Posted by, ‘Anon’.
This lecture was like a two-hour rollercoaster ride. It went too fast for me, I don’t pretend to have understood how it all worked, but I want to do it all again. “Oh friends, there are no friends, what is friendship for”? Dr Jasper Joseph-Lester introduces the visiting video, installation, new media artist and curator Dr Amanda Beech. Who began with a short account of how her ideas developed. “No one unilateral drive, the ideas move around a bit”.
Dr Beech then went on to give an insight into some of the main points of her enquiries; The relation between democracy and violence, scrutinising inflated or empty language in narratives of freedom, popular culture, the language of force and the force of language. Beech used an example of art from a time and place where the individuals voice had to be suppressed. When real artists starved, went underground or fled the country. Many ‘dissapeared’ in the night. A slide; Joseph Torak and a view of his studio interior. Work in progress. Three stone sculptures. A little horse, a middle horse, and a big horse. Torak became Hitlers favorite artist and prospered, for a time. A darkly humorous way to emphasise her disdain for ‘weak or uncritical’ art. Not real art because it’s not for everyone. Making what ‘they’ want others to see. Propaganda. ‘Everythings great here, it must be, just look at our art and you can see’. Pastoral idylls, healthy farmers and horses till the fertile land.
In an earlier paper and symposium Beech had opened discussions upon an idea of ‘nothing existing outside of language’ leading into a way of questioning the concept of ‘world’ as a construct. Through her work Beech sometimes deconstructs things and shows how they do not work, fractures belief of universals and accepted structures of power. Opens up philosophical spaces where things are no longer unquestionably accepted. “Arts role is to resist and reveal forces of ‘bad power’”. Dark power, which [to some, today, may] conjour images of faceless secular priests of the American world system. Beech seems to suggest the need for, if not to encourage, an art of mainstream utility and usefulness. Seems sceptical of ‘weak and uncritical art’ and to champion an art of social enlightenment. The insightful versus blindness. “Oh, art is doing some good over there!” But also critical of culture [in the widest sense] and its political potential.
Her positive ideals relate to ‘social glue’ and solidarity. Promoting that engaging voices and inspiring change, great masses of people and a theoretical point of view on the way forward are the cornerstones of any democratic revolution. The statement ‘art can make communities happen’ illustrated the potential of art as a part of a process of difference and potential change in a similar manner to the U.S female environmental artists of the 1970′s. Raising awareness and agitating the unseen dangers of the supposed, perceived as idealistic connections between knowledge and power. How a sense of place and community can equal continuity. How that contributes to health and well-being, fostering civil pride and confidence which raises quality of life and reduces crime. Beech questions the use of language and ‘considers the way in which power is experienced both through and as images’.
A short video of the struggles of the popular fictional character Jack Bower in the U.S prime-time TV series ’24′ is shown. The president is portrayed as evil and stupid, a metaphor for ‘bad power’. Money and power rule. Law is suspended. Season #6. Jack Bower, the ‘dead’ super hero returns. The clip shows Jack torturing his own brother with a pain inducing serum. His question – “how do I find McCarthy?” Through this Beech relates to examples of how popular culture often presents that the pursuit of the ideals of freedom, justice and success are often hinged on violence. How common practice often relates to violence to democracy and how this is disseminated through popular culture.
The lecture subverts languages potential for covert, clandestine and surreptitious operations and control systems in the sense of surveilor reversal. The work seeks a conection with a politics of enlightenment which pre-supposes that there is the potential for freedom from oppression, inhibition and convention. On some level transforming the position of the surveilor into the surveiled which both subverts, and makes un-seen, seen.
Noam Chomsky. Look at the work of the specialists in contemporary affairs and compare what they say with the world of fact. You will often find great and fairly systematic divergences. Then you can take a further step and try to explain these divergences, taking into account the class position of the intelligentsia. [...] If such analysis is often carried out poorly, that is because, quite often, social and political analysis is produced to defend special interests, rather than to account for the actual events. [...] The alleged complexity, depth and obscurity is often part of the illusion propagated by the system of ideological control, which aims to make the issues seem remote from the general population and to persuade them of the their incapacity to organise their own affairs or to understand the social world in which they live without the tutelage of intermediaries.(1)
Chomsky relates this to violence in democratic society by using an example of the American world system as “the entire history of the U.S being based on violence, from the Indian wars to Vietnam.
Slavoj Zizek discusses [online] the differences between subjective and objective forms of violence. The very real, not anonymous, in the media all the time. And forms of capitalist violence, with its guilty anonymous, the shareholders and so-on with no ‘real’ responsibility. The level at which this type of capitalist violence is necessary for its normality to be able to continue.
Listening to Amanda Beech can open up a new way of looking at ‘world’ and accepting that wherever culture and politics meet there is always likely to be some level of control, somewhere, whether it is at one end of ‘world’ or the other. Whether Stalin’s vision of an ideological culture or the CIA’s ‘double dick’ liberal attitude to U.S artists anti-American policy statements during the cold war. For if art [and culture in the widest sense] embodies and [or] represents the type of society within which it was made [whether forced or otherwise] and if capitalism [communism, neo liberalism or whatever] and culture are decisively linked and integrated within societies then any dynamic within the former will have significant impact upon the status of the latter.(2)
If both of Zizek’s types of violence are ‘in the media all of the time’ whether anonymously or not. Affect. And artists who are able to operate ’outside certain structures of power’ utilise the democratic freedom of their position to mirror this violence. Effect. Then this, I propose is the relationship between democracy and violence to which Beech refers. By making it into art it becomes distinguished from other man-made objects, or activities of man. It becomes empowered.
‘The Cold 6000′ 2006, a 12 minute video. The use of James Ensors narrative over documentary or warscape style footage of Las Vegas [it could have been Iraq through night vision lenses] Beech harnesses both the ‘force of language’ and ‘the power of image’ through the media of video. Movement ‘through’ the city promoting a real sense of ‘the now’. Augmented to this, staccato, drum-base music, fast paced, at volume. Speed of image changes disoriente. Too fast to read text. Out of control. Monochrome greys and the darkness of the auditorium/ gallery echo a sense of the cold city at night. Moving fast. Hunter or prey? Surveilor or surveiled? A sense of danger, of violence made palpable. Atmospheric and linear perspectives. The images slow down. The text becomes easier to read. “HE -WAS- JUSTIFIED”. A powerful sense of the real but imploded, collapsed, fractured, ruptured, Truth?
The video seemed to offer as most films do, something of the ducal seat. One single viewing point. A point of view for an individual. One of weakness in terms of Beech’s use of Hobbes ‘to be alone is the lowest you can get’ and the importance of friends and community leading to ascent. As per the environmental artists, above, and their attempts to unite great masses of people. One of the few spaces left today to escape, for the most part, and attempt to discuss issues such as these is within the liberalism of culture and the arts. Lectures such as Beech’s give the opportunity to take a step back and have a look around. No matter if we agree at the end of the evening or not.
Dr Beech interrogates the violence that is implicit in the way we represent ourselves as free subjects. I don’t think that she agrees that, that is the only, or the correct method of representation. She investigates the rhetoric of violence as a condition of subjectivity. She does not ‘say’ that liberalism is intrinsically violent. But asks that if it is [which it is not] then how would that problematic our conception of the art world [...] as a free space for expression – leading to the need for contingency.
Dr Amanda Beech; ‘ideals of freedom, justice and success’ and ‘the artist as instrumental to the social’. How would she (how would we all?) have fared in Nazi Germany or during 1930′s Stalinist Russia? disappeared in the dark of night probably, never to be seen again, and not to a Dacha in the pine forests, in a new car paid for by the state. Something to be celebrated… not the new car, certainly not her disappearance, but the relative ‘political currency’ and freedom of art today. Anon.
(1) Carlos P Otero (Ed) 1999, Noam Chomsky: Language and Politics, pp 142-147, Black Rose Books: New York
(2) Francis Francine & Jonathon Harris (Eds)1992, Art in Modern Culture, an Anthology of Critical Texts, pp 32-33, Phaidon: London
