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nettime: DISCORD


Discord:  Sabotage of Realities
by Gabriella Bartha and Thomas Bass

A copy of the text sent to _telepolis_ and translated into German by
Armin Medosch for the December issue.   Our apologies for the
incomplete character set.


PRELUDE
Sabotage implies coordinated action and a tantamount if not explosive
result:  the cordon up for investigation, the vigilant examination of
evidence, the summoning of the forensist, the buckle of shackles, the
righteous confession of the accused, the ring of the gavel.  Discord
hints at social strife and protest, the spontaneous rumblings of the
mob.  Both individual radicalism and collective malaise deserve
exploration beyond the typical strategies of representation utilized
to challenge the legitimacy of power and its diverse forms.  

Disappointingly, it appears, at least in this current manifestation
concerning discord and sabotage on display in Hamburg, that the
incessant distraction of capitalist totalitarianism has triumphed, for
the warped culture of success has significantly dampened the
conceptualization and expression of dissent.  Transnational
corporations and the residues of the atrophied state resist the
unsupervised and the unpermitted, relying on affiliated media
conglomerates armed with the mantra of objectivity to persuade the
catatonic audience of its happiness and any potential saboteurs'
threat to that happiness.  This monopoly of monetary and political
alliance effectively licenses sabotage to sychophants.  Entertainment
disperses any concrete attack with the lure of the next purchase.  

Despite the poor prognosis, reliable techniques to evade the ultimatum
to behave abound: effigy, debauchery, licentousness, fraud, forgery,
counterfeiture, etc.  Even the enlightenment of a minor detail, an
extract from the panoply of distraction, can be exquisitely pertinent
to the paradox of effective sabotage:  the tattoo histories of the
gulags' inhabitants detailing the confessions also collected in
criminal files; the transmutation of species at the freak show, a
woman promising her audience a spectacular metamorphosis into a
gorilla; Auroville's meditative architectural bliss for the
disaffected cosmopolitan European.  In the confines of art, these
gestures of defiance are captured by the likes of Mark Pauline's
Survival Research Laboratories, Artporn's burlesque revelry in dungeon
sex, and CONTAINED's annual anarchic machine orgy in the outskirts of
Linz.  

Courageous few attempt to rip the shroud off embalmed consumerism by
defiling its sanitary corpse with the unclean and the taboo:  only the
exceptional saboteur manages to summon the will, the execution, and
the concentration to shatter the formulaic utopia glowing on screens
the world over.  However, interactivity--the ambrosia of the future,
the claim of contact between the organic and inorganic, the salvation
of the disaffected--counterattacks to reduce experience into its
simulation and replication.  Stumbling with this new media in hand,
coopted into perfecting the ultimate of popular tranquillizers, the
artist struggles to either integrate, manipulate, or exorcise media
and its technology that dwell in the subconscious where one
instinctually reaches for the phone or flips through the channels.  

Discord does frustratingly little to resolve this dilemma of rejecting
or embracing commodification.  Six thematic zones demark the
conceptual foundation of the exhibition:  control
(security/insecurity), news services (disinformation), everyday life
(alienation), border politics (walking the tightrope), state
machineries (law, discipline, repression), and science fiction and
economy (the administration of the future).  These divisions only
obfuscate the rendering of the curators' praiseworthy yet muddled
concept.  Discord bathes in neutrality, unsure whether to undermine or
support contemporary hierarchies.   It fails to offer a tangible
comment on what may indeed be the seeds of discord, merely documenting
and representing rather than prying open a window of discourse with
the theory and legacy of its subject.   

With this prespective on discord and sabotage, we viewed the realized
and unrealized submissions, actions and concepts, that seem to replace
more traditional art objects.  Since the choice of media was open, the
visitor found sundry embodiments of artists' projects, ranging from
sculpture to video, from photography to mixed installation, from
action to corporate advertisement.

CONFINEMENT
Upon ascending the stairs to the exhibition hall, the visitor is given
the option to apply for a passport at the undeniably popular NSK,
involving bureaucratic procedures and a lengthy queue; to play mai
jong in an "interactive" person-to-person encounter with Wang Yigang's
Chinese logic; or to shoot NSK's applicants with Lynn Hershman's mock
M-16, which was supposed to simultaneously project war images
appropriated from broadcast media.  But only the pink traces of
Yukinori Yanagi's ant and its 24 hour confinement and Gary Carsley's
Ministry of Public Works are intriguing enough to demand further
inspection.  The success of Yanagi's Wandering Position project lies
in the predictable result of an ethology experiment. The subjects of
the experiment try to escape from the cages of the experimental
domain, thus challenging a physical border as well as that between
scientific and artistic reasoning while hinting at the protests and
actions of the Animal Liberation Front.  Gary Carsley approaches
confinement, both of the collective and the individual, with a
penchant for glamor, a decoration of the mundane that suggests
liberation from the prefabricated and packaged.  However, he plays
with this culture of wrapping, offering his services and products to
those willing to indulge their taste for metallic roses, reminiscent
of the flowers for sale next to the cemetery.  Indeed, these flowers
serve as a font to spell out the four letter verses of private desire,
consummated and unconsummated.

DECEPTION
Moving into the second portion of the first hall, Daisuke Nakayama's
Car of Desire 1995 strikes the visitor with its crafted, voluptuous
curves, though the temptation to finger its polished surface is
hindered by Nakayama's insertion of metal fins into the body of the
car.  Without these almost invisible barriers, reclining on its
wooden, lacquered surface would relieve the immediate somnolent state
experienced in the presence of Anja Wiese's Erfassungbereich, Louis
Couturier and Jacky Lafargue's deja vu poster project, Birgit
Brenner's miserable Tranenruckfuhrung, and Mark Formanek's Archiv der
100 Statements, all uncensored.  

Andreas Peschka's Stempelset fur Attentater also deals with
temptation. Reproduced on rubber stamps and available for sale to the
more scrupulous visitor, Peschka's fingerprint serves as a catalyst to
crime while mimicking the official.  In the spirit of the work, the
stamps can be lifted from under the glass case and taken home to
assist in any crime requiring the burden of proof to fall on Peschka. 
Frantisek Skala's contribution, Sark, though partly impenetrable due
to our language incomprehension and the lack of English translation of
the accompanying philosophical extracts, plays with the role of the
predator and prey, the techniques of mimicry and deception vital to
survival of animal as well as human life.  The large photographs
showing the artist in various cycles of attack and defense have been
retouched to reflect the contours of the toy shark motif gripped by
the artist.

NARROWCAST
Dispersed within this melange of various attempts to convey deception
and restriction, televisions--connected to no apparent surveillance
cameras except in the case of Andre Korpys and Markus Loffler's
untitled facetious bank project complemented by a diorama of the
Deutsche Bank's interior--displayed the video projects of other
potential saboteurs.  However, in total, whether the Television Spots
of Stan Douglas or Hans-Peter Scharlach's Untitled, they possessed the
qualities of an amateur confused about what exactly to do with the
equipment and footage.  With the exception of Jayce Salloum's Kan ya
ma Kan few of the videos made even a marginal attempt to cut through
the biased perspectives of media enterprise.  

NUCLEUS
In a separate dimmed room, the false euphoria of Marcus Bastel's mixed
media installation dominates a disproportionately large section. 
Perhaps if confined to a smaller space, the project would have forced
Bastel to find a more elegant way of drawing the same conclusion:  the
futility of trying to make order in the domain of concepts.  Within
this dark core, the very depths of the exhibition, awaits The File
Room, Antonio Muntadas' project cataloguing censorship's practice and
history.  Belonging more to the well lit interior of a library, this
online contribution sequestered among real filing cabinets, neither
impresses nor threatens the visitor of the Kunstverein and Kunsthaus. 
Once again, we faced incomprehensibility with Peter Iblher's tunguska
index:  the banal lifted to significance by the projection of
photographs and text that suggests secret services and their amoral
yet ineffective plots.  The final component of this darkened core is
Bea de Visser's tranquil BLINK.  Coined as an Interior of Difference,
the installation space oozed aquatic peace, solitary faces melting
into one another to form a collective.  Portraits, the faces suspended
in the water  (though this could equally be the ether), acted as a
more subtle comment on anonymity.  

ACTION
Among those addressing their projects with action, Heath Bunting's
magnetic mail art avenges the scourge of consumer surveillance.  The
principles of shoplifting are reversed, the bar code planted on
authority, in the visage of the local postwoman, entering the premises
of a shop with Heath's devious postcards.  Alarms squeal and the thief
is apprehended, though to the bewilderment of all, it is the postwoman
who has perpetrated the deed.  It was a relief to think of this
scenario among the disappointments of the exhibition in terms of both
discord and sabotage.  

Jorgen Erkius' untitled furniture deconstruction resembled Bunting's
strategy in terms of reversing the hierarchy of power.  Erkius tamely
dissected a sofa and various household accessories that he later
reconstructed with tape and glue for redelivery to his own flat.  If
Erkius had invited the audience to participate in the destruction,
then it might have been a more enjoyable part of the exhibition.  

NSK's presence relied on the same psuedo-fascistic concepts that they
have been recycling for the last few years in conjunction with IRWIN
and Laibach, the hegemons of Slovenian art.  Frank Riepe appropriates
and manipulates treaties between authorities and the determined
inhabitants of the autonomy seeking Italian village of Seborga.  His
Invisible Embassy of Seborga looks for a virtual space for the
establishment of a new state, faintly suggesting a cult of personality
for the as yet unnamed autocrat supported by legions of online
bureaucrats.   

The promotional Space-Lab of Cornelia Schmidt-Bleek celebrates the
aeronautic liberation of the kitchen promised in nascent 1960s
consumerism.  However, Cornelia's version of this sentimental era
hardly touches the contemporary viewer except for her/his stomach keen
for a sterile Lufthansa dinner.  Although not qualifying as an action,
the two E.E. PODS of Kenji Yanobe reminisce about the same 60s era
motifs, the technology of the cosmonaut with one important difference:
 her/his emergency escape capsule is lined with snacks from the local
nonstop and requires 1 DM for operation. 

COMMERCE
Jan-Peter Sonntag's modern minimal disco 4 or Nina Fischer and Maroan
El Sani's mock utopian, new-agey be supernatural paralleled rather
than parodied the slogans and logos of commerce. Trying to market and
advertise their product, The Second Hand Water, Ingarsvala Thorsdottir
and Shan Zhuan Wu at least remained reserved, ironic and sarcastic
about evoking the passion to buy.  However, Technology to the People
eclipsed their effort by offering streetside consumer technology to
the have-nots. The slick brochure elaborated on their devices intended
to add convenience to the lives of the dispossessed, like the Street
Access Machine, the Recovery Card and the Personal Folkcomputer.  By
addressing the problem of those that remain disconnected, Technology
to the People will invariably provide patients for Markus Kach's
Institute for media diseases.  Novel in conception but lacking in
execution, the mixed media installation's examining room relies on the
terminology and graphics found in any desktop publishing package for
its content rather than establishing an entirely new field of
pathology or reinforcing medicine's role as nothing more than a
product.  Corporatism is not the only reference in the history of art
and media, for the people's computer has yet to find a manufacturer or
distributor as enthusiastic as that of the people's radio.  

EXECUTION
The itinerary of this quick review of most of the projects realized
followed the natural or arbitrary order in which the visitors
encountered and grouped the works. We followed neither the zones as
suggested in the press release nor the map of zones promised to be
attached to the guide to the exhibition.  To do so would be
labyrinthian.  Even after explicitly reading about the division into
zones, it is hard to deduce a clear concept for Discord.  

Behind this problem lurks the failure to engage the potential of the
exhibition, to create either the splendor of nascent dictators or the
sly calculations of the manufacturers of consent.  Discord could have
redressed the spectacle of distraction but rather played directly into
its agenda.  

This exhibition--which is highly conceptual and claims to have a theme
and even more a strategy--inadmissibly excludes carefully researched
or written theoretical material.  Indeed, there is a reference to Rene
Block and Robert Filliou's Peace Biennale.  However, in this case it 
functions only as a hollow slogan regarding the goals of the
exhibition:  "to visualize unpeaceful realities."  Perhaps the
publishing of the catalogue promises salvation.  In similar
exhibitions the catalogue even substitutes for the show, especially
due to the absence of art works (still) addressing the senses.  

Adding to this indecisiveness, all unrealized submissions were
available on request for inspection, perhaps indicative of the
insecurity of the jury in determining exactly what projects deserved
realization.  The visitor gets the impression that the very works that
have not been realized possess a greater potential for sabotage.  Most
of the works seem to be interchangeable between the zones, while the
ones not realized and stored in folders in the backroom promised hope
in their embryonic, pure state, unspoiled by selection and
materialization.  Nonetheless, Discord: Sabotage of Realities deserves
credit for introducing the public to an exhibit and its new media
paraphenalia that begin to investigate the parallels between the
invidual saboteur, the artist, and the collective mode of discord,
society.



Discord:  Sabotage of Realities
Kuntsverein und Kunsthaus in Hamburg
29 December 96--19 January 97

URLs
telepolis  http://tp.heise.de/tp/
Discord  http://www.icf.de/discord
Fileroom  http://fileroom.aaup.uic.edu/fileroom.htm
Invisible Embassy of Seborga  http://www.foebud.org/kcoopawp/1consul/
Institut for media diseases  http://www.moving-art-studio.com/
   september/media_diseases.html
NSK  http://www.heck.com/nsk.html
Artporn  http://www.desk.nl/~artporn/index.html
Survival Research Laboratories  http://www.srl.org/



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