Public (E-Journal, York University)

PREFACE
The Lunatic OfOne Idea is the second issue of Public, which is edited and published hy the
Public Access Collective. Public presents visual and written material that broadly addresses
the political, aesthetic and theoretical construction of "the public."
The articles by Jane Kidd and William Wood address specifically the project The
Lunatic OfOne Idea, curated by Public Access and presented at a suburban shopping mall
in Toronto during 1937/33. For this project 16 artists produced short video works for a 36
monitor video-wall installation. Documentation of the project is included in the last pages of
this journal. The articles by Arthur Kroker, Paul Virilio, Janine Marchessault and the
interview with Jacques Derrida address broader issues pertaining to new technology and the
public sphere. Laura Mulvey's article extends these considerations to questions of the
'popular unconcious.' Finally the artists' projects by Sylvie Belanger, Jana Sterbak and
Krzysztof Wodiczko explore the relationship between public and private technologies.
COVER:
DAVID TENIERS THE YOUNGER
ARCHDuKE WILHEM'S PAINTED GALLERY
(1650, BRUSSELS)
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English

Preface

Kidd, Jane

2
JOHN GREYSON, ADS EPIDEMIC
STAGING POLITICS IN THE
CORPORATE SPHERE
JANE KIDD
- being a Primer for Artist's Collectives experimenting with public technologies
- (with examples from The Lunatic of One Idea, a Public Access project)
1. CHOOSE A YOUNG CORPORATION; RISKS ARE MORE LIKELY TO BE TAKEN.
The Wall Network Inc., a new Toronto-based company, was engaged in developing video-
walls as venues for advertisers in major shopping malls in the Toronto area. The company
had one 36 monitor colour videowall facility at 'Square One' Shopping Centre in Missis-
sauga, Ontario - with hopes for other locations.
Public Access approached the company with a proposal to run short artists' videos in
conjunction with regular advertising to be developed and programmed specifically to the
videowall's formal capacities. The Wall Network agreed to donate videowall access, pro-
gramming facilities, and transferral of artists' videotapes to videodisc - services which
would otherwise be prohibitively expensive - while artist fees and production costs came
from other government funded arts councils.
2. THE PROJECT MUST APPEAR TO BENEFIT BOTH PARTIES; CORPORATIONS
SHOULD NOT ALWAYS UNDERSTAND PROJECT'S ACTUAL INTENT.
Public Access was able to capitalize upon the current corporate views of art: The Wall
Network's belief that participating artists would produce works that both experimented with
and complemented the videowall's formal capabilities. Descriptions of intended works
provided to The Wall Network were, in some cases, intentionally vague.
The Lunatic of One Idea was possible only because of the Wall Network's belief that its
aims and Public Access' mandates could intersect to mutual advantage. However, corporate
aims and collective mandates were soon clearly at odds - a situation which gave rise to
duplicity on both sides.
3. GET A CONTRACT; BUT BEWARE OF VAGUE TERMINOLOGY
At Public Access' request, The Wall Network provided artists with an outline of the criteria
by which artists' projects might be found 'unacceptable' for the videowall site. The general
guidelines prohibited extreme violence, sex and offensive language; while underlining the
subjective nature of such guidelines, The Wall Network expressed a belief in the artists'
"common sense" and "sense of responsibility to the mall's family audience" which would
ensure "good taste."
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In late September, The Wall Network refused to programme Krzysztof Wodiczko and
Leslie Sharpe's video which outlined the ten warning signs of shopaholism (as taken directly
from a popular consumer's magazine) and depicted a female shopaholic eating a 'shoe soup'.
The Wall Network found the content to be "disrespectful" and its form to be aesthetically
unsuitable.
4. MAKE SURE BOTH PARTIES HAVE REACHED A CONSENSUS AS TO THE
TERMS OF THE CONTRACT; PARTIES MAY HARBOUR MISTAKEN BELIEFS.
The Wall Network had, just prior to the commencement of The Lunatic, asked for and
received a short synopsis of each artist's video - this, in their eyes, comprised a contract.
The Wall Network attacked the Wodiczko/Sharpe video on the basis that it did not conform
to the original proposal and thereby, according to them, did not fulfill contractual obliga-
tions. Public Access had never regarded the project descriptions as contractual in nature.
5. WHEN THE CONTRACT FAILS YOU, TRY A PLEA FOR ABSOLUTE ctJRATO-
RIAL RIGHTS; BUT BEWARE OF COMPROMISING THE PROJECT THROUGH
COMMODIFICATION.
In ensuing negotiations, Public Access argued for the overall curatorial integrity of The
Lunatic as a body ofworks - no one work could be excluded or altered without compro-
mising the project as whole. Public Access stressed that censorship of anyone work would
mean the immediate termination of The Lunatic.
The Wall Network accepted these conditions with the proviso that Public Access develop
a higher profile vis a vis Square One management (vague mention was made of complaints
about the project from mall management and shopkeepers). To this end, a written explica-
tion of Public Access' curatorial role was to be passed along to Square One management, and
The Lunatic OfOne Idea brochures were to be handed out to the public at the mall site. The
projects which had previously appeared intermittently amidst advertising and other ~aterial
were now to appear en bloc, underlining their unity as curated artists' projects. Public
Access agreed to all of these concessions - despite the fact that they may have undercut the
project's desired 'seamlessness'.
6. KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN AND SUSPECT THE WORST; SHIT CAN DISAPPEAR.
Towards the end of the project, a stressed Wall Network employee inadvertently informed
Public Access that the term "shit" in John Greyson's The ADS Epidemic had been excised
during its September run without Public Access' knowledge or the artist's consent. A poten-
tial Wall Network client had apparently expressed his outrage at the offensive language.
"Shit" was immediately edited from the work. (Ironically "shit" could have been removed
without resorting to sneak tactics since the artist had contractually agreed to The Wall
Network's "offensive language" clause.)
7. BEWARE OF THE YOUNG CORPORATION; BUSINESS MAY BE UNSTABLE.
The Wall Network subsidized The Lunatic videos as part of the entertainment "filler" which
appeared on the videowall in conjunction with paid advertising. The Wall Network, however,
was unable to attract advertisers to the new, expensive technology of the videowall at the
SQUARE ONE location. On average, one or two advertisements ran daily in a continuous
cycle. As a result, contrary to Public Access' original expectations, artists' videos generally
ran back to back with other "filler" rather than with paid advertising.
8. REMEMBER THAT THE TERM "CORPORATION" IS DEFINED AS "AN ASSO-
CIATION OF INDIVIDUALS"; THEORETICAL INTERVENTION AIMED AT "THE
CORPORATION" RAISES COMPLEX MORAL DILEMMAS IN ITS APPLICATION
WITH INDIVIDUALS.
It became increasingly evident in the course of Public Access' dealings with the Wall Net-
work's representative that this particular employee was experiencing a great deal of friction
with her supervisor with regards to The Lunatic. The 'subversive' content of some of the
videos was placing the young financially stressed company at risk of alienating clients, a risk
they simply could not afford. The Wall Network employee in charge of overseeing the project
continued to support The Lunatic as a whole but to some degree found her position increas-
ingly untenable.
Public Access' position as well became problematic as the attempts at compromise
necessitated negotiating between the interests of the company and the artists - in particular,
trying maintain a sense of responsibility to the latter. The whole process of negotiation
between individuals involved another sort of negotiation for Public Access - between larger
theoretical aims and the intricacies and contradictions of practical experience.
In the end, the largest group of individuals and arguably the most important, could not
be negotiated with or addressed directly. The impact of The Lunatic on the public, the
project's audience, remains for the most part, a large question mark.
REALIZE THAT ANY INTERVENTION OF THIS SORT WILL FACE CONTRADIC-
TIONS INHERENT TO THE PROJECT; KEEP IN MIND FROM THE OUTSET THAT
THESE CONTRADICTIONS WILL AFFECT AND QUESTION THE VERY STAN-
DARDS BY WHICH THE RELATIVE SUCCESS OF THE PROJECT CAN
BE MEASURED.
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Staging Politics in the Corporate Sphere

Wodiczko, Krzysztof

Lurie, David

74
A VEHICLE FOR THE URBAN NOMADS
KRZYSZTOF WODICZKO AND DAVID LURIE
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In The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of1844, Marx describes the home of the
factory wage labourer as a "return to a cave dwelling...now contaminated with the pestilence
of civilization." If labour power exemplifies the sophisticated development of human needs, it
simultaneously reduces the factory worker to a condition of bestiality - poverty is, for Marx,
the "putrefaction of man."
Factory labour in the 19th century exists within buildings - the factory and the tenement
where the labourer returns each night - that have reduced the necessary means of living;
"light, air, space, etc. - the simplest animal cleanliness - ceases to be a need for man." In
other words, the worker has no right to a habitat or job nor has he (sic) a right to expect any
minimal conditions of either. He occupies these places "only precariously" as both home and
means of support can be withdrawn from him at anytime.
The contemporary situation, in which unskilled labourers are all but un-needed,
signifies a fundamental shift in the situation described by Marx. For many, shelter and
other means of subsistence are no longer available through the exchange oflabour. In New
York City, for instance, while factory labour remains an important segment of the economy,
it is subject to a continual erosion. Concurrently, low income housing, which since the 19th
century has been fairly readily available, is now rapidly disappearing.
In Marx's terms, the movement of estrangement has reached its epiphany. The capital
produced through workers' own power has been deployed in such a way that the workers are
no longer needed. A whole segment of the urban population is becoming, in economic terms,
entirely superfluous. Now while the city may have removed the traces of the individuals who
originally lived and worked in its buildings, the physical transformation has failed to remove
the poor persons themselves. Homeless and jobless, they have nowhere to go, nowhere, that
is, where they might literally disappear.
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If, according to Marx, wage labour reduces individuals to the very condition of beasts,
what are we to make of those who have even been excised from the work economy: without
shelter or home, these people remain unrecognized as minimal citizens within civil society,
even as they stubbornly refuse to remove themselves from our sight.
Borne of the desperate need for food and shelter, a new economy of exchange has
developed within this new community of the homeless. With the passage of the bottle bill in
New York in 1983, the collection and redemption of cans and bottles has now become a
means of subsistence for a growing population of New Yorkers. The activity of redemption is
demanding: the daily collection, sorting and returning of 500 cans and bottles (an extraordi-
nary feat for all but the strongest and most fit individuals) yields just $25.
The re-cycling activity of the homeless follows from the insight that even if an object has
been consigned to the garbage, it does not necessarily mean that its exchange value has been
exhausted. Indeed, many homeless scavengers have extended their redemptive activities to
include the collection and marketing of almost any type of found object (books, magazines,
shoes, trinkets, etc.).
The incredible demands of their collection activities combined with the constant peril of
attack and intimidation by the police and other authorities, have compelled homeless persons
to adopt a highly mobile, nomadic form of survival. To wit, homeless persons have devel-
oped their own highly idiosyncratic types of vehicle - shopping and postal carts have proved
to be the most reliable vehicles for modification - with which to transport their personal
property and collect material for redemption.
The Homeless people in New York have today laid a stake in the way that the city is
organised publically. Though locked out of the general wage labour economy, their visibility
and engagement in the everyday life of the city is of obvious political significance: they make
a public claim to the right to engage in work and repudiate any attempts to deny their
legitimate claim to membership of the community of the city.
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The goal of the Homeless Vehicle Project is to develop strategies for ameliorating the condi-
tions of homeless people. In this way it seeks to play a role in the atmosphere of crisis in the
city, exposing the community's lack of and urgent need for permanent housing. If members
of the urban community have now developed powerful and circuitous ways to avoid having to
apprehend the daily lives of the city's homeless residents, then one of the strategies of the
Homeless Vehicle Project is confrontation: to bring the plight of the homeless, their everyday
existence, into the everyday lives of the 'non-homeless'. It is only perhaps when the homeless
are confrontationally recontexualised within the operational field of the 'recognised' resi-
dents and workers of the city, that the cognitive armour which enables us to resist apprehen-
sion of the condition of the homeless may be Jlunctured.
The vehicle, as it is designed, is a skeleton. During use, collected objects may be
attached to its metal frame to change the vehicles's appearance substantially. However, the
vehicle is designed to be always recognisable - both by users and viewers - as a mechanism for
persons and one that is appropriate to their everyday activities. Through the use of this
machine, which will be identifiably their own, homeless scavengers will challenge the failure
of the urban community at large to recognise their role in the city's network of exchange.
Carrying with increased speed and efficiency their scavenged detritus, the homeless will
display to the city their conditions of survival openly and confrontationally. No longer
relegated to the world of abused objects, the vehicles' users will claim a right for their work
as well as an articulation of that right within the public space.
Vehicles will be configurated in a variety of different ways, some in reclining positions,
others in travelling or resting positions. Sleeping, cooking, eating and even vending will be
some of the essential activities that the vehicle will be used for. By linking together groups of
vehicles in one particular place, the social character of homeless person's survival strategies
will be exemplified. Together, vehicles will create a visible, cohesive community of homeless
persons on the streets of the city. In addition, the linking together of vehicles will provide a
line of armoured protection - much like the wagon formations of an earlier generation of
american nomads - from the often dangerous encounters with authority and so called 'angry
citizens' .
The missile-like form of the prototype illustrated here signifies the aggression implicit in
the activities of homeless scavengers. The movement of the carts through the ever transform-
ing city (a site of real estate speculation) with their attendant found materials (no longer
garbage but representing a viable exchange value) is the sign of the homeless' refusal to be
reduced to mere passive observers.
The vehicle was designed through discussions with a group of homeless persons and has
been produced and tested in co-operation with its future users. It is not conceived of as a
solution to the failure of the government to produce homes for the tens of thousands of
persons who live and work on the streets of New York. Neither is this prototype likely to be
useful to the majority of homeless individuals in the city. Rather the vehicle attempts to
address the immediate, specific needs of a particular group of homeless people. One of the
most pressing needs for some of them is to confront the city and its 'non-homeless' residents
with the operational strategies that the former employ in order to survive.
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Thefollowing took part in the homeless vehicle project:
Francois Alacoque, Janusz Bakowski, Tom Finkelpearl, Jay Johnson,
Kyong Park, Jagoda Przybylak, Heidi Schlatter, Rikkit Tirevanija,
David Lurie and Leslie Sharpe.
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The author gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance
of the Canada Council.
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A Vehicle for the Urban Nomads

Marchessault, Janine

An Erotics of Space

Kroker, Arthur

44
PANIC MEDITATIONS
ARTHUR KROKER
PANIC ASTRONOMY
What is the relationship between astronomy and torture?
I have often been puzzled by this relationship because of a particular, and grisly,
outbreak of State-sponsored political torture. In the 1970s while living in Italy I followed with
outrage the accounts of the violent days at the beginning of the Pinochet regime in Chile, and
the spreading thereafter of the shadow of political torture, from the disappeared to the
mutilated. I also noted, and wondered about, a coincidental newspaper account that in the
very first weeks of the political coup the United States, which had just sponsored the new
military regime, announced also a major funding support for astronomy observatories high
in the Chilean Andes.
Since then, I have thought of the surrealistic contrast between the screams of the
tortured in Chilean politics, and the spectral, space-gazing silence of the astrophysics
laboratories. There was no apparent political relationship between them, other than that of
the ideological indifference of scientific value-neutrality. One was immanently inscribed in
the torture-techniques of earth-bound knowledge; and'the other was almost utopian, or at
least an appealing instance of scientific humanism over the years, in its steady announcement
of the discovery of new galaxies, pulsars, quasars.
I was reminded of this relationship when reading recently in the International
Herald Tribune that a major competition had just been held to fully technify the Chilean
observatories, placing them directly under the radio telemetry control of one of the major
industrialized countries. The headline read: "From Bavaria to Chile to Eighteen Billion
Years Ago." It was only ironic, and perhaps a point of undoubtedly unfair historical
coincidence, that Hitler's political birthplace had thus claimed a double inheritance:
not only the continuation anew of fascism in the Chilean state; but now, also, in the Chilean
galactic observatories.
45
Or is it something different, and more explicitly sinister? Not a relationship of the silence
of non-identity between astronomy and political terror, but, at least on the basis of a mutual
epistemological origin in panoptic and disciplinary knowledge, their common issue from a
deeply shared cosmology. An unhappy intellectual complicity, therefore, between astronomy
with its panoptic eye gazing into space as the purest expression possible of the will to truth,
and political torture with its panoptic turned earthward in the equally purest expression of
the will to power. Is there not, perhaps, at work here a more secret cabalistic knowledge
between political torture, which begins and ends with a pure astronomy of the victim's body,
and astrophysics, itself a will to pure facticity, which compels the universe to confess its
secrets.
Thus, two kinds of scientists - star gazers and body gazers: both performing according
to the very same rules of knowledge, and both responding to the same political impulses - if,
that is, postmodern power be thought about in its deepest and most constitutive expression as
the dynamic unfolding everywhere of the will to exact the tiniest secretions of information
from its citizenry (social nature) and from the galaxy (nature). All of this carried out by
complicit methodological strategies: whether by surveillance under the sign of the panoptic
eye, by the decoding of the cabalistic signs of information acquired, or by the more
immediate political stratagem of forced confessions. Is it, perhaps, that like Foucault's
prisons or medical clinics, which are the truth-sayers of the hidden rules of power in society
at large, the astronomy laboratories, high up on the Andean mountaintops, also provide the
ruling epistemological codes for State terrorism: power as panoptic surveillance; the complic-
ity of knowledge and power in the postmodern condition; and the minute gathering and
decoding of information acquired from the static of the physical universe, or from the
screams of the tortured, a whole dedoublement of stellar knowledge and bodily facticity
under the sign of an indifferent galaxy.
If it be objected that astronomy is a pure science, far removed from the specificities of
political struggle and brute power, then let it also be noted that the postmodern state, of
which Chile is an avant-garde, not retrograde, expression, surely has its ocular origins in
Bentham's fateful design of panoptic surveillance as the ruling power stratagem in the era of
power/truth. If it be said that this ocular knowledge is, through the medium of astrophysics
and technologies of galactic exploration, already space-bound, then this just might mean that
the fateful relationship between astrophysics and torture in Chile stands ready now to be
recapitulated at a higher and more intra-galactic level of abstraction in the future.
A surrealistic inquisition, then, of star-surveillance and body gazing as also part of Chile's
tragic political legacy for the western world.
So, finally, why panic astronomy? Because at least in the Chilean case, the very continu-
----------~------
ation of astrophysics in the Andes throughout all of these dark years is surely founded upon
and constituted by a suspension of ethical discourse about the relationship between science
and torture. Panic astronomy? Over and beyond the terrible infolding of the will to truth
and the will to power, astrophysics in the Andes is also in the way of a looking away from the
tortured screams of the innocent. And so, of course, the Bavarian (telemetried) connection,
not only as a superior technological form for the management of the ocular power of surveil-
lance, but also as an expedient ethical suppressant.
Consequently, a more troubling question: In that deliberately imposed silence between
two state technologies - one involving the seduction of the scienticization of the stars, and
the other implicated in the violence of the scienticization of the tortured body - in this
almost impossible gap of ethical indifference between science and terror, might there not also
be found a privileged, and terrifying, glimpse of our political future?
PANIC DREAD
Peter Watkin's brilliantly evocative film, Edward Munch, captures perfectly this Norwegian
painter's curious historical fate as the artist whose tragic imagination marked the end of
nineteenth-century panic melancholy at thefin-de-siecle and the beginning of
twentieth-century panic dread at thefin-de-millennium.
Melancholy? That's Munch's famous painting The Sick Child as a searing sign of the
strategiefatale of the nineteenth-century modernist mind. Here, Munch's artistic imagina-
tion is enucleated within the horizon of the modernist antinomies: tragic finitude at being
trapped in fatigued tubercular bodies as death-chambers (the painting is of Munch's dying
sister); and a frenzied revolt on behalf of life (the stripping away of all extraneous detail and
the scarring of the canvas). This is not bourgeois expressionism in revolt against naturalism,
but a meditation on suffering and fatigue carried to such a point of intensity that the painting
actually speaks, it cracks, it weeps the silence of perfect muteness.
And panic dread? That is The Scream as the twentieth-century Munch. Here, the
painterly imagination no longer operates at the edge of tragedy and free expression, perhaps
because Munch has witnessed the breaking into the body of all the technical interpolations of
subjectivity. Even free expression - the critical aesthetic distancing strategy of the nine-
teenth-century mind - runs into the bitter knowledge that transgression itself is only part of
a rupture which confirms.
When meditating on Peter Watkin's filmic study of Munch, I think not so much of
Nietzsche, but of Albert Camus. In The Rebel, Camus said of our predicament that we would
stand midway between two forms of revolt: metaphysical revolt against the absurd (with its
47
demand for an impossible unity), and historical revolt against injustice. Refusing suicide,
Camus chose complicity with history. Munch, however, was the more insightful because
ambivalent. Perhaps more than Nietzsche, and certainly more than Camus, Munch intimated
that our condition would be to live with the constant tension of the suicide, of the scream. A
scream so continuous, so total, and so mute with psychotic intensity that it would sound like
laughter from the joke of a cynical history and a cynical politics. As Munch says in Watkins'
film, he finally saw only panic dread in what was apparently social progress.
PANIC PIGEONS
There is an old, abandoned brewery in Montreal. It hasn't been used for forty years.
However, it is home to thousands of pigeons.
Last year an entrepreneurial artist received a grant from the Canadian Government for
a new art installation (his own). Refusing the customary museum space, the artist in question
held his show at the old brewery, with its legacy of pigeons and their droppings. Refusing
also this natural landscape, which had its own quality of sublimity and terror, the artist
reclaimed the factory space to the aesthetic standards of contemporary art exhibitions (white
walls, black floors, painted pipes), and was, in fact, in the process of trying to hustle three
million dollars in grant money to make the reappropriated landscape of the factory a site
where rising real estate values could be happily complicit with rising artistic values.
Once the art exhibit was opened to the public, it was evident that the artist's work was in
the best tradition of contemporary, and traditional, French perspectives on the Enlighten-
ment. The dialectic in his work was between hyper-rationalization and hyper-expressionism.
Violent pastiches of Turner's paintings (where the paint actually dripped from canvas
"plagiarisms" of Turner's Vesuvius onto the floor) alternated with exquisitely refined, and
mathematically precise, renditions of the measured world: the squaring of the circle; the
mapping of the natural landscape into a tidy grid of longitudes and latitudes; the whole
Cartesian reduction of space to a mathematical formula.
However, missing from his work was any sense of mediation, specifically between his
depictions of sublimity and terror in Turner and the Cartesian appropriation of the natural
landscape or, more generally, between the dual legacy of enlightenment: romanticism and
rationalism.
On this same opening day, though, a curious event took place. Two pigeons suddenly
swooped in through the door and sat on one of the installations. It was reported that the
artist went berserk, screaming that someone had left the door open, flapping his arms (in a
real case of pigeon panic), finally succeeding in chasing the pigeons out.
The pigeons flying in the door, of course, gave the lie to the whole venture, not just to the
lack of mediation in the French Enlightenment of which this artist's work was the most
recent example, but also to the complicity of romanticism and rationalism in refusing nature
and the double complicity of art and real estate values in refusing pigeons: Montreal's newest
homeless victims.
Panic pigeons, therefore, as the dark spirit of the dialectic of enlightenment coming
home to roost.
PANIC PSYCHOANALYSIS
The Schizoid Subject
Francis Bacon is the painter of the postmodern body which is actually peeled inside out,
splayed across the mediascape, with its organs dangling like passive servomechanisms waiting
to be fibrillated from outside.
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FRANCIS BACON.
THREE FIGURES AND
PORTRAIT (1975)
The Hermetic Body
It is just the opposite with the artistic productions of Lucien Freud.
If Freud (as the grandson of Sigmund Freud) is the painter par excellence of the death of
the psychoanalytic subject, that means that his art is a screen-effect, a truth-sayer, of the
disappearance of the famous reality-principle of the unconscious in the postmodern
condition. In Freud's artistic productions, the postmodern subject is represented as inert
and evacuated, actually imploded with such intensity that the body serves as a tomb for a
postmodern self which does not exist.
In many of Freud's paintings, and particularly in those featured in the recent retrospec-
tive of his work at the Beaubourg in Paris, his portraits of the feminine subject push the
conventional symptomology of the modernist psychoanalytic subject to its point of excess,
and then collapse: hysteria (the portrait of his first wife who, with exaggerated eyes always
gazing outward, quietly strangles the cat); compulsion-repetition (Freud always paints one
picture - supine women in suppressed silence staring blankly into white space);
displacement and projection (friend with rat); and an intense and unresolved mother fixation
coupled with a determined reduction of womanly subjects to 'girls'.
Here, we are left with a serial scene of vacant subjects, isolated, supine, silenced, their
gaze turned outward: not as some have claimed a recovery of anguished human identity, but
just the opposite - cancelled identities to such a degree of compulsion that their bodies
actually implode, resurfacing finally as blank screens. Indeed, if the Freudian subject can
possess such blank identities and if the symptomology of the painting can be so banal, maybe
that is because the Freudian subject no longer exists except as an artistic echo, a painterly
image-reservoir, of an already vacated subjectivity. Not then the unconscious any longer, but
the full publicization of the collapsing subject. Not dream states, but disembodied dreams as
the prevailing sign of postmodern psychosis. And not even a subject any longer, but a
memory trace onto which are inscribed all of the cultural signs of the end of the
psychoanalytic subject: painterly mothers, strangled cats, friends with rats, women as girls,
and always the intense, unresolved and compulsive fixation with the mother figure. The
common point: not Freudian psychoanalysis, but the implosion of the Freudian subject into
Bataille's history of the eye with its erotics unto death. Probably against his own intentions,
Lucien Freud has produced a brilliant parody of the limitations, and neurotic fixations, of
the psychoanalytic subject. In his work, the unconscious moves outside the body, and the
blank stare of all his painterly subjects is left as a necessary social remainder of the reduc-
tion of the self to a mirrored-image of the psycho-simulacrum.
While Bacon may paint the fully exploded body, the organ which is turned inside out
and splayed across the postmodern social terrain, Freud paints the hermetic body, the body
which implodes into the silence of non-identity. A distressed and emblematic sign of the end-
point of the psychoanalytic subject, Freud fully explores the ruins within. Indeed, in his art,
even the quality of the oil-paint changes over the years, from light colors and smooth quality
in his early works to mottled skin colors and rough, raised oils in his later works. It is as if
the text of the canvas begins to crack apart and to speak in the geography of its colors and
textures of the reality of the ruins within. Not so much the ruins of the womanly subjects in
these paintings, but the degree-zero of the panic male vision which is represented in all of its
melancholy brilliance and aridity in the artistic productions of Lucien Freud.
Reason and Madness
If Lucien Freud is the truth-sayer of the end of the psychoanalytic subject, then it might also
be said that Francis Bacon is the truth-sayer of science as power. Curiously, while Lucien
Freud is the intellectually faithful grandson of Sigmund Freud, the founder of
psychoanalysis, Francis Bacon is the collateral descendent of Francis Bacon, the author of
Novum Organum, and with it the creation of the governing episteme of modernist scientific
discourse. As if by an ironic gesture, two of the key axial principles of western culture-
psychoanalysis and science - are inscribed by blood lineage in the artistic imaginations of
Bacon and Freud. Here, art is finally a truth-sayer of the deprivations of the western
episteme: of the final production of the fully scienticized subject as a grisly alternation
between the schizoid and hermetic self.
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Panic Meditations

Virilio, Paul

CHALLENGER EXPLOSION (1986)
H1NDENBURG EXPLOSION (1936)
THE MUSEUM OF ACCIDENTS
PAUL VIRILIO
"When it comes to information distrust the probable. Always begin by believing what
seems incredible." Emile Gaboriau
To innovate the vessel was already to innovate the shipwreck, to invent the steam engine, the
locomotive, was again to invent the derailment, the rail catastrophe. So it goes for the birth
of aviation, airplanes innovating air-crashes, the air catastrophe. Not to mention the auto-
mobile and car pile-ups, electricity and electrocutions, nor especially those major techno-
logical hazards produced by the development of chemical and nuclear industry ... each
period of technological development, with its instruments and machines, brings its share of
specialized accidents, thus revealing en negatifthe scope of scientific thought.
The military object, armaments or diverse devices, invert the tendency to privilege
SUBSTANCE; on the contrary, the logic of war requires the ACCIDENT, disasters as a
principle: canons, shells, tanks or missles are then nothing but cumbersome war artifacts to
be lightened and minaturized as quickly as possible while their destructive effects (range,
impact. .. ) are constantly improved and made more spectacular in a bid to obtain the abso-
lute weapon (atomic or otherwise), the absolute expression of major technological risk, the
absolute form of fear, and thereby, one would hope, the beginning of wisdom.
Indeed, the beginning of wisdom would be, above all, an awareness of the symmetry
between substance and accident, instead of constantly dissimulating them. To acquire a tool,
a new piece of industrial equipment or whatever, is also to acquire a danger, a particular
risk; it is to open one's door, to expose one's intimacy to hazards, slight or major. To censor
evidence, as is so often the case, is to practice dissimulation, ensure disinformation, and so
contribute to a loss of confidence in the effects of science, analogous today only to what
happens in politics. Hence the disinterestedness, the decline of curiosity in the most varied
fields, reckoned to the unprecedented development of electronic or other images, though the
simulation industry marks the rise of contradiction and even a certain compensation.
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Exposing the accident in order not to be exposed to it is, at present, the main function of
simulators used to measure the performance of technological objects. It seems to me, the
same should hold for the new museography, especially that which claims to deal with science
and industrial products.
SCIENCE MUSEUMS: A PROBLEM OF "POSITIVISM"
With the opening of the latest French museum at La Villette, there is left only to unveil the
hidden face of industrial production, namely (that which is constituted through) failure and
breakdown. The aim is not to construct an "Anti-Museum," but to demonstrate the very
notion of "museum" as applied to experimental research, and in this way contribute to the
constitution of what may one day be the science ofan anti-science museum: the public
platform for what never exposes itself, yet nevertheless exposes us incessantly to major risks.
At a time when headlines and newscasts are almost permanently preoccuppied with
voluntary or involuntary accidents, dramas, natural or terrorist-induced catastrophes, the
problem facing a museology of science is not so much a choice between the gallery of
machines, the depository museum similar to an "Arts et Metiers" and a laboratory museum
like the "Palais de la Decouverte," but rather one of a philosophical and scientific positiv-
ism. It is the choice of a lyrical illusion of progress whose purpose is to continously mask all
that is negative in the name of science, as if exact science would progress by dissimulation, or
censorship of its own errors and false calculations ...
There is an urgent need, it would seem, to make room in public information for "fallibil-
ity," that tendency particular to the work of certain theoreticians who preach the research
priority of refutation within each scientific discipline. A "post-positivist" approach, insofar
as it goes beyond an ideology oflinear and continuous progress, would exclude the impor-
tance of the avatar and beneficent error.
It is pointless to rehabilitate the traditional criticism or auto-criticism used by scientists,
it is a question ofinversing the relation to the proof: proof by failure, exemplary refutation,
and not solely by spectacular success.
For our "anti-museum" of accident simulation would not, as we often find, resemble
substantial dissimulation where one is given to see, in order to overshadow truth, but rather
it would be a matter of inversing the relation to the exhibition ... rather like methods of
experimental approximation where the failure to achieve the object, leads to a continual
testing of what cannot be. Or again, using negative procedures, not to terrorize researchers
(engineers, scientists ... ) but to familiarize them with the unusual, so as to prepare them to
react predictably and efficiently, thus avoiding the dangers of habit - that professional
deformity born of a routine confidence in the reliability of technological objects.
"Exhibiting the accident" consists therefore, in exposing what is improbable, what is
unusual and yet inevitable.
THE EXPLOSION OF CHALLENGER LIVE
IN FRONT OF MILLIONS OF TV VIEWERS.
Pontifical infallibility does not exist when it comes to major catastrophies; the "Challenger"
disaster is there to prove it. Moreover, if we observe what has happened, given that the
techology was so recent (4 to 5 years at the most), it is undoubtedly NASA's complacency, its
derisory estimation of the probable risks, that is responsible for the catastrophe. With all the
disparate and heteroclite technologies used for the launching [ie. the "space-shuttle" (sophis-
ticated), the two boosters (not very different from the V2s used in the last war) and the
enormous container of liquid hydrogen], the accident is not so much that the space-shuttle
exploded in mid-air but that it actually lifted off!
These "extreme situations" [situations-limites] require the utmost vigilence against
routine; it should be the same when it comes to information on 'extreme technologies,' and
this should apply not only to professionals, those responsible for the programs and other
decision-making executives, but also to the amateurs and naive spectators of recent techno-
logical achievements.
In this sense, it could be said that the real exhibition of science and technology at this,
the end of the twentieth century, is not to be found in the showcases of the "Musee de la
Villette," but rather in the explosion of the "Challenger" just above the Kennedy Space
Center, live, in front of hundreds of millions of TV viewers sitting in front of their cathode
windows.
"To expose or to be exposed, that is the question," to be or not to be conscious, scientifi-
cally speaking, of risks, of what befalls without consent: accident, the hidden face of all
natural or man-made substance. Given that all simulation studies emphasize the search for
suprise (expecting the unexpected), we should today refute Aristole's dictum: "there is no
science ofaccidents," since this new generation of image simulators constitutes the "science"
of a progressive unveiling of the accidental which, until recently, was impossible to imagine.
Scientific speculation and exhibition are frequently limited (as they are for art) to "human
accessibility." In otherwords, their capacities of aperception of the environment, capacities
linked to their only organs of perception, organs which today are relieved by, an impressive
ensemble of prostheses (audio-visual, automobile) which permit indirect access to another
spaceltime in order to apprehend extreme phenomena.
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A NEW SCENEOGRAPHY WHERE ACCIDENT EXPOSES ITSELF.
"What actually happens is so far ahead ofour thinking, ofour intentions, that we can
never reach it and never know its true appearance." Rainer Maria Rilke
This insolvency, if it still carries a profound truth, does not totally reflect actuality since the
essence of numerical exposition has as its objective, the updating of that unactualized
appearance, that surprise rupture, the sudden disfunctioning or the grave perturbation.
How can we therefore under such conditions, dare present to the public, in a place that was,
lest we forget, the theatre of a monumental error in programming, the feat of rationality
without exposing the priority of that other scientific feat, namely the meteorological forecast
of catastrophe? The exploration ofafuture time, a "time" which is the very space of tomor-
row, rapid space which comes uninvited into the lives of the machine, men and even society
through the economic and political side-effects of resounding failures ...
At a time when the public is interested in outer space, it might be worth constructing a
mental image of each incident, each accident that happens, like some sort of "fire-bolt"
whose impact is being prepared in obscurity, in the deep temporality of the material, of the
machine: a propitious obscurity, similar to that of the firmament concealing future collisions.
In this preventative perspective, the accident cannot be reduced to its fatal conse-
quences, to its practical results, ruins or wreckages but must be related to a dynamic and
energetic process, to a kinetic and cinematic sequence that seems unable to relate to the
relics of destroyed objects, demolitions and wastes of all kinds.2
In this way "the expostion of the accident," the exposition of that which habitually
exposes us, calls for a new museography, a sort of meta-museography capable of over-
exposing and under-exposing the matter and systems threatened, a way of showing what
happens when the unexpected occurs, signaling the absolute necessity for techniques of rapid
"cinemacrophotography" and computer generated images.
It would no longer be a question of simply exposing new objects or the aftermath of
disasters, nothing to stimulate the morbid curiousity of visitors which would only favour a
new romanticism based on technological ruin in the manner that a beggar exaggerates sores
to inspire pity. After having polished the brass on the first steam engines, in the twentieth
century museums we won't deliberately blacken the burnt out ruins of advanced technology.
No, what is needed is a new scenography where only what is exploding or decomposing is
exhibited. A paradoxical mise en scene of the obscene, where decomposition and disintegra-
tion follow artistic display and high-tech design.
"The aesthetic of disapperance" be it progressive or instantaneous, is no longer that of
appearance, of a style or a genre or a scientific author; visitors will no longer file past
galleries since the "space"of the exhibition will have lost all interest, its museographic
attraction will be replaced by the time ofexhibition, depths of time comparable to those of
the most vast horizons, the most vast landscapes: landscapes in which "events" replace the
old exhibition halls, where architectural spaces disqualified on the one hand because of their
orthogonal geometry, 3 and on the other hand because of the necessities of an "urgent"
projection, would have nothing to do with the hanging of photographic or graphic work, an
exhibition of objects or industrial products.
Finally, as we saw on the TV news (18.2.86), the live demolition of a large building in a
Paris suburb, the transmutation in 8 seconds of a 180m high-rise building into 70,000 tons of
rubble: the "museum of accidents" already exists, I've seen it: it is the TV.
Translated by Yvonne Lawrence
NOTES
1'This article appeared as part of the inauguration of the new science & technology museum La Cite de la Villette
in March '86. Originally published in Art Press no. 102 (April '86): pI3-14.
2 In this field recall the precursive character of the exhibition by Sacha Ketoff: Air Crash Galerie Lacloche, June
1978.
3 As in the case of the exhibition Les Immat<iriaux Spring 1985 at Centre Pompidou.
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The Museum of Accidents

Lewis, Mark

Payne, Andrew

The Ghost Dance: An Interview with Jacques Derrida

Mulvey, Laura

The Oedipus Myth: Beyond the Riddles of the Sphinx

Wood, William

6 I
THE LUNATIC OF ONE IDEA
BYTHE LAKE:
THE LUNATIC OF ONE IDEA
WILLIAM WOOD
The politics ofemotion must appear
To be an intellectual construct. The cause
Creates a logic not to be distinguished
From lunacy)
So we sit down, here, in another place, recalling an earlier time by the lake when walls lit up
with lunacies of another order. The Mississauga site-tape for "The Lunatic of One Idea"
shows me what is there to be recalled; for, with the video wall down, there is nothing but the
tape to record its place, and the place records the discs devoted to filling the wall and I end
up in a construct where a wall is but a picture in another place.
That is a pithy thing to add to the dog food and the water and the car trips and the lady
who eats her shoe. But what do the mall-inhabitants do when confronted with the splendour I
am begged to answer for? They drink hot brown water and chew frozen dead milk; they look
up and wait for someone to come; slide in and out of camera view as they perform passages of
ambulation which have nothing to do with the wall being there. They do not see and cannot
care to see how the Participaction ad comments on their excess and calls them to trim up.
(Why take them to task? Why presume a missive to no address? It is the government talking
and they don't respect the letter of the law.) They have no need of the new Ford careening
through the 36 monitors, chopped up into racy fragments unified by a baritone voice-over.
What need they? Another Ford brought them there and, if anything, they want a GM on the
way out. Surprise!
As the site tape's gratuity, we follow one hapless citizen down the mall-street, away from
the video wall. The floor streaked with red light from exit signs, the store fronts receding into
film-noir-the real effect of the much-vaunted index whereby the real world is just not bright
enough for magnetics to hold so that we always appear as darkness, contrast, burn-out-only
to cut off just past the television store, with its multiple screens showing the same channel.
And then we find a cut back, after a moment of silence, to find that he, and we, have dis-
obeyed what comes next: the Pet Shop Boy's call to ask "What have I, What have I, What
7
have I done to deserve this?" (A lie I live with.)
... One wants to be able to walk
By the lake in Geneva and consider logic:
To think of the logicians in their graves
And of the worlds of logic in their great tombs.
The Wall Network was a failure. You can't buy into it now (under that name) as the authori-
ties have taken it to be a vain thing and eliminated its assets and its name under bankruptcy
proceedings. What we use as a term of intellectual, if not moral failure has caught The Wall
Network in the legal bind of being denominated and dispersed; I am no investigator worthy
the hire to find the financials.
Suffice to say that they tried to sell time and nobody can really afford to spend the time
to capture the mall people. They have already been caught if they are there and the harder
work of persuasion goes on elsewhere: in the home, on the car radio, in the office gossip of,
"Yes I got it there. I'd never seen so many things contained under one roof." Then, the roof
gives way for our view and we see that a conflict comes across the wire and it's "Out of
Africa" on 13, "Return of the Jedi" on 11 and "North-by-Northwest" sandwiched in be-
tween. Who's to say who is a hawk and what's a handsaw, if we are reduced to this type of
displacement?
As a year-long pilot, The Wall Network could not fill its space. Infant of a residual world
of consumer displays, it attracted neophytes and big spenders-those most desperate to
change their form of public access. Only they would bother to query. Just who would sit and
watch images when the objects are so close at hand? Only they could even consider the
supplementary totality thus encumbered. Someone beyond our reach, some body, some
figure we can hold on to, who might be beyond our call, who might be an infinitesimal or at
least minuscule portion of our share. Who do we miss the most and just who do those above
want to reach-just who, what being, in their right mind, is the right hook into another
source of market success, another grantable constituency, another gang to placate in this
seemingly endless and paranoid series of gangs?
Lakes are more reasonable than oceans, Hence,
A promenade amid the grandeurs of the mind,
Bya lake. with clouds like lights among the grand tombs,
Give one a blank uneasiness, as if
One might meet Kosantinov, who would interrupt with his lunacy.
It is simply names which work today: you can supply your own so that I can raise the ques-
tion without revealing mine. A list of shops, one for the A-team, one for the elusive short-list,
one for somebody who replaces the tailor I left behind. The images are there for the uncon-
vinced and no one enters Square One without being already cubed to fit the matrix thus
described. Remind them of the names-Greyson, Wodiczko , Lasovich/Simmons, Klein,
Garnet, Burgin, Frenkel, Mulvey.
Did you see how pointy black heels were cut in with sport shoes last week? (What
brand?) How, if she could walk, would a babe appear if her heels were able to make her run?
How, to ask again, how about that nice back-brace Benjamin described. The photo took so
long that one had to be supported; it was the best for the dead children who will be remem-
bered as Horst, Willhemina, Chritian, and Solweig. So, what if one just ran Benji down the
line and hooked up with a device that could keep you upright before the picture was
snapped, before its after-image was even thought about? Why wait around for the mall-side
booth when it is always possible to be a picture and a passport? Aura me over and name me
twice. All you have to find is the right source of misrecognition. Our birth in advertising.
These pictures, fractured and orchestrated in the zero-place of the mall-street, were
screened for a flaneur beyond their knowing. The mallster is able to get into contact with the
things sold, has little distance from the fantasies of transport that the screen can figure. In
the new type of street the mall makes (inside-out and waiting for wagons to spray the inhabi-
tants), the restrictions of choice comes as comfort to his/her sensibility. If anything, he and
she are there to participate in making images previously screened into a reality of knowing
places and contours, a surface longing; an amorphous desire that the mall puts to use by
being promiscuous in a way the street can never be.
A street always pre-figures its inhabitants. They may be from another place and be
passing through, unattached to its individuality, but, like the lakes in ourselves, the street
hopes to lure them in, to gain attention because it is unique among all the streets
it surrounds.
He would not be aware of the lake.
He would be the lunatic ofone idea
In a world of ideas, who would have all the people
Love, work, suffer and die for that idea
Neither human warmth, nor atavistic desire will make a subject worthy of watching. But I
watched, in a room I knew well, and chose the tapes for display. The Wall, then, seemed to
deny what I have written and come to suspect. It seemed, in that cenacle, to be written wider
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than anything I'd seen before. It commanded attention if only because its novelty promised
to deliver the manipulation we had waited for. Not some sort of implant so much as a pleas-
ure-unit, a sort of addition that, like the scotch in a boilermaker, made the usual brew into a
chill. What if they came to the mall and found a wall displaying, almost in mimicry of the
home, the hopes and fears contained off-site-what extra rapture could be added into the
already spaced-out and capitalized zone of drop because you shop, eat because you need
meat, shop around and then think? Well, the Wall held promise then, promise for a sup-
posed public imaginary because they came and because we chose to pick on them.
Everyone is prone to excitement and I failed on this point, for, when it came time to
choose, there was a loss within me. Where would the Wall touch another and who would
touch that point where images became impetus? Some wanted to plaster the spectacle as if it
were a band-aid to the wound while others took the route of living within the construct.
Mallster-thought, a place of commands and pictures, a space demanding control but permit-
ting diversion; asking for a place among the goods where a message could replace a good (art-
for-art echoing within the imaginary; all things can go astray but for the form of the address
and the type of input relayed. Take this grid as form; take it here, in this spot, and be
gracious about it).
DDDDD
So a number of things went on :
-A dog, wandering, eating, spliced up so that parts of his torso stay in place as he eats
from a different part of the bowl (rhythm soundtrack made-up from old synth-collab, Ben
Smit, director); cf., Samuel Beckett: "Habit is the ballast that links a dog to its vomit." Pet
me so that the difference between what you want and what you need ...
-Looking at professional mallsters, taking their brace in line and showing someone else
how coolly they approach the camera; security is never a concept for the shopper and being
looked at is part of the problem before it's part of the solution. Look again: that boy that
comes in at the end is too swift for the mall-game. A sure-to-see he is no 'burburian though he
appears mightily disturbed and all-but-downtown from the on-site look-oh yeah, Grand-
master says "Don't push me coz I'm close to the edge". Sure, for this guy, the edge is a credit
limit and that communicates to the gang that looks good before they leap the well. (Tom
Taylor/Rosemary Heather)
-Oh, nothing can go wrong; smooth soundtrack, sounds like something I could sing at a
rally. Very good, as our known-lake comes in the trail of foam from a boat and those tootsies
done up for the beach. There is the cranky faux-Mahler and the faux-disco picks up the beat
to leave our Mann on the beach. Oh, this is not a Death in Venice, but it is a star turn. Tell
them all, all the rubber-footed lot of them, that their dread is constructed to fill a grave and
expect them to act as if what mattered was what went down on the sand. Never so right, but I
wonder what is somehow unfulfilled in giving Mississauga a view of life along the lakeshore.
Lou Reed just took his face off on MuchMusic, to the lyrics "Love is trustlNo money down".
(John Greyson)
-Column up! I'm calling for an order of toast and everyone falls down on me. The trio
(pillar, Wonderbread, and toasty slice) meet their match in an out-take from the Art of
Noise. Which, despite its anchored lineage, is what goes on here and may make this few
minutes the ones worth staking a claim upon. The charm of the useless holds the pleasure of
being mistaken. What I can't see for the trees is the sky through a beat-box toy. (Dennis Day,
Chris Martin, Sue Rynard)
-Please Stand Aside. Indeed, the voice-over (which lasts but a minute) sets us up to
hear more from her. But the images move too fast-as if in generational increments-from
the office to the fire of the factory and the after-burn of the shuttle, to money, Mammon,
opening the doors unto the world. But always the world seen through those blinkers of a
power attempted everyday. Is nothing to be risked in the face of futile, or, as this sequence
would have it, genetic forays into control? Righteously passed over, I sense no danger in
watching the world turn, for all will win out as the forces pass by me. Free at last, free at
last ... to drift as archaic. Please take up my train. (Nancy Paterson)
-The greeny sea, mother to-be, my past comes back as salty, foreign cheeks. Water-
wall, as only a mike can make it to the ear, but never cleansing, always sullying the solids we
know to lurk behind the fluid screen. How to make this moment all-one and sufficient? We
can see the ruined turrets and hear the interrupts of the diva and the train. Tunnel-in and
then come out to see the credits (Eva Marie Saint of the Twentieth-Century). There is the
lake and the mind, and we go through the window to be set loose to bob on the inland sea.
Once ice moved, here scurrying as it melted to grind down porous rock to leave furrows and
drumlins and a hole to become a lake behind. Logic then becomes a process of drinking in,
and, now, Lady Chatterly's on the screen with Sylvia Kristel as the forlorn wife making a
mockery of what was already a bit of a sailor's story. Life should be such that our breath was
punctuated by a diva. (Laura Mulvey, which I watch again and again.)
-Hey, You Mass! Listen up! No one hear but us short-term screamers. "TELL/NELLI
(see the bell)/YELL HELL/HELL!" Never trust a god-star. Nell's cartoon-visage translates as
condescension as we count the grains of the beach. Go to the Superstore and they yell at the
kids and everyone around disproves. (United Media Art Studies, on the wing for you.)
-Tell me true, my Vera, is religion like shopping or is shopping religious? Does every
angle have its angel, or each preacher his cher pre? (Lacroix put this one to him.) Story beats
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anagrams every time, but what is in place to hold them to the mall-state: so many things to
read from the surface that there is no time for text. No intonation, but none needed because
the feudal process of providing the narrative before the letter has given way, rent like a cloak
or a stall, to the modern world where the globe is like the tire around my tummy. (Vera Frenkel)
-Better to punctuate with the grid, moving and freezing all the questions. (She is going
to eat it, the little tramp!) Yes, $82.37 last month on $1257.96, charges, $20.49. Your pay-
ment has not reached us, but ... The grid organizes the word so sparingly, making the
screens barred like teeth, the matrix a fallible unit, and the question into a probe that sort of
tickles. (What if you walk on them all day and then boil them, would the salt do some good?)
This is the best way to catch the eye, on the way out the door, and the language has its logic.
The mall is formed of a survey, begat on a parking lot, and lives heartily with infusions of
plastic and the pulses of bodies through its core. (Isn't that what softens them up?) And,
although confessional, this is not ecclesiastic but conscientious. To look out through the grid
and ask as if there were another word other than yes. (Krzysztof Wodiczko )
-My favourite story, told twice and 36-times two: they embrace over and over, the
coffee spilled under the tower's gentle one-eyed gaze. Boom, Pachabel, so moving and so
funereal that it is the favourite 'classic' tomb-tune in the world. Ideogram for the lake and
the vault, I grow weak on its recall-so much did it shade my life there, so many times I saw
it and her and the thing spilt. (Victor Burgin)
-Another lyric on the water edge, and why not get to know our finny friends? The
overdone noise of leaks and the flow of the seal coming in at the camera so smooth and
speckled with moulds and stinking emerald water, coming out and sectioning off to then slip
away. Sort of queasy what with the flippers and the fur undulating. How to tell the seal from
the sea if not in the tank? (Rhonda Abrams)
-We love them and then we kill them; America doing both at once. Mixing the narrative
and pulling out all the stops on those little cheeky bums on the adverts and the way we feed
them in McDonald's (sure site for a molester) because every bit of a kid's pleasure is magni-
fied in the custodial eye. Then the death toll, the missing-part aching to be prodded and
massaged into our own home and the kid being tagged, drawing on the wall the continual
attraction of their helpless ability to be lost and found, disappeared by us. But the thing here
is the equation and not the passing of intelligence-the burger linked to the milk carton and
tied to the anchorwoman's intoned "non-custodial parent". Someone profits from all this
attention and what is perpetuated is the rumour that when they chew we wanna suck.
(Michael Klein)
-The old self-reflex of showing them where you came from-"Shopping Trip." Me too
on the freeway back then, back seat, the eyes in training for what to see out the window. And
seeing nothing but home, the garbage and the flowers, freeway and yard. The ultimate
conceit being when the mall becomes the home and the spot in the lot is the driveway. Dad
avoids mowing the lawn while Mom waters the tar. Best use of the grid as window here,
glazed panes each allowing a parallax; the hand-held camera becoming an old love of the
tripper's bored gaze. (Caroline Simmons/William Lasovich)
-Cross-reference to Klein, but watch how the little one is reigned-in as the warning gets
worse. Helpless. The lake is poisoned like the corrupt way he is treated. But what to do when
the mesh is so exact? The water will kill you, and you can't stay away. What remains is the
matter of the sophisticated lack of match that is so cool and clear. Tasteless, watery, Oedi-
pus. (Eldon Garnet)
-I can hardly see the last one-all details multiplied across the six-by-six. Ending in a
mouth but starting in a purse, some sticks and another colour in there for decor.There is the
idea here of the repetition being compensation for the individual cell allotted to each and all.
See not yourself sixty feet high, but so many more than one, so many selves all cloned in a
flip from the dancefloor track. Pulse it out, get the seriality of the mall, and punch through
to the quiet of lips bared and the grid becomes the mouth that does not speak for all the noise
of the detail. The lips mouthing what has come to be heard everywhere else. Oxymoron
leading to hyperbole, so that the end is open-faced but calls for SHHH. (Kass Banning)
In a world ofideas. He would not be aware of the clouds,
Lighting the martyrs of logic with white fire.
His extreme oflogic would be illogical
But the beautiful simplicity of the mall, its attraction for those wishing for risk-free invest-
ment, is that it sucks its fluid in without pausing for breath. Ignoring consciousness of
individuality, but sustaining itself as merely a shifting series of spaces for let, it nevertheless
attracts a predictable set of clients. A chain-store and a chain to follow: the Dilex bunch;
with them, the Birks and Bowrings, and the Signor Angelo's, the Body Shops and the
Bed Shoppe; and, with them, the Bombay Store and the St. Marks; and with them the Jean
Machine and the Aquariama. The requisite Cineplex begets the Orange Julius and the A & W
and the United Cigar Store picks up the rear with the Ho Chi Minh and the lone flower store
(who came to death asking what a grotesque thing a rose is?). They come, as if they had place
cards, so long as the hours allow, for it is the place and not the activity that draws them in.
Going there is always superfluous since some other promise is involved rather than
simple transaction.
1. Wallace Stevens, "Esthetic du mal"
OJ
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