After the first day at the Utopian Studies Conference I can say that:

1. Utopianists are no more stylish than your average academic;

2. Are more likely to be male than female;

3. They are much more likely to smile at you for no reason [than your average stranger at a conference].

So the other week the three kingpins of celebrity economics in Ireland, David McWilliams, Eddie Hobbs and George Lee were all on Saturday night TV.

However there were no handbags at dawn or any direct challenges at all to each others economic predictions/ political positions (pre June 24 this was before the official announcement of The Recession). Instead, the three men regressed into an economic nostalgia glued together with anecdotes of Curly Wurlys and half crowns found on the street and cashed in at the sweet shop.

A comment from The Property Pin:

I was hoping we would ‘get real’ but no. This is just a fluff piece with a little bit of light sabre rattling, but no killer thrusts. The three boys almost being publicly embarrassed for being so right, and having to defend themselves - ‘no miriam, i’m not a doom monger’.

With the Dans and the Austins and the Toms and the Kens in the dock to explain how this all came about.
People in Ireland aren’t long about whinging to Joe Duffy if they think they were charged too much for a meal in a restaurant, but we have an entire generation who have been ripped off for their life savings and possibly their career earnings and there isn’t a fucking murmur of discontent to be found anywhere. It’s disturbing.

It seems that the penny sweet remains the primary unit that acts both as a touchstone for avarice and a way to extrapolate larger economic structures.

 Finally found it, abandoned to a passing race of dibbles, taking turns to smell dusty or damp over the seasons.

There was an excellent article in the Sunday Tribune (business section) last weekend, written by Maxim Kelly, that drew attention to the recent trend of using nostalgia for advertising purposes.

There are other examples too, loads of them, some of which I’ve written about here

1. The new TV ad for Sprite is a pastiche of Shaft, with Sprite bottles substituted for guns.
2. The new McDonald’s TV ads cut to a flashback of ‘the eighties’ (I’ve so far seen two versions; one is of an aerobics class, bizarrely referencing fitness)
3. Henri Hippo has been relaunched as the icon of Ulster Bank, albeit with a more digitised style of animation than before. I recently saw copy on a Henri billboard that read ‘Remember when happiness was staying up to watch Dallas?’

So there a few notable things here.

Mc Donalds and Sprite are both global corporations, and the signifiers they light on are similarly ‘global’ (ie referring to hegemonic American popular culture). Visually, these two ads also share a very distinct gritty, ‘analogue’ quality when they’re visually quoting The Past.

Henri Hippo is a much more localised phenomenon, with a much smaller audience, and the focus on Dallas as a childhood experience narrows the demographic further – to people around my age (twenties to early thirties) who lived in Ireland at the time. It’s an unusual experience to feel so targeted by advertising, and if nothing else it really makes me interrogate my memory and experience of this time. Do I really remember it like that? Is the story I have belonging to my childhood, or someone else’s?

Ulster Bank has today brought back the iconic 1980s children’s character Henri Hippo who introduced the idea of saving to a generation of Irish children nearly 30 years ago… At the re-launch of Henri Hippo, Richard Donnan, Managing Director of Ulster Bank Retail Markets said: “Henri Hippo will be fondly remembered by a generation of Irish adults who were introduced to the concept and habit of saving through a great sense of fun. Many of them will now have their own children to whom they will want to pass on a habit that will have served them well down through the years. We want to help parents encourage and motivate their children to save.”

From here

There is something larger here about nostalgia marketing and the time cycles that seem to be involved. I don’t know how ‘new’ the use of nostalgia is in marketing, but it seems to be running on a 20 – 30 year cycle at the moment.

In 1998, Nicolas Bourriaud actually wrote about this in relation to contemporary art, pointing out how art in the 80s drew from the ‘visual effectiveness’ of 60s Pop, and art in the nineties seemed to ‘identify’ with trends from the 70s, including a sense of crisis, saying

Fashion can thus create aesthetic microclimates which affect the way we read recent history.

*Amateur Hour, a showcase at Self Interest and Sympathy for new learning, knowledge, skill or entertainment* Submissions welcome to selfinterestandsympathy [at] gmail.com

Arthur C. Brooks has written a great series of posts over at Freakonomics about personal happiness, according to politics, religion and the relative extremes of these beliefs. He’s recently published a book on Gross National Happiness.

Among his findings/ conjectures are that Conservatives Are Happier than Liberals. 

A commenter says:

One possibility that springs to mind: Perhaps people who label themselves as “extremely” liberal or “extremely” conservative are also more likely to call themselves “very” happy. That is, someone who uses immoderate terms to describe his political views might also use immoderate terms to describe his degree of personal happiness — and that might reflect a difference in rhetorical style rather than a difference in life satisfaction.

There’s a correlation here between happiness and faith, it seems.

Earlier in the year I was at a seminar for utopian studies where the issue of religion and utopian thinking arose (this was specifically in relation to science fiction literature, and ‘religion’ seemed a relatively disparaging term in the way it was used).

This led me to wonder, could being an atheist - or at least lacking a belief in the afterlife - lead to an inability to imagine the future?

This is a version of an article recently published in the Visual Artist’s Newsheet. It’s a response to a roundtable discussion titled ‘Creativity versus Commodity’, organised for Colin Darke’s exhibition at Temple Bar Galleries, Dublin, written about here. [February 8th 2008]

The Capital Paintings evolved from Darke’s earlier work, Capital, where the artist transcribed the entire text of Marx’s three volumes of ‘Das Capital’ onto 480 2D objects, all mounted in A4 laminates. With The Capital Paintings, Darke has returned to the previous work, reconsidering and re-presenting every piece in the earlier work as a to-scale oil painting on canvas, though removing the layer of text previously written over each object. Thus, ‘Darke flips the previous process, the ready made becomes the ‘unique’ art object, the banal commodity further commodified and rarified via its display in the gallery context’. (1) The format of Darke’s work replicates the Christmas ‘selling show’ it immediately followed, and promotes this obvious slippage.

Where Capital was perhaps a distant cousin of Marx’s text, the Capital Paintings are a familial relation at another remove from the initial work, and a further remove still from Marx. Nevertheless, he hovers as the invisible referent.

Sarah Pierce chaired the discussion, which, titled ‘Creativity versus Commodity’, set up from the very beginning a problematic polarity of these two terms. Pierce opened with remarks that questioned the usefulness of this supposed opposition, proposing the notion of a ‘circular economy’ that we are all implicated in, but it proved a difficult opposition to shift.

David Mabb, currently showing work with Darke in the Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast, read an extract of the text he had written for the collaborative catalogue for this show. In this context, the artists became critics/ presenters of each other’s work, and Mabb’s presentation reflected specifically on Darke’s practice in relation to a Marxist discourse. He contends that there are two ways of looking at the series of paintings; either as a ‘labour of love’, or as a process of increasing alienation. Do the paintings promote a rarefied production of fine art objects (the tradition of oil painting on canvas); or, coming from a non-painter, do they advocate for a craft production of sorts? Mabb asserts that it’s the precarious ‘wobble’ between these positions that makes the work ‘successful’.

Christina Kennedy, Head of Collections at IMMA, was the representative of the art institution at the table. She placed the discussion within a broader international context of artistic and curatorial interest in issues of economy and commodity, mentioning two recent exhibitions, Not for Sale, curated by Alana Heiss at PS1, New York, and For Sale, curated by Jens Hoffman in Lisbon. She picked up on previous elements of Darke’s practice, locating his earlier work within the tradition of institutional critique, specifically referring to earlier temporary pieces where texts were written on institutional walls as a strategy to resist commodification.

She proposed that the museum as an institution has now been ‘exonerated’ and can act as a cultural custodian that acts to prevent resale. She speaks of the new institution of the art fair as ‘capitalism at its zenith’ and describes how some artists may ‘succumb’ to these forces of ‘extreme commodification’. The idea that artistic integrity somehow vanishes in the context of an art fair is a curious one, and the suggestion that artists might somehow resist this system by withholding production is startling. After all, an artificial shortage of art objects is no less a market tactic than one artist she mentions who produces series of small, saleable works (in the artists’ own words, ‘slut paintings’).

Maeve Connolly pointed out that the current exhibition did not really sit within this register of institutional critique, acting as it did as a uniquely flexible grid of 480 paintings that could be easily exhibited in multiple formats. The scale and the cost of the work actually points to a museum as the likely purchaser, and in fact there is no particular reticence on the artist’s behalf in relation to selling it. Sarah Pierce likewise suggests that institutional critique is a practice actively supported by museums and that such positions have shed their oppositional tendencies.

Jesse Jones made a circumspect presentation that opened with a reflection on the place of talkers and listeners in such situations as these, and how knowledge production operates as a commodity that informs, adds to or diminishes the value of a given artwork, gallery or artist-as-brand. Once we talk, write and use language around an artwork, we bolster and build its commodity value. Of course, mentioning Marx, whether a serious reference or a mere name-drop ironically adds to the cachet and marketability of particular artworks too.  She rejects the conflation of ‘commodities’ with ‘objects’ as a conceptual cul-de-sac, and also spoke of a need to address the processes of commodification at work within newer modes of practice such as collaborative, community or participatory practices.

In addition to being self-reflexive about the conditions of the discussion, and the knowledge production that such a scenario entails, Jones was self-conscious about her response to the exhibition, and to art work generally. She described a self-consciously ‘schizophrenic’ response to artworks that invoked her twin identities as an artist and as a Marxist. Cautioning against ‘the fairytale of communism’, she warned against a reading of Marx that becomes a bedtime story, inducing slumber rather than an awakening.

Sarah Pierce tried to tease out some of these ideas of artistic labour that loomed large in this exhibition in relation to other forms of labour and production. If knowledge production is commodified, how is this done, and for whom? While artists may be alienated from their product, it’s unlikely that they are alienated from their labour… ‘I am autonomous, I am free, I am working all the time’.

Declan Long made a similar point to Connolly and Jones earlier in relation to the production of knowledge and the role of art education, drawing attention to how education itself and the very experience of this gallery talk (chiefly populated by students and lecturers) is totally embedded in these processes. Critical engagement or consumption produces commodities too… artists may often find that their time is worth more to talk or write about art than to make it.

This sense of expansion in relation to ideas of labour and creativity relate better to contemporary economic models than ideas of ‘Commodity’ that seem weighty and awkwardly attached to objects. Unfortunately the discussion only managed to escape this territory in brief moments, such as when Aislinn O’Donnell queried the ‘dated-ness’ of the whole debate, and asked, what is a commodity now? Clearly art, like other economies, is becoming increasingly based on the provision of services and experiences rather than the production of goods. She challenged Darke that the process of making this work does not capture or address how the economy has diversified and changed.

Joan Fowler contended that the discussion was in danger of reifying the artist’s labour. How does ‘labour’ relate to ‘making’? She cautions against valuing labour in an unquestioning kind of way. 

Following the presentations, Sarah Pierce highlighted the absence of ‘creativity’ within the debate, and wondered about what happens to the ‘things’ no longer of value for use or exchange. She connected this to an idea of anonymity and invokes Foucault’s idea of the ‘anonymity of the murmur’ – things that cannot be easily claimed or owned by any one person. A major gap in the discussion, in relation to contemporary economies and creative social and cultural practices, were the creative commons, open source and copyleft movements. This is testament only to the sense of inertia the terms of the discussion induced.

The solidity of this language is in dramatic contrast to the dynamic language and nomenclature that surrounds ‘The Economy’. I’ve been keeping a list of these different economic conceptualisations that so far includes the Tapeworm Economy (2), the Attention Economy (3), the Rhizome Economy (4), The Experience Economy (5), the Bridget Jones Economy (6), the Karaoke Economy (7). These terms are in addition to the now commonplace Creative and Knowledge Economies.

Tim Stott describes how boredom relates to alienation, and wonders if maybe boredom provides a potential stumbling block to processes of commodification – boredom as resistance? This is in the context of a capitalism that ‘produces moods’.

It seems clear that processes of commodification are increasingly related to the generation of knowledge or services rather than objects – generally cheaper to mobilize and more easily sold. Creativity in the marketplace is often manifested as a conjuring trick that generates ‘something out of nothing’: currently, the most profitable websites do not sell objects, and barely sell services – they sell ephemeral networks and structures. YouTube, MySpace, Facebook do not produce anything. They only produce the opportunity for users to generate their own content.

Economists and social commentators are split over this web 2.0 phenomenon that sees the proliferation of free or pirated music and software, bedroom TV, podcasts and so on. While some (including James Suroweicki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds) could be described as techno-utopianists that see web 2.0 as a massive democratising force in cultural production, others such as Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, see this kind of unbridled creativity as ultimately damaging to standards of established quality and a threat to cultural institutions (be they Tower Records shops or the Guggenheim). This is mainly because such cheap, democratic creativity does not have to be paid for to be consumed. When the producers become their own self-satisfied audience, other more established forms of cultural production may wither. In this situation, it would seem that if artists are to resist the forces of commodification, they must do so cautiously.

A voice I can’t identify in the audience asks whose labour do we reify? Can we radicalize a practice by speaking about one person and their labour?

Are commodities evil?  Is labour good? It seems we are locked in a dance with very established questions.

NOTES

1. Temple Bar Galleries press release, February 2008
2. www.karavans.com/tapeworm.html
3. www.readwriteweb.com/archives/attention_economy_overview.php
4. 4. www.jeffvail.net/2006/04/rhizome-theory-directory.html
5. 5. The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage, Joseph Pine, James H. Gilmore, Harvard Business Press, 1999
6. 6. ‘ Singles and the City’ in The Economist, December 20^th 2001
7. 7. Jonas Ridderstrale and Kjell a Nordström, Karaoke Capitalism, Greenwood, 2005. www.karaokecapitalism.com

Sunny day at IMMA*:

Wheelchair ramp to crappy bookshop

None to ladies’ toilets

*Irish Museum of Modern Art

Photos by Sarah Browne, Berlin Fleamarket, April 2008.

The curatorial premise of Adam Szymczyk and Elena Filopovic was of a ‘diurnal’ biennale, with an exhibition on show during the day, and different programmed events to happen every night. With four different venues, little or no information available on artists outside of the mediation programme, or labels on works, this strategy acknowledged and emphasised the partiality of the exhibition experience.

This was to be welcomed in some respects, as I found that I tried harder to engage with the work than I might normally do, especially considering that many of the artists were unknown to me. However, the flipside of this was that when you did get really interested in an artist or a given piece of work, it was difficult to find out more, or even to remember their name. Participating artists are not foregrounded on the biennale website which results of course in a presentation that is much more curator-centric than artist-centred. Which I suppose is not bad in itself, but I know what side my bread is buttered on.

This exhibition was as demanding for participating artists as for the viewer, with the majority of the work being commissioned especially for the biennale and/ or the Berlin context. Berlin is probably now the world capital for art production, with artists from all around the world coming to live and make their work there, typically earning their money elsewhere. There has been a rash of responses to the city’s post-communist legacy too in recent years: both Tacita Dean and Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani (all of whom live in the city) have made film works in response to the Fernsehturm, for example. Often, these works are made in Berlin and shown elsewhere, redolent with the yellowing glamour of the fading communist past.

So the challenge of context is particularly important to this biennale, as some of these artworks ‘come home’ or are exhibited in the place of their making. The works in the Neue National Gallerie faced the formidable task, not of being installed in a white cube, but rather in a clear glass box (designed by Mies van de Rohe, no less). Many of these works explicitly dealt with historical legacies of modernism and/ or communism. What was odd and unexpected for me was how the building’s presence exerted itself on the works: all marble floors, glass walls and wood panelling, it inferred on certain works a distinctly dated decorative aesthetic, and maybe leached out some of their intended irony or criticality. Work that could have been light grew heavy. A standout piece here was Susan Hiller’s The Last Silent Movie, an audio piece projected onto a suspended screen near the centre of the gallery.

The Last Silent Movie opens the unvisited, silent archives of extinct and endangered languages to create a composition of voices that are not silent. They are not silent because someone is listening… some of them sing, some tell stories, some recite vocabulary lists and some of them, directly or indirectly, accuse us, the listeners, of injustice.

(From here)

The array of flags hanging outside the exterior of the building, announcing the Biennale’s presence, were visible behind the projection screen. This is quite a beautiful work in itself and becomes a wonderfully subtle and nuanced response to the biennale context. Likewise, What Every Gardener Knows is an arresting audio piece installed in the Skulpturenpark that is based on Mendel’s theory of inherited traits, a discovery later used to justify the so-called ’science’ of eugenics, which proposed the elimination of all individuals who carried ‘undesirable’ inherited traits. The work was originally commissioned for the exhibition “Genius Locii” in Stadtpark Lahr (Schwarzwald) resonating differently in Berlin, but not off-key. (The MP3 can be downloaded here)

In contrast, the work of Turkish artist Ahmet Ögüt, titled Ground Control, was originally made and shown in Istanbul, and the use of asphalt was intended to evoke the looming threats of globalised development in Turkey. The intended meaning of this work is completely illegible in the context of a white cube in Berlin, where the most obvious referents for this gesture would be the Minimalist floor sculptures of Carl Andre, or the incisive interventions by Michael Asher in the lineage of institutional critique. Not to consider how such a work might travel is puzzling. The ‘official’ reading given by the gallery mediators roots the works ‘meaning’ to a fixed origin in Turkey. This attempted rigidity of interpretation is a willful blindspot in relation to the swift flow of global capital and cultural currency.

Solid works by Ulrike Mohr and also looked to the city’s recent communist past. Mohr’s intervention consisted of transplanted wild trees from the ruins of the Palast der Republik, placed in the same configuration in the Skulpturenpark. Pedro Barateiro remade two Soviet bus shelters as contemplative reading stations for his pamphlet, The Naked City, which can be read at the artist’s blog.

The outstanding work for me at BB5 was Lars Laumann’s video work Berliner Mauer, that followed the marriage of one Swedish woman to the Berlin Wall: she is ‘objecto sexual’ and avowedly apolitical. During the course of the video, she discusses at length her complex sexuality in a tone that accords her a certain gravity and dignity – I at least felt that the artist had treated her respectfully and that exploitation was not at issue in the work. (Much of the commentary, all in her own words, is transcribed from her own extensive website). She describes in detail the almost indescribable despair at the ‘disaster’ of 1989 and also her sexual relationship with her object-husband. Their could not be a much more entangled relationship between the personal (bodily) and the political (albeit denied). A response to Berlin’s communist legacy that approaches from the side rather than head-on, this work created more possible responses than it closed down.

There’s an excellent review of BB5, written by an exhibition mediator, over at Paramnesia Berlin