CABINET

A quarterly magazine of art and culture Issue 2 Spring 2001 US $8 Canada $12

Cabinet Immaterial Incorporated 181 Wyckoff Street Brooklyn NY 11217 USA tel + 1 718 222 8434 fax + 1 718 222 3700 email cabinet@immaterial.net www.immaterial.net/cabinet Cabinet (ISSN1531-1430) is published four times a year by Immaterial Incorporated. Immaterial is a non-profit art and culture organization incorporated in New York State. Contributions to Immaterial Incorporated and Cabinet magazine are tax-deductible under Section 501 (c) (3) of the Internal Revenue Service code and may be sent to our address above, in return for which we will send you a framed letter of thanks bearing Immaterials imitable corporate seal. Cabinet is in part supported by generous grants from the Flora Foundation and the Frankel Foundation. Printed in Belgium by Snoeck-Ducaju and Zoon Editors-in-chief Brian Conley and Sina Najafi Editors Saul Anton and Gregory Williams Art director Richard Massey Editors-at-large Mats Bigert and Allen S. Weiss Image editor Naomi Ben-Shahar Website Luke Murphy and Kristofer Widholm Contributing editors Joe Amrhein, Molly Bleiden, Eric Bunge, Christoph Cox, Cletus Dalglish-Schommer, Pip Day, Steve Fishman, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Dejan Krsic, Ilisa Lam, Jesse Lerner, Tan Lin, Roxana Marcoci, Ricardo de Oliveira, Phillip Scher, Rachel Schreiber, David Serlin, Lytle Shaw, Debra Singer, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Jay Worthington Copy editor Sara Cameron Prepress Zvi @ Digital Ink Subscriptions One-year subscriptions United States/Canada US $24 Mexico US $28 Europe US $34 Airmail Other US $38 Airmail Please send a check made out to Cabinet to our office address above. You can also subscribe using a credit card via our website at www.immaterial.net / cabinet. We strongly prefer checks if possible. Phone + 1 718 222 8434, fax + 1 718 222 3700, or email subscriptions@immaterial.net for further information. Please include your email address in all correspondence. Advertising Email advertising@immaterial.net or call + 1 718 222 8434 We accept and welcome unsolicited manuscripts. Please send all proposals and manuscripts to our office or by email to proposals@immaterial.net. We cannot be responsible for returning manuscripts or unsolicited original artworks. The views published in Cabinet are not necessarily those of the writers, let alone the publishers of Cabinet. Contents 2001 the authors and Immaterial Incorporated. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction of any material here is forbidden without prior permission. Seor Postmaster: Send address changes to Cabinet, 181 Wyckoff Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217, USA.

Cover: David Shrigley, Untitled, 2000

Contributors

Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock is an artist and a music lover. He lives in New York City. Rudolf Arnheim is currently retired and living in Michigan. In addition to being the first and only professor of the psychology of art at Harvard, Arnheim has taught at the University of Michigan, Sarah Lawrence College, and the New School for Social Research. Magnus Brts is an artist and writer based in Stockholm. Brts has previously been on the editorial board of the Swedish magazines 90TAL and Index. He teaches at the University College of Arts and Crafts in Stockholm and is also a lecturer and examiner at the art colleges in Ume and Gothenburg. Sebastian Brecht has been making art-inspired desserts for ten years and plans to open a shop in New York in the near future. He lives in New York City. Sara Cameron is an editor and cultural theorist. She treasures her Las Vegas roots, but calls Brooklyn her home. Andrea Codrington is a New Yorkbased writer specializing in design and visual culture. She is editorial director at the American Institute of Graphic Arts and a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Harpers Bazaar, and I.D. Carrie Cooperider is an artist living in New York. She is also the Director of Education at Snug Harbor Cultural Center on Staten Island, New York. Christoph Cox teaches philosophy, critical theory, and contemporary music at Hampshire College. He is the author of Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation. A regular contributor to The Wire, Artforum, and Pulse!, he is currently editing a sourcebook of writings on theories and practices in music since 1948. Fredrik Ekman is a lyricist and writer based in Stockholm. His articles have appeared in Svenska Dagbladet, Allt om Bcker, BLM, and Dagens Nyheter. Ekman was previously a member of the editorial board of the Swedish cultural magazine 90TAL. His musical works have toured in Europe. Jeff Gibson is an artist and writer living in Brooklyn. A former senior editor of Art & Text, he is currently production manager of Artforum and managing editor of Bookforum. Excerpted in this issue are definitions taken from his self-published artists book dupe: a partial compendium of everyday delusions. David Gissen is Associate Curator for Architecture and Design at The National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. He is currently developing an exhibition on human conveyance (elevators, escalators and moving sidewalks) and one on flying buildings.

Uta Grundmann has worked as a freelance journalist, art critic, and graphic designer since 1992. She was formerly an editor at the German art magazine Neue bildende kunst: Zeitschrift fr Kunst und Kritik. David Hawkes is associate professor of English at Lehigh University and the author of Ideology. His new book, Idols of the Market-place: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in Renaissance English Literature will be published by Palgrave Press in 2001. Kim Jones is an artist based in New York City. His performances as Mudman began in the 1970s and have continued until today. Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss is an architect from Belgrade living in New York City. He is a founder of Normal Group for Architecture and one of the authors of the upcoming book Harvard Guide to Shopping with Rem Koolhaas and a group of thesis students from Harvard University. Jovanovic Weiss is a contributing editor of Cabinet. Jeffrey Kastner, a contributing editor of Art & Text, writes on contemporary art and culture for publications including The Economist and The New York Times. He lives in New York. Vladimir Kulic is an architect living in Belgrade. He is co-editor of the forthcoming Belgrade Architecture. Jim Lambie is an artist living and working in Glasgow. He is represented by Anton Kern in New York City. An-My L is an artist living in New York City. She teaches photography at Bard College. Jesse Lerner is a filmmaker currently working on The American Egypt, an experimental documentary about the history of the Yucatan. Mark Lombardi lived and worked in New York. His estate is represented by Pierogi Gallery, New York. Bo Lnnqvist is a professor in European Ethnology at the University of Jyvskyl in Finland. He contributes a column on cultural criticism to Hufvudstadsbladet, Finlands largest Swedish-language newspaper. Thomas Mulcaire is an artist and curator living between Cape Town and New York. Most recently his work has been exhibited at the 1998 Sao Paolo Biennial and at Marian Goodman in Paris. He is currently producing a film called Johnny inside the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Sina Najafi is co-editor in chief of Cabinet.

Ricardo de Oliveira is an artist living in New York City. His work has been featured in major international exhibits, including the 1995 Venice Biennale. He is currently working on a public art project to be launched in the spring of 2001. Frances Richard is a writer who lives in Brooklyn. She is a frequent contributor to Artforum and the nonfiction editor of the literary journal Fence. Warren Sack is a software designer and media theorist. Prior to joining the faculty at University of California Berkeley in the fall of 2000, Sack was a research scientist at the MIT Media Laboratory and a member of the Interrogative Design Group at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies. Christian Scheidemann studied art history and the conservation of medieval paintings in Germany. Based in Hamburg, he has worked as a freelance conservator since 1983, specializing in contemporary art. David Serlin is a contributing editor to Cabinet. His forthcoming books include Artificial Parts and Practical Lives: Histories of Modern Prosthetics and Replaceable You: Engineering the American Body after World War II. David Shrigley is a Glasgow-based artist who has published numerous books of drawings, the most recent of which can be found at www.pkbs.co.uk and at www.redstonepress.co.uk. Michael Stevenson is a New Zealand artist living in Berlin. He is represented by Lombard-Freid Fine Arts in New York and Galerie Kapinos in Berlin. Mark Sussman teaches at New York University College and is co-founder of Great Small Works, a puppet theater company based in New York City. Sven-Olov Wallenstein is a philosopher and an art critic living in Stockholm. He teaches art theory at the University College of Arts and Crafts and philosophy at the University of Sdertrn, both located in Stockholm. He is co-founder of the Art Node Foundation in Stockholm and a contributing editor of Cabinet. Allen S. Weiss teaches at the Performance Studies and Cinema Studies Departments at New York University. He is the author of numerous books, including Phantasmic Radio. Weiss is an editor-at-large at Cabinet. Gregory Williams is an art critic and writer living in New York. He is also an editor of Cabinet. Slavoj Zizek is a philosopher and a researcher at Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Vienna. He is the author of many books, including The Fragile Absolute and The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime.

Contents

Columns

12 15 17 18 21 23 25 29 33 36 40 42 46 48 50 53 54 62 65 70 70 74 76 82 86 89 89 90 95 103 108 110 110 11, 38, 51, 101, 112 0

Colors Andrea Codrington The clean room David Serlin Leftovers Carrie Cooperider Ingestion Allen S. Weiss Breathable food David Gissen Hobo nickels Jeffrey Kastner Transformative technologies Sven-Olov Wallenstein Brigdo Lara: post-pre-Columbian ceramicist Jesse Lerner From Western Marxism to Western Buddhism Slavoj Zizek The Center for Cultural Decontamination Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss & Vladimir Kulic Core samples Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock Abstract concrete: Francisco Lpez and the ontology of sound Christoph Cox Caribbean moonlight, Canadian sunset Jim Lambie Dupe: a partial compendium of everyday delusions Jeff Gibson And I thought church was fun Sara Cameron Without shadows: histories of utopia Allen S. Weiss The standard for eggs-in-shell United Nations/Economic Commission for Europe Holiday in Cambodia David Hawkes Small wars An-My L February 4 Tom Mulcaire Sambizanga project Ricardo de Oliveira Fall of Saigon/Panamarenko Michael Stevenson Utterance is place enough Frances Richard Mapping very large-scale conversations Warren Sack The offshore phenomenon: dirty banking in a brave new world Mark Lombardi The recent drawings: an overview Mark Lombardi George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stephens insert by Mark Lombardi Psychocivilization Jos Delgado interviewed by Magnus Brts & Fredrik Ekman The intelligence of vision Rudolf Arnheim interviewed by Uta Grundmann Conserving latex and liverwurst Christian Scheidemann interviewed by Gregory Williams Confessions of a Finnish pastry eater Bo Lnnqvist interviewed by Sina Najafi Architecture and dessert Mark Sussman Commissioned pastry: The Brecht Sebastian Brecht Drawings David Shrigley Postcard project Kim Jones

Shorts

Random

Conversations, charted

Interviews

And

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Columns

Colors Beige Andrea Codrington Beige is the color of evil, or at least thats what Aaron Priven thinks. Priven, the author of the Internets only website dedicated to that most unassuming of hues, writes: Most people think if colors have attributes such as good or evil, that the color of evil is either the red of arterial blood gushing from a wound, or the deepest black of the darkest night sky. While these are certainly evil colors, they are not as evil as beige.... The most evil color has to appear benign.1 Priven might just have a point. At first blush, of course, the color beige might have all kinds of comforting associationsfrom oatmeal, that pabulum of wintertime childhoods, to a worn-to-softness pair of trousers. But beige is also the color of deceit and oppression. Khaki, after all, originated in mid-19th-century colonial India, where it took its name from the Urdu term for dusty. It was in the altogether differentbut no less exoticlocale of Transvaal that the British first realized that donning dun-colored uniforms while fighting the Boer locals would help them sneakily blend into their dried-out South African surroundings. Thereafter, khaki replaced regimental blues and reds and became a military staple the world overas well as the building block of any hot-climate camouflage pattern. One can easily find other examples of beiges pernicious ability to blend into the background at the political and sociocultural level. Just consider the Hannah ArendtJohn Mellencamp continuum. What does a German-born left-leaning political critic hold in common with a hard-living Midwestern rock star? Arendt, whose 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem gives a firsthand account of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, was one of the first 20th-century thinkers to set forth the idea that evil was represented as much in this world by banality as by anything that could be called sinister. She based this observation on Eichmanns behavior during the trial, which was marked by total thoughtlessness: clich speech patterns, a lack of critical ability, and unthinking obedience to authority. (As a Nazi, of course, Eichmann also tended to wear beige uniforms.) Exactly 30 years later, John Mellencamp came out with a song that further implicated the relationship between banality, evil, and

the color beige: Its just beige to beige Thats all it is these days, Little windows for you to crawl through. You just do whats expected of you. Its just beige to beige to beige These days. Of course, Mellencamps formula that routine (beige) equals constraint equals evil is a rock-and-roll staple. It is also at the very core of the advertising techniques that drive contemporary consumerism, as Thomas Frank has pointed out in The Conquest of Cool. Commercial fantasies of rebellion, liberation and outright revolution against the stultifying demands of mass society, he writes, are commonplace almost to the point of invisibility in advertising, movies and television programming.2 In a cultural moment predicated on visual flamboyance, beige is indeed the enemy. It is a truism that when the economy is doing well, colors brighten (hence the Great Depressions nickname as the Taupe Age). According to the Color Marketing Group, the countrys most influential color forecasting organization, colors like Mazenta (A new twist on magenta that leaps from retro right into the future) and Fuschion (An active, unisex pink that is both sporty and glamorous) will be dominant in 2001which leaves beige beyond the pale. Apple Computers, one of the most obvious progenitors of the consumption-as-rebellion method of advertising, is now in the position of distancing itself from decades of cranking out what tech aficionados disparagingly term beige toasters. These days, Apple heralds each season with a splashy introduction of new colors for its lollipop-reminiscent iMac. An interview with iMac designer Jonathan Ive on Apples website even bears a headline that reads Sorry, no beigethus shifting blame from the company to the color. (Interestingly, when German designer Hartmut Esslinger first created the original Macintosh in 1984, the company lovingly referred to the beige box as Snow White.) Of course to every revolution there is a counter-revolution, and recent years have seen a return of low-key colors in fashion. But far from representing suburban normality or old-school comfort, highstyle beige is all sharp tongue and urban angularity. Beige is like the martini of color, says New York-based club organizer Erich Conrad in a 1997 Esquire article called Ecru Brut. Its quiet but toxic.

Colors is a column in which a guest writer is asked to respond to a specific color assigned by the editors of Cabinet. The Clean Room, David Serlins column on science and technology, appears in each issue of Cabinet. Leftovers is a column in which Cabinet invites a guest to discuss leftovers or detritus from a cultural perspective. Ingestion, a column on cuisine, sthetics, and philosophy, presents Allen S. Weisss Gastronomic Alphabet in three parts. The final installment will appear in the next issue.

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Previous page David Shrigley Untitled, 2000

Beige (C6, M9, Y23, K0)

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There is certainly some evidence to the contrary. Those frenetic jitterbugging commercials for Gap Khakis seem to reposition beige as the methamphetamine of color. But whatever your poison, too much of either might land you in the infirmary. And according to Sir Elton Johnwho knows a thing or two about substance abuse and sartorial extravagancebeige is one color that should be kept in the clinic. At a VH-1 Fashion Awards show a few years ago, John spoke out against boutiques looking like hospitals, selling a lot of beige suits. Evil. Toxic. Hospital-like. Could these terms really apply to a hue that Websters describes as the color of undyed wool? Could the wolf really be dressed in sheeps clothing?A quick numerological evaluation of color chip 468C in Pantones ubiquitous matching system reveals an astounding answer. Adding the colors three numbers amounts to the number 18. And we all know that the number 18 results when you combine 6 + 6 + 6.
1 See

Japan as well as the corporate corridors of Madison Avenue. One could easily spot, for example, the influence of Scopitones endless configurations of dance party choreography on 1998s crop of advertisements for Gap khakis by graphic artist and video director Mike Mills. A smorgasbord of moody ballads, long-lost dance crazes, and lessthan-one-hit wonders, the Scopitone parade includes everything from French pop diva Franoise Hardys Tous Les Garons et Les Filles, filmed between Ferris wheel cars and girls petticoats at a Parisian street carnival, to George Mc-Kelveys My Teenage Fallout Queen, an unfunny folk protest parody dedicated to suburban radiation nightmares; to Joi Lansings The Web of Love, a camp spectacular involving witch doctors, human-sized spider webs, and a surfeit of impossibly large breasts. Scopitones are a cinema buffs wet celluloid dream. According to the Society for the Restoration and Preservation of Scopitone Jukeboxes and Films in Daly City, California, French and US record companies produced more than 700 Scopitones between 1960 and 1967. Collectors and unsuspecting junk dealers regularly uncover lost or rare examples of the genre from industrial warehouses and suburban garages alike. In addition, the high camp, soft-porn dimensions of Scopitonesreferenced even by Susan Sontag in her seminal 1964 essay Notes on Camphave made them mandatory viewing amongst connoisseurs of early 1960s mass-market kitsch and mavens of that eras amateur erotica, porn, and sexploitation films. Yet for all the sthetic pleasure that Scopitone images ultimately provide, watching them as 16-millimeter projections or as VHS videos gives them a partially elevated cinematic shape, one that is, in fact, quite removed from the films more popular and low-brow origins. The term Scopitone itself refers not to the films but to the machines on which the films were first introduced to the viewing public. Scopitone players, bulky forerunners of the video jukebox, were mechanical, coin-operated vending machines outfitted with 30 viewing screens and internal mech-anisms that delivered a selection of short 16-millimeter films on demand. To a certain degree, then, the critical fixation on Scopitones cinematic qualities obscures the more complex technological legacy that lurks beneath the groovy music and white go-go boots. In the late 1940s a cadre of French film enthusiasts gained access to a huge surplus of 16-millimeter film cameras used for high-altitude reconnaissance missions. While they had already developed a way to convert these surplus cameras into film projectors, it was not until the late 1950s

that they configured the projector housings to accom-modate a programmable, rotating carousel that could hold a vertical stack of up to 36 short films. By 1960, the group had perfected their product and sold their design through a newly-organized company, CAMCAan acronym for the baroque-sounding Compagnie dApplications Mecaniques a LElectronique au Cinema et a lAtomistique. They named their inventions Scopitones. In 1964, CAMCA sold North American distribution rights to a Chicago-based billboard company, Tel-A-Sign, which specialized in building customized neon signage for restaurants and bowling alleys. The success of vending machine technology in the United States combined with the popularity of consumer video electronics was enough to convince distributors of coin-operated machines to add Scopitones to their sales list. The large-format plastic cabinets and view screens, a sure sell, seemed positively visionary, the enviable products of a spaceage culture lulled into soporific succor by the push-button ease of passive entertainment. The meteoric rise and spectacular fall of TelA-Signa company that made and lost millions in less than a decadeand film production companies such as Debbie Reynoldss Harmanee, the source of most great domestic Scopitones, has been charted in a 1999 essay by film historian Jack Stevenson. In The Jukebox that Ate the Cocktail Lounge: The Story of Scopitone,1 Stevenson tells the Scopitone story as a uniquely American, fallen corporate fantasia involving Miami Beach lawyers, Senate investigations into mob activity, and the indignant wrath of the fundamentalist Christian right. By 1965, TelA-Signs most triumphant year, thousands of Scopitone machines installed throughout the United States showed off scores of new promotional films that were made by industry-owned production companies and shipped out like cases of Harveys Bristol Cream by vast networks of film distributors. By 1969, however, pending lawsuits against and bankruptcy applications by Tel-A-Sign had destroyed the domestic Scopitone empire. The machines became forgotten relics of niche-marketed consumer technology, even though the production of music films by record companies did not abate until the early 1970s. The Beatles promotional video for Hello Goodbye, to name but one example, was filmed on 10 November 1967, the same day that I was born. Although the Scopitones mystique as an icon of popular entertainment was fading by the end of the 1960s, within a few years a large proportion of the original CAMCA projection mechanisms inside Scopitone players were reassembled for alternative ideological uses. In the United States,

www.geocities.com/Paris/9386/. Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 4.
2 Thomas

The clean room Love machines: unwinding the technology of the Scopitone David Serlin Last summer, I spent a warm evening at a rooftop party in Park Slope, Brooklyn, drinking beer and watching Scopitones, threeminute promotional films from the early 1960s, today regarded as precursors to the modern music video. On the tar-covered roof of a former boarding house, an audience of appreciative twenty-somethings and nostalgic baby boomers gathered to watch a single reel of perhaps 25 collected Scoptiones, which were shown on the white sidewall of a rowhouse through an ancient, metallic blue, school board-issue 16-millimeter projector. Gulping down what seemed like gallons of black celluloid stock, the projector hummed with a reassuring clarity while broadcasting these stylized, deeply saturated Technicolor films representing a lost Atlantis of postwar youth culture, one full generation before the birth of MTV. In recent years, Scopitones have acquired a certain cult status, providing inspiration for film festivals in the US, Europe, and

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for example, the same machines formerly used to show Scopitone films featuring button-down American balladeers and bosomy French chanteuses were installed at NASAs visitor centers at Houston and Cape Canaveral. The former video jukeboxes were outfitted with films of rocket launches and animated cartoons of future space colonies that promoted the wonders ofand sustained federal funding for rospace technology and research. The Scopitone came to dish out the visual propaganda with which NASA countered public indifference for the US space program in the 1970s. In France, the same Scopitone players into which French workers and teenagers had fed beaucoup de centimes were installed deep in rural coal mines, where they were supplied with reels of procedural and safety films. The same machines that happily objectified sexy pop moppets like Sylvie Vartan and Elvis look-a-like crooners (like Johnny Halliday, Vartans real-life husband) now helped shape French coal miners. The confusion was further compounded when films were screened for these same subjects in settings far removed from the familiar comfort of neighborhood cafs. For a generation of workers and vacationers of different classes located on opposite sides of the Atlantic, staring into the heart of the dark Scopitone to watch anything other than light entertainment must have produced stunning cognitive dissonance not unlike, one imagines, the experience of watching films made for Scopitone machines in the early 1960s while sitting on the rooftop of a Brooklyn rowhouse some forty years later. Fortunately, the Scopitone players militaryindustrial heritage does not seem to have tarnished the humble, low-tech sthetic that their promotional films preserve for contemporary viewers. The remaining films remind us that we are a generation trapped, for better or worse, in a media-literate and technology-savvy era in which many households regularly use digital video cameras, DVD players, and streaming QuickTime and RealPlayer cybercasts with a good deal of expertise. It is not difficult, as Stevenson points out, to draw parallels between the amateur cinematography of Scopitone films and the work of 1960s Pop auteurs like Andy Warhol, Russ Meyer, or brothers Mike and George Kuchar. At the same time, one is constantly reminded that Scopitones were intended from the beginning as an unapologetically commercial venture. Scopitone machines were planned originally for family-friendly venues like pizza parlors and bus terminals, even if they also surfaced in more swinging commercial spaces like after-hours nightclubs and bowling alley cocktail lounges. They were nothing more or less than hulking, glittering vending machines that offered products

16

Video stills from Jody Millers "Queen of the House"

not unlike those of other similar coin-operated machines that jet-set pleasure seekers wearing Oleg Cassini capes or Pierre Cardin pantsuits might have encountered in a hotel bar in Montreux, a seedy nightclub in Atlantic City, or in a porn theater in the rue St. Denis or (pre-Disney) Times Square. In this sense, the technology of the Scopitone, even more than the films that it played, is the missing link in a visual genealogy of popular sthetic forms of the latter half of the 20th century.
1 See

http://hjem.get2net.dk /jack_stevenson/ scopi.htm Sample footage from Scopitones is available on Cabinets website at www.immaterial.net/cabinet

Leftovers The secret collection Carrie Cooperider In the 1950s and 1960s, Katherine Evans Cooperider compiled a secret collection of European toilet paper. Although private collections are commonplace and widely displayed in museums and galleries, a secret collection is revealed only through the creation of an intimate pact or the intervention of accidental circumstances. It was the latter that brought my grandmothers collection to light. The single sheets of toilet tissue were discovered by us, her family, after her death, modestly housed in a manila envelope among other papers. I dont know what Gramma Kathy was thinking when she made her secret collection, though I can surmise the following motivations: a xenophobic delight in this most palpable proof of the inferiority of European culture (our toilet paper is much softer!); a kleptomaniacal satisfaction in finding the most economical and lightweight souvenirs imaginable; even an sthetic appreciation for the subtle nuances of the individual papers. What ever her reasons, she held on to the tissue for decades, even as the increasing circumscription of her living space caused other possessions to be jettisoned. As far as I know, she never breathed a word about her toilet paper collection to anyone. There is shame associated with the secret collection; there is an unspeakable reason for concealment. Though a highly pragmatic person and the daughter of farmers, Kathy was probably not insensitive to the stigma attached to all things bearing even a whiff of the excremental. And, as

17

Photos: Carrie Cooperider

with many covert collections, the issue of theft stole its way in. The toilet paper in her collection had never been for sale, nor was it a gift. I wonder: Did she surreptitiously hit WCs for which she had no immediate need, solely for the purpose of acquiring a new and unique sample for her collection? Did she rationalize it by telling herself that, after all, it was only a small amount? Or did she make a little deal with herself when visiting toilets for legitimate purposes: I will tear off X amount of paper, which I would have used for myself anyway, and then from that amount, save a bit for my collection, thus side-stepping the theft question? One sample is quite clear about proprietorshipits stamped Government Property. That she experienced a sense of culpability as a collector is revealed in the comment she inked on the sample from Toulouse: In box on wall with lockfound it unlocked. Due to the experience of living through the Depression and being a young widow with four children, my grandmother was possessed, necessarily, of a thrifty imagination: souvenirs, because they were unnecessary, were wasteful. To frivolously remove a needed commodity like toilet paper from its appropriate setting must have seemed unconscionable on some level. That her guilt was superceded by an exultant sense of her own good fortune is evidenced by the fact that she nonetheless claimed her prize. After this legacy entered my custodianship (through the grace of my father, who is the actual owner of the collection and from whom it is on more or less permanent loan), I built a special case for it made of cast-off furniture legs and empty French wine crates, fitted out with a demure little skirt. It became part of an installation I exhibited in New York. The installations inspiration came from a small leather-bound, gilt-edged journal I had found in a second-hand shop, completely blank save for an inscription in gold: My Trip to Europe, 1955, Ethel L. Mumma. The journal was ambiguous and the implicit narrative tantalizing. Perhaps Ethel only wished to go to Europe but never got further than the stationery store to purchase her book and gold penor perhaps she did go but was so busy with her new identity as a tourist that she never had the time to write. I fleshed out a portrait of Ethel through the installation, The Ethel L. Mumma European Wing of the Mundaneum/World Museum, which echoed the experience of visiting period rooms. As with all period rooms, it reflected not only historical but social context; Ethels desire to visit Europe seemed to me emblematic of a kind of 20th-century, middle-class American cul-

tural longinga nostalgia for a European heritage too distant to be authentic, coveted because it conferred a level of sophistication not available domestically, and despised because it was snooty and put on airs. In my imagination, Ethel L. Mumma became an alter ego for my grandmother, and I credited Ethel with some of my grandmothers experiences. In effect, I sent Ethel to Europe. With the toilet paper collection my grandmother (and Ethel) could indulge both their desire and disdain: They had been to Europe, seen its dazzling traditions of high culture, and returned with a kitsch souvenir that not only made clear the decisive difference between Americans and Europeans, but did it in a way that made a person feel lucky to be independent of Europes patrimony.

Ingestion A personal gastronomic alphabet, part II Allen S. Weiss I Some like the new, some the old, some everything, some nothing at all. There exists a gastronomic imperative of the first person singular. Not as subjective choice, but as determinable style. Not as rhetorical inflection, but as existential openness. It is precisely the issue of such point of viewthe Nietzschean question of who is speaking that determines our faith in a given gastronomic discourse and establishes a common level of gastronomic interaction. The most pointed comparison might be that of different restaurant guides. The year 1900 was a key moment in modern gastronomy, as it marked the appearance of the first Guide Michelin (recently republished in a centennial facsimile edition), soon followed by Escoffiers Le guide culinaire in 1903. This tandem would codify a certain French culinary tradition that was both a 19th-century reality and a 20th-century ideal, solidifying a myth that still exists, however attenuated. Escoffiers encyclopedic compilation of recipes and techniques long constituted the lineaments of quality and style that were interiorized by the anonymous, panoptic Michelin mechanism, thus becoming the (often inappropriate) standards by which cuisine was judged in an expanded, increasingly democratized 20th-century version. As the discourse and criticism of French cuisine began to encompass, however hesitantly, regional, peasant, and familial cuisines (as well as an increasing influx of foreign and experimental foodstuffs and techniques), the culinary presuppositions behind the

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Michelin standards were revealed as glaringly inadequate; yet change was to come slowly. In the course of this century, the dialectic between tradition and invention would be played out within the culinary arts, with the Michelin as a conservative touchstone for all other critiqueit is precisely the anonymity and stylelessness of the Michelin that makes it useful, yet risky. In guides of narrower rangesuch as the now famed Gault-Millau, at least in its early versions (before Henri Gault and Christian Millau became institutionalized as Gault-Millau), or the wonderful series of small guides to French country inns entitled French Leave, written by the perspicacious Englishman Richard Binnswe can come directly to know the likes and dislikes of the authors, measure their intuitions and foibles, gauge the gastronomic differences between the critics and ourselves, and consequently choose restaurants and dishes accordingly. In such works, one may and must read between the lines. To the contrary, guides such as the immensely popular Zagats seriesastute statistical compilations of readers reactions, instantiating La Rochefoucaulds dictum that, Our taste is no longer our own, we no longer command it, it changes without our consentare truly populist enterprises. Here, our own opinions, which become part of a statistical sampling, are precisely what exist between the lines. What Michelin is to tradition and Gault-Millau is to innovation, French Leave is to intimacy and Zagats is to consensus. j Junk food. Cultural studies has motivated vast amounts of writing on fast food and junk food conceived as a major sociological phenomenon; they are occasionally also considered in culinary terms, either as a counter-ideal opposed to the heights of transcendental cuisine, or as a means to argue for the total subjectivization or nonhierarchization of culinary values. Howeverwhile usually avoiding arguments on these matters, since they originate in a very different, indeed antithetical universe of values from my ownI still await the word of a great chef who claims any inspiration whatsoever from such food. Furthermore, in response to criticisms of hierarchical sthetic judgments, quite frankly, I have never yet heard anybody say, Hey, lets go out for an awful meal. The notion of taste, when practically utilized in regard to food, almost always implies good taste. I wish to insist that this position is not at all a manifestation of culinary snobbism, since the very poorest of peasant foodsin fact much less expensive, more nourishing, and simpler than fast food, and still just as ubiquitous and widely appreciatedhave inspired haute cuisine from its inception. Consider

onion soup, cabbage soup, and that provenal garlic soup whose name so poetically indicates a zero-degree of the culinary arts, ago boullido, boiled water. K As psycholinguistics readily testifies, the letter k, as a glottal occlusive, corporeally and symbolically articulates the tensions between the upper and lower parts of the digestive tract, between speaking, eating and defecation; between life and death. It belongs in the kitchen, and is indeed its very essence. Its appeal to curiosity is legendary, and I might cite two examples. First, consider that bizarrely named Austrian dish, kaiserfleisch [kings flesh]a rack of smoked pickled porka term that suggests quite novel rituals concerning the politico-theological problem of the two bodies (sacred and profane) of the king. Also of interest is the German term katzenjammermeaning both a hangover and a specific remedy for hangovers (namely, thinly sliced beef marinated in a vinaigrette, then folded into mayonnaise with potatoes and gherkins)yet another instantiation of the efficacy of the antithetical sense of primal words. L Logic. Certain art forms inscribe, within the work itself, the proper manner of appreciation. Paintings done in one-point linear perspective, for example, guide the spectator to the proper viewing positionall deviation risks distortion. Most cultures also distinctly articulate the proper sequence of eating given dishes on a menu, as well as the appropriate combinations of wines and dishes. Yet very rarely are there revealed the secrets and subtleties of precisely what constitutes the optimum order of eating and combining the different morsels that appear on a dish! The more complex the dish, the more difficult the problem. Often, the logic is simple. For example, one dish recently enjoyed at Michel Bras (Laguiole, France)on one plate, cepes classically sauted in garlic and parsley, and on another a portion of mountain hamnecessitated, after a brief moment of trial-and-error, eating the two parts simultaneously, for the mushrooms were under-salted, and the ham was salt-cured. At the other extreme, a dish like Brass gargouilloua warm vegetable and herb salad containing nearly three dozen ingredients, highlighted with edible flowers, sprouts, crystallized herb leaves and pearls of flavored oilspermits many possible combinations and series. Indeed, the numerical possibilities are staggering, approaching 36 x 35 x 34 x 33... etc. We here broach the matter of gastronomic

intuition and discover that, regarding a dish of such complexity, every bite is tantamount to a composition. This is not an argument of culinary scholasticism, but a daily reality. Culinary logic also guides the invention of new dishes, motivated by the desire to find novel solutions to old problems. In France, foie graswhether served chilled in a terrine or sauted and hotis traditionally paired with a sweet accompaniment, whether a glass of Sauternes, Barsac, Monbazillac, or Baumes de Venise, or else a fruit stew (more commonly associated with game), etc. At the restaurant Le Mjane (Espalion, France), this problemalong with the subsidiary question of how to serve bread with foie graswas brilliantly resolved in a recent creation: sauted foie gras in a crust of fouace (a regionally specific type of sweet brioche), dusted with course salt and pepper, and set upon a drizzle of ratafia- (a fruit liquor or wine fortified with brandy) based sauce. Animal, vegetable, mineral; liver, breadstuff, wine, saltall in every bite; an elegant solution to a classic problem. M Menus belong to the ontological category of prophetic phenomena and, like most prophecies, disappoint more often than not. N Names. Consider the genius of nomination and the poetry of apples: Autumn Strawberry, Baldwin, Black Gilliflower, Blue Pearmain, Bullet, Bushwacker, Cabbage Head, Chenango Strawberry, Cortland, Delicious, Esopus Spitzenberg, Golden Delicious, Golden Sweeting, Granny Smith, Grimes Golden, Gravenstein, Hangdowns, Idored, Jonared, Jonathan, Juicy Bite, Kestrel, Ladies Sweeting, Ladys Finger, Large Never Fail, Long Pippin, Macoun, McIntosh, Melon, Melt in the Mouth, Missing Link, Monstrous Pippin, Nickajack, Northern Spy, Old Foxwhelp, Paula Red, Pawpaw, Pound Sweeting, Prima, Priscilla, Puritan, Red Astrakhan, Red Delicious, Red King, Red Prince, Red Rome, Red York, Rhode Island Greening, Rome Beauty, Royal Red, Russet, Sassafrass Sweet, Sheepnose, Sops of Wine, Spartan, Starkling Delicious, Slackmy-Girdle, Sour Bough, Sparhawk, Spartan, Stayman, Staymared, Talmans Sweeting, Wealthy, Westfield Seek-no-Further, Winesap, Winter Banana, Yellow Newtown... O Ostentation. Every epoch, every social group, has its own forms of culinary ostentation. It would be difficult to write of ostentation without mention of decadence, aristocratic and otherwise. Food has always been

among the most common forms of conspicuous consumption. It should therefore not go unnoticed that one of the foundational moments in the history of modern cuisine was one of its most decadent meals: Grimod de la Reynires mock funerary feast, an extended joke highlighting a banquet of all black foods in a particularly morbid setting. Indeed, it was deemed so perverse that J.K. Huysmans, in rebours, the 19thcentury exemplar of decadence, used it as the model for des Esseintess final feast. The menu of this funerary dinnerfor which the invitations were in the form of a death noticeincluded turtle soup, Russian rye bread, Turkish olives, caviar, pressed mullet roe, smoked Frankfort sausages, game in black sauce, truffle cream, ambered chocolate cream, puddings, plums, and grapes, served with wines of Limagne, Roussillon, Tenedos, Van de Peas, and Port. (Incidentally, this is an early example of fusion cuisine!) The food was placed on blackrimmed plates and the wines in dark glasses, all set on a black tablecloth and served, to the tunes of funeral marches, by nude black women in mules and silver stockings covered in tears, all in a room decorated in black, giving on to a garden with paths covered in charcoal. In a less literary context, consider two dishes. The restaurant Bond Street (New York) offers a special sushi platter where one of the morsels of sushi is topped with a minute sliver of pure gold leafan extreme example of the subtleties of conspicuous consumption, its bottom line. Contrast the extravagance of the 19th-century gamebird pie described in the unjustly forgotten La Table au pays de Brillat-Savarin, written by Lucien Tendret, nephew of the famed gastronome, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. The dish, offered by Monseigneur Gabriel Cortois de Quinsey, Bishop of Belley, to his canons for the feast of Notre-Dame, consists of pastry crust lined with a forcemeat (containing chopped veal and pork flesh, chicken livers, black truffles, egg, and cognac), upon which are placed the marinated parts of numerous gamebirds (greenshank, snipe, quail, partridge, corncrake, and whole beccafico, to which are added cockscombs, mushrooms, black truffles, and butter), all topped off with another layer of forcemeat, and sealed with a pastry crust perforated in the center. A sauce is prepared by crushing the birds entrails and stomachs, moistened with beef bouillon, marinade, and white wine, all of which is reduced and then strained, to be added to the pie before serving. Try and imagine what such a dish would cost in a restaurant today, when a single snipe is an extreme luxury, the rare times one is even available. Furthermore, how many of us would actually enjoy the intense, and decidedly high and fecal, fla-

vors of this dish? Indeed, one of the forgotten cuisineswith its own codes of ostentationis that of the hunt, once at the summit of aristocratic passions, and now relegated to a small subculture. Rare is the restaurant that does total justice to game. (I personally know of only one: LAuberge de ltre in Quarr-les-Tombes, France.) Ostentation might well coincide with quality and perfection in a fine and creative object or event (cf. Yquem, infra), but more often than not it is merely a sign of commonplace one-upmanship. As decadence commands a certain vogue in our fin de sicle, albeit in a particularly post-post-modern fashion, it should be notedto the detriment of the sthetic aspects of gastronomythat the popular press tends to measure cuisine by monetary standards. (Numbers make easy gauges: how can one not react to the recent news that at a charity auction, one bidder paid $500,000this is not a typo for a single bottle of 1992 Screaming Eagle Cabernet?) One often reads feature articles in non-gastronomic magazines on great (or to-be-great or would-be-great) chefs, without encountering a single menu or recipe, or even mention of a single dish, yet replete with his or her financial portfolio. According to Nietzsche, decadence has a double meaning: The negative sense is that of the decline of culture; the positive a philosophical form of protest against that very same culture, not unlike the double significance of dandyism earlier in the 19th century. Needless to say, the positive decadence that differentiates cuisine from everyday eating occasionally exists precisely in the baroque extravagance of creativity, where food sets the scene for pleasure, passion, and flights of the imagination. P Paradigms. Appropriate to the current situation of post-modern multiculturalism, notably the hybridization of genres and the flow of international capital, fusion is the reigning contemporary culinary paradigm. One extreme is the fusion of two different cuisines, not unlike so many world music combinations: Here, culinary identity dissolves in a mtissage that is usually disappointing, though it occasionally offers successful and surprising results. The other extreme is the desire to maintain a culinary identity, all the while profiting from exotic techniques and ingredients, as is the case for so much French nouvelle cuisine (see Herbs, supra). It is of particular interest that spices, herbs, flowers, and preserved or cooked fruits have taken a central role in this cultural intermixing, given that they abound in much earlier moments of European cuisine. (One may note, for example, the English Elizabethan marigold tart, or the even

earlier Tudor herb and flower salads.) The recent history of fusion cuisine was actually initiated by a culinary imperialism, a blend of major and minor cuisines, such as Vietnamese cuisine Gallicized or Americanized to please an upscale, outgroup crowd. Now, the path is open to all possibilities, butlike the mixing of food-stuffs though all is possible, not every combination is necessarily interesting. If ever the hybridization of fusion cuisine becomes the paradigm, and national or regional cuisines no longer constitute a central operative principle, haute cuisine might well be spoken of as one now speaks of the historic avantgardeas something of the past. Cuisine as historic index and symbolic form.

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Shorts

Breathable food David Gissen

In the history of architecture and design there have only been a few effects electric light, forced airthat have had the capacity to cause massive environmental and behavioral shifts. Last year at Barcelonas annual design fair, the Catalonian designer Marti Guixe presented another breathable food. Pharma-food, a system of nourishment by breathing, is an appliance that was developed by Guixe to explore the transformation of food into pure information. Guixe, who has been studying alternative forms of eating for several years, realized that the breathing of food already occurs via the inhalation of dust that hangs in the air at work and at home. Guixe hypothesized that this form of eating, from which one gains a miniscule amount of minerals and vitamins, could be transformed into a more potent meal, a dustmuesli, that would supply a powerful dose of nutrients. The Pharma-Food appliance, which sprays this rosolized nutrition, connects to a computer and requires Microsoft Excel to enter exact values for such things as riboflavin, vitamin C, and protein. The combination of these nutrients are saved on the computer as documents with names such as SPAMT, which has the nutrient language of tomatoes and bread, and Costa Brova, a seafood dish that is heavy on the iodine and light on carbohydrates. Guixe imagines diners composing these meals and sending them as e-mail attachments to other owners of the Pharma-food emitter. Like MP3, says Guixe. While Guixe has explored the experience of eating this information, less explored and of equal significance is where this type of eating can now take place. Guixe imagines Pharma-food in a special Pharma-bar, essentially a simple room with tables and chairs and several emitters. But why is this necessary when he has liberated food from kitchens and from forms of ingestion that require utensils and dishes? Pharma-food will allow eating to occur anywhere at any

time; on subways, in cars, in our beds, while exercising, sleeping, or making love. Most interesting is what effect this device will have on the home, particularly the American home, which is dominated by the kitchen. While technologies are given free range at work and in other public spheres, the home is typically the place where devices such as Pharma-food are tamed and held in balance by a previous technology that the new device is meant to replace. Central heat did not eliminate the fireplace; it allowed this formerly grimy, soot-filled artifact to become an sthetic symbol and heart of the American home. People began using fireplaces less, but when they did, they burned wood in them again instead of coal. Similarly, cooking the monthly meal may involve stoking a wood-fueled, castiron stove while simultaneously breathing a few appetizers with friends. Pharma-food joins the work of other, primarily European, designers who are exploring alternative regimens for such activities as washing or eating. One of Guixes Catalonian contemporaries, Ana Mir, is exploring a technology that allows one to wash without water. Like Guixes approach, this project would allow washing to occur anywhere. In their work, these designers not only free regimens from their fixed location in relation to certain products; they also free these activities from their traditional engagement with the body. Unlike designers such as Philippe Starck or Richard Sapper, who strive to revise traditional technologies, Guixe has discovered that the problem of eating does not involve the design of a new type of stove, sink, or refrigeratorthe problem of eating requires finding a new mouth.

Dust Food Muesli. Photo: Inga Knlke. Home Dust. Pharma-BAR. Photo: Inga Knlke.

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Mark Twain.

Self-portrait carved by George Washington "Bo" Hughes, one of the premier known hobo nickel artists.

Turtle. Once a buffalo.

Hobo nickels Jeffrey Kastner

Money may be the root of all evil, but what is the root of money? It exists in a strange gray zone between reality and illusion; the definitive token of worth, it is intrinsically worthless. Unraveling the dizzyingly complex mechanics of money is not easy; indeed, like a car or a computer, as long as it continues to work properly, most people feel no need to even try. I certainly never haduntil recently, that is, when a friend introduced me to an obscure little piece of Americana called the Hobo Nickel. What started as a glancing interest in a modest, oddball collectible ended up provoking profoundly tangled questions about what money is and how it functions. Now I fear I will never be able to look at my pocket change in the same way again. First minted between 1913 and 1938, the Buffalo or Indian Head nickel was designed by James E. Fraser, a former assistant to Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The coins obverse, or heads, side featured a Native American profile that was said to be a composite of three individuals from three different tribesan Ogalala named Iron Trail, a Northern Cheyenne known as Two Moons, and Big Tree, a Seneca that had a brief career in 1920s silent movies. The reverse side of the coin was an image of a bison named Black Diamond, who then lived in New Yorks Central Park Zoo. The coin was relatively plentifulover 1.2 billion were minted during the 25 years of its run. However, a small number of them were adapted by the nations then-significant population of itinerant workers, both as a mode of craft and a kind of parallel currency. (During the Depression as many as one out of every five able-bodied individuals was idle; thousands took to riding the rails in search of temporary work as a way of life.) Often using little more than a pen-knife, many of these drifters painstakingly altered the extremely hard coppernickel alloy, transforming the Indians head into profile portraits of friends and loved ones (both male and female), of other hobos, or of themselves. Rare examples

also feature alterations of the buffalo, typically into donkeys or elephants. These Hobo Nickels were a way for the vagabonds to increase the value of the coin so that it brought a more advantageous exchange when used to barter for food and drink, or for lodging or transportation. For todays coin collectors and scholars (including the 350 or so aficionados that make up The Original Hobo Nickel Society, Inc., in which my friend has become a member-in-good-standing), these so-called hobo nickels fall within the category of exonumia, defined by numismatists as objects of historical interest that resemble coins or currency. Some have fetched thousands of dollars at auction as examples of vernacular American craft. From the first examples of state-sanctioned currency in the 5th century b.c., the guarantee of a coins value was the precious metal from which it was made; insofar as individuals valued gold or silver by weight, a gold or silver coin was equally valuable. But, of course, gold and silver are inher-ently not really worth anything either. They are simply socially accepted symbols of value that, in themselves or in the doubly symbolic form of coinage, function as a transactional medium that allows individ-uals to determine the manner in which different kinds of goods can be exchanged fairly. My wheat; your wood; her goatdespite their obvious differences, each is worth something relative to the other. This worth is based on a complicated combin-ation of factors, from the availability or scarcity of the materials involved to the amount of time and labor necessary to produce the particular commodity in question to the desirability of that product. Money is the social means by which these comparative values are coherently expressed and their circulation facilitated. This functional structure is so ubiquitous, so much a part of our everyday lives, that it almost defies analysis. Part of the reason for this is the fact that as our system of

commerce has evolved and become more sophisticated, it has also become increasingly abstracted. American coins long ago ceased to be made of actual gold or silver; today they simply are gold- or silvercolored. And the raw materials and labor they are designed to draw equivalencies between are virtually invisible to the contemporary consumer. The distance between what money is and what it represents is greater than it has ever been. In their simple, unassuming way, Hobo Nickels create a small rupture in this seamless value-identity of money. My friend noted that one of the first things that drew her to the nickels was the frisson she felt in seeing something we regard as uniform and immutable defaced. Based on the high prices paid for mis-struck or poorly cut coins on the collectibles market, she is clearly not alone in her response to this disfigurative gesture. But I have come to believe that there is more to this. It is not only an object that is deformed by Hobo Nickels, but also the theoretically immut-able system of value that the object rep-resents. They turn a token of commodification into the commodity itself; transform a symbol of labor into a product of laborperhaps most amazing of all, they manage to make money actually worth something.
More photographs of Hobo Nickels are available at Cabinets website at www.immaterial.net/cabinet

Opposite, top Three hoboes in a car. The symbol inside the boxcar is a hobo sign meaning "safe route," and the word "Dicer" under the boxcar means freight. This is the ultimate reverse carving on a hobo nickel.

All photos: Bill Fivaz

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Transformative technologies: notes towards a redefinition of the avant-garde Sven-Olov Wallenstein

Is the avant-garde dead, defunct, an attitude belonging to a past whose bearings on the present have been lost once and for all? Or does it always await us, coming toward us from a future whose shape is as yet undetermined and open? The first option seems inevitable if we link the idea of the avant-garde to modernism as it exploded on the scene in the 1920s and 30s, and if we see it as a defined and historically circumscribed style with a definite set of questions that can surely no longer be ours within the space of postmodernity, where the artistic gestures of the early 20th century seem hopelessly nave. But if we try to detach the impetus of the avantgarde from what has para-doxically enough become its heritage, if we unearth its problems rather than its solutions, then we could perhaps incline towards the second option: the avant-garde is neither alive nor dead, but always there, virtually, waiting to be redefined and reinvented anew. On the level of historiography, the advent of postmodernity above all brought about a (perhaps paradoxical) reinvigoration of the writing of modernisms history. If we have somehow detached ourselves from mod-ernism and modernity (concepts whose earlier evident mutual implication has also been questioned), then all writing of history becomes an acute and normative invest-ment in the present. It tells us not only where we came from and how it all began, but is just as much meant to stake out a course for the future and to prescribe cer-tain acts and practices as more relevant, contemporary (in the sense of being cum, with, the movement of time), and legitimate than others. Surveying this literature with any exhaustiveness is an impossible task. I will present three different ways of perceiving the problem of the avant-garde in order to put my own argument in perspective. Two of them, Matei Calinescus and Peter Brgers, are fundamentally negative, whereas the third, Hal Fosters, attempts to rethink the issue of the future of the past in a new and radical way and thus prepares for my own (modest) proposal for a redefinition of the avant-garde. Three perspectives In his Five Faces of Modernity (1977), Matei Calinescu provides us with a detailed analysis of the historical vicissitudes of

the term avant-garde, from the French Revolution and the first use of the term with reference to art in the circle around Henri de Saint-Simonwhere it denoted a fusion of artistic, scientific, and political radicality under the banner of the spearhead-artist through its shifting uses in the 19th century and into the 20th. What Calinescu discerns in this process, however, is a conflict between modernism, where a viable and productive connection to the past is preserved, and the avant-garde, which attempts to disrupt the concept of art and its institutional framework. What began in the early 19th century as a quest for a constructive synthesis ends a century later with a furious negativity: Beginning as a promise and ending as almost a parody, avant-gardism constitutes an inner derailing of modernism and Calinescu does not regret its eventual demise and fade-out. This rather negative interpretation, its finely nuanced analyses of many historical documents notwithstanding, still leaves us with the question of the status of the avantgarde in the present.1 As is often case in this type of analysis, Calinescu starts off with a kind of saturation of the concept under scrutinyits essential variations, negative and positive, have been played out, the case is closed, and the owl of Minerva spreads her wings in the dusk of historiographical discourse. For Peter Brger, the genealogical parameters of analysis are rather different but his final analysis will remain just as negative as Calinescus. In his pathbreaking Theorie der Avant-garde (1974), he situates the historical avant-garde (exemplified for Brger by movements like Surrealism, Constructivism, or Duchamps readymade) against the background of a gradually developing sthetic autonomy where art only refers to itself. This was already theoretically formulated by Kant in his Critique of Judgment (1790) but reached its full-blown form in the last decades of the 19th century in Symbolism and lart pour lart, with Mallarms posie pure as the most obvious case. The historical avant-garde attempts to break with this situation and sublate the institution art, not just to criticize the inadequacy of some particular medium (painting, poetry, etc.), but to reconnect art and life in a program for a new sthetico-political lifeworld. Needless to say, this project failed (and some of its proponents paid bitterly for

this, in many cases with their own lives), but its consequences for posterior history are limitless, since it instituted what we could call the limitless expansion and solidification of art as an institution. The historical avant-garde failed in a tragic way, but the neo-avant-garde movements that Brger traces from the late 50s and onwards failed (or perhaps even succeed-ed) in another way that he calls parodic (the schema for this analysis is derived from Marxs Louis Bonapartes 18th brumaire). The revolt is no longer aimed at art as institution, but now takes place inside the safe haven of these now fully developed institutionsthe barriers between art and life are torn down inside art itself, and the neo-avant-garde is at best nave, at worst cynical. Brgers model (which is obviously much more nuanced and richly detailed than comes across in this brief summary) might, however, lead to a kind of post-historical quietism. The neo-avant-garde, and with it all of the present, is condemned to an endless self-deception, and Brger occasionally seems to retreat to a Hegelian position: What remains is not the production of new works, but an stheticophilosophical reflection on past works. At the end of the book, Brger talks about the limitless availability of artistic means today, which puts into question the possibility of a coherent sthetic theory in the sense it has come down to us from Kant and Hegel to Adorno. Neither art nor sthetic theory seems to have any options left but to contemplate its own demise in the increasing leveling and repressive desublimation of late capitalist culture. In the third perspective, proposed by Hal Foster in his Return of the Real (1996), there is still hope for a return of the avant-garde, although the sense of return will here render the historical evidence more complex. Against Brger, Foster argues that we should not hypostatize any given moment as the origin of a full-blown avant-garde in relation to which all subsequent neo movements would be mere repetitions or representations. In fact, the moment of the avant-garde is only constituted, Foster argues, by being repeated and comprehended, as it were, in a later phase. The major piece of evidence is of course Marcel Duchamp, who only becomes the histori-cally decisive Duchamp he is for us through a series of re-readings and reap-

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praisals begun in the late 50s and extending up to the present day. In this sense, nothing is ever fully there, nothing is given at once together with all of its sense. The law of history becomes a deferred story, constantly told in a retroactive way. Foster paints this rather more complex picture by way of Freuds conception of deferred action (Nachtrglichkeit ), especially as this is (re)interpreted in Lacans 1964 seminar The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. The traumatic encounter with the Real, Lacan argues, can only be a missed encounter; we always arrive too late or too early, and the Real can only be that which returns through repetition. In the same way, the trauma caused by the irruption of the avant-garde in the early 20th century can only be understood and its sense fully unfolded within the neoavant-garde. Against Brgers rather simplistically linear model, which always perceives temporal sequence as causal and the second moment as straightforwardly derived from the first, Fosters argument is a good one. The problem is, however, that he himself hypostatizes another moment, namely the 60s and its classical conceptual strategies, as the moment of a true critical retrieval of the historical avant-garde. Even though this is not intended by Foster, his argument seems to produce the same reading of our present as Brgers did in relation to the 60s; the moment of truth is always already past and it becomes difficult to grasp the present. Would it be possible for Foster to argue that current artistic forms repeat and comprehend those of the 60s without stretching the argument too far? He never really addresses the issue of how, indeed if, the structure of deferred action extends into our present, and perhaps this is because such an argument tends to condemn the present to a negative afterlife. Arts sense of historicity indeed seems weak today, and most of the arguments which have propelled the avant-garde throughout modernitya powerful historical logic premised in part on medium-specific selfcriticism tending towards formal breakthroughsseem exhausted. If there is radicality today, it is no doubt located in what Foster terms horizontal as opposed to vertical strategies, which use art as a means for intervention into specific debates

and pay less attention to the dimension of art historical mediation and the inner workings of representation and of the signifier. If we remain within vertically reflexive self-criticism, art will continue to speak of its own history and inevitably end up in an ivory tower of formalismbut if we opt for pure horizontality, we will succumb to the inverse illusion of immediacy and transparency. To take us out of this dilemma, Foster proposes the notion of parallax as a way to keep both of theseequally necessarydimensions in balance. This seems however more like a way of rephrasing and circumscribing the problem than solving it. Avant-garde temporality seems exhausted and we enter into a kind of weak thought, as Gianni Vattimo calls it, where we can only witness with melancholy (or delight, depending on ones position) the dispersal of the idea of the avant-garde. The time of the virtual We noted how Foster in his critique of Brgers linear model of history and its latent Hegelianism proposed his own model of history derived from an analogy with the notion of deferred action in Freud and Lacan, where the trauma need not be (and in its most radical version cannot be) present at first, but is only registered afterwards, in repetition. Faced with the objection that modeling history on consciousness is too traditional a move, Foster turns the tables and proposes that we should use this objection as a springboard and conceive of history on the basis of the most radical and sophisticated model of consciousness available. Thus we find Freud and Lacan usurping the place of Hegel. It may be allowed to ask just how radical this displacement is, especially given Lacans well-known dependence on Hegel. In fact, we might find ourselves locked in an inverted dialectic (which is of course Hegel once more), where each new moment is understood as a delayed proxy of another moment, a past reconstructed and comprehended (one senses the closeness to Hegels Aufhebung in this word) in repetition. Perhaps we should attempt, especially when the idea of the avant-garde is at stake, to experiment with other ideas of time and experience more radically dissociated from dialectics. If Fosters analysis delivers us from one kind of historicism, it may lead us into another, namely a kind of infinite

analysis (which also threatened Freud), where we will live in an always displaced present. When we ask the question of the avant-garde in historical retrospective, the answer seems pre-programmed: The historical avant-garde is, by definition, always on its way to exhaustion, even though it may be repeated and resituated and give rise to diabolically complex forms of reception and to infinite analyses where the transfer between analyst and patient trigger ever new problems. Put this way, the question opens onto an abyssal complexityrepetitions of repetitions, an originary scene which recedes ever further back while also insisting to be reproduced in the historians own discourse as the mirage of the originbut never onto the question of the present, let alone the question of the future. But what could be the avant-gardes relation to time if we abandon both the cumulative time of Brger and negativedialectical time of Foster? Other conceivable temporalities could be the time of deprivation and withdrawal, which Jean-Franois Lyotard has attempted to unearth in Kants theory of the sublime, or, what I will propose here: the time of the virtual. This idea has been put forth by Gilles Deleuze, partly based on a reading of Berg-son but also going far beyond this original context, and has been picked up by, for instance, John Rajchman in his recent book Constructions (1998). The time of the virtual would be that which doubles the present with another untimely time, creating, as it were, a swarm of divergent possibilities; or as Rajchman puts it, quite small virtual futures, which deviate from things known, inserting the chance of indetermination where there once existed only definite probabilities. The question of the virtual would bear upon what is set free in the present, on new modes of thought becoming possible in the blank interstices of the present as it is wrested open not just toward an art historical past, but towards a much more indeterminate field of forces, technologies, and social movements. Thought within this time of such a virtuality, the question of the avant-garde need not be posed within the history of forms or styles, since this is what immediately makes it old (awakening the demon of precursors) or turns it into a cynical quest for the new, which turn out to be the same thing.

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A problem with such a re-definition is that the very word avant-garde has always tended to imply linear conceptions, a troop advancing ahead, going beyond a front line stretched out before us in a terrain that is essentially already known. Already in the first century A.D., Frontinuss Stratagemata established a close connection between warfare and Euclidean geometry that has remained in our imaginary. Perhaps we need to think otherwise, the art of war having undergone tremendous changes and no longer relating to surface battles with perceptible front lines, spatially isolated fragments, and massings of force. Why not rethink the issue of the avantgarde based on telewars (war in the age of intel-ligent machines, as Manuel De Landa would have it) and current models of con-flict, with the battlefield as a function of global conflicts and much of the actual contact taking place over immense distances, dislocalizing the space-time of the experiencing body? This would be a multidimensional space, with other and highly variable geometries, differently organized surfaces, times, and velocities, all overlaid in a new way. In such a war-space, there is no obvious ahead, no clear avant or arrire since what counts as the terrain is itself a function of strategy. The question would then be whether the very concept avant-garde here loses all pertinence, or if something else could be thought in this concept (and on what grounds could we be denied this right?). If we suppose that such new conceptual connections can be forged, then the sense of directionality would here be very different, just as the connection to a surrounding milieu would require a new permeability and topology. No matter how difficult this is to think, the avant-garde would no longer be thought of as advanc-ing into a terrain ahead of us and negating what lies behind it, but as the actualization of a different type of space, the kind of smooth space defined by Deleuze and Guattari in relation to the nomadic war machine, irreducible to the striated and sedentary space of the imperial war machine. On the basis of such notions, which no doubt need to be defined much more clearly, I believe another formula ought to be tested: not what is or what was the avant-garde, but what could it become? If this still involves historical repetition, re-actualization, etc., then we need to think of this as a repetition coming from a still

undetermined future. As Foster says, we may repeat in order to free ourselves from a present felt to be stagnant, but it should be noted that we do so to free ourselves from both the past and the present by confronting those unknown powers that approach us from the future (as Deleuze would say, the future is not of the order of the possible, where actualization takes place in the image of the idea, but of the virtual, a becoming which doubles history with a stratum of the counter-historical, a dimension of the untimely). To think the question of the avant-garde in this way would imply seeing the development of art in its different historical con-stellations as a way of acting on extraartistic materials (technologies, social structures) which are themselves in constant mutation. The unfolding of the historical avant-garde would in this sense by no means just constitute a negative response to the solidification of the institution art (as Brger would have it), but rather a way of capturing, reconfiguring, and prolonging other movements in society. The autonomy of art lies precisely in its capacity to capture its outside as an inside, and vice versa. The avant-garde is the name of this transformation, this capture whereby the respective values of the inside (the sthetic) and the outside (that which is acted upon) both change. And the important thing is the transformation, not the name. What would be those new forces that art attempts to capture and appropriate? With due precaution, we could perhaps point to a few of these domains. The most pervasive fact throughout the history of the various avant-garde movements, as well as in the present, is the force of technological change. Each fundamental technological mutation seems to release a corresponding transformative artistic energy. An example would be Walter Benjamins constructivist appraisal of industrial reproduction technologies and the possibility of new and non-auratic forms of art outside of the confines of classical sthetics. In Benjamin, these possibilities seem to be deduced almost immediately out of the technology itself (which was also one of the charges made against him by Adorno). Thirty years later, Conceptual Art (and to some extent Pop Art as well) was to be propelled by similar motifs, less emphatically but also with an unmistakably utopian

flavor. In the age of mass-mediatized reproduction, art was to be made accessible to everyone. As a dematerialized flow of information, it was to contribute to radical democracy, if not in relation to real economies, then at least within the symbolically-charged sphere of the production and circulation of artworks. These hopes were of course just as vain as Benjamins, but perhaps we should focus less on shattered dreams than on the kind of movements they make possiblean explosion of new artistic gestures and strategies that we without doubt see as avant-garde, and that we are still working through today (perhaps also repeating and comprehending in Fosters sense). That todays information technologies release the same transformative energies is clear. The utopiasand the navetsare analogous, as are the visions of a new anarchism predicated upon the dissolution of the system producer-consumer, the leveling of sthetic hierarchies, the new metaphysics of networks, and an economy less and less focused on the materiality of the consumer object. (In fact, in their emphasis on the commodity as sign or mark, many models of the current economy that take as their framework the semioticpsychic political economy of the sign rather than classical political economy seem to come straight out of Jean Baudrillards early work. These theories had an almost overwhelming presence in art discourse in the 80s, but were dismissed by many as too apocalyptic and dystopian. Today they seem revived almost in the guise of normality.) An artistic avant-garderegardless of whether it would accept such a term, or perhaps precisely because it would reject it scornfullywill no doubt insert itself into this sphere of circulation, as if both to destabilize and accelerate it, just as the avant-garde in the early 20th century broke down traditional sthetic form in order to adapt us to a new techno-industrial plateau (the analysis of which has been undertaken in great detail by Manfredo Tafuri). But before this is determined and made recognizable as critical intervention, submission, ironic complicity, or something else, it is above all a place of indeterminacy, a place where art changes, and a zone of temporary formlessness which gives rise to new modes of construction, subjectivity, and experience.

On an even more speculative level, we could add recent developments in biology and biotechnology. Here we encounter the limit of traditional humanism, where the form Man appears more dubious than ever (as was already presaged by Michel Foucault some three decades ago). The possible convergence between a biotech-nical and informational paradigm will surely have tremendous impact on the arts, some of which have been charted by Katherine Hayles in relation to literature in her recent How We Became Posthuman (1999). A visionary forerunner would here be the exhibition Les immatriaux curated by Jean-Franois Lyotard at the Pompidou Center in 1985, which dealt with the new sense of immaterials, the transformation of materiality and physicality into waves, flows, and packages of information. It is surely in this dimension that we should seek the sublime and the unpresent-able that Lyotard (in his famous 1983 essay) claimed constitutes the underlying momentum of the avant-garde, and not exclusively in what made up that particular essays examples.2 These technological mutations have to be understood as both emanating from and reacting upon the social changes resulting from multinational capitalism in its globalized phase (which was pointed out by Fredric Jameson in his classic essay on the cultural logic of late capitalism, written the same year as Lyotards essay on the sublime). Today we are witnessing the rapid dissolution of an Occidental art historical narrative that has been at the basis of most theories of the dialectical movement of form and materials. This means not only the end of the traditional dialectic between mass culture and modernism but also of the mantra of the dissolution of the border between them, as it has been diagnosed, cherished, and feared since the Frankfurt School of the 30s. What we require is a new analysis of the situation and its possibilities after the breaking up of the mono-cultures that previously contained the high-low dialectic and whose downfalls mark the end of the idea of a unified public space, now mutating into proliferating sub-systems. Criticism, debates, and patterns of publishing will change as intellectual communities become less rooted in language, place, or nation. It would, of course, be erroneous to think that entities like the nation-state simply would disappear. As Saskia Sassen has demonstrated, these
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changes bring about a restructuring of the state apparatus, with new forms of centrality, control, and monitoring in a space of electrotecture characterized by new interfaces of physicality and informatics and by new urban forms and trajectories. As Sassen argues, decentralization and centralization do not form exclusionary opposites, but rather complementary poles in a new world system that will not be more democratic than before, just characterized by new conflicts. To remain within the art world, these changes are reflected in the formation of a new elite of curators. It would be false to downplay this change by pointing to the long tradition of museum curating. Historical analogies will not help us chart this territory because the function is new: not to preserve the old, but to organize and systematize the pro-duction of new things and symbols in the circulation of the art world. The curatorial function expresses the increasing profes-sionalization of this world, and its increasing emphasis on self-regulatory mechanisms. The system of biennials, triennials, etc., indicates the extent to which the institution produces goods meant for internal circulation and evaluation, and dispenses with the classical notion of an audience. (To some, this may in fact look like a perverse realization of Kosuths 1969 statement that, like science, advanced experimental art does not have an audience since it is primarily directed towards other artists.) It would be easy to provide moralistic comments on this situation, but it would also be misleading. There is no reason to see the loss of earlier functions as purely catastrophic, as if our capacity to perceive and grasp works of art would be uniquely tied to certain historical modes of production and distribution. Older systems of selection and presentationfrom the gradual demise of jury systems and the birth of the avant-garde in its various attempts to create new systems, both democratic and elitisticare just as much or as little repressive as current systems. Todays avantgarde faces the formidable task of inventing new situations, modes of production, and reception. Such an avant-garde no doubt exists, and it will be both like and unlike the one that once appeared as the historic avant-garde at the beginning of the previous century. Those outer forcestechnologies, economies, and power relationsthat

it works over, appropriates, and transforms are themselves in constant movement.

1 It should be noted, however, that Calinescu systematically disregards most movements from the early 19th century when an avant-garde positioneven though the word may not have been used as suchimplied a constructive renewal and reconsidering of artistic practice rather than mere destruction. 2 The emphasis on Barnett Newman has done great damage to Lyotards argument, since it gives the impression that the sublime would have an essential connection to certain late modernist painting, which it does not. The question Newman relays to us is that of the now (What is now? Is it happening? etc.) and even though for Lyotard these questions are registered in Newmans vertical zips of color, these questions need not be inscribed in these particular forms for us.

Brigdo Lara, post-pre-Columbian ceramicist Jesse Lerner

In July 1974, Mexican police arrested and imprisoned a group of individuals from the Gulf Coast State of Veracruz for the possession of a collection of what appeared to be looted Pre-Columbian ceramics. Though such objects have long been protected as national patrimony, the high prices they fetch in the auction houses and galleries of New York and Europe fuel a contraband traffic in antiquities. At the trial of the accused, archeologists from the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia (INAH) testified that the ceramics had been taken from ancient sites in the Cempoala region, in the central part of the state of Veracruz. Convicted largely on the basis of this testimony, the individuals were sent to prison for their role in this illegal trade in looted objects. From his cell, one of the convicted individuals, Brigdo Lara, made an unusual demand. At his request, clay was brought to the jail. From within his cell Lara then proceeded to create indisputable proof of his innocenceidentical reproductions of the pieces that had sent him to jail. He was not a looter at all, it turned out, but a wrongfully accused forger, an accomplished imitator of ancient styles. For the past twenty years he had been fabricating contemporary copies of ancient ceramics. Though he worked in many styles including Aztec and Mayan, his specialty was the ceramic wares of the ancient Totonac, a population that inhabited Veracruz and flourished between the 7th and 12th centuries a.d. The replicas were taken from the jail and once again shown to the same experts from the INAH whose testimony had led to the convictions. Once again the verdict was rendered: These too were judged to be ancient pieces from Cempoala. Cleared of the charges of looting, Lara was released from jail in January, 1975. He was subsequently employed by the state Anthropology Museum in Xalapa, second in the country only to the National Museum in Mexico City, to restore ancient pieces and to review the collection for forgeries. Lara continues to sculpt what look like ancient objects, pieces which he prefers to call original interpretations. He has since been licensed as a maker of replicas by the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, the very institution that once condemned him as a looter, and he now signs all of his ceramics.

Lara at work. Photo: Jesse Lerner.

A decade after his release from jail, Lara began to learn something of the fate of the approximately 40,000 pieces he claims to have made prior to his arrest and reform. Agustn Acosta Lagunes, then governor of Veracruz, spent considerable sums overseas in order to purchase and repatriate numerous ancient objects for a pet project, the Xalapa Anthropology Museum. After the governor returned with a number of purchases made at Sothebys in New York, Lara came forward with a dramatic announcement. He had made these ceramic pieces. Further investigations revealed more and more of Laras objects all over the world. Some had become part of prestigious international collections. The Dallas Museum of Art, the Morton May collection at the Saint Louis Art Museum, New Yorks Metropolitan Museum, and important collections in France, Australia, Spain, and Belgium all contained pieces that Lara claims to have made. In fact, Lara may have been so prolific that he had a hand in shaping what is today understood as the classic Totonac style. In 1971, the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History presented a large exhibition entitled Ancient Art of Veracruz. Today, it appears that at least a dozen of the objects exhibited there were made by Lara. While cautious about any expression of pride in his accomplishments, Lara is equally uncomfortable with the designation forgeries. He prefers to think of them as his own originals.1 As remarkable as his tale is, Lara is certainly not alone in his efforts to forge ancient Mesoamerican sculptures. The elevated prices these objects fetch, the availability of the raw materials, and Mexicos relative poverty all fuel the black market trade in forged antiquities. The business is veiled in secrecy, for obvious reasons, but the history of forgery seems to be long and complex. The trade has been traced back to colonial times. Some have speculated that during the Conquest artisans sought to preserve older religious objects by providing the Spaniards with an unending supply of forgeries to destroy. This dynamic changed when Mexico gained its independence from Spain, but the cottage industry continued to flourish, spurred by new developments. One such development is noted in an 1886 article in the magazine Science, in which William Henry Holmes links the arrival of the railroad to the burgeoning

market in ancient objects of dubious authenticity: It is very easy for the native artisan to imitate any of the older forms of ware; and there is no doubt that in many cases he has done so for the purposes of deceiving. A renewed impetus has been given to this fraudulent practice by the influx of tourists consequent upon the completion of numerous railways.2 Another development that fostered forgery was photography. The late 19th century was a time in which the circulation of photographs and other accurate likenesses of authentic Pre-Columbian objects was relatively limited. In spite of archeologys central role in 19th-century Mexican photography (Desire Charnay, Frederick Catherwood, and the LePlongeons are protagonists in both of these histories), distorted reproductions were commonplace. Guillermo Dupaix, Luciano Castaeda, Frdric de Waldeck, and the other travelers and adventurers published their impressions of the Pre-Columbian ruins, often accompanying these texts with fanciful images bearing little resemblance to anything Mesoamerican. It is likely that these contributed to the proclivity to manufacture bad fakes, objects singularly unconvincing. Notorious among these is the sculpture known as the Dying Aztec, which looks less like a Mexica object than a mediocre knock-off of a Frederic Remington sculpture. That these kinds of egregious distortions were understood and exhibited as authentic objects suggests that Westerners could not grasp the Pre-Columbian sthetic. Its rules and conventions utterly alien to anything with European traditions, the Mesoamerican sthetic clearly escaped the anonymous craftsman responsible for the Dying Aztec, just as it escaped the illustrated magazines that produced such distorted reproductions. The contrast with Laras work could not be more dramatic. Not only do his ceramics achieve an sthetic level that, according to Lara, at least, leads some collectors to prefer them to authentic objects, but they are also unusually credible, to the extent that some of his claims have been questioned. Corroborating Laras claims of authorship has proven no simple matter. The Metropolitan Museums Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection of Art of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas

possesses a spectacular, three-foot tall hollow ceramic figure of Ehecatl, the Mesoamerican wind god. Fluoroluminescence and other laboratory tests attempting to date the artifact have yielded ambiguous results, and expert assessments of the object based on style achieve no consensus. Lara, who has never been to New York, knows a great deal about the piece and its construction, enough to suggest that at the very least he was witness to its manufacture. But other details seem to contradict this conclusion. Before being donated to the Metropolitan, the object was exhibited in New Yorks now-defunct Museum of Primitive Art. Before that, it was part of Nelson Rockefellers private collection. When Rockefeller purchased the object Lara was eight years old. It does not look like the work of an eight-year-old. When pressed for details, Lara explains that that he made the Ehecatl figure many years ago. Could Lara have been the apprentice to an older, master forger, making him the latest, most notorious representative of a tradition of later-day Totonac ceramicists? Lara emphatically denies this, claiming to be an autodidact. His training was in the fields as a child in Loma Bonita, Oaxaca, and Mixtequilla, Veracruz, where he grew upareas rich in archeological artifacts. He would study the fragments of ancient objects that peasant farmers would turn up while plowing their fields. From these he would extrapolate the form of the entire object. Meanwhile the Metropolitan Museum has taken the piece off display. Whether the Mets Ehecatl is a fake fake, that is, an authentic object falsely labeled as a forgery, remains an open question. Laras success points to certain weaknesses within the archeological establishment, which has paid a great deal of attention to iconography and the identification of divinities and royalty. Only relatively recently has it started to examine the raw materials used to create the objects. Laras expertise lies precisely in this area. In his studio is a vast assortment of clays from the region, each with a different hue and set of characteristics, and each serving diverse functions in the forgers repertoire. Archeologists know more about the worldview that the objects give us access to than Lara does. Not being an 11th-century Totonac, he does not know which elements are associated with which gods. One can imagine that if a member of that ancient culture had a chance to evaluate Laras creations, they
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Opposite Ehecatl, The Mesoamerican wind god. Attributed to Lara. Currently in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Photo: Lee Boltin

would have rejected them, just as William Henry Holmes dismisses the some of the more inept forgeries he encounters: compositions made up of unrelated parts (derived, maybe, from ancient art), and thrown together without rhyme or reason.3 To the extent that archeologists have used his objects to draw inferences about the ancient world, Lara is guilty of adding misleading data to the pool of available evidence. The degree to which Laras creations have been disseminated make it difficult to share Holmess assuredness when he writes: Doubtless in time most of the spurious objects will be detected and thrown out.4 In 1910, Leopoldo Batres published his Antiquedades Mejicanas Falsificadas: Falsificacion y Falsificadores, the first book-length study of forgery in Mexican antiques. The book presents reproductions of numerous objects of dubious authenticity, supporting Batress claim that certain celebrated objects are inauthentic. It also offers an eyewitness account of a workshop of forgers located near the pyramids of Teotihuacan.5 Batress depiction of the forger is an unflattering one, typically as both a victim of unscrupulous middlemen and an alcoholic who spends his time in taverns.6 Though information on the subject is scarce, Batress evident contempt is consistent with most accounts of forgers and their motivations. Almost without exception, the most celebrated and accomplished forgers of the 20th centuryLaras peersare depicted as despicable people. Cleared of accusations of collaborating with the Nazis, Hans Van Meegeren has never-theless gone down in history as a resentful failure, stung by the critical rejection of his own mediocre paintings, kitschy oils of fawns and overblown allegorical scenes exhibited under his own name in his youth. More recently, John Myatt, forger of Picassos, Matisses, and Giacomettis, is invariably portrayed as a hapless loser, manipulated and bullied by his own collaborator, the more intelligent and conniving John Drewe. Lara, however, does not fit this profile. An affable, modest man from a poor rural area, he expresses a sincere admiration for the Pre-Columbian cultures that he mimics, and regrets not having lived in those times. No longer beholden to the imposed vow of silence of the forger, he signs all of his original
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interpretations, and is insistent on his authorship. This points to the dilemma of the forger, for whom the greatest success implies anonymity, the reverse of the experience of any other artist. Perhaps, before his arrest, Lara craved the recognition that could only come at the price of exposure. If this is so, then the upshot must be a disappointment. Re-categorized as contemporary replicas, the market value of his creations has plummeted, and rather than exhibiting in the Metropolitan, he now shows at events like the Veracruz State Fair. In art world terms, this is an unquestionable step down, though the objects he created have not changed. The question we may ask here is the following: do the authentic Totonac objects express a worldview now otherwise lost to us, while Laras only mimic this worldview? Are Laras not an equally authentic expression of what Hillel Schwartz calls the culture of the copy?7 Though he makes no such claims, it is tempting to view Laras story as some sort of a comeuppance. Looters continue to carve up archeological ruins, raid tombs, and ship off the spoils for sale on foreign markets. Today, the black market for antiquities makes it easier for forgers to operate by discouraging collectors from inquiring into an objects provenance. Before the institution of laws protecting national patrimony, museums, universities, and other scientific institutions engaged in these activities unhindered. Even after the institution of these protective laws, Edward H. Thompson smuggled objects from Chichen Itza to Harvards Peabody Museum.8 In the light of all this, there is, it seems, a kind of poetic justice in the fact that a peasant artisan with a grammar school education seems to have fooled not only dozens of collectors, but some of the worlds leading archeologists and curators. Laras success does not simply call into question the expertise of the authorities, but subverts that neo-colonial project which continues to drain Latin America of its cultural heritage.

Interview with Brigdo Lara, Xalapa, Veracruz, 31 May 1996. 2 William Henry Holmes, The Trade in Spurious Mexican Antiquities, Science, vol. VII, no. 159, p. 170. 3 Ibid., p. 172. 4 Ibid., p. 170. 5 Leopoldo Batres, Antiguedades Mejicanas Falsificadas: Falsificacion y Falsificadores (Mexico, D.F.: Imprenta de Fidencio S. Soria, 1910), p. 14. 6 Ibid., p. 15. 7 Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy (New York: Zone Books, 1996). 8 A brief account of this notorious incident is provided in Leo Deuel, Conquistadors Without Swords (New York: St. Martins Press, 1967), p. 268.
1

Jesse Lerners documentary film Ruinas contains a section on Lara. For more information, see www.ruinas. org.

From Western Marxism to Western Buddhism Slavoj Zizek

The ultimate postmodern irony of today is the strange exchange between Europe and Asia: at the very moment when European technology and capitalism are triumphing worldwide at the level of the economic infrastructure, the Judeo-Christian legacy is threatened at the level of ideological superstructure in the European space itself by New Age Asiatic thought, which, in its different guises ranging from Western Buddhism to different Taos, is establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism.1 Therein resides the highest speculative identity of opposites in todays global civilization: although Western Buddhism presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of capi talist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple and retain inner peace and Gelassenheit, it actually functions as its perfect ideological supplement. One should mention here the well-known concept of future shock that describes how people are no longer psychologically able to cope with the dazzling rhythm of technological development and the social changes that accompany it. Things simply move too fast, and before one can accustom oneself to an invention, it has already been supplanted by a new one, so that one more and more lacks the most elementary cognitive mapping. The recourse to Taoism or Buddhism offers a way out of this predicament that definitely works better than the desperate escape into old traditions. Instead of trying to cope with the accelerating rhythm of technological progress and social changes, one should rather renounce the very endeavor to retain control over what goes on, rejecting it as the expression of the modern logic of domination. One should, instead, let oneself go, drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference toward the mad dance of accelerated process, a distance based on the insight that all this social and technological upheaval is ultimately just a non-substantial proliferation of semblances that do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being. One is almost tempted to resuscitate the old infa-mous Marxist clich of religion as the opium of the people, as the imaginary supplement to terrestrial misery. The Western Buddhist meditative stance is arguably the most efficient way for us to fully participate in capitalist dynamics while retaining the appearance of mental sanity. If Max Weber were alive today, he would definitely write a second, supplementary, volume to his Protestant Ethic, entitled

The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism.2 Western Buddhism thus fits perfectly the fetishist mode of ideology in our allegedly post-ideological era, as opposed to its traditional symptomal mode in which the ideological lie which structures our perception of reality is threatened by symp-toms qua returns of the repressed, cracks in the fabric of the ideological lie. The fetish is effectively a kind of symptom in reverse. That is to say, the symptom is the exception which disturbs the surface of the false appearance, the point at which the repressed Other Scene erupts, while the fetish is the embodiment of the Lie which enables us to sustain the unbearable truth. Let us take the case of the death of a beloved person. In the case of a symptom, I repress this death and try not to think about it, but the repressed trauma returns in the symptom. In the case of a fetish, on the contrary, I rationally fully accept this death, and yet I cling to the fetish, to some feature that embodies for me the disavowal of this death. In this sense, a fetish can play a very constructive role in allowing us to cope with the harsh reality. Fetishists are not dreamers lost in their private worlds. They are thorough realists capable of accepting the way things effectively are, given that they have their fetish to which they can cling in order to cancel the full impact of reality. In Nevil Shutes melodramatic World War II novel Requiem for a WREN, the heroine survives her lovers death without any visible traumas. She goes on with her life and is even able to talk rationally about her lovers death because she still has the dog that was the lovers favored pet. When, some time after, the dog is accidentally run over by a truck, she collapses and her entire world disintegrates.3 Sometimes, the line between fetish and symptom is almost indiscernible. An object can function as the symptom (of a repressed desire) and almost simultaneously as a fetish (embodying the belief which we officially renounce). A leftover of the dead person, a piece of his/her clothes, can function both as a fetish (insofar as the dead person magically continues to live in it) and as a symptom (functioning as the disturbing detail that brings to mind his/her death). Is this ambiguous tension not homologous to that between the phobic and the fetishist object? The structural role

is in both cases the same: If this exceptional element is disturbed, the whole system collapses. Not only does the subjects false universe collapse if he is forced to confront the meaning of his symptom; the opposite also holds, insofar as the subjects rational acceptance of the way things are dissolves when his fetish is taken away from him. So, when we are bombarded by claims that in our post-ideological cynical era nobody believes in the proclaimed ideals, when we encounter a person who claims he is cured of any beliefs and accepts social reality the way it really is, one should always counter such claims with the question OK, but where is the fetish that enables you to (pretend to) accept reality the way it is? Western Buddhism is such a fetish. It enables you to fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it; that you are well aware of how worthless this spectacle is; and that what really matters to you is the peace of the inner Self to which you know you can always with-draw. In a further specification, one should note that the fetish can function in two opposite ways: either its role remains unconsciousas in the case of Shutes heroine who was unaware of the fetish-role of the dogor you think that the fetish is that which really matters, as in the case of a Western Buddhist unaware that the truth of his existence is in fact the social involvement which he tends to dismiss as a mere game. Nowhere is this fetishist logic more evident than apropos of Tibet, one of the central references of the post-Christian spiritual imaginary. Today, Tibet more and more plays the role of such a fantasmatic Thing, of a jewel which, when one approaches it too much, turns into the excremental object. It is a commonplace to claim that the fascination exerted by Tibet on the Western imagination, especially on the broad public in the US, provides an exemplary case of the colonization of the imaginary. It reduces the actual Tibet to a screen for the projection of Western ideological fantasies. Indeed, the very incon-sistency of this image of Tibet, with its direct coincidences of opposites, seems to bear witness to its fantasmatic status. Tibetans are portrayed as people leading the simple life of spiritual satisfaction, fully accepting their fate, liberated from the excessive cravings of the Westerner who is
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always searching for more, and as a bunch of filthy, cheating, cruel, sexually promiscuous primitives. Lhasa itself becomes a version of Franz Kafkas Castle: sublime and majestic when first seen from afar, but then changing into the paradise of filth, a gigantic pile of shit, as soon as one actually enters the city. Potala, the central palace towering over Lhasa, is a kind of heavenly residence on earth, magically floating in the air and a labyrinth of stale seedy rooms and corridors full of monks engaged in obscure magic rituals, including sexual perversions. The social order is presented as the model of organic harmony and as the tyranny of the cruel corrupted theocracy keeping ordinary people ignorant. The Tibetan Buddhism itself is simultaneously hailed as the most spiritual of all religions, the last shelter of ancient Wisdom, and as the utmost primitive superstition, relying on praying wheels and similar cheap magic tricks. This oscillation between jewel and shit is not the oscillation between the idealized ethereal fantasy and raw reality: in such an oscillation, both extremes are fantasmatic, i.e. the fantasmatic space is the very space of this immediate passage from one extreme to the other. The first antidote against this topos of the raped jewel, of the isolated place of people who just wanted to be left alone but were repeatedly penetrated by foreigners, is to remind ourselves that Tibet was already in itself an antagonistic, split society, not an organic Whole whose harmony was disturbed only by external intruders. Tibetan unity and independence were themselves imposed from the outside. Tibet emerged as a unified country in the ninth century when it established a patron-priest relationship with the Mongols. The Mongols protected the Tibetans, who in turn provided spiritual guidance to Mongolia. (The very name Dalai Lama is of Mongol origins and was conferred on Tibetan religious leader by the Mongols.) Events took the same turn in the 17th century when the Fifth Lama, the greatest of them all, established the Tibet we know today again, through benevolent foreign patronageand started the construction of Potala. What followed was the long tradition of factional struggles, in which, as a rule, the winners won by inviting foreigners (Mongols, Chinese) to intervene. This story culminates in the recent partial shift of the Chinese strategy. Rather than use sheer military coercion, the Chinese now rely on
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ethnic and economic colonization, rapidly transforming Lhasa into a Chinese version of the capitalist Wild West with karaoke bars intermingled with the Disneylike Buddhist theme parks for Western tourists. In short, what the media image of the brutal Chinese soldiers and policemen terrorizing the Buddhist monks conceals is the much more effective, American-style socioeconomic transformation. In a decade or two, the Tibetans will be reduced to the status of the Native Americans in the United States. The second antidote is therefore the opposite one: to denounce the split nature of the Western image of Tibet as a reflexive determination of the split attitude of the West itself, combining violent penetration and respectful sacralization. Colonel Francis Younghusband, who in 1904 led the English regiment of 1,200 men that reached Lhasa and forced trade agreements on the Tibetans, and was a true precursor of the late Chinese invasion. He mercilessly ordered the machine gun slaughter of hundreds of Tibetan soldiers armed only with swords and lances and thus forced his way to Lhasa. However, this same person experienced in his last day in Lhasa a true epiphany: Never again could I think of evil, or ever again be at enmity with any man. All nature and all humanity were bathed in a rosy glowing radiancy; and life for the future seemed nought but buoyancy and light.4 The same went for his commander-in-chief, the infamous Lord Curzon, who justified Younghusbands expedition thus: The Tibetans are a weak and cowardly people, their very pusillanimity rendering them readily submissive to any powerful military authority who entering their country should forthwith give a sharp lesson and a wholesome dread of offending.5 Yet this same Curzon, who insisted how nothing can or will be done with the Tibetans until they are frightened, declared in a speech at an Old Etonian banquet: The East is a university in which the scholar never takes his degree. It is a temple where the suppliant adores but never catches sight of the object of his devotion. It is a journey the goal of which is always in sight but is never attained.6 What was and is absolutely foreign to Tibet is this Western logic of desire to penetrate the inaccessible object beyond a limit, through a great ordeal and against natural obstacles and vigilant patrols. In his
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travelogue To Lhasa in Disguise, published in 1924, William McGovern raised the tantalizing question: What provokes a man to risk so much on such an arduous, dangerous, and unnecessary journey to a place that is so manifestly unappealing when he at last gets there? To the Tibetans, at least, such a useless trek seemed nonsensical. McGovern wrote of his efforts to explain his motives to an incredulous Tibetan official in Lhasa: It was impossible to get him to understand the pleasures of undertaking an adventure and dangerous journey. Had I talked about anthropological research he would have thought me mad.7 The lesson to our followers of Tibetan Wisdom is thus that if we want to be Tibetans, we should forget about Tibet and do it here. Therein resides the ultimate paradox: The more Europeans try to penetrate the true Tibet, the more the very form of their endeavor undermines their goal. We should appreciate the full scope of this paradox, especially with regard to Eurocentrism. The Tibetans were extremely self-centered: To them, Tibet was the center of the world, the heart of civilization.8 What characterizes European civilization, on the contrary, is precisely its ex-centered characterthe notion that the ultimate pillar of Wisdom, the secret agalma, the spiritual treasure, the lost object-cause of desire, which we in the West long ago betrayed, could be recuperated out there in the forbidden exotic place. Colonization was never simply the imposition of Western values, the assimilation of the Oriental and other Others to European Sameness; it was always also the search for the lost spiritual innocence of our own civilization. This story begins at the very dawn of Western civilization, in Ancient Greece. For the Greeks, Egypt was such a mythic place of lost ancient wisdom. And the same holds today in our own societies. The difference between the authentic fundamentalists and the perverted Moral Majority fundamentalists is that the first (like the Amish in the United States) get along very well with their American neighbors since they are simply centered on their own world and not bothered by what goes on out there among them, while the Moral Majority fundamentalist is always haunted by the ambiguous attitude of horror/envy with regard to the unspeakable pleasures in which the sinners engage. The reference to Envy as one of the seven

deadly sins can thus serve as a perfect instrument enabling us to distinguish authentic fundamentalism from its Moral Majority mockery: authentic fundamentalists do not envy their neighbors their different jouissance.9 Envy is grounded in what one is tempted to call the transcendental illusion of desire, strictly correlative to the Kantian transcendental illusion: a natural propensity in the human being to (mis)perceive the object which gives body to the primordial lack as the object which is lacking, which was lost (and, consequently, possessed prior to this loss); this illusion sustains the longing to regain the lost object, as if this object has a positive substantial identity independently of its being lost. The conclusion to be drawn from this is a simple and radical one: Moral Majority fundamentalists and tolerant multiculturalists are two sides of the same coin: they both share a fascination with the Other. In the Moral Majority, this fascination displays the envious hatred of the Others excessive jouissance, while the multiculturalist tolerance of the Others Otherness is also more twisted than it may appearit is sustained by a secret desire for the Other to remain other, not to become too much like us. In contrast to both these positions, the only truly tolerant attitude towards the Other is that of the authentic radical fundamentalist.

See Peter Sloterdijk, Eurotaoismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1989). 2 In a strictly homologous way, the opposition between globalization and the survival of local traditions is false. Globalization directly resuscitates local traditions, it literally thrives on them, which is why the true opposite to globalization are not local traditions, but universality. See chapter 4 of Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso Books, 1999). 3 In the classic literature, one should mention Emile Zolas Germinal, in which the attachment to a rabbit helps the Russian revolutionary Souvarine to survive. When the rabbit is slaughtered and eaten by mistake, he explodes in an outburst of violent rage. 4 Quoted from Orville Schell, Virtual Tibet (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2000), p. 202. 5 Ibid., p. 191. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., p. 230. 8 William McGovern, quoted in Schell, ibid., p. 230. 9 Is not the obvious thing for an analyst to root Envy in the infamous penis envy? Rather than succumbing to this temptation, one should emphasize that envy is ultimately the envy of the Others jouissance. My affluent business-oriented colleagues always marvel at how much work I put into theory and, comparatively, how little I earn; although their marvel is usually expressed in the terms of aggressive scorn (How stupid you are to deal with theory!), what obviously lurks behind is envy: the idea that, since I am not doing it for money (or power), and since they do not understand the reason I am doing it, there must be some strange jouissance, some satisfaction in theory accessible only to me and out of reach to them.
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Nationalism and catharsis: The Center for Cultural Decontamination, Belgrade Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss & Vladimir Kulic

According to a rare press release, the Center for Cultural Decontamination (CCD) in Belgrade is an independent cultural institution that has worked since 1993 to revive the liberal spirit of the arts and public discourse under the impossible conditions of war, economy, politics, and the heavily suppressed human spirit of the last decade in Yugoslavia. Given these conditions, it is therefore surprising to read in the next sentence that since acquiring its own space in Belgrade five years ago, the Center has organized more than 1,000 exhibitions, performances, and public events (at a rate of two events every three days). As we read on, The main aim of the Center is to transform the social atmosphere that has been contaminated by orchestrated nationalism, hatred, and destruction. After noting that the Center does not belong to any political party in Serbia, the press release informs us that cultural decontamination is about catharsis, which a dictionary defines as the purging of emotions through a work of art, or, in psychological terms, as the discharge of repressed or pent-up emotions resulting in the alleviation of symptoms or the elimination of the condition. For a society that continues to operate on what the CCD calls contaminated patriotism, the call for decontamination means something very different than it would for someone in the US or Western Europe. Recent philosophical and cultural debates in Western Europe and the States on the rhetoric of decontamination have usually focused on the fear of contamination from a purported external source of impurity. In the American context, for example, the language of decontamination was invoked by the right wing during the Cold War to provoke the fear that communism was threatening to taint the pure American national psyche. Opposed to this is the alternative view that there is no pure inside to begin withthat all cultures are always already impureand that the drive toward decontamination is a symptom of a paranoid psyche invested in a dangerous fantasy of purity. From this alternative viewpoint, contamination is the valorized term, one that signals the desire to move beyond the temptation to identify a purely good self and a purely evil other. But what would the rhetoric of decontamination mean in the inverse case, when parts of the inside see the inside itself as
36 Entrance to the CCD

infectious, and a relationship to the outside as the relief? During the Milosevic era, Yugoslavia was labeled a prison not only by the political opposition now in power but also by the cultural community that refused to be associated with the regime. Whatever contamination might mean in the West, in a former communist country with a proliberal past the term was turned inside-out into a synonym for nationalism itself. Within the context of institutionalized nationalism, the CCD had to have a bi-focal program: an activist agenda alongside the original focus on the arts. For example, during the 1996-97 student demonstrations in Belgrade, the Center supported the strike among theater professionals. This initiative sparked fierce discussions among actors and directors as to whether they should continue to mount productions or not. The CCD has published one of these discussions, full of differing articulations and opinions, as a pamphlet in the very form of a drama. The CCD program is open to almost any art form, although the focus falls on theater and performance. This is logical because prior to founding the CCD, Borka Pavicevic served as a principal of the Yugoslav Drama Theater. She was ousted from that position by Milosevics apparatchiks on political grounds. The CCD, established shortly after the nationalist purge in the state institutions, became the space for some forms of theater that were banned (along with their producers) from official theaters. Two examples include Macbeth/It, a dance and drama production directed and choreographed by Sonja Vukicevic; and more recently About Germany, a theater performance based on the writings of Bertolt Brecht, Hermann Broch, Volkmar Von Zuelsdorf, and Hannah Arendt about postWorld War II Germany, that was written and directed by Ana Miljanic. The centers activities in theater, art, and politics were seen as oppositional from the very beginning. The opposition was directed not at reactionary drama but at a whole way of thinking that for the last decade had valorized Serbian nationalism. Although a justified fear of the regimes reactions made directors wary of producing content that was transparently antiMilosevic, there were also direct attacks. For example, the Center organized an exhibition of drawings by Bogoljub Maki

Arsenijevic, who escaped from jail where he was imprisoned for organizing protests against Milosevics regime. On opening night, a letter arrived from the author, whose drawings had been done on the covers of prison library books. It had been written that day and was the first sign of the runaway political prisoner. Or take the production called Combed Singer by Petar Lukovic, an eminent journalist who started publishing extremely witty anti-war articles in the early 90s. Appearing on stage were characters representing Radovan Karadzic, Biljana Plavsic, Milosevic, his wife, as well as other people accused of war crimes by the International Tribunal in The Hague. Situated in the row of foreign embassies in the center of Belgrade, CCD operates from a 1920s building that was originally a private art gallery for European Art built by an influential family shortly after the end of World War I. The Center decided to keep the original gallery name, Pavilion Veljkovic, in memory of the family. It is Monday, 9 October 2000, four days after the fall of Milosevic and what is known as The Bulldozer Revolution. We are at the Center to pose some questions to Borka Pavicevic, the Centers founder and director, and Ana Miljanic, program director and the Centers most active theater director. Before coming here we were wondering what we should talk about, especially given what has been happening in Belgrade in the last couple of days. Our editor in New York, who had heard about the Center, had thought it was called the Center for Cultural Contamination, not Decontamination. What made you choose this term? Borka Pavicevic: The first time that the concept of decontamination became public was during the student demonstrations of 1996-97 in Belgrade. The students came to the center of the city where Milosevics socialists held a counter-rally and the students decontaminated the city from the counter-rally by cleaning the streets with soap. That was the first time that the public understood what our center was about and that what is going on around us is not because of us but because of the Milosevic regime. I remember that many people called us during the students decontamination of the streets with the soap, and they told us: Now we understand what you want to say.

Considering the recent political changes and the fact that decontamination will hopefully now become a general orientation, do you think you should shift direction and change the name? BP: No, no, no! Because you still have the contamination of culture coming through the nationalist mythology, through nationalist parties, and so on. For example, the great contamination of patriotism is that the Serbs lost the Kosovo battle in the 14th century, which turned into the myth that we were born to become the victims of history and that the whole world is prosecuting us because of that. Ana Miljanic: I think that our goal for the future will be to act as a critical institution that will not just oppose current cultural models or paradigms but also promote other values that are neglected. I think that it remains an important question whether this politically awakened citizenry will continue to be present as a political force in this transition period. This will be our major task: not to let them go home and mind their own business while the professionals run the country. I think a good sign of this is the decision of the student group Otpor [Resistance] to stay in opposition to Kostunica and promote this as their future agenda. Promoting is about selling something to somebody, even if its something as complex as the feeling of collective guilt. What do you think of the idea of trying to deliver manifestos to the public? AM: If you have a group of artists, historians, or art historians saying that our cultural life is awful and kitsch and explain-ing the roots of this, you are doing some-thing which is quite important. But thats different from proposing what kind of values should be promoted. The question is: Should we just import culture from Europe and the world that has money, or did we have in our past some traditions, weak or not, which actually functioned as links to the world? If you are just importing modernism from outside, then you are saying that we were the barbarians, which is not true. How do you view the responsibility of the intellectual elite for what was happening in Serbia?

Borka Pavicevic all photos Sabine von Fischer

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AM: In the 80s, cultural workers prepared for the entire nationalist project. It was prepared for in the theater, in architecture, and so on, by the so-called dissidents of nationalist intellectualism [a class that claimed to be a victim of Titos Yugoslavia]. They recognized Milosevic as someone who could help them realize their program. Milosevic was a man without ideas, he was a part of the establishment, and was connected with the Army. When the plan failed, first in Croatia, then in Bosnia, and then finally in Kosovo, they decided not to play that card anymore. But Milosevic imagined that since he was in power, maybe he was really important. BP: I was looking at Milosevic three nights ago on television. The shot was very plain, there was an opening, and he was standing there. There was nothing behind him or anything else and you could see just one ordinary, banal, everyday person. And then you remember 1991 and how he spoke in Kosovo, always speaking like Lenin with large groups there and everybody was marching. Now you see one stupid, average man who has nothing to say, actually. I remember the reactions when the Center appeared for the first time. There really was not much left of the public institutions that were formerly centers of public interest, and this new center was both welcome and also suspicious to many. The reaction was Yes, we need a center, but who are these people now? How was it to do double duty as both an activist center and as a traditional performance space? AM: I think we will lose one part of our program and I am very happy for itnot because I did not like this program, but because I think that other institutions will take on some of that programming. Very often we were doing the work of public or state institutions, because nobody wanted to collaborate with our state authorities.

Do you still feel like an alternative space, one thats needed only when something like that happens? AM: I think what happened in the last ten years in Yugoslavia somehow delivered people who were naturally a part of the mainstream culture or the mainstream educational system to the margins. The Center was born as a bridge between the cultural audience and the intellectual elite but also between marginal alternative projects and the mainstream culture, which no longer had any space to work in. The alternative character mainly meant being an alternative to the national cultural paradigm that was dominant in Serbia. There is a lot of indoctrination, not only in the quite large segment of the population that voted for Milosevic in the last election, but even among those people who were in the revolutionary crowd just a few days ago breaking into the Federal Assembly building. There are still myths endlessly repeated by the state television, like, We have to fight for our integrity and sovereignty; We must not allow foreign companies inside because they will destroy our economy; and so on. BP: Exactly, this is contamination. And it is still alive. The final contamination is when the nation becomes a state and culture becomes a national culture. What does that mean for us? My answer is another question, namely: Which culture can say that it does not stem from many cultures? Is there such a culture as a single culture? Milosevic was talking about the sovereignty of culture and that is why the people are contaminated. The concept of sovereignty is the most conservative 18th-century word from the time when nation-states were first formed. And you have his story about sovereignty, which is supposed to protect you from the outside. This theory of sovereignty functioned like inner sanc-tions, in every sense parallel to the

outside sanctions, the economic and political embargo imposed on Serbia by the world and the United Nations throughout the last decade. Perhaps the greatest problem with this series of myths is that they are not based on complete lies, but on half-truths. This play with half-truths really is what makes these myths possible, what makes them work. It is very important to distinguish which is which. BP: You are coming to the major problem we are working with and that is reality. People who are educated on half-truths dont participate in reality and actually lose all sense of it. The problem of this contamination is an inability to accept reality, and therefore you have kitsch and virtual reality being promoted as culture while real life happens elsewhere. How can I pretend that you are not here, and that the people who are searching for Ivan Stambolic [the former president of Serbia, who was kidnapped a short time before the elections] are not here? Because they are here,and hes still missing. This is reality. This is actually a problem of grasping the reality that has already happened. And, of course, in some way we are privileged, because it actually takes a certain sensibility just to see reality. This is like the division between culture and kitsch, where everything based on a half-lie is kitsch. Therefore we had this political indoctrination with kitsch around us. And for that reason and because of many interpretations around and within the media, I was expecting a civil war. And it is great that the possibility of civil war was overthrown by reality.

Opposite David Shrigley, Untitled, 2000

Overleaf Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock Core Samples: Me, Paul, Matt, Gabriella, Brian, Steve, 2000

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Abstract concrete: Francisco Lpez and the ontology of sound Christoph Cox

5 October 1948, Paris In August of 1944, Pierre Schaeffer, announcer for Radiodiffusion Franaise, celebrated the liberation of Paris by playing a recording of La Marseillaise to an ecstatic France.1 Four years later, Schaeffer heralded the liberation of music. Under the title A Concert of Noises, Schaeffer broadcast a set of tudes he had composed entirely from recordings of train whistles, spinning tops, pots and pans, canal boats, percussion instruments, and a lone piano. In contrast with traditional musique abstraite, which passed through the detours of notation, instrumentation, and performance, Schaeffer called his new music musique concrtemusic built from the sounds of the world and assembled directly by the hands of the composer via the manipulation of phonograph discs or the splicing of magnetic tape. Schaeffer gleefully abandoned the space of the concert hall, celebrating the fact that radio and recording made possible a new experience of sound. He termed the experience (following Edmund Husserls procedure of phenomenological reduction, which aimed at isolating the pure datum of experience) reduced listening or (following the Pythagoreans, whose initi-ates, the akousmatikoi, listened to the master from behind a veil) acousmatic listening. Schaeffers profound influence on late 20thcentury music led in two directions. On the one hand, along with John Cage, his experiments fostered musical postmodernism. His concrte procedures would later be developed and perfected by hiphop DJs from Grandmaster Flash to Q-Bert and sampling artists from John Oswald to David Shea. Acousmatic listening would soon become the norm, as telephones, Muzak, Walkmen, and car stereos filled the sonic spaces of everyday life with disembodied sound. On the other hand, Schaeffer himself saw another set of possibilities in the acousmatic world of musique concrte: the affirmation of a metaphysical impulse characteristic of Romanticism and High Modernism. By recording sounds, altering them (slowing them down, speeding them up, reversing them, chopping off their attack or decay), and playing them back over radio or phonograph, Schaeffer hoped to isolate a world of pure sound cast adrift from the sources of its production and indepenent from the domain of the visual. What began
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in the quotidian and the commonplace was, by a set of mechanical procedures and instruments, cast into another ontological realm.2 8 July 2000, Queens, New York I have a completely passional and transcendental conception of music, remarks the Spanish sound artist Francisco Lpez after his DJ set at P.S.1. Of course, I have lots of ideas about the world and politics and whatever, but I think these things shouldnt contaminate, shouldnt pollute the music. Im very purist.3 Manipulating two turntables, a Powerbook, and a mixer, Lpez has just subjected a blindfolded audience to deafening blocks of granulated noise composed, it turns out, of Death Metal recordings sliced, diced, and piled up ad infinitum. Lpez is perfectly comfortable on a DJ platform; but his guiding sthetic is hardly the postmodernist pastiche of the hip-hop turntablist. On the contrary, Lpez is a resolute modernist who unabashedly deems his work absolute music and talks earnestly about summoning the ineffable. Though he draws his material exclusively from field recordings and found sound, Lpez is a musical abstractionist obsessed with sonic substance. He is critical of what he calls the dissipative agents of music, which is anything that distracts attention from the pure matter of sound: language, text, image, referentiality, musical form and structure, technique and process, instrumental virtuosity, etc. His compositions are dramatic and elegant, abounding with sonic subtlety and intricacy and exploring the extremes of aural perception. Often an hour in length, they unfold slowly; layering, juxtaposing, fading, and dissolving slabs of sound that rumble and rasp, buzz and hiss, grate and whir. The recent Untitled #89 (Or/Touch), for exam-ple, begins with minutes of silence and gradually builds into a mlstrom of metallic or insectile hums that pulse and swirl, albeit just within earshot. Musical modernism is generally associated with academic composition, for which Lpez has nothing but contempt and which he considers moribund and obsolete. But Lpez is a key figure in a new modernism a neo-modernist underground populated by an international network of DJs, experimental musicians, and sound artists

(among them Bernhard Gnter, Masami Akita, Christian Fennesz, and Zbigniew Karkowski) working with the pure matter of sound and reanimating crucial moments in the history of audio experimentation. 4th Century, b.c.e., along the River Ilisus, outside of Athens In Platos Phdrus, the sweet song of the cicadas chorus prompts Socrates to recall a musical and philosophical myth. The cicadas were once human beings, recounts Socrates. When the Muses first introduced song, these men and women were so overtaken with the joy of singing that they forgot to eat and drink and soon perished. As a gift, the Muses transformed them into cicadas, insects capable of singing continuously without nourishment. Upon their death, the cicadas were obliged to report to each of the Muses a list of those human beings that had honored them. To Calliope and Urania, oldest among the Muses, the cicadas reported those who had lived the rarest and noblest of human lives: the philosophical life, one dedicated to the apprehension of pure Being abstracted from its worldly instantiations and connections.4 Rainy season, 19951996, Costa Rica Trained as an academic entomologist, Lpezs conversion to his musical vision took place in the rain forests of Latin America. The notes to his 1997 recording, La Selva (V2_Archief) offer this account: La Selva, like many other tropical rain forests is indeed quite a noisy place. The multitude of sounds from water (rain, water courses), together with the incredible sound web created by the intense calls of insects or frogs and plant sounds, make up a wonderfully powerful broadband sound environment of thrilling complexity. The resulting sound textures are extremely rich, with many sound layers that merge and reveal themselves by addition or subtraction, challenging perception and also the very concept of individual sounds. Lpez continues: There are many sounds in the forest but one rarely has the chance to see the sources of most of them. In addition to the fact that a multitude of animals are

hidden in the foliage, the foliage also hides itself, keeping away from our sight a myriad of plant sound sources Many animals in La Selva live in this acousmatic world, in which the rule is not to see their conspecifics, predators or preys, but just to hear them. This acousmatic feature is best exemplified by one of the most characteristic and widespread sounds in La Selva: the strikingly loud and harsh song of the cicadas. During the day, this is probably the most typical sound that naturally stands in the foreground of the sonic field. One can perceive it with an astonishing intensity and proximity; many times you hear the cicada in front of your face. Yet, like a persistent paradox, you never see it.5 1964, Central Brazil/Paris The paradoxes of musique concrte baffled the anthropologist Claude Lvi-Strauss, a contemporary of Schaeffer. In the course of justifying the traditional symphonic scheme through which he presented his analysis of Bororo mythology, Lvi-Strauss wrote: There is a striking parallel, between the ambitions of that variety of music which has been paradoxically dubbed concrete and those of what is more properly called abstract painting. By rejecting musical sounds and restricting itself exclusively to noises, musique concrte puts itself into a situation that is comparable, from the formal point of view, to that of painting of whatever kind: it is in immediate communion with the given phenomena of nature. And like abstract painting, its first concern is to disrupt the system of actual or potential meanings of which these phenomena are the elements. Before using the noises it has collected, musique concrte takes care to make them unrecognizable, so that the listener cannot yield to the natural tendency to relate them to sense images: the breaking of china, a train whistle, a fit of coughing, or the snapping of a tree branch.6 It is a parallel and paradox embraced by Lpez and deployed in his polemics against John Cage and acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer.7 Like Cage, Lpez urges the dissolution of conventional distinctions between music and noise, composition and reception. Yet, for Lpez, Cage too quickly abdicated the role of creative artist, substituting chance procedures that

continued Western art musics obsession with methodology and structure to the neglect of its true essence: sonic substance itself. Like Schafer, Lpez calls our attention to the richness of the sonic environment and considers the world the best sound generator there is. Yet, for Lpez, Schafer, too, neglects sonic matter in his ecological focus on the relationship of sound to place, health, and communication. Acoustic Ecology and the Nature Sounds movement also foster what Lpez considers a false or restricted conception of nature: nature as a bucolic refuge from human civilization. Acoustic Ecologists, in their Rousseauist fantasy, seem to forget that nature is also noisy and violent, the province of crashing waterfalls, howling hurricanes, and screeching monkeys. I like frog sounds as much as I like machine sounds, Lpez replies. And I use both in my work. The question is not: Do the sounds come from nature or come from machines? To me, the point is that the sounds by themselves have their own entity. From that point of view, it doesnt matter if youre working with frogs in the jungle or with machines in the city. If youre interested in the sounds, you can combine these two things and can also focus on the specific sound matter youre getting from those sources. Paraphrasing Ren Magritte, Lpez warns his listeners La Selva is not La Selva.8 To Cage and Schafer, Lpez replies: Let us Schaefferians have the freedom of a painter.9 Autumn 1964, Brooklyn, New York Lpez is deeply critical of Western cultures obsession with the visual. Yet he continually draws on metaphors from the visual arts, which clearly provide the model for his ideal of sonic abstraction. In conversation, he is likely to explain his concrte procedures by analogy with sculpture or photography. To focus the listeners attention on sound alone, he abandoned composition titles in 1997 and began releasing his work in clear slimline cases all but devoid of verbal and visual information. This strategy recalls that of abstract expressionist and minimalist painters and sculptors, who freed their arts from figural representation so that they could explore their real stuff: color and shape, space and mass. Like Lpez, Morton Feldman hoped that his music approximated the sublime stasis

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of an abstract canvas. Though he worked closely with Cage, his mentor and friend, Feldmans sthetic was more profoundly shaped by his association with the painters Phillip Guston, Willem DeKooning, Mark Rothko, and Franz Kline. [T]here was a deity in my life, Feldman told an interviewer, and that was sound. Everything else was after the fact. Working at the height of serialism, Feldman confounded the systematizers with his delicate, drifting compositions, in which sounds came and went free of melody, rhythm, aim, or goal. The story goes that Karlheinz Stockhausen once chased Feldman around a conference, hounding him with the question, Mort, whats your system? Feldman is said to have replied simply, I dont push the sounds around. Commenting on Stockhausens colleague, Pierre Boulez, Feldman spat: Boulezis everything I dont want art to be. It is Boulez, more than any other composer today who has given system a new prestigeBoulez who once said in an essay that he is not interested in how a piece sounds, only in how it is made. No painter would talk that way.10 1936, Santa Fe, New Mexico In a 1958 article written for It Is, a shortlived magazine dedicated to abstract art, Feldman repeated his condemnation of Boulez and instead celebrated the music of another Frenchman: Noise is a word of which the aural image is all too evasive But it is noise that we really understand. It is only noise which we secretly want, because the greatest truth usually lies behind the greatest resistance And those moments when one loses control, and sound like crystals forms its own planes, and with a thrust, there is no sound, no tone, no sentiment, nothing left but the significance of our first breathsuch is the music of Varse.11 Two decades earlier, Edgard Varse had turned away from tone, melody, and rhythm and toward a new conception of music that he called simply the organization of sound. Speaking to an audience at the Santa Fe home of radical naturalist, Mary Austin, Varse imagined a music of the future. When new instruments will allow me to write music as I conceive it, the movement of sound-masses, of shifting
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planes, will be clearly perceived in my work, taking the place of the linear counterpoint. When these sound-masses collide, the phenomena of penetration or repulsion will seem to occur. Certain transmutations taking place on certain planes will seem to be projected onto other planes, moving at different speeds and at different angles. There will no longer be the old conception of melody or interplay of melodies. The entire work will be a melodic totality. The entire work will flow as a river flows.12 Feldmans and Varses visions offer fitting descriptions for much of Lpezs output. Beginning and ending nearly imperceptibly, Lpezs compositions mobilize fluid masses of noise that course, slide, and crash with a force at once serene and threatening in its awesome power. 11 March 1913, Milan Outlining his program for an art of noises, the Futurist painter Luigi Russolo wrote his friend, the composer Balilla Pratella: It cannot be objected that noise is only loud and disagreeable to the ear. It seems to me useless to enumerate all the subtle and delicate noises that produce pleasing sensations. To be convinced of the surprising variety of noises, one need only think of the rumbling of thunder, the whistling of the wind, the roaring of a waterfall, the gurgling of a brook, the rustling of leaves, the trotting of a horse into the distance, the rattling jolt of a cart on the road, and of the full, solemn, and white breath of a city at night. Think of all the noises made by wild and domestic animals, and of all those that a man can make, without either speaking or singing. Let us cross a large modern capital with our ears more sensitive than our eyes. We will delight in distinguishing the eddying of water, of air or gas in metal pipes, the muttering of motors that breathe and pulse with an indisputable animality, the throbbing of valves, the bustle of pistons, the shrieks of mechanical saws, the starting of trams on the tracks, the cracking of whips, the flapping of awnings and flags. We will amuse ourselves by orchestrating together in our imagination the din of rolling shop shutters, the varied hubbub of train stations, iron works, thread mills, printing presses, electrical plants, and subways.13

Back at P.S.1, Lpez is celebrating the pleasures of urban noise. I have many sounds on my releases that are very similar to the sounds you can hear on the street, he notes. But, people dont listen to those sounds very well. So recording is important because it leads people to listen. 20 October 2000, Amherst, Massachusetts Lpezs discourse abounds in paradoxes: a Romantic/modernist in the heart of DJ culture; an auteur who aims to bear witness to sound itself; a sonic abstractionist who insists on the priority of field recording; a metaphysician whose medium is the sensual. One would have thought that sthetic postmodernism had discredited such Romantic and modernist claims to sthetic purity and abstraction. Yet perhaps the choice is no longer one between modernism and postmodernism. From Schaeffer onwards, DJ culture has been guided by two figures: the cut and the mix. To record is to cut, to separate the sonic signifier (the sample) from any original or natural context or meaning so that it might be free to operate otherwise. To mix is to reinscribe, to place the floating sample into a new chain or machine of signification. The mix is the postmodern moment,in which the most disparate of sounds can be spliced together and made to flow. But the mix is made possible by the cut, that modernist moment in which sound is lifted and allowed to become something else. Before it is reinscribed, the sonic signifier can achieve, momentarily, a kind of pure potentiality, abstraction, and freedom. To sustain this moment is impos-sible, for meaning and signification are ever ready to capture and reinscribe the way-ward mark or sound. But the genius of Schaefferand of Lpezis to call our attention to the cut, that elusive moment in the constitution of recorded sound, and, for a minute or an hour, to break the flow.
Small portions of this essay appeared previously in The Wire (September 2000), pp. 3233. Thanks to Molly Whalen and Dan Warner for contributions.

Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Is Paris Burning? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), pp. 25657, cited in Lowell Cross, Electronic Music, 19481953, Perspectives of New Music (Fall/Winter 1968). 2 See Pierre Schaeffer, La Musique Concrte (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), pp. 924, and Trait des Objets Musicaux (Paris: ditions du Seuil), p. 91 ff, p. 261 ff. 3 Unless otherwise noted, quotations from Lpez are drawn from my interview with him at P.S.1, Queens, New York, July 8, 2000. 4 Plato, Phdrus , 230c, 258e259d. 5 Francisco Lpez, liner notes to La Selva: Sound Environments from a Neotropical Rain Forest (V2_ Archief, V228), pp. 1112. 6 Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), pp. 223. 7 See R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977). 8 Lpez, liner notes to La Selva , p. 8. 9 Lpez, Schizophonia vs. lobjet sonore: soundscapes and artistic freedom, eContact! 1.4, http:// cec.concordia.ca/econtact/Ecology/Lopez.htm. For Lpezs critique of Cage, see Cagean philosophy: a devious version of the classical procedural paradigm, http://www.franciscolopez.net/ cage.html and the interview with Lpez in Rvue et Corige (May 1999), available at http://www.franciscolopez.net/ int.html. 10 Morton Feldman, An Interview with Robert Ashley, August 1964, Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, Expanded Edition, ed. Elliot Schwartz and Barney Childs with Jim Fox (New York: Da Capo, 1998), p. 364. The Stockhausen anecdote appears in a number of places, among them Paul Griffiths, Modern Music and After: Directions Since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 303. Morton Feldman, Predeterminate/Indeterminate, in Morton Feldman: Essays, ed., Walter Zimmerman (Berlin: Beginner Press, 1985), p. 47. 11 Morton Feldman, SoundNoiseVarse Boulez, It Is 2(Autumn 1958), p. 46. 12 Edgard Varse, The Liberation of Sound, Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, p. 197. 13 Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises , trans. Barclay Brown (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986), pp. 2330.
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A track by Francisco Lpez can be found on Cabinets website at www.immaterial.net/cabinet.

Overleaf Jim Lambie Caribbean Moonlight, Canadian Sunset, 2000

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Dupe: a partial compendium of everyday delusions Jeff Gibson

sideline omniscience............................................................................................................................

pixel anxiety........................................................................................................................................... optical dropout......................................................................................................................................

monochromania....................................................................................................................................

misconceptualism.................................................................................................................................

mirrorsteria...........................................................................................................................................

malicious benevolence......................................................................................................................... akes progress....................................................................................................................................

faux-dysfunctionalism......................................................................................................................... fabrication fallacy..................................................................................................................................

stainless zeal ........................................................................................................................................ autoerotic ambition...............................................................................................................................

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a heightened sense of enlightenment based on inexperience a fear of poor resolution an evasive gazing upon dead space the profound conviction that meaning and affect are most present when absent the mistaken belief that all concepts are inherently interesting the automatic imitation of hysterical behavior the devious use of kindness to diabolical ends upward mobility, perversely at odds with a high rate of professional failure idiot activity, masking a lack of talent, ability, or imagination an inordinate emphasis on process, veiling a paucity of ideas an insincere enthusiasm, leaving no impression hanging oneself on the abuse of power

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And I thought church was fun: the Midwest gives a Vegas girl a run for her money Sara Cameron

It was only a short tripa vacation, an exploration, an investigation into the heartland. I didnt think that six days in Branson, Missouri, would be enough to win me over. After all, I spent 16 years in the original cultural wasteland of Las Vegasit was a little difficult to comprehend the mechanisms of a Las Vegas wanna-be that seeks the glory of being an Entertainment Town without relying on the aid of gambling, prostitution, white tigers, or anything open past 10pm. But Branson beckons millions beyond those (like myself) who seek to decipher the American mystique by crossing through hell and high water (a torrential downpour over Memphis) to reach this jewel of the Bible Belt. I found its true cunning to lie beneath the bright lights and second-rate entertainers that lure caravans of recreational vehicles driven by seniors from around the Midwest. This Missourian Mecca, where good Christians come to let their hair down to the rockin melodies of Bobby Vinton, held a secret seductiveness I wanted to decode. Bransons remarkable celebration of mediocrity offered me a deluge of culture shock that will remain with me until the end of my days. The elements of which it seemed most proud were those that would have been laughed out of the state of Nevada for their amateurish proclivities. I was astounded by the sub-par excellence of Shoji Tabuchi, the Japanese bluegrass fiddler whose showcase of the most base features of show business somehow makes Wayne Newtons recently penned 10-year contract in LV seem sensible. Then there was the sense of regional pride for the Worlds Largest Banjo at the all-you-caneat pizza and salad restaurant. Now, I know from overblown spectacles, and let me tell you, that banjo it aint that big. Yet through some miracle of psycho-cultural subversion, some deeply rooted sleight-ofhand, I loved Branson from the bottom of my Southern Nevada heart. I spent my days at Silver Dollar City, a Godfearin amusement park with a pioneer

theme, over-dosing on Kettle Corn, a truly delectable popcorn concoction with both salt and sugar that Bransonians devour in frightening proportions. Its no 50-cent shrimp cocktail, but that Kettle Corn sure is good. My nights were whiled away at Jimmys Keyboard Lounge, one of Bransons few true watering holes, watching the proprietor (you guessed it Jimmy) pas-sionately emoting via his Hammond B-3 organ. This was not your everyday piano lounge. Listen up, Vegas lizardsthis guy had mirrors behind his organ pedals and patent leather shoes. The man was not playing around, and this, dear readers, is the kind of thing that won me over: the untainted experience, the sheer under-thetop-ness of it all. The Branson Strip has its fair share of neon and a notion of the bigger equals better concept that makes Vegas great, but it possesses an innocence that shines through the faade. During my brief stay, the Pandoras box of the Missourian enigma was not completely opened up to me, but my teenaged companion on the Silver Dollar City log ride offered me a glimpse of the key. It was at this point when I realized that my sense of self and my Las Vegas experience were my only notions of reality, and they were being slowly undermined. Her statement, although bordering on the surreal, instantly secured my appreciation of the Branson mystique. I love it here! she cried, as we were about to be hurled to our dampened destinies. I mean I thought church was fun, but this is great! Who needs Vegas? This is living.

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Photo: Sara Cameron

Opposite David Shrigley Untitled, 2000

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Without shadows: histories of utopia Allen S. Weiss

Utopias that collapse, gates of Eden that close behind you everywhere... Claudio Margis, Microcosms We each value one utopia; all others are hell. Indeed, how many utopias have vanished in our lifetime, how many recent events mark further failures in this history of ideals and perfections: May 68; AIDS; the fall of the Berlin Wall; the year 2000? Every epoch, if not every generation, renews this impossible history. But to what ends? One of the works displayed in the exhibition Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World organized by the Bibliothque Nationale de France and The New York Public Library is an engraving printed in Paris in 1848 by Frdric Sorrieu, Universal, Democratic and Social Republic: The Pact.1 This celebration of the humanist ideals of the revolutions of that year depicts a vast procession of peoplemixing nations, classes, sexes, agesmarching together toward a statue of the Republic with, above in the heavens, Christ, surrounded by the heavenly hosts, offering a benediction upon human fraternity. One need not be a deconstructionist (just a bit cynical) to note the irony, indeed the internal contradiction, inherent in this image. (Hanging in my library is a fin-de-sicle engraving based on the same iconographic model, though totally melancholic and macabre: A mlange of people march determinately, if not all joyously, toward the gaping jaws of a huge deaths-head, with an empty sky offering no icon of resurrection or hope.) It is no wonder that this erudite and massive exhibition ends on the most somber of notes, displaying a copy of Hitlers Mein Kampf, harbinger of the Nazi dystopia which is a model of a certain purity, transparency, and subordinationall utopian ideals. Utopia. No place. As named by Thomas More in 1516, such is an imaginary country with an ideal government. Henceforth, the title became a generic appellation for the greatest diversity of projects, from the

sublime to the ridiculous. There are utopias of the past (The Garden of Eden, The Age of Gold, The Sacred Isles, The Lost Continent, Arcadia), utopias of the present (quests, rev-olutions, enlightenments, technologies, exoticisms) and utopias of the future (Apoc-alypse, Millennium, Socialism, The New Jerusalem). Whether critical or constructive, these are well-formed lands, of impeccable order and imperious lucidity, where psychological and social contradictions are annulled in collective bliss. A perusal of this exhibition reveals that the imagination of utopia can be schematized according to a number of classic oppositions of European thought: natural (Hesiod, Works and Days) / technological (Karel Capek, R.U.R.); local (Claude Nicolas Ledoux, the city of Chaux) / global (Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities); terrestrial (Thomas More, Utopia) / celestial (Saint Augustine, The City of God); rural (Ovid, The Metamorphoses) / urban (Hugh Ferriss, The Metropolis of Tomorrow); religious (The Bible) / secular (Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto); stable (Antonio Averlino, Codex Magliabecchianus) / mobile (Jean Wauquelin, Chronicles of Alexander); scientific (Francis Bacon, New Atlantis) / fantastic (Jonathan Swift, Gullivers Travels). However, one major opposition is missing here, individual / collective, for the structural key to this exhibition is the notion that utopia is, if not always a collective project, at least a fantasy of collectivity, since here individuality is anathema. To speak of collectivity and utopia is a tautol-ogy. Utopia is based on a totalizing,if not always totalitarian, impulse, entailing a coherent law and a stable symbolic, eschewing the aleatory and the deviant, eliminating accident and disorder. Indeed,it is interesting to note what seems to be a geometrical imperative to the imagination of utopia: A large percentage of the images displayed in this exhibition depict round or spherical spaces and objects, whether they be gardens, cities, islands, the earth, the moon. Mathematical elegance? Aesthetic perfection? Panoptical possibilities?

What does it mean to include a copy of the American Declaration of Independence in an exhibition on utopias? How does this transform our notion of political philosophyor of utopia, for that matter? Might it not suggest that while most literary models of utopia are closed, if not totalizing, other forms exist: pragmatic, indefinite, open works? What possible effects can this have on theories of jurisprudence? Could one imagine an exhibition based on the notion of private utopias? Would this not pose epistemological problems parallel to those evoked by Wittgensteins critique of the notion of private languages? Might this not be the history of reverie? Would this be madness? Such a project would entail a celebration of individuality, of impurity, of shadows, of silence, of perversity. We need not access psychoanalytic theory to realize that perversion contests the law of the symbolic, and that no utopia can contain a society of radical individuals, a community of those who disavow community. But this is another matter, the subject of another exhibition... (If such a project were possible, it might well be inspired by Harald Szeemanns exhibition, Les machines clibataires, based on the book of the same title by Jean Carrouges, or else by Andr Blaviers anthology of eccentric and impossible projects, Les fous littraires. And one should not forget that creator of so many small perfect worlds, Joseph Cornell, who spent his entire life on Utopia Parkway...) Upon leaving the Bibliothque Nationale, I walked along the quay, wondering about what form this review might take. Who wouldnt consider, however briefly, a Borgesian schema, that of a labyrinthine universal library (pace Alain Resnais s documentary on the old Bibliothque Nationale, Toute la mmoire du mondeall the memory of the world), where each reader is lead through a surreptitious but efficacious rhetoric to his or her own utopia? Or perhaps, in hermeneutic legerdemain, the totality of the exhibition

Follower of Faustino Bocchi (attrib.), The Fertility of the Egg, c. 1700-1750 Courtesy Milwaukee Art Museum

Overleaf and following pages Excerpts from the Standard for Eggs-in-Shell explanatory brochure, published jointly by the United Nations and the Economic Commission for Europe, 1990

continues on page 62

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Holiday in Cambodia David Hawkes

could be considered in its very heterogeneity, such that each utopia would act as an explicit critique of every other one (like Christ vs. the Republic, rather than Christ and the Republic, in the engraving described above.) Or in a clever moment of auto-reflexivity, the utopian quest could be condensed into a literary cabinet of curiosities, echoing the deep structure of Cabinet. (Isnt it for such moments of authorial hesitation that we take pleasure in reading the explanatory notes and the textual variants at the end of certain authors complete works!?) As I mused upon these ultimately unsatisfying possibilities, I came upon the great gardening store, Truffaut, situated on the Quai de la Gare. Needing a few items, I entered, and with sudden recognition and delight realized that the arrangement of this storereflecting its ideals: the perfection of nature in an urban settingis a strictly utopian organization! (The major Parisian competitor of Truffaut, Vilmorin, bears the motto The enchanted space.) One need not seek the utopia of the 21st century only in cyberspace, with its malleable spatiality, heterogeneous semiotics, and fluidity of identity. Utopia can be an intimate, sensual, moveable feast. I bought a huge flowerpot, perfectly round and celestial blue, in which to plant a bush of white roses.
The exhibition catalogue, edited by Roland Schaer and Lyman Tower Sargent, is accessible on the internet at www.bnf.fr.
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The revolutionary is a dedicated man. He has no interests of his own, no affairs, no feelings, no attachments, no belongings, not even a name. Everything in him is absorbed by a single exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passionthe revolution. Sergei Nechayev, Catechism of the Revolutionist These words were written a century after the French Revolution, and a century before the fall of the Berlin wall. They are historically situated halfway along the trajectory of the Age of Revolution. Between 1789 and 1989, repeated violent attempts were made to destroy traditional and customary institutions in virtually every nation in the world, and to replace them with a more rational mode of social organization. The French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions, and those they inspired, were attempts to impose Enlightenment by force. Their architects shared the belief that history was a process guided by reason, and that clearing the path for the progress of reason was a task so vital that it subsumed all other considerations. In particular, in theory and in practice, they were characterized by a hostility toward individualism, and by a pronounced willingness to subordinate the individual to the collective interest. The four years during the 1970s in which the Khmer Rouge held power in Cambodia exhibit, in microcosmic form, the tragic paradox of modern revolutions. Like Jacobin France or Bolshevik Russia, Democratic Kampuchea was not ruled by tyrants, but rather by romantic idealists. Communist and Fascist regimes may have claimed similar numbers of victims, but there remains one vital difference between them: Communism is idealistic, while Fascism is cynical. Hitler was privately known to his subordinates as the carpetchewer, due to the frothing, uncontrollable rages he would fly into when contradicted. Mussolini was derided by many acquaintances as a strutting, vainglorious lout. But everyone who ever encountered the reclusive figure of Saloth Sar, who will be remembered by history as Pol Pot, found him to be a thoroughly pleasant person. Those who knew or met him recall his gentleness and mild humility, his kindly, humorous, and intelligent aspects. This raises a pertinent question: How could such a man be responsible for

what may very well be the vilest atrocities committed in all of history? There are many possible answers. Pol Pot may have been an actor, a hypocrite. Deeply rooted social conflicts may have rendered the Cambodian wars unusually visceral. Much of the suffering may have resulted from the exigencies of emergency, rather than from deliberate design. But even taken together, these answers are unsatisfactory. The contradiction between the character of Pol Pot and his actions represents, in microcosm, the most perplexing political contradiction raised by the revolutionary era of 17891989. The answer may lie less in the character of the man than in the nature of modern revolution. As Edmund Burke first observed, idealistic politics, in practice, produce terror and cruelty. The mild-mannered school-teacher known as Saloth Sar and the dreadful monster known as Pol Pot turn out to be the same man. In ideology and methodology, the Khmer Rouge was essentially Maoist, but the major difference was that no personality cult was erected around Pol Pot. In fact, Pol Pots aim was nothing less than the eradication of the individual personality, and he started with his own. The Khmer Rouge had been in power for over a year before anyone beyond the inner circle realized that the easy-going Sar and the terrifying Pot were one and the same. The official line was that Comrade Sar had been killed in the fighting of the early 1970s. And in one sense, this was true. Whatever motivated Pot, it was not a desire for personal fame or aggrandizement. It may even have been the opposite. The underdeveloped nature of Khmer society, along with the devastation and social dislocation produced by the American bombing of 196970 meant that Cambodia appeared to the Khmer Rouge as an enormous tabula rasa, a place where few barriers existed to the immediate implementation of the most idealistic theories of agrarian communism. As soon as they captured Phnom Penh in 1975, the Khmer Rouge evacuated it and every other city in Cambodia. The child-soldiers who marched into the capital were so unfamiliar with commodity goods that they were seen eating looted toothpaste. In an orgy of iconoclasm that recalls the religious riots of 16th-century Europe or 8th-century

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Byzantium, even potentially useful commodities were physically destroyed. Television sets, furniture, cars, and money (even desperately-needed US dollars) were all consumed in public bonfires. The Khmer Rouge then set about the task of destroying the individualism it saw as the root of all social ills. It democratized the language, cleansing it of words implying differences in social status. It abolished private property, dressed the entire population in identical black costumes, and gave the people identical jobs producing rice. It made Cambodians eat identical foods in communal halls and sleep in identical buildings. It killed anyone who held opinions different from that of the Khmer Rouge, including the entire urban middleclass, which was presumably contaminated by foreign influences. In its obsessive drive toward a new beginning, it recruited children as cadres on the assumption that they were least corrupted by the past, and most readily amenable to the stated Khmer Rouge project of taming a man to become a machine. Pol Pot later recalled this project in terms he must have learned from Nechayevs Catechism: Everyone must become a perfect tool of the revolution... [the revolutionary] must have no feelings. We had but one duty: think of the collective and purify ourselves. To this end, the population was forced to engage in regular bouts of self-criticism, in which their previously existing personalities were supposed to be broken down and replaced by a more rational model. The Khmer Rouge, like Mao Zedong, viewed individualism as a characteristic of Western capitalism, at odds with traditions of Asiatic collectivism. The destruction of the individual would thus represent resistance to encroaching industrial imperialism and reassert a continuity with an ancestral agrarian past. But this view is contradicted by the Khmer Rouges other conspicuous aim, which was precisely the total eradication of traditional culture in all its forms. Its attitude towards existing culture once again echoes Nechayevs Catechism, which claims that the revolutionary has broken every tie with the civil order and the entire cultivated world, with all its laws, proprieties, social conventions and its ethical rules. He is an implacable enemy of this world, and if he continues to live in it, that is only to destroy it more effectively.
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To this end, temples and schools were closed, monks and teachers murdered, and 1975 declared Year Zero. The influence of the Western Enlightenment notion that hierarchy and inequality are the inevitable fruits of reverence for tradition is unmistakable, as is the French Revolutionary impulse to shake off the burden of the past and re-design society on a rational, rather than a customary, basis. A major thread of 20th-century thought has been to rethink the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the social models it has created. The history of Cambodia in the 1970s is a powerful support to Theodor Adornos theory, first proposed in Dialectic of Enlightenment as an analysis of Nazi Germany and modern totalitarianism, that total rationalization of society transforms into its oppositetotal barbaric irrationality. The germ of Adornos idea is found in Georg Lukacss History and Class-consciousness, in which the author notes that all societies use rational thought as one element of their epistemology, but only Western modernity works on the assumption that reason offers the only means to a correct understanding of experience. Reason, in post-Enlightenment Europe, argues Adorno, became a fetish, which is, by the Enlightenments own criteria, characteristic of primitive, barbaric thought. The Khmer Rouge seemed to have fetishized reason in just this way. Its assumption was that Cambodia could be transformed into a rationally organized communist state by magic. Like a magician, Pol Pot believed he could achieve this transformation by simply commanding that it occur. The consequences are well-known, and they are still highly visible in Cambodia. Two years ago a book was published which occasioned among the expatriate community of Phnom Penh not so much scandal or consternation as murderous, vengeful fury. Written by a young Israeli named Amit Gilboa, Off the Rails in Phnom Penh: Into the Dark Heart of Guns, Girls and Ganja opens with the following sentence: Phnom Penh is an anarchic festival of cheap prostitutes, cheap drugs, and frequent violence. Its depiction of life in Cambodia becomes progressively more salacious and sensationalistic from this point on, and while Gilboa comments about the Khmers themselves, his real concern is with the expatriates, whom he depicts as a marauding horde of debauched maniacs. As the titles

allusion to Conrad suggests, the book proposes to describe the degeneration of the rational Western individual in irrational and supposedly barbaric (Gilboas word is primitive) surroundings. Anyone visiting Cambodia today will realize that Gilboa is exaggeratingbut not wildly. In truth, many of the Westerners in Phnom Penha collection of wild-eyed mercenaries, fevered whoremongers, addled addicts and thrill-seekers who believe that slums have soulwould not look out of place in Apocalypse Now. The only com-parable city in the world is Port-auPrince, the capital of Haiti. In both places, the veneer of civilization is stretched very thin over the personalities of many of the Western residents. Both cities seem to encourage the disintegration of Western reason as typified by Western individuality. The drunken IRA veteran, now a security consultant with nebulous but palpable influence in high places; the crazed Glaswegian hotelier who spends his evenings blasting an AK-47 into the darkness; the Swiss speedfreak flitting manically between male and female brothels; the former rock star currently tending bar on the banks of the Tonle Sap: such figures have always exemplified reaction formations to the paradoxical demand at the heart of subjective autonomy: a simultaneous demand for increased individuation and for increased conformity. The Royal Palace in Phnom Penh is stupendously beautiful, and Angkor Wat is one of the wonders of the world. But most tourist attractions in Phnom Penh are attractive, presumably, because of the evidence they provide of sheer disregard for human life. There are the Killing Fields, whose most prominent feature is an enormous obelisk composed entirely of human skulls; there is the Toul Sleung interrogation center, whose most prom-inent feature is a map of Cambodia composed entirely of human skulls; there is the firing range, where one can hurl grenades and fire rocket launchers at human-shaped targets; finally, there is the brothel district of Toul Kork, where teeming masses of HIV-riddled children sell two-dollar blow-jobs. These last two are enthusiastically patronized by many expatriates, as are the astonishingly uninhibited purveyors of opium and heroin.

Small wars An-My L

The chaos and viciousness of contemporary Phnom Penh provides a sharp contrast to the days of Democratic Kampuchea, when marriages were often arranged by the state, and when adultery and even flirting were capital offences. Today, Cambodia ricochets between tyranny and sensuality the two oldest and most persistent Western caricatures of the Orient, dating back to Alexanders depiction of Darius. Whereas a hundred years ago, south-east Asia offered refuge to the dissolute younger sons and rootless adventurers of imperial France, today it is the favored haunt of their postmodern equivalents, backpackers and world travelers. Such people had already replaced traditional imperialists by the days of the Hippy Trail, but over the last decade they have multiplied to the degree that a year or two of lounging around the Third World has become as de rigueur for bourgeois European youth as the Grand Tour was for their aristocratic forbears. The wild popularity of the recent film The Beach, which evocatively portrays the despoilation of native culture and environment perpetrated by mass tourism, captures the perversity of the situation. With marvelous irony, the production of this film caused significant real environmental damage to the Thai island of Phi Phi. Over the course of the film, Garlands narrator, a peppy American tourist hanging out on an idyllic island, gradually disintegrates. The films he has seen about the Vietnam war intrude on his perceptions of the real south-east Asia. He ends by acting out the plot of the most famous Vietnam war film of all: he turns into Mistah Kurtz. Conrads Heart of Darkness was the first literary description of this process; today, Heart of Darkness is the name of the most notorious backpacker bar in Phnom Penh. In post-imperial Western culture, Kurtz has achieved the status of myth, and the Kurtzian condition of many of the expatriates of Phnom Penh suggests that history is doing Pol Pots work for him. The disintegration of the individual self and the spilling over of Western reason into barbaric unreason are well underway in Cambodias expatriate community and similar strongholds of touristic decadence. The inarticulate announcement by Conrads African of the demise of the European Mistah Kurtzhe dead,has become something of a clich, even a catchphrase,

used to encapsulate the ironic encounter of Enlightenment reason with its other. The rational individual subject is a creature of Cartesian philosophy, bourgeois morality, democratic politics, and early capitalist economy. There is no reason to assume that it can flourish outside those conditions. To Pol Pot, clearly, the individual was indissociable from the imperialistic Western culture that he sought to resist. His desire to subordinate the individual to a supra-human rationalism suggests the under-lying dialectical complicity between the two great ideological adversaries of the Enlightenment. In the eyes of future generations, capitalism and communism, like Protestantism and Catholicism appear today, will seem remarkable for what they hold in common, rather than for the differences that spur their adherents into battle. Like communism, capitalism also involves the exaltation and fetishization of reason. The transformation of an object into a commodity occurs through the impo-sition of a rational concept upon irrational things. In a commodified society, as in a fetishistic one, things acquire anthro-pomorphic attributes, including the very rationality that reason projects upon the world. As it is applied to human beings, however, commodification has the opposite effect. When human life, in the form of labor-power, becomes a commodity, it ceases to be fully human. Objectified, turned into a thing, a life is stripped of the reason it would exemplify. In other words, the crowning dialectical irony of the Enlightenment might be that the Maoist doctrine of the Khmer Rouge and the disorientating domination of global capital turned out to be different means to the destruction of the rational subject, the replacement of the individual with an inhuman, perhaps supra-human system, a total state, a global fetish object for reason. If this is the case, then Saloth Sar and Pol Pot may turn out in the end to be two faces of the same postmodernity.

The subject of Vietnam, more specifically the Vietnam of the mind, has been the focus of my work for some time now. In 1994 I returned to Vietnam for the first time since the end of the war for an extended photographic project. Over the years, disconnected from the place and with only a handful of family pictures available, I had come to construct my own notions of Vietnam drawn from childhood memories, photojournalism, and Hollywood films. Instead of examining contemporary Vietnam and seeking the real, I therefore made photographs that only used the real to ground the imaginary. Even though the war itself was not the focus of these photographs, it was present because of its conspicuous absence. At the conclusion of this project in 1999, I became interested in finding a way to incorporate popular imagery of the Vietnam War into my work. While doing research on the Internet, I discovered a site for Vietnam War re-enactors and began attending their events. These men are drawn to reenacting the Vietnam War for complex reasons. Besides having a passion for mili-tary history and an obsessive, formal approach to the art of re-enactment, they are also driven by deeply personal and complex psychological motivations. In comparable ways, the re-enactments allowed me to delve into my personal experiences of war and attendant adolescent fantasies about soldiers in uniform. Through the exploration of war imagery and the sthetics of combat photography, I have begun to recast the war as a smaller, safer, and ultimately resolved conflict. The re-enactors and I have each created a Vietnam of the mind and it is these two Vietnams that have collided in the series entitled Small Wars. Here I experience Vietnam in America as I experienced once America in Vietnam: as a world of conflict and beauty.

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February 4 Tom Mulcaire

Sarah Maldorors Sambizanga (Angola/ Congo, 1972) is a film about acting. In fact, the film was seen to be so effective at mobilizing action that the Portuguese colonial authorities banned it from being screened in their then province of Angola. It was first seen publicly in Angola only after the country won its independence in 1974. Based on a novel by Luandino Vieira, a political prisoner of the Portuguese from 1961to 1974, Sambizanga is a fictionalized chronicle of the arrest and fatal imprisonment of a man whose underground activities were an impenetrable secret to all around him. It was at a prison near the Luandan suburb of Sambizanga on February 4, 1961, that the first uprising of what was to become the Angolan resistance movement was staged. The film is set a few weeks before that uprising, during a time of increasingly desperate and repressive security measures by the colonial government. Rather than depicting the rebellion itself, Maldoror concentrates on the events leading up to it, the growing dissatisfaction among people forced into submission by colonial rule, their realization that they must unite to end it, and the subsequent emergence of Angolas first revolutionary martyrs. In these respects the film may occupy the same position in the history of Angolas revolution that Eisensteins Potemkin did in the history of the Soviet revolution. However, an important difference is that, since Angolas revolution had not yet been achieved when Maldoror released the film, she was both presenting history and issuing a call to arms. It is worth noting, too, that Maldoror assisted Gilles Pontecorvo in the filming of The Battle of Algiers, a masterpiece of semi-documentary filmmaking and

a seminal document in the history of that struggle. Sambizanga could not be made in Angola, and Maldoror decided to film it in the Congo with a French crew and a cast of exiled Angolan guerrillas. The performances are so candid that at times the film appears more as documentary than staged performance. Domingos Oliveira plays, and gives his name to, the doomed hero of the piece, a massive, almost iconic figure who covertly organizes against the Portuguese while working as a tractor driver in a grueling mining quarry. In the establishing shots he is shown as a model worker and a loving husband and father in a young family. But at first light the next morning, a police van screams through the ompound towards his house. Domingos is arrested, and in a scene reminiscent of footage of the arrest of Patrice Lumumba, he is trussed, viciously beaten, and thrown into the van to be transported to a prison in Luanda. His wife Maria, played by Elisa Andrade, is unaware of why her husband was arrested or where he is being taken. To find him she is forced to embark on a long voyage to the capital with their baby. Angry and desperate, she struggles through a world that rarely explains anything to women. Throughout most of Marias journey, Maldoror uses a telephoto lens that compresses the space, blurs the countryside, and separates characters from their surroundings. This is the visual equivalent of the Angolan peoples social and political situation. Although their country is rich, the people are prevented from taking any meaningful part in defining its future or distributing its wealth. Maria is presented walking through fields and down endless roads. All the while alone and making little progress, she reaches Luanda.

Previously sheltered by mens conceptions of what women ought to know, Maria walks into a wall of lies, deception, racism, and brutality. Having been shunted from jail to jail by disinterested warders, Maria finally learns that her husband is being interrogated by the secret police. Her journey to this realization presents the movement towards political consciousness as a physical ordeal. Maldoror uses Marias and Domingoss story to underline the sociological conditions of an oppressed colony and to detail the covert organized web of resistance and solidarity that operates just below the surface of daily life in these situations. The figure of a tailor who teaches Marx while working on a pair of trousers, and a group of small boys who act as his runners as they play in the streets around his shop emphasize that collective action seems to be the only viable path to liberation. Still, even with the knowledge that his wife sits waiting outside the prison, Domingos refuses to cooperate with the authorities and is beaten to death as an example. The film closes as Maria returns from Luanda. It is too soon for us to assume that she will become a revolutionary, although we may infer that the step is inevitable. News of Domingoss death reaches the revolutionary community, which immediately begins preparations for the storming of the prison near Sambizanga. Maldoror lets the audience leave on a wave of revolutionary potential, the last scene ending on the rebel leaders pronouncement that they will attempt to free the political prisoners: That day is February 4!

The screen shots from Sambizanga on the next three pages are part of a larger project by Ricardo de Oliveira. These photographs attempt to recreate and comment on the experience of watching a film and on the possibility of sharing that experience with other people. By highlighting certain details and frames, de Oliveira brings to the fore specific narratives that are only implicit within the film. What is emphasized in these pages is the films implicit criticism of an absolute divide between the innocence of the Angolan children and the guilt of the Angolan authority figures collaborating with the Portugese, between the nostalgia for the home and the terror of the giant, labyrinthine space of incarceration used by the Portugese. These children might one day become those guards; the Angolan homes and villages are also sites of internal repression. Acknowledging the continuity between these supposedly opposed figures and spaces tempers Sambizangas optimism for a future 70

revolution: Repression is not merely an external force, overthrowing the colonial powers does not signal the end of all future repression. The visual impact of these images is also a tribute to the powerful but overlooked cinematic contribution of post-colonial Africa. I often think of Sambizanga in relation to Eisensteins Potemkin, says de Oliveira. I think that this may in part be because of the mixture of revolutionary fuel and pathos that both films share. But where Eisenstein introduces montage as a method of composing his dramatic narrative, Maldoror uses a more flexible, almost experimental time-continuous camera. After Eisenstein, we associate montage with revolutionary filmmaking. Maldorors film points to another, less visible tradition of revolutionary filmmaking.

Sambizanga

a film by Sarah Maldoror a project by ricardo de oliveira

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Michael Stevenson Untitled, 2000 Courtesy the artist and Lombard-Freid Gallery

Conversations, Charted

Utterance is place enough: mapping conversation Frances Richard

The map image is a synthesis of spatially and temporally registered gestalten, each a synthesis in its own right No degree of thematic constriction can silence the conversation among map signs. Denis Wood, The Power of Maps A map is a picture, a rendering in twodimensional space of three-dimensional topography ordered through the filter of four-dimensional experience. A map establishes spatial relations between landmarks, commits these relationships to a particular scale, and aligns the resulting picture so that a viewer (reader, orienteer) can enter it. Its use-value lies in articulating connections: You Are Here, This Is the Place. Such connections may be situated anywhere along a continuum of quantitative accuracy, from the pristine measurements of a United States Geological Survey plat to the sketch you scribble for a friend so she can find your house from the subway. Like naming and counting, mapping is a method for articulating the existence of things an operation causing chosen features to rise like newborn islands from the chaotic welter of experience, fixing them in time-space and bestowing (or foisting) upon them a significance that allows these features to be found again, to be approached from new angles while still holding them in the context of previous encounters. Maps index reality in layers. And conversation? Setting aside the various media in which one might occurthe language of flowers, body language, Morse codea conversation is a more-or-less unscripted verbal exchange, an ostensibly non-hierarchical talk shared by two or more participants. It is a group endeavor, a multivocal whole that will break down if one voice dominates unduly, or if too many fade away. Conversations do not always happen in real time, but time is inextricable from conversations because they are inherently improvisatory. If every member knows beforehand what each is going to say, speech becomes rote exhibition, not exchange. Sociolinguists are fond of noting that the etymological root of conversation is the Latin convertere, to turn around. To succeed as conversation, shared speech requires such back-and-forth, with its intrinsic unpredictability (being unpredictable, of course, is not the same as being interesting). In their turns, conversants spin a discourse. Their talk creates a mesh of
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specifically phrased ideas, a tissue of interpretation and response in which thought moves from latent to kinetic. Conversation generates reality as temporary and cooperative. A language is therefore a horizon, and style a vertical dimension, which together map out for the writer a Nature, since he does not choose either. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero Between mapping and conversation a third term migrates, now acknowledging the inscribed, representative character of the map, now gesturing to the elementally linguistic condition of conversation. How does mapping conversation differ from writing? Map and written text are artifacts, experience once (at least) removed. The conversation is experience up front. In its objecthood, the map detaches from whatever landscape it purports to render; it slips into its own register as a freestanding unit, a self-enclosed area operating by reflexively validated rules. The tropes of mappingincluding scale, legend, color, the use of contour isobars and other conventions for translating three-dimensional elevation into two dimensionsare no less stylized than the parameters of any other discourse. The cartographer has a Nature too, derived from scientific tradition and perceptual habit, more or less unchosen, not the least bit natural. The map is a particular kind of story about reality. The cooperative unpredictability of conversation forms around its speakers a terrain. Its words are audible and obvious. The dynamic shapes limned by the progressions of those words are subtler. The modulations of tone, timing, and implication form an uneven surface, a topology of group exchange. To write conversation is a word:word transformationno extra light is shed on shape. In mapping, terrain becomes obvious, the sine qua non, while the semiotic maneuvers undergirding its representation drift into background. To map location is a space:space transformationno extra light is shed on language. But mapland, just as conversationwords. Mapping conversation differs from writing because it literally indexes language as shape. It arranges words across an armature of space.

 I call [these drawings] narrative structures because each consists of a network of lines and notations which are meant to convey a story, typically about a recent event of interest to me like the collapse of a large international bank, trading company, or investment house. Mark Lombardi, The Recent Drawings: An Overview I am mapping the political and social terrain in which I live. Shall we cut it there? Mark Lombardi, video conversation with Andy Mann, February 28, 1997 The drawings are graceful, intriguing, eminently readablebut also pleasing to the eye as abstract webs, spangles, clusters. Done in black ink with red accents, on cream or white paper, they signify diagram from a distance, well before anything legible enters the viewers mind. Anticipating textual focus, the glancing eye understands that some plethora of information is being schematized, presented for maximum accessibility. Unconsciously indoctrinated within the symbol system of (possibly pseudo-) scientific notation, we approach these images expecting to be led through a thicket of data toward a factually supported conclusion. And this is exactly what happenssort of. Investing the time required to move from looking at to reading a Lombardi drawing, we depart from the generic information structure established by a two-dimensional arrangement of arrows and circles, and enter a narrative structure with specific characters, settings, events, and chronologies. What story is being told? Several overlays of interpretation power up together. Most obviously, we are shown that Henry Kissinger, or the Vatican Bank, or Charles Keating, or Flushing (NY) Federal Savings, have been involved in double-dealing, shady finance, international scams. We get dates, patterns of influence, types of transactions. Do we believe? The answer is probably yes. But this Q&A is a gateway to other layers of the story. Lombardi spends years researching his narra-tives; every item is culled from the public record as available in books, wire service reports, magazines, etc.; every mark we see is supported by thousands of cross-referenced notes on alphabetized

index cards. In other words, like most maps, these drawings posit themselves as truthful documentation, field-tested and verifiable, presented only for the edification of an interested public. In writing terms, Lombardi plays the lone reporter, relentlessly ferreting out secrets and compiling devastating dossiers on the big boys from the modest war-room of his file-strewn apartment. We accept that Kissinger, et.al. are guilty as charged, and the subtextual hum of real-life fact gives the images poignancy and force. But in a sense it would not matter if the whole panorama of Lombardis narrative were fabricated from his imagination. Just as his sweeping curves and dotted lines adapt a preexisting vocabulary of corporate graphing, the archetypes of crusading informer and corrupt V.I.P. are readymades from our cultural milieu, and we receive them as suchthe artist makes a remarkable case, but we probably knew this stuff already. Growing up post-Watergate, inured to the idea that no one gets rich or maintains power without resorting to espionage, intimidation, and payola, we expect revelations of high-level venality. Lombardis work provides them. The visual elegance of his phrasing is analogous to the oratory of a great muckraker, the comeliness of David as he gears up for Goliath. Their ostensibly neutral or indexical format protects the drawings from looking like agitpropthey are too strange and beautiful for that, and yet their social and political content is direct. Free to enjoy the form and be disturbed by the content, we are brought into Lombardis orbit as confidants. We become his interlocutors, people on whom the nuance of his project is not lost. As conversation, then, Lombardis diagrams speak in multiple directions. Following the patterns he has traced, from Rome to Havana, Iraq to Tennessee, we can practically hear the buzz of covert phone calls and smoke-filled-room agreements, the blur of accents, guffawed satisfaction and growled threats. We are flies on the wall, bugs in the drapes, righteous surveillants. Moreover, Lombardi shows himself in notational conversation with his sources, eliciting and weaving together disparate voices. As audience, we stand before the work in dialogue with it and our internal chronicles, recalling scraps of news weve picked up elsewhere, orienting our attention to take in what

Lombardi is telling us. Mapmaking emerges to facilitate the control of social processes in rapidly expanding societies. Denis Wood, The Power of Maps To create their series Argument Drawings, the artists Janet Cohen, Keith Frank, and Jon Ippolito map their own discussions, graphing in color-coded lines the twists and reversals of talks on such topics as the impossibility of distinguishing art you think is historically important from art you like and the danger of Bill Gates.1 To diagram casual, private interaction in this functionalist way raises issues about the creative potential of argument, and the shift from chat to chart is a clever joke, a toying with the tropes of number-crunching. But the drawings do not leap into statistical overload. They retain the scale of the friendship they delineate. There are three artists; there are the red, green, and blue lines. It is easy to imagine having this conversation yourself; easy, as a viewer, to pretend, Ill be the blue, as if choosing a marker in a board game, easy to enter the map without feeling a time/space distortion press in upon your conception of yourself. Normally, this is not the case in mapmaking. Cartographic historian Denis Wood describes a difference between mapping and mapmaking, which corresponds to the degree of centralization and division of labor established in a given society. Mapping, he proposes, is a fundamental act of human cognition. Mapmaking is a function of bureaucracy. In mapping, then, the act of tracing and remembering landscape is its own reward, a total process that does not need to culminate in an external, circulating text called the map. Held within the shared consciousness of people who know and use their land intimately, the knowledge construct also remains at a human scale, articulated in direct proportion to the bodies who have gathered and continue to navigate by it. During field work in 1989, one Inuk elder told me that he had drawn detailed maps of Hiquligjuaq from memory, but he smiled and said that long ago he had thrown them away. It was the act of making them that was important, the recapitulation of environmental features, not the material objects themselves.2 The Inuk elder describes what would
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normally happen in conversation, where it is the act of voicing that is important, the recapitulation of thought. To append conversation with a material document like the Argument Drawings is excessive, a baroque intrusion into an organic event which is the artists point. The difference between internal memorymap and surveyed document also runs parallel to the anthropological (and literarycritical) distinction between storytelling and writing, wherein the artifactual, written text signals a loss of communal interrelationship, a shift away from the conversational nature of oral transmission around the fire. According to this particular master narrative of culture, the sign disconnects from the referentthe hill becomes an inkblot and the lore becomes typographyin order to consolidate power in a stratified society. The novel is said to have created the bourgeoisie; in the same way, the map creates property. But Wood also enumerates instances of what might be called subversive mapmaking, the most famous of which is probably the Peters projection map of the world, which allots to each continent a graphic area proportionate to the area it occupies on the globe. By correctly showing Africa larger than North America and Greenland smaller than South America, the Peters projection distorts the familiar Mercator projection, stretching it vertically, as though the landmass had sagged, in order to correct the politicallyinflected connotations of a world-view in which North America and Europe are the biggest, at the center. Both the Argument Drawings and Lombardis work subvert mapmaking in this way. But while Cohen, Frank, and Ippolito keep their maps actual size as it were, Lombardi takes on byzantine cases typified by astronomical numbersof players, of dollars, of references. The Inuk elder who draws his map and then discards it is similar to Cohen, Frank, and Ippolito in that his process retains an intimate scale. He is comparable to Lombardi in that he is managing a gigantic fund of informationa whole region, with its bays and inlets, weather-patterns and wildlife. The difference, obviously, is that the Inuk mapper has no reason to subvert a process that supports his existence. When Wood says that mapmaking arrives with the founding of the centralized state, he implies that the map splits away from

the body via the alienation caused by the growth of industrial capital. In capitalism (so goes another master narrative of culture), the work of art becomes commod-ified, causing a loss of aura that corres-ponds to the alienated workers loss of identification with his or her production. The Inuk elder is imagined as existing in visceral proximity to his landscapein con-versation with it but organized, science-based mapmaking inspects and records that land while no longer depending on real-time, backand-forth survival on it: In other words, mapmaking is no longer con-versational. In the mass-produced map, a represented landform loses its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.3 Subversive mapmaking tries to reassert the map as a dialogic tool, tries to revive the aura of presence and integration symbolized by the Inuk elders memory. But artists like Cohen, Frank, Ippolito, and Lombardi (or Arno Peters, for that matter) can only do this in a self-conscious way. The exchange enacted by subversive map-making no longer takes place between inhabitant and landscape, but between reader and reader, both homeless to a certain degree, sojourners in alien terrain. The Argument Drawings recuperate presence through insouciant personality, by privileging the artists own more-or-less unremarkable experience. Lombardis handling of the problem of alienation and aura is more complicated. Near the end of his life, he was experimenting with using the Internet as a research aid, and with computer-generated versions of his drawings. The exponential increase in archive-access and the corresponding facilitation of copying and adding to existing pieces would have altered his process significantly.4 But perhaps more importantly, computerassisted versions of Lombardis works would have eroded their nature as unique, handmade interventions into the web of sinister transactions that have become synechdochical for the powerlessness of average citizens. Lombardis drawings testify to the overwhelming task of continually reasserting personal perspective in a political and social environment that is not only rapidly expanding, but increasingly imagined as totally digitized, decentered, and manipulable. By illustrating the difficulty one person has in mastering the movements of global capital, his drawings also remind us that the huge distortions of scale endemic to

such wealth tend to scramble into nonsense, unless a single interested intelligence sorts them out. The Conversation Map system is a Usenet newsgroup browser that analyzes the text of an archive of newsgroup messages and outputs a graphical interface that can be used to search and read the messages of the archive. The Conversation Map system incorporates a series of novel text analysis procedures that automatically compute a set of social networks detailing who is responding to and/or citing whom in the newsgroup; a set of discussion themes that are frequently used in the newsgroup archive; and a set of semantic networks that represent the main terms under discussion, and some of their relationships to one another... The Conversation Map system computes and then graphs out who is talking to whom, what they are talking about, and the central terms and possible metaphors of the conversation. Warren Sack, Conversation Map: An Interface for Very Large-Scale Conversations Gigabytes of streaming data and considered, individual opinion; global networks and personal voice: The Interface for Very Large-Scale Conversations (VLSCs) developed by Warren Sack through the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT attempts to order the cacophony of enormous listserv discussions. The interface consists of four parts, or rather, it offers four interrelated filters through which to sort the accumulated messages of a given newsgroup. The social, thematic, semantic, and message thread filters isolate and foreground different aspects of the VLSC content, making it possible for a researcher to zero in on chosen facets of the material while deemphasizing others. For example, the archive profiled in Sacks introductory webpage, soc.culture.albanian, analyzes more than 1200 messages posted between 16 April and 4 May 1999, a period in which the war in Kosovo was at its height. In the Social Network, we see a graphic model of the frequency with which individual posters spoke and were responded to. With a click of the mouse, we can see who was posting opinions that drew flurries of response, and who was crying in the wilderness at the periphery. Since w 79

Cohen, Frank, Ippolito Details from Agree to Disagree (Marriage is a great way to ruin a relationship), 1995. Courtesy of the artists

the Social Network recognizes reciprocal statements only (A quotes B; later B refers to A), those whose messages were not reciprocally engaged do not appear. Basic social math appliesif no one picks up on what you say, you tend to drop out of the conversation. Soliloquy is not social. The menu of Discussion Themes and the Semantic Network sort for what is called cohesioninstances of verbal adjacency and association that suggest thematic and semantic import. Algorithms for distilling these lexical cohesions are derived from computational linguistics and quantitative sociology: Specifically, two terms are talked about in similar ways if they are often used with the same verbs, appear together with the same nouns, and share a large number of adjectives with which they are both modified... If [two terms] are used in similar ways by the discussants (e.g. Youre wasting my time, Youre wasting my money, You need to budget your time, You need to budget your money), then the two terms will show up close to one another in the graphically displayed Semantic Network, and so indicate the presence of a literal or metaphorical similarity between the terms (e.g. Time is money).5 In the thematic and semantic panels, the problem of schematizing meaning is solved via simple grammatical parsing, where the equation time is money takes as its least common denominator the modular interchangeability of the two nouns. In the last of Sacks four display panels, the Message Thread Archive, the schematic operation is more complicated. Message Threads symbolize the linked progressions of statement, response, and counterresponse that compose evolving segments of the VLSCthis panel offers a chronological overview of the entire archive. Here the mapping procedure moves beyond linguistic adjacency which comes bundled, as it were, with its own application for sorting, i.e. the rules of English grammar. Diagramming the relationship between successive messages, Sack finds himself fully immersed in the unpredictable realm of actual conversation, and the organic nature of his explanatory metaphors reflects this: Conceptually, a thread is a tree in which the message is the root and links between the responses are branches.

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Graphically, a thread tree can be plotted as a spider web in which the initial post is placed in the middle, responses to the initial post are plotted in a circle around the initial post, responses to the responses are plotted around that, etc. One of the nice features of plotting the thread trees as spider webs is that, at least in theory, any size tree can be plotted within a given amount of space.6 In other words, by playing on the formal similarity between different kinds of ramifying structure (root and branch system; spider web; they-told-two-friends-and-soon) very large-scale meaning can be shrunk to fit the screen of your Palm Pilot. Underlying this concept is not only a practical methodology for translating prose into sym-bol, but an implicit assertion about commu-nication as a sequence of traceable pathways, issuing in more or less orderly fashion from a single, knowable starting point. Sack does not offer a rationale for the practical applications of his program perhaps because, to anyone who has tried to follow a newsgroup, its uses should be obvious. Critics, theorists, and students of any stripe who want to digest the content of a particular VLSC must quickly be drowned in data without some formula for prioritizing what they read. Net users may be pioneering technological practice, but they are also in the same position as every adventurer in new territory since the Sumerians. Without a means of recording acreage and bushels harvested, the management of a population explosion across a fertile delta is impossiblehence clay tablets, algebra, and (it is postulated) some of the first maps. With only sail and sextant, the ocean must remain for generations splotched with blank swaths, where there may be monsters. Imagine mapping the entire Atlantic coastline from Maine to Florida, traveling on foot, with handheld instrumentsas the US Army Corps of Engineers did in the 1850sto such a degree of accuracy that satellite images laid over them fit precisely. Consider the dizzying number of measurements, calculations, and notations made by surveyors that did not need to be made again in future years by naval officers, fishermen, shipping merchants, and wayfarerstravelers whose transit along the eastern seaboard had stimulated, and now benefited from, the development of the Coastal Survey maps.

The polydirectional exchange of listserv conversation is a comparably emergent phenomenon: Sacks project unfolds a tiered grid on which this collective polemic can be tracked. Electronic communication is often theorized in terms of a return to epistolary or conversational consciousness, and the opportunity of discussing, say, the Kosovo situation with political scientists, Balkan historians, NATO-watchers, Albanian teachers, and Serb journalists represents a previously unimaginable crucible for spontaneous intercultural and interdisciplinary debate. The existence of such a collective is so fascinating that the interface seems transparently beneficial, a labor-saving device without which important knowledge would smear into static. Sacks high-tech browser and Mark Lombardis painstakingly low-tech works on paper thus perform similar procedures on the information glut, but their interventions point to opposite feelings about that information. The group Lombardi examines is a suspect elite, and the conversations are presumed to be exploitative and selfserving, ripe for the whistle-blower. Newsgroup and chat-room speech, in contrast, is imagined as vox populi in action. The VLSC map does not expose a closed coterie; it expands an egalitarian fellowship. Nevertheless, the much-touted democratic connectivity of cyberspace is a prime example of Denis Woods rapidly expanding societythat is, a society in which mechanisms for stratification develop apace with the logarithmic expansion of enfranchisement. We are already entering a period where ubiquitous access, nonstop e-commerce, and increasing regulation encourage nostalgia for the rough-and-ready days of geek/hacker prospectors and cybercowboys. New frontiers do not resolve into habitual settlement without new maps, and the despoilation brought by crowds is only lamented after a site is on the map so that crowds can find it. Whether you view new maps as helpful tools, as Sack does, or weapons of control, like Wood, or even as organs of resistance la Lombardi, depends on your perspective as a dweller in the opening environment.

Utterance is place enough. Ralph Waldo Emerson As Lombardis phrase narrative structures tacitly admits, the mapped conversation is a constructed fantasy, a quixotic and intentional mix-up between quantitative and qualitative analysis. Maps belong (or seem to belong) in the domain of numbers and objective physicality, while conversation is a quintessentially subjective, immaterial process. It may be that projects juxtaposing the two invite failure, since they attempt to index the ineffable. But it might be said that we try to do that all the time. Mapping conversation is more unusual, but no more absurd, than composing written descriptions of smells or taking photographs of the Grand Canyon. In a sense, the scalar audacity with which Mark Lombardi and Warren Sack seek to bring their vast fields of study into tangible proximity with individual readers exemplifies the hubris and pathos of all signifyingart, politics, and utterance included. If representation solidifies one and dematerializes the other, what is the difference between a moment and a place?
Janet Koplos, The Argument Drawings at Wynn Kramarsky, Art In America, November, 1997, pp. 130-31. 2 Wood, p. 40. The author is quoting research conducted by Robert Rundstrom. 3 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Illuminations, (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 220. 4 Lombardi discusses these concerns in a videotaped studio visit with Andy Mann, February 28, 1997. 5 Sack, www.media.mit.edu/~wsack/ toc. html:Detailed Introduction 6 Sack, ibid.
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An online version of the "Argument Drawings" by Cohen, Frank, and Ippolito is available at www.three.org/ agreetodisagree.

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Mapping very large-scale conversations Warren Sack

The new public spaces that I am interested in are very large-scale conversations (VLSC). On the one hand, very large-scale conversation is a medium that those who inhabit the Internet know very well. Usenet newsgroups, large e-mail listserves, and other places on the Internet where large volumes of e-mail are exchanged are good examples. On the other hand, from the perspective of the history of media and public space, very large-scale conversation is an entirely new and mostly unexplored phenomenon. At no other point in history have we had a medium that supports manyto-many communications between hundreds or thousands of people. VLSC takes place across international borders, often on a daily or hourly basis. Unlike with older mediafor instance, telephonesparticipants in these very large-scale conversations usually do not know the addresses of the others before the start of a conversation. VLSC on the Internet is a new space where people who might never have known of one anothers existence are now forging bonds. A space has opened in which, with some good luck and hard work, new forms of relations might be forged. Naturally, this vision about the future of a networked society involving a proliferation of global conversation implies an optimism and perhaps, as some critics would have it, a navet. If I want to participate in one of these huge discussions, my problem is this: How can I listen to thousands of others? And, conversely, how can my words be heard by the thousands of others who might be participating in the same conversation? Phrased as a design problem, the question becomes the following: What software can be designed to help participants navigate these new public spaces? Toward this goal, I have designed the Conversation Map system. The conversation map Given a few hundred or even a few thousand e-mail messages, the Conversation Map system analyzes those messages using a set of sociological and computational linguistics techniques. This automatic analysis yields three sorts of interrelated summaries. The Social Network is a summary of who is talking with whom. Themes is a summary of the topics embodied in the messages that are important to the con-versation. The Semantic Network is
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a summary that is perhaps the most interesting of all. The Conversation Map system generates a sort of rough-draft thesaurus. This thesaurus can be under-stood as a network of definitions or metaphors of the discussion that have emerged over the course of the conversation. It might reveal that the group is inventing new words or new ways of talking about known subjects. To do this, all of the content of the e-mail messages is analyzed and summed together using several techniques of computational linguistics. The soc.culture.albanian images on the opposite page were generated by the Conversation Map system after it analyzed about 1,300 messages posted to the Usenet newsgroup soc.culture.albanian in the spring of 1999. It is a graphical summary of a large argument that engaged Albanians, Serbs, and others during the war in Kosovo. Social networks The upper left quadrant of the Conversation Map shows a set of social networks that record who is reciprocating with whom. By reciprocating, I mean who is mutually responding to and/or quoting from whom. Thus, if I were to post a message to the newsgroup and then you were to respond to it and then, later in the discussion, you were to post to the newsgroup and I replied toor quoted fromyour original message, then the two of us would be reciprocating with one another. As reciprocating participants of the discussion, you and I will appear as nodes in the graphs representing social networks and a line will be drawn between us. If we reciprocate many times over the course of the conversation we will be plotted close together. In contrast, those pairs of participants who reciprocate only once will be plotted relatively far apart. Those participants who show up closely connected are pushed to the middle of the graph and can be understood as virtual mediators of the newsgroup. To end up in such a position one needs not only to post many messages but also to have others in the group reply to or quote from many of ones messages. So, the social network display acts both as a filter for spammers and a means to identify some of the main players in a discussion. Themes The menu in the upper-middle of the interface lists the themes of the conversation. Lets say I post a message about football, and then you respond with

a message that includes some reference to baseball. Then, perhaps later in the discussion, you post a message about skiing and I respond with one concerning skating. Our reciprocation will be represented in the social network, but some approximation to the theme of our exchange will also be listed in the menu of themes. In this case, since football, baseball, skiing, and skating are all sports, the term sports might be listed on the menu of themes. Calculating that these four terms are all sports requires, of course, a machine-readable thesaurus. The thesaurus employed in the Conversation Map system is WordNet. Semantic network One way to understand the difference between the menu of themes and the graph depicted in the upper right-hand corner of the interface is this: While construction of the menu of themes requires the use of a pre-defined thesaurus, the calculations performed to create the semantic network in the upper right-hand corner automatically generate a rough-draft thesaurus. To create a rough-draft thesaurus the Conversation Map system does the following: First, the content of all of the messages exchanged during the conversation is parsedi.e., subjects, verbs, objects and some other modifying relations are identified between the words of each sentence in the texts of the messages. Next, a profile is built for each noun in the corpus of messages. By profile, I mean that for each noun a vector is created that records a) all of the verbs for which the subject functioned as a subject; b) all of the verbs for which the noun functioned as an object; c) all of the adjectives which modified the noun; and so forth. Once a profile has been calculated for each noun, the nouns profiles are compared to one another and each nouns nearest neighbor is identified. If two nouns are nearest neighbors then, according to this calculation, they appear in similar contexts. Or, to put it more plainly, if two nouns have similar profiles, then they can be said to have been talked about in similar ways by the participants in the discussion. On the semantic network, if two nouns are nearest neighbors, then they are plotted as two nodes connected to one another. Why, one might ask, is this sort of analysis of interest for the navigation of very large-scale conversations? To answer this question, I compare this sort of analysis
All images courtesy Warren Sack 83

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with some work done by the cognitive scientists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. In their book Metaphors We Live By they claim that one emergent metaphor of our culture is, for instance, that argu-ments are buildings. As part of their method they show how two nouns, which might be considered, a priori, to be com-pletely unalike, show up in very similar contexts. For example, one can say, The building is shaky but one can also say, The argument is shaky. One can say, The building collapsed, and also The argument collapsed. Similarly, both buildings and arguments can be said to have foundations, to stand, and to fall; be constructed, be supported, be buttressed, etc. A set of similar sentences of this sort provides an empirical means for thinking about and discovering how definitions and metaphors are produced over the course of a large amount of discussion. Thus, this tool for automatic, rough-draft thesaurus generation can be seen as training wheels to allow us, within the context of a specific conversation, to begin to generate the sorts of hypo-theses that Lakoff and Johnson explore in their book. So, the Conversation Map gives some data exploration/navigation tools to start to understand how different conversations differ from one another according to the metaphors and definitions that are produced by the collective efforts of their participants. Message archive The lower half of the interface is a graphical representation of all of the messages that have been parsed and analyzed by the Conversation Map system. Messages are organized into threads where a thread is simply defined as an initial post, all of the responses to the initial post and all of the responses to responses. The threads are organized in chronological order; the first thread posted to the newsgroup appears in the upper left-hand corner and the last thread posted appears in the lower right-hand corner. If a thread contains many messages, it shows up as a green square on this display. If a thread contains few messages, then it shows up as a black square. Thus a rough guide to the posting activity in the newsgroup over the period of time spanned by the messages is displayed. New social formations Very large-scale conversation is a new kind

of public space and new types of social formations are facilitated or engendered by it. I am exploring four of these new sorts of social formation: One area of online conversation that I am interested in is national and international discourse about so-called mass media, especially television. Certain television shows have over one billion viewers. Despite the content, the sheer size of their audience makes them worthy of serious consideration. Internet discussions about television shows make it clear that audiences are not masses. They are, rather, highly interconnected groups of people negotiating the meaning and significance of shows, characters, and studio politics in daily, international, online forums. With the anthropologist Joseph Dumit I am also exploring very large-scale conversations that focus on medicine and health issues. Gulf War syndrome, multiple chemical sensitivity, chronic fatigue syndrome, and attention deficit disorder are all examples of what Dumit calls illnesses you have to fight to get. Many medical and insurance industries refuse to recognize their existence. Consequently, the sufferers mobilize amongst themselves to get the status of their illness changed and thus recognized so that they will be treated by medical practitioners and reimbursed for medical costs by their insurance companies. Since it is rarely the case that sufferers are geographically localized or members of some pre-established lobbying group, the Internet is an essential forum for their self-organization into cohesive groups. Probably the most widely recognized of the new social formations engendered by online communications is the Open Source Movement. Technical discussions and exchanges over the Internet have resulted in new pieces of software e.g., Linuxthat constitute a new social and economic force and challenge existing products and conventional production methodologiese.g., Microsofts production of the Windows operating system. Very large-scale conversations devoted to technical issues are often some of the most tight-knit and productive of online forums.

Finally, the newsgroup analyzed for the Conversation Map summary of soc. culture.albanian is an example of people functioning as citizen diplomats. Ordinary citizens are now conducting international relations through their discussions with ordinary citizens in other hostile and friendly nations. These discussions are often very messy. However, even in the form they take today, these very large-scale conversations point to new possibilities in the conduct of international relations. Mapping public space and navigating social formations The Conversation Map makes some of the social relations produced through online conversation visible by diagramming them as social networks. It identifies and sorts the themes of discussion according to their importance in the social network. Thus, the menu of themes gives one some insight into what is central to the conversation. Finally, if one wants to explore hypotheses concerning possible emergent metaphors of discourse, the Conversation Map provides a tool that can help one make these sorts of hypotheses. All of these dimensions of online conversationsocial networks, themes of discussion, and emergent metaphors and definitionsare indicative of the new social formations produced in the public spaces of very largescale conversation.
More information about this project can be found in the publications and working demos at www.sims. berkeley.edu/~sack/CM.

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The offshore phenomenon: dirty banking in a brave new world Mark Lombardi

A number of recent trends and developments, from the Internet to NAFTA to a single European currency, appear to portend a future borderless world culture. National boundaries, some of which have existed unchanged for centuries, were initially erected to separate and enclose people, places, and societies. But in the age of information they have become, or so the argument goes, utterly obsolete; an impediment to fair trade and an inconvenience to travelers, a barrier to cooperation and understanding among peoples, a tool in the hands of despots preaching everything from xenophobia to outright homicidal racism. Perhaps we would be better off, as the multilateralists would have it, in a world without political boundaries. Then again the absence of border controls and international frontiers can have other, perhaps unforeseen, consequences as well, a good example of which is the growth of offshore banking and the black money industry. Black money can be defined as ready cash or any liquid asset whose origins and ownership have been intentionally obscured from view. It is money that has been cleansed and sterilized; laundered through a vast international labyrinth of telex rooms, coded bank accounts, anonymous trusts, and corporate shells. Once it has found safe haven in, say, Switzerland, Hong Kong, or Panama, the assets are supposedly (but not always) sheltered from the prying eyes of foreign tax officials, police, and courts, and anyone else who might claim a percentage or interest in the funds. There are many reasons why someone would want to avail themselves of such services. Perhaps the oldest is the fear of seizure or confiscation in times of war, civil unrest, or political instability; whats known as fright capital. Quite often when a country is invaded, under threat of invasion, or in the grip of a civil war or reign of terror, there is an attendant rush to ship assets out of the country. A classic case is the struggle of thousands of European Jews to transfer their property (most of which was never recovered) out of Nazi-controlled areas and into Switzerland and beyond. But far and away the most common reason is tax evasion. The first truly modern multinational tax evaders arose in the United States in the 1920s. They were men like Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the late
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president, a stock manipulator and liquor importer who ordered his foreign suppliers and attorneys to submit fraudulent and inflated bills which he then promptly paid in order to move otherwise taxable profits overseas. Another was Meyer Lansky, the infamous longtime chief financial officer of the American mob. Lansky and his associates, whose revenues came primarily from bootlegging, illegal gambling, loansharking and prostitution, employed couriers and bagmen to carry their ill-gotten loot to banks overseas, primarily in Canada, Switzerland, and the Bahamas. By the midl93Os many large US-based corporations had also begun to get in on the act by setting up foreign subsidiaries and affiliates, particularly in the United Kingdom and Bermuda, as vehicles for various kinds of financial gimmickry. Since those early days the stateless money industry has experienced a phenomenal rate of growth. Hundreds of international banks, financial companies, tax advisors, attorneys, agents, couriers, and brokers (some based in the US, some overseas) now cater to the ever-expanding trade. The traditional havens (besides those already mentioned above) would also include Luxembourg (where fees from the financial services sector account for a fifth of all government revenues), Monaco, Liechtenstein, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Singapore, Beirut, and Bahrain. They must now compete with an assortment of new and far-flung offshore banking centers touting state-of-the-art services and secrecy controls in places like the Netherlands Antilles and the Cayman Islands. In the Caymans, for instance, there are no person-al, corporate, or inheritance taxes and it is illegal for an employee or officer of any bank or corporation to disclose any infor-mation about its assets, financing, or ownership. Not surprisingly over 20,000 corporations, including 550 international banks and trusts, are currently registered to do business in the Caymans, which recently reported over $400 billion in offshore bank deposits for only 30,000 full-time inhabitants, an average of $14 million per citizen! Most of this growth is attributable, naturally, to the dirty money generated by the $200 billion a year worldwide market in illegal drugs. Of this amount, at least half receives some kind of laundering every year before resurfacing once again in
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legitimate investments. But the same financial channels used to process drug money can also be used to commit other types of crimes. Offshore entities have by now become a sort of honeyhole for an increasingly brazen crop of white-collar techno-bandits who work the system to plunder corporate assets and embezzle bank funds, commit securities fraud, launder commercial kickbacks and facilitate bribery, conceal assets from creditors, establish bogus tax shelters, and alter accounts to improve their financial statements in advance of a sale. In other words, they cook the books and engage in every kind of imaginable scheme intended to defraud or mislead if not a tax collector or bank regulator then, depending upon the circumstances, perhaps ones own part-ners, shareholders, auditor, spouse, or relatives. The most notorious con men and flim-flam artists of recent times, everyone from Robert Vesco to Marc Rich to Nick Leeson, operated from behind similar veils of secrecy provided by foreign banks, trusts, and shell companies and could never have succeeded without them. Likewise Dennis Levine, the Wall Street broker convicted of insider-trading in league with Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, booked all his deals through fronts established in the Bahamas. Then there is Charles Keating, the banker whose folly at Lincoln Savings cost the taxpayer $2 billion. In April 1989, just hours before the Feds had planned to seize his empire, Keating wire-transferred over $300 million to mysterious bank accounts in Europe (part of which was later recovered). Another example would be the two Colorado developers who defaulted on over $100 million in loans from Neil Bushs Silverado Savings of Denver while at the same time pouring tens of millions into multiple offshore trusts they had set up in the English Channel isles and elsewhere (for the benefit of family and friends). In 1988 Silverado collapsed and US taxpayers were left to pick up a $1.2 billion tab. The offshore centers have also become a kind of home away from home for an increasingly nomadic cast of semilegitimate predatory capitalists, currency raiders, and futures speculators who, especially when acting in concert, can and have done some serious macro-economic damage. The standard example of this would be the Hunt brothers of Dallas who,

together with a group of agents fronting for members of the Iranian and Saudi royal families (including Ghaith Pharaon, a leading figure in BCCI), tried to corner the silver market some 20 years ago. When the scheme finally imploded in March 1980, the ensuing financial turbulence nearly took down the entire commodity futures market along with several leading American banks. Currency raiders mounting a faceless collective assault on a weakened central bank (most recently those of Indonesia, Russia, and Brazil) can have a crippling impact on a local economy and on the ability of the targeted nation to service its external debt. Anonymous predatory entrepreneurs intent on pillaging their way to maximum yields can and have caused longterm (if not irreversible) environmental damage, particularly of late in the tropical rain forests. It has even been suggested that the torrent of hot money that fueled the US economy in the early years of the Reagan administration led not to real sustainable growth and job creation but to excessive speculation in the real estate and securities markets, which resulted in an inevitable crash, that of November 1987, in which nearly a trillion dollars worth of investments were literally wiped out overnight. All things considered, the economic, social, and political repercussions of all this shuffling to and fro have been nothing short of staggering. To continue the rundown, it is estimated that nearly half of the $375 billion in new debt taken on by Latin American borrowers between 1975 and 1985 vanished forever through offshore pipelines. Perhaps another $100 billion or so flowed out of the rest of the Third World. In Italy, Mexico, and India, where tax evasion has been elevated to a national sport, the revenue loss has at times been serious enough to virtually cripple the central government. Meanwhile in Colombia, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Panama, where drug money reigns supreme, the drug lords have recently succeeded in converting their overwhelming financial advantage into unchallenged political power. One would think that the democratic governments of the world, especially those in the West, would have the will and muscle to impose some type of order to this monumental loophole. Through this

loophole private citizens and companies alike can avoid paying taxes, criminals can launder their profits, profiteers can manipulate markets, and con men fleece their prey, all without serious fear of prosecution. Nor would it take much to force these offshore dens of thieves into compliance with international financial norms; American citizens have, for instance, been prohibited from traveling to or doing business in Cuba, Iran, and North Korea for years. A concerted, Western-led multilateral travel and financial embargo of the Bahamas, Caymans, Bermuda, Panama, and Singapore, among others, would quickly bring these flags of convenience into line. But so far, Western political elites have not seen fit to put even the most egregious operators out of business. This is because the politicos and their leading supporters and constituents, sadly enough, have occasional need of such services themselves. In this post-Watergate era of alleged transparency and full disclosure, ambitious politicians who still want to get theirs now routinely employ indirect channels to receive and coordinate contributions, bribes, and payoffs which at times, for added security, means going offshore. The established powers may also wish to retain the capability, even though it is sometimes a nuisance, because offshore money centers can also be mobilized into a potent political weapon in service of ones foreign policy goals. There are times when a government, say that of the United States, might consider it useful to encourage flight capital from an unfriendly country, say that of Chile after the election of Allende or that of Nicaragua after the Sandinista revolution. The consequent loss of hard currency can have a destabilizing effect on any new government. Capital flight tends to deplete a countrys foreign reserves, which can lead to devaluation, spiraling inflation, and loss of confidence in a new and untested regime. Along those same geopolitical lines, the offshore centers can play a key role in strengthening an alliance by facilitating what is known in diplomatic circles as Grand Corruption. Grand Corruption refers to the diversion of state-owned funds and resources into the pockets of various heads of state, their relatives, cronies, designated subordinates, and bagmen. w

Given the proper conditions, the practice can take root anywhere. But it is most prevalent today in the already-impoverished Third World. There are a number of ways a kleptocrat can loot his or her own country, three of which especially stand out: through the seizure and sale of state-owned commodities such as gold, diamonds, oil, timber, and so on; by obtaining enormous commissions from multinational corporations in exchange for contracts to sell products, provide services, or construct large projects in their country; and by diverting or skimming loans granted by foreign donor governments and international aid organizations. Combine these with what the leader and his surrogates might be collecting in the way of local petty grafts, bribes, and payoffs and you have what could amount to a fairly hefty sum. The attitude of most Western governments to this activity is simple; they deplore it in countries considered unfriendly while condoning or even encouraging it among clients and allies. The purpose is to concentrate money and power in the hands of loyal local elites. Thus, unlike hot investment capital flowing in from other tainted offshore sources, politicallypackaged black money often receives special red carpet treatment because it is controlled by a corrupt ally. Though fully aware of the source of the plunder, officials of even the most lawabiding Western countries rarely interfere in the process, citing mutual cooperation, national security interests, or healthy export markets as a pretext. Thus former Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie was able to amass a fortune worth around $15 billion over the course of his reign, most of which was banked and invested in Europe; exZairean president Mobutu Sese Seko was believed at the time of his ouster to control bank accounts and assets in Belgium, the former colonial power, worth several billion dollars at a minimum; and Saddam Husseins personal and family fortune was at one time estimated at between $10 and $15 billion, some of which was invested in major French companies. Much the same applies to the Marcoses of the Philippines, the Shah of Iran, the Duvaliers of Haiti, Noh Tae Wu of South Korea, Suharto of Indonesia, Somoza of Nicaragua, the Salinas brothers of Mexico, ad infinitum.
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In some cases the level of cooperation offered by a patron state can go beyond noninterference to the actual provision of advisors and access to financial entities capable of performing whatever services the lucky ally or client might require. It is thought that Castle Bank and Trust (founded in the Bahamas in 1964), Nugan Hand Limited (chartered in Australia in l973), and World Finance Corporation (which operated out of Miami in the middle to late 1970s) provided such services at the behest of several successive American administrations. The offshore pipeline can also be utilized by governments to carry out secret military, political, and intelligence-related activities. Virtually every nation on earth possesses some kind of intelligence service or capacity that it uses, among other things, to conduct clandestine and sometimes illegal activities in various parts of the world. Covert operations, as they are known, encompass acts of sabotage, intimidation and assassination, arms trafficking, embargo-busting and the formation of insurgent guerrilla armies, the acquisition or theft of classified documents, the bribery of foreign officials, academics, businessmen, and journalists, the surreptitious funding of political parties and front groups, and so on. They are a nations invisible hand, intended in one way or another to influence events and attitudes in a foreign country. All of this takes money, hopefully clean money, so the great powers resort to the same mechanisms, if not the same banks and experts, as everyone else. For example, in the 1980s BCCI, an Arab bank headquartered in London, was used not only by drug dealers and con men but also by the governments of the US, UK, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf Arab states to funnel support to Afghan guerrillas fighting Soviet occupation; to pay off friends and adver-saries alike; and to conduct secret arms sales to Iran. Meanwhile BNL, a stateowned Italian bank, was used by some of the same parties to finance the arming of Iraq. At one time the Soviets had their own network as well, operating primarily from Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Panama. To many people this is all just a big game; a rather high-stakes, grown-up version of Peekaboo or Find-the-Flag. But it is also an exceedingly dysfunctional game whose continued existence poses a serious challenge to the rule of law, to political and

corporate accountability at home, and to economic development abroad. Offshore banking is one sector of the international economy over which some kind of control must be asserted and soon, lest we find ourselves in even further hock and political hot water.

Recommended reading Mark Lombardi

The recent drawings: an overview Mark Lombardi

James Ring Adams, The Big Fix: Inside the S & L Scandal (New York: Wiley, 1990). Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI (New York: Random House, 1993). Michael Binstein and Charles Bowden, Trust Me: Charles Keating and the Missing Billions (New York: Random House, 1993). Alan Block, Masters of Paradise: Organized Crime and the IRS in the Bahamas (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Pubs, 1991). Theodore Draper, A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs (New York: Hill & Wang, 1991). Rachel Ehrenfeld, Evil Money: The Inside Story of Money Laundering and Corruption in Government, Banks and Business (New York: Shapolsky, 1992). Nicholas Faith, Safety in Numbers: The Mysterious World of Swiss Banking (New York: Viking, 1982). Stephen Fay, Beyond Greed: the Hunt Familys Bold Attempt to Corner the Silver Market (New York: Penguin, 1983). Alan Friedman, Spiders Web: The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq (New York: Bantam, 1993). Thomas Gladwin and Ingo Walter, Multinationals Under Fire (New York: Wiley, 1980). Mark Hulbert, Interlock: The Untold Story of American Banks, Oil Interests, the Shahs Money, Debts, and the Astounding Connections Between Them (New York: Richardson & Snyder, 1982). Robert Hutchison, Vesco: The Story of the Biggest Securities Fraud of Modern Timesthe Looting of IOS (New York: Praeger, 1974). Herbert Krosney, Deadly Business: Legal Deals and Outlaw WeaponsThe Arming of Iran and Iraq, 1975 to the Present (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1994).

Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots: A Rue Tale of Drugs, Dirty Money and the CIA (New York: Norton, 1987). Jonathan Kwitny, Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World (New York: Penguin, 1984). Penny Lernoux, In Banks We Trust: Bankers and their Close AssociatesThe CIA, the Mafia, Drug Traders, Dictators, Politicians and the Vatican (New York: Anchor, 1984). Peter Mantius, Shell Game: A True Story of Banking, Spies, Lies, Politics and the Arming of Saddam Hussein (New York: St. Martins, 1995). R.T. Naylor, Hot Money and the Politics of Debt (New York: Linden/ Simon & Schuster, 1994). Steven Pizzo, Mary Fricker, and Paul Muolo, Inside Job: The Looting of Americas Savings and Loans (New York: McGraw Hill, 1991). Anthony Sampson, The Arms Bazaar From Lockheed to Lebanon (New York: Viking, 1977). William Shawcross, The Shahs Last Ride: The Fate of an Ally (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988). James B. Stewart, Den of Thieves (New York: Touchstone. 1992). Nick Tosches, Power on Earth: Michele Sindonas Explosive Story (New York: Arbor House, 1986). Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside story of BCCI (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992). Lawrence E. Walsh, Iran-Contra: The Final Report of the Independent Counsel (New York: Times Books, 1994). Ingo Walter, Secret Money: The World of International Financial Secrecy (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1985). Steven Wilmsen, Silverado: Neil Bush and the Savings and Loan Scandal (Washington, D.C.: National Press Books, 1991).

In 1994 I began a series of drawings I refer to as narrative structures. Most were executed in graphite or pen and ink on paper. Some are quite large, measuring up to 5x12 feet. I call them narrative structures because each consists of a network of lines and notations that are meant to convey a story, typically a recent event of interest to me, like the collapse of a large international bank, trading company, or investment house. One of my goals is to explore the interaction of political, social, and economic forces in contemporary affairs. Thus far I have exhibited drawings on BCCI, Lincoln Savings, World Finance of Miami, the Vatican Bank, Silverado Savings, Castle Bank and Trust of the Bahamas, Nugan Hand Limited of Sydney, Australia, and many more. Working from syndicated news items and other published accounts, I begin each drawing by compiling large amounts of information about a specific bank, financial group, or set of individuals. After a careful review of the literature I then condense the essential points into an assortment of notations and other brief statements of fact, out of which an image begins to emerge. My purpose throughout is to interpret the material by juxtaposing and assembling the notations into a unified, coherent whole. In some cases I use a set of stacked, parallel lines to establish a time frame. Hierarchical relationships, the flow of money, and other key details are then indicated by a system of radiating arrows, broken lines, and so forth. Some of the drawings consist of two different layers of informationone denoted in black, the other in red. Black represents the essential elements of the story while major lawsuits, criminal indictments, or other legal actions taken against the parties are illustrated with red. Every statement of fact and connection depicted in the work is true and based on information culled entirely from the public record.
Mark Lombardi poster insert George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stephens c. 1979-90, 5th version Courtesy of Pierogi Gallery

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Interviews

Psychocivilization and its discontents Magnus Brts & Fredrik Ekman

The letter from Professor Delgado carries two insignias. One is made of Hebrew letters on what looks like a Torah scroll. Under the scroll it says lux et veritas light and truth. The other insignia reads Investigacion Ramon y Cajal. In our letter to him, we have explained that we are two artists who have been studying his astonishing research, and that we are interested in his views on the relationship between humans and machines. Jos M.R. Delgado has written that he will be most happy to receive us at his home in Madrid. Delgados name is a constant on various conspiracy websites dedicated to the topic of mind control; those with names like The Government Psychiatric Torture Site, Mind Control Forum, and Parascope. The Internet has in fact become the medium of conspiracy theorists. The network functions as an endless library where the very web structure lends itself to a conspiratorial frame of mind. The idea that every phenomenon and person can be connected to another phenomenon and person is the seed of the conspiracy theorists claim to make the connections between things, track the flow of power, and show how everything hangs together within some larger murky context. Before traveling to Madrid, we get a hold of Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society, the 1969 Delgado book most often cited on the Net. The book has has been gathering dust for 30 years at the universitys psychology library: It has never been cracked open. It is a dis-turbing book, less because of its photographs of animal experiments than because of the triumphal tone of the writing. Delgado discusses how we have managed to tame and civilize our surrounding nature. Now it is time to civilize our inner being. The scientist sees himself on the verge of a new era where humans will undergo psychocivilization by linking their brains directly to machines. Ramon y Cajalthe name on one of the two insigniais referred to in Delgados book. Cajal was a famous histologist who became the young Delgados mentor and inspiration. In his acknowledgements, Delgado cites Cajals telling claim that knowledge of the physicochemical basis of memory, feelings, and reason would make man the true master of creation, that his most transcendental accomplishment
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would be the conquering of his own brain.1 Professor Delgado is now 85 and lives in a suburb of Madrid. Madrid is also the home of an anonymous group of people who call themselves Nosman, and are dedicated to gathering information about Delgado and his career. We e-mail Nosman and receive some awkwardly written responses that oscillate between warnings about the Spanish security agencies and suspicious questions about us and our interest in Delgado. For some reason, they refuse to meet with us but give us Delgados e-mail address anyway. Delgado, on the other hand, responds immediately when we get to Madrid. He is very eager to invite us to lunch. It was at Madrid University that Delgado began his research on pain and pleasure as the means of behavior control. After World War II, he became the head of the Department of neuropsychiatry at Yales medical school. In 1966, he became a professor in physiology. By that time, he had further developed the research of the Swiss physiologist and Nobel Prize winner Walter Rudolph Hess who had used electric stimulation to chart how different parts of the brain control different motor functions. After a series of spectacular experiments on animals in Bermuda, Delgado wrote: If you insert electrodes directly into the brains of cats and apes, they will behave like electronic toys. A whole series of motor functions can be triggered based on which button the experimenter pushes. This applies to all body parts: front and back paws, the tail, the hind parts, the head, and the ears. Using electrostimulation in a group of gibbon apes, Delgado succeeded in dismantling the usual power structure within the group. He gave a female ape with a low ranking a control box connected to electrodes that were implanted in the groups alpha male, and the female learned to use the box to turn the alpha male on and off at will. The electrodes were inserted into the apes brain and connected to an instrument that Delgado called the stimoceiver. The stimoceiver was an ideal instrument for two-way communication. Researchers could affect and at the same time register

Opposite X-ray of a monkeys head showing two assemblies of electrodes implanted in the frontal lobes and in the thalamus. Photo taken from Delgados book Physical Control of the Mind.

activity in the brain. From earlier prototypes where the lab animals were connected with wires, a remote control model was later developed that could send and receive signals over FM waves. The device was developed from the telemetric equipment used to send signals to and from astronauts in space. We have already established radio contact with space; it is now time to establish contact with the human brain, a recurring refrain in Delgados articles. The taxi lets us out in an upscale suburb of Madrid where a light rain is falling on the brick houses. A church service has just finished and people in Burberry clothes are streaming out of a strange concrete church. At the entrance of the apartment building where Delgado lives, we are met by a fashionable and exuberant American woman of indeterminable age. The woman, who is Delgados wife, talks nonstop in the elevator that opens directly into the apartment. The apartment is decorated in a fussy, bourgeois style. If it were not such a bleak day, the view would extend all the way to the Pardo Mountains. Delgado gives us a very cordial welcome. He is a proper old gentleman with sharp, intelligent eyes. Delgado says that he has had a nightmare about our visit and woke up crying in the middle of the night. In the dream, we had showed up barefoot and in short sleeve shirts and had proceeded to gulp down all of his meringues. An hour later, we are seated at the marble table in his dining room and are served meringues and strawberry tarts after a large meal. We do not want to have more than one meringue each. In a CNN special from 1985 called Electromagnetic Weapons and Mind Control, the reporter claims that Delgados experiments were limited to animals. Nor is there anything in the texts on the various websites that indicates how far Delgado went in his research. His experiments on humans seem to have fallen into a strange collective amnesia. But anyone can walk into any well-stocked American medical library and take out Delgados own reports and articles on the subject. There we can find his own candid, open descriptions of how he moved on from experimenting on animals to humans. In an article called Radio Control Behavior in the February 1969 issue of The Journal
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of Nervous and Mental Disease, Delgado, Dr. Mark, and several other colleagues describe what was the first clinical use of Intracerebral Radio Stimulation (IRS) on a human being. The stimoceiver itself only weighed 70 grams and was held fast by a bandage. One of the patients hid her stimoceiver with a wig because the experiments lasted days or weeks. The patients were scrutinized thoroughly. Everything they said was taped, their EEG was recorded, and they were photographed at regular intervals in order to document changes in their facial expressions. In one of the articles photographs, we see two of the subjects engaged in spontaneous activity. They are both girls with bandages over their heads. The girl in the background is holding something to her mouth, perhaps a harmonica. The other girl is bent over a guitar. Delgados colleague, Dr. Mark, is smiling at them. Mark had already achieved some notoriety at this time by claiming that all anti-social behavior is caused by brain damage. His recommendation had been the mass scanning of the American population in order to detect such damage in time and correct it. Delgado and Marks article offers short descriptions of the patients who have had the device affixed to their brain. A black fourteen-year-old girl on the border of developmental disability who grew up in a foster home suddenly goes into a fury that leads to the death of her two stepsisters. A thirty-five-year old white industrial designer who ends up killing his wife and children flies into a rage when other motorists try to overtake him and he chases them and tries to run them off the road. Their aggressive behavior is supposed to be registered by the stimoceiver in the way a seismograph registers the earths tremors and the same stimoceiver is then to turn them off via the FM transmitter. Delgado bombards us with a steady stream of anecdotes, scientific comments, and provocative rhetorical questions that are only interrupted by occasional tender comments directed to his wife. He tells of his work at the Ramon y Cajal Institute in the 1930s. In order to save a few paltry pennies, he would take a short cut through the zoo on his way to and from work. He would wander through the zoo alone at dawn and dusk and would hear lions and tigers roaring in this jungle in the city. After

the War, he came to conquer nature in his own way in Bermuda. Even his wife was delighted to see the alpha male gibbon collapse when the underlings pushed the control lever. Do you remember how we thought of Franco? says his wife. Imagine being able to turn off the Generalisimo. Delgado responds But who could have put the electrodes into the dictator? With electromagnetic radiation we could have controlled the dictator from a distance. We did some experiments at Yale where we influenced the brain from up to 30 meters away. One of the most important reasons why we wanted to meet Delgado is that we imagined him and his activities as belonging to a borderland between fiction and reality, between science and madness. People in psychotic states of mind often feel themselves controlled by foreign voices or spend their lives trying to prove that they have had a transmitter implanted inside their skulls that dictates their actions and thoughts all day and night. We ask Delgado what he thinks of the fact that his research provides a realistic edge to such fantasies. He answers that he has on several occasions been contacted by strangers who say they want to have their implants removed and also that he has been sued by people he has never seen. Delgado is silent about the article that appeared in the Spanish monthly magazine Tiempo last year, where he was interviewed about exactly such accusations. The Tiempo reporter claimed that Delgado has ties with the Spanish secret police. Delgado stretches out after the strawberry tarts. He has come to think of a case in Pittsburg in the 1950s where a robber was offered a milder sentence in exchange for being lobotomized. I was operating electrodes into peoples brains at that time together with my good friend David Koskoff. It was Koskoff who carried out the lobotomy on the robber. The patient was quiet for a while after the operation but then reverted to carrying out robberies again. In despair over his own unreliability, he decided to take his own life. He wrote a suicide note addressed to Dr. Koskoff: Doctor, all your work has been in vain. I am an incompetent man and a criminal. I am taking my life but I am shooting myself in the heart and not the head. I donate my brain to you for research.

Delgados wife puts her arm on his shoulder and says And very little has happened since then, dear. There are still lots of bums running around. The comment makes us both look away. A moment later, we are sitting on the sofa. Delgado admits that not one useful application of the stimoceiver has come out of his research. We knew too little about the brain. It is much too complicated to be controlled. We never knew which parts of the brain we were stimulating with the stimoceiver. We didnt even manage to prevent epileptic attacks, which we thought would be the simplest of things. We never found the area where epilepsy attacks originate. He says all of this without a trace of bitterness, as if in passing. We are surprised by his casual attitude toward the stimoceiver, which in the 1960s and 70s was heralded as a great contribution to science. To demonstrate the power of their invention, Delgado and his colleagues orchestrated violent scenes in the lab. In her book, The Brain Changers: Scientists and the New Mind Control, Maya Pine describes a film where Dr. Mark attaches a stimoceiver to an electrode in a womans brain: As the film opens, the patient, a rather attractive young woman, is seen playing the guitar and singing Puff, the Magic Dragon. A psychiatrist sits a few feet away. She seems undisturbed by the bandages that cover her head like a tight hood, from her forehead to the back of her neck. Then a mild electric current is sent from another room, stimulating one of the electrodes in her right amygdala. Immediately, she stops singing, The brainwave tracings from her amygdala begin to show spikes, a sign of seizure activity. She stares blankly ahead. Suddenly she grabs her guitar and smashes it against the wall, narrowly missing the psychiatrists head.2 The same incident was described in one of Delgados own articles. This experiment was repeated three days in a row. If there were any problems with the experiments for Delgado, these were not ethical in nature but technical. How do you replicate the lab situation in society? How do you cut off the electricity to the stimoceiver? How do you avoid scarring

and inflammation where the stimoceiver enters the brain? But the problems did not provoke any doubts about the supposed success of the stimoceiver. In the long run, the technique could be used to make people happy from a distance. When did you stop the stimoceiver experiments? we ask him. To our surprise, he responds indignantly that he has yet to do so. After Yale, I have continued my experiments here in Spain, both on animals and on humans. Delgados pragmatism does another pirouette and we are beginning to have trouble following him. Delgado pours coffee with his trembling hands. Spanish guitar music from the stereo fills the silence. We look together through the three recent collection of essays that Delgado has placed in front of us. Their publication dates range from 1979 up to this year. There is no emphasis on neurophysiology in any of them. Instead, they address questions of learning and upbringing from a more general psychological point of view. Until the end of the 70s, Delgado and his colleagues were considered conquerors of an unknown territory, a wild and expansive jungle, the landscape of the brain and the soul. Apparently Delgado never got very far into the jungle, which proved to be much too thick and impenetrable. He has apparently retired without any regrets. He has instead started to cultivate his own garden. My new book is going to be called The Education of My Grandchildren and Myself. We ask if it is possible to learn to interpret the electrical language of the brain and mention the Swedish science journalist Gran Frankels interview with Delgado back in 1977.3 In the interview Delgado claims that it is only a question of time before we connect the brain directly into computers that can communicate with the brains electrical language. Delgado makes a dismissive gesture and looks at us as if we are numskulls. It is impossible to decode the brains language. We can obviously manipulate different forms of electrical activity but what does that prove? When we ask him about his colleague, Dr. Robert G. Heath, who claimed to

be able to cure schizophrenic patients with electrostimulation, Delgado breaks into a patronizing smile and says, Yes, yes, youre supposed to have a box on your stomach with cables coming out of it that attach to electrodes in your brain and you stimulate yourself. It never worked. We lead him to a discussion of his own patients. Delgado interrupts us: I have never done experiments on people. For a moment, we wonder if well have to take out one of his own scientific articles and hold it in front of him as evidence. We start to look for our file with hundreds of medical reports and articles. You have to under-stand, he says. There are incredibly stringent rules around experimenting on humans. All the experiments I was involved in had a therapeutic goal. They were for the patients best. In one of the Yale reports in our file, there is a description of an experiment on an epileptic mental patient. The report states that the woman has been in asylums for a long time, she is worried about her daughter, and suffers from economic hardship. Electrodes measuring 12 centimeters have been stuck into her brain, 5 centimeters of them inside the brain tissue. She is interviewed while being given periodic electrical stimulation. The woman is tossed between various emotional states and finds that strange words are coming to her mind. She experiences pain and sexual desire. At the end of the interview, she becomes flirty and her language becomes coarse, only to be ashamed later and ask to be excused for words that she felt had come to her from outside. The woman has been transformed into a speaking doll that unwillingly gives voice to her brains every whim. Delgado, who had previously been so flattered by two artists being interested in his work, now seems to be looking at us with new eyes. Who are we? And what do we want? His tone is short and sharp. The temperature in the apartment has dropped a few degrees. In Physical Control of the Mind, Delgado proudly sums up how he has used electrodes implanted for days or months to block thought, speech, and movement, or to trigger joy, laughter, friendliness, verbal activity, generosity, fear, hallucinations, and memory. With this in mind, we ask
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him what therapeutic results came from these experiments. As a whole, they didnt result in any methods, except in the case of patients with chronic pain. He looks at the clock and says that we only have five minutes left. But we do not want to abandon our questions about the patients. What happened to them? How long were the implants in their brains? Del-gado now becomes somewhat vague. He says that it was other researchers that left the implants in for a long time, not him or Dr. Heath, and he does not recall which patients it was. The electrodes were taken out of his own patients after a couple of days and did not cause any injuries. We killed maybe a few hundred neurons when we inserted the electrodes. But the brain has millions of neurons. When Delgado spoke in the 60s of the precise interface between brain and machine, it gave rise to a number of farfetched military visions. His research was also mainly funded by military institutions such as the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force AeroMedical Research Laboratory. In the US, the CIA and government research in (and use of) different means of behavior control was made public in a series of congressional hearings in 1974 as well as in a Senate investigation three years later. Witnesses offered a glimpse of the CIAs astonishing experiments in the so-called MK-Ultra program. The list of MK-Ultra experiments is like a group photo of the extended family of behavioral technologies: hypnosis, drugs, psychological testing, sleep research, brain research, electromagnetism, lie detection. The specific operations had very imaginative names: Sleeping Beauty, Project Pandora, Woodpecker, Artichoke, Operation Midnight Climax. One of MK-Ultras fields of interest was electromagnetic fields and their effect on human beings. In 1962 it was discovered that the Russians had directed microwave radiation at the American embassy in Moscow with the hope of penetrating through to the ambassadors office. The CIA immediately mounted an investigation under the codename Project Pandora. Concurrently with his research on the stimoceiver, Delgado had begun research on electromagnetic radiation and its capacity for
94 Delgado in his apartment in Madrid. Video still courtesy of Magnus Brts

influencing peoples consciousness, and there is speculation that Delgado may have been involved in Project Pandora. The CIA arranged for apes to be brought to the embassy. When the apes were examined after a period of being radiated, it was discovered that they had undergone changes in their chromosomes and blood. The personnel at the embassy was later reported to have increased white blood cell counts of up to 40 percent. The Boston Globe reported that the ambassador himself suffered not only from bloody eyes and chronic headaches but also from a blood disease resembling leukemia. We take up Delgados research on electromagnetic fields and their effect on people. I could later do with electromagnetic radiation what I did with the stimoceiver. Its much better because theres no need for surgery, he explains. I could make apes go to sleep. But I stopped that line of research fifteen years ago. But Im sure theyve done a lot more research on this in both the US and Russia. We understand now that Delgado thinks the meeting ought to come to an end. We ask him about Project Pandora and he confirms the story of the Moscow Signal without any hesitation but he denies being involved in the operation. In 1974 Delgado testified in front of Congress at the MK-Ultra hearings and made his views very clear: We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically manipulated. The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electrically control the brain. Some day armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain.4 When we confront him with this statement, he falls silent for a second. His crystalclear memory of a moment ago suddenly evaporates. A fog sweeps in, the words become hard to get out. He does not recall

The intelligence of vision: an interview with Rudolf Arnheim Uta Grundmann

ever being called to Congress. And he has no desire to acknowledge the kinds of statements we have just mentioned. For a second, Delgado becomes a very old and fragile man. But in the next moment, he is standing up straight again and has shaken off all these unpleasantries. Now he is in a hurry. He has to meet his sick sister-in-law. We try to secure a second meeting but he is evasive and talks about the vagaries of the weather and trips to his country house. Out the door in a cloud of cigar smoke, the taxi takes us back to Madrid.
Translated by Sina Najafi

This text is an excerpt from a chapter of Brts and Ekmans forthcoming collection of essays Orienterarsjukan och andra berttelser that will be published in Sweden in September 2001.
1 Jos

M. R. Delgado, Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. xix. 2 Maya Pines, The Brain-Changers (London: Allen Lane, 1974), p. 197. 3 The interview is available in Frankels book Ingenjrstrupper i hjrnan (Stockholm: 1979). 4 Jos M.R. Delgado, Congressional Record, nr. 26, vol. 118, 1974. An excerpt of the footage of the interview with Delgado is available on Cabinets website at www. immaterial.net/cabinet.

Rudolf Arnheim, who began in the 1920s to apply Gestalt psychology to art, was born in 1904 in Berlin. He studied psychology, philosophy, art history, and music history at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, where he received a doctorate in 1928. Beginning in the mid-20s he wrote articles and reviews on film, art and literature, finally becoming an editor at Die Weltbhne. In 1939 Arnheim emigrated via Rome and London to the United States. Though little-known in Germany, Arnheim has had a strong influence on art history and art psychology in America, where he taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the New School for Social Research, Harvard University, and the University of Michigan. His books, including Film as Art (1932), Art and Visual Perception (1954/1974), Visual Thinking (1969), Entropy and Art (1971), The Dynamics of Architectural Form (1977), and The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (1988), as well as a great number of his essays, have been translated into many languages. Rudolf Arnheim currently lives in Ann Arbor, where he spoke with Uta Grundmann.1

Mr. Arnheim, you were born in Berlin. In texts about Berlin written during the years in which you lived there, a great deal is mentioned about Berlins vitality and radiance. Heinrich Mann described it as the future of Germany and the hearth of civilization. What do you remember about Berlin? Berlin was definitely an exciting city in the 20s. A kind of creative chaos dominated, a very productive diversity. I was born directly on Alexanderplatz, in the middle of Berlin. It was where the Berolina stood; this was a large statue like the Statue of Liberty, a symbol of the city of Berlin. But after a short time my parents moved to Kaiserdamm in Charlottenburg, near Lietzensee. We lived there through the years leading up to the Nazi period, until the beginning of the 30s. My father had a small piano factory; of course he wanted me to take it over. But I just distracted the employees from their work because I wanted to know how such a piano was built. My father didnt like that. And then there was the university. You studied psychology and art history at Friedrich Wilhelm University. Wasnt this combination unusual at the time? If you wanted to study psychology in the 20s, you had two main subjects, philosophy and psychology, because psychology was not yet considered a single subject. To that I added art history and music history as minor subjects. I was very interested in both art and psychology, but I was actually first prompted by my teachers, the Gestalt psychologists Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Khler, to really take a good look at these subjects. Berlin University was the birthplace of Gestalt psychology, which dealt primarily with sensory psychology and the perception of form, as well as with art. I received my doctorate in 1928 with a work on expression in faces and handwriting, a theory of visual expression. And that established my art psychology. The concept of Gestalt is extremely important for your work on art and perception. Can you tell me something about the most important principles of Gestalt psychology? Gestalt psychology was basically a reaction to the traditional sciences. A scientific experiment was based primarily on breaking down its object into single parts
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and defining them. The sum of the definitions then corresponded to the object. By contrast, the Gestalt psychologists, referring among other things to the arts, emphasized that there are common connections in human nature, in nature generally, in which the whole is made up of an interrelationship of its parts and no sum of the parts equals the whole. Every science has to work with the whole structure. Gestalt theory also says that the factual world is not simply understood through perception as a random collection of sensory data, but rather as a structured whole. Perception itself is structured, is ordered. This also concerns art. The work of art was a prime example of a Gestalt for my psychology teachers. Sigmund Freud was one of the first psychologists who applied his theory to art. You have said yourself that art is an attempt to understand the meaning of our exis-tence, and that it is important to pay attention to the elementary things that are at the root of the artistic process. This connects you with Freuds intention. However, you harbor a fundamental skepticism toward the application of psychoanalysis in sthetic investigations. Why? Thats what I want to tell you. I was already buying the first editions of Freud as a schoolboy. Psychoanalysis interested me tremendously as a theory, and Freud was a wonderful writer. For example, his book on jokes is very interesting; it uncovers a lot about the bases of productive thought. But Freuds insistence on sexuality as the motivation for art was never clear to me. I actually related more to Adler, and in certain respects to Jung, although I have had my major objections to Jung. Apart from that, I had no great interest in individual things. I was more interested in general principles. In 1928 you joined the editorship of Die Weltbhne, published at the time by Carl von Ossietzky and Kurt Tucholsky, as a film critic and editor of the cultural section. How did you arrive at Die Weltbhne? I began writing film criticism in the mid-20s for the Stachelschwein, which was published by Hans Reimann. At the same time, I nervously sent my first works to the famous [Siegfried] Jacobsohn, who was still chief editor at Die Weltbhne at the time. He accepted them. Jacobsohn died in 1928,

the same year I received my doctorate, and Ossietzky became chief editor. He carried the entire responsibility, since Tucholsky lived almost exclusively outside of the country. Ossietzky had to answer to everything that Tucholsky caused through his radicalism. He even went to prison for it. So I became a steady employee of the cultural section of Die Weltbhne, and Ossietzky worked on the political section. This went on until 1933; until the Nazis came. Berlin was known in the 20s as the center of political journalism; this reputation was based in large part on the existence of the Die Weltbhne, which, more than other newspapers, functioned as a sort of wanted list of the Weimar Republic. To what extent were you affected by the political events surrounding Die Weltbhne? After the burning of the Reichstag in 1933, the employees of the newspaper would no longer be safe. I must confess that I never had much to do with politics myself. Sure, Die Weltbhne was a very important political newspaper. At the same time, we werent aligned with any party, rather with human rights in general, with the efforts toward freedom and justice, with truth. I had published a short essay in the fall of 1932 in the Berliner Tagesblatt, a satire of Hitler. Hans Reimann, who had some kind of relationship with the Nazis, called me one day and said: Its better if you disappear from here. I did that; at first I simply didnt let myself be seen. I lived at the time in Spandau. And in August 1933 I went to Rome. To Italy? Everything wasnt as bad there as in Germany. And you know, our conception of the danger that came from the Nazis was quite nave. We had one government after the other and thought it would be over within half a year. After that you emigrated to America through London. I no longer know exactly when that was, probably 1937 or 1938, since Hitler visited Mussolini in Rome and Mussolini declared his support of the race laws. Now, I came from a Jewish family and I had to leave

Italy. The writer and art critic Herbert Read, who with his wife had translated my book on radio into English, vouched for me so that I could go to England. There I worked as a translator at the BBC for two or three years and waited for my entry visa for America. In 1940 I finally arrived in New York. Your first film criticism appeared in 1925. Already at that time you defended photography and film against the accusation that they are nothing more than mechanical reproductions of nature. In your book Film as Art from 1932 you worked out the expressive means of film in terms of the difference between the images that form our view of the physical world and the images on the movie screen, and you interpreted them as a source of artistic expression. How would you define the artistic basis of film? My interest in film originated with an interest in the expressive capabilities of the visual. For this film offered a wealth of new examples. I was occupied with the question of how one could represent the world through a moving image, which is, how-ever, limited by the screen. This very limitation allowed me to conclude that film can never be a simple reproduction of reality. On the contrary, filmic images have the ability to shape reality and produce meaning. Film interprets the visible world through authentic phenomena from this world and thus takes hold of experience. Film is not a direct representation in contrast to the indirectness of art; rather, it is a form of artistic expression. Your interest in the formal conditions and expressive possibilities of film was above all applied to the visual aspects of the blackand-white silent film. Why? For me the silent film possessed great artistic purity of expression. Therefore, I assumed that sound and dialogue are not suitable for promoting the image formation on the film screen; rather, they significantly limit the expression of the image. However, as I recently wrote in an essay, this neglects the basic principle of Gestalt psychology, in which all elements belong together in a whole. By now it is commonplace to say that film is the visual medium of the 20th century. There is also little disagreement that film can be art. But the old prejudice that film is a

mechanical reproduction of reality, and is thus not art, is still alive. It seems to me that your book on film could be a model for an art history of film. But art history is still hardly willing to take a good look at film. Why do you think this is the case? Because film has become a victim of the entertainment industry, which considers telling stories more important than form or expression. In the early years, when the great films were being made, the film industry still had very little influence, even after the UFA [film studios in Germany] had been founded. The filmmakers had much more artistic freedom, and one could see this. Only the best works are just good enough for art history. In this respect, film is not an art-historical problem today, but rather a topic for the social sciences. There have been times when the question, What is an image?, has produced explosive situations. It hasnt been answered yet, and it is still pursued in countless articles and books, seminars, and symposia. As late as the Enlightenment, images, as well as language, were understood as transparent media that represent reality and give access to reason. In the modern age, images turned into riddles, into phenomena which require explanation, since they separate reason from reality. Many works today assume that images must be understood as a kind of language, as signs behind which is hidden an arbitrary mechanism of representation and ideological mystification. What do you consider to be the essence of pictures? How do we master images? The essence of an image is its ability to convey meaning through sensory experience. Signs and language are established conceptual modifiers; they are the outer shells of actual meaning. We have to realize that perception organizes the forms that it receives as optical projections in the eye. Without form an image cannot carry a visual message into consciousness. Thus it is the organized forms that deliver the visual concept that makes an image legible, not conventionally established signs. In all of your works on visuality and art, certain concepts are especially important: structure and tension, order and disorder. Can one say that images are the basic principle of the order of things, as Michel Foucault would call it, that holds the world together with figures of knowledge?

Yes, that is definitely important. You see, this is the fundamental difference between me and Siegfried Kracauer. For Kracauer the world was raw material; from this concept he, in his Theory of Film, derived the definition of the photographic and filmic image as contributing to the rescue of outer reality and introducing physical nature in its original state. But images do not imitate reality, they hint at it. They have the ability to make the essential part visible, and are thereby a fundamental principle for understanding the world. Vision and perception are not processes that passively register or reproduce what happens in reality. Vision and perception are active, creative understanding. You have to imagine the following: When we observe something, then we reach for it; we move through space, touch things, feel their surfaces and contours. And our perception structures and orders the information given by things into determinable forms. We understand because this structuring and ordering is a part of our relationship with reality. Without order we couldnt understand at all. Thus in my opinion the world is not raw material; it is already ordered merely by being observed. To this day we do not see photographic images as inventions, but rather as authentic copies of physical reality. Our mode of seeing and the way in which we deal with these images are influenced by the fact that these images are mechanically produced by a camera. How do we know how to treat images that look as if they were mechanically reproduced, yet which were mathematically manipulated on the computer or were somehow constructed? Will our relationship to reality change through the ever more rapid development of technology and the concomitant shift in conditions of perception? I hardly think that the form of recording, whether through photography, film, or even through the computer, has a major influence on the visual qualities of images. The formal qualities of images exist independently of the means by which they were produced. The main problem connected with digital images is that of authenticity. The newspaper, the media in general, are full of images that one can obviously no longer believe. All information must be mistrusted, including, of course, film and photography as information resources. And that is less an sthetic than a social problem. w

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In your book, Art and Visual Perception, you apply Gestalt theory to art. Is there a general visual composition principle in art? Which elements constitute artistic expression? Art, just like perception in general, is dependent on the structure of forms and color. Consequently Art and Visual Perception deals with the relationship between perception and art. We had already said that vision orders reality, and it does so in its primary, projecting structural features. A good image can only be one that informs us about the observed thing. This means that it must leave out unnecessary details, concentrate on meaningful characteristics and convey them unambiguously to consciousness. Furthermore, it is completely essential for perception, and also for art, that that which is seen possesses dynamic character. One has to understand perception and artistic expression as a dynamic relationship. Everything that appears in a work is effective due to forces that are manifested in form and color. The dynamic between the forces, between the elements, conveys the expression. You refer in this context to the meaning of an artistic view of reality, which makes it possible to recognize the world. What do you think is the essence and function of art? I consider art to be a means of perception, a means of cognition. Perception makes it possible to structure reality and thus to attain knowledge. Art reveals to us the essence of things, the essence of our existence; that is its function. Again and again you have been preoccupied with the problem of central perspective and realism. It could well be that there are many other representational possibilities for depicting what we really see. The conviction that perspectival images are at least in certain respects identical with natural human sight and objective external space is intact. Since the invention of photography and film this conviction has been further strengthened. Clearly the mechanical apparatus vouches for the naturalness and authenticity of its images. This suggests the conclusion that our senses prescribe certain privileged representational forms. I wouldnt say that. Perspective, and especially Renaissance perspective, is only one way of interpreting the world. It is the
Arnheim in Palm Beach, Florida. Photo: Jos Snchez-H

result of the search for an objectively accurate description of physical nature. But also, every other mode of visual representation is a legitimate attempt to do justice to reality. Every other mode of visual representation can bring about the natural character of represented objects and convey an image of reality. The claim to authenticity of naturalistic, central-perspectival representation paradoxically originates with the fact that it appears to be the most realistic because it evokes the illusion of life itself. That only proves, however, its proximity to optical projection. The specific and highly complicated style of visual representation is not at all detected. Here I differentiate myself from what Gombrich thought about this matter. Gombrich thinks that there is no vision without assumptions, no innocent eye. In relation to the truth of our perceptions, or images, we are always faced with the problem that there is no unmediated visual world against which we can compare our perceptions. If vision is as much a product of experience and cultural determination as the making of images, then what we com-pare pictorial representation with is not reality; rather, it is a world already clothed in our representational systems. What essential connection is there between pictorial representation and the represented object if the mode of representation is not based on established conventions? Is there an objectivity of perception? You know, Gombrich was trained by the cynics. And I have always been an optimist. I have always believed in the great possibilities of people to grasp the truth. For me everything creative depends on objective truth. And perceptions are objective facts, although no one has ever been in possession of objective truth and probably never will be. I want to explain this to you. Everyone must at least have similar perceptions when they look at the same thing, because otherwise no communication could take place. Images must also be compatible with one another so that a person receives one and the same thing at different times. That different observers of one and the same thing see different things has to do with the fact that perception is indeed not mechanical reception of sensory data; rather, it is the creation of structured images that naturally depend on the personal experi-

ence of the observer. The observation of the world demands an interaction between the objective characteristics supplied by the observed thing and the nature of the observing subject. In addition, I dont argue against the idea that there is a historicity of perception and that cultural determinations play a role in vision. In particular, the problem of realism clarified that the naturalistic style of representation is a cultural appearance. A look at history shows that the dominant standard of pictorial representation in different times and in different cultural circles is not the same and that certain forms and patterns repeat themselves. This is especially valid for style. That is what I wanted to demonstrate with my investigations: for every age there is an affinity for forms. This doesnt mean, however, that a certain kind of representation is based exclusively on established conventions or the external conditions of a tradition. I think it has become clear that your interest has basically always been directed toward the theory of knowledge; in other words, the investigation of cognitive processes in the relationship of consciousness to the real, existent world. In your book, Visual Thinking, you support the thesis that thought can only be productive if it disregards the boundaries between visual perception and the intellect. As a rule, however, when you are talking about thought you mean vision and perception, that is, the ability to visualize things. But knowledge is also connected with the nature of language: The representation of the world is made vivid and complete by means of language. Through its ability to name things, it can recreate the world of which it forms a part. Thus knowledge does not appear to be possible without linguistic concepts. How do you define knowledge? Is knowledge possible without language? My essential assertion in the book you mentioned is that language is not the formal prototype of knowledge; rather, that sensory knowledge, upon which all our experience is based, creates the possibilities of language. Our only access to reality is sensory experience, that is, sight or hearing or touch. And sensory experience is always more than mere seeing or touching. It also includes mental images and knowledge based on experience. All of that makes up our view of the world. In my opinion, visual thinking means that visual
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perception consists above all in the development of forms, of perceptual terms, and thereby fulfills the conditions of the intellectual formation of concepts; it has the ability, by means of these forms, to give a valid interpretation of experience. Language, on the other hand, is in itself without form; one cannot think in words, since words cannot contain an object. Language is instructed by sensory perception. It codifies the given knowledge through sensory experience. This doesnt mean that language isnt tremendously significant for thought, for all of human development. Human existence is unimaginable without language. I am only stressing that language is an instrument of that which we have gained through perception, in that it confirms and preserves the concepts it forms. In your art theory you constantly have architecture in mind; you wrote a book about the dynamics of architecture. If I understand you correctly, you also consider architecture to be a way of visualizing the world. What appeals to you about architecture? I got involved with architecture mainly because with it I could get away from naturalism. In architecture I actually had to deal with mere form. And otherwise that is the case only with music. My affinity for architecture is also due to the fact that architecture is an abstract medium, which means that it doesnt work with individual characteristics, but rather with general principles. And I already said that the primary perceptual feature of vision, and not only of vision, is the dynamic among the elements. This is quite obvious in architecture. Beyond that, I found it very essential that architecture treats mere form as an artistic means, and at the same time it has practical meaning. I had already been occupied for a long time with the relationship between function and sthetics, and for me they are directly connected. The function of architecture is an indispensable part of its visible condition, and sthetics is a part of the function. They cannot be separated. You have certainly heard about the fight over the conception of the Jewish Museum in Berlin. You must at least be familiar with the plans as well as the photos of Daniel Libeskinds building. What are your thoughts on the meaning

of this building and its status as a museum? I think the meaning of a building lies in its visible composition; you were completely right when you mentioned that before. By way of the architectural form the meaning has to be understood by the eye. But in general one can only judge architecture on site. And I have merely seen photographs of Libeskinds building. This zigzag form seems to me to be very substantial; it represents a historical succession and at the same time maintains its individuality. This was very clear to me. I am also quite moved by the empty space in the center of the architecture. There was a community there that was enormously influential during the Weimar Republic, a community from which hardly anything is left. The museum is thus addressed to someone who is no longer there. Translated by Gregory Williams
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A version of this interview was published as Rudolf Arnheim: Die Intelligenz des Sehens in Neue Bildende Kunst (August-September, 1998), pp. 56-62.

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David Shrigley Untitled, 2000

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Conserving latex and liverwurst: an interview with Christian Scheidemann Gregory Williams

During the past several decades, the field of art conservation and restoration has been forced to reckon with an increasing body of fragile, ephemeral, and unstable works that defy traditional categories and institutional methods. Christian Scheidemann, a Hamburg-based, freelance conservator specializing in contemporary art, agreed to answer a few questions about the rewards and complexities of his practice. Gregory Williams recently conducted an interview with him via e-mail.

Id like to begin with some basic questions about the discipline of conservation. First of all, what is the difference between conservation and restoration? There is indeed a difference between conservation and restoration. Conservation is always the second thing we do. It involves things like saving the material in art works from falling apart, fixing loose paint and improving the structure of objects. Restoration would be step three: cosmetic retouching and removal of dirt and varnish in order to make the work look wellmaintained. But the first thing for any conservator to do is to prevent works of art from damage, to control environmental and climate conditions, to care for proper handling and packing, to avoid unacceptable travel conditions, and to tell people to respect the work as a unique expression of a unique individual. Contemporary art is often so vulnerable that you cannot really restore it but only prevent damage. We spend half of our time in prevention and giving advice. Do you and your colleagues perform all of these tasks? Yes, we do. All organized conservators agree to a code of ethics, which says that you should treat any work, regardless of its value and the will of the owner, as a historically unique and irreplaceable work. We decide from case to case what to do and what to save. There is a lot of responsibility involved with these decisions. How does one train to become a conservator? In the United States there are universities in New York, Delaware, Indiana, and Texas where you can be trained to become a conservator. It takes about six years to get a degree in conservation. In Germany it is about the same; you have to study for four years at a university and do some practical work before spending two years in a conservators studio.

It seems that your position requires you to have a command of various aspects of both art and science. What kind of knowledge is the conservator expected to possess? Lots of patience and curiosity, but this is not unique to the conservator. One must know about chemistry, biology, art history, and physics, as well as have practical knowledge of those materials you wish to work with. As a furniture conservator, you should have carpentry experience; as a paper conservator, you should do exercises in bookbinding; as a conservator of photography, experience as a photographer or laboratory assistant is advised. For a conservator of painting you should have a good sense of observation and art history, as well as familiarity with all of the natural sciences. In any case, beginners should talk to museum conservators in order to be sent in the right direction. Im curious to know more about your clients. Do you do more work for museums or collectors? Our studio mainly works for collectors, but also a great deal for museums and art dealers. We are often recommended by artists, who feel that their work is being understood and well-maintained by us. We work very closely with artists like Matthew Barney, Robert Gober, Paul McCarthy, Kiki Smith, and Sarah Lucas. You can imagine the range of intentions and materials we are dealing with. As someone who works frequently with contemporary art, you must be constantly confronted by non-traditional materials. What was your most difficult assignment as a conservator? How did you overcome the problem it presented? Besides the challenge of preserving food in art works like the fruit used by Zoe Leonard, the liverwurst for Jonathan Meese, a bed made out of Italian ciabatta bread for Jana Sterbak, and chocolate for Janine Antoni, the biggest challenge for a conservator is to

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work with historical synthetics like cellulose nitratesthe first generation before Plexiglasused by Lszl Moholy-Nagy or natural latex used by Paul Thek, Louise Bourgeois, and Richard Serra in his early work. These problems can only be solved in close collaboration with scientists, for instance with the Smithsonian Institute in Washington or the Doerner Institut in Munich. We have conferences about the conservation of modern art and there are workshops and seminars on technology. In terms of the application, however, you have to experiment yourself. We once spoke about the time you had to preserve a giant pound cake produced by Matthew Barney. Can you tell me more about that experience? Yes, indeed, it was right after Documenta IX (1992) in Kassel. Matthew phoned me to ask if I could bake a big pound cake in the shape of an extended pill (Hubris Pill). His cake, which he showed in the installation OTTO-Shaft, had been destroyed by rats in the parking garage, which was the site of the installation. It took us about one year to find a bakery that was willing to let us experiment with paste in their work space. Finally, we found a solution, a tech-nique to build up a pound cake in the mold Matthew had sent. The problem was that either the inside was still raw after an hour of baking time or the outside started to turn black after 90 minutes. So we made a construction with wire mesh containing a void inside and it worked. Eventually, the grease had to be extracted with chemicals and the space of the grease had to be replaced by synthetics. We had acquired the necessary experience earlier with the conservation of Robert Gobers doughnuts. Do you feel that there are some works that are simply meant to be ephemeral (for instance, leftovers from Fluxus events, certain works by conceptual artists, or props used in performances)? Or should these objects be maintained as historical documents? Richard Tuttle once stated in a conversation with me that all his works were meant to go with the wind. He said he would never care about his materials and he liked the idea that his objects were so lightweight that they would just fly away and disappear like a cloud in the sky. However, when looking

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Preservation of Gobers doughnuts. Photo: Christian Scheidemann

at his elaborate production of artists books, I cannot take this statement seriously. During the early days of their careers, most artists do not really care about the materials they use; they are not meant to last forever. As interest increases from collectors and museums, they often care very much about proper materials and techniques. This, however, runs the risk of losing all the charm of fragility and ingenuity. There are artists who encourage the decay of their work. Or, to put it more precisely, the transformation of the work. I think of Dieter Roth and his objects made out of cheese that would acquire mold, change color, and keep the spectator at a respectful distance because of the intense odor. In reference to his chocolate pieces he told me as a conservator: The worms and bugs in my pieces are my employees. You must not disturb them; they have to do their job like any one of us. The only thing you do about these works, these concepts, is to document the changes by taking photos from time to time. So it sounds as if there are, at least in principle, works that should be left to their own devices. Can you think of any artrelated object that you would refuse to restore or conserve? There is no work that I would refuse to restore based on quality and intention. But I would always restore my favorite art works first and luckily there is so much to be done in the conservation of contemporary art that I can set up priorities. Another aspect is that if you work in collectionsprivate or publicthe storage, environmental, climate, and general preservation conditions have to be settled and this goes for all works of art, expensive and cheap, big and small, high and low quality. One reason I would refuse to restore an art work would be that I would not feel safe with the characteristics of the material, or that it would be too complicated in terms of advanced technology, computerized animation, and so forth. In this case we would arrange for the work to be done by specialists under our supervision in order to maintain respect for the work as a creative idea and technical document of that time. Restoration never means to bring a work back into its original state, but to accompany it through its period of existence.

In restoring and cleaning classic works of art, some conservators have been attacked for essentially changing the nature of the original object. Have you experienced a situation in which a work produced within the past thirty years was treated in a way that will significantly alter its subsequent historical reception? Art works do have a life of their own; some grow up under good circumstances, some dont. Collectors and museum curators take on a huge responsibility to maintain a collection and to choose the best staff available to care for the works on hand. There has been a lot of discussion about the best possible training of conservators in order to encourage respect for an art work as a historical document and not as a document of a fashionable method of conservation treatment. Also, it has always been a great challenge to respect the age of an artifact and not make it look brand new. However, should a painting have suffered so much from damage or a cleaning treatmentfor example, the glaze or the epidermis is destroyedthen we have to let the object die and not try to reanimate it with over-painting and new interpretations. If I were to recall a restoration which has significantly altered the historical reception, I would think of Barnett Newmans Who Is Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue of the mid1960s. The color-field painting had been damaged with eleven knife slashes by a psychopath in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1992. The work was destroyed and could not be restored in the sense of hiding the damage. A New Yorkbased conservator recommended by the widow of the artist repainted the entire surface with a lambskin roll. There is now no more texture from the artists brush-strokes, no more changes in color, no translucency; the work is dead. But it still is on display in the collection under Barnett Newmans name. In conserving an art object created by a living artist, how do you balance the intentions of the artist in relation to the demands of the museum or collector? From the moment of its production and throughout its lifetime the art work has first priority. All requests from museums and collectors have to be judged against the authenticity of the work at hand. A con-servator is not a craftsman who fulfills

the demands of a curator. He has to make decisions based solely on the authenticity of the work. What kinds of legal rights do artists have regarding the maintenance of their works? Im referring to certain documents or certificates that accompany an increasing number of works from the 1970s to the present, in which the artist specifies the conditions of the works installation or upkeep. Have you encountered these situations? Apart from a few exceptions, most artists do want their work to be immortal, eternal. Some artists use the most refined and delicate materials for their purposes and of course expect the utmost respect towards the handling of the workwhich they deserve. As conservators we do our very best to maintain the original state as long as possible, and we introduce shipping companies and art handlers to the specific problems of the work at hand. We examine contemporary art works and provide directions to the collector like medical instructions for a patient. I spend half of my working time dealing with protection and damage prevention. Artists interpret damage to one of their works as a personal offense, which I can totally understand. In the press we periodically hear stories about works of art, such as the Newman painting, being attacked and harmed by individuals with varying motives. Have you ever restored a work that had been damaged by vandalism? Is this a fairly common occurrence? In general there are two forms of vandalism: the first has to do with ignorance and frustration; the second is motivated by rebellion and opposition to the meaning of the object. In all museums and public collections you can find vandalism. It has been common sense so far that the object should be removed from the collection without much publicity. Vandals often want to make their problems public by attacking famous art works and they long for publicity. One should try not to give them the audience. In Europe most employees are restricted by law from talking about certain accidents in their respective museums. However, some cases have become very public through the

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international media, such as the story of the series of sulfuric acid attacks carried out by a lonely and disturbed man. He destroyed twenty-three paintings and was arrested in 1979, after he had attacked Rembrandts Jacobs Blessing and three works by Rembrandts pupils in the Kunstmuseum in Kassel. At that time I was on a team of four conservators trying to find ways to neutralize and extract the aggressive acid. It was a battle against time. What are some of the more difficult substances youve had to conserve or restore? Fortunately no artist has ever declared an astronauts space suit to be an art work. All these high-tech materials, created as part of humanitys utopian dreams, will become a nightmare once they disintegrate. Art works made of a composite of mixed materials are difficult to preserve. Apart from soap bubbles, I think that latex and rubber are some of the most unstable substances in the art world. At what point in the restoration process does the damaged component of a work need to be replaced entirely? Who makes those decisions? This is a very interesting question. First of all, any replacement, whether it involves retouching a painting or replacing an engine in a kinetic sculpture, leads to a loss of authenticity. Often it is not a question of who makes the decision but who acts the fastest. Assistants to artists are usually quick to replace worn-out parts by updated technology. Recently I had to do a restoration of a kinetic sculpture by Paul McCarthy, the Alpine Man (1992), which depicts an old man in dropped Lederhosen devotionally fucking a big barrel. The hip was broken apart from all the moving back and forth. I talked to the artist on the phone and asked for his opinion. He said, Actually my idea was to take all these worn-out fuckers from The Garden and assemble them into a new sculpture, The Worn Out

Fuckers Seniors Home, and replace the old men with young ones. To fulfill this inten-tion of the artist was not possible due to the will of the respective collectors, who want-ed their authentic Old Man to be restored and maintained. It would take days to answer your question properly, but to keep a long story short I would say that the conservator should operate with a wide network of artists, chemists, philosophers, historians, and lawyers. He should work along the lines of professionals together with the Code of Ethics, which is obligatory for every con-servator organized in one of the major conservators associations. How have the techniques of the conservator changed in recent years? To what extent is the discipline still using the time-tested methods developed in the traditional museum conservation departments? There is nothing more valuable than experience and time-tested methods, even in conservation. Apart from the application of traditional methods, conservators of contemporary art do consult commercial laboratories on questions about synthetics, storage problems of latex and rubber, coatings for chocolate, humidifiers for objects made of soap, elephant dung, disinfectants, etc. Museum laboratories are well-equipped, but they often deal with questions that arise from within the collection. Emerging art is often not yet part of the collection. What are the most routine kinds of jobs, the jobs that must be taken when there are no pound cakes to conserve? The most routine job is to prevent damage, to consult curators during exhibitions, to design crates, to create a museum climate. Being trained as a painting conservator, I do a lot of restoration of modern paintings; cleaning, weaving the canvas holes, retouching, finishing. Documentation of every single step of the work is one of

the most time-consuming tasks to fulfill. Another job is to find extra parts for lightbased objects, motors for kinetic works, to find through the Internet the producer from thirty years ago of a plastic tube used by Mario Merz. Do you work with much art that requires maintenance of technology? Have you had experience in trying to conserve a work whose technology is out-of-date or no longer accessible? We do care a lot about video art and all of its related media. To preserve video art is not just a technical issue; it is not just a matter of transforming an analog medium into a digital DVD or Laserdisc. If the issue at stake is about the documentation of a performance or maintaining cinematic material, I would agree to transform the tape into digital media. Sometimes, however, depending on whether the quality is good or bad, the magnetic tape will lose information as well as sthetic elements. This may sound romantic, but we historical materialists have had the experience that through the centuries it has always turned out that technology was the only real thing, no matter what philosophy, artistic strategy, or concept was behind it.

Robert Gober, Bag of Donuts, 1989 Photo: Christian Scheidemann

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The confessions of a Finnish pastry eater: an interview with Bo Lnnqvist Sina Najafi

Bo Lnnqvist is a professor in European Ethnology at the University of Jyvskyl in Finland where the classical tradition of pastries and coffee shops still survives. His book Pastries: A Study of the Cultural Expression of Luxury follows the rise and imminent fall of the pastry. Sina Najafi spoke to him over the phone.

Why a book on the cultural history of pastries and why this book now? My idea was to approach the history of European luxury through such a small and bizarre thing as the pastry. For this I had to take a long perspective and go from country to country. The utmost periphery of this story is Scandinavia, especially Finnish pastry culture, which has been preserved until today. So I see the movement as a cultural process where the meaning of such a small thing changes all the time as it moves from one context to another. At a symbolic level, these shifts happen through things such as ritualization, stheticization, and miniaturization. My interest as a cultural anthropologist is to connect the concrete material level with the symbolic level, and the way meaning is shaped between these two levels. You can have a long historical perspective on pastries because its history in Europe is well documented, but you can also approach it through fiction, traditions, and personal accounts. In looking at cookbooks from previous centuries, you discuss how pastries, tarts, buns, cakes, and pies were once all placed under one category. Up to the 18th century, the boundary between them seems very open. But what is a pastry proper? A true pastry has a bottom like a cakes, it has to be filled with a jam or cream filling, and the third element is the glazing, which can be decorated. There are variations on this. It can, for example, be a ball of chocolate, but there must be something hidden inside, some kind of surprise. The pastry proper develops in Venice. From the early Middle Ages until the late 18th century, Venice was one of the focal points of European fashion and luxury goods. We know that in the 17th century, the pastry cooks or confectioners in Venice consisted of immigrants from the poor valleys in the Grabunden province of Switzerland. After an edict passed in 1603 that allowed people from Switzerland to settle and

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work freely in Venice, these immigrants established themselves quickly as pastry chefs and developed the art to a new high point and organized themselves into guilds. All of this is connected to the introduction of coffee and the new custom of eating pastries with coffee, as opposed to the prior arrangement where you had a pastry as a dessert at the end of dinner with a glass of liqueur or wine. Coffee had been known in Constantinople in the 1550s but only reached Venice in 1645. At first, it was only sold in pharmacies as a drug. Around 1680, a man from Grabunden opened the first coffee shop in Venice. By the early 1700s, the Grabunden immigrants ran 105 enterprises in Venice. But then the Venetians became jealous and when the edict expired in 1766, it was not renewed. Thats when these people left and pastry culture spread through Europe. We have a lot of documents about the pastries made by these Grabunden pastry chefs when they arrived in Scandinavia. There was resistance at first, of course. When the Swiss bakers showed up in Scandinavia in the early 19th century, the local bakers would ask the city not to allow these foreigners to work there, claiming that their own breads and sweet things were enough for the public. The whole spread of pastries was part of the process of civilizing the upper classes. Luxury was no longer just to fill your belly with more food than anyone else, but to recognize a little thing like a pastry. This was more a class phenomenon used to delineate the border against the lower classes. The lower classes still had to eat when they could and starve for the periods in between. This is also the moment when the names of pastries became more sophisticated. They were named more and more often after famous emperors, kings, or queens. There was a similar move in fashion. In Paris, Marie-Antoinettes fashion designer named every one of the queens hats after a famous actress. There are also influences

from the Far East; the idea of decorating objects with seashells, for example, leaves its mark on the culture of pastries. But if you look, the names were simply given by one individual baker to a new creation and they have stayed. At one level, there is no rationality to these things. The Sarah Bernhardt pastry was invented by a Norwegian baker! And a pastry can also have different names in different countries. What makes a pastry named after someone become accepted and spread as a recognizable item to order and buy? Look at the Alexander pastry invented in 1818, which is the first Finnish pastry to be named after someone. At the time, Alex-ander I, the czar of Russia, was a very popular ruler in Finland, and people had expected him to visit Helsinki on two occasions and he hadnt made it. He was supposed to come in 1818 and the Swiss pastry makers had already created the pastry in his honor, but he ended up coming in 1819. But you see, the pastry had to be associated with some other things; Alexander had decided that Finland could keep its old laws and language. There is Alexander Street in Helsinki, and so on. A whole complex of things came together. When did the tradition of naming pastries after a famous person end? It goes on all the time, but now its connected to some specific celebration. For example, for the 100th anniversary of Alvar Aaltos birthday in 1998, the leading baker in his hometown invented an Alvar Aalto pastry. But its difficult for an Alvar Aalto pastry to make it because then you need a whole Alvar Aalto movement. Its surprising that some of the great pastries named after famous people, such as the Napoleon, are baked in a pan and then cut. Is there a cultural distinction between a pan-cut, democratic pastry and individual pastries?

The development of pan-cut pastries is again tied to the rise of coffee houses. At that point you had to streamline the production of pastries. You write that the pastry will disappear in the next millennium. Why? And has this possible disappearance anything to do with you writing this book? Cultural anthropologists turn to studying things as they are disappearing. I have written a book on toys, and in that case, I came to understand at the end that it was the child who was disappearing. The disappearance of the pastry is a question of a whole world coming to an end, both con-cerning the work of craftsmen and the ques-tion of eating as a whole in the West. With the new fitness trends, sweet things are less popular nowadays. But its also the wienerbrd thats coming and getting rid of the pastry. It would be ridiculous to have a Meryl Streep pastry now, but maybe the Sarah Bernhardt pastry sounded somewhat ridiculous back then. If you had to name a pastry after someone, who would it be? It would be Christina, the 17th-century queen of Sweden. Im fascinated by her. She abdicated her throne and went to Rome and became a Catholic. She was in Rome at the time when these Swiss bakers started in Venice. What else are you working on? I have just finished a study of the potbelly of the Finnish man, which continues to exist despite all the health trends, despite Nokia, and despite what doctors are saying. Im interested in such paradoxes in culture. Are you a pastry eater yourself? Yes, I have a potbelly myself and I like to feed it.

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And

Architecture and dessert Mark Sussman

The Brecht Sebastian Brecht

Contemporary practitioners of the nineteenthcentury parlor genre of toy theater, normally confined to the dry media of paper, cardboard, and balsa wood, have wondered about the possibilities of the culinary arts for miniature theatrical expression. In his appreciation of the miniature theater, G.K. Chesterton writes: By reducing the scale of events it can introduce much larger events.... You can only represent very big ideas in very small spaces. Conceptual grandeur in inverse proportion to architectural scale. Pastry, candy, and cake would seem to offer the most structurally stable edible materials for a miniature architecture of the stage. Could we fashion baroque opera in meringue and spun sugar? Might the cake serve as a platform for the staging of ideas, great and small? What would a Brechtian cuisine look like? The toy theater revival, now in its tenth year, gains momentum; but it has yet to cross the threshold of the edible. Or has it? Erst kommt das Fressen, wrote Brecht, in his most famous proverb. Dann kommt die Moral. First comes the eating, then the moral. Critic Fredric Jameson has addressed the compressed literary form of Brechts maxims, a style that recalls the direct, minimal language of the Bible and which the playwright used as a means of political address through epic dramaturgy. Minimal narrative, only gestus. Sebastian Brecht, grandson of the playwright, is a chef, a workaholic artist using flour, sugar, and chocolate. His confections are light, complex, sublime. Now, commissioned by Cabinet, he has made a dessert in homage to his playwright grandfather: dental moldings of Brechts teeth filled with 1.6 ounces of white chocolate clenching a cigar made of one and a quarter ounces of the dark stuff. Bertolts famous cigar functioned as a sort of prop on which to hang the cryptic proverbs and startling idea-crystals delivered to arrest thought and estrange the drama of everyday life and its myths of progress. Sebastian renders it here in a miniature tableau of the writer about to speak.

10 oz. of cream 10 oz. of dark chocolate 2 oz. of milk chocolate 1 oz. of organic tobacco 7 oz. pure white chocolate (for teeth) Put 1 oz. of crumpled organic tobacco of your choice into 10 oz. of simmering cream. Take off the heat and leave for 30 minutes. Strain the mixture through a very fine sieve. Reheat the infused cream until simmering and then pour over 4 oz. of dark chocolate and 2 oz. of milk chocolate. Whisk this mixture until it is smooth. When this mixture is cool, put it into a pastry bag with a half-inch tip and pipe out cigar length shapes. Temper the remainder of the dark chocolate and put it down on some tin foil. To temper dark chocolate, melt it to 45 degrees centigrade, cool it down to 27 degrees centigrade (until it begins to look muddy), and then reheat it up to 31 degrees centigrade (until you can pour it). The process for white chocolate is the same but the temperatures are 45, 26, and 29 degrees centigrade respectively. Roll the piped chocolate cigar shape around until it is evenly coated (you do not want it to be too neat). Get some molding compound from your dentist and make impressions of your teeth or your loved ones. Temper 7 oz. of white chocolate and pour into impressions. Take out when shiny and hard. Place cigar in mouth.

Sebastian Brecht wishes to thank his dentist, Dr. Theodore Sewitch, for his technical advice.

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Photo: Eran Offek

Overleaf David Shrigley Untitled, 2000

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