Nor the splendor of time - Antony Gormley, Model

"But what is it that I love in loving thee? Not physical beauty, nor the splendor of time, 

nor the radiance of the light -so pleasant to our eyes- nor the sweet melodies of the various 

kinds of songs, nor the fragrant smell of flowers and ointments and spices; not manna and honey, 

not the limbs embraced in physical love -it is not these I love when I love my God. 

Yet it is true that I love a certain kind of light and sound and fragrance 

and food and embrace in loving my God, who is the light and sound and fragrance 

and food and embracement of my inner man"

Saint Augustine, The Confessions, Book X, Chapter 6

The Antony Gormley "Model" exhibition at the White Cube gallery runs from the 28th of November to the 10th of February. Most of the opinions ascribed to the artist where expressed at his discussion with Tim Marlow on the 12th of December 2012. 

Theo Van Doesburg - Study for rhythm of a russian dance - 1918

Antony Gormley's career echoes masterfully many of the concerns I have so far displayed on this blog: his work address what has been described as a return to modernity, but a re-constructed modernity, largely freed from it's inbuilt contradictions, from it's ruthless violence and it's teenage angst, leaving only the poetics of reason and the mystique of abstraction. 

Gormley is not alone in this pursuit, but whether him or the others are genuinely moved by the crushing ideals of high modernism, or whether they are content to re-enact those glory days as an heroic (if futile) last stand against the post-modern wasteland, I cannot tell. In either case they have my sympathy. 

Antony Gormley - Transfuser - 2002

Gormley's sculpture addresses many of the "traditional" themes of monolithic modernity: the multitude, harmony, abstraction, or proportions, but generally through the conceptual lens of the human body, which seems to provide him with a permanent referential around which to build his rational aesthetics. 

His new show continues in this vein, exploring the body as a space we inhabit. 

The entire exhibition is an aggregation of rectangular cuboids, in different materials (from corten to polystyrene  via wood, cast metal and plastic) and in a variety of scale, from the toy soldier to the pavillon. 

We can identify three parts to the exhibition, three main scales of work: the smaller works are all to be found in one room, which seem essentially to document the conceptual and technical process that brought us the larger works. The process in question is essentially one of abstraction, where the human body, it's shapes and it's proportions, is gradually simplified into a combination of angular boxes, much reminiscent, in it's later stages,  of Malevitch' Architekton. 

Antony Gormley - Mark - 2012

The medium scale is one more or less consistent with actual human proportions: what at first appear like an abstract accumulation of blocks reveal, at closer inspection, human bodies, playfully disposed in natural, and not so natural positions, around the gallery space, like so many dancers frozen into intimate performances, but boxed, reduced to the space they occupy. 

The third scale, and judging from the talk given by the artist, the central work, is a rather gigantic construction of metal sheets which the visitor is first invited to circle, to study as a gigantic sculpture, before being invited, like Job, to enter in a Hobbesian Leviathan. 

Perambulating inside the controlled space proves to be as compelling an experience as promised by the artist: the complex interplay of surfaces, planes and light make for many surprising vistas and interactions, prompting intense experiences mixing claustrophobia, disorientation and exploration; Like a concrete presentation of St Theresa's Interior Castle we visit a space so stripped of signification that we can project our elusive, innermost realities onto it. 

Antony Gormley - Model - 2012

Space and architecture as a metaphor for inner life is itself an important modern concept (as described by Frances Yates)  and Gormley is fond of colliding this subjective, intimate construction of psychological architecture with the harsh, brutal(ist) materiality of the world he constructs - his rhetoric allies the pervasive abstraction of mystique and Platonism with the materiality sculpture as an exploration of space. The modern meet the modernist. But ultimately his work seems to address the power of the metaphor, organic and spatial. 

The exhibition is compelling on more than one ground: for it's stretching of the boundaries of the gallery experience, as one has come to expect from international artists, but also for his very refined take on modernity, whose latent mystic and spirituality will hopefully take part in shaping the supposed revival of modernism. 

Antony Gormley - Model - 2012

Yet this very mystique can also leave one wanting: If Le Corbusier's houses were machines to live in, what is the purpose of Gormley's? The new modernist paradigm seems keen to conciliate art for art sake with pure contemplation, and when Gormley characterizes his work as a tool, as "machine" one is tempted to say, he remains elusive as to its purpose: oceanic feelings, self-exploration, or inverted allegories of the cave all sound very much contemplative in essence. 

Contemplation is an activity essentially solitary, inward and subjective, even leaving little room for the contradictory maelstrom of opinions and ideals the modern culture cater to. The very elusiveness of the absolute the artist seems to invite us to pursue leaves a gaping void in both his work and his theory, which one can only wonder at. If modernism is to be revived in all it's claims of purity and high-mindedness, not only as a style or a facade, but as a genuine, heartfelt ideal, surely tolerance, accessibility and marketability will have to make room for an absolute, transcendent telos that will suffer no contradiction.

Oskar Schlemmer - Illustration for "Man and Art Figure" - in Theater of the Bauhaus - 1925

Haus-Rucker-Co. - The Epoch of Space

"We are living in the rococo of modernism today"

Peter Eisenmann

The good people at WORK Gallery in Kings Cross often host exhibitions presenting exciting contemporary artists involved in political and radical practices - but their latest exhibition, no less exciting for all interested in Utopias and counter-culture, is dedicated to the work of Austrian architectural collective Haus-Rucker-Co. Composed of Laurids and Manfred Ortner, Gunter Zamp Kelp and Klaus Pinter, they gained international attention between the late sixties and the early eighties, proposing daring interpretations of the urban landscape in a number of temporary installations ("Provisional Structures") in various cities and gallery space. They also produced a large amount of paper architecture - a field, you might have gathered, of particular interest to this blog. 

The exhibition runs until the first of September and sample a variety of projects spanning over their entire production, from furniture to full size buildings - all richly documented through a variety of pictures, sketches, collages and models: 

Organic shapes, synthetic materials, sensual futures, pea coats and mustaches: what Haus-Rucker-Co, has been known for on the blogosphere is well represented but are also treated to a unique insight in the theory and the concepts that sustained their projects. 

Haus-Rucker-Co. - Environement Transformers - 1968

The Space Age was not all Sputnik and The Jetsons: it also brought more theoritical investigation of space. Not, this time, as a liminal world where the grown man's impatient imagination could roam free, but the ambiguous environement where physicality meets cultures and practices - the space of Fontana's actions, of Foucault's geography and of Lefebvre's justice.

"The great obcession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history (...) The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space."

Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces, 1967

The epoch of the Space Age future was to be an epoch of space; Freed from the contingency of history, freed from the guilt and the responsabilities, the architect was at last allowed to experiment for experimentation's sake: "Its design is free from local politics and utilitarian pressure because provisional architecture is not burdened with the mortgage of having to sustain the next hundred years" says Laurids Ortner, one of the founding members of the collective.

And indeed, the idea of provisional structures, constructions that are designed and produce to last a limited period, addresses directly this primacy of space over time: whereas architecture until then, more openly than any other field of design, seemed to be concerned with history or it's rejection, here it may have found in ephemerality it's full avant-garde realization. 

On the contrary, interrogations about space become central, and of public space in particular. Spaces of interaction, of exchange, where social life potentially enters the realm of the experimental:

"Within urban areas 'naturally grown' provisional structures have already shaped the general appearance to a large degree: the 'every day' architecture of traffic lights, add-paintings, traffic signs, masts and wiring has long since overcome classical architecture."

Laurids Ortner 

Indeed a lot of the Austrians work is concerned with urban, common space, it's use and it's appropriation - certainly the most obviously political element in their practice. Many of their works, treading the thin line between public and private spheres, would address in Jurgen Habermas words, our relationship to the other, but also to the sphere of public authority.

The experiments of the group in soft structures, modular architecture and transparent surfaces are indicative enough of their expectations, whereas later works like Insel Hamburg, Schrage Ebene or Wellenweise hint at their oblique strategies, and interrogations concerning the inclusiveness and the delimination role of architecture.

"The construction of voluminous changing shapes from a moving malleable substance."

Manifesto Blanco, 1946

Haus-Rucker-Co. - Gelbes Herz - 1968

Space Age has pretty much disappeared, relegated to the backlands of quirky furniture and retro hype - every once in a while we see it resurfacing in a film or collection, recently in it's soviet flavour in particular (Kosmograd, Post-gravity Art, CCCP, etc.) 

Conceptions of the future have evolved a lot throughout history and often provide quite peculiar evocations of the zeitgeist: Futurism, we will see, was an obvious forerunner, and if it's fanatical devotion to mass media brings it closer to the Space Age populist strategy, it's brutal avant-gardism still leaves it miles away from Twiggy and Mary Quant's child-like optimism:

The 1960s Space Age was rooted not, as for the Italian Futurists, in that metaphysical experience of the mechanized war machine, but in an other type of machine: one pointed to the stars, in a collective effort to propulsing the human body beyond the sky, into this abstract and minimalism empyrean kingdom were life was so alien that functionalism itself could look exotic, reconciling in the process pop culture's demand for spectacular with high-modernism. 

The conquest of space certainly brought about the near mystique optimism in the potency of human thought, but in parallel the western world's economy was settling into a new paradigm, seeing the parallel rise of youth culture and leisure society: the complex interactions between these two concepts will determine large chunks of both the mainstream to come, and the vociferous Marxist counter-culture:

"Should a man wander through the city and see through the busy but aimless throngs, 

consuming themselves, he would be amazed" 

Robert Chasse, Hall of Mirrors, Council for the Liberation of Daily Life, 1967

A number of pieces of Haus-Rucker-Co. presented in the exhibition address questions of environmentalism (like "Grune Lunge" or "Natur Inszenierung") and the space occupied by nature in the city: the entire "Berg in der Stadt" proposal (1973-74) suggest the construction of large facades of fake mountainous surfaces, mounted on a metallic skeleton, simulating from one side a slice of raw, natural landscape, and displaying on the other the full artificiality of it's construction. 

Here there is a clear departure from the polished and industrialized aesthetics of the Space Age: in exposing the underlying structure, architecture is changed from a commodity to a process. William Kent, who is credited for inventing the English garden, created vast enclaves of tightly controlled nature, paradoxically mimicking the natural landscape as it can be found outside of gardens. Yet throughout his pastures one can find ruins, fake obviously, but as carefully aged and deconstructed as his garden were skillfully overgrown. The ruins, he said, were a pivotal element, as they were to be the sole indicator of the presence of man, stressing how much work and thought went in the design of those modern arcadias. Maybe it is under this light that one should see the structures proposed by Haus-Rucker-Co. : as many displays of artifical nature, be it an oasis or a mountain, to remind the city-dweller of the skills and perfection of nature that went into the creation of our cities. 

Haus-Rucker-Co. - Palmtree Island, Downtown Megastructure & Environement Transformers - 1971

"provisional architecture is agressive. It breaks up burnt-in habits of seeing." 

Laurids Ortner

Many of their projects address classical tropes of the modernist to post-modernist turning point:  the hidden is made apparent, the structure become external and the artifice, the technicality becomes part of the overall aesthetics. 

There is little doubt that their work has had a decisive influence on further architecture, not on only their fellow paper architects (AntFarm, Archigram...) but also on the deconstructivist "movement" for example: the own "Uberbauung" project of hanging gardens on the roofs of Vienna partly prefigured Coop Himmelb(l)au's iconic Falkestrasse rooftop structure. 

"As if we who are accumulators and generators of movement, with all our added mechanical limbs, with all the noise and speed of our life, could live in the streets built for the needs of men four, five or six centuries ago."
Antonio Sant'Ellia, The Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, 1917

Just like googie, borax and streamline moderne, or the Italian Futurists before any of them, it seems that the eference to the future, an essentially imagined space, place them at the edge of modernity: planning and optimism, central to modernist urbanism and superstructures, retain it's pragmatic credentials as long as projection in the future is presented as idealism - when the artist is perceived to take a step into fiction or speculation, he suddenly becomes guilty of arbitrary indulgence. 

 

"Technological achievements of our time are way ahead of our physical and intellectual development. We are human beings of the eighteenth century and have to live in an environment of the twentieth and twenty-first century." 

Laurids Ortner

 

Haus-Rucker-Co. - Mind Expanders - 1967

 

 

Not withstanding their shared fascination for the machine, one key difference between the Space Age aesthetics and Italian Futurism is their respective relationship to the body: the fifty years that separate the two movements left their mark on the new conception of the future. Whereas Marinetti was vehemently calling for the renunciation of the physical, for a transformation of the body into a machine, the 60' and Haus-Rucker-Co. in particular, on the other hand, work towards a transformation of the machine into a body. 

Of course organic shapes (Gaudi, Hundertwasser, their contemporary Werner Panton) and concepts (Kisho Kurokawa) had been in use long before: at the beginning of the XXth century, the rise of concrete had meant as much the liberation from straight lines and right angles as it had heralded the modernist rationalization. Similarly the speedy development of plastic and it's easy shaping, by way of injection or void pump, allowed further transgression of the angular and asexual models of yesteryear.

 

 

"The right angle as a principle of all rigid structures oculd be overcome without formal arbitrariness, simply through the characteristics of new materials. What possibilities! Changing a society by the fact it now finds itself in a softly flowing environement: gliding into a different way of thinking on gentle wings." 

Laurids Ortner

 

 

Gelbes Herz, an blow-up structure designed for two, inflate and deflate rhythmically, imitating maybe the respiration of a living body, coming, we are told, to press it's soft synthetic interior onto the visitors at each pulsation. 

The evocative experience tell probably as much about our longings as to those of it's inventors - Whether the throbbing alcove seems like a squeaky sexual playground, like a maternal safe-space or like an isolation tank for oceanic consciousness, it is the tension between those options, placing the work miles away from the hyper-virile and brutal sexuality invoked by the Futurists and Marinetti in particular, that situate it in an ambiguous and therefore perverse sexuality. 

 

 

"Perverse as well as impersonal" 

Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture

 

 

Many of the group's structures (Balloon for Two, Oase no7, Gelbes Herz...) are designed to offer a sense of intimacy inside the public space: the plastic membrane isolate the visitor from the world around them, participating one can imagine, in re-appropriating the public sphere - but paradoxically, all those modules, all the spaces seemingly designed to restore human interactions in their perfected, edenic sense, are formed of mostly transparent membranes. 

This might hold one of the paradoxes of Haus-Rucker-Co. and one that spreads over the sixties and their uneasy relationship to political radicalism and utopia: their reforming ideals are unabashedly a form of spectacle. Militants are media-conscious, spirituality is communal, sexual liberation brings about commodification.

Of course Haus-Rucker-Co. is not Amon Duul II - but in crystallizing the typical tension of the age between radicalism and commodification (generally justified as a strategy of efficiency), they seem to exemplify what Eisenmann's catchy saying, "The Rococo of Modernism", always brings to my mind: a society, to use Situationist terminology, where détournement and récupération have become so deeply embedded into each other that deciding whether radicalism uses spectacle or spectacle uses radicalism is virtually impossible. 

 
 

Haus-Rucker-Co. - Cover and Balloon for Two

 
 

"Toys for adults simulating contact, contact between two people, a man and a woman, 

who experience their environement and themselves in a completely new way." 

Haus-Rucker-Co. on Vanilla Future, 1969

 
 

The very impermanence of the structures not only question their role in the urban context but also grant them a specific status: as a construct that can be removed and transported, we tend to identify the provisional structure with a tool - but in the mean time, it's artistic ambition leave it largely deprived from a practical use. The useless tool is then left with only two option: too tactile and eager for an audience participation to be a work of art, the structure aims at delivering an experience rather than a message: it's a toy, a Froebel's gift for the epoch of space. 

 
 

"Play is (...) imitation of the total human life, of the inner, secret, natural life in man and in all things. It produces, therefore, joy, freedom, satisfaction, repose within and without, peace with the world. The springs of all good rest within it and go out from it." 

Friedrich Froebel, Inventing Kindergarten

 

 

The "goals" of the Haus-Rucker-Co. structure, seems in good part to have relied on the characteristic terminology of the times: development of "psychological capacity", "exploration of the inner world" and "concentrated experience" are ludicrous psychobabble. They share this ludicrous psychobabble with an other contemporary culture of keen experimentators, psychedelics. 

The goals and the medium of the "environement transformers" and, considering it was also producing sound and light effects from the inside of it's dome, the "mind expander", are as reminiscent of Pucci's 65 fligh attendants as of the mind machines of the seventies and their low-fi hallucinogenic virtual reality. but unlike those, the construction of a space isolated from the quotidian, such as Nicolas Schoffer's Cybernetic City, or the some of Warhol's more ambitious Happenings aimed at the immersion of the audience as a group. 

What the sixties brought to this age-old dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk is a radical shift of focus from the demiurgic artist to the audience: the relationships within it, and their relationship with both the world inside and outside of the artwork. Quite characteristically the "Mind Expanders" are designed for two seaters, just like the Happenings or the Cybernetic City were intended as spaces of exchange - not only between the artist and the audience but within the audience itself, becoming what Habermas coined Offentlichkeit. 

When the designer aim at creating or re-organizing the social interactions of it's audience he becomes irremediably political. The space of the piece becomes a temporary autonomous zone, and the artwork becomes a utopia. 

"In strongly opposing the world of play to that of reality, and in stressing that play is essentially a side activity, the interference is drawn that any contamination by ordinary life runs the risk of corrupting and destroying its very nature." 

Roger Caillois, Men, Play and Games

If, as Caillois argues, reality is likely to corrupt the world of the game, then the game itself might be, in return, able to corrupt the game of life: 

The experience of the game, and it's collective experience even more, constitutes the essence of the situationist alternative life experience. A self contained world, with it's own rules and it's own goals (if any) - both a prophetic vision of what the future could be, and an experiment on how to build it. 

"Everything that was lived has moved away into representation." 

Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle

Not having had the chance to try out any of the mind expanding "machinery", I am allowed to remain skeptical as to the actual mind expansion this would provide: if one was particularly eager to link back Haus-Rucker-Co. to situationist ideas, one could see in the presentation of normal quotidian experiences, though the absent lense of the mind expanders and environement transformers, as a form of détournement, or even maybe as over-identification with the society of spectacle it adresses: within the particular frame provided by the helmets or the dome, that provide little if any effectual transformation to the sight of the eyes, the capitalist world is framed as what it is, a spectacle. 

"Not houses finely roofed or the stones of walls well build, nay nor canals and dockyards make the city, but men able to use their opportunity." 

Alcaeus, quoted by Donal Kagan

Many of the works of Haus-Rucker-Co. like a number of their contemporaries, attempt to re-asses our relationship to space and it's purpose: a space abstracted from history and positioned in what must have seemed at the time like a timeless future. The continuous emphasis on impermanence they saw as a key to experimentation, an unstable state where architecture is freed from it's constraints of firmness, commodity and delight. Freed from the contingencies of purpose and durability they were allowed, more than functionalist architecture and urbanism could ever dream, to re-write human relationships between themselves, but also of course, human relationship with their environment. 

"Architecture is a theatre stage setting where the leading actors are the people, and to dramatically direct the dialogue between these people and space is the technique of designing." 

Kisho Kurokawa

It seems that the timely pop aesthetics that presided over many of Haus-Rucker-Co designs emphasizes, consciously or not, the playful and inconspicuous aspects of their work - "relaxation" and "changes in consciousness", for all their savoury meaninglessness, hint at a growing sentiment in the sixties: the prevalence of experience over ownership - happiness no longer a situation it is a state of mind.

Like all narratives that attempted, throughout the twentieth century to bridge the gap between style and politics, to rationalize the utopia into a historical or post-historical situation, the Space Age was bound to end up stripped off from it's militant substance and relegated to the quirky and the inconsequent. But in the case of Haus-Rucker-Co. it seems that the collective moved away from away from the kitsch early enough and stuck instead to it's Utopian ideals. 

"The architecture of pleasure lies where concept and experience of space abruptly coincide." 

Bernard Tschumi, The Pleasure of Architecture

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.

...

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.

...

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. 

View Larger Map

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. 

...

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.