Disseminar

A: Perhaps the first thing that should be said about the work in question is that it displays its own existence as content, and only exists through this content. It questions itself, asking even how it can ask such a question, and, in turn, uses this enquiry as the base material of the work. Without the one, there’s no other, nothing to ask, nothing to ask about. The piece is thus hermetically sealed, engaged in a conversation that is reciprocal and irresoluble, spoken in its own private tongue. And closed off to external critique.
C: What are we doing talking about it then?
B: It’s comparable to a non-representational painting, which represents itself only as a painting, visibly demonstrating the transparency of the medium. Such a work is ‘about’ the purification of the object, the subtraction of extraneous noise and information, painting boiled down to its essence. And yet, this process, which in modern art history is seen as a trajectory towards complete abstraction, is ultimately a surrender to the phenomenal, a confession that there is only a painted canvas. The question becomes then; what can be said about the incommunicable? As it turns out, plenty. The reduction of painting to its purest form, either as a shape within the picture or as the picture itself, is a statement against the image, a position informed by Platonic idealism, Kant, Greenberg, Van Doesburg, Albers. This is the inherent contradiction of the ‘pure’ work; that it is dependent on context and language. This kind of thing-in-itself seeks to exist in a vacuum, as an eternal, untouchable end and ideal of painting. However, from this moment, our contemporary vantage point, it is possible to look back at the high end of modernity, and see instead the earliest signs of the next stage, where the artwork acts as both the culmination of modern abstraction and as a precursor to post-modernity’s fascination with surface. It is a shift from the impenetrability of the concrete object to the shallowness of the open work. At the same time, this formal shift is accompanied by a conceptual one. There is, on the one hand, the absolute yet indecipherable truth of the former, the noumenon, in Kantian terminology, which transcends thought and experience, and on the other, a fragmentary and incoherent constellation of discursive sites, possibilities and hypotheses, unable to establish a dominant position.
C: Of course, this isn’t a painting. But you’ve opened up the idea of concreteness as a key quality of the work, so we can start from there. It’s probably also a good idea to recognise that there is a distinction between this quality as a defining characteristic of high modernism, and self-referential work that is more dialectical, able to accommodate other voices even as the piece continues to talk about itself. It’s the difference between showing and telling. To go back to the example of painting, Rene Magritte’s image of an image of a pipe comments upon its own status as representation without resorting to pure abstraction and deliberate obfuscation. The same with Mark Tansey’s works. But we’re not engaged in painting at this moment, but rather looking at the conditions of our own dialogue, a dialogue that is in a common language, that interrogates itself with clarity.
A: Except that it doesn’t. The interpretation of language is dependent on language, it cannot go outside the text, as Derrida would have it. It might be possible to come up with any number of interpretations of Magritte’s or Tansey’s paintings, but these readings will still adhere to the conditions of theory. They are necessarily subjective and incomplete. To speak authoritatively is to speak objectively or from outside the subject of enquiry, both of which are impossible propositions, even for the artist. So really we haven’t moved from one stage to another at all. The contemplation of the absolute, concrete piece of work requires a certain amount of faith, a belief that the inexpressible ideal is present yet unutterable. The monochrome, the lump of raw clay, the photograph of the photograph; these objects are airtight, self-sufficient, and impervious to criticism. The viewer looks at something that is meant only to be looked at, that is only the medium itself, and that is essentially anti-illusionary. What you see is what you see, in other words. However, the dialectical, self-referential work, which allows for commentary and critique, is still dictated by its medium, in this case, language. This metaphysical impasse ensures that our critique can only ever be subjective, a relative position, and that any conclusion we might come to is necessarily hypothetical. It remains in a state of ‘textual play’, an aesthetic of suggestions and proposals, ideas and plans. Such a work is neither true nor false; this division no longer exists.
C: Doesn’t that also apply to your own explanation?
A: Of course. Again, we depend on faith in a system which doesn’t listen to its own advice. If there is such a thing as objectivity, it can mean only the system of relativism itself, which absorbs subversive texts as evidence of pluralism, without letting such arguments alter its fundamental structure. In this way, it undermines critique through inclusion, assimilating it as the base of a disparate, porous and aesthetic system. The relationship of the subjective argument to the overall organization of these arguments resembles that of signified to signifier, although I prefer Fredric Jameson’s analogy of the sound of the dog’s bark to the dog- the dog isn’t named after the bark. The system and its theoretical production are not subject to the same laws.
C: So the system, like you in this discussion, has covered itself. We can go on talking, but only to hear the sound of our own voices. There is no possibility of disproving your statement, because the medium of discourse is already compromised. It’s like an inversion of that familiar argument of the gallery non-visitor: “I don’t know what I like, but I know about art.” The viewer is able to comment upon the work, interpret it, yet any value judgement he makes is offset by the existence of any number of other, equally relevant, subjective opinions.
B: Also, the system evolves. It isn’t static but something that is affected and determined by its production. There’s a tendency to treat this quite heavily reified dialectical system as if it were independent of the information and content which wrote and shaped it, and which continues to shape it. Really, all we have here is an accumulation of text, complementing and/or contradicting each other, without establishing any of the old dominant hierarchies. Or at least that’s the idea. But again, in some sort of hangover of modernism, we believe that this is structured and stabilised, maintained in an invisible, unknowable arrangement that we can only define negatively. So, apparently it exists, but cannot be proved, cannot be taken apart. Or maybe it doesn’t exist, but is merely the ‘theoretical production’ of some of the loudest participants. We’re led to believe that the system is inclusive and is therefore able to integrate subversion as part of its egalitarian nature, and, in the same breath, that the theory that constitutes and reinforces this chimera is beyond reproach. Thus, it is the absolute truth that everything that makes up its composition is untrue, because the component parts are subjective, and therefore, only partially true. It contradicts itself.
C: It’s impossible to delineate an infinite range of viewpoints, without favouring one or another. And that takes me back to my previous point, that the discourse is compromised by a levelling of value in order to sustain an artificial and unnatural equilibrium. We end up with a kind of pure relativism, which I don’t think was the original intention. It’s a constant unsettling of the foundations, as if truth itself was the enemy, instead of a series of ideologies which didn’t quite work out. Yet in spite of this supposed break from modernism, the whole enterprise has this post-Marxist tinge, with its continual revolutions, dismantled hierarchies, and supposed equality of viewpoints, all firmly located in theory, without the repercussions of enforcing it in practice. It’s like a fantasy version of how things could have been, and a tacit admission that the dream is over. But this isn’t the point. Rather, like their failed utopian vision of society, this virtual, theoretical system cannot resist human nature. There will always be a relentless need for one stance to dominate others, to exercise its ‘will to power’, so to speak. And despite its pluralist structure, or anti-structure if that’s how we’re supposed to think of it, some voices are spoken over and drowned out in the cacophony, while others are heard clearly. This premise of Jameson’s, with his differentiation between the system and the product, the dog and the bark, can easily be seen as just one of those audible, insistent arguments, shouting loudly that ‘all opinions are equal’. It’s an idea which is good in theory, only as long as it stays in theory. And this is the system itself; a controlled environment, a play-room. That might not be a bad thing. It can encourage new ideas and opinions, areas of difference which were previously overlooked or disregarded. Also, we might have been less hasty in embracing the grand, and largely deeply flawed, ideologies of modernism if these ideas had received a period of critical examination. But, ultimately, when are we able to apply these new developments, if they are to be merely subjective, speculative theories?
B: Maybe we’re looking at it the wrong way, as either/or. Isn’t it possible to apply an idea critically, without subscribing to it wholeheartedly? Perhaps this ‘post-Marxist’ tinge is merely an acknowledgement of past mistakes, an attempt to implement the things that worked and dispose of those that didn’t. It seems that, after modernism, we feel we must necessarily go to extremes and endings, even to ‘pure’ relativism, when relativism itself depends on context and conditions, on the very impurities of theory. I wonder if, on some level, we want to look for narratives, universals and conspiracies, as a way of objectifying the disparate and the subjective. This is the will to power as much as the critic who writes the system. The critique of the pluralist system suggests a distrust of the uncertain, and a fear of aporia, the point of indecision where evidence both proves and disproves truth. It jars with the image of oneself as unified, as a consistent identity.
A: So we’ve reached another aspect of the piece in question; that of schizophrenia, and the subject as a variety of perspectives. Consequently, my reading of a work does not remain static but is affected by the subtle changes and modifications of this image of my self. Am I able to hold two opposing viewpoints at the same time? Perhaps, but only with the recognition that neither of these attains the conditions of truth, and that they are not held with any assurance but may still be tentative steps towards a considered, synthesised decision.
B: There’s a connection with the loss of the artist’s authorial pre-eminence here too. It’s as if the subject, in being granted the decision to dictate what is and isn’t art, has usurped the role of the artist. They can play with the work, change their minds, adapt and customize its meaning. Every aspect of society is now open to interpretation, as an anthropological sign or a type of readymade, without actually ‘making’ the work. The old dichotomies of artist and viewer, activity and passivity, and even art and interpretation seem to have dissolved into a haze. This puts the artist, understood in the conventional sense as a painter or writer, in the position of the viewer or reader, interpreting their own work. The image or text is merely a cipher for meaning, and their own interpretation no longer enjoys the privilege of artistic intention or authenticity. Instead of consolidating the author in an act of pure expression of the ‘self’ or the ‘soul’ or some other vague and untenable concept of identity, the text destabilises the unity of the maker. He is no longer able to recognize himself in his characters, or the generic codes and tropes of his work, which, after all, may represent some unknown reader far better than they portray their writer. This is what it means to break down objectivity – the alienation of the artist from his own production.
C: Are you serious? Hasn’t this idea of the ‘death of the author’ died out itself yet? I’d say that it’s petrified into the opposite of what it put forth, and turned into a doctrine based around Roland Barthes himself, even if he refuses to call himself an author.
B: And I’d take the other view, that it’s more relevant than ever. Certainly, with the barrage of image and information-based media through the expansion of television and the internet, it seems like there is less time to verify and identify fact from fiction. As such, everything is tainted with the suspicion of partiality. In addition, ideas are freely stolen and regurgitated, texts plagiarized, references unacknowledged, concepts distorted, and all usually without any consequence. Who can trace a thought back to its absolute origin? It’s like that saying about the history of philosophy being a series of footnotes to Plato, or something to that effect, and I suppose in this context it doesn’t matter what the exact quote or who the author is. Ultimately, we cannot place ideas or works; they are anonymous and adaptable, pieced together from fragments and in constant flux. They are disseminated in an instant, and usually anonymously, whether that’s from a domain name in the middle of nowhere or as a second-hand opinion in an argument. And, staying with this concept of the internet as a technological model of language and communication itself, the individual site is not a closed, concrete statement, but is linked to other pages, other spaces.
C: What you’re really talking about here is a variation on the autonomous author, an idea which probably never existed in the first place. Nevertheless, the art-object is still representative of its maker, even if the artist no longer conceives of himself as the absolute point of creation, a notion which died out with action painting and automatic writing and now seems like a momentary historical trend. As it is, the work is made up of various strands of influence, images cut out of mass-media and art history, lines of text which have solidified into cliché and pastiche. But I don’t think this implies cynicism or ironic detachment on the part of the author, even if there is an awareness, and wariness, about modernism’s cult of the individual genius. The return to past movements, and the picking up of old techniques and strategies by contemporary artists, is just as likely to represent their disdain for the avant-garde trajectory, which left behind a number of unfinished projects in the rush towards purification. That straight line, marked out retrospectively by Clement Greenberg, treats art as if it was science, as a teleological advance in incremental stages.
A: Or it’s set out from the other end of modernism, just as Marinetti and the futurists expected. But that’s not the point. The very act of returning and re-contextualising these elements is itself a gesture dredged up from the historical moment of the situationists, who détourned images from popular culture, comic books, cinema and visual art and juxtaposed them with their own slogans and manifestoes. So there is something of an infinite loop, a conundrum of reference and influence, where the contemporary artist who plunders the detritus and remains of history is, perhaps unknowingly, re-working the techniques of others who had previously done the same. Even the rejection of novelty has been tried before, and because of this, there is some sincerity about the appropriation of extant materials. It isn’t original, or progressive, and definitely not revolutionary. It is the authentic expression of an existence defined by the consumption of information, digested and shat out as ‘new’ product. The innate character, the essence, of the individual is revealed as a series of quotations and preferences, a temporary collection of sources, sound-bites, rumours, opinions. Yet instead of accumulating into a suitably complex and sophisticated knowledge, these fleeting impressions dissipate and give way to others, without ever adding to the experience of the recipient. They are, in accordance with the schizophrenic aspect of the work, like voices in the head, or the series of personas which exist at the same time without being aware of one another.
B: Well, maybe dimly aware…
A: The text or image that is created by this subject is therefore the reconstitution of these impulses and a representation of the self only insofar as it collates a variety of transient passages into a loose affiliation, a sudden cohesion and, all too quickly, a collapse and re-alignment. That brief flicker of stability is too fragile to be preserved in paint or script; it has already changed and taken on fresh, alternate meanings, from inception to actualisation and eventual distribution. An artist who sees his work as an automatic gesture, a slash of paint across the tabula rasa of the bare canvas, doesn’t realize that that instant was preconceived, built up out of history and knowledge, continuing on after the paint has dried.
C: What are we talking about here? We seem to be slipping back and forth between the visual artwork and the text, the static and the temporal.
A: That’s what the piece is, though. A meaning is written for an image, and revised over time. The viewer fixes his understanding of the work, delves into it more thoroughly after the initial impression recedes, and erases that first reading even as he develops it.
C: That’s not what I mean. You’re approaching everything from the position of the spectator, as if the book and the image are the same, and are understood the same. But what is this? Lecture, performance, conceptual artwork, debate; this has nothing to do with the painted canvas, or systems of communication. This discussion is not an analogy for a larger discursive environment. It has limitations in its topic and number of participants, a set path to follow, although one that is being stretched with every digression. Nevertheless, it sticks to theory, and a fairly orthodox one at that. So this conversation is mapped out already, but ultimately goes nowhere, as was established in the opening sentences. It’s not enough to say that it’s down to the viewer to tell us what he thinks is going on. Your artist is the same as your viewer, right? So you tell me what this work means.
B: I think there’s a point there. Aren’t we supposed to be determining the basic constituents of this piece, not language or art in general? After all, this conversation can be placed in a historical context which includes the performative art of James Lee Byars or Tino Sehgal, Brechtian theatre, concrete poetry, Robert Morris’s ‘Box with the Sound of it’s own Making’, structural filmmaking, the vortograph and the rayograph, ‘Tristram Shandy’; an entire history built around the investigation of the work through the work itself. And this version of events necessarily overlaps with another history, another series of works, which concern themselves with the position of the artist, objectivity, authenticity, and the lack or loss of these qualities. Or another sequence, of various works which interpret history, or which exist only momentarily, or are visibly and intentionally artificial. A piece can be dissected through its similarity to others, even if some of these related works might seem at odds with each other. It doesn’t have to all neatly fit together, to form a seamless, perfect argument. These discrepancies between artistic or theoretical positions offer a place to contribute and develop the more established, albeit incomplete, discourses. Things need to stay open-ended. I’m thinking, for example, of Theodor Adorno’s ‘Minima Moralia’, where the text is broken into sections or topics which do not necessarily build towards a finished argument, but veer off in tangents and departures. The author makes a point of acknowledging this, that it isn’t meant to be read as a complete, unified work, but as a series of reflections or even as attacks from different directions. For Adorno, what he calls the “disconnected and non-binding character of the form, the renunciation of explicit theoretical cohesion” is an expression of both subjective experience and the inevitable failure of subjectivity as a system. There is a quote from him later in the same book; “the denial of objective truth by recourse to the subject implies the negation of the latter: no measure remains for the measure of all things.” And, of course, Adorno, having already recognised in the logic of the Enlightenment the eventuality of fascism and genocide, would’ve been aware just how far a philosophical totality can translate into actual totalitarianism. So there is a real, political basis behind this fragmentation that insists on instability, yet is nevertheless weakened as a system by this insistence. The only alternative to a series of alternatives would be the definitive, singular history, driven by progress towards the eradication of difference, in thought and reality.
C: Except that this, this seminar doesn’t represent difference in any way. It’s merely a trick of ventriloquism, or do you usually carry prepared notes on Adorno? Our discussion has only the appearance of spontaneity and free thought, but really this has all been written out, even this interruption.
B: Original, spontaneous thought is exactly what we’re against here. The idea that because an argument is presented through dialogue or casual conversation it is somehow truer than the premeditated, scripted monologue is questionable. It’s like saying that the straight talking of the down-to-earth politician or the reportage of the journalist is more authentic, more honest, because it is couched in a particular style. As if these manners of speech cannot be simply picked up and tried on to suit the task at hand, and discarded just like any other disguise. I don’t think this seminar is any guiltier than any other lecture or essay. It does follow a certain, artificial format, but at the very least acknowledges its faults by incorporating disagreement into its structure. Better these imperfections than to feign infallibility, hiding behind a one-way argument which isn’t able to admit its own shortcomings or allow any external dissent.
C: It’s a get-out clause, though, isn’t it? Like Adorno, defiantly rejecting cohesion and objectivity, and distrusting subjectivity. It’s like he’s found the one theoretical perspective which cannot be disproved, and only because he’s already gotten there first. And that’s this talk, too. It’s the simulation of open debate, a forum which allows for intrusions and segues, but which is controlled irregardless.A: If it is controlled, it’s only because there’s still confusion over what a theory of aesthetics is meant to achieve. Is it anything other than a bourgeois preoccupation, an entrancement with the flickering shadows of an absent reality? We are only arguing over speculation and representation, or, at least, we might be arguing, we appear to be arguing. This is our current position; unable to make our minds up between the instability of simultaneous, subjective locations and the simplicity of the objective grand narrative, everything becomes tainted with doubt. So the work attempts to figure itself out, through the tactic of delegating its various lines of thought to three characters, three mouthpieces. It’s a device, like the unreliable narrator, or the repetition of events which approach the same subject from different angles.
C: So if this is actually meant to be some kind of artwork or performance, then why is it necessary for it to relentlessly question itself? Isn’t it generally better for a work to retain some ambiguity, to pose questions rather than attempt to answer them? We dismiss modernity as a misjudgement, a forced effort to narrow down difference into a singular objectivity, in politics and art, yet all we are left with is the replication of its literary and formalist tricks, and a resigned fascination with an image, having already given up on finding any significance. It’s nothing more than a series of experiments where we already know the answer. This work tries to justify its own existence through rigorous self-examination, but, take away that perpetual search for an underlying motive, and the whole thing crumbles into nothingness. There is nothing to be found in this conversation other than our reason for having it. Besides that, we’re just filling time.
B: A purely formal art, without the promise of transcendence or the discovery of truth, will always be just that. This dialogue fulfils those conditions of a non-progressive, anti-hierarchical artwork, in that it doesn’t seek to attain completion. It might come to an arbitrary stop, abandoned in mid-stream, but can always be picked up again with a new set of characters and new directions. I don’t even know if it would be possible to return to the notion of an ideal truth, certainly not with a clear conscience. Even if, and this is already happening, there is an attempt to reduce pluralism into a simplistic Manichaean worldview, like a throwback to the good old days of capitalism versus communism, it’s impossible to erase difference. The lines of communication have changed, been rewired, both conceptually and technologically, so that a dissident point of view is able to occupy a space outside of the mainstream. In fact, the mainstream itself has become so decentralised that even the prevailing, dominant perspective is easily seen to be subjective at heart, manipulated for the sake of its proponents. So there is a certain sophistication which has come with the expansion of the discursive field, where previously marginalised positions have gained a new visibility and are able to engage with and participate in the system. What they can accomplish by this remains to be seen.
A: Nothing, because they’ve already spread themselves too thin. Awareness of power doesn’t necessarily equip the subject with the means to challenge it. Even in our vaunted system of open communication and debate, there is a tendency to regard antagonistic viewpoints as mere conspiracy theories. The only solution seems to be a complete withdrawal from the argument.
C: And yet you keep talking.
A: I’m just suggesting it as an idea. I don’t have to believe in any of this. We’re engaged in a round of speculation, without any real, concrete ramifications, or any of this supposed connection to the system of discourse. We are the product, remember? That’s why this discussion, in all its transparent artifice, is an accurate portrayal of contemporary art discourse. The dispersal of objective truth into subjective components negates any form of general compromise. At best, we see small, isolated groups of critics agreeing a temporary cease-fire in their interpretations, before disturbing this peace with a new development or angle. The system is maintained through the separation and specialization of these unstable critical positions, who’ve accepted impotence and inaction over obliteration. Either live peacefully within the system or be destroyed by the system. That’s not to say that this decision has been forced upon them, on us, I should say, but rather that it’s been willingly agreed to and encouraged. We’re the ‘young conservatives’, as Habermas has it, consciously relegating culture to its own niche, segregated from society and economy except so far as the system permits. The artist is allowed his little gesture, his micro-utopian interventions, but always within the context of relativism, where such events are normalized and made harmless.
B: Clearly, this conversation doesn’t fall in with that kind of work - we’re closer to a kind of theatrical performance here - but that attitude of dragging everything else down brings me back to Adorno and his view that the philosopher’s role isn’t to win the argument but to lose in such a way that his adversary discredits his own thesis. I realize that your position is one of post-modernity having sublimated the most dangerous instincts of the avant-garde, but this was an end that was present in the beginnings of modernism, in the futurist credo that they too would be forgotten and replaced, supplanted by other movements. The modern urge to resist stabilization, to push history forward, has paradoxically ended up on the side of tradition, looking backward from the contemporary moment. It’s been absorbed into the present, so that this past is always a re-contextualised version of the actual period, more of a given vision of the pre-post-modern. Is this anything other than an idealized past where the future could still innocently be looked forward to, a perpetual continuum of progression without an end in sight?
C: Isn’t this seminar just an exercise in denial, then? Isn’t that why it’s “closed off to external critique”, as was stated at the outset, and why our arguments are no more than a formal device and an illusion of free discourse? This work, this concrete discussion, isn’t a display of plurality, but a reproduction of it, a singular, sterile image of a conversation. And that includes this apparent deviation from the script, which only looks like an attempt to inject some unpredictability into the debate. Even that’s just a pose. Rather than allowing the space for irregularity and actual subjective interjection, this aesthetic object approximates these properties within itself, within the complete, predetermined nature of the modern work.
A: As you point out, I made this all clear from the beginning. Just because you’ve taken the long way around to come back to this point, it doesn’t mean that this discussion hasn’t been honest in its intentions. Even though the system of relativism claims to have moved on from modernity and its attendant notions of objective truth and innate aesthetic value, in reality there is only the dispersal of that truth. The whole has extended its reach to incorporate any trace of difference. It has made theory into aesthetics, a subjective opinion amongst a theoretically infinite number of contrary and complementary, yet always equivalent, opinions. Where’s the proof either for or against the system? It’s already part of it as a component of the very structure it seeks to analyse, and which, because of its subjectivity, it cannot grasp. The criticism of the object is what constitutes the form of the object. And, as such, the notion of the concrete, the self-enclosed, and the autonomous work permeates the post-modern condition, which is essentially just a development of the modern. In the same way that the anomalies of the avant-garde were edited and re-contextualised to fit the narrow constraints of Greenberg’s definition of modernism, the contemporary system takes in and ‘post-modernizes’ everything which might remain outside of its structure, irrespective of chronology or intent. It has expanded its capacity, no longer discarding that which doesn’t fit, but adjusting its own parameters to include the incongruous, the hostile and the negative.
C: So I guess there’s no point in taking any questions, then.
B: No. No questions.

A New Script for Guy Debord's Critique of Separation, 1961

This text uses the script from the Rebel Press edition of Society of the Spectacle and Other Films by Guy Debord. The notes on the visual content, sub-titles and musical accompaniment remain the same, with a new commentary replacing the original written voiceover. This work is to be distributed by e-mail to participants in Conflux 2006, New York, September 2006.


“We don’t know what to say. Words form themselves into sequences and
Tracking shot over a group of people on a café terrace. The camera, hand-held as if in a news report, moves toward Debord
gestures recognize each other. Outside us. Of course some methods are
who is talking to a very young brunette.
mastered, some results verified. It’s often pleasant. But so many things we
General view of the two of them walking off together.
have wanted have not been attained; or only partially and not like we
Another girl, blonde.
thought. What communication have we desired, or experienced, or only
Cartoon strip: Blonde-haired girl looking exhausted. Caption: “But it
simulated? What true project has been lost?”
had failed, the jeep was too deeply bogged down in the liquid mud of the swamp…”

This statement opens Guy Debord’s film, 'Critique of Separation'. At the
360 degree panorama shot from the Saint-Merri plateau.
Sub-title: Halfway on the path of life I found myself again
(Couperin: March of the Champagne Regiment)
same time a space opens between text and image, sound, sub-title, where
in a dark forest where the right the right way had been lost.
these questions, ostensibly about the breakdown of a relationship,
(End of the March)
suggest the end of meaning itself. One picture slides into another, and
Cartoon strip: A diver thinks: “Without the lifeline and without air
I won’t last long. If only I could free myself from these weights…”
alters the interpretation of the other, and the original commentary takes
High angle shot in a bar. A couple enter, shut the door, and advance.
an abrupt turn. Only a few lines later, Debord insists on the need to
dissolve the film’s subject matter, to change its meaning. The image floats
there, open to a range of subjective, even contradictory, readings, detached
from the original narrative. In the variability of possible responses, there is
A still shot taken from a film: A US Marine radio operator. Behind
no clear-cut answer, only a series of equivalent guesses. The only honest
him stands an officer and the heroine.
Sub-title: Do you read me? Do you read me? Come in,
come in…
explanation is the one offered at the beginning of the film:
…Over and out:
“We don’t know what to say.”


This time and place is already lost. The moment the image is taken, it
View over Place de la Concorde from a helicopter.
disengages from that context, is ready to be taken up, re-written, re-made.
The Seine running through the centre of Paris.
And yet this what Debord wanted. This is where the build-up of détourned
images expresses only indifference to an already forgotten original.

Close-up of a rocket taking off.
The movements and gestures of modernity, and their trajectory towards
General view of the take-off.
an eventual, illusory ideal, have been absorbed into the spectacle.
“What true project has been lost?” asks the commentator, answering his
own question. It is truth as a project which has disappeared, or rather,
A pilot equipped for the stratosphere. An officer with drawn sabre.
been made questionable, suspect, “truth which has almost everywhere
ceased to exist or, at best, has been reduced to the status of pure hypothesis.”
Shot of the cover of a science-fiction book.
Truth as (an) aesthetic.


The straight line towards the apex of modernity diverts and repeats back upon
A pinball machine; the movement of the ball.
itself, reenacting the experiments and trials of the past, under the aegis of
the spectacle. History unfolds, rewinds and re-plays its significant moments as entertainment, as a distraction.
What about 1968? The situationists? Debord himself?
A still from a film: A king and knights around the Round table.
(Bodin de Boismortier: Allegro movement, Op. 37 – Concerto in E Minor in five parts)
They have been integrated into the system, as the spectacle’s shorthand for
Sub-title: To give every person the social space essential
‘subversion’, and as an example of its inherent harmlessness and egalitarian
Two situationists
for the expression of life.
nature. Yet it is also an implicit demonstration of its authority. The negative
One knight defies another in a picture from a Hollywood-style film.
gesture is allowed, only through the good will of the spectacle, which
A situationist drinking a glass of wine.
refuses to take sides in politics. There is no outside the system; everything is subsumed within its permeable, pluralistic structure.
General view of a group sitting at a table in a café in Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève.
Sub-title: If man is created by circumstance, one must create human circumstances.

Sub-title: Comrades, unitary urbanism is dynamic, that is to say it is in direct relationship with modes of behaviour.

This movement, this ‘ism’ (despite their insistence on being known only as
Other situationists
Sub-title: Passions have been interpreted enough. It’s a question now of finding new ones.
situation-‘ists’, never as situation-‘ism’) cannot escape the inevitable process of absorption into the spectacle. It has become petrified, as a lost opportunity
The girl from the opening shot passes by.
to be re-played once again, as farce. Despite the gradual purification of the
Panoramic aerial view of the centre of Paris.
Situationist International, the purging of artists and the visual image (itself particularly susceptible to re-contextualization), and the withdrawal of
Debord’s films from circulation; all these attempts to evade the spectacle
overlook the unavoidable concretization of the temporal moment and the
re-imagination of this ‘historical’ past in the present.

You can’t destroy all the evidence. There will always be some piece of
The quarreling knights again.
The same girl again.
(The music dies away)
writing, a drawing, photograph, script, rumour, anecdote, memory.


The separation of the image from the original moment, and its placement
Alternating tracking shots: the face of the girl; an aeroplane gets
in another context, against other images, ensures the loss of that original
further away after taking off from the snow-covered countryside
value. Debord recognizes this, and realizes that the détourned image could
still become another weapon in the spectacle’s arsenal. In this light, the
self-imposed banning of his films in France, apparently as a gesture of
protest against the lack of any serious police investigation into the assass-
ination of his friend and publisher Gérard Lebovici, may suggest another
motive. Perhaps as a way of hiding his true intention: the gradual eradication of the image itself. If meaning is essentially hypothetical, even ephemeral, then it might be best not to reveal the actual meaning of the gesture itself, but to cloud it as a political statement, to protect the image and the intent.
Panormaic view over the Quai d’Orléans, as seen from the Left Bank. Close-up shot of a detail of the same Quai.
(Boismortier: reprise of the Allegro)
The removal of these films seems like an arbitrary decision, unconnected
with Lebovici’s murder, but perfectly in keeping with Debord’s distrust of
Panoramic shot of trees buffeted by a tornado.
the artwork and a medium which even he regarded with ambivalence. As he states
Aerial photograph of the Allée des Cygnes, Paris.
in ‘Considerations on the Assassination of Gérard Lebovici’: “The cinema has not been my passion, and not even the anti-cinema. ‘What we saw him leave behind, without pain, was not the object of his love,’ as Bossuet would say.”
(The music dies away)


What has been left behind? Footage of dead people, dead ideas. The image
The UN Security Council. Khruschev in a room with De Gaulle at his side.
of the spectacle and its instruments of power and authority. Both cinema
Eisenhower greets De Gaulle.
and anti-cinema. From the perspective of the spectacle, Debord has himself
Patriotic ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe; De Gaulle and
disappeared, momentarily. This system is always able to reintegrate the
Khruschev standing to attention.
negative to eventually take in even the so-called ‘Pope’ of the situationists.
Eisenhower and the Pope talking.
Eisenhower in the arms of Franco.
The image separated from reality renders reality questionable, as if the events of history were merely a series of random encounters.
A riot in the Congo; soldiers disperse the crowd with blows from their rifle butts.
We watch a version of history, distant and condensed, like the half-memories of an innocent bystander. Of images perceived on television or in fiction, as if they had never really happened or had only been experienced second-hand.
Photo of Djamila Bouhired in a police station. At the edge appear
The spectacle places truth in inverted commas. Had Debord realized this?
the hands of the parachutist-journalist Lartéguy. Tracking shot
That even the critique of power eventually comes under its spell, that the
towards the female prisoner’s face.
film against the spectacle is necessarily also of the spectacle. Or had he really convinced himself of his gesture as a genuine protest against the police and their collusion in Lebovici’s murder? Perhaps, at that time, he was sincere.
Later, Debord would develop the theory of the integrated spectacle, above
politics and media, as the overriding system which is instead expressed
The young girl talks and laughs
(Couperin: reprise of the March of the Champagne Regiment)
through these outlets, and the withdrawal of his films would take on a
new significance. As an admission of futility, surrender. Or rather, as a
negative gesture, negated again in Debord’s willful misinterpretation. It is
an anti-statement, a refusal to engage with meaning, or in current military
parlance, what could be called an ‘unknown unknown’.
(The music stops)

Even as the spectacle separates meaning from product, this gesture (if such
In a tracking shot the camera passes quickly across the façade of
a gesture did exist) remains hidden from its gaze, hidden by the fact that it
Saint-Lazare railway station, then moves away up the Rue de Havre
may never have been intended. Everything else is absorbed and commodified.
showing numerous cars coming down the street.
The historical moment of the avant-garde as an aesthetic and social impulse is both lost and made present, détourned in service to the new. From the
contemporary position, the formal advances of the old guard are lifted freely, transplanted and subverted. To exist is to exist in the spectacle, a system that
A squadron of the Republican Guard passes by in the distance.
Sub-title: The new beauty will be of the situation.
is pervasive, all-consuming. The only act able to circumvent this is one
Sub-title: Across the path of all the possible directions which arrive so quickly at this moment, our only friend, our bitter enemy.
which can never be known or recorded, which passes away without commentary or notice.

March-past of West Point cadets in an equally archaic uniform.




A squad in the course of manouevres.


The real Debord would not escape quite so easily. Already, he has been
Continuation shot of the movement of the ball in the pinball machine.
Sub-title: Who would wish to have as a friend a man who
resurrected from suicide as an icon of iconoclasm, a demonstration of the
discourses in such a manner? Who would choose him
spectacle’s ability to exhume and re-animate the dead. This version
from amongst others to discuss their affairs? Who would have recourse to him during their tribulations?
even makes an appearance in Richard Linklater’s 2001 film ‘Waking Life’,
And finally to what useful purpose in life could he be put?
as the highly spectacularized ‘Mr. Debord’. And yet, while this figure supposedly
Mutineers forced back into the courtyard of an American prison. The ball disappears.
Sub-title: To disturb everywhere the appearance of the existing false dialogue.
represents the opposition to the society of the spectacle, the dazzling
Tracking shot over a large number of parked cars.
visual imagery of Linklater’s film undermines any such argument. Achieved through a blend of computer animation and digital photography, the aesthetic
Sub-title: Already further away than India or China.
allure of the movie overwhelms the critique, and, as a result, creates
a strange disjunction between image and commentary, where the medium
A couple kiss in the street. Boys and girls at a café table.
Sub-title: A poor rebellion, without language but not without a cause. The programme will make itself.
Two of the lost children of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
cancels out the message, as if Debord was speaking of the necessity of
A prison guard in a watchtower.
Sub-title: Partisans of the power of forgetting.
eliminating speech, or trying to film the end of cinema.
THE SCREEN REMAINS DARK.
Sub-title: Besides, it’s less a question of form than of the

traces of form, impressions, memories.
The double of Debord cancels out the original. It is insubstantial, a
doppelganger mouthing the words of an other, while subtly contradicting
(and affirming) his argument, through his very existence. This ghost is
Sub-title: We are faced with a world which has fallen apart relentlessly.
thus an exaggeration and a natural extension of the spectacle.

THE SCREEN REMAINS DARK, WITHOUT SUBTITLES OR COMMENTARY.

As the inevitable return and incorporation of Debord demonstrates the
The young girl who’s been featured a lot.
adaptabilty of the spectacle it also exposes the inherent weakness of the
situationist methodology. This film itself, the ‘Critique of Separation’, uses
Panoramic shot over cut-up sentences: “The production also shows
Sub-title: The truth of an artificial society.
borrowed imagery, stock footage, repeated scenes, a “panoramic shot over
the mark of youth.” “It’s terrible, magnificent, hopeless disorder.”
cut-up sentences”, even intermissions of a black screen, seemingly borrowed from Debord’s own, earlier film ‘Howls in Favour of Sade’. These elements
“All the elements of an American detective novel are there –
are taken over and turned against the spectacle, as a practice to activate
violence, sex, cruelty; but the direction…”
the passive experience of the viewer, to initiate a subjective, critical reading
of the scopophiliac impulse. Like the techniques of the psycho-geographical drift through the urban environment, or the insertion of subversive slogans
in comic books, the re-contextualization of prior material is intended to
disrupt complacency, and allow a moment of lucidity into the suffocating
Swimmers filmed from under water.
atmosphere of the spectacular society.
Photos of a few situationists.

(Couperin: reprise of the March of the Champagne Regiment)
The subjectivisation of the spectator is the instant of contamination by the
spectacle. And the situationists’ failure. ‘Mr. Debord’ quotes Robert Louis
A group at the counter of a café.
Stevenson: "Suicide carried off many. Drink and the devil took care of the rest.”
Comic strip: A man holding a glass thinks: “The dice are cast. Now
she has to say yes to me, soon, very soon.”
Sub-title: How many bottles since then? In how many glasses, in how many bottles has he hidden himself, alone since then?

In opening the work to a plural, relative interpretation, Debord’s thesis is
made hypothetical, and thus a part of the theoretically diverse structure of
the spectacle. It becomes one of many, unfixed and circulating freely in the
Shot of the cover of a detective novel called Swindle. A woman in
profile; further away a man, glass in hand.
multitude without ever finding any answers.
A blonde-haired girl.
Trees in a tornado.
A napalm explosion.
The path cut by the tornado.
The same blonde girl.
Panoramic shot over the cut-up sentence: “The wine of life is drunk, and only the dregs are left in this pretentious cellar.”
(End of the March)

In the end, there is only situation-ism, an image of Debord and the Inter-
Continuation of the riot in the Congo.
national. The spectacle owns its representation, undoing all their hard work, re-showing the films and relics of that moment. Yet, they had already
Two photos already seen of situationists alternate in and out of
Sub-title: It’s quite normal that a film on private life should
shot as the sub-title explains the conversation they are having.
be solely composed of private jokes.
disappeared from this representation, leaving only the shell of the move-
ment, and the simulacrum of Debord. The failure of the situationists is proof
The blonde girl.
Sub-title: I didn’t understand it all.
of the spectacle, that it could only adapt and absorb any opposition, that
Asger Jorn.
Sub-title: In the same way one could make a series of documentaries over three hours. A kind of ‘serial’.
it would even expand to accept the blank screen, the détourned fragment,
the anti-spectacle. After that, the situation need no longer exist. The instig-
ators could withdraw, while “drink and the devil took care of the rest.”
Debord.
Sub-title: The ‘Mysteries of New York’ of alienation.
The refusal to engage was the impetus for self-destruction. What else had to be done, but expel the situationists?
Asger Jorn.
Sub-title: Yes, that would be better, more boring; more significant.
“What we saw him leave behind, without pain, was not the object of his love”. And another quote from Debord, at the close of this ‘Critique of Separation’:
“I have scarcely begun to make you understand that I don’t intend to play
Debord: the camera draws away from him.
Sub-title: More convincing.
the game.”

Sub-title: (To be continued).

Un Identity

This text originally appeared as an online essay at www.recirca.com/articles in 2002, and later as a text-based artwork in an exhibition at Cornerhouse Projects, Manchester, UK, 2006.

I.

The following article is part of an ongoing series of artworks which investigate the relationship between author and reader, artist and viewer. These works also question the very notion of the author; if truth is determined by the subjective, infinitely variable experience of the reader, then can objective truth even exist? Such concerns, at the heart of post-structuralist theory and conceptual art, pose writing as text, visual arts as site. Within these spaces meaning is dialectical, fluctuating in a system of social, historical and political factors. The artist merely provides an opening into this environment and his interpretation of the work is as relative as any spectator's. In this spirit, I have constructed this essay through the words of others, as a (loosely) coherent site of the dialectic. While many of these sources are deeply entrenched in literary theory, a number are taken completely out of context. Even in contradiction, the ideas of others can be adapted and re-contextualised. An extensive endnotes section opens up the dialectic further, directing the reader to continue beyond the text. For the sake of cohesiveness, capitalization and punctuation have been altered to fit the text.

II.

We only ever speak one language... (yes, but) we never speak only one language 1.
I, too, hide in language, within this book 2. I use words in a sense that makes them meaningless, and of course the only way you can make something meaningless is to present it in all of its possible meanings 3.
'An author is the only person who has written his or her own words'- the assumed definition of identity is questionable. For instance, I do not write out of nothing, or from nothing, for I must write with the help of other texts, be these texts written ones, oral ones, those of memory, those of dream, etc. 4.
One might even describe the concept of the unique individual and the theoretical basis of individualism as ideological 5. All art, from the crassest mass-media production to the most esoteric art-world practice, has a political existence, or, more accurately, an ideological existence. It either challenges or supports (tacitly, perhaps) the dominant myths a culture calls truth 6 . The individual is an effect of power, and at the same time 7 we are more than individuals, we are the whole chain as well 8. Both he who is writing these lines and the reader who reads them are themselves subjects, and therefore ideological subjects 9.
I am also an artist- if that means anything at all in this post-Derridean context 10. I am led by my ideas, but where do these ideas come from 11?
A sharing of the void, a pooling of lack which is today the rule in individual and social relations 12. The sudden multiplication of 'points of view' 13. A veritable revolution in our conception of the relations between power, desire, identity, political practice 14. An universe of borders, seesaws, fragile and mingled identities, wanderings of the subject and its objects 15... the tempting traps of structuralism and formalism and the obsession with modernity 16. A vast amalgam of disparate signs, styles and structures culled indiscriminately from world cultures, past and present 17. A quality of anarchic freedom and explosive creativity in the exotic hybrids produced 18.
Art's declaration of independence is thus the beginning of the end of art 19.
What does it mean to have property 20? I think that the meanings change 21... we can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original 22. A dialectical text, rather than presenting an opinion as if it were truth, challenges the reader to discover truths on their own 23. A text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash 24. Meanings shift and change their reference like shifting perceptions of perspective from an optical illusion 25 ; not a picture of living reality, but merely an arrangement of dead signs 26. There are just as many objective principles of taste as there are aesthetic judgements 27...the maximization of opportunities for individual variation 28. In seeing an object, I can construe (translate) that object within many seemingly complete 'languages' of perception. Another person seeing the same object may construe a similar number of languages, none of which need necessarily coincide with mine 29.
Suppose the library has two copies of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Peter takes out one, and John the other. Did Peter and John take out the same book, or different books 30?
Preoccupied as I was with my notes and the ever-widening and contracting circles of my thoughts, I became enveloped by a sense of utter emptiness 31. I had to go to the records 32. On a piece of paper in the wastebasket is the following text, scribbled in pencil 33:
‘There will appear orthodox publications, something like our encyclopaedic dictionaries, in which everything will be so accurately calculated and plotted that there will no longer be any individual texts or adventures left in the world 34.’
I find myself digging deeper 35... words slip away from me; the 'I' sounds false 36. It occurred to me that my thoughts were becoming incoherent, which wasn't unusual. Sustained for a phrase or two, they splintered 37 (anonymous yet differentiated crowds swept up in an endless, seemingly haphazard pattern of movement 38). An empty shell. Those were the first words that sprang to mind 39. This work existed already before it was made 40... exists in the instant it comes into being and is simultaneously received 41.
The demise of the author as transcendent self or bearer of meaning has borne along a rejection of the text as discrete or self-contained object; attention has been focused, instead, on a model that poses meaning as constructed in the discourses that articulate it, in an interactive context of reader and text 42. The existence of all these meanings indicates that that the communication involved here is not solely or essentially one between individuals- between author and spectator 43. In order to reflect the thing as it is, the spectator must return to it more than he receives from it 44. Each self harbors unsuspected, and undetectable, dimensions that identity may prove to be far more baroque than we had imagined 45... we see our own image multiplied in its facetted reflections 46.
Art 'lives' through influencing other art, not by existing as the physical residue of an artist's ideas. The reason that different artists from the past are 'brought alive' again is because some aspect of their work becomes 'usable' by living artists. That there is no 'truth' as to what art is seems quite unrealized 47. The philosopher can no longer pretend to provide privileged access to truth 48. Language is a reality that is not about truth 49.
Within postmodernity, when one opens up spaces within spaces one often finds more images, more sounds 50. We receive the 'world' as fragmented, shattered, hence differentiated 51. The text is informed by discursive operations at the level of its conception, production and reception 52. An artist might advance specifically to get lost, and to intoxicate himself in dizzying syntaxes, seeking odd intersections of meaning, strange corridors of history, unexpected echoes, unknown humors or voids of knowledge 53. Neither randomness, heterogeneity of content, nor indeterminacy are sources of confusion for this mode 54. It depends for its effect on the context of ideas it changes and joins 55, depends on the beholder, is incomplete without him 56. New meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships are continually being created 57... no pre-established harmony or order, no certainty 58. Everything exists within the world; nothing can exist independently 59.
This shift in practice entails a shift in position; the artist becomes a manipulator of signs more than a producer of art objects, and the viewer an active reader of messages rather than a passive contemplator of the aesthetic or consumer of the spectacular 60. As with allegorical fragments, the viewer must fill in, add to, build upon suggestive elements in the text supplying extraneous historical, personal and social references, rather than, as in modernism, transporting himself to the special world and time of the artist's original production 61. The concept of an 'ideal' receiver is detrimental in the theoretical consideration of art 62.
Individuated texts have become filaments of infinitely tangled webs 63. Each piece segues into the next like chapters in an evocative but fragmentary novel, weaving non-narrative stories that buzz with human presence but in which no human appears 64. Everywhere there are surprises and sensations, yet nowhere is there any outcome 65. A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by pre-established rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for 66.




III.

1. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin, Stanford University Press, p. 10.
2. Ciaran Carson, The Star Factory, Granta, p. 106.
3. Robert Barry in Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art, Phaidon Press, p. 358.
4. Kathy Acker, 'Writing, Identity and Copyright in the Net Age' in Bodies of Work: Essays, Serpent's Tail, p. 100.
5. Fredric Jameson, 'Postmodernism and Consumer Society' in The Cultural Turn, Verso, p. 6.
6. Martha Rosler, 'Lookers, Buyers, Dealers and Makers: Thoughts on Audience' in Brian Wallis, ed., Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, New Museum of Contemporary Art, p. 322.
7. Michel Foucault, 'Two Lectures' in Power/ Knowledge, Harvester Press, p. 98.
8. Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, University of Chicago Press, p. 115.
9. Louis Althusser, 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses' in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory 1900-1990, Blackwell Publishers, p. 935.
10. Victor Burgin, 'Tea With Madeleine' in The End of Art Theory, Macmillan Press, p. 106.
11. Richard Foreman, 'The Mind King' in My Head Was a Sledgehammer, Overlook Press, p. 130.
12. Jean Baudrillard, L'autre: Luc Delahaye, Phaidon Press, p. unnumbered.
13. Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb, Verso, P.18.
14. Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, Blackwell Publishers, p. 24.
15. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Columbia University Press, p. 135.
16. Philip Roth, The Human Stain, Vintage, p. 267.
17. Alexandra Munroe, Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky, Harry N. Abrams, p. 341.
18. Rosalind E. Krauss, 'Cadaver' in Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User's Guide, Zone Books, p. 64.
19. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Zone Books, p. 133.
20. Pamela M. Lee, Object to be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark, MIT Press, p.56.
21. Jeff Koons in David Sylvester, Interviews With American Artists, Chatto & Windus, p. 342.
22. Sherrie Levine, 'Statement' in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory 1900-1990, Blackwell Publishers, p. 1067.
23. Ross C, Murfin, 'Reader-Response Criticism and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' in James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Bedford Books, p. 270.
24. Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author' in Image-Music-Text, Hill and Wang, p. 146.
25. Laura Mulvey, 'Cosmetics and Abjection: Cindy Sherman 1977-1987' in Fetishism and Curiosity, British Film Institute, p. 73.
26. Boris Groys, 'Life Without Shadows' in deDuve, Pelenc, and Groys, Jeff Wall, Phaidon Press, p. 61.
27. Robert Zimmerman, 'Toward the Reform of Aesthetics as an Exact Science' in Harrison, Wood and Gaiger, eds., Art in Theory: 1815-1900, Blackwell Publishers, p. 609.
28. Richard Rorty, 'Globalization, the Politics of Identity and Social Hope' in Philosophy and Social Hope, Penguin, p. 237.
29. Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden, 'The Role of Language' in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory: 1900-1990, Blackwell Publishers, p. 879.
30. Noam Chomsky, New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, Cambridge University Press, p. 16.
31. W.G. Sebald, Vertigo, Harvill Press, p. 65.
32. V.S. Naipaul, Reading and Writing, New York Review of Books, p. 32.
33. Sophie Calle, Double Game, Violette Editions, p. 154.
34. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From Underground, Penguin, p. 33.
35. Edward W. Said, Out of Place, Granta, p. 277.
36. Emmanuel Carrere, The Adversary, Bloomsbury, p. 170.
37. Alexander Trocchi, Cain's Book, John Calder, p. 72.
38. Linda Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity, Thames & Hudson, p. 26.
39. Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart, Harvill Press, p. 224.
40. Marisa Merz, 'Untitled Poem' in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, ed., Arte Povera, Phaidon Press, p. 255.
41. Emilio Prini, 'Una Macchina Fotografica Fotografa' in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, ed., Arte Povera, Phaidon Press, p. 162.
42. Kate Linker, 'Representation and Sexuality' in Brian Wallis, ed., Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, New Museum of Contemporary Art, p. 391.
43. Wendy Leeks, 'Ingres Other-Wise' in Janis Tomlinson, ed., Readings in Nineteenth-Century Art, Prentice-Hall, p. 55.
44. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Verso, p. 189.
45. Ralph Rugoff, Scene of the Crime, MIT Press, p. 95.
46. Diana Nemiroff, Jana Sterbak, National Gallery of Canada, p. 39.
47. Joseph Kosuth, 'Art After Philosophy' in Ellen H. Johnson, ed., American Artists on Art: From 1940 to 1980, Harper & Row, p. 136.
48. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, 'Memory Lessons and History Tableaux: James Coleman's Archaeology of Spectacle' in James Coleman: Projected Images: 1972-1994, Dia Center for the Arts, p. 52.
49. Lawrence Weiner, 'Intervention' in Buchloh, Alberro, Zimmerman, and Batchelor, Lawrence Weiner, Phaidon Press, p. 140.
50. Peggy Phelan, 'Opening up Spaces Within Spaces: The Expansive Art of Pipilotti Rist' in Phelan, Obrist, and Bronfen, Pipilotti Rist, Phaidon Press, p. 71.
51. Henri Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, Verso, p. 43.
52. Mary Kelly, 'Re-viewing Modernist Criticism' in Brian Wallis, ed., Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, New Museum of Contemporary Art, p. 93.
53. Robert Smithson, 'A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art' in James Meyer, ed., Minimalism, Phaidon Press, p. 239.
54. Robert Morris, 'Notes on Sculpture Part 4: Beyond Objects' in Jeffrey Kastner, ed., Land and Environmental Art, Phaidon Press, p. 231.
55. Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, University of California Press, p. 70.
56. Michael Fried, 'Art and Objecthood' in James Meyer, ed., Minimalism, Phaidon Press, p. 235.
57. Raymond Williams, 'Dominant, Residual and Emergent' in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory: 1900-1990, Blackwell Publishers, p. 981.
58. Birgit Pelzer, 'Double Intersections: the Optics of Dan Graham' in Pelzer, Francis and Colomina, Dan Graham, Phaidon Press, p. 57.
59. Kazimir Malevich, 'Futurism-Suprematism, 1921' in Jeanne D'Andrea, ed., Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Centre, p. 177.
60. Hal Foster, 'Subversive Signs' in Charles Harrison and Paul wood, eds. Art in Theory: 1900-1990, Blackwell Publishers, p. 1066.
61. Brian Wallis, 'What's Wrong With This Picture? An Introduction' in Brian Wallis, ed. Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, New Museum of Contemporary Art, p. xxii.
62. Walter Benjamin, 'The Task of the Translator' in Illuminations, Fontana, p. 70.
63. Sadie Plant, 'zeros+ones: Digital Women + The New Technoculture' in Helena Reckitt, ed., Art and Feminism, Phaidon Press, p. 285.
64. Frances Richard, 'D-L Alvarez' in Artforum September 2000, p. 179.
65. John Berger, 'Against the Great Defeat of the World' in The Shape of a Pocket, Bloomsbury, p. 210.
66. Jean-Francois Lyotard, 'What is Postmodernism?' in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory: 1900-1990, Blackwell Publishers, p. 1014-15.