modern and postmodern art’s content. This is seventies art’s main issue, as well as its strength and weakness”

In Duchamp’s work, and more contemporary ones (like Buren’s, for example) the questioning about the context where the art was present; pieces joined “the outside world with the inside”, but the artist himself was nowhere to be seen. He was still secluded in his genius aura.

Then, when we move to Rosalind Krauss text, we encounter a changed art world.  Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Michael Heizer, Richard Serra, Walter De Maria and few others went a step further in questioning the context of the artwork .

 Krauss’s article discusses, mainly, the concept of ‘sculpture’ on what she calls ‘the expanded field, and how sculpture is a category that can be, nowadays, almost infinitely malleable:

“The historian/critic simply performed a more extended sleight-of-hand and began to construct his genealogies out of the data of millennia rather than decades. Stonehenge, the Nazca lines, the Toltec ball courts, Indian burial mounds – anything at all could be hauled into court to bear witness to this work’s connection to history and thereby to legitimize its status as sculpture.”

            In order to demystify this now obscure term, Krauss compares it to the concept of monuments and, later, makes a diagram to elucidate the notions of not-landscape and not-architecture to draw the limits of modernist sculpture; and end up in the thinking in another term: complex - both landscape and architecture piece. To illustrate the term:

 By 1970, with the Partially Buried Woodshed at Kent State University, in Ohio, Robert Smithson had begun to occupy the complex axis, which for ease of reference I am calling site construction. In 1971 with the observatory he built in wood and sod in Holland, Robert Morris had joined him. Since that time, many other artists – Robert Irwing, Alice Aycock, John Mason, Michael Heizer, Mary Miss, Charles Sidmons – have operated within this new set of possibilities.

             Although this new conception of landscape and architectural art marks a very important shift in the way we perceive the context a work of art - by making the context as the content itself; and turning the outside (landscape/architecture) into the ‘inside’; the same issue found on modernism it’s still present: the absence of the artist.

                        When, at last, we turn to Marcia Tucker PheNAUMANology, the cycle seems to finally close itself, as Bruce Nauman brings his insides, outside – to the public – and invites the viewer to do the same.

             While other artists shut the world off, were hostile to the spectators, and ‘ran to the mountains’ (resorted in landscape and architectural art), Nauman works with the most real, straight-forward, possible material: his own body.

Bruce Nauman finally opens his doors and windows, and let everybody in – changing the whole notion of artwork, context, artist and viewer. He doesn’t exhibit a finished, neatly done, work of art; “he sees his art as more closely related to man’s nature than to the nature of art”. He promotes an experience with the viewer, inviting him to be the actor:

 By dealing with the ways things are experienced instead of how they are made or perceived, the intent of the work is realized only through the physical involvement of the spectator.

Although Nauman’s relationship with the audience may be considered ‘hostile’ in O’Doherty’s logic  - as it “express itself through physical discomfort (radical theater), excessive noise (music) or by removing perceptual constants (the gallery space)” - it cannot be matched to other raging avant-garde artists acts.  

            Nauman’s works are too concerned with the bodily experience and centered in his own corporeal perceptions to be that aggressive towards another body. Yes, he intends to cause psychological emotions on his audience – but his main goal is to let them experience these physic experiences at their own way, and not trying to ‘impose’ anything. And, also

This concern with physical self is not simple artistic egocentrism, but use of the body to transform intimate subjectivity into objective demonstration. Man is the perceiver and the perceived; he acts and is acted upon; he is the sensor and the sensed.

With this last quote, by Marcia Tucker, we close the cycle of context as content, finally bringing together the artist, the viewers and institutions:

Structuralism and constructionism are terms that lead to an immediate association with the word building. Building, as a verb in the gerund: “construct by putting parts or material together over a period of time”; and building, as a noun, in the edifice and structure sense of the word. 

The intention of this text is to build (in a metaphorical sense) a correlation between the views of Michel Foucault, Stuart Hall, Laura Mulvey and Betham’s Panopticon  building (in a literal sense); and bring their arguments to our present time. First things first; let’s start with Foucault’s concept of discourse:  

[By discourse, Foucault meant] ‘a group of statements which provide a language for talking about – a way of representing the knowledge about – a particular topic at a particular historical moment… Discourse is about the production of knowledge through language But… since all social practices entail meaning, and meanings shape and influence what we do – our conduct – all practices have a discursive aspect’ (Hall, 1992, p.291)

At a first glance, the notion of discourse could be mistaken by the precepts of semiotics. Although they are, indeed, closely related, for Foucault the semiotic theory lacked one crucial aspect: the notion of the historical moment. 

Like Barthes and other semioticians, Foucault was a constructionist; however, his main concern was with the production of knowledge and meaning not through language, but through discourse – and within a specific historical context. In his view, there is no such thing as an ‘absolute truth’, as he did not believe that the same phenomenon would be found across different historical periods. He thought that, in each period, discourse produced forms of knowledge, objects, subjects, and practices of knowledge, which differed radically from period to period, with no necessary continuity between them. (Hall)

Indeed, looking back on the history of mankind, we can see that a lot (not to say every) of the once considered ‘absolute truths’ fell apart with the advent of science, philosophy, technology, etc. Heck, we used to think that the Earth ended on an abysm and that ‘hysteria’ could be cured with vibrators . It is non-sense to think that there is such a thing as a given – and unchangeable - truth. Or isn’t? 

In order to really learn, as a great professor (to remain anonymous) once said, we have to question everything and everybody. We cannot believe every thing we read, or see, or listen. One has to question: “Why trust someone else’s beliefs over your own?” Knowledge empowers people. As Sir Francis Bacon once claimed, “scientia potentia est"  - and Foucault couldn’t agree more, as he focused on the relationship between knowledge and power, and how power operated within what he called an institutional apparatus  and its technologies (techniques). 

Knowledge linked to power, not only assumes the authority of ‘the truth’ but has the power to make itself true. (…) Truth isn’t outside power… Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. (Foucault, 1980, p.131)

For the sake of this argument, consider Foucault’s statements on truth and power accurate. Now, let’s dig deeper on the notion of power. Hall summarizes Foucault’s ideas on the topic:

We tend to think of power as always radiating in a single direction – from top to bottom – and coming from a specific source – the sovereign, the state, the ruling class and so on. For Foucault, however, power does not ‘function in the form of a chain’ – it circulates. It is never monopolized by one centre. It is deployed and exercised through a net-like organization’  (Foucault, 1980, p. 98).  This suggests that we are all, to some degree, caught up in its circulation – oppressors and oppressed. Power relations permeate all levels of social existence and are therefore to be found operating at every site of social life. 

And, again the man, Foucault, in The Eye of Power: “The summit and the lower elements of the hierarchy stand in a relationship of mutual support and conditioning, a mutual ‘hold’ (power as a mutual and indefinite ‘blackmail’)”.

Done, for now, with the quoting, let’s try to place these ideas on our reality: So, power has not a single direction; and it does not go only from top to bottom. Power, as Foucault puts, it’s a circle. The ‘sovereign’, ‘the state’, ‘the ruling class’ needs the ‘bottom’ of the hierarchy just as much (or maybe even more) than the poor mortals need them. 

In order to reign, a King must be recognized and respected as such. But, at the time – and, still, nowadays - few had that awareness. Sure, some royalty was beheaded (RIP Marie Antoinette), and thrones were conquered, but people always had the weird tendency of being condescending towards the ruling classes. Why put up with corrupt leaders, and stuck-up nobles for so long?

Today, with the so-called democracy and the voting system, politicians have to kiss-ass of the population in order to ‘rise to power’. People are now fully responsible to whom they give power to – and they also have the means to revoke it. So why do we continue to victimize ourselves, thinking that our leaders are the ‘bad guys’; the ‘bad decision-makers’; the ‘evil of the world’; if the only reason why they are our leaders is because we made them in the first place?      

On The Eye of Power, Foucault describes a conversation between himself, Jean-Pierre Barou and Michelle Perrot. Among others topics, they discuss the role of ‘opinion’, and the power of the ‘gaze’, on the eighteenth-century population: 

It’s the illusion of almost all of the eighteenth-century reformers who credited opinion with considerable potential force. Since opinion could only be good, being the immediate consciousness of the whole social body, they thought people would become virtuous by the simple fact of being observed. (…) And failed to see that these media would necessarily be under the command of economico-political interests. (…) They believed opinion would be inherently just, that it would spread of its own accord, that it would be a sort of democratic surveillance. (Foucault, “Power/Knowledge”, p.161)

Perrot claims that the thinkers at the time ‘misunderstood the difficulty they would have in making their system take effect’ and that ‘they didn’t realize that there would always be ways of slipping through their net, or that resistances would have a role to play’; Perrot, then, goes on talking about her study on the revolts against surveillance (gaze), and Foucault’s follow on the discussion about the resistances of Bentham’s Panopticon. 

Keeping these arguments and Mulvey’s psychoanalysis of ‘scopophilia’ and ‘voyeurism’ in Visual and Other Pleasures in mind, let’s shift, again, to our reality:

Against the statements made by Foucault and Perrot, people now deliberately put themselves under constant surveillance and are more-than-willing to be someone else’s object of voyeurism. We all want our 15 minutes of fame (or I-don’t-know-how-many Likes and Shares); we want to be looked at; we want to be the actors of Sternberg’s and Hitchcock’s movies; we want to be the obsession of Peeping Tom’s. And that is completely insane. 

Instagram pictures, facebook profiles, iPhone fingerprinting, GPS phones, Internet search tracing are only few examples of our lunatic behavior of bluntly giving all our personal information to anyone who has Internet access. At a first glance, all this modern tools (Google Maps can find the nearest best restaurant – just give him your exact location; or Tinder can find the perfect romantic match for you – just provide your address, phone number and recent pictures) seems so benefic to our daily lives that we seize to notice how dangerous they really are. 

“Look, there’s that lovely kid, Mark Zuckerberg, offering you a lovely network to connect with your lovely friends”. And at what cost? Oh, a bargain: Just all of your personal information – to make him earn gazillions of dollars by selling all the data to advertisement, Google, and whoever is willing to pay the highest price. 

We are now under constant surveillance – and, worse: we don’t even care anymore. Never mind all the cameras everywhere; it is George Orwell’s 1984 on the 21st century. “Heck, if we have cameras, we can now be movie stars! Why not tape ourselves and upload it on the Internet?” Now, everybody seems to have ‘scopophilia’ at some degree:  What else can explain the amount of ‘likes’ given to pseudo-celebrities online profiles; or the sales rates of weekly tabloids? 

‘Culture is Ordinary’. To start comprehending what Raymond Williams means by this phrase, and to relate to what Allan Kaprow wrote on his Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life we must, first, delimitate what the author comprehends as ‘Culture’. In Raymond Williams words,

“We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a whole way of life – the common meaning to mean the arts and learning – the special processes of discovery and creative effort. (…) I insist on both, and on the significance of their conjunction”.

“Culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind.”(R. Williams) This statement may seem a little vague at first glance, but it actually says a lot about how we manage our everyday lives.

The culture (in the broader sense) that we live in, works merely as a background for our daily errands - and most people can go through life without really thinking about it. Sure, we can easily point the differences between our culture, and other cultures – as our habits and traditions are very different from Japanese’s or primitive African tribes – but how often do we think about our own habits and traditions?

Allan Kaprow and his fellow artists invites us (by ‘us’ I mean ‘viewers’ and ‘spectators’ of their artistic performances) to reflect about our everyday life by putting the spotlight on our ordinary routine. In his text, The Education of the Un-Artist, Part III, Kaprow give several examples of experimental arts that uses the modern society as a model – and bring the audience from watching to actually performing.

Ultimately, daily habits are taken as performances, and that completely changes its meanings because, as Kaprow says, “consciousness alters the world, that natural things seem unnatural once you attend to them, and vice versa”.

That statement made sense in the 1970s, when it was written, and still makes very much sense right now. People have became obsessed with their daily routines to a point that, now, it all seems too much.

All routines, today, seem exhaustively rehearsed – but not to be intellectually reflected upon, but just to look prettier in the picture. And people perform non-stop. A walk on the street could be a walk on a runway (we all have a paparazzi-like friend who may take a picture anytime); and a meal at a restaurant a grand-event. Kaprow’s ready-mades are now all over the place.

With the advent of social media and the powerful ‘share’ button, there aren’t any boundaries between personal and public life. Want a proof? Just open your Instagram. (Well, if you don’t have Instagram, try Facebook. And, ultimately, if you are not at all in the social medias, check the tabloids) How many pictures of food, and people waking up, or brushing their teeth, or looking at the mirror, or of their pets can you count? What does all that mean? Who actually cares about that? Apparently us. (Yes, sorry to inform, but you too).

Back to Raymond Williams text: the author paints a panorama of the English society of the late 1950s, analyzing its thinking and behaviors, influenced by Marxists ideas. Regardless his personal identification with communist philosophies, he still manages to recognize that some of the Marxists interpretations of society cannot be accepted: Raymond is radically against the idea of the prejudiced expression ‘ignorant masses’. Moreover, his against the term ‘masses’ at all:

“I don’t believe that the ordinary people in fact resemble the normal description of the masses, low and trivial in taste and habit. I put it another way: that there are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses”. 

With these statements - and a few others throughout the text - Williams portraits, unintentionally, a common human feature: to think of ourselves as a separate piece of the society; as individuals, and not in a group kind of way. It is always ‘me and them’, instead of ‘us’. And that is one of the reasons why the term ‘ignorant masses’ is still accepted by some people.

They (those who believe in the term masses, and that the masses are ignorant - and I do not include myself as I do not share this belief) failed to understand that they tooare part of this group so-called ‘mass’. That everybody is in the same boat, the same society, with the same culture and values. To consider your peers ignorant is to assume your own ignorance. And no one wants to look at him or herself as that.

Allan Kaprow says in his essays that ‘Only in the fine arts does the quest for originality remain a vestige of individualism and specialization. It is the ideological token of the sufficient self’. Although the text was written almost 40 years ago – and in that time, could have made sense - today, the reality is other: everybody strives to be different, to stand out. True, we still have the need to feel ‘part of something’, as every human being probably has, but we want to be unique.

And artists, too, want their art to be unique. “Originality as an index of integrity may be on the wane” (A. Kaprow). Is not. Nowadays, to make an imitation became just too easy. Everyone can scan a painting; print a poster, or copy paste a text. The same way that everybody can be (or at least, everybody thinks that they can be) a photographer just by having a smartphone and a photo-editing app.

“Artists are noticeably discarding unique handmade qualities in favor of multiples made by machines or teams, ideas conceived by groups, or processes generated in the lab environment”. To Kaprow, that citation signifies the decline of the uniqueness of artworks. But, today, that can signify the exact opposite: everybody can take a picture, as the digital cameras do all the work practically themselves, but there’s only few people who can gather big teams, and generate grandiose ideas that end up being unique pieces. Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons are just two examples.