Re-Reading Marx.....Am I a Marxist?

As part of the research for this project I have been re-reading Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto. This is because my project, although figurative in its choice of form, is intensely sociological in terms of its content. My work questions the position of the body in contemporary society in relation to issues of consumption and identity; asking to what extent are our bodies affected by our patterns of consumption, and to what extent do we use our consumption of various products as a means to define our identity. These two central questions raise further issues of body politics -to what extent is our position and role in society defined by the type and shape of our body? The most obvious examples of these questions in action is the position of disabled people in our society, a subject that is personal for me because of the mobility problems I suffer as a result of injury to my right leg.

However, to return to the main question of this post, am I a Marxist? I have been re-reading The Communist Manifesto, as well as other pieces of Marxist theory online in order to try to gain a deeper and more accurate understanding of his economic theories. I first read The Communist Manifesto aged thirteen, and filled with teenage innocence and enthusiasm, I embraced it wholeheartedly and considered myself to be a dedicated commie for many years to come. This was back in the 1980's, when the Cold War was raging and Margaret Thatcher was on the rampage in this country. My study of Marx at that time, [like many others I suspect], began and ended with the Manifesto; as soon as I saw the thickness of Das Kapital, I lost a touch of my revolutionary fervour.....

So now that I find myself creating a project which is motivated largely by sociological and economic questions, I have found it essential to re-examine some of these ideas in more detail. Its simply not good enough to talk about "the effects upon the body of life within the capitalist economy", without having at least a rudimentary understanding of what that means, and more importantly, what is proposed as an alternative. So I find myself coming back to Marx, and reconsidering his eternal challenge: "Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains!". But at the same time I am old enough to remember the Soviet Union, and to know that life there was not the revolutionary workers paradise that Marx envisaged.

However, I loathe with all my heart what is happening in this country and the USA at this present time, whereby giant corporations are granted the rights of an individual despite having resources unavailable to the ordinary citizen, [which they use to avoid tax and exploit ordinary people], where our economic system is based on debt through fractional reserve banking, and taxpayers money is used to bail out corrupt bankers, [and there is little of that anyway since our governments refuse to enforce the tax laws when it comes to corporations], rather than to provide social security for those in need and a decent infrastructure for all. I guess ultimately I'm a good old-fashioned Keynesian socialist, who wants to see government spending directed at helping restart the economy in times of recession, and reduced when things are going well.

Anyway, as they used to say on Blue Peter, "here's one I did earlier", a picture of Karl Marx from a slow afternoon at the office, back in my graphic design days, titled Halftone Marx.

Benedict Drew - Heads May Roll

Went to see Benedict Drew's show 'Heads May Roll' at Matt's Gallery in Mile End. Enjoyed it & found his work informative in regard to my own animation work. According to the press release from the gallery, the

"work scrutinises the effect and intent of mediated images, synthesised voice and the fractured narrative of instructional speech.......This immersive exhibition attempts to make sculptural the absurdity of a life spent staring into a screen and the social anxiety induced by ‘smart’ objects via an alternative sci-fi stage set comprising of a landscape of objects, sound and projection" [http://www.mattsgallery.org/artists/drew/exhibition-2.php]

It was a two room installation, connected by a short passage which had been draped with silver plastic sheeting to give the effect of a tunnel. The first room required that you put on a set of headphones and faced a large flatscreen TV set into the wall. This played a looped film which combined close-up images of various materials, [I think some very fat or wax, and a fibrous carpet], colour bars spreading across the screen, slowly pooling liquids and disembodied limbs. The images were intercut with text messages, either placed on top of the projected image, or standing alone in a colour field. The words asked us to question our reality. Meanwhile, the viewer is caught in the midst of a complex soundscape. The score from the video piece in the second room, was audible in the first, while a complex mix of sounds was played directly into the viewer's ear through the headphones needed for the first room. Whether this was a deliberate intention, to have the two sound arenas coinciding like this, or just an inevitable consequence of the work being shown in a small gallery is not known, but the overall effect, of being able to tune between the two soundscapes was interesting.

The second room had two further video installations, both projected on screens on top of large wooden tables, underneath which were smaller monitors playing looped films of, [I assume], the artist assembling some of the electronic circuitry he uses in creating his work. Below is the promotional video for the show, [which doesn't appear to be loading, so I have linked to it below], and two images released by the artist in conjunction with the show. The second one, Headroom 2014, is the main image used in the second of the two video installations which were shown in second room at Matt's Gallery.

http://www.benedictdrew.com/

No Body, 2014, Benedict Drew

Headroom, 2014, Benedict Drew

This show was really informative and useful for my practice, because I have only just recently made the leap across to using time-based media for my work. As I wrote for the degree show catalogue entry, I truly due feel that animation has allowed my work to reach another level, since the body is not a static object, [at least not in life anyway], and animation grants those who work with it abilities unavailable in painting. At the very beginning of this blog, I examined an interview with Francis Bacon, where he discussed the question of violence within his paintings, and I said that this also was a central issue for me, to find the means to imbue my work with an atmosphere of menace and violence, without merely manufacturing crude reproductions of images of violence. I believe that time-based media offers a a far greater ability to achieve these ends than the canvas, or at very least it has different options and possibilities, which at this particular moment suit the ends which I am trying to achieve far more than painting, hence my decision to use only time-based media and Photoshop collage to achieve the goals of this current project.

Dissertation

This has been such a busy week, I haven't been able to stop for a second. The biggest thing I guess was handing in my dissertation on Monday. Its such a relief to have it out of the way, and to be able to focus on my studio work & preparation for the degree show.


My subject was:

American and Viennese Actionism: A Case Study of Trangressive Performance Art and Critical Responses to its Emergence

What is American Actionism I hear you ask. Its performance art like Paul McCarthy & Chris Burden, whose practice is shocking and disturbing. Because of its superficial similarity to the work of the Viennese Actionists, I coined the term American Actionism to describe their work. The differences are that the Viennese group were reacting to the political structure in Austria, which was never de-Nazified after the Second World War, and saw the same political, bureaucrats & police officials remain in power after the war, whereas McCarthy, Burden, Mike Kelley, were reacting to American culture, especially the denial and sanitisation of violence in the media, and the crass consumerism which has become so much a part of American life.


A large part of my argument was that Paul McCarthy is no longer a transgressive artist in the sense of Georges Battaile's thoughts on transgression, but is today very much part of the art market; his practice having been successfully recuperated by the market forces of capitalism. Today, McCarthy produces shock & spectacle, not transgression & subversion, Rabelaisian spectacle rather than Battailean transgression.



Chris Burden's work is an example of extreme body art, which is highly transgressive, [in other words breaching societal norms and taboos]. For his MA thesis he confined himself to a gym locker for five days, he had a friend shoot him with a .22 rifle, and had himself crucified to the roof of a Volkswagen Beetle, which was then pushed into the middle of an LA street.

How do the oeuvres of McCarthy and Burden relate to my studio practice, considering they are working within performance, and I am a painter/collagist/animator? Their work, although in a different media involves using shock, disgust as well as humour to critique cultural icons and mainstream media. Thus they inform me of the conceptual ideas which I want to make use of in my practice. They are an important contextual element in my work.

Paul McCarthy, Bossy Burger, 1991

Paul McCarthy, Pinocchio Pipenose Householddilemma, 1994

Herman Nitsc

Chris Burden, Transfixed, 1974

Sequencing Animations

I've begun building a continuous loop of my Flash animations in one single file. I'm placing each one on the timeline, with a single cell between them, and using the Flash code, [ActionScript 3.0] to control the movement of the playhead through the sequence.
Its complex & time consuming. I have to work out the exact length of the musical score for each animation, and in some cases I have to edit the music clip as well so that I don't have one animation that plays for too long.

The result though is one single file which plays each animation for twenty seconds or so, then has a two second break on a blank black screen, [or in some cases I 'tween a bright yellow oblong across the screen in this cell just to show off my Flash skills!], then moves on the next animation. Once I get every animation I create on a single loop, I can edit it by removing the fiirst cell and placing it at the end of the sequence, so that this one starts at a different place to the original, save it as sequence_2, then edit that one in the same way, so it starts at a new place, saving it as sequence_3, and so on, until I've got ten or so loops which all begin in a different place.

The advantage of this is that when it comes to the final show, I will only need ten computers to play the animations, rather than a computer for each single animation -which if I build fifty would be impossible.

Its a really complex procedure to get this right. I'm having to build a big chart which shows each loop in a line, then I can decide which score plays when, so that in the beginning the music from the animations are distinct, until one after the other each score begins to play, and the sound rises to a din, and then one by one each score is removed until the sound is clear again.....and then the process begins again, over and over.

Its a really complex task I have set myself, but I know that if I manage to sequence every animation so that the sound layers on top of each other until its a din, then fades away until the music is audible, and repeats this over and over, it will be very effective towards creating a sense of disharmony and shock to accompany my work.