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Production of something, outside of self, outside of mind, the mental picture…The physical item/object/”sense act” renders ‘visible’, not ‘magical’ , the thought or art. It is as if birth takes place…Today there is a blending of ‘magical’ with ‘visible’. ‘Visible’ includes all that is virtual; and that includes the ‘magical’ connotations of commodities and their auras in the seamless world of advertisements and the production of experience.

Listening to Stephen Shaviro over the last few days on ‘affective dissonance’ as explanation for current sweep of strange, precarious, often confusing tides washing over subjectivity, and in film aesthtics; the discontinuity or ‘post-continuity’ or maybe what was referred to at one time, as  ‘post-structuralism’ in terms of film form.

The idea of undoing predictable ordering of thoughts in the manner that images are put down, as a means to deconstruct? didactic narratives (this a strong trope in late 80s?) rather, the post-structuralist idea was to rupture expectations of narrative sequence, or open them up to possibilities of multiple “readings” (post-modern term). The ‘readings’ would be open to cultural, social, political, or alternative interpretation. Both Shaviro and Galloway’s exploration of the efficacy of terms, is an approach to theoretical work that is a happy one, especially since they include in the positioning of social science, critique, theory, the presence and effects of social media and new technologies and networks. Many art and cultural terms are out-moded at present and need this mindful reworking of meaning, and we need new words, to encapsulate present conditions of human subjectivity and thought since the introduction of Deleuze’s concept of the ‘dividual’ in the late 80s, a response to internet technologies and their effect upon the ‘subject.’ (the dividual can be found in famous essay ‘Post-script on Societies of Control’.  In the conversation on Cultural Technologies podcasts on cinema between Alex Galloway and Shaviro, Jane Bennett’s book, “Virtual Matter” is mentioned and then they go into the useful difference between ‘sentience’, ‘consciousness’, and ‘cognition’.

Note: Watching the PBS news last night, the term ‘long haulers’ came up as a way to name a portion of Covid 19 survivors who have long-term health problems now as a result of having contracted the virus. PBS did their best to find 3 individuals who before hand had no health issues at all and in fact were robust and athletic. While their stories were the main idea and very interesting, I was struck by the term (and the special moniker for it) ‘long haulers’ which sounded as though it could be applied to a super giant truck capable of carrying a huge load for a long time. I was struck by how ‘news’ makers or maybe just US news? or maybe just PBS news, or maybe its the way we need to breakdown and decipher large populations in this country – that we give sections names. New names that reflect their condition. I found myself wondering if this was done in other news in other countries with the same zeal as it is done here to bracket the subject matter.

Also struck by Galloway’s assertion that we used to consider ‘0’s and ‘1’s important and that we now need to consider that over and that it is ‘1s’ and ‘2s’ That all 1s’ are split into ‘2s’ I’m not sure exactly what he meant, but wondered where Luce Iriguay’s writing disappeared to, the essay/book ‘The Sex that is Not One’ where she writes about womens’ genitalia as being about two lips, not one object…so maybe Galloway is suggesting that we have accepted, even internalized this ‘difference’ into our understanding? He would be a child of feminism and have learned from a feminist mother of the importance of ‘2’. ?

20 and 21_Fragments by Selen Ozurk – Poet of Meaning

Selen Ozurk is a self-taught artist/poet, a translator, and a painter (see bio at end) who has been giving away her poetry in small booklet form to friends and strangers in and around the city. She does this when, she told me, she has made too many booklets to mail! Nine of her poems will be published in MONDAY a local, annual journal and she is completing English translations of both Arnaut Daniel  (See this for more on Arnaut Daniel) and Cavalcanti. (See here)
I read about Selen’s poetry on Facebook. She was giving away a last few (real paper) booklets and offering them to takers like myself, a lover of free publications & books. Since being introduced to her poetry through social media, and during this interview, Selen has created a third series, “15 Poems from Mendocino” which works together as fragments of a collection. They are provocative, almost haiku-like, searching works and I really loved them for this reason alone.

MH– About your poetry pamphlet, which I’m very happy to have, thank you…There is no author on the booklet?

SO – I am their author… while the choice to leave off the name was a deliberate one, no significant rationale behind it had occurred to me until I had already begun to give and sell the booklets and some who received them asked me if I wasn’t concerned that they would be stolen. My intention was to keep such a small project to an accordingly small and certainly more local scale than that it gained; any questions of claim seemed unfeasible enough when I was creating the work that I didn’t feel any need to assert it.

MH – This is the first poetry pamphlet that you have made. You mentioned “handing them out” or “they’re almost gone” – where do you distribute them?

SO – Yes! I completed this first project in late August, another in late September, a slightly heftier third the other day (in mid-October), and am now working on a fourth. I’m young  enough that I have been more concerned over these past two seasons about getting as much paper into the wastebasket as possible than I have been about getting the pamphlets into as many hands as possible. Thus, my intentional distribution was limited to virtual word-of-mouth, and my intentional ambition was that I send enough off –over and out of the country –that I print up ridiculous amounts and disseminate them in the flesh where I am now living and at least break even at that.

MH – Talk about the title, please. ‘Fragments’…of?
SO: In full— When I first began to write poems they were flowery & abstract; I knew that this was a crutch for the fact that I didn’t yet know what I wanted to say, let alone know how to convey it by my medium. I didn’t begin to grasp what I believe I am now grasping of how to write and (what is more important) how not to write poetry until I came across the work of Ezra Pound. I realized at once that the image was the way out of this mire, and just as well that it was useless to convey by a poem what image could better be conveyed by a painting. I wondered whether the key was not to convey a meaning by a syntax the coherence of which is possible only in poetry. In this my initial project I felt that, even aside from my inexperience, there was something endemic to what I meant such that I could only glean it in fragments. This effort was complicated by the fact that no-one composes a good poem with a meaning which is not somewhat discovered or developed in the very process of writing it. While I decidedly do not endorse the “first thought, best thought” M.O., there is always an irreducibly arbitrary element to this composition; one can have as many thoughts about something striking as there are hours in one’s life to form them, and one does not always know which had better be magnified, and which had better be left in the dark, in order that it strikes others just as clearly.
The fragmentary nature of my first project better enabled me to discriminate the thoughts which detracted the force of each piece from the thoughts which best informed its meaning. Thus, the pieces are consistently anchored in light (or lack thereof), which I felt to be the natural image before me which most closely transposed this discrimination, and much of their pathos was anchored in shoring up a little light, making an ever-upward creative center for oneself (or continuing in lack of one).
In short— They are fragments of what I mean to say.
MH – Where else is your poetry going or coming from?
SO – The idea is to produce enough good work that I may compile it in book-form, but this idea isn’t directing my writing…However, I am having nine early poems (i.e. the entirety of Fragments, save for one poem which I excised) published in an upcoming issue of MONDAY, a local, annual journal. I’ve sent out no work between that lone effort and the last half-month, which I’ve spent furiously slashing & sending a few batches of more recent work, and so I expect more headway on this front in early spring.
One should begin trying to write as well as the gods as early as possible, and I believe that one can’t begin that attempt so young, but in tandem with the attempt to explore one’s own ‘emotional spaces’; however, I’ve proceeded in systematic fear of the abstract & the confessional, which seem to me the most common pitfalls overcome by young poets in the process of honing their intention & technique, even if they may present confessional & abstract complexes in their more mature work. Robert Lowell & Anne Sexton exemplify well what I mean by the maturation of confessional poetry; Wallace Stevens & Paul Celan exemplify well what I mean by the maturation of abstract poetry.
I’ve been increasingly anxious to hone my technique toward the presenting itself, i.e. to instill a sense of the means by which I may present a complex of concrete images in a poem to stir the reader to a greater or lesser extent; a poem reads as lukewarm at best if it does not sustain a clarity of image & an intensity of emotion in its attempt to rouse.
MH – Ezra Pound has been an influence, how?
SO: Because of  that intention in his work toward the presenting itself, which I have just described, the cohering characteristic of my writing has bent—- particularly in the last twenty pieces I’ve written— toward:
(1) more concrete imagery, i.e. in presenting what I see, using objects from the natural (perceivable) world as non-metaphorically as possible; in presenting how and what I feel, using no abstraction in the poem that refers to nothing but itself (this has been the most difficult),
(2) leaner economy of language, i.e. using no word which does not contribute to the presentation of such an image,
(3) using no word, nor sequence nor break thereof, which does not contribute to a sense of rhythm which is naturally musical, i.e. which is not necessarily limited by any predetermined  poetic meter, but only by the maximum extent to which the words, when read, sing themselves. This is practically a cribbing of Pound’s early formulation of the principles of his technique. In other words, I owe to him my operative conviction that the sublimity of a poem is contingent upon the rhythmic condensation of a sustained emotional complex, & that the strength of this condensation is contingent upon the (almost always non-metaphorical) use of a concrete natural image, & the fitting of the words used to present it to their sound & cadence.
MH – Wonderful. What are your themes? Please describe.
SO: With considerable difficulty. To write at all is to hear oneself think more or less clearly, & in doing so to delineate that fragment of inchoate life driving the thought; in my experience, one senses a thought pre-linguistically, and formulates it cognitively, in near-retrospect. This process by which one finds & sustains the emotional sense in the course of this cognitive delineation & linguistic manipulation constitutes the predominating measure of success which I apply to writing in general, and to poetry above all. (Tangentially— I’m finishing a provisional translation of the complete works of Arnaut Daniel, master of the Provençal troubadours, & continually recall that the very word derives from the Provençal  ‘trobar’, meaning ‘to find’.) I write in recognition of this live experience, that is, that to think in syntactically meaningful English always comprises my formulating in English, after the fact, a thought which was more akin to a felt mode of being. In consequence, I’ve never written a poem or sentence with a communicable meaning that I didn’t more or less discover in the very process of writing it (and, always, in awareness of an irreducibly arbitrary element in this & all syntactical composition as such)…
All themes that I trace in my work are echoes of this consequence; the golden thread in all being the expression of certainty in uncertainty, a grounding firmly in the uprootedness that is the mode of self-conscious life as such, and an unimpeachable doubt as to whether any clarity to be found in this may extend at all beyond oneself & beyond one’s time. Bleak & empty the end-vision is certainly not, and its strength is in the contrary optimism, in the expression of the lifting force, the clear note in the mangled chord, the light-bruised bridge; however, one writes from a bleak & empty season, and one must write near to the heart; “in this is paradise enough.”

MH: “one must write near to the heart; ‘in this is paradise enough’. Thank you!

Selen Ozturk was born in Istanbul and raised in the Bay Area. She was educated in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Alongside ongoing original work, her current projects include English translations of Arnaut Daniel and Cavalcanti from the Provençal and the Italian, respectively. She resides in North Beach, San Francisco.

 

20 and 21_Jeremy Hight: One-man Literary Artist and Theorist

SEMINAL_TEXTS presents Jeremy Hight: One-man Literary Artist & Theorist

An interview with Jeremy Hight by Molly Hankwitz

From Hight’s MFA thesis at Cal Arts (never again shown and later destroyed) An interactive work but made only of wood, cheap hinges, and a hidden motor.Text moved when the image was opened in the main gallery, but was impossible to fully read and when it was stopped the next person only saw what was left after the first viewing.
Jeremy Hight is a writer and a theorist. He has been best recognized, perhaps, for his essay, “Narrative Archeologies”, which has been credited as one of four primary texts on ‘spatial narrative’ a feature of locative media, or the practice of place-based art and communications tied to a specific place. Since that essay, Hight  been working tirelessly with new media art in literary and theoretical  ways, writing for numerous journals and publications, curating with the International Society of Electronic Artists, and concerning himself with how narrative structure works within current technologies and memory as a novelist.

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In this long-awaited exchange, I asked Jeremy about the locative work he did on the collaborative project 34 North 118 West as an inspiration or catalyst for his novels:
That first (or one of the first) locative narrative works was made mostly because the technology could let places and history “speak”and potentially “skin” the world with stories; things not possible on paper. I literally almost got run over by a car when the idea hit me while crossing the street — theory feeds the writing and vice versa for me— and theory can be so beautiful in ideas and in exploration in the way of narratology and poetics! Also, my mind processes in pictures and leaps. Some lean toward theory and others to a story or sometimes both.
And about starting out writing novels and pursuing writing…?
I wrote and completed three novels years ago but felt each had huge flaws. I did a wild cleanse and tossed them out (3 hefty bags of paper). I knew I must always keep learning, pushing, working toward new aspects of voice and craft and the cleanse ended up really helping this process. Soon after I had an epiphany while heading to work on a summer morning as the sun was just breaching the horizon. My wife, also an amazing writer), put on Chopin instead of our usual oldies or a podcast and all became light and form, shades of color, a quiet loudness of lines and gradations. It was stunning. I sensed then something elemental and profound in paring things down, implying metaphor, seeing subtle repetitions…
As an odd, young boy I was in love with science, history, writing and word origins (etymology) equally. I sensed that they also all cross-pollinated each other and at times that borders of naming of forms and fields were problematic, limiting and even absurd. As a pimply teen I did things I just told no one about as I was too scared to seem weird. I wrote a unified field theory at 14 that was not terrible, I developed an immersive interactive intuitive weather data analysis tool that narrativized data sites “live” as a simulation at 12; obsessively studied game theory, chaos theory and quantum mechanics in high school. I also began to struggle with math in its mid-ground innards. The steps were hard for me (I see now I have dysfraxia and numbers move around ). The dream of a Phd in meteorology was fading fast. I still loved language, though, and the concepts and beauty of weather and data and I began falling in love with conceptual art.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You’ve written this book “The Ghost in You”. Tell me about how the publication came about…
The publisher runs a radio show and has interviewed me before about my more conceptual and new media work as well as short stories. He is a conceptual artist himself and sound artist.  Life is funny. I was shopping for publishers for my novel and he said, ‘Hey, what if we make it a conceptual work together?”The book is printed as a zine format intentionally, but with double cover and he selected symbolic images and new line breaks before typesetting so it is the death of the author and a work of text and image and a larger concept.  The run is only a hundred in print and each is hand numbered like prints of a painting would be. After we sell out (soon)  it will only be available as a digital download and the “book” as object will be a ghost.  I will be making it over as dada-esque objects for sale, too, goofy votive candles, jellies to spread on toast (or not), and a beer brewed based on the balance of elements in the prose (an idea I first had years ago… relating a digital image or text as a balance of “flavors” in something tangible like a soda.
My other book available on Amazon is called “What Remains” and it was published by a semiotician and digital artist named Talan Memmott. It was a conceptual work that took sci fi films like Jurassic Park and took out all sci fi and text and I wrote new classic literary prose from the skeletal prose and narrative that was to remain.  Jurassic Park with no computers or park is a bare-bones tale of faith and mortality. It worked surprisingly well.  My first published book was called “I Am the Ghost Here”  and was a short story collection that crashed Hitchcock-like suspense with elements pulled only from the dynamics of social media. The ghost is/was  both me as author (Roland Barthes again with death of the author)  and of self into flesh space and digital space.
Tell me about the ghosts…
The place we live in now has a gentle hungry ghost…Female….I wish I could help her. I really do. But, she exists in a liminal space; perhaps in a house long gone as did the ghosts in my parents’ house growing up (a man always politely floating around looking for his wife and her falling and making a splash for twenty years among other things). Time is not linear and these spirits are self-aware. The man would actually apologize when seen and she has said she is hungry and cold. We both have heard it. In the novel I felt the need to explore narrative as a sort of moebius strip, two characters and stories that overlaid, but never literally crossed. She senses him as a moving of air as he is a spirit while he flies/drifts to help her. At times he can see things mortals simply cannot. There also are subtle similarities between the two. She longs to actually touch objects for a tactile kind of memory trigger; to feel the past and loss while he is tired of absolute freedom and misses the aches and itches of a body and things like job interviews, a shoe untied, the obtuse mundane bondage of existence. William Blake blew me away as a teen because he examined huge dichotomies not in ethics and nature but in poetics and within seemingly something else added. Martin Amis in Time’s Arrow  showed by time moving backwards how horrific moments in history can be in their inhumanity and cruelty as almost to do harm to time and space itself. Toni Morrison showed me how so much internal pain could be expressed so powerfully by both metaphors and descriptions; that deeper inference. Such amazing work.
Ghosts come with a litany of clichés. How did you approach this?
I wanted to avoid the minefield of ghost clichés some of which are:  how they move, are disconnected, can lead to cheesy messages and even bad love stories so often. The ghosts in some Japanese stories, however, are echoes from the past and can even be moral compasses in the present for those who have strayed from what is moral and kind. Other ghost clichés I worked to avoid included the ideas of the evil ghost, the benevolent ghost, the one dimensional spirit that is a cartoon, the redemptive moral allegory of the ghost having to find their divine purpose and of the ghost being some symbol of modern society. These were on my mind while writing the entire book as pitfalls into which the writing could fall. The ghost in the book is morally ambiguous, thus, at times wishing to be parasitic in a human to “live again” and taste the little things we hate like failures and limitations, the mundanely moral. At other times he is caring , melancholy, and longing for some greater meaning to grasp.
Talk a bit about what drives your creative process or gives it meaning…?
I wrote the book using music as a kind of internal spatial joystick for him (the ghost). Ambient-like Eno when he was to drift across the skies, Chopin and other classical when he needed to move more specifically on the ground and with others alive or also in a liminal space. I tried to keep that first morning I mentioned above close as well, with the sun rising and light and shadow along the forms of nature and city; that deep tide under things simply as they are. Something I see in both main characters and their lives and events they exist in is a kind of combination of solidity and fluidity, sort of like the butter melting on the persistent pancake metaphor. 
Memory, it has been argued, is the main body of a life lived and how one sees oneself and their place in this world. The present is but a hectic or dull sliver that only feeds, continually, the past. It is what remains, decays, distorts or is forgotten. Neurological science has found that we must forget or little details will sink cognition into a morass of minutia and detail. There is something so moving in the need to forget and to remember deeply, but incompletely. A beloved book if remembered whole and complete would cool down (like that pancake stack in the opening scene)  into something not to return to, into words as driving directions, not poetics and resonance, so we forget parts and remember others and return again as a different person to read the work as our life experience. Current world and tastes and desires have changed as they always do, yet a spark forms once again, and a conduit and circuit flows once again.
What are you working on now?
My theory has come to show itself in new media art, electronic literature, glitch art, sound art, theory texts and concepts within stories and what a book can be. Now I am researching artificial intelligence and have developed methodologies to pull new chapters from old novels by extending algorithms and the unfinished equations within a narrative of interactions of variables and self-aware prose that changes with each reader and “reads”  by parsing text from the internet. The funny thing about academic writing is I have published mostly book chapters (semiotics, art theory, aesthetics, art history, pedagogy, semantics, poetics and digital art methodologies) but outside of classrooms I wonder who reads them at all. They perhaps are the true ghosts.
I’d like to read your pedagogy. We need strong ideas in pedagogy today for the kinds of students we have and to decolonize academia – with the #BIPOC, #LGBTQ movements, women’s movement.
Thank you for taking time to give us your provocative insights about the work.

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Literary art projects by Jeremy Hight:

Ukrainian writer’s “novel” – a pdf digital work with isbn  (just the word “yum.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A few paragraphs by conceptual artist published as a digital book
and awarded imaginary award.
These fake book covers are from “Nimbus”, an absurd publishing house
within an imagined, smelly room behind the timeline on Facebook.
It is a conceptual folly. Designed by Jeremy Hight and shown in galleries and online exhibitions.

 

Still from the collaborative work “Carrizo Parkfield Diaries” now in the permanent digital collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Hight’s prose poems of ‘memory’ and ‘trauma’ were correlated to data from earthquake sensors in the San Andreas fault.

‘The work was me beginning to look at the notions of text and image and form and ephemerality be it in digital art or other forms.’ – Jeremy Hight.

 

Links to get Jeremy Hight’s new book:

The Ghost in You

https://wtbc.bandcamp.com/merch/the-ghost-in-you-by-jeremy-hight?fbclid=IwAR0Ubaet38LU97ADqzvnrj6rAZnh9HLamGFt5UmkoN3dRbyaXT2yxY8dMGU

https://www.scribd.com/document/253695273/i-am-the-ghost-here-by-jeremy-hight

What Remains

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/what-remains-jeremy-hight/1125549006

Hight’s essay “Narrative Archeologies”:

Jeremy Hight

The Suicide Club, Immersive Art and Law-Free Zones: The Performance of Experience

by Molly Hankwitz, June 2020.

The Suicide Club, pre-cursor to the more notorious Cacophony Society, was founded by Gary Warne, Adrianna Burk, David Warren and Nancy Prussia in San Francisco in 1977 and was finished by about 1982.

Pro Arts gallery, Oakland, held a talk on the Club as part of the retrospective exhibition SIGNMAN: JOHN LAW curated by Natalia Mount. The talk was certainly an open nod to the ideas and the friendships forged in the ultimate “now” of being around at that time, and searching for the soul of creative practice. At the same time as a contemporary gallery talk, the substance of the Club’s activity was showcased to a new, younger audience and gave depth to knowing the work of John Law, Oakland artist.  The gallery space was full of Law’s art and audience and one time members of the Club were peppered throughout. Cacophony Society leader, and co-creator of early Burning Man events,  John Law, and Don Herron, Suicide Club member and founder of the Dashiel Hammett walking tours in San Francisco were both present and engaged us with lively conversation.

Such underground groups and events have scant representation in scholarship. The anarchical, free-thinking, and unconventional “methodologies”, legendary at the time of their inception, are often difficult to pin down in documents or afterthought. You had to be there. This condition alone leads to their ongoing status. The Situationist International owes much to the ambiguity of their own terms when curious writers and artists speculated upon their past. They are elusive, and until recently given the work of scholars like McKenzie Wark, have regained discursive significance.

In the case of the Suicide Club’s  surrealistic escapades, news articles, photographs, and ephemera cannot tell us what it was like to take part. Law and Herron firstly dispelled myths that suicide had anything to do with the Club’s objectives. Nor was suicide or attempted suicide a prerequisite for Club participation as rumors had it. Rather, Club members needed to participate in the street theater and pranks. 30 members rode  San Francisco cable cars stark naked and wrote post cards along the way to commemorate the excursion (see links below). Elaborate games in odd locales and urban explorations of abandoned buildings, cemeteries, sewer ways, waterways, and bridges were some of the Club’s “locales”. They also tried “infiltrations”. The Unification Church and The American Nazi Party were particularly impressive for having been infiltrated by the Suicide Club. Such actions resonate with media-hacking performances such as those of The Yes Men.

It is thus difficult to recreate how underground “live” art was received or how it impacted participants. As a history in art it is compelling to revisit the spirit of the time with those who did the work.  John Law describes the Suicide Club as semi-formless, ad hoc and action-oriented art group whose claim to secrecy was due to the public nudity or trespassing both are illegal in San Francisco. In newspaper clippings, costumed members appear grinning, suggestive of the delight in getting away with something. Between the top-secret dramatic locations, the scant documentation, and unpublished scripting which took place during their events, their art was liminal or impossible, deliberately defiant of categorization and  oriented towards “thrill”. They were made for those who participated. They are similar to the psychogeographic “derives” of the SI; an effort to experience “experience” in a capitalist world; an effort to touch the inner mind and conscience and dream-state of the imagination.

Radical gestures such as public nudity gave the Club its legendary status and that status was once again earned when they morphed into The Cacophony Society, a profoundly non-art collective aimed at the absurd; the dadaist. The Cacophony Society influenced artists and audiences through highly-visible public works. Santacon was an amusing critique of retail commodity culture.  When dozens of Santas flood the pre-Christmas retail scene, identically dressed, they present the endlessly reproducible spectacle of capitalist Christmas as its own hall of mirrors. The 2014 publication of The Cacophony Society book, Tales of the Cacophony Society,  and  John Law’s retrospective reflect upon the comic fun of artmaking.

Other descriptions of the Club’s activities from the Pro Arts talk emphasized the care in planning and the way “members” were included. Participation was had by anyone willing to make the events happen and there was rarely a dull moment in San Francisco’s 1990s art world, when the Cacophony society was around. Art became viewed as an unofficial stream of happily inane events intervening in everyday life.

Cover up

Considering some of the excess and liberation of the San Francisco art scene such as gay liberation art made here when gay rights barely existed elsewhere, or when women’s performance took over in the 1960s and 1970s, it is obvious that the artistic milieu promises something different. In the more madcap events, it was often exclusion from the arts which triggered momentum. San Francisco’s experimental scene has been shelving the white-walled gallery space for decades, and focusing upon uncontrolled bodies and the performance of experience. The Suicide Club challenged normative social reality and the control of public space to say the least. Their disregard for normative values in public safety as purported by the ‘safe’, sends a  message of speculative freedom and the more immersive, private experiments were expressions of art-as-engaged-experience not as something still, passive; devoid of participation. Their antics link conceptually, perhaps, to the increasingly “interactive” computerization of culture in the 90s.

Even more so now in the device-oriented world of multiple, small screens, dependent upon device/platform/information and computer-mediated-communication, art can be viewed as a spectacle which circulates and mainstreams its own artifacts. This distanced seeing/experience of “social media” does not replace the art, as much as we attempt to make artforms out of it, and to be connected and networked. Art cannot be learned or performed as a packaged event, or a mere expression of information tourism, reliant upon data and image glut.  Art, thus made, falls forever over backwards into its own mistaken quantifications of what is important. The work of art becomes a game.

John Law is a professional artist, a sign painter by trade with a dramatic studio atop the Oakland Tribune tower. His unconventional works have rarely intersected in any predictable way with officialdom. But, as a leader of the Billboard Liberation Front, and “fueled by a single passion: the timely improvement of outdoor advertising” he made climbing up interstate billboards and altering the meaning of advertisements into a revolutionary, culture jamming practice. Always maintaining a career deliberately out-of-bounds, Law has been both catalyst and artist, using the buildings, bridges and billboards of the Bay Area as a backdrop upon which to play, to dream; to ignite relevance and passion. Who the dreams were for, or what the fact of dreaming meant, remains with the players, in the few artifacts, and in the memories.

A Legacy in Art

Conscious formulation of an ethos which embraced artistic freedom and experimentation was part of the Suicide Club’s antics wherein Law scouted for vacant places: waterways, accessible rooftops, empty warehouses, and anchored ships. He and other members would study these locations and how they would use them as an immersive world in a future event. But it is also clear that the mere act of transgressive trespassing and illegality was part of the art; a way of defying law and order thinking and of laying claim to the city.  Such was established a methodology in defiance of surveillance,  in what the late Cacophony Society artist Cary Galbraith referred to as “the zone”, resonating with  Hakim Bey’s “autonomous zones” and the “ambient unity” lamenting of the SI, who rethought Paris as a place of artistic play.

In one of these events, lines of a script and directions were typed on a typewriter as the group progressed, making immediate  the operations of the event as it unfolded, and allowing for experimentation in constructs of social relations, much like Yvonne Rainer questioned structures of authority through filmmaking.  Thus, props, space, and ideas were in a collective convergence or flow in these Club events, similar to the manner by which VR or “game worlds” adjust according to players’ choices while changing in physical atmosphere. Desire, action, expression rose according to a collective plan or agreement. Once the Club dressed up, each as a different animal, and got on a public bus. “Who was going to arrest a bunch of people dressed as animals?,” Law said with a smile. How much defying of authority could they get away with?

The anti-logic was clear. The Pro Arts audience grinned. “Only about 20 people would know anything at all,” Law stated when asked about secrecy. He then recalled how women members were challenged to learn new skills.  Word processing or food preparation would be sidelined for learning to climb three stories by rope or swimming in freezing-cold water. Contemporary “escape rooms” which come with a high priced ticket and reservation or the adult-only “pirate parties” of the 2000s might be considered bourgieous examples of said- relief from lifestyle.

Story

 

Immersive artworks are now produced with VR and AR. These artforms have a history in experimental film, projection art, and video installation. Immersive, emotional, even learning environments have had two main directions. One, they are designed to allow single or multi-viewer interaction with virtual elements and narratives as part of a “game” type world – the most obvious analogy for immersive display – and open the concept of “world-making” to collective input (think Minecraft) and to “game-changing” where game-space and “storyline” and characters are co-created by viewers/players. Of equal if not greater potential, however, due to its more direct route to the senses, in terms of experience, is the use of programming and visuals to re-direct expectations of game play (frequently the thought processes of military industrial entertainment) in order to produce shocking, surprise effects and experiences for the viewer/participant. In these works, viewers identify with and experience the emotional landscapes of others and learn to judge the formulations of “navigation” from a critical standpoint.

Tamiko Thiel and Zara Houshmand’s (with activist Susan Hayase)  VR installation, Beyond Manzanar, first produced in the 1990s, has been recently revamped as an immersive installation and expands on mainstream concepts  “game-worlds” to raise questions of “the connection between the racial profiling and scapegoating that led to mass violations of Japanese  Americans’ rights and the similar fear and hate-mongering aimed at Iranian Americans during the “Iranian Hostage Crisis” (November 1979 to January 1981) to those who experience the art. Beyond the expectation of play that is inherently part of the VR spatial imagination, Beyond Manzanar is a highly controlled  “experience” in which, despite the choices of movement which a participant might expect to “get” or to “want”, the viewer/participants find themselves imprisoned inextricably or bombed from above in locations associated with beauty and peace. The logic of “freedom” is undermined by the reprogramming of spatial expectations, through the subversive mapping of Japanese and Iranian cultural spaces deployed visually and technologically. Arguably, this intent to immerse the viewer in an unfamiliar logic, so as to job them out of their everyday way of seeing is close to the intentions of The Suicide Club when they sometimes took up a perilous ‘playspace’ for the pleasure of experiencing what was unanticipated. Both artistic efforts utilize immersive reality for purposes of experimental investigation into ethical and meaningful action as well as to critique social norms and convention.

Beyond Manzanar stills from video.

John Law’s retrospective, SIGNMAN: JOHN LAW, a collection of neon-works, photographs and small sculptures was enmeshed with themes of transgressive movement. The use of police tape, the adumbrated billboards, even the unlikely publishing of his photographs, billboard and climbing work in media of the time, offer a glimpse into Law the artist who worked to suggest a function for himself as artist within and without convention. Ultimately, the work of John Law, and the Suicide Club, can be read as a deep and authentic understanding of the public and private city as a space upon which anarchy can act, and be rewarded.

The work of The Suicide Club and The Cacophony Society speaks to a lineage of artists who went after uncontrolled expression amidst encroaching surveillance, taxing of flows, gated communities; law and order, hegemony, sexism, and the pervasive privatization of urban life.

—

SIGNMAN: JOHN LAW

Exhibition at Pro Arts Gallery, Oakland, CA.

August 2019

https://proartsgallery.org/event/signman-john-law/

 

 

 

 

 

Links and Resources

Photo of the Reenactment of the Summer of Love by Greg Mancuso,

All other photos (with exception of Playland, n.a.) courtesy, Molly Hankwitz.

The Suicide Club archive – https://www.scribd.com/document/213747288/Cacophony-Society-00-Lanc

The Suicide Club chronology of events – http://www.suicideclub.com/events/

Tales of the Cacophony Society – https://johnwlaw.com/2018/08/13/tales-of-the-san-francisco-cacophony-society-pdf-and-news-of-coming-reprint-in-paperback/

Suzanne Lacy Performance/Installation – https://www.suzannelacy.com/performance-installation

Beyond Manzanar – https://sjmusart.org/event/creative-minds-tamiko-thiel-and-zara-houshmand-susan-hayase