July 2008

OK, one more Lost in Space synopsis and the nostalgia binge is over.
"The Magic Mirror" is another Penny episode that mirrors "My Friend, Mr. Nobody" but backtracks on its magic.
In this one, tweener Penny frets about growing up because she doesn't want to indulge in romantic "goop" like her older sister Judy does with Don the spaceship's stupid second-in-command, and doesn't want to spend the better part of her day thinking about hairstyles.
(Unspoken but implied feminist reading: she also doesn't want to live in a world where she makes sandwiches for the rest like Mom.)
For her attitude Judy calls her a "tomboy" and yes--"ugly." Penny is palpably crushed by this insult.
A magic mirror appears for no reason on the ground near the Jupiter 2 and through a series of plot complications, Penny falls into it.
On the other side is a world dreamed up by the producers after smoking much reefer and watching every Cocteau film.
It's a shadowy world of draperies, knickknacks and Egyptian statues. Mirrors are portals to the outside, but are mostly one-way. Things, and unfortunates such as Penny, fall in and are forever trapped. Tantalizingly, she can see out of any mirror anywhere (including ones on the spaceship, where she spots her family) but those looking in the mirrors cannot see her.
The sole human inhabitant of this interstitial dimension is homely '60s cult actor Michael J. Pollard (later cast as C.W. Moss in Bonnie and Clyde.)
This 26 year old "boy" has spent eternity watching other people through his mirrors, living in a room that he "never has to clean," and having fun between chased among the museum relics by a hairy one-eyed monster (I think we know what that symbolizes) that periodically comes to kill him. He has so far avoided the creature for aeons of doom-laden entertainment, and has watched Penny the tomboy through his mirror and wants her to join him in his merriment.
After initial disgust the same open-minded Penny that befriended Mr. Nobody 14 episodes back learns about the boy and his world through polite questions but she knows he is a ghoul and she must find a way out. She invites him to join her but he cannot leave the mirror world.
After another series of plot complications she returns to the Jupiter 2 and at the end of the episode mends fences with the womenfolk by asking how she would look "with my hair piled on top of my head like this." The line is delivered in front of her shipboard vanity mirror where the boy will be watching her acquisition of seductive adult moves, while he is doomed to remain in pre-adolescent neverland hell.
Thus where "Mr. Nobody" casts Penny as the wise character finding her own emotional place outside the patriarchal structures of the ship, "The Magic Mirror" is a scary object lesson to girls who would deviate from the nuclear family model. Disappointing backsliding by the writers, if subverting basic American values is considered good. Though a glimpse of Pollard's "goth" world might still be powerful medicine to some, in comparison to the bland interiors of the Jupiter 2 tract home.

From Paddy Johnson's notes on the Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel:

Originality and production. Oliver Laric is quoted by Petra Cortright, who represents the younger generation, “I’ve kind of come to the point right now where I don’t see any necessity in producing images myself — everything that I would need exists, it’s just about finding it”

That's fine, it combines Warhol with the Douglas Huebler "world-is-full-of-objects-I-do-not-wish-to-add-any-more" conceptualist message.

More interesting is to make art yourself and then look at it as if it were an appropriation. In other words, granted, there is no reason to make art anymore (due to the sheer glut, or due to the bankruptcy of the ideas underlying it). So you view yourself as a symptom and subject your own tastes and choices to the rigorous inquiry you would give other subjects in the world.

This is the Picabia view as opposed to the Duchamp view. Picabia was a Dadaist and his textbook work is "anti-art." But then after he made that point in the 1910s he kept working for several more decades, producing portraits, nudes, and abstractions. Up until the '80s or so all this late work was considered unimportant and neo-conservative. Benjamin Buchloh certainly thought so, including FP in the essay "Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression."

Then artists such as Salle and Schnabel gave FP a fresh look and some revisionist scholarship happened and now the late work looks a lot smarter to us.

But if you are going that route (or in music following Poulenc and his "surrealist" appropriation of orchestral banality) heaven help you because you will be misunderstood. You could paint something channeling your "inner high school student" and people will not see the conceptual frame you put around it. They do not have time to parse the bad from the good-bad in your work. (It's especially problematic if, say, every third thing you do is actually, unequivocally bad.) Nevertheless it's a more interesting, psychologically risky place than the lofty position where you are just choosing.

See also

Until Rhizome can institute flat comments (as opposed to nightmares of achronological nesting) and find some way to moderate the LOLZ PWNED guys, comments will be made here. This responds to Ceci Moss's interview with João Ribas. [linked changed - see below]* Ribas recently organized a show arguing that individual subjective expression has become "deradicalized" due to its democratization. Moss asked him why he only included individual artists in the show and didn't include any recent work by collectives.

Thanks, Ceci, your question about collectives was good and Ribas tied himself in knots trying to answer it.**

This idea of eliminating the self has been standard practice at least since Minimalism. "Generative systems, or eliciting meaning from iteration, standardization, or repetition" tend to produce the most cool and elegant objects, naturals for collection and consumption. Knoebels and Palermos are practically hard currency in the art world.

Other artists in the Kreps show are also known quantities. But Elaine Sturtevant isn't about anti-authorship? She meticulously recreates other artists' work as her work.

To say that purging the self is suddenly relevant again because MySpace pages ("user-driven media") encourage narcissism is to erect a straw person.

Expressive subjectivity, done deliberately and reflexively, can be just as radical as hiding yourself in a system. The Picabia model over the Duchamp model. The resulting work may be perceived as tasteless, however, and less likely to find a place in the finer homes.

It's good not to be talking about Net Art 2.0.

**From Moss's interview:

I noticed you curated exclusively individual artists for the show. How would the exhibition have differed if you had included artist collectives or groups? Was this ever a consideration?

That is an important point----I think it was because the idea is not to derail authorship, a perennial hobbyhorse, but to delimit the markers of subjectivity. They are not the same thing. So the notion was: could you have a singular subject who produced or set off meaning, an effect, rather than the affect, of meaning, a subject who was still soliciting meaning from procedural form without relying on this tired notion of the self? That is the point of Duchamp's Three Standard Stoppages, which is a heavy presence in the show. Or for that matter, what differentiates Haydn from Beethoven---the latter wrote fewer symphonies partly because of an emphasis on the expressive, development section of sonata form, rather than the use of rhetorical, gallant motifs�But could this subject also be ceding subjective control through generative systems, or eliciting meaning from iteration, standardization, or repetition itself? The point was precisely to revisit the idea of the singular artist's subjectivity -- how it's formed and fetishized as labor and appended to meaning...this is clear in the way drawing is traditionally defined by a 'phenomenology of the hand': the way it supposedly has some closer fidelity with intention or thinking. That is different, to me, from the Surrealist premise of the cadaver exquis, and its psychoanalytic foundations, or the collapse of authorial intent supposedly allowed by collaborative work. It might just be two or more of these same subjectivities at work in the end, and so the affect could be quite the same---it was for Breton, despite the declared intent, as it was for the School of Rubens, the same subjectivity is reproduced no matter how many people are involved. That's different than say how Haydn worked---in collaboration with a patron for 30 years. There is also the added problem of the value of collective labor...this is a bit too long-winded to get into here, but the valuation of collective labor--collaboration---in late capitalism is problematic.

Update: The idea that we are drowning in narcissism has been prevalent at least since the "Me Decade" of the '70s. Another counterexample besides Picabia where expression was used in an interesting, reflexive way (straddling the individual, the collective, and the institutional) was Jim Shaw's "Thrift Store Paintings" show at Metro Pictures (and its online cousin, Guthrie Lonergan's curated selection of MySpace intros). Viva (mediated) expression!

*Update, 2011: The Rhizome link has been changed to http://rhizome.org/editorial/2008/jul/11/interview-with-joampatildeo-ribas/

The typographical similarity has been noted by annoyed Cronenberg fans. What connection exists between a male enhancement drug and a vaginal bioport? one asks. That seems obvious, but unnoticed so far is the rhyming of the game pod programmer's name, Allegra Geller, with a rival enhancement product. And then there is the "gristle gun."