Crossroads

"If all artists could see the crossroads of these celestial paths, 

if they could comprehend these monstrous runways and the weaving 

of our bodies with the clouds in the sky, then they would not paint chrysanthemums" 

Kazimir Malevitch, "From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: 

The New Realism in Painting", 1915

Alfred Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art Chart, 1936

André Breton, Surrealist Intrusion into the Enchanter's Domain, 1960 (thanks to Tessel)

Neue Slovenische Kunst, NSK Organizational Diagram, 1986

« It is a sort of absolute rule that everywhere, in all places, at all times of civilization, in all beliefs, by all means and in all regards, the untrue supports the true ; the true gives the untrue as its ancestor, as its cause, as its author, as its origin and its end, without exception nor remedy, and the true engenders this untrue by which it itself demands to be engendered.»

Paul Valery, Petite lettre sur les mythes, 1928

Hexen 2.0 - Part 3

Black Dog Publishing, who is also running the gallery space where the Litterature exhibition is hosted, published an art book and, interestingly, a tarot deck of Treister’s project. They have been working with Treister for several years and my copy of Hexen 2039 was already published by them – as I said earlier they provided me with a book and a deck: The book itself is a paperback in calendar format, full colour and thick matte paper. No fold-in poster in this one, but a succession of the various elements constituting the complex Hexen 2.0 ecosystem, from the diagrams to the tarot cards, via the bibliography, the portraits, etc. as well as a short discussion of the project by art historian Lars Bang Larsen.

During the talk they hosted at WORK gallery, Suzanne Treister mentioned the sign at the Science Museum recommending a thrity minutes circuit between her artworks – certainly in 30 minutes spent in a gallery space, one can only experience the technique of the artist. The concept and the narrative, which for me holds the more revolutionnary aspects of the project, we can at best glimpse at – neither the extreme complexity of the diagrams, nor the coherence of the narrative or the seamless integration of the artwork into history, can there be experienced. One need time, patience, and research to fully uncipher the project, and in that regard, the book format seems very appropriate.

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Mathew Wilson Smith in his seminal study of the relatively overlooked subject of the Gesamtkunstwerk titled The Total Work of Art, drawing on Adorno, posit Wagner, who is widely regarded as the originator of the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk as we understand it, at the root of a dialectic movement between organicist immersive art work and the ideal of Moholy-Nagy’s Bauhaus theater, or, more surprisingly, of Bertold Brecht. Smith argues that Brecht’s concept of Verfremdung did not contradict, and indeed worked with the notion of Total Art Work, in a “synthetic” or at least non-organic sense.

Hexen 2.0 : Installation at the Science Museum

I am yet to read his conclusions but his tackling of the notion of cyberspace I see in the continuity of this evolution: Treister’s practice is inherently multimedia, not only in the computerized sense of the word, as demonstrated by her pioneering publications of Rosalind Brodsky’s adventures on CD-rom, but also in her more recent use of different medias on each sides of the Hexen’s diegesis. On the level of the artwork, visual arts certainly have the upperhand, but through the use of large amounts of texts, as well as prints or photo-montage, she achieves enough variety to be immersive. On the level of the “narrative” itself, the artworks represent a variety of formats, documenting in the particular complementarity of historical research, the subject of her work. The particular ungraspable quality of this subject, part history, part scientific phenomena, and part political manifesto, participate in it’s “real world” aesthetic quality – but it is in collapsing the clear-cut separation between the world at large and the microcosm of her artwork that she achieves the quality of Gesamtkunstwerk, harnessing, like various experimental video games in the past (In Memoriam for example), real world genre and events into her own “narrative”.

Hexen 2.0 : HISTORICAL DIAGRAMS: The Computer - From the 

MK ULTRA via Counter-Culture to Technogaianism

Here I put narrative in inverted comas because, indeed, the narrative structure of Hexen 2.0, which was already rather unusual in Hexen2039, is virtually non-existent, or more accurately it is invisible. In gamification this is what they would call a sandbox project, as in the fact that the author provides the audience with a certain number of modules in which they are free to evolve, to explore or to ignore, with no particular goal, a defining feature of open-world game design, which certain commentators (Bullfrog’s Peter Molyneux or SimCity’s Will Wright for example) has defined as a the essential separation between game and virtual realities.

Maxis/Electronic Arts, SimCity 4, 2003

This types of environments, be it in the form of games or of pure simulation (SugarScape), are often credited as archetypal emergent systems, and, funnily enough, studied closely by a variety of inheritors of the cybernetic tradition, from AI engineers to social scientists.

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But all is not emergent in the world of Hexen 2.0. In the sixties, when Philip K. Dick was writing The Man in the High Castle  one of his most famous works and probably the most celebrated uchronia in Science Fiction (exemplifying the counter-narratives dear to the artist, reminiscent of the recent development of counter-factual history), he was using the I Ching to write, to devine the plot. Many years later he was actually blaming inconsistencies in the story-line on that practice. As I do for Treister he seemed back then to consider his work as one of world-building, which might be a bit creepy given his later gnostic leanings, but which we can imagine to have involved the creation of actors and forces, which, once associated with the abstract elemental forces of the I Ching, were then combined and recombined according to the “interpretations” of the book.

Philip K. Dick's famous letter to the FBI about 

Solarcon-6 and a (alleged...) worldwide Nazi conspiracy

The influence of Dick, whose style has been occasionally coined “paranoid fiction” and involved a variety of governmental, occult or philosophical factions, is often quoted by Treister – maybe her decision to use a tarot deck, with it’s rich symbolism and modular potential, to illustrate the various elements of her mythos, is again a reference to the writer.

HEXEN 2.0 : Tarot: XXI : THE WORLD

The 78 card deck itself is large enough to be fully readable, printed on thick card and seemingly takes Crowley’s own tarot deck as a starting point. The cards constitute in my eyes the “meat” of the project, more so maybe than the large historical diagrams, and many of the most interesting elements of the Hexen nebula are more widely developped here. The form itself is ambiguous: like Jodorowski, or Jung, one can think, as we do for every symbol resisting historicisation, of the major arcana at the very least, as timeless archetypes – or one can follow Timothy Leary in seeing them as a narrative of themselves, depicting the evolution of man, or in the present case, the evolution of society. 

Hexen 2.0 - Part 2

“Adorno viewed disenchantment not so much as a process but an ideology, a class-anchored  form of thought that heralded the struggles of the bourgeois revolution. As such it is not inescapable, but must be understood to be combated.”

H. C. Greisman (1976), “’Disenchantment of the World’: 
Romanticism, Aesthetics and Social Theory”, The British Journal of Sociology 27, 4.

Last Wednesday on the 28th of March I attended at WORK Gallery, who is currently hosting an exhibition of her work, a discussion between Suzanne Treister and Adrian Danatt. Suzanne Treister I have already presented in a previous post, and Danatt, whom I never had the chance to hear about before, is apparently a prominent art critic known, according to Wikipedia, for gifting dead birds to his hosts.

No such antics this time but a discussion which, if sometimes hazy, gave us the opportunity to confirm a certain number of assumptions concerning Treister's new project as well as debunking a few others. 

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Black Dog treated me to a a beer, a book and a tarot set for review purposes, which I will further discuss later (not the beer). The exhibition itself  presents on one hand preliminary adventures of Rosalind Brodsky in video form -several hours of free association forming a continuous story-line over the years- while the rest comes as an addition to the Science Museum exhibition and echoes an element of 2039, with a bibliography of Treister's researches, presented in the form of extremely detailed mirrored pencil drawings of the book covers. 

Hexen 2.0 : Litterature

We heard during the panel discussion, that the mirroring was an artifice aimed at implicating the audience with the work, requiring more involvement from the spectator to actually decipher the artwork, a recurrent theme in the Hexen series. Yet most of the discussion seemed to focus less on the particular form implied by the multimedia and modular approach of the artist, than on the difference between hidden and occult, and more interestingly, on the difference, between 2.0 and 203. 

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There are many reasons to love conspiracy theories: Franck E. Dec dickian's rants sudden surge in popularity exemplify conspiracy theory as refined and strangely media-conscious outsider art. 

Hexen 2.0 : HISTORICAL DIAGRAMS: The Computer - From the 

ANTIKYTHERA MECHANISM to QUANTUM TELEPATHOLOGY

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the Mutus Liber and maybe Campanella’s City of the Sun are only a few examples of the rich esoteric litterature that florished from the middle age to the end of the 18^th century and gained mainstream recognition as works of art: all of those books in their intrinsequely symbolic nature have acquired a particular status in artistic and litterary history, not only for being the backdrop onto which an endless succession of ideologies has been projected, but also for being in their mystery, a unique form of work coupling enough structure to hint clearly at a meaning and too few clues for any answers to be definitive. 

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499)

Art itself is often open to those interpretations – we create our own meaning, we decrypt or project ideologies and intentions onto artefacts that remain ultimately unknown, often even to the artist – it comes as no surprise that “secret history” that particular discipline in conspiraciology looking at history to divine in it a secret meaning or an underlying organisation, is so fond of art: from the arcadian sheperds to the Chartres cathedral, we are faced with signifiers whose original meaning has been lost but whose power lies in the multitude of interpretations it recieved, in a word, it's history.

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What Danatt seemed unwilling to admit is that when dealing with “fringe culture” be it in the form of conspiracy theory or pseudo-science (as discussed in a recent Margaret Wertheim's awesome article for New York Review of Books), we deal with a mass of information that are sometimes individually verifiable but whose agencement, whose structure, is fictional. Conspiracy is essentially a matter of connecting the dots.

HEXEN 2.0 : Tarot: Three of Pentacles: 

Electronic Social Engineering

Like those children games that reveal, as we trace the lines between the numbers, a figure or a character, when looking at history we are faced with a choice: we can either docilely follow the numbers to find the figure that we were meant to find, or we can refuse the given order of things and try to decrypt new forms, new patterns.

HEXEN 2.0 : Tarot: Four of Pentacles: Tim Berners Lee

This is a game (games seems a recurrent theme in Treister’s older work) – and it's fragmentary presentation encourage the visitor to participate himself in this exercise of world building, ushering the audience in the alternate consensus of the project, in order not only to trigger an emotional response towards the artwork, but also an intellectual response towards the content. 

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Treister insisted repeatedly during the conversation that Hexen 2.0 contains no elements of fiction - I have my reserves on this, but I guess one can blame the séance "vidéo" at the Science Museum on form rather than content, like the alchemical references or the format of the tarot : it is easy to believe her, anyone who has researched towards historical fiction for long enough ends up experiencing the eerie Belbo syndrome and finding that history, and reality itself, writes a plot better than one could ever come up with. 

Ernst Haeckel, detail from Phaeodaria, from Art Forms in Nature

As Umberto Eco depicted, there is a point where the new facts your researches provide seem to fit chillingly well with the pieces of the puzzle you have selected before and brings you in front of the choice between believing your own creation or denigrating it as pure fiction. So Treister decided to let her research roam free, obliterating the formally narrative aspects and the fiction it required, to leave only actual facts, presented in a modular fashion and leaving for the audience the job to build the missing narrative, possibly through their own involvement with the entities, movements or characters described, or at least with their many proxies in our daily lives. 

Hexen 2.0 - Part 1

The Hexen series is such a dense work – in terms of it’s concept and it’s content – that in order not to bore you or me to death, I will have to take radical decisions onto what deserves my attention and what does not.

Hexen 2.0: Cybernetic Séance

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In 2007 a first exhibition entitled Hexen 2039 introduced me to Rosalind Brodsky, the fictional alter ego of the artist Suzanne Treister, a delusional art teacher supposedly time travelling to research, in that first project,  sound based technology developped by the american military to enforce mind control. The work itself took the form of a collection of drawings, films and installations, describing in detail a conspiracy spanning over decades and covering with dazzling cohesion, military secrets, psychich phenomena, counter-culture mythology, pop cimematography and the occulture in it’s more historical expression.

Hexen 2039: U.S. Psychological Operations Equipment

The result was a body of visual work that acted as a mere anchor point for what the art-work really was about, that is a theory, an interpretation of accepted historical facts assembled together as to hint towards a secret, occulted order of things.

Hexen 2039 Diagram

This approach was asking some very interesting questions, first, in the way the visual (or more generally physical) act as a representation of the conceptual content of an art-work, but also crystallizing the nebula of questions anyone interested in conspiracy theory or historical fiction is bound to ask: what separates history from fiction?

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Hexen 2.0 in terms of media, takes a form relatively similar to it’s precursor, that is a series of graphic works, including diagrams, ink prints and tarot cards, as well as a film and, apparently nowhere to be found at the science museum, pencil renditions of the project’s rich bibliography.

   

Hexen 2.0: Macy Conference Attendees: Gematria

In it’s content, though, it is rather different: the mood, first of all, is a lot more serious – many facets of the 2039 installment were blown out of proportion, leaving both a near humorous after taste and a sense that the art works could be read as a form of psychotherapy addressing the relationship between for exemple paranoia and creativity. Here everything is a lot more credible, and the elements of pure fiction, if there are any, are much more difficult to identify.

Hexen 2.0: HISTORICAL DIAGRAMS: From Diogenes of Sinope to 

Anarcho-Primitivism and the Unabomber via Science-Fiction

Whereas in the first project Treister looked at delusion to provide the other-worldly in her work, here she obviously look at the liminal and the extreme, from primitivism to system theory. And as a matter of fact, science in it’s more speculative and theoretical form connects necessarily with ideology, granting ideas the aura and the power to pose as the boogeyman central to any conspiracy theory.

Hexen 2.0: Tarot: XIV Temperance: Arpanet

She then takes us on a roller-coaster of utopianism, neoluddism, psychedelics, secret governmental projects, system theory, emergence, the internet and all that virtuality has promised for the years to come. This is all very interesting, the filliation in her history of ideas is presented via the large scale diagrams, sort of Mutus Liber inspired spidergrams (a lot more interesting graphically than the first series), while her portrait gallery present the founding father of cybernetics , the secret chiefs of her theory, and the tarot itself bring a more in depth examination of the cloud of inter-related elements of her narrative.

Hexen 2.0: Tarot: Six of Wands: Hackers

But what really strikes a chord, the format aside, is that pretty much every fragment of her narrative echoes an interest of mine: Hexen 2039 went from Austin Osman Spare to brown noise and 2.0 starts with ternary computers to Zerzan. Although this unapologetic omnipresence of counter-culture first seems gratifying, with a bit of distance it seems to be asking what is our true relationship to fiction, history and that grey area that lay in between.

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The entirety of the artwork can be perceived on two different levels : one I would call fictional, where the artifacts are understood to be artworks, relating to each other and telling a story about people and their interactions, with all the symbolic meanings this entails, and one I would call meta-narrative, if you can forgive the pretentious jargonization. In this meta-narrative we take the art work not as a fiction but as a documentation of a real world conspiracy.

Hexen 2039: Graphite drawing - U.S. Army Civil Affairs and Psychological 

Operations Command (Airborne) Fact Sheetwith Gematria

In the first project Hexen 2039, the entirety of the artistic production could be interpreted as, obviously, an artwork, or as the documentation of a historical phenomenon, if the conspiracy described was to be taken seriously. This ambivalence seems to have largely disappeared from the second occurence, where Rosalind Brodsky (who provided the meta-narrative uniting the fictious and the real) is nowhere to be found. Also, the tarot itself seems to be a slightly indulgent form of narrative exposition as at the time (I am still to buy the book) it does not seems to tie in with the meta-narrative.

Hexen 2039

Hexen 2.0

This ambiguous position between fact and fiction made Hexen 2039 a truly immersive piece of work: further research from the visitor could seamlessly continue the artwork into the rich body of conspiracy theories it could be connected with, and definitely Hexen 2.0 begs to be approached in the same way, which is a fascinating feat in itself and can provide anyone with months of coherent narrative. Yet on my way to the Science Museum I was hoping that Treister would have come up with new ways to blur the frontier between her work and the real world – Surely I should be glad else I would have to start wrapping my scalp in tinfoil.