GOOD? A Reconsideration of the Newspaper …THEFIRST/LASTNEWSPAPER PORTAUTHORITY,6418thAvenue,NewYorkCity,NY10036 DEXTERSINISTER A Reconsideration of the Newspaper Industry in 5 Easy

THE FIRST/LAST NEWSPAPER DEXTER SINISTERPORT AUTHORITY, 641 8th Avenue, New York City, NY 10036

A Reconsideration of the Newspaper Industry in 5 Easy Illusions (1)

As you stare at this form, watch your perspective flip back and forth.

TWO

BLIND MEN

DESCRIBE

“BLOODY GOOD

ELEPHANT”PORT AUTHORITY — Yesterday’s Berlin-based weblog imomus.livejournal.com ran apiece about this paper headed “Newspaperstalked and serenaded by a ghost of its trueself.” In an ensuing exchange with (Anony-mous), iMomus concluded “we’re basicallytwo blind men describing an elephant here.The only difference is that I think it’s prob-ably a bloody good elephant.”

A few days beforehand one of TF/LN ’sregular correspondents pitched the idea of aninterview with renowned sound engineer andpolymath Walter Murch, making a case forhis inclusion with reference to the followingquotation:

“At the basic level, a transition is simplythe process of changing from some state Ato another state, B. What we should exam-ine carefully is the degree of change, and ourawareness of it. Change is happening all thetime, though we are not always conscious ofit. But without change there is no percep-tion. This is somewhat of a paradox. If youare staring constantly at a static object youwould think that nothing is changing, but itturns out your eyeballs are constantly mov-ing, though the movements are so tiny youare unaware of it. You might be stationary,the object you are staring at might be sta-tionary, but your eyeballs are rapidly scan-ning the image in what are called microsac-cades, at the rate of around sixty per second.It is this slight vibration — the eyeballs aremoving about 1/180th of a degree — that iskeeping your perception alive, scrubbing theimage across a slightly different set of rodsand cones at the back of your eye. In a wayit is kind of like the scanning electron gunin a video monitor. Fascinating experimentshave been performed, neutralizing these mi-crosaccades, and the result is that the visionof the subject quickly dims and then disap-pears entirely, even though his eyes are openand he is in a lighted room. At a very basicperceptual level, then, there has to be somekind of a transition, a change, for us to per-ceive the world at all.”

This statement describes both the pointand point-of-view ofTF/LN with such alarm-ing economy, that we urged our correspon-dent to follow the lead. As it turned out, shewasn’t scheduled to meet Murch, only invitedto a dinner that he would also attend.

“If I could ask Murch only one question,”she wondered, “what would that be — ?”

“One designed to extract an exact replicaof that quotation,” we replied.

The after-dinner conversation reportedlylasted four hours. (DS)

TWO

BLIND MEN

DESCRIBE

“BLOODY GOOD

ELEPHANT”PORT AUTHORITY — Yesterday’s Berlin-based weblog imomus.livejournal.com ran apiece about this paper headed “Newspaperstalked and serenaded by a ghost of its trueself.” In an ensuing exchange with (Anony-mous), iMomus concluded “we’re basicallytwo blind men describing an elephant here.The only difference is that I think it’s prob-ably a bloody good elephant.”

A few days beforehand one of TF/LN ’sregular correspondents pitched the idea of aninterview with renowned sound engineer andpolymath Walter Murch, making a case forhis inclusion with reference to the followingquotation:

“At the basic level, a transition is simplythe process of changing from some state Ato another state, B. What we should exam-ine carefully is the degree of change, and ourawareness of it. Change is happening all thetime, though we are not always conscious ofit. But without change there is no percep-tion. This is somewhat of a paradox. If youare staring constantly at a static object youwould think that nothing is changing, but itturns out your eyeballs are constantly mov-ing, though the movements are so tiny youare unaware of it. You might be stationary,the object you are staring at might be sta-tionary, but your eyeballs are rapidly scan-ning the image in what are called microsac-cades, at the rate of around sixty per second.It is this slight vibration — the eyeballs aremoving about 1/180th of a degree — that iskeeping your perception alive, scrubbing theimage across a slightly different set of rodsand cones at the back of your eye. In a wayit is kind of like the scanning electron gunin a video monitor. Fascinating experimentshave been performed, neutralizing these mi-crosaccades, and the result is that the visionof the subject quickly dims and then disap-pears entirely, even though his eyes are openand he is in a lighted room. At a very basicperceptual level, then, there has to be somekind of a transition, a change, for us to per-ceive the world at all.”

This statement describes both the pointand point-of-view ofTF/LN with such alarm-ing economy, that we urged our correspon-dent to follow the lead. As it turned out, shewasn’t scheduled to meet Murch, only invitedto a dinner that he would also attend.

“If I could ask Murch only one question,”she wondered, “what would that be — ?”

“One designed to extract an exact replicaof that quotation,” we replied.

The after-dinner conversation reportedlylasted four hours. (DS)

TIME

CAPTCHA’D

FOR GLOBAL

GOOD?

PALO ALTO — In 2002, Stanford Univer-sity launched a “community reading project”called Discovering Dickens, making Dickens’snovelGreat Expectations available in its orig-inal part-issue format and asking its alumniand other members of the Stanford commu-nity to read along, exactly as Victorians firstdid, with the serial version that appearedfrom December 1860 to August 1861. In2004, as Discovering Dickens readers followedA Tale of Two Cities, Stanford joined thenewly-formed Google Print Library Project,along with the University of Michigan, Har-vard, Oxford, and the New York Public Li-brary. A year later, the program would be-come know as the Google Books Partner Pro-gram, or, more simply, Google Books.

At the launch of Google Books, Google’sintent was to scan and make available 15 mil-lion books within ten years. By 2008, justfour years into the project, 7 million bookshad already been scanned. When books arescanned, words are automatically convertedby Google’s Optical Character Recognitionsoftware into searchable text. Occasionallythere’s a problem with the conversion, andGoogle’s OCR software either can’t recognizesome text or it isn’t confident about its con-version, having checked the results againststandard grammar rules. The only way toconvert these wayward words and phrases isto introduce human eyes into the system.This September, Google did just that withthe purchase of reCAPTCHA.

ReCAPTCHA was invented by Luis VonAhn, who also invented the CAPTCHA, atest that can tell if a user is a human ora computer. CAPTCHAs are effective atblocking spam, verifying accounts, and a va-riety of other online tasks. Von Ahn’s orig-inal CAPTCHA presented a randomized setof letters warped in such a way that a com-puter could not read them, though humanseasily could. A few years ago, Von Ahn be-gan thinking of the time people were wast-ing filling out CAPTCHAs. It bothered him.About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solvedeveryday. Each one takes about ten secondsof time to solve; collectively people spendmore than 150,000 hours a day solving thetests. What if this time could be harnessedfor the global good? Von Ahn found a way:instead of random letters, his new system,reCAPTCHA, presents users with two En-glish words, one known and the other un-known. The unknown words are pulled ran-domly from a pool of scanned words thatOCR cannot convert. Users solving the newreCAPTCHAs require the same amount oftime as before — ten seconds — to recognizeand type these two words. But now, everytest produces a human user’s confirmationand the digitization of an unknown word.ReCAPTCHA digitizes 45 million words aday, or about 4 million books a year. In ad-dition to the words reCAPTCHA digitizesfor Google Books, reCAPTCHA’s other sig-nificant source of unknown words comes from

TIME

CAPTCHA’D

FOR GLOBAL

GOOD?




BLIND MAN

IN DARK ROOM

LOOKING FOR

BLACK CAT

THAT’S NOT

THERE

HELLAS — Our story begins in AncientGreece, with Socrates announcing, “I knowthat I know nothing.” Clearly, confusion hasalways been at the heart of wisdom. Cen-turies later comes a statement many have at-tributed to Charles Darwin: “A mathemati-cian is like a blind man in a dark room look-ing for a black cat that isn’t there.” As a sci-entist committed to cataloguing, explaining,and drawing a clear picture of nature, Dar-win mocked the mathematician’s inability todescribe the physical world in anything butabstract and speculative terms. Artists alsounderstand the world in these terms. Withtheir help, we can learn to enjoy the expe-rience of not-knowing and the playfulness ofbeing in the dark.

EXPLANATIONS DON’T EXPLAINIn 1831, Charles Darwin set sail and traveledto the Cape Verde Islands, the Falkland Is-lands, the South American Coast, the Gala-pagos Islands, and Australia. The notes hetook in his journal led to our general under-standing that life-forms develop in the con-text of how they adapt to various environ-ments in their efforts to survive, and not inisolation. While mathematicians were in theirdark rooms looking for abstract black catsthat weren’t there, Darwin wrote a theory ofevolution that explained life on earth.

Towards the end of the nineteenth cen-tury, however, the speculations of mathemati-cians began hinting at a far more complex ex-planation of nature. Non-Euclidean geome-try allowed mathematics to take into accountthe reality of curved space, and the work ofmathematician Henri Poincare lay the foun-dation for chaos theory. Most remarkably,he suggested that “The life of mathematicsnot logic exists in intuition, not logic” punc-turing science’s long-standing obsession withfacts and truth.

Poincare ushered in a century of math-ematical revelations: Max Planck outlinesquantum mechanics in 1900, Albert Einsteinpresents Special Relativity in 1905, followedby his General Relativity in 1916, WernerHeisenberg’s uncertainty principle in 1927,and Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorem in1931.

Working alongside Einstein at Princeton,Godel inherited a discipline that began torealize that the human mind is not a logicengine, but an analogy engine, a learning en-gine, a guessing engine, an aesthetics-drivenengine, and a self-correcting engine. In hisspeculative mathematics, Godel arrived at aproof revealing that “all axiomatic theories(top-down ‘explanations’) are necessarily in-complete and that ‘truth’ will always have ahole in it. In other words, all mathematics —even simple arithmetic — always relies on at

BLIND MAN

IN DARK ROOM

LOOKING FOR

BLACK CAT

THAT’S NOT

THERE





Working alongside Einstein at Princeton,Godel inherited a discipline that began torealize that the human mind is not a logicengine, but an analogy engine, a learning en-gine, a guessing engine, an aesthetics-drivenengine, and a self-correcting engine. In hisspeculative mathematics, Godel arrived at aproof revealing that “all axiomatic theories(top-down ‘explanations’) are necessarily in-complete and that ‘truth’ will always have ahole in it. In other words, all mathematics —even simple arithmetic — always relies on at

BLIND MAN

IN DARK ROOM

LOOKING FOR

BLACK CAT

THAT’S NOT

THERE





Working alongside Einstein at Princeton,Godel inherited a discipline that began torealize that the human mind is not a logicengine, but an analogy engine, a learning en-gine, a guessing engine, an aesthetics-drivenengine, and a self-correcting engine. In hisspeculative mathematics, Godel arrived at aproof revealing that “all axiomatic theories(top-down ‘explanations’) are necessarily in-complete and that ‘truth’ will always have ahole in it. In other words, all mathematics —even simple arithmetic — always relies on atleast one assumption that cannot be provenwithin its own system.”

To re-state this theorem (outside the lan-guage of numbers) would be to claim that itis fundamental to the nature of any explana-tion that it always contains an element thatremains unexplained and not understood.

Re-stated again — all explanations also

don’t explain.In the world of science — that fortress of

logic, reason, and knowledge — not-knowinghas inched its way into knowledge. Not toreplace it, and also not to contradict it . .. but instead to become acknowledged as anecessary part of how knowledge works. Theencyclopedic ambitions of the Enlightenment(the historical period leading up to Darwin)began losing ground, and Modernity set offwith what John Keats called “negative ca-pability” — the ability to tolerate, and evenenjoy, the experience of confusion or doubt.

THE BLIND MANMarcel Duchamp was a devoted student ofPoincare’s Science&Hypothesis(1905), whichnoted that “the aim of science is not thingsthemselves — as the dogmatists in their sim-plicity imagine — but the relations betweenthings; outside those relations there is noknowable reality.”

Creating an equivalent notion in the lan-guage of art, Duchamp formulated his fa-mous algebraic comparison:

The ratio a / b

a = the exhibition, b = the possibilitiesis in no way given by a number c

( a / b = c ) but by the sign ( / )which separates a & b.

Fifty years before conceptualism, Duchampdisrupted the territory of art at its core, byasking, “Can one make a work of art that isnot of ‘art’?” Can there be an art that isn’t?How can one invent an entirely other wayof thinking and knowing? Can one imaginea new epistemological map, equipped withan additional dimension that reaches outsideand beyond the familiar north/south poles ofknowing and not-knowing?

The contemporary cultural theorist SaratMaharaj has named this other epistemologi-cal dimension in his discussion of “xeno-epi-stemic” and proposal of “avidya”:

“In the provocative spirit of ‘the workof art that isn’t,’ why not adopt the term‘non-knowledge’ — despite pejorative con-notations — for visual arts’ cognitive pro-cesses? Non-knowledge, at any rate, is notat all the same as ‘ignorance.’ It refers tothe knowledge system’s ‘other,’ that inde-terminate xeno-zone between ‘knowledge/ig-norance.’ For this ‘infra-thin’ chink let’s usethe term Avidya. In sanskrit vidya means‘knowledge’ as in the phrase ‘to see-know’:the Latin cognate is video, to see, and itsmodern English cousin is ‘video.’ The pre-fix ‘A’ signals the neutral gear, a semi-freeze:the idea is that ‘systematic knowledge’ is neu-tralized in ‘Avidya’ but not entirely annulled.Vidya/Avidya are not quite binaries.”

As Duchamp explored and Maharaj rec-ognizes, art can operate outside the linearor binary axis of ignorance/knowledge andintroduce another epistemological dimension— nonknowledge, “avidya,” or productiveconfusion — that itself represents a power-ful form of knowledge, a way of knowing.

least one assumption that cannot be provenwithin its own system.”







The ratio a / b







Duchamp’s way into this other dimension wasby way of what he called the “infra-thin.”This is the place of Poincare’s fourth dimen-sion, Godel’s undecidability, Maharaj’s avid-ya, art that isn’t, and a work of art that isnot “of Art.”

Even Denis Diderot (the inventor of theEncyclopedia), did not consider confusion tobe the enemy of knowledge. He saw — be-yond good/bad — confusion as the conditionthat defines all of us. As a result, Diderotdidn’t seek to abolish it, but imagined that“confusion could lead us to a new realism!”and identified positive and productive formsof confusion. In Letter on the Blind (1749),Diderot embraced the confusion of the blindman, “for if understanding the world requiredbreaking down any subject to its original, el-emental components and then putting themback together again in an orderly fashion with-out skipping any steps, then the blind man— with his superior powers of abstractionand speculation — can do it best.”

Returning to Duchamp: after his ready-made urinal was rejected by the 1917 Armoryshow, he co-published two issues of a smallsatirical magazine called The Blind Man, re-ferring to the short-sightedness of the crit-ical establishment and of the viewing pub-lic with regards to modern art. The articlesin the journal were left anonymous, fuelingmore speculation.

This aphorism by Eric Dyckaerts perhapsbest summarizes such playful acts of not-knowing:

“If there’s a discrepancy between certaintyand truth, the certainty of the discrepancysabotages its truth.”

CHILD’S PLAY“The impulse to make a new language is astrong one,” Matt Mullican tells us, “kidsdo this all the time.” The potential of non-knowledge is often closely connected to thecuriosity of children. Not only do childreninvent new languages all the time, but thoselanguages form the basis for a pedagogicalmethod used in kindergartens around theworld. Soon after the Second World War,Italian schoolteacher Loris Malaguzzi starteda child-care program near the Northern Ital-ian city of Reggio Emilia.

What is now known as the “Reggio EmiliaMethod” sees children as little researcherswho strive to understand the world, makingtheir own theories to explain it. A teacher’sresponsibility is to guide their natural cu-riosity rather than replace it with a knowl-edge that is foreign to them. Each childhas a particular theory in a particular lan-guage, making a school into a place of a hun-dred theories in a hundred languages. Whiletraditional pedagogy tends to favor one ofthem and discourage the ninety-nine others,the Reggio method recognizes the value ofkeeping them all, allowing the child to inserta beautifully-impossible cacophony into thefabric of knowledge.

This line of thought culminated in 1987with French philosopher Jacques Ranciere’sThe Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in

Intellectual Emancipation. In it, he arguedhow the traditional teacher-student relation-ship does nothing but reinforce inequality,stultifying the learner. A non-emancipatedstudent “is the one who ignores that he doesnot know what he does not know and ignoreshow to know it. The master is not only he









Intellectual Emancipation. In it, he arguedhow the traditional teacher-student relation-ship does nothing but reinforce inequality,stultifying the learner. A non-emancipatedstudent “is the one who ignores that he doesnot know what he does not know and ignoreshow to know it. The master is not only hewho exactly knows what remains unknownto the ignorance,” [but] “he also knows howto make it knowable, at what time and whatplace, according to what protocol.”

A student is held captive by his or herreliance on explanations, “But the child whois explained to will devote his intelligence tothe work of grieving: to understanding, thatis to say, to understanding that he doesn’tunderstand unless he is explained to.”

Ranciere insists on the equality of all in-telligences and considers the central goal ofeducation to be the revelation of an intel-ligence to itself, and not the gift of a pre-ordained “knowledge.” In his book, he dis-cusses the emancipatory potential in teachersremaining ignorant of what they teach, andto act instead as enforcers and verifiers of thestudent’s own will-to-learn. It is the experi-ence of learning — the doing — that matters,not the knowing of teaching. Moreover, “thestudent of the ignorant master learns whathis master does not know, since he does notlearn his master’s knowledge.”

CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE INIn one of his metalogues with an imaginarychild, Gregory Bateson wrote that “in orderto think new thoughts or to say new thingswe have to break up all our ready-made ideasand shuffle the pieces.”

In his foreword to the well-titled exhibi-tion Things We Don’t Understand, curatedby Roger M. Buergel and Ruth Noack, Died-rich Kramer notes that “It is not always easyto be confronted with situations that invali-date entrenched patterns of understanding.The value of this confrontation is directlyproportional to our ability to convert the cri-sis of insecurity into the fertile potential ofchange.”

With that in mind, let us recognize theimportance of not understanding a work ofart. A work of art opens up that world ofnon-knowledge and helps to make sure wedon’t lose sight of it, keeping us curious andactively speculating. “Artists don’t solve pro-blems, they invent new ones,” (Bruce Nau-man), “Art isn’t here to explain things,” (Jo-seph Beuys), “The artist has an unknowa-bility: the ability to unknow,” (Sarat Ma-haraj); Robert Rauschenberg said “I couldnot live without confusion”; and Bruno Mu-nari is even more to the point: “Il piu grandeostacolo alla comprensione di un’opera d’artee quello di voler capire.” (AH)

who exactly knows what remains unknownto the ignorance,” [but] “he also knows howto make it knowable, at what time and whatplace, according to what protocol.”






He stood up from the bench and walked backinto the inner space, towards the kitchen,raising his voice asking does anyone wantsome soup. Pumpkin. It was clear that he’dalready prepared this courtesy, calling outmore for the sake of speaking his own mindfor his stomach, and provoking us into think-ing about food and considering our own hung-er. He lit the fire under the pan and lifted thelid. The sound of his words carried on andout to us, as he mashed the pumpkins, abovethe pans and cutlery. He turned around toopen a cupboard door and take four deep,white glazed bowls, and four plates. Thesewere stacked and placed on the sideboard.Turning towards a drawer under the side-board next to the sink, he pulled out spoons,knives, a ladle and a longer serrated knife.These he laid on the plates together with thepiled bowls and carried them out to us, lay-ing them down in the middle of the table andthen arranging four places for lunch. Fac-ing me, still talking, he put the knives andforks down for his own point of view: knifeand spoon right, fork left; then corrected thesetting, “So now, after all these years,” helaughingly scolded himself. Another trip intothe kitchen, humming to the removal of pa-per wrappers brought back a square woodenboard with a large loaf to one side, a selectionof cheese and cold meats on the other.“Help yourselves.” (WH)

How Media Masters Reality #2

THEY CAME

TO SEE

WHO CAME

TIVOLI, NY — You know the script: A pol-itician and a military spokesperson mountthe stage, each takes their place behind apodium. They face the ladies and gentle-men of the press and a bank of TV cameras.A line of flags provides an appropriate back-drop as the politician begins to speak. Thepolitician reminds us of the necessity of theaction they have taken. The politician re-minds us that we did not want war, in factwe did everything in our power to preventconflict, but if an aggressor willfully turnsaside all overtures for a peaceful resolution,and if the aggressor continues to threaten thefundamental values of our society, then thereis no choice.

The military spokesperson now points toa screen demonstrating the efficiency of theweaponry our forces have employed againstthe aggressor. It also displays evidence of themilitary capacity of the aggressor. It seems ifthey were given the opportunity they couldinflict terrible harm on our forces, and to theway of life many have died to preserve.

But the press briefing is more than just ascript; you also need the stage, the podium,the uniforms, the flags, the press, and thecameras if you want to master reality.

Simply through their performance, cer-tain media events can have an effect in theworld. In 2003, a military man mountedthe stage and provided evidence of Weaponsof Mass Destruction. What surprised manyabout this performance was the comparativeease with which it was exercised and the po-tency of its result — a war could be prose-cuted despite any real “evidence” producedto suggest that such weapons did exist. Itwas as if the whole machinery of the pressbriefing was a feedback loop, which justifiedmilitary action but also legitimized the pressbriefing itself. This is mastering reality.

For those of us raised with the notionthat the press and TV news exist to some-how “get to the bottom” of things, and thatthe news media is a forum in which thingscan be proven or disproved, the ease withwhich transparent nonsense became a matterof fact that could justify fatal action came asa shock.

Whatever this thing we call “the newsmedia” is, it is not in its nature to simply testmatters of fact. The WMD incident demon-strated that the apparatus of the media ac-tually has the ability to produce facts. Thepress briefing demonstrates two fundamen-tal things about the structure of contempo-rary media: 1) It’s a feedback loop that giveslegitimacy and conveys narrative to its pro-ducers, 2) The incantation that “produced”WMD reminds us of French philosopher Mi-chel Foucault’s most valuable lesson — dis-

course produces its object.Today I’d like to travel back to the be-

ginning of the video revolution and reflect ontwo media events produced by Ant Farm in1975: Media Burn — in which a customizedCadillac was driven through a pyramid ofblazing television sets — and The Eternal


THEY CAME

TO SEE

WHO CAME









Frame — a re-enactment of the assassinationof John F. Kennedy.

Twenty-two seconds of footage of the as-sassination, taken in Dallas in 1963 by Abra-ham Zapruda, was sold to Life magazine onthe night of the shooting for $150,000. Life

published stills from the film shortly after-wards. (Later, the Zapruda family wouldbe paid $10 million by the US governmentfor rights to the film). Stills were also re-produced in the Warren Commission Reportof September 1964. The Warren Commis-sion also used the film as the basis for a se-ries of reconstructions that served as part oftheir investigation. The film itself was notbroadcast until 1975. Perhaps more than anyother, this moving image defined the turbu-lence of the 1960s for a wide American publicduring the 1970s.

Don Delillo’s 1997 novelUnderground cap-tures the sense of this moment in a fictionalaccount of one of the film’s first public, orsemi-public, viewings in the summer of 1974.The scene takes place in an apartment withtelevision sets in every room. In each rooma video of the same piece of footage plays,with a slight delay.

Delillo writes: “The event was rare andstrange. It was the screening of a bootlegcopy of an eight-millimeter home movie thatran for twenty seconds. A little over twentyseconds probably. The footage was known asthe Zapruda film and almost no one outsidethe government had seen it. [ . . . ]

“The footage started rolling in one roombut not the others and it was filled with slursand jostles, it was totally jostled footage, ahome movie shot with Super 8, and the limou-sine came down the street, muddied by sun-glint, and the head dipped out of the frameand reappeared and then the force of the shotthat killed him, unexpectedly the head shot,and people in the room went ooh, and thenthe next ooh, and five seconds later the roomat the back went ooh, the same release ofbreath every time, like blurts of disbelief.”

In this scene, Delillo combines multiplescreens plus the delay techniques of Dan Gra-ham’s video pieces from that era (a techniquealso used by Gillette & Schneider in theirhighly influential Wipe Cycle). It merges theuse of video as radical software — elementscan be patched and re-configured in waysthat were not possible with film — togetherwith with an understanding that televisionhas been around long enough to be regardedas junk. All this is blended with the shocktactics of art-media groups from the early 70ssuch as Ant Farm, Radical Software, TVTV(Top Value Television).

If the 8mm footage was created in the ageof the news reel, it is mediated in the age ofvideo, which operates under the economy ofthe feedback loop — to be re-recorded on totape and repeated over and over again, to beset in the eternal frame, to cycle within theeternal return of “rolling news.”

Ant Farm’s re-enactment of the Kennedyassassination, The Eternal Frame, was madethe year that Zapruda’s footage became “pub-licly available.” Ant Farm’s copy of the filmcame from conspiracy theory sources and wasoriginally bootlegged out of the Life maga-zine lab.

Ant Farm originally wanted to film earlyin the morning, to avoid the crowds, but itbecame evident to them that the light wasnot the same as the light on the Zapruda

Frame — a re-enactment of the assassinationof John F. Kennedy.

Twenty-two seconds of footage of the as-sassination, taken in Dallas in 1963 by Abra-ham Zapruda, was sold to Life magazine onthe night of the shooting for $150,000. Life

published stills from the film shortly after-wards. (Later, the Zapruda family wouldbe paid $10 million by the US governmentfor rights to the film). Stills were also re-produced in the Warren Commission Reportof September 1964. The Warren Commis-sion also used the film as the basis for a se-ries of reconstructions that served as part oftheir investigation. The film itself was notbroadcast until 1975. Perhaps more than anyother, this moving image defined the turbu-lence of the 1960s for a wide American publicduring the 1970s.

Don Delillo’s 1997 novelUnderground cap-tures the sense of this moment in a fictionalaccount of one of the film’s first public, orsemi-public, viewings in the summer of 1974.The scene takes place in an apartment withtelevision sets in every room. In each rooma video of the same piece of footage plays,with a slight delay.

Delillo writes: “The event was rare andstrange. It was the screening of a bootlegcopy of an eight-millimeter home movie thatran for twenty seconds. A little over twentyseconds probably. The footage was known asthe Zapruda film and almost no one outsidethe government had seen it. [ . . . ]

“The footage started rolling in one roombut not the others and it was filled with slursand jostles, it was totally jostled footage, ahome movie shot with Super 8, and the limou-sine came down the street, muddied by sun-glint, and the head dipped out of the frameand reappeared and then the force of the shotthat killed him, unexpectedly the head shot,and people in the room went ooh, and thenthe next ooh, and five seconds later the roomat the back went ooh, the same release ofbreath every time, like blurts of disbelief.”

In this scene, Delillo combines multiplescreens plus the delay techniques of Dan Gra-ham’s video pieces from that era (a techniquealso used by Gillette & Schneider in theirhighly influential Wipe Cycle). It merges theuse of video as radical software — elementscan be patched and re-configured in waysthat were not possible with film — togetherwith with an understanding that televisionhas been around long enough to be regardedas junk. All this is blended with the shocktactics of art-media groups from the early 70ssuch as Ant Farm, Radical Software, TVTV(Top Value Television).

If the 8mm footage was created in the ageof the news reel, it is mediated in the age ofvideo, which operates under the economy ofthe feedback loop — to be re-recorded on totape and repeated over and over again, to beset in the eternal frame, to cycle within theeternal return of “rolling news.”

Ant Farm’s re-enactment of the Kennedyassassination, The Eternal Frame, was madethe year that Zapruda’s footage became “pub-licly available.” Ant Farm’s copy of the filmcame from conspiracy theory sources and wasoriginally bootlegged out of the Life maga-zine lab.

Ant Farm originally wanted to film earlyin the morning, to avoid the crowds, but itbecame evident to them that the light wasnot the same as the light on the Zaprudafootage and they needed it to be as close tothe “real thing” as possible.

Via the Warren commission, the Zaprudafootage was already caught in a media feed-back loop, forming a catalyst that generatedthe noise of speculation, folding back to cre-ate a conspiracy panic. Because it was notvisible as a moving image for eleven yearsafter the event, the footage became the ab-sent center of the Kennedy assassination —22 seconds of action stretching into eternity.

The re-enactment served as a responseto the belief that the Zapruda footage couldsomehow reveal something that had been hid-den and repressed. But maybe the footage isre-played and re-enacted so often preciselybecause it fails to represent. A failure ofrepresentation is, in psychoanalytical terms,the central characteristic of trauma, but thereenactment also fails to speak of somethingat the centre of the technology of non-scriptedfilm: its promise to display evidence, its pro-mise to carry the burden of proof.

Four years after Ant Farm’s historic me-dia interventions, Pope John Paul II stagedhis own media event when he visited Poland.The visit was described by writers DanielDayan and Elihu Katz as a shamanized me-

dia event, which through its staging actuallysteered a course of events (the rise of the Sol-idarity movement and the eventual collapseof the Polish government). The event wasa ceremony, but a ceremony of a particu-lar sort. Like the incantation of Weapons ofMass Destruction, through its performanceit established the meaning of the event andinstitutionalized it in collective memory. Itis the moment of shamanistic feedback whena new definition of what is possible is estab-lished, and it is then that the next step isurged forward. The media event can be seenas a form of consecration because it gathersinto itself a series of values that feed backto form a narrative of a state of affairs thatrequires action. The ceremony of the count-down (which is itself a media invention, in-troduced in Fritz Lang’s Frau im Mond, in1929) begins the narrative that ends withthe moon landing. This event — staged fortelevision from countdown to touchdown —inscribes a series of values through its perfor-mance. It speaks of an era of positivist tri-umph, when American know-how knew how,it represented the end of an era in which thevision of a murdered president was finally re-alized. It joins a string of images that arepre-scripted, including the 22 seconds of theZepruda footage and the televised funeral ofKennedy, which folds back into its self tomake a narrative of reality.

Media Burn was performed on July 4, 1975,a few months prior to The Eternal Frame.A modified 1959 Cadillac El Dorado Biarritz(The Phantom Dream Car), piloted by twodrivers guided only by a video monitor, wasdriven through a pyramid of blazing televi-sion sets. As in The Eternal Frame, Media

Burn featured the Artist-President, John F.Kennedy, played by Doug Hall. He gives acontent-less speech that sets the stage for themain event. Indeed, the speech highlightsthe degree to which a media event needs tobe ritualized. The speech is one of the sup-port structures that need to be put into placein order to constitute a “real” pseudo-event.The President speaks:

“Who can deny that we are a nation ad-dicted to television and the constant flow ofmedia, and not a few of us are frustratedby this addiction. Now I ask you, my fellowAmericans, haven’t you ever wanted to putyour foot through your television screen?”

The artist-president is the rhetorical shellof politics itself, his speech collapses past, fu-ture and present as the ghost of politics pastreports on the significance of what is aboutto happen.

“Today, there stand before us two mediamatadors, brave young men from Ant Farmwho are about to go forth into the unknown,and let me say this, these artists are pioneers,as surly as Louis and Clark when they ex-plored uncharted territory, they are pioneersas surly as Armstrong and Aldrin when theyset foot on the moon . . . ”

Ant Farm’s Chip Lord, speaking on thesubject ofMedia Burn in 2002, cited MichaelShamberg’s seminal book Guerrilla Televi-

sion (1971) which inspired various initiativescombining the collectivist ideals of the 1960swith the potentially democratizing (new) tech-nologies of video, closed-circuit TV, and ca-ble of the 1970s: “[Using TV to destroy TV]was consistent with the Guerrilla Television

position, to destroy the monopoly of central-ized television. There was a lot of rhetoricabout how cable TV was going to democra-tize production.”

Ant Farm’s media critique can be under-stood as a critical response to the promiseof video, and perhaps more than any otherartists they articulated its contradictions. Re-leased from the monopoly of the networksand accessed by ordinary citizens, the Porta-pak video camera promised personal and so-cial empowerment — make your own socialand technological networks, make and dis-tribute your own programs, construct yourown social software, democratize artistic prac-tice. But, as we will see in subsequent is-sues of How Media Masters Reality, the val-ues of self-empowerment could easily be ac-commodated within a media feedback systemin which our performance becomes not onlya commodity that we sell to ourselves butalso a means by which the media could nar-rativize and legitimize itself.

In 1962, Daniel Boorstin coined the term“pseudo-event” to describe events designedsolely to be reported: presidential debates,press conferences (and media burns). ButAndy Warhol understood better than any-one else that the media event isn’t somethingyou simply consume. Describing the unfold-ing hallucination of the factory, Warhol said,“They came to see who came.” The peoplewho come to see the party become the party,the figure and ground become a single flow-ing image. In the same way, the figure andground of the press shifts backwards and for-wards from the press as they arrive to reportthe event and to the press as their bodiesprovide the props for the event. In the nextinstallment of this series we will look at whywe, as performers in the media feedback loop,are losing the script and picking up the for-mat. (SR)


THEY CAME

TO SEE

WHO CAME









7 NOVEMBER 2009

A Reconsideration of the Newspaper Indus-try in 5 Easy Allusions (1): as you stare atthis form, watch your perspective flip backand forth.

Homer . . .John Milton . . .

Johann Sebastian Bach . . .

Jorge Luis Borges . . .

. . . and James Joyce all became blindin later life.








The ratio a / b















Intellectual Emancipation. In it, he arguedhow the traditional teacher-student relation-ship does nothing but reinforce inequality,stultifying the learner. A non-emancipatedstudent “is the one who ignores that he doesnot know what he does not know and ignoreshow to know it. The master is not only he

who exactly knows what remains unknownto the ignorance,” [but] “he also knows howto make it knowable, at what time and whatplace, according to what protocol.”













The ratio a / b







From the New York Public Library Picture Collection: “Beijing. Reading the newspaper.The headlines announce good news: ‘The Nationalist armies are advancing toward the Southand gaining important successes.’ On the same day the Communists reached the city gates.”

TIME

CAPTCHA’D

FOR GLOBAL

GOOD?




the archive of the New York Times.The case of reCAPTCHA once again un-

derscores the fact that text takes time. Eventhe seemingly insignificant act of parrotingback some random letters or words occupiesus for a collective 150,000 hours everyday.But while the typical production of text ismade by one or a few writers producing wordsserially in sentences one after another, re-CAPTCHA has millions of users producingtext randomly, separating words from theirproper context and syntax and presentingthem to us based on their ambiguous formand unlikely transliteration instead. Ratherthan invention, reCAPTCHA’s method is al-gorithmic. And rather than originality, re-CAPTCHA’s word generating rationale boilsdown to one thing: verification.

Verification is also central to the snarl ofissues surrounding the legality of the GoogleBooks project more generally. Many worksit has scanned, like Dickens’s writings, werealready free of copyright and in the public do-main long before the project started. (MarkTwain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,which entered the public domain in 1942,was first published in 1884. Dickens died in1870.) However, many of the works GoogleBooks has scanned are still under copyright,and Google has scanned them anyway in anattempt to make them more accessible —like a “card catalog,” according to Google— however, authors’ and publishers’ rightsgroups have objected to this and sued Googleto stop them from scanning works under ac-tive copyright. For another large segmentof the books Google has scanned, the copy-right status is simply unknown. So-called“orphan” works, under copyright but nowout-of-print, are those works for which, af-ter a “reasonable effort” has been made tolocate a current copyright holder, no suchperson can be found. On one hand, Googlemust attempt to verify whether or not a cur-rent copyright holder exists. On the other, itmust verify to the court that it has been ex-haustive in conducting its search in order tomake the book available to users of GoogleBooks. And this two-part effort has led towhat the New York Times described earlierthis year as “A Google Search of a DistinctlyRetro Kind.” The article continues,

“Since the copyright holders can be any-where and not necessarily online — givenhow many books are old or out of print —it became obvious that what was needed wasa huge push in that relic of the pre-Internetage: print.

“So while there is a large direct-mail ef-fort, a dedicated Web site about the settle-ment in 36 languages, and an online strategyof the kind you would expect from Google,the bulk of the legal notice spending — about$7 million of a total of $8 million — is goingto newspapers, magazines, even poetry jour-nals, with at least one ad in each country.These efforts make this among the largestprint legal-notice campaigns in history.

“That Google is in the position of payingfor so many print ads ‘is hilarious — it is theultimate irony,’ said Robert Klonoff, dean ofLewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore.”

Klonoff’s comment is apt. In its attemptto digitize all the world’s books, Google hasnot only been forced to search for what itcannot find, but the company, which madeits billions by serving relevant advertisementsto users of its search engine, must now spendmillions placing similar ads in tiny publica-tions that its Google Books service (and thescanning of books more generally) may ulti-mately render obsolete.

For the readers of Discovering Dickens,Google’s hundreds of little text advertismentsmay seem reminiscent of the ads scatteredthroughout the original part-issues of Dick-ens’s serial works, each of which included16 pages of advertising flanking 32 pages oforiginal text. The benefits of the “Invisi-ble Spine Supporter” and “Dr. Lecock’s Fe-male Wafers” were proclaimed alongside en-treaties urging buyers to purchase “AlpacaUmbrellas” and “Children’s Frock Coats andPelisses.” It was a bazaar inside of Bleak

House, a marketplace within Martin Chuz-

zlewit. For Dickens’s publishers, his text pro-vided a perfect vehicle for additional adver-tising revenue. But, with the aid of the re-cently developed idea of copyright, Dickens’stext would soon become a commodity of itsvery own. (RG)

Ant Farm: The Eternal Frame (1975) and (overleaf) Media Burn (1975)

Performa, a non-profit multidisciplinary artsorganization established by RoseLee Gold-berg in 2004, is dedicated to exploring thecritical role of live performance in the his-tory of twentieth century art and to encour-aging new directions in performance for thetwenty-first century.

The second First/Last Newspaper was as-sembled by DEXTER SINISTER with contri-butions by Steve Rushton, Angie Keefer, RobGiampietro, Will Holder, Francis McKee, Pe-ter Fischli & David Weiss, Ryan Gander, JanVerwoert, Nick Paumgarten, Snowden Snow-den, and Jason Fulford. Produced under theumbrella of PERFORMA 09 and presentedin partnership with Times Square Alliance.Edited in cooperation with Defne Ayas andVirginie Bobin.

Masthead set in Strike Alphabet courtesyShannon Ebner.

Performa, a non-profit multidisciplinary artsorganization established by RoseLee Gold-berg in 2004, is dedicated to exploring thecritical role of live performance in the his-tory of twentieth century art and to encour-aging new directions in performance for thetwenty-first century.

Ryan Gander, Banner for Europe, 1999. A banner on the building site for the commonwealthgames swimming pool, Oxford Road, Manchester, UK.

ICONS

GOVERN

ACTION

MANHATTAN — “There is nothing funnyabout the urinal,” Peter Fend insists. Per-haps not. Nor is there anything particularlyfunny about the deteriorating state of ourglobal ecosystem. Nevertheless, several hun-dred otherwise sober attendees at a recentsummit held at the New York Public Librarylaughed heartily as Fend showed a sequenceof Powerpoint (TM) slides leading directlyfrom Marcel Duchamp’s iconic urinal, Foun-tain, through Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty,to a drawing of the globe in which the world’soceans appear to be spiraling down the tubes.

Fend was on his way to Germany fromNew Zealand, where he divides his time, witha stopover of a few days in New York to ap-pear at the summit. There, he was allottedseven minutes to present the work of OceanEarth, the corporation he founded in 1980,which has been the focus of his consider-able energies for the last thirty years. Fendcited Duchamp’s Fountain to illustrate whathe sees as the profound influence of icons inthe development of political and social insti-tutions: “Icons govern action. The urinal,like Morton Shamberg’s God, which is justa piece of plumbing, governs subsequent ac-tion. Throughout much of western culture,the notion of the state has been embodied inthe leader, the hero, the standing figure. Ifan icon is terrain, or surroundings, instead ofa role model or hero, then it causes a differ-ent orientation of social activity — we cometo see the ideal as our surroundings, not aleader. The surroundings are whatever bowlwe happen to be in.”

For Fend, Duchamp’s Fountain, albeit aurinal on a pedestal, is the obvious metaphorto effectively lead society in the direction oftopological priorities, toward a radical reori-entation of values. While his audience maybe laughing, Fend is not. He is taking it allquite literally, and he has a point. After all,if wars are fought over imaginary lines, thenicons — the images we project onto the world— would seem to govern action, indeed.

Ocean Earth was formed by Fend in part-nership with fellow artists Colen Fitzgibbon,Jenny Holzer, Peter Nadin, Richard Prince,and Robin Winters as the legal entity OceanEarth Construction and Development Corpo-

ration. Over three decades, the company’strajectoryhas extended from satellite imageryand media programming to the developmentof alternative energy resources and a nation-wide school curriculum with a hands-on ped-agogical agenda for sustainable ecology. Ac-cording to the 1981 Corporate Statement,“Ocean Earth Construction and DevelopmentCorporation develops regional plansand otherarchitectural programs that promote thosemeans of energy production which in no waycontribute to ecological breakdown of the pla-net.” Instead, Ocean Earth would pursue de-velopment of solar-generated energy in a va-riety of forms, including sea-based biomass,degradable chiefly to methane — the projectto which Fend and Ocean Earth are primarilydedicated today, and which is in pilot devel-opment for the exhibition Ruhr 2010.

To be clear, Ocean Earth, by Fend’s own

Unlike the utopian proposals put forth byCedric Price, Archigram, and other vision-ary architects, the proposals of Ocean Earthhave taken the form of viable solutions formass communications, education, and energyproduction. In many cases, Ocean Earth’swork has entailed re-conceptualization of so-cial and political territories along completelydifferent lines, as well as a rethinking of la-bor. The work sits in unfamiliar territory,somewhere in-between established paradigmsfor art, business, and science, projecting aworldview somewhere in-between capitalismand anarchist utopia.

Fend is tall and thin, apparently averseto palaver. Conversations with him beginas if they might be ended at any momentby forces beyond immediate control. Un-til then, there is a great deal of ground tobe covered and not enough time to cover it.To a meeting during his recent trip to NewYork, he brought an oversized suitcase, fullof drawings and papers, from which he pro-cured plans and documentation from OceanEarth as he spoke. Files were opened. Xe-roxes were made. Photographs were taken.The air in the room was bated. In Fend’scompany, one has the palpable sense that theclock is ticking on civilization.

Fend expresses frustration with the eco-nomic disempowerment of artists. “I havelong argued that the art world is corrupt.It is not transparent and not financially orlegally honest. The power structure wantsart to be disempowered.” It does not wantthe changes that result from new thought,i.e., art. As a result, the art world has en-gendered a religion of disbelief. “Whatever isshown or said is supposed to be disbelieved,and it is supposed to not become real. It issupposed to not work.”

He calls for artists to assume political andeconomic power to realize their ideas, partic-ularly because he believes it is the role ofartists to conceive of new solutions to ad-dress deteriorating ecological conditions. Helaments, “artists are often afraid of takingtheir art to its architectural or mediaspacepossibilities.” As historical reference pointsfor the influential practice he envisions, Fendcites Renaissance artist-engineers Le Notreand Vauban, who developed new strategiesfor political control of space. Vauban de-signed a pentagon-shaped fortress for LouisXIV that clearly influenced the design of theU.S. Pentagon building, and Le Notre is well-known as the designer of the landscape ofmodern France, which eventually influencedthe city plan of Washington, D.C.

While Fend’s models for practice are ser-vants of the state, his agenda for art is cul-tivation of territory. He explains, “Ratherthan talk of money, one could use the broaderterm, from French, of la Richesse. Or abun-dance. Our task is to assure that the ter-ritory where we are has abundance, that itcan support the healthy and long lives of thenative animals and plants, and also supportpeople.” Thus considered, wealth is territo-rial. When people reduce wealth productionto commodities, with earnings gained fromsales to consumers, then society takes a de-pletive approach to wealth. It plunders theland. The French word for a site of richesseis patrimoine.

What are we doing about our patrimony?What are we doing, to use Duchamp’s model,about our urinals? He called them Fontaines— that is, they would be sources, or foun-tains, of more richesse and abundance.

With characteristic impudence towards anacademic status quo, Fend reaches beyondthe widely accepted reading of the urinal —that the meaning of a cultural work is unsta-ble, and is more or less an effect of the so-cial and political space in which it exists —to emphasize instead the significance of itsphysical, formal qualities, in which he sees anew paradigm for thought and action.

Marco Roth of n+1, who met Fend dur-ing his recent trip, perhaps best describes thework of Ocean Earth as “the hopeful spiritof Situationism (soyez raisonnable, deman-dez l’impossible!) grafted on to the tech-nological imagination of Futurism. If thoseItalians hadn’t been fascists, they would’vebeen a bit like Ocean Earth. It seems like agrandiose project, but it’s grandiosity for thesake of the community, not for the individualartist. He strikes me as the most thoughtfulkind of anarchist, someone who really askswhat it would take to break the state or cor-porate monopolies on the means of control,surveillance and speed, and then sets abouttrying to realize it.” (AK)

ICONS

GOVERN

ACTION

MANHATTAN — “There is nothing funnyabout the urinal,” Peter Fend insists. Per-haps not. Nor is there anything particularlyfunny about the deteriorating state of ourglobal ecosystem. Nevertheless, several hun-dred otherwise sober attendees at a recentsummit held at the New York Public Librarylaughed heartily as Fend showed a sequenceof Powerpoint (TM) slides leading directlyfrom Marcel Duchamp’s iconic urinal, Foun-tain, through Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty,to a drawing of the globe in which the world’soceans appear to be spiraling down the tubes.

Fend was on his way to Germany fromNew Zealand, where he divides his time, witha stopover of a few days in New York to ap-pear at the summit. There, he was allottedseven minutes to present the work of OceanEarth, the corporation he founded in 1980,which has been the focus of his consider-able energies for the last thirty years. Fendcited Duchamp’s Fountain to illustrate whathe sees as the profound influence of icons inthe development of political and social insti-tutions: “Icons govern action. The urinal,like Morton Shamberg’s God, which is justa piece of plumbing, governs subsequent ac-tion. Throughout much of western culture,the notion of the state has been embodied inthe leader, the hero, the standing figure. Ifan icon is terrain, or surroundings, instead ofa role model or hero, then it causes a differ-ent orientation of social activity — we cometo see the ideal as our surroundings, not aleader. The surroundings are whatever bowlwe happen to be in.”

For Fend, Duchamp’s Fountain, albeit aurinal on a pedestal, is the obvious metaphorto effectively lead society in the direction oftopological priorities, toward a radical reori-entation of values. While his audience maybe laughing, Fend is not. He is taking it allquite literally, and he has a point. After all,if wars are fought over imaginary lines, thenicons — the images we project onto the world— would seem to govern action, indeed.

Ocean Earth was formed by Fend in part-nership with fellow artists Colen Fitzgibbon,Jenny Holzer, Peter Nadin, Richard Prince,and Robin Winters as the legal entity OceanEarth Construction and Development Corpo-

ration. Over three decades, the company’strajectoryhas extended from satellite imageryand media programming to the developmentof alternative energy resources and a nation-wide school curriculum with a hands-on ped-agogical agenda for sustainable ecology. Ac-cording to the 1981 Corporate Statement,“Ocean Earth Construction and DevelopmentCorporation develops regional plansand otherarchitectural programs that promote thosemeans of energy production which in no waycontribute to ecological breakdown of the pla-net.” Instead, Ocean Earth would pursue de-velopment of solar-generated energy in a va-riety of forms, including sea-based biomass,degradable chiefly to methane — the projectto which Fend and Ocean Earth are primarilydedicated today, and which is in pilot devel-opment for the exhibition Ruhr 2010.

To be clear, Ocean Earth, by Fend’s ownaccount, is an architectural firm that onlyhappens to “use art ideas and arise from artpractices.” It is a corporation formed byartists, built on the legacy of Gordon Matta-Clark and others who embraced unconven-tional architectural practices, envisioning thereorganization of physical space according toecological priorities. In a culture in whichcontemporary art practice is often orientedtowards observation and critique, and art qui-etly, if disdainfully, seats itself somewhere to-wards the back of the academic or the media-entertainment bus, Fend makes an extraordi-nary claim for art, which resonates with histake on Fountain. As Fend puts it, “Art isthe best way to approach the problem [of eco-logical production] because it is a modelingof what the material values are.”

Since its inception, Ocean Earth has initi-ated a variety of projects using technologicalmeans to see and render landscape and po-tential energy resources in unorthodox ways.The group developed a television programwith Paul Sharits in 1981 called Space Force,which — in the spirit of Stewart Brand orBuckminster Fuller, though with a decidedlydarker tone — was intended to disseminateinformation from satellite observation of theearth to the public in order to “show thepublic what endangers it, be that pollution,soil exhaustion, mineral depletion, climac-tic changes, or hostile military preparations.Space Force exposes the public safety dan-gers to public view, with state-of-art advancesin video and film, in photography and televi-sion, most dramatically and most instanta-neously on television.”

The extension of Ocean Earth’s venturesinto mass media reflects Fend’s belief that“media is essentially territorial,” and there-fore an aspect of architecture. In the 1980s,using publicly-available satellite imagery cap-tured by Landsat, a U.S. civilian satellite,members of Ocean Earth worked with NASAexperts to analyze these images and thus pro-duce commercially-viable information whichthey then sold to major news organizations,including NBC and the BBC. Although thecivilian satellite images were of inferior res-olution to more sophisticated military satel-lites, weather permitting, Ocean Earth couldsee enough to identify air bases and troopmovements in hot spots of conflict, includingLibya and the Falklands. In the context ofthe Cold War, the market for images of warzones was greater than that for prospectiveproject sites related to conservation, ecologyand land use.

By the end of the 1980s, most of OceanEarth’s founders and early collaborators, in-cluding artists Dennis Oppenheim, Paul Shar-its, Wolfgang Staehle, Kirsten Mosher, andTaro Suzuki had moved onto other pursuits.Meanwhile, Ocean Earth renewed its energy-focused work. In 1994, a proposal to be-gin methane production from algae extrac-tion and fermentation in Wellington, NewZealand, which had been many years in de-velopment, fell through. Subsequently, HeidiMardon, a New Zealander who had been aspearhead in the Wellington project, turnedto the public school system, becoming direc-tor of a program called Enviroschools, witha pilot group of three schools. From thisbeginning, in 1999, Enviroschools has grownover the past ten years to enroll 213,000 stu-dents today — roughly 5% of the entire NewZealand population.

Unlike the utopian proposals put forth byCedric Price, Archigram, and other vision-ary architects, the proposals of Ocean Earthhave taken the form of viable solutions formass communications, education, and energyproduction. In many cases, Ocean Earth’swork has entailed re-conceptualization of so-cial and political territories along completelydifferent lines, as well as a rethinking of la-bor. The work sits in unfamiliar territory,somewhere in-between established paradigmsfor art, business, and science, projecting aworldview somewhere in-between capitalismand anarchist utopia.

Fend is tall and thin, apparently averseto palaver. Conversations with him beginas if they might be ended at any momentby forces beyond immediate control. Un-til then, there is a great deal of ground tobe covered and not enough time to cover it.To a meeting during his recent trip to NewYork, he brought an oversized suitcase, fullof drawings and papers, from which he pro-cured plans and documentation from OceanEarth as he spoke. Files were opened. Xe-roxes were made. Photographs were taken.The air in the room was bated. In Fend’scompany, one has the palpable sense that theclock is ticking on civilization.

Fend expresses frustration with the eco-nomic disempowerment of artists. “I havelong argued that the art world is corrupt.It is not transparent and not financially orlegally honest. The power structure wantsart to be disempowered.” It does not wantthe changes that result from new thought,i.e., art. As a result, the art world has en-gendered a religion of disbelief. “Whatever isshown or said is supposed to be disbelieved,and it is supposed to not become real. It issupposed to not work.”

He calls for artists to assume political andeconomic power to realize their ideas, partic-ularly because he believes it is the role ofartists to conceive of new solutions to ad-dress deteriorating ecological conditions. Helaments, “artists are often afraid of takingtheir art to its architectural or mediaspacepossibilities.” As historical reference pointsfor the influential practice he envisions, Fendcites Renaissance artist-engineers Le Notreand Vauban, who developed new strategiesfor political control of space. Vauban de-signed a pentagon-shaped fortress for LouisXIV that clearly influenced the design of theU.S. Pentagon building, and Le Notre is well-known as the designer of the landscape ofmodern France, which eventually influencedthe city plan of Washington, D.C.

While Fend’s models for practice are ser-vants of the state, his agenda for art is cul-tivation of territory. He explains, “Ratherthan talk of money, one could use the broaderterm, from French, of la Richesse. Or abun-dance. Our task is to assure that the ter-ritory where we are has abundance, that itcan support the healthy and long lives of thenative animals and plants, and also supportpeople.” Thus considered, wealth is territo-rial. When people reduce wealth productionto commodities, with earnings gained fromsales to consumers, then society takes a de-pletive approach to wealth. It plunders theland. The French word for a site of richesseis patrimoine.

What are we doing about our patrimony?What are we doing, to use Duchamp’s model,about our urinals? He called them Fontaines

Part 2: Headless Body, Topless Bar

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NEWS FROM

NOWHERE

GLASGOW – Listen.“She thought fleas beautiful. Gazing at

their stained sections through the microscope,she once said, gave her a feeling as ecstaticas smoking cannabis. In her bedroom shekept them in cellophane bags, in order notto miss a thing that they were doing . . . Alifelong atheist. She admitted that she hadbeen tempted to believe in a creator whenshe discovered that the flea had a penis.”

It’s an obituary for Miriam Rothschild byAnne Wroe for The Economist, in 2005. Ac-cording to the journalist, Rothschild’s father“was a flea man” and that was the genesis ofthe passion that led her to discover the flea’sjumping mechanism. This obituary rangesfrom the eccentric to the strangely poeticas Wroe notes, “The smell of a very gentlysqueezed ladybird, she once said, will stay onyour hands for days.”

The obituary column is another of themany glorious cul-de-sacs to be found in thebest newspapers. It demands a disciplinefrom its writers that rivals that of the haiku.All the basic biographical information shouldbe included — date of birth and death, fam-ily, career etc. But it thrives on the tellingdetail and on anecdotes that would make anovelist weep in despair. Neil Gaiman, forinstance, cites The Telegraph’s tribute toColonel Michael Singleton as his favorite obit-uary. A prep school headmaster, Singletonwas Spartan in his regimen.

“Long walks, cold dormitories and regu-lar hymn-singing were also an integral partof the education, along with cricket nets andLatin prose. Despite a brisk code of disci-pline, Singleton took a laissez-faire approachout of the classroom. Every November 5 thesmallest boy in the school was sent down atunnel to light the very core of the bonfire.None, so far as anyone can recall, was everlost.”

This is not just life from another, van-ished world but also writing that understandsthe tone needed to delineate it precisely:

“What central heating there existed wasnot always effective, or even switched on.Boys were permitted to capture owls and keepthem in the fives court, provided they caughtenough sparrows to feed them. One boy re-calls being given the task of rearing a lambto which he developed some emotional at-tachment. The animal, called Lottie, disap-peared shortly before the school’s Christmasfeast, and the boy realised what had hap-pened only when he was the first to be sum-moned for second helpings.”

Humour and eccentricity certainly helpan obituary along and often it’s the moreobscure candidates who provide this whilethe famous dead bore us with their historicalachievements. Sometimes, though, an obitu-ary can shed an entirely new light on a tiredsubject as in the case of Lady Bird Johnson.Keith Colquhoun describes a moment in herlife like this: “November 22nd 1963 startedin a drizzle, but soon turned bright. Thesun shone on Dallas, the breeze was light,


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NOWHERE










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NEWS FROM

NOWHERE










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NOWHERE









account, is an architectural firm that onlyhappens to “use art ideas and arise from artpractices.” It is a corporation formed byartists, built on the legacy of Gordon Matta-Clark and others who embraced unconven-tional architectural practices, envisioning thereorganization of physical space according toecological priorities. In a culture in whichcontemporary art practice is often orientedtowards observation and critique, and art qui-etly, if disdainfully, seats itself somewhere to-wards the back of the academic or the media-entertainment bus, Fend makes an extraordi-nary claim for art, which resonates with histake on Fountain. As Fend puts it, “Art isthe best way to approach the problem [of eco-logical production] because it is a modelingof what the material values are.”

Since its inception, Ocean Earth has initi-ated a variety of projects using technologicalmeans to see and render landscape and po-tential energy resources in unorthodox ways.The group developed a television programwith Paul Sharits in 1981 called Space Force,which — in the spirit of Stewart Brand orBuckminster Fuller, though with a decidedlydarker tone — was intended to disseminateinformation from satellite observation of theearth to the public in order to “show thepublic what endangers it, be that pollution,soil exhaustion, mineral depletion, climac-tic changes, or hostile military preparations.Space Force exposes the public safety dan-gers to public view, with state-of-art advancesin video and film, in photography and televi-sion, most dramatically and most instanta-neously on television.”

The extension of Ocean Earth’s venturesinto mass media reflects Fend’s belief that“media is essentially territorial,” and there-fore an aspect of architecture. In the 1980s,using publicly-available satellite imagery cap-tured by Landsat, a U.S. civilian satellite,members of Ocean Earth worked with NASAexperts to analyze these images and thus pro-duce commercially-viable information whichthey then sold to major news organizations,including NBC and the BBC. Although thecivilian satellite images were of inferior res-olution to more sophisticated military satel-lites, weather permitting, Ocean Earth couldsee enough to identify air bases and troopmovements in hot spots of conflict, includingLibya and the Falklands. In the context ofthe Cold War, the market for images of warzones was greater than that for prospectiveproject sites related to conservation, ecologyand land use.

By the end of the 1980s, most of OceanEarth’s founders and early collaborators, in-cluding artists Dennis Oppenheim, Paul Shar-its, Wolfgang Staehle, Kirsten Mosher, andTaro Suzuki had moved onto other pursuits.Meanwhile, Ocean Earth renewed its energy-focused work. In 1994, a proposal to be-gin methane production from algae extrac-tion and fermentation in Wellington, NewZealand, which had been many years in de-velopment, fell through. Subsequently, HeidiMardon, a New Zealander who had been aspearhead in the Wellington project, turnedto the public school system, becoming direc-tor of a program called Enviroschools, witha pilot group of three schools. From thisbeginning, in 1999, Enviroschools has grownover the past ten years to enroll 213,000 stu-dents today — roughly 5% of the entire NewZealand population.


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Humour and eccentricity certainly helpan obituary along and often it’s the moreobscure candidates who provide this whilethe famous dead bore us with their historicalachievements. Sometimes, though, an obitu-ary can shed an entirely new light on a tiredsubject as in the case of Lady Bird Johnson.Keith Colquhoun describes a moment in herlife like this: “November 22nd 1963 startedin a drizzle, but soon turned bright. Thesun shone on Dallas, the breeze was light,and Lady Bird Johnson enjoyed the drivein the open limousine, even when the Se-cret Service man thrust her husband downto the floor, even when the car screeched soviolently round the corner by the hospitalthat she feared they would be flung out ofit. Looking towards the first limousine, shesaw what looked like ‘a drift of pink blossom’on the back seat. It was Jackie Kennedy ly-ing across her dying husband.”

Colquhoun, like his successor Ann Wroe,wrote for The Economist one of a few selectpapers that have transformed the obituaryinto a minor art form (The Telegraph andThe Independent are the others). At theirbest, obituary writers can sketch a momentof life that reveals something of an entire cul-ture. Colquhoun, for instance, implies farmore about empire, race, and human curios-ity that he states in these lines on a deceasedmonk:

“The achievement of Karl Kehrle, a Bene-dictine monk, was to breed a very decentBritish bee. Wherever in the world apiaristsmeet they speak in awe of Mr Kehrle’s sturdybee, which produces lots of honey and is re-luctant to sting. Like the British themselves,it is a mongrel, combining the virtues of thenative bee with those of worthy bees fromelsewhere. Mr Kehrle once heard of a promis-ing bee said to be found only in central Africa.Although in his 80s, in poor health and car-ried on the back of a friend, he tracked thebee down on the slopes of Mount Kiliman-jaro.”

These columns negate the idea of news,exposing current affairs and history itself asthe crude curriculum vitae of the rich andpowerful. Trading on the ostensible reasonfor their existence — the reporting of a death— they instead broadcast lives well lived orotherwise, replacing the order of intelligenceinformation with the random chaos of the ev-eryday.

This element of chaos characterizes manybyways of a newspaper, undermining its morestrategic aims. If obituaries are death lettersthat surreptitiously celebrate life then pressphotography only comes into its own whenit stumbles on a corpse. Photography is per-haps, for editors, the lowest permissible formof journalism (it eschews words entirely, cir-cumventing reason to rush directly towardsour nerve centers). But in the face of disas-ter, photography will overturn words.

On Friday 13th, January 1928, the New

York Daily News ran just such a front page.Under a headline reduced to one word —“DEAD!” — there was a full cover pictureof a masked woman strapped to an electricchair in Sing Sing prison. Ruth Snyder, ahousewife from Queens and Judd Gray, acorset salesman and Snyder’s lover, had mur-dered her husband Albert, the editor of Mo-

tor Boating magazine. Thomas Howard, aDaily News photographer, was present as awitness to her execution and, unknown to theguards, had strapped a camera on his ankleto capture the image. The original shot ispitched upwards at a near 45-degree angle,showing Ruth Snyder beyond the shoes of thesurrounding witnesses. The image printedon the front page of the Friday 13th Daily

News, however, is a straightened and croppedclose-up of Snyder strapped to the chair. Atthe bottom of the page runs a meta-caption,commenting as much on the publication ofthe image as on the story itself:

and Lady Bird Johnson enjoyed the drivein the open limousine, even when the Se-cret Service man thrust her husband downto the floor, even when the car screeched soviolently round the corner by the hospitalthat she feared they would be flung out ofit. Looking towards the first limousine, shesaw what looked like ‘a drift of pink blossom’on the back seat. It was Jackie Kennedy ly-ing across her dying husband.”









RUTH SNYDER’S DEATH PICTURED! —

This is perhaps the most remarkable exclu-

sive picture in the history of criminology. It

shows the actual scene in the Sing Sing death

house as the lethal current surged through

Ruth Snyder’s body at 11:?? last night. Her

helmeted head is stiffened in death, her face

masked and an electrode strapped to her bare

right leg. The autopsy table on which her

body was removed is beside her. Judd Gray,

mumbling a prayer, followed her down the

narrow corridor at 11:11. “Father, forgive

them, for they don’t know what they are do-

ing!” were Ruth’s last words. The picture is

the first Sing Sing execution picture and first

of a woman’s electrocution.

That Daily News front page overturnedall sense of “news.” The power of the im-age went far beyond the story of Ruth Sny-der and Judd Gray’s crime and far beyondany treatise on criminology. It thrust readersinto deeper issues of ontology, compelled thenewspaper to publish an additional 750,000copies to meet demand and confronted thepopulation with an incomprehensible visionof the world.

Newspapers appear to offer us intelligencethat will help us decipher a changing world.In fact, they repeatedly rupture and floodacross their boundaries into realms of non-sense, where our true reading pleasure lies.

Obituary expert Nigel Starck pinpointsjust such a moment in his brief account ofa British military man: “Major Digby Tath-am-Warter, of Britain’s Parachute Regiment,carried an umbrella into battle at Arnheimin 1944. When a brother officer questionedits value in the face of an artillery bombard-ment, the major replied: ‘But what if it rains?”’(FM)

THE PITS

NEW YORK — Walking or riding along theavenues, you can imagine the storefronts with-out tenants. Bank branches, juice bars, shopsselling electronics and scarves: all of themgone, unable to make the rent, and the land-lords, verging on default, unable to lure re-placements. It’s a feasible scenario, if youconsider the consumer-confidence and con-sumer-price indices, the wealth destruction,all the layoffs and trickle-down effects, andthe allegedly unrelated possibility, as theNew

York Times reported last week, that “some-thing funny is happening on the dark side ofthe universe.” (“A better and more enticingexplanation for the excess is that the parti-cles are being spit out of the fireballs cre-ated by dark matter particles colliding andannihilating one another in space” — andhere we were blaming Alan Greenspan.) Afriend who worked in Southeast Asia in thenineteen-nineties, during the recession there,recalls visiting Bangkok and Jakarta to seethe abandoned high-rises of the preceding eco-nomic boom. He found ranges of half-finishedbuildings, derelict superstructures occupiedby tent shanties and with squatters gatheredaround fires. It may be no great leap fromthere to a vision here of burning garbagecans and jerry-rigged cardboard in Washing-ton Mutual’s cashless vestibules or the bareaisles of Circuit City.“What will it look like?”is a question of

the hour, as people try to visualize the waysin which life will change in New York as aresult of the financial and economic crisis.In the mind’s eye, we tend to populate ourrecessionary streets with squad cars paintedgreen, cat’s-eyed ambulances, and other ana-chronisms — “Fort Apache, the Bronx: TheRemake.” But, really, the city will probablyjust look the way it does now. After an ex-traordinary era of construction and renova-tion, demolition and replacement, there willalmost certainly come a long period in whichlittle to nothing gets built. Putting asidethe long-discussed public projects that areendangered or doomed (the Second AvenueSubway, the West Side Railyards, BrooklynBridge Park, Moynihan Station, etc.), dozensof private undertakings have stalled or died.The calls go out to the architects: pencilsdown. We have inherited, from the goodyears, a glut of housing, almost all of it of theunaffordable kind — condos galore — and anincrease in office space amid a sudden, steepdecrease in the need for it. Throw in the highcost, or total unavailability, of capital, owingto the credit freeze, and you have a New Yorkthat may be frozen in time. The skyline,which has been very dynamic recently, like astereo’s equalizer display, should sit still fora while. The clothes in our closets today willbe the ones we’re wearing when we’re old.Keep an eye on the construction pits that

developers dug to make way for the founda-tions of new buildings. The town is pockedwith them. The real-estate boom fosteredgrand schemes, which, though they are inmany cases now stillborn, began with holesin the ground. The expiration, earlier thisyear, of a tax-abatement law, 421-a, encour-aged residential builders to dig quickly, toachieve grandfather status and thus betterfinancing. Hence a sudden spate of new pits,some that builders may have had no inten-tion of filling soon anyway. In some cases, if

THE PITS

NEW YORK — Walking or riding along theavenues, you can imagine the storefronts with-out tenants. Bank branches, juice bars, shopsselling electronics and scarves: all of themgone, unable to make the rent, and the land-lords, verging on default, unable to lure re-placements. It’s a feasible scenario, if youconsider the consumer-confidence and con-sumer-price indices, the wealth destruction,all the layoffs and trickle-down effects, andthe allegedly unrelated possibility, as theNew

York Times reported last week, that “some-thing funny is happening on the dark side ofthe universe.” (“A better and more enticingexplanation for the excess is that the parti-cles are being spit out of the fireballs cre-ated by dark matter particles colliding andannihilating one another in space” — andhere we were blaming Alan Greenspan.) Afriend who worked in Southeast Asia in thenineteen-nineties, during the recession there,recalls visiting Bangkok and Jakarta to seethe abandoned high-rises of the preceding eco-nomic boom. He found ranges of half-finishedbuildings, derelict superstructures occupiedby tent shanties and with squatters gatheredaround fires. It may be no great leap fromthere to a vision here of burning garbagecans and jerry-rigged cardboard in Washing-ton Mutual’s cashless vestibules or the bareaisles of Circuit City.“What will it look like?”is a question of

the hour, as people try to visualize the waysin which life will change in New York as aresult of the financial and economic crisis.In the mind’s eye, we tend to populate ourrecessionary streets with squad cars paintedgreen, cat’s-eyed ambulances, and other ana-chronisms — “Fort Apache, the Bronx: TheRemake.” But, really, the city will probablyjust look the way it does now. After an ex-traordinary era of construction and renova-tion, demolition and replacement, there willalmost certainly come a long period in whichlittle to nothing gets built. Putting asidethe long-discussed public projects that areendangered or doomed (the Second AvenueSubway, the West Side Railyards, BrooklynBridge Park, Moynihan Station, etc.), dozensof private undertakings have stalled or died.The calls go out to the architects: pencilsdown. We have inherited, from the goodyears, a glut of housing, almost all of it of theunaffordable kind — condos galore — and anincrease in office space amid a sudden, steepdecrease in the need for it. Throw in the highcost, or total unavailability, of capital, owingto the credit freeze, and you have a New Yorkthat may be frozen in time. The skyline,which has been very dynamic recently, like astereo’s equalizer display, should sit still fora while. The clothes in our closets today willbe the ones we’re wearing when we’re old.Keep an eye on the construction pits that

developers dug to make way for the founda-tions of new buildings. The town is pockedwith them. The real-estate boom fosteredgrand schemes, which, though they are inmany cases now stillborn, began with holesin the ground. The expiration, earlier thisyear, of a tax-abatement law, 421-a, encour-aged residential builders to dig quickly, toachieve grandfather status and thus betterfinancing. Hence a sudden spate of new pits,some that builders may have had no inten-tion of filling soon anyway. In some cases, if

and Lady Bird Johnson enjoyed the drivein the open limousine, even when the Se-cret Service man thrust her husband downto the floor, even when the car screeched soviolently round the corner by the hospitalthat she feared they would be flung out ofit. Looking towards the first limousine, shesaw what looked like ‘a drift of pink blossom’on the back seat. It was Jackie Kennedy ly-ing across her dying husband.”









a developer hasn’t already paid for the steel,he will be inclined, or forced, to walk away.Buildings that are halfway built tend to getfinished, although they may wind up beingwhat are called “see-throughs.” What willbecome of the pits? Can we turn them intohalf-wild swimming holes, like the granitequarries of New England? Ring them withbarbed wire and convert them into debtors’prisons or internment camps for the culpritswho structured synthetic C.D.O.s? They’dmake excellent ha-has, for livery horses orlivestock. Corn mazes. Extreme-cockfightingarenas. Or perhaps they could serve, overtime, as urban tar pits, entrapping and pre-serving in garbage and white brick dust theoccasional unlucky passerby for the scientificedification of future generations, if there turnout to be any. Or they could become parkinglots.Vacant space tends to remain vacant, in

anticipation of an upswing. Tax policy, iner-tia, and the eternal belief that things will getbetter (profitable) again usually trump civicdreams of pocket parks or stickball fields.Whoever ends up owning it all, after the fore-closures and the workouts are done, holds outfor the big payday. The greatest pit of themall is at Ground Zero, where the squabblingamong constituents and stakeholders, as wellas the usual big-city incompetence, even be-fore the financial meltdown, has kept the holea hole for years. Now it’s hard to imagine away out of it. (NP)From The New Yorker, December 8, 2008

GONZO

PRAGMATISM

BERLIN / LOUISVILLE — The fundamen-tal beauty of a manner of thinking — andphilosophy of design — that recognizes thevalue of making well-considered decisions inhighly contingent situations lies in its avowalof optimistic practice.

This is the intuition that many situationswhich seem irresolvable when described ingeneral theoretical terms (ideological, meta-physical, etc.) can actually be resolved, some-how, when you dare approach them with areadiness to listen, learn, negotiate, and im-provise. This insight is at the center of prag-matist thought; it is its wit.“By God! You old bastard! Good to see

you, boy! Damn good . . . and I mean it!”

There’s been a lot of talk about pragma-tism recently, but the re-articulation of itswit is a tricky proposition. Divested of itsphilosophical humor, pragmatism is reducedto an ideological travesty when it appears inits current dominant form: the imposed pres-sure to improvise under all circumstances, tothe best of your abilities.

This is epitomized by the knee-jerk opti-mism of a “Can-Do” culture, whose attitudeof “scrape by and keep smiling” seems req-uisite for the increasing numbers of peopleworking under precarious conditions. Doespragmatism as proposed in the philosophyof William James cease to be a creative act— an act of freedom — when precarious liv-ing conditions leave you with simply no otherchoice? How do you set the emancipatoryspirit of pragmatism apart from the ideo-logical farce that the “Can-Do” imperativemakes of it? How can you re-animate its in-herent humor and wisdom? Its soul?

It’s a question of intention: how to ap-proach a given situation? The political, emo-tional, and artistic prudence of pragmatismresides in the realization that the specific con-text of the situation in which one does orsays something will determine the meaningand effect of one’s actions and words. Prag-matism is defined by the capacity to graspthat context and react honestly to the spe-cific challenges that it presents. Witty prag-matism is the art of responsive and respon-sible reactions.In the air-conditioned lounge I met a man

from Houston who said his name was some-

thing or other — “but just call me Jimbo”

— and he was here to get it on. “I’m ready

for anything, by God! Anything at all. Yeah,

what are you drinkin’?”

But what if that situation is rigidly gov-erned by questionable or intolerable laws? Inthis case any response that is practically pos-sible within the given situation will abide bythose laws and therefore confirm them. Prag-matists who content themselves by “work-ing with whatever possibilities” under op-pressive conditions become conformists — bydefault rather than conviction, it’s true, butthe result is the same. The tacit acceptancethat we simply grin and bear the lives welead, that radical change is not an option,affords pragmatism a fatalist tinge. Tradi-tionally this fatalism is expressed, compen-sated, and cloaked by jovial irony, as perthe British stereotype: Carry on Seargant,Teacher, Constable, Nurse, Doctor, England

GONZO

PRAGMATISM













. . . Don’t make a fuss! Carry on regardless!A pragmatism that might defy this fatal-

ist bias would have to wed its responsive-ness with a spirit of non-reconciliation. Thisstance would invoke discontent as a moti-vating force (rather than a side effect in theform of the begrudging and complaining thattypically accompanies “making do”). In thisspirit, the pragmatist engages with the givennot on the premise that “the given” is allthere is to life, but with an awareness thatthings could be otherwise. When facing spe-cific problems, the possibility of radical dif-ference remains in view.“What’s wrong with you, boy?”He grinned

and winked at the bartender.

Often it is precisely an underlying senseof irreverence that allows people to act in asituation at all, simply because this irrever-ance loosens the grip of the rules establishedin that context. Is that not the originary re-bellious spirit of pragmatism? Its disregardfor the rules, laws, traditions — “truths” —that impose standards of what de iure, by thebook, cannot be done (when, as the prag-matic person will de facto demonstrate, ofcourse it can)? This critical edge is what canenable pragmatism to cut through the Gor-dian knots created by false beliefs. When itcasts “the given” in a different light and dis-pels imaginary constraints, pragmatism en-ables people to act, causing small insurgences.Irreverence makes pragmatism a liberatoryforce.“Who you work for?” I stared at him

again. “Don’t you read the newspapers?”

No matter how emancipatory it sounds,this proposal still has a peculiar ring to it.After all, any self-help book or motivationaltrainer will also aim to teach you techniquesto dispel imaginary constraints . . . but onlyto turn you into a happier, healthier, moreproductive slave to a competitive work cul-ture that, deregulated as it is, knows neitherrules nor impossibilities anyway. In whichcase to “take it and run” may just be down-right reckless.

So, while the contrarian kernel of pragma-tism needs to be disassociated from the fatal-ist Carry On Conformism that it is tradition-ally prone to collapse into, it equally has tobe set apart from its current conflation withthe Can-Do culture of compulsive buoyancyand reckless competitiveness. If these twomutations of pragmatism seem like carica-tures of postwar British- and contemporaryU.S.-American culture, that’s because thesetwo countries have historically been the van-guards of both formulating pragmatism as aphilosophy and implementing it as an ideol-ogy.I leaned closer to him, half-whispering:

“Look . . . how would you like a job?” He

backed off quickly. “What? Come on, now.What kind of a job?” “Never mind,” I said.

“You just blew it.”

But this conversion is not conclusive; therelation between the originary philosophy andits ideological version is an ongoing strugglecarried out in the arena of everyday culture,politics, and ethics. As such, it seems im-portant to highlight instances of people whoperform the adversary ethos of pragmatismin their work and wit. To write the history ofthis antagonism is to support those who havetaken sides with the philosophy and againstthe ideology.

GONZO

PRAGMATISM













. . . Don’t make a fuss! Carry on regardless!A pragmatism that might defy this fatal-

ist bias would have to wed its responsive-ness with a spirit of non-reconciliation. Thisstance would invoke discontent as a moti-vating force (rather than a side effect in theform of the begrudging and complaining thattypically accompanies “making do”). In thisspirit, the pragmatist engages with the givennot on the premise that “the given” is allthere is to life, but with an awareness thatthings could be otherwise. When facing spe-cific problems, the possibility of radical dif-ference remains in view.“What’s wrong with you, boy?”He grinned

and winked at the bartender.

Often it is precisely an underlying senseof irreverence that allows people to act in asituation at all, simply because this irrever-ance loosens the grip of the rules establishedin that context. Is that not the originary re-bellious spirit of pragmatism? Its disregardfor the rules, laws, traditions — “truths” —that impose standards of what de iure, by thebook, cannot be done (when, as the prag-matic person will de facto demonstrate, ofcourse it can)? This critical edge is what canenable pragmatism to cut through the Gor-dian knots created by false beliefs. When itcasts “the given” in a different light and dis-pels imaginary constraints, pragmatism en-ables people to act, causing small insurgences.Irreverence makes pragmatism a liberatoryforce.“Who you work for?” I stared at him

again. “Don’t you read the newspapers?”

No matter how emancipatory it sounds,this proposal still has a peculiar ring to it.After all, any self-help book or motivationaltrainer will also aim to teach you techniquesto dispel imaginary constraints . . . but onlyto turn you into a happier, healthier, moreproductive slave to a competitive work cul-ture that, deregulated as it is, knows neitherrules nor impossibilities anyway. In whichcase to “take it and run” may just be down-right reckless.

So, while the contrarian kernel of pragma-tism needs to be disassociated from the fatal-ist Carry On Conformism that it is tradition-ally prone to collapse into, it equally has tobe set apart from its current conflation withthe Can-Do culture of compulsive buoyancyand reckless competitiveness. If these twomutations of pragmatism seem like carica-tures of postwar British- and contemporaryU.S.-American culture, that’s because thesetwo countries have historically been the van-guards of both formulating pragmatism as aphilosophy and implementing it as an ideol-ogy.I leaned closer to him, half-whispering:

“Look . . . how would you like a job?” He

backed off quickly. “What? Come on, now.What kind of a job?” “Never mind,” I said.

“You just blew it.”

But this conversion is not conclusive; therelation between the originary philosophy andits ideological version is an ongoing strugglecarried out in the arena of everyday culture,politics, and ethics. As such, it seems im-portant to highlight instances of people whoperform the adversary ethos of pragmatismin their work and wit. To write the history ofthis antagonism is to support those who havetaken sides with the philosophy and againstthe ideology.

Against this backdrop, the optimistic prac-tice of “good manners” amounts to a similardefiance of both the backslapping pragma-tism of the Carry-Ons and the coercive no-holds-barred pragmatism of the Can-Dos.Good manners demonstrate a degree of con-sideration, a refusal to simply accept the rulesof an imposed, false game, instead insistingon the time, right, and freedom to considerone’s terms of engagement in a given situa-tion. This is crucial, because neither of thetwo ideological versions of pragmatism grantanyone this time, right, and freedom. Bothconstrue a scenario of economic pressure (thephantom threat of eternal postwar scarcity,or the bottomless fear of precarious futures)in which taking time to consider terms seemsout of the question; only immediate actionappears appropriate. Doesn’t an insistenceon good manners, then, effectively contesteconomic pressure as the ultima ratio, thegold standard, in relation to which every-thing else must be measured and justified?But what the hell? Anybody who wanders

around the world saying, “Hell yes, I’m from

Texas,” deserves whatever happens to him.

And he had, after all, come here once again

to make a nineteenth-century ass of himself

in the midst of some jaded, atavistic freakout

with nothing to recommend it except a very

saleable “tradition.”

This insistence is inherently anti-econom-ical. In a scenario of all-out economic pres-sure, ruled by deadlines, time spent consid-ering the preliminaries of how to engage willalways seem like wasted time, or at least timethat noone can afford. To take that time —indeed to show that it even exists — in a cul-ture governed by the economic imperative,makes good manners the closest you mightget to civil disobedience.

The danger of embracing “good manners”,however, is its tacit espousal of conservatism.It certainly doesn’t sound like civil disobedi-ence. It seems crucial again, therefore, toswitch tracks and re-emphasize the irrever-ent wit at the heart of pragmatic philosophy.(And to note that the ability to maintain aconstant awareness and balance of the two— the good-mannered and the irreverant —seems to be what we’re after here.) Let’stake another example.

Conducting pragmatic negotiations in dif-ficult situations usually requires one to actas a (good-mannered) moderator in order tomake people talk and listen to each other.However, this doesn’t mean that a pragmaticstyle of engagement is moderate by defini-tion. On the contrary, in a situation wherethere appears to be no possibility of discus-sion, to politely, categorically insist on dis-cussing possibilites nonetheless implies an ir-reverent disregard for how the situation isbeing portrayed — and that can hardly becalled moderate. When there is no properway to solve a problem, because how that“proper” is construed by the book is part ofthe problem, the pragmatic way to sidestepthe whole scenariomust seem improper. Actsthat testify to pragmatic philosophical witwill therefore always have something improperand immoderate about them. To recoup thephilosophy from the ideology, then, meansembracing the immoderate consideratednessof an irreverent, improper, gonzo pragma-tism.

This gonzo pragmatism, alive and criti-cal with its irreverent, improper, immoderate

Against this backdrop, the optimistic prac-tice of “good manners” amounts to a similardefiance of both the backslapping pragma-tism of the Carry-Ons and the coercive no-holds-barred pragmatism of the Can-Dos.Good manners demonstrate a degree of con-sideration, a refusal to simply accept the rulesof an imposed, false game, instead insistingon the time, right, and freedom to considerone’s terms of engagement in a given situa-tion. This is crucial, because neither of thetwo ideological versions of pragmatism grantanyone this time, right, and freedom. Bothconstrue a scenario of economic pressure (thephantom threat of eternal postwar scarcity,or the bottomless fear of precarious futures)in which taking time to consider terms seemsout of the question; only immediate actionappears appropriate. Doesn’t an insistenceon good manners, then, effectively contesteconomic pressure as the ultima ratio, thegold standard, in relation to which every-thing else must be measured and justified?But what the hell? Anybody who wanders

around the world saying, “Hell yes, I’m from

Texas,” deserves whatever happens to him.

And he had, after all, come here once again

to make a nineteenth-century ass of himself

in the midst of some jaded, atavistic freakout

with nothing to recommend it except a very

saleable “tradition.”

This insistence is inherently anti-econom-ical. In a scenario of all-out economic pres-sure, ruled by deadlines, time spent consid-ering the preliminaries of how to engage willalways seem like wasted time, or at least timethat noone can afford. To take that time —indeed to show that it even exists — in a cul-ture governed by the economic imperative,makes good manners the closest you mightget to civil disobedience.

The danger of embracing “good manners”,however, is its tacit espousal of conservatism.It certainly doesn’t sound like civil disobedi-ence. It seems crucial again, therefore, toswitch tracks and re-emphasize the irrever-ent wit at the heart of pragmatic philosophy.(And to note that the ability to maintain aconstant awareness and balance of the two— the good-mannered and the irreverant —seems to be what we’re after here.) Let’stake another example.

Conducting pragmatic negotiations in dif-ficult situations usually requires one to actas a (good-mannered) moderator in order tomake people talk and listen to each other.However, this doesn’t mean that a pragmaticstyle of engagement is moderate by defini-tion. On the contrary, in a situation wherethere appears to be no possibility of discus-sion, to politely, categorically insist on dis-cussing possibilites nonetheless implies an ir-reverent disregard for how the situation isbeing portrayed — and that can hardly becalled moderate. When there is no properway to solve a problem, because how that“proper” is construed by the book is part ofthe problem, the pragmatic way to sidestepthe whole scenariomust seem improper. Actsthat testify to pragmatic philosophical witwill therefore always have something improperand immoderate about them. To recoup thephilosophy from the ideology, then, meansembracing the immoderate consideratednessof an irreverent, improper, gonzo pragma-tism.

This gonzo pragmatism, alive and criti-cal with its irreverent, improper, immoderatewit ought to find itself perpetually at oddswith the order of ordinary ways and con-ventional procedures. The apparently good-mannered mode of “quiet conversation,” forexample, may well still be the perfect mediumfor negotiating pragmatic solutions to con-tingent problems, but we should be carefulto dissociate this ideal from a conservativenostalgia for gentlemanly customs.“You’ll know him when you see him; don’t

worry about that.” Creeping Jesus, I thought.

That screws the press credentials. I had a vi-

sion of some nerve-rattling geek all covered

with matted hair and string-warts showing up

in the press office and demanding Scanlan’spress packet. Well what the hell? We could

always load up on acid and spend the day

roaming around the clubhouse grounds with

big sketch pads, laughing hysterically at the

natives and swilling mint juleps so the cops

wouldn’t think we’re abnormal. Perhaps even

make the act pay; set up an easel with a big

sign saying, “Let a Foreign Artist Paint Your

Portrait, $10 Each. Do It NOW!”

The traditional site for quiet conversa-tions about important decisions is the draw-ing room, to which powerful upper class menwithdraw (after dinner) to do politics andbusiness, in private, excluding women specif-ically, and the public generally. In order todisavow this dubious legacy, then, quietly spo-ken gonzo pragmatists may have to radicallyresituate the quiet conversation outside thedrawing room, in noisy places, central loca-tions, right where problems present them-selves and where participation is not just pos-sible but inevitable, simply because peopleare all around, passing by. Following thisthought to its illogical conclusion, then, itwould be most appropriate for the negotia-tions between gonzo pragmatists to take placein loud, populated places, where they areabsurdly inappropriate. Given that all theinevitable noise and interruption will makestaying focused on any conversation all butimpossible, what else could it be? Nothingless than a mockery of the idea that therewas ever a “proper” way — by the book —of handling such situations. (JV)

c� Peter Fischli / David Weiss, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

IN BRIEF

Size-wise, the largest newspaper published in

New York State was an issue of The Constel-

lation, issued in New York City on July 4,

1859. The press, designed to accommodate

the single sheet opening to 100 × 70 inches,

broke down during the first print run.

IN BRIEF

Size-wise, the largest newspaper published in

New York State was an issue of The Constel-

lation, issued in New York City on July 4,

1859. The press, designed to accommodate

the single sheet opening to 100 × 70 inches,

broke down during the first print run.







































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GOOD? A Reconsideration of the Newspaper …THEFIRST/LASTNEWSPAPER PORTAUTHORITY,6418thAvenue,NewYorkCity,NY10036 DEXTERSINISTER A Reconsideration of the Newspaper Industry in 5 Easy