The Black Swan Collective: November 2012

A few exhibitions/installations have caught my eye across in New York State recently. One of which is scarily two years behind something similar recently posted on here in name and media used...

Takeshi Murata: Melter 2

Taking over the giant illuminating advertising billboard's of Time Square Takeshi Murata has created an immersive animation that appears for a few minutes just before midnight every evening over the month of November. Looks like quite a visually impacting -rather psychedelic- experience to happen upon.

The Whitney Museum is currently showings a retrospective of work by Wade Guyton. An artist who for the past 20 years has devoted his time exploring our changing relationships to images and artworks through the use of common digital technologies, such as the desktop computer, scanner, and inkjet printer. Along with exhibiting previous work he has created a new piece specifically made for the Whitney Museum.

Untitled, 2006, Epson Ultrachrome inkjet on linen, 89 x 54 inches

And finally came across Circa 1971 today. An exhibition at the Dia in Beacon which celebrates EAI's (Electronic Arts Intermix) 40th anniversary, showcasing a series of diverse video works in EAI's collection that reveal the development of video work in art practices. It includes pieces by Vito Acconci, Eleanor Antin, Ant Farm, John Baldessari, Lynda Benglis, Shirley Clarke, Dan Graham, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Joan Jonas, Gordon Matta-Clark, Nam June Paik, Raindance, Anthony Ramos, Carolee Schneemann, TVTV, Steina and Woody Vasulka, and others

Gordan Matta Clark, Chinatown Voyeur, 1971, 60 mins, video black & white, sound,

Kit

This is the essay that Adam Fine kindly wrote to accompany my recent exhibition 'Tomorrow Comes A Day Too Soon'

I'm sure he'll appreciate any feedback,

Sam

A Brilliant Veneer

Adam Fine

We live in an age less than golden. And if history must teach us one lesson, it's that we will forget most if not all of what history can teach us. The failings of past times do not vaccinate subsequent generations from a doomed repetition, rather they remain cancers in remission, ever threatening to re-emerge resistant to prior treatments, leaving us scrambling desperately for new cures.

The period in American history immediately following its Civil War and coinciding with the Second Industrial Revolution is known as the Gilded Age, a term attributed to the 1873 novel of the same name by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. This era, roughly spanning the late 1860s to 1896, proved to be a terrific exercise in Manic-Depression—reaching exceptional highs and catastrophic lows with little room for balance.

With the abolishment of the economics of slavery, the US embraced an economy centric to corporations. Railway expansion brought opportunity and business to the American West in levels heretofore unseen, and concurrent with the railway industry's growth, there also grew manufacturing, agriculture, mining and finance. Patents increased exponentially with enormous technological advances in electrical applications, communication, the moving image and transportation among many others. Alongside these new industries, the middle class rose with solidified concepts of upward mobility in the form of career tracks for skilled workers and managers. Labour unions equipped with the ability to strike would also gain traction in the name of workers' rights. And those captains of industry—reaching, even surpassing levels of wealth and power only previously held by monarchs and nobility abroad—engaged in immense philanthropy: establishing universities, schools and academies, hospitals, venues for the arts, public libraries, and charities. At first glance, America seemed to emerge from the horrors of its Civil War into a shining new golden age of prosperity.

But prosperity is often enjoyed most by the few who can control it. Indeed this golden age would prove itself gilded: a glittering veneer upon a vast corrosion.

During this same time, concepts of eugenics, Social Darwinism and “the survival of the fittest” emerged into new prominence. Innate superiority, in the natural sense, was deemed to be found within the powerful individuals who languished in the spoils of the free market, while the poor—those who are governed rather than govern—were believed to be inherently weak, a result of moral depravity, cultural failure, ideology, religious tradition, ethnicity. So-called 'political machines' took root to control an increasingly corrupt political system—locally and nationally—via bribery and physical coercion. Black Friday and the Panics of 1857, 1873, 1884, 1893 and 1896—economic depressions defined by financial risk-taking, failed investment, fraud, and the collapse and bailouts of financial institutions, with suspected ties at times with the highest levels of government—pockmarked notions of societal growth. The new American aristocracy, dubbed “Robber Barons”, created tight monopolies in their respective industries through strict vertical integration of their corporate trusts. Workers suffered under sometimes fatal working conditions, and career tracks were typically designed with absolute ceilings; union strikes could be met with military opposition. A result of deregulated industrial practices was reflected in Upton Sinclair's 1905 novel, The Jungle: a Socialist piece exposing immigrants' treacherous working and living situations along with many ghoulish practices of Chicago's meatpacking industry. And the American South, formerly aligned with the Confederacy, found itself outside any prosperity or growth seen in the rest of the nation, with most farmers only renting their land, and replete with the same political malfeasance, poverty, racial and gender inequality, and racial violence experienced in some degree nationwide.

Light, it would seem, can mask far deeper shadows.

The idea of an age of progress, existing as merely a golden veneer upon a dilapidated interior, still resonates to this day, reflected on a global scale not only in physicality but also systemically. Progress in the past century is unmistakeable. We can communicate with individuals across the globe almost instantly, and in fact, we can travel to said individuals in a matter of hours, not days or months. Medicine and sanitation have rendered moot many of the scourges that long plagued past civilizations. We now understand much more about science from the dynamics of our universe to the mechanics of life, having answered many questions of physics and biology and better knowing what questions to ask.

On the other hand, this march forward has equally deleterious effects. This exponential progress, a term comfortably italicised or set in quotation marks, brings with it certain attitudes, expectations, and actions which are self-damning to the concept. When people expect technology to cater not only to their needs but also to their wants, their whims, the original problems mankind have faced tend to be lost within the public's weak attention span and lacking imagination. For instance, once smallpox was effectively eradicated, so too were its vaccines; however, many countries still have stores of the virus, and if used nefariously or even carelessly, we are left with an old problem and little recourse to an effective solution. And on a less apocalyptic note, but no less imperative to cultural health and longevity, we have left much of our cultural qualifiers—literature, news, music, film, art—to an ethereal and ephemeral digital cloud. The expectation of such information to be immediately available on a 24-hour cycle has led to a higher reliance on digital media than on traditional physical media. We can access Fahrenheit 451 instantly on an e-reader (without a much needed sense of irony), but given this lack of physical source material, we establish ourselves not only within a metaphorical Gilded Age, but a new Dark Age where access to information can be as easily controlled as instantly lost or rendered technologically obsolete. As well, with reliance upon digital photography, the historical and journalistic chronicle of our times is threatened. With the related storage methods for digital images and like material, we may not be able to fully conceive what our times will provide future generations, future archaeologists and anthropologists. Consider the impact that photographic processes had in communicating the deadly effects of America's Civil War to the nation, as well as the effect said processes had upon the tradition of painting—both inextricably related to the physical photograph. We understand much of earlier civilizations based on the structures they built, what texts lasted on papyrus, vellum or stone. With our flimsy, temporary structures and architecture, and with the ephemerality of our collections of technological and cultural material, we are only building ourselves a higher platform from which to fall, far out of sight of its foundations.

We cannot ensure a hopeful future whilst denying it a past. Progress must be mindful of its origins, and success must acknowledge its own failures.

Ultimately, the solution and the problem, the light and the dark, the prosperity and the poverty are inherently human matters. The industrial and technological advances that mould societies create imbalance, poverty and slavery in equal measure. Disparities between the states, social and ethnic groups in the latter half of nineteenth century America are easily paralleled in this more globally connected age, between 'developed' and 'developing' nations. When we learn to drive, we are taught not only to look several seconds ahead of where we are, but also to mind our mirrors for what remains behind. Both are necessary to keep our course.

A veneer, no matter what skill or substance it implies, does not substitute for integrity of structure and cannot exist alone.

Marx Reloaded

From across the pond in Albany's State

[Untitled]

Big in France

A Brilliant Veneer