This article contains an analysis of Warren Neidich’s early photographic work of 1997 until 2002. These works which are linked to the extensive theoretical production of the artists are contextualized with the concept of the dispositif and apparatus which was developed by Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and recently Maurizio Lazarrato. The article provides a close description of the parameters of four pivotal work groups of Neidich’s early practice, Brain Wash (1997), Double Vision (1997-2000), Short Reverse Shot (2001) and Law of Loci (1998-1999). These works were realized with the aid of low-tech devices stemming from neuro-ophthalmology, marking the interface between current neuro-philosophical discourses such as bio-politics, the plasticity of the brain, the apparatti of visual, i.e. analog and digital culture, and the philosophy of memory. It is suggested that Neidich, even though he intervenes and contributes importantly to these intermingling discourses in a broad manner, is particularly interested in the degraded and infirmed implementations of human vision in order to explore new sensations and habits of perception.

When one reads about Warren Neidich’s early work of the 1990s, particularly about American History Reinvented,(1) most of the focus concerns an interpretation of the technical aspects of the production of his oeuvre through a media-philosophical scrim upon which an exploration of the cultural milieu is made possible. Foucault’s notion of Apparatus(2) and the dispositif, developed further by French film theorist Jean-Louis Baudry in the mid-seventies (Baudry, 1975), are relevant to any exploration of Neidich’s work.(3) Having imported optical devices, mainly from the realm of neuro-ophthalmology, for the production of his art works one can utilize these aforementioned theoretical concepts in order to understand his projects more concisely especially those produced and discussed in this paper between 1997 and 2003. The apparatus as a technical term hints at the practical elements of the “machines of seeing” of our “scopic regimes” (Jay, 1988: 3-27) such as photo, film and video camera, projectors as well as the projection space of a cinema (or lecture hall), and finds its counterpart in the idea of the dispositif which supplements – in a more general way – these two closely aligned concepts of structuralism and early structuralist film theory and a more recent counterpart in Maurizio Lazzarato’s media theoretical concept of Noo-politics. For him power establishes itself over the brains of the multitude from afar through the use of contemporary apparatti like the internet and particularly software agents which limit difference and create homogeny by administrating attention and memory (Lazzarato, 2003: 186).

However fascinating the mechanisms of seeing in modern times became when thinking of amateurish photo practice or visits to the movie theatre, the history of vision is above all a history of consumerism and paternalism one hand, and of eagerness for knowledge in the scientific domain on the other. Considering these complex interwoven territories, where vision (in the sense of perception) is subject to the power of knowledge, one can trace back in history its incredible power of infatuation, a danger that is embedded and reproduced more than ever in the digital image.

The idea of a ‘seduced vision’ through an analysis in time both backwards and forward as opposed to one that is simply linear and positivistic to produce, if you will, a-temporal machinic assemblages is inspiring. During the 19th century, scientific photography did not only bring to light until then unknown pictures such as Auguste-Adolphe Bertsch’s mites and other species which were unable to be seen with the naked eye or Josef Maria Eder and Eduard Valenta’s radiographs of animals. Fascination for micro-photography went so far that until the 1860s scientists still believed it possible to see more in a photographic detail when it was blown up. For instance, grains in the film emulsion became when blown-up proof of the existence sub-cellular particles and organelles. That was a tragic misinterpretation of the photographic ontology (Breidbach, 2002[1998]: 221-250). This also calls to mind the intricate investigations on Secondo Pias first photographic capturing of the Holy Shroud in 1898. Photography is, as it may seem, the medium per se to “search for something” (Geimer, 2002: 143-145) that is in flux in its state and hardly recognizable let alone visible.

That these misinterpretations were finally discussed tells one that vision and history cannot be understood separately from each other. Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (1990) is considered to be an important reference in the delineation of the evolutionary history of modern vision linking it, as it does, to the use and forms of diverse optical devices invented and used during the century of the Industrial Revolution. Crary made clear that an optical machine as primitive as it may look for us today was a device of wonder, fascination and fantasy then. Notwithstanding, it is striking enough that even simple devices such as the stereoscope, which can be tested in many museums of film history these days, are still appealing to us.(4) Stereoscopes, stroboscopes and zoetropes (and the photographic camera) – all pre-cinematic devices have not only been set up in amusement parks of the 19th and early 20th century (Maase, 1997), but were simultaneously used as objects to probe visual capacities such as “time-sense” and “space-sense” perception. Hugo Münsterberg, a German American pioneer in film theory and author of The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916), anticipated, as Giuliana Bruno in an extensive essay made strikingly clear, the “neuroaesthetic approach” (Bruno, 2009: 92) which has been developed by Neidich among others and which is being discussed widely in Anglosaxon and German art criticism since the turn of the 21st century.(5) Naming an example, Münsterberg investigated at Harvard Psychological Laboratory how film montage – motion – is able to affect emotion and empathy (Bruno, 2009: 102-103), i.e. in neuroaesthetic terms the shaping of the brain as it were.

This essay is not able to investigate how optical devices influence one’s brain structure in the sense of its changing neuro-physiological states from a scientific neuro-psychological point of view, nor does it explore the artistically less interesting phenomenon of evocating certain visual stimuli in order to surprise or manipulate the viewer as one can see it in works using mirrors or light for example. It shall trace back Neidich’s artistic interpretation of low-tech devices from neuro-ophthalmology such as the prism bar and Lancaster glass, which became adequate items with which to explore their possibilities as hybrid interfaces. These Hybrid Dialectics, as he calls them, are neither diagnostic devices used to determine abnormalities of the brain, nor are they meant to merely obtain particular artistic expressions, but a middle ground with which to “produce new kinds of images in the hope of enlisting in the viewer new sensations and habits of perception.”(6) In this context, the idea of the extended cognition plays a mediating role in Neidich’s thinking as there is the “plastic brain” (Clark, 2008: 68) which is subject to constantly altering states, for instance in the man made milieu in which a series of designed and engineered apparatti are embedded in analogue and digital culture in order to make scopic regimes immediately usable. By linking the history of vision to processes such as cinematic suture, Neidich’s interest lies interestingly enough less in extending the perceptual cognitive apparatus, but in discovering its degraded and infirmed margins.(7) It is the field of rupture and manipulation of the institutionality of visual culture that Neidich intervenes pushing forward the discussion on the idea of the “distribution of the sensible” (Rancière, 2006)(8) and the so-called “economy of attention”, the economic concept of the cyberspace and its urge to bind attention (Mandel and Van der Leun, 1996).(9) The focus of this essay lies therefore in this intriguing relationship between the exploration of a tool (the optical devices) as a metaphor for occidental cultural thinking and its literal use following self-conscious representational strategies. In this sense it can be seen that the exploration of technical and optical devices in the field of art practice is very often misleading viewer’s attention to the wrong site most notably when visual phenomena evoke first of all sensational pleasure. In the case of Warren Neidich’s early photographic pieces one can see how he oscillates between the techné of the artistic process and the realm of the artistic invention.

One of Warren Neidich’s first artworks is a video called Brain Wash from 1997. A man sits at a table and focuses on a rotating black and white striped drum. It’s a so-called “optokinetic drum”(10) which is used as a simple device for stimulation and assessment of optokinetic nystagmus, an involuntary eye movement, respectively. Brain Wash was Neidich’s first application of his Hybrid Dialectics and was closely aligned with the concept based on Marcel Duchamp’s idea of the objet trouvé by which the double-sided, hybrid character of a work of art as dependent on its authoritative context is made strikingly clear for the first time in art history. The camera/viewer observes the man staring at the drum and a close-up of the eyes shows the particular eye movement of the protagonist. This kind of subtle vibration of the eyeballs is followed by a cut away shot of the eyes of the man at a distance which now move rhythmically to and fro, left and right. In the next scene the viewer visualizes a 180 degree pan of the horizon which is made to shake and tilt. The purposeful shaking of the hand held camera in this sequence is a direct reference to the type of unstable frame that characterizes Lars von Trier’s aesthetics of Dogma. The notable linkage of the camera as apparatus connected to the apparatus of seeing was a nod to Duchamp’s Handmade Stereopticon Slide (c. 1918-1919) which fuses geometry, projection and perception paradigmatically showing the horizon of the sea and an octahedron. As Neidich pointed out, this particular sequence depicts the “eratic spaces of a world in transition.”(11) At the conclusion of the 180 degree camera pan movement there is a cut to the man again (revealing that it was apparently not he who was looking), followed by a close-up of the eyes again looking left and right, ending in a fade-out of the rotating optokinetic drum. The whole story is accompanied by a fast-paced sound track from the Japanese pop group Pizzicato Five.

Brainwash can be seen as sort of a comedy. Its narration is based on different filmic strategies such as the use of the linear arrangement of sequences at the beginning in which tracking shots, cutting in and away and the close-up are assembled together. This virtual movement is traditionally perceived as a stringent development of a simple time-space-relationship as can be observed in the early films of the Lumière brothers. The other strategy, the more elaborate one, is the shot reverse shot, a film technique that imitates throwing a glance at another person, often off-screen, in order to make clear to the spectator which protagonists are looking at each other. Simply said, each device which interrupts the traditional filmic eagerness to imitate human perception gives evidence to the factitiousness of the film. This happens in Brainwash in a quite tricky way when filmic conventions are broken up by juxtaposing sequences that give one the impression that they fit – nevertheless, they don’t. The piece is therefore even more of a caricature in the sense of E. H. Gombrich’s definition of identities that “do not depend on the imitation of individual features so much as on configurations of clues (…)” (Gombrich, 1986: 292). Similarly, Neidich does not seem to guide the perception of the viewer to clues just in order to communicate a content, but to the quite opposite, paradox direction. Having the optokinetic nystagmus caricatured by eyes moving is one such paradox for from a neuro-scientific point of view one has nothing to do with the other. This example displays how two divergent concepts collide. Even more obviously is the tilting shore as a sequence which depicts the internalised vision of the protagonist. Again, it is neither nor. As the camera moves around and stops at the body of the man, the sequence of the shore is a “double-vision” film convention, unclear of course who is who and who sees what. Nevertheless, this is Neidich’s manipulation of the cinematic gaze and – above all – his engagement in the philosophy of perception.

Brainwash can be considered a relevant example to introduce Warren Neidich’s medium comprehensive practice. His practice is shaped by a thorough knowledge of the physiognomy of the eye and the brain, the psychology of perception and the history of art. He uses optical devices as a starting point from which he explores his core questions. As one can understand in seeing Brainwash he uses low-tech devices and, as in this case, filmic (that is perceptional) conventions, in order to visualize what effects and shapes the brain, but also deceives the eye. The optokinetic drum in the beginning and the end of the video serves as a parenthesis. If Neidich would have executed this image as a painting, it could have been something such as Bridget Rileys’ Cataract 3 (1967) whose title, it is not without reason, is also a notion from ophthalmology. Strikingly, Riley’s and Neidich’s artistic expression is inspired by a negative connotation: the defect of vision. Working with the negative(12) Neidich reformulates what is considered a damage to or a loss in vision. Another series of work, his photographs Double Vision (1997-2000), among others, take up this idea and transfer it into a paradoxical but positive result. Double vision, or diplopia, is a dysfunction of one or both eyes, so to speak a misalignment of the eyes which results in seeing double. Interestingly enough the brain is able to correct and suppress the information of one eye because movement through space proves evolutionarily speaking difficult and even dangerous.

Double Vision, Louse Point (1997-1998) is a series of photographs that shows scenarios of bathing people at the beach of Louse Point on East Hampton, New York. The images are a reminder of the recreational gatherings of the well-known artists and writers Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Clement Greenberg and others in the 1950s. Neidich’s images obtain a touch of nostalgia by equilibrating the photographic colours, mainly by reducing magenta that gives the impression as if the photographs had been exposed to too much sun.(13) The images show an unusual element: translucent blue and red circles, reminding one of the strange phenomenona of orbs.(14) Unlike the opaque blobs on John Baldessari’s faces, Neidich’s spheres do not replace, mask or abstract, but float and shimmer translucently like extraordinary atmospheric phenomena – blue tinted lunar eclipses, red fireballs, but also the diaphanous coloured glass of a Claude’s glass. There is something mythical about them with their coronas, as they seem to move “spot lighting” the outer world like a light ray either ignoring people in the image or aiming directly at them. By being translucent, the coloured circular surface marks undoubtedly an area between the viewer and the scenery.

The phenomenon of double vision is not seen here as a misalignment but as a movement into visual depth towards the vanishing point. Being created by placing a Lancaster glass in front of the camera lens,(15) Neidich’s apparatus refers to the single point perspective construction as an expression of the outer world’s symbolic form in Erwin Panofky’s sense (Panofsky, 1991). However, there is also the artist’s other interest in visual perception in a more physiological way than Panofsky. One can argue, that Neidich’s photographic work also marks a spot as an area of afterimage, pointing out unknown areas of the science of neurology with a hint to “cognitive ergonomics” as he calls it (Neidich, 2003: 21). The phenomenon of afterimage can serve here as a metaphor of what can be seen in this image production, an amalgam of remembrance, inner perception in the shape of visualized visual traces of the brain cortex, and most of all the result of an artistic process to break up the mimetic function of photographic representation.

Warren Neidich makes ample use of optical devices in his early art works. Another work, Shot Reverse Shot is a series of performances, resulting in a video and a series of photographs. Again, he is not reformulating the traditional filmic strategy of the shot reverse shot, but uses the technique literally in order to obtain not only unknown visual experiences but also distinct viewing structures. The prism bar, which is held in front of the protagonist’s eyes, fans out perception revealingly in both ways. The object is a neurological and ophthalmological device to measure an eye’s deviation after a stroke or a trauma for the later surgical reconstruction of the misalignment and reconstitution of single vision. In Shot Reverse Shot it is used as a cadenced glass to look through, a window which is in itself the traditional metaphor of vision since the picture pane depictions by Leon Battista Alberti in De Pictura (1435) and Albrecht Dürer in Underweysung der Messung (1538). Exploring the situation of the two protagonists – viewers, one of them filming the scene – who look through the prism bar standing in front of each other and experiencing a refracted view, one is immediately reminded of another concept of perception which is Jacques Lacan’s often cited three diagrams from The Four Fundamental Concepts (1981). As Martin Jay pointed out, Lacan was very much inspired by his friend of the Surrealist magazine Minotaure, Roger Caillois, who introduced a dihedron to “clarify the relation between eye and gaze (…) in his 1935 essay on ‘Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire’” (Jay, 1993: 365). Lacan developed the idea of the screen (écran) which is the site of correlation between one’s eye looking at an object and the gaze (marked as “light”) looking back. It is intriguing to see that Lacan is using the metaphor of the camera to come to the second diagram(16) and to his understanding, that what “was looking at me at the level of the point of light, the point of light, the point at which everything that looks at me is situated.” (Lacan, 1981: 95 and Jay, 1998: 365).(17) In his concept the screen is the place of the subject who is not only “caught, manipulated, captured in the field of vision,” (Lacan, 1981: 92 and Jay, 1998: 364) but who also embodies the paradox of being in between light and the opaque simultaneously. With the screen concept the single focus of the God’s eye-view is clearly abandoned. Coming back to Neidich’s work Shot Reverse Shot one can trace back such concepts by understanding the prism bar as a place of interference. The viewing structure is antidromic, even equally administered between different protagonists who are all from mixed ethnical background. Each one embodies different historical conceptions using the analogue simple device of a prism bar or the digital video camera. One can even argue that the gaze of the protagonists, being documented on one side, experienced unmediated on the other, is a paradigm of an altering subjectivity in process by the aid of a prosthesis and a clue to the neo-liberal global world order governed by the WWW.(18) This would also sync up with Lacan’s notion of the screen as a place of mediation. Kaja Silverman commenting on this relationship proposed that Lacan’s screen is also subject to social and historical interpretations “by describing it as that culturally generated image or repertoire of images through which subjects are not constituted, but differentiated in relation to class, race, sexuality, age and nationality,” (Silverman, 1989: 75-76) an observation which also possesses validity in Neidich’s work.

Using the prism bar in a direct way such as in the Shot Reverse Shot project one can also observe that in its playful use it instigates the dissolution of personal space and boundaries that determine personal interactions. Even though vision is refracted, the process of seeing not only more but above all unconventionally is, as mentioned above, crucial and is very much related to Neidich’s neuro-biopolitical interests. Whereas Shot Reverse Shot can be seen as part of Neidich’s interactive projects the last photographic series being discussed in this paper is dedicated to photography as a medium of guarding the past (actually the present in its moment of capturing) for the future. It is also part of Neidich’s extensive explorations into the “History of Consciousness”.

Law of Loci was undertaken by Neidich in a short time span of approximately fifteen months in 2002-2003 when the artist visited his ill father’s home outside New York City regularly. The term describes the main mind memory aid of the Antique world delineated by Cicero in De Oratore. Cicero himself employed the method to memorize his speeches by walking mentally through the area of the Forum romanum. Simonides of Ceos, the legendary inventor cited by Cicero, found out that by using the spatial relationship of the imagination of a house one is able to recall things better. Instead of walking mentally through the space of the house he grew up in he instead physically wandered from room to room as well as outside revisiting spaces of his childhood and adolescence where things had happened to him. This physical component of the project became pivotal. By moving through his parents’ house and its environments the artist explored and questioned what is one of the core functions of photography: capturing traces of actuality. As Roland Barthes has showed so poignantly in Camera lucida (1981) the photograph occupies the place of remembrance and mourning. It is still striking that capturing images of beloved persons and places, the present of that particular moment is inscribed into the surface of the filmic material as soon as it is taken and is turned into the past the very moment. Neidich’s series of Law of Loci above all visualises this paradoxical nature of photography.

The photographs of Law of Loci were taken through a prism bar with positive-negative Polaroid film material. They depict a fragmentary vision of the house, selected views from its inside such as photographs hanging on a wall, curtains, and also Neidich’s father. They also show its close surrounding, a lake, a shack, tables and chairs in a garden, and trees. The pictures are sometimes blurred, often tilted, and black and white. Having used Polaroid film material the idea was to capture a snapshot instantly, finding a visual analogy of an experience that cannot be caught in a picture without undergoing essential transformations. As Thierry de Duve argues, the “snapshot is a theft; it steals life. Intended to signify natural movement, it only produces a petrified analogue of it. It shows an unperformed movement that refers to an impossible posture. The paradox is that in reality the movement has indeed been performed, while in the image the posture is frozen.” (De Duve, 1978: 114). Neidich’s way to produce these images was not only to move physically through space in order to find views which represented his remembrances of the house at that particular moment. He also had to move the prism bar in order to split up his own vision and receive an aesthetic expression which in some ways mimics early movement studies of the history of photography. Therefore, the effect of instant photography was not based on capturing the fluidity of life, but on seeing the effects of the prism movement in the moment when the images were taken. As de Duve argues, not only the image is frozen, but in Neidich’s case even movement is brought to a standstill. By using this unorthodox photographic practice Neidich found a way to match the physical world with an analogue of his mental vision of the non-depictable, arguing that memories are unable to be captured in a picture and can only be visualised by finding a metaphorical counterpart. Memory is considered non-representional, continual and performative, as Gerald Edelman and Giullo Tononi recently argued: “(…) memory in global mappings is not a store of fixed or coded attributes to be called up and assembled in a replicative fashion as in a computer. Instead, memory results from a process of continual recategorization (…) There is no prior set of determinant codes governing the categories of memory, only the previous population structure of the network, the state of the value systems, and the physical acts carried out at a given moment.” (Edelmann and Tononi, 2000: 97-99).

This understanding of a performative mutating memory could be also seen in relation to the German film theorist Siegfried Kracauer’s concept of the photographed object or person as a ghost. In the early essay “The Photograph” (1927) Kracauer describes how capturing a photograph of an actuality is gradually sliding into the far past and that there is always a drifting away of the past from the present. As German film theorist Heide Schlüpmann pointed out, Kracauer’s concept of photography in the interwar times was very much influenced by Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu where the French novelist delineates his encounter with a photograph of his grandmother (Schlüpmann, 1991: 115).(19) The image of the grandmother plays an equivalent crucial role in Kracauer’s essay because he had recognised a sort of estrangement in it (Schlüpmann, 1991: 116)(20). Kracauer sees a dichotomy between the photograph and the memory arguing that memory “encompasses neither the entire spatial appearance of a state of affairs nor its entire temporal course. Compared to photography, memory’s records are full of gaps,” therefore “memory images retain what is given only insofar as it has significance. Since what is significant is not reducible to either merely spatial or merely temporal terms, memory images are at odds with photographic representation.” (Kracauer, 1995[1927]: 50). Kracauer’s understanding of photography is not primarily based on the ontological concept of the analogue print with a reference to positivist science as can exemplarily be seen in Roland Barthes’ concept of the referent. He recognises different temporal states of a photograph and made clear that even though temporality is written into the process of registering an image, the photographic image does not conserve the depicted but rather destroys it. This can be seen in his extensive exploration of the photographs of different women such as his grandmother. Most importantly his research is based on a present evaluation of the photographic effect and in distance to the various pasts which are trapped in the photographs.

Neidich’s Law of Loci is not only an example of photographic imagery which is not able to preserve the past in a constant way, even less as a visualization of personal memories. His conceptual approach is based on pivotal theories of photography and the mnemosyne dealing with the idea of capturing the personal and the present which is in flux of being lost, becoming the past immediately. Admittedly, the process of production is insofar technical and a re-evaluation of photographically registered movement as it is based on the structure of the apparatus. And even though the images of Law of Loci recall Etienne-Jules Marey’s geometric chronophotographs or Eliot Eliofson’s photograph of Marcel Duchamp decending a staircase (21), Neidich’s process is less conducted towards an exploration of the physical conditions of light exposure and film speed. The so obviously registered movement is produced on a third spot, namely with the help of an optical device which is linked to the science of perception and, not to forget, the failure of human vision. Even though quintessentially analogue the pictures of Law of Loci have to be understood as unfathomably detached from the referential nature of its production. The question remains unanswered if an understanding of these works necessarily ask for a clarification of its production process, if one remembers the examples from the past when magnifying glasses made so far unknown worlds visible. Neidich’s early photography serves both ways, and its conceptual nature makes a deep understanding of the metaphorical meaning of the artist’s use of optical devices visible. However, despite the media-philosophical and the literal use of these objects, the photographic works also can be seen as a sort of enigmatic pictures that link the nature of these images not to the visible world, but to notions of the unreachable.

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Susanne Neubauer is a freelance curator and art historian. She was curator at Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland, from 2002-2009 and is currently a PhD candidate of the University of Zurich. She is the author of numerous articles on contemporary art and the art of the 1970s. Her main interest is in the documentation and publication of ephemeral art, curatorial strategies and the reception of Latin American art in Europe. Her recent essays are on Ree Morton, Lygia Clark and Paul Thek.

Endnotes:

[1] The work American History Invented from 1989 is a thoughtful use of different historical printing materials, camera lenses, and archival display methods. See (Dietz, 1989).

[2] “The apparatus is thus always linked to certain limits of knowledge that arise from it and, to an equal degree, condition it”. See Michel Foucault’s understanding of the apparatus which is of particular interest for Neidich: (Foucault, 1980: 194-196).

[3] As are the works of Michael Snow, Stan Brakhage and Jean-Luc Godard. Neidich’s interest lies above all in the unveiled processes of the cinematic production as can be seen in Snow’s Wavelength (CAN, 1967), Brakhage Prelude: Dog Star Man (USA, 1961) and Godard’s Le mépris (F, 1963).

[4] The contrary case, I would suggest, is a walkable camera obscura where the projected image, depending on the weather outside, is usually not very well visible – and for your habits a disappointing matter.

[5] Neidich began lecturing on Neuroaesthetics in 1995 at the School of Visual Arts New York. See on his take on neuroaesthetics and the concept of neural plasticity: Journal of Neuro-Aesthetic Theory (www.artbrain.org; founded by Warren Neidich), (Neidich, 2009b: 114-119), (Livingstone, 2002), (Stafford and Terpak, 2001), (Linke, 2001), (Zeki, 1999), (Breidbach and Clausberg, 1999), (Clausberg, 1999).

[5] Email to the author, April 19, 2010.

[6] On the “intoxicated sight” see (Neidich, 2003).

[7] Neidich has referred several times to the work of Jacques Rancière, claiming that particularly in the mutation of the so-called “distribution of the sensible” the power of art can be found. Reformulated as “redistribution of the sensible” Neidich’s own theoretical writing links the concepts of power of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze to Maurizio Lazarrato’s concept of “noo-power.” On this discussion see (Neidich, 2009a).

[8] In the sense of Thomas Mandel and Gerade Van der Leun, “attention is the hard currency of cyberspace.” (Mandel and Van der Leun, 1996).

[9] I do not agree in seeing a zoetrope in this device as many other writers have referred to when explaining Brainwash, including the artist. A zoetrope is a precinematic device which is created by a round cylinder obtaining observation slits and a series of images such as a galloping horse which are attached in the inside. While looking at a turning zoetrope, one’s eyes focus on the image(s) inside which causes the effect of the illusion of a moving image. There is no eye movement in itself which distinguishes the core function of a zoetrope from a optokinetic drum.

[10] “At the heart of this video is the notion of the cataclysmic shift of the viewer of the late 19th century as he or she transitioned into the early 20th century. A viewer in which cinema not photography would produce the conditions of perception and cognition.” Email correspondence with the author, April 19, 2010.

[11] Stan Brakhage’s experimental film Prelude: Dog Star Man (USA, 1961) where he scratches analogous film material or uses distorting lenses in order to receive unknown imagery to the eye is another example.

[12] Photographs change their colors due to chemical instability of the photographic paper. Magenta and yellow is reduced when photographs receive too much light, cyan and yellow are more instable in darkness.

[13] Some people believe that orbs are paranormal balls of light on photographs or video film.

[14] Neidich’s sculptural and photographic works, also the Hybrid Dialectic Device, were shown in the exhibition “The Mutated Observer, part 1” at California Museum of Photography in 2001.

[15] On Lacan’s use of the camera as metaphor or an “imaginary apparatus” see (Silverman 1989: 72).

[16] In this passage Lacan offers an anecdote of a floating sardine can in water. Lacan explained that the can “was looking at me, all the same. It was looking at me at the level of the point of light, the point of light, the point at which everything that looks at me is situated – and I am not speaking metaphorically.” (Lacan, 1981: 95), cited after (Jay, 1998: 365).

[17] The exploration of this condition influenced Neidich’s later work, Earthling. See (Neidich, 2008).

[18] „I was in the room, or rather I was not yet in the room since she was not aware of my presence… Of myself… there was present only the witness, the observer with a hat and traveling coat, the stranger who does not belong to the house, the photographer who has called to take a photograph of places which one will never see again. The process that mechanically occurred in my eyes when I caught sight of my grandmother was indeed a photograph.” Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time. Swann’s Way, quoted by (Schlüpmann, 1991, 115).

[19] Schlüpmann argues that this photograph in the 1920s was retrospectively already part of film, as its concept represented “the repression of death, the continuation of life”. (Schlüpmann, 1991: 116).

[20] Reproduced in Life Magazine, Nr. 284, New York,

In 1989, Warren Neidich published his American History Reinvented, a vast project, using the medium of photography to engage in a discourse that goes further than the mere interpretation of history.1 Within Neidich’s many reconfigurations of history, a complex story is retold with layered and intricate methodologies, taking the viewer beyond memory, to uncharted territory where the line between truth and fiction becomes blurred. As Neidich’s philosophy is deeply rooted in cognitive science, he claims that the human brain is currently undergoing a phase of “cyborgisation,” due to immense and sudden changes in our media-centered technological environment. In his book Blow-up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain (D. A. P, 2003), Neidich proposes a model in which natural memory (those memories recorded through experience with the real world) and photographic memory (the production of memory constituted through the mind’s interaction with the plethora of mediated images found in books, advertising posters, in family albums, museums, billboards, and film) are in competition for neural space.2

Given Neidich’s emphasis on the formation of memories and their relationship to both authentic, lived experience and to photographic imagery, American History Reinvented can best be discussed in the context of theories of replay, sampling, and re-enactment, and as part of event culture and mass media. Neidich is playful in his reinterpretation of historical events in American history, and tests notions of truth within the history of photography, particularly within photojournalism. His reinventions go beyond the world of historical evidence, and into the realm of creative photography, where the notion of truth is subjected to the bizarre, surreal ambience of staged museum settings and the other institutional spaces that Neidich has critiqued. (See, for example, “Gallery,” p. 000: “Recoding American History, Roping off History,” 1986.) Neidich’s project crosses the line between documentary practice and conceptual art. As Pavel Büchler has argued:

A critical attitude towards older or concurrent (competing) modes of production is one of the most distinctive features of modern art. At its most radical, as for instance in 1960’s conceptual art, it was this systematic scrutiny of the traditions and conventions of modernist photography that brought to the fore the possibilities of integrating photography’s broader social functions, within art.3

Büchler puts forward the notion of “investigation” as the driving force behind this type of photography, and in this respect, Neidich’s practice corresponds to the work of Victor Burgin (b. 1941), David Hilliard (b. 1964), and Bernd (1931–2007) and Hilla Becher (b. 1934). A consideration of more recent photography suggests how Neidich’s American History Reinvented can be understood as a precursor to projects of contemporary practitioners negotiating the territory of re-enactment, particularly UK artists such as Jeremy Deller (b. 1966), who won the Turner Prize in 2004, Tom McCarthy (b. 1969) and Rod Dickinson (b. 1965) in their collaborative projects, and photographer Jim Naughten.

History and Re-Enactment, Then and Now

The role of the historian and the notion of what constitutes historical evidence have become more unstable in recent decades. The intervention of digital technology has revolutionized history-in-the-making, as well as the analysis and distribution of recordings of events. Neidich’s 1989 project interrogated these changes at the very beginning of this paradigm shift, highlighting the speedy, almost seamless, revolutionary changes within the culture of information technology. Simultaneously, Neidich’s work investigates issues of identity politics, and his method of exploration using historical evidence as a construction has only become more meaningful over time, and as the number of texts relating to these issues has increased.

Neidich’s project questions the supposedly harmless nostalgia offered by “living history” museums and re-enactments, revealing their one-dimensional view of events, and unmasking the information received in this context as inauthentic and fictional. It is the institutional context of the museum and the presumption of photography’s truthfulness that verifies the meanings attached to the reconstructed scenes. As one commentator has put it, “Neidich engages in an act of cynicism and originality…a fictional rectification of social roles that both pre- and postdates the famous Farm Security Administration Project that established the important role of the photographer in America’s social conscience.”4

Theorist of photography Vilém Flusser has claimed that the machine has dominated the postindustrial age, but specifically in the mode of what he calls “apparatus”: camera, computer, agencies of state, and market forces. Flusser insists that, “apparatuses were invented in order to function automatically, in other words independent of future human involvement. This is the intention with which they were created: that the human being would be ruled out.”5 What Flusser puts forward is the notion of the photographer as a “passive” interloper in the photographic experience, secondary to what is made possible by the technology at hand. The machine controls the processes, and even though the photographer makes a choice in relation to how the photograph is taken and processed, he or she is secondary to an outcome predetermined by the existing technologies. Neidich’s practice consistently and deliberately questions the apparatus as paradigm in his conceptual approach to reinterpretation, and in his groundbreaking project, he has self-consciously chosen handmade technologies in his interventions on prestructured historical events.

Neidich’s exploration of photography, history, and reinterpretation includes, for example, the juxtaposition of albumen prints with a set of photographs after retouching, printed at an amateur photo lab on RC paper, a cheap plasticized imitation of real paper (“Gallery,” p. 000: “Pseudo Event, Free Soil,” 1987–1988). The rationale for this choice is threefold: firstly, to draw attention to the importance of photographic materials and their symbolic function in the determination of photographic meaning. We are reminded that photographic history itself is not, as Beaumont Newhall suggests in his canonical chronicle of the medium, a linear progression of techniques, technologies, and creative potential.6 Secondly, the use of RC paper draws attention to the material distinctions between the handmade prints throughout the history of photography and the mass-reproduced machine prints of today. Finally, this decision binds these images, through their materiality, to other images that derive from library files in which one never has a chance to inspect the original archive or touch the original prints.

Later in Neidich’s ongoing project, he uses the giant Polaroid format in his appropriation and reshooting of the Associated Press propaganda photographs depicting Japanese Americans interned in relocation camps during World War II, fraudulentlymposed as happy and thriving individuals (“Gallery,” p. 000: “News from No-Place, Return of Loved Ones,” 1988–1989). These images operate alongside Neidich’s staged photos of African Americans inhabiting the life and roles of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie in America. In this section (“Pseudo Event: the Politics of Appropriation”), the staging of historical events and their subsequent manipulation and falsification calls attention to the well-documented instances of similar alterations in archives such as those manufactured by Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, who felt it necessary to manipulate their own national photographic record in the hopes of solidifying personal legacies.7

Viewing and reinterpreting these photographs requires a leap of faith on the part of the viewer, for in the context of the institutional archive, we are predisposed to believe unquestioningly what the photograph tells us. Neidich’s interventions reveal how the use of RC prints in archives becomes part of the inbuilt illusion of “authenticity,” as the resin-coated paper in this process is sealed by two polyethylene layers, making it impenetrable to liquids. Since no chemicals or water are absorbed into the paper base, the time needed for processing, washing, and drying is significantly reduced in comparison to fiber-based papers. Resin paper prints can be finished and dried within twenty to thirty minutes. Resin-coated papers have improved dimensional stability, and do not curl upon drying. And so, as we observe the quickening of time, photos made in haste, and the intervention of modern photographic processes, there is the emphasis on durability over fragility and on the distance from the original photographic processes.

Neidich’s photographs are typically taken onsite with a 4 × 5 camera and rephotographed with a 35 mm camera to make the doppelganger in an act of self-appropriation. This type of assemblage is found in many of the series that make up American History Reinvented, as falsification becomes the believable norm. Each series utilizes a different kind of camera, lens, and format.

For “Aerial Reconnaissance Photographs: The Battle of Chickamauga” (this event originally took place 19–20 September 1863), the artist hired a twin-engine plane to fly over a Civil War re-enactment at a historic battlefield outside Chattanooga, Tennessee, in order to photograph it from the air; he then processed the resulting images in the archaic tintype format (“Gallery,” p. 000: “The Battle of Chickamauga,” 1990–1991, and “Chickamauga Double Line-up,” 1990). Here Neidich re-enacts Félix Nadar’s legendary balloon journey above Paris in 1858, but he also produces a dialogue with Edward Steichen’s famous aerial photographs first delineated in Allan Sekula’s pivotal study “The Instrumental Image: Steichen at War.”8 Again, Neidich’s use of tintypes oppositionally foregrounds the contemporary modernization of information gathering, museum culture, and memory. For this series, Neidich used a 35 mm camera with three different lenses—wide-angle, normal, and telephoto—to make pictures of the re-enactments.

Neidich’s work also draws our attention to present-day staged news events. From George W. Bush’s triumphant landing on an aircraft carrier to the annual Academy Awards ceremonies, we are overwhelmed by what Daniel Boorstin referred to as “pseudo-events” in which make-believe events are created only to be documented and distributed through media circuits for profit.9 These are woven into the daily menu of disasters, scandals, and gossip to be distributed worldwide on twenty-four-hour news channels hungry for fresh stories to disseminate to a public riveted to television sets and computer screens. In this evolving cultural-visual landscape, the conditions of the truth of the image can vary enormously.

Contemporary Art Practice and Re-enactment

One can trace a genealogy for Neidich’s work in early experimental art photography, including that of the Surrealists, whose “staged” photographs provoke visual discord, questioning the relationship between representation and reality. Here, silent dramas enhance for the viewer the strangeness of unlikely juxtapositions, as in the staged montages of Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) and Eli Lotar (1905–1969). The “performed image” creates dissonance for the viewer, placing him or her in a separate, third space of observation, between reality and unreality. The questioning of what is real becomes a part of the viewer’s experience, but the scopophilic drive and desire to encounter the truth overrides and suspends the viewer’s disbelief.

As in Surrealism, Neidich’s camera acts as a scientific instrument that takes the place of the organ of sight in the detection of strange and reinvented realities. In Neidich’s framing and cropping, insertions, and playful rearrangements of reality, he offers up a hypertrophied real, where the viewer remains in a liminal state, between what has happened in the past and what changes have occurred in the re-enactment, and observes the actual physical interventions in the photographs that mediate between the two.

Neidich’s American History Reinvented looked forward perspicuously to myriad current art practices that engage with re-enactment, and in which artists restage events as investigations of current political and social conditions. Neidich’s work is also an examination of the problems of authentically performing the past. He analyzes re-enactment both as a cultural phenomenon and as a series of performances that aim to recreate past events accurately. Rather than simply perpetuating a complacent nostalgia for the past, a re-enactment as an art project may have the potential to prompt a critical reevaluation of historical narratives as singular isolated events.

Until recently, with the notable exception of Richard Schechner, there has been little written about the phenomena of the historical re-enactment.10 In the last two decades, however, studies on re-enactment produced within the fields of visual arts and performance studies have increased dramatically. Recently, scholars including Rebecca Schneider,11 Peggy Phelan,12 Baz Kershaw,13 and Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks,14 have been involved in a critical reevaluation of this field of investigation. A reexamination of Neidich’s photos within this discourse will contribute to scholarship in the field of performance studies regarding the role of repetition, mediatization, and disappearance in performance, while simultaneously examining the key problems of performing the past in postmodern culture, with particular focus on the emergent notion of authenticity or authentic experience.

Double-Take: Re-enactment in recent work

Jeremy Deller, the collaborators Tom McCarthy and Rod Dickinson, and Jim Naughten are influential and controversial UK-based artists experimenting in the area of event culture, and have all made re-enactment central to their oeuvre. By recreating on film the violent clash of the 18 June 1984 miners’ strike which took place in Orgreave, a small town near Rotherham in South Yorkshire, UK, on Sunday, 17 June 2001, the day before the seventeenth anniversary of the original strife, Deller offered a restaging of a political event that occurred during a period of immense change in UK politics under then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Artangel, the London-based public art commissioning agency, engaged Deller to film this re-enactment within an art context (Plates 1–2). This work has become pivotal in event culture, linked to art, and viewed in the cultural arena. What is striking is that Deller’s live re-enactment was so realistic that it is virtually impossible to differentiate the recreated action from footage of the original confrontation. Deller has taken a further step in the falsification of historical evidence, as his intention to create a “double take” was also linked with the need to reinstate some of the trauma of that event. He described the undertaking this way:

Despite unpleasant cold & wet weather (in stark contrast to the blazing heat of June 1984), our 800 re-enactors and extras threw themselves into their roles. Because of the weather, uniform/period clothing was not fully worn until Sunday morning. “Riot Policemen” square-bashed and were trained by Lancashire Constabulary instructors in the use of long and short shields, whilst the “bobbies” practiced forming a cordon and holding their ground against the expected “pushes” by the “miners”. The latter practiced advancing and running away in loose formation, looking unorganised although for the purposes of our re-enactment, being highly organised through a “command structure” not dissimilar to our “police”.15

In addition to re-enactors, miners who were present at the historical event also took part, as did 280 local people. For these participants, a feeling of déjà vu became part of the experience. For Deller, this sense of the uncanny was intentional, as the experience of cultural forgetting became one impetus to make this work. By moving the context of viewing this work from newsreel/documentary film to art museum, Deller has discovered a new audience and generation of viewers for the dissemination of this event. Deller develops his ideas within the tradition of the exploration of history and authenticity that Neidich set out in American History Reinvented.

Rod Dickinson & Tom McCarthy’s installation, titled Greenwich Degree Zero (2006), including film footage (57 seconds, black and white, 35 mm, silent), was the first collaboration between artist Dickinson and artist/novelist McCarthy (Plate 3). This is an exhibition that interrogated in detail the role of media and technology in the construction and reconstruction of public experience and memory.

The artists’ starting point is a strange late nineteenth-century event: on the afternoon of 15 February 1894, a French anarchist named Martial Bourdin (1868–1894) was killed when the bomb he was carrying detonated. The explosion took place on the slope beneath the Royal Observatory in London’s Greenwich Park, and it was generally assumed that his intention had been to blow up this building—the place from which all time throughout the British Empire and the world was measured, and a prime symbol of science—“the sacrosanct fetish of to-day,” as Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) wrote in The Secret Agent in 1907.16

Using the mechanisms of historical representation, Dickinson and McCarthy reimagine the event as a successful attack on the observatory. Employing a similar methodology to Neidich, they infiltrate and twist the media of Bourdin’s time: creating a film shot on a hand-cranked Victorian cinematic camera depicting the burning observatory, reprinting existing 1894 newspaper reports and anarchist literature edited to fit their version of events, as well as video interviews with contemporary explosives experts and political historians. The installation reports an event that did not quite happen, blurring the distinction between fact and fiction and relocating the genuine public outrage and hysteria about the threat of anarchist terror that prevailed in the 1890s in the ambiguous space of nonevent. Bourdin’s death brought on a plethora of speculative stories in both the mainstream and underground media. Rather than try to establish the “truth,” Dickinson and McCarthy use a form of repetition to reach back to the degree zero of time, mediation, and terror.17

Jim Naughten is a photographer who, as a child, was obsessed with his collection of toy soldiers, tanks, and all things military. He would build aircraft and hand paint in detail his toy soldiers. His family has strong military links: his grandfather was a “desert rat” who served with General Bernard Montgomery’s 8th Army. It is no surprise, then, that as a photographer in adulthood, he has chosen re-enactment as the theme of his photographic practice. Yet Naughten’s work is different in methodology and intention from Neidich’s, Deller’s, or Dickinson and McCarthy’s.

The subject matter for Naughten involves an investigation into what lies behind the strange phenomena of re-enactment culture, especially for the individuals who take part. Over two years in Kent, in the countryside of South East England, Naughten made a digital record of the various battle re-enactments. During this period, his topology includes some five thousand shots, edited down to form a book of portraits of the re-enactors. Naughten is astonished at the seriousness of the sitters, and the attention to detail of their costume, hair, and accessories (Plate 4). Their “look” perfectly recaptures that of wartime Germans and Britons. As one critic of Naughten’s work has proposed, “by standing outside his subjects, however close they may be to the fantasies of his childhood Naughten nonetheless sublimates his subjects by means of photographic technique…Jim Naughten’s Re-enactors maintain their mystery. Nothing of their real lives is revealed.”18

Naughten’s project adds a new dimension to the subject of truth and the role of photography in reinventing history. The sense of the uncanny is again at play here: Naughten’s perfect portraits pose interesting questions in relation to technological advances, as his flawless digital prints portray subjects whose passion compels them to mimic people from time past: a soldier, naval officer, or sergeant, and women who act as civilians on the sidelines. Under the guise of “living history,” these individuals are also able to live out a fantasy or nostalgia for the past that emanates from all other areas of its representation within the modern technologies of the movie, the television drama, and the museum. Naughten’s subjects are photographed with a plain white background, mimicking the straight photography of August Sander (1876–1964), or more recently the portraits of young bullfighters and mothers by Rineke Dijkstra (b. 1959).

Against this stark background, the viewer’s gaze lands on the expressions of Naughten’s subjects and on their pristine and perfect attire. In Sander’s case this photographic trope was used to represent a stereotype, and in Dijkstra’s case to critique the notion of the stereotype as well as the history of photography. In Naughten’s work, the subjects remain deeply rooted in their own fantasies, highlighted against the stark background. We have no real sense of the individual; his subjects are expressionless and bland, apart from their extraordinary uniform costumes and their obvious commitment to re-enactment as a way of life.

KATHY KUBICKI is senior lecturer in photography at the University for the Creative Arts, and Editor of the journal Photography and Culture. She has written widely on contemporary photography, film, video, and installation art, and her interview with French artist Daniel Buren (b. 1938) was recently published in Speaking of Art: Four Decades of Art in Conversation (Phaidon, 2010).

1 Warren Neidich, American History Reinvented: Photographs (New York: Aperture, 1989).

2 Warren Neidich, Blow-Up: Photography, Cinema, and the Brain (New York: D. A. P., 2003).

3 Pavel Büchler, “The Blind Train Spotter: A Delirium of Doubt,” in Where is the Photograph, ed. David Green (Maidstone: Photoworks, 2003), 88.

4 Lew Thomas, “Picture Intimidation and the Return of the Vanquished,” in Warren Neidich, American History Reinvented, 7.

5 Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 73.

6 Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present Day (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1949).

7 As in Alain Jaubert, Le Commissariat aux archives (Paris: Barrault, 1986). See also David King, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in

Stalin’s Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997).

8 Allan Sekula, Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works, 1973–1983 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984).

9 Daniel Boorstin, Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Athenaeum, 1978).

10 See Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), as well as his Performance Theory (London: Routledge, 2003).

11 Rebecca Schneider and Gabrielle Cody, eds., Re:Direction: A Theoretical and Practical Guide (London: Routledge, 2001).

12 Peggy Phelan, “Hinckley and Ronald Reagan: Reenactment and the Ethics of the Real,” in Life, Once More: Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art, ed. Sven

Lütticken (New York: D. A. P., 2005).

13 Baz Kershaw, The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard (London: Routledge 1999).

14 Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, Theatre/archaeology (London; Routledge, 2001).

15 “The Battle of Orgreave recreated,” Historical Film Services, http://www.historical- filmservices.com/hfs%20gallery%202.htm (accessed 24 January 2010).

16 Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Story (Garden City: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1907), 38.

17 Greenwich Degree Zero, Beaconsfield, http://www.beaconsfield.ltd.uk/projects/ greenwichdegreezero/greenwich-degree-zero.html (accessed 24 January 2010).

18 Bill Kouwenhoven, “The Secret Life of Jim Naughten,” HotShoe (October–November 2009): 46.

Warren Neidich

At Exhibition we have a number of rules—or prescriptions—that establish three levels of chance that envelop each artist intervening in our project. The rules are as follows: first, the artist’s name, written on a small piece of paper, is drawn from a hat in which up to ten names have been included. The artist is then contacted and a meeting is scheduled at the space. After the artist has understood and agreed to a set of overriding conditions upon which the project was founded—for instance, that he or she give up all rights to the work and that the work is not to be sold—the artist is asked to roll dice. Three rolls determine where the artist can operate within the space. The floor plan of the space is uniquely constituted for each invited artist so that, for instance, what was a pie-shaped conformation for one could become a set of concentric circles emanating from the center of the gallery for another. If an artwork already occupies that space, the new artist has the right to move, destroy, change, parasitize or ignore it. These three levels of chance have the effect of making this project, as much as possible, one that is uncurated. Does anyone think that these rules of chance could be instituted and recoded into a set of prescriptive devices mapped into the context of a magazine format? Could we throw the dice here as a way to begin our conversation for Art Lies?

Jakob Schillinger

Reading the statement I’m supposed to respond to (the order of statements predetermined, in fact, by a proverbial roll of the dice), I’m tempted to ask, Who are you speaking to, Warren? Which makes me wonder who I am speaking to right now. My interest in Exhibition is that it does not (at least not primarily) address an abstract audience but instead generates and gives space to concrete relations and interactions. By “addressing an abstract audience” I mean a principle that I see at work not only in the production and showcasing of art but also in practices of everyday life: the reification of activities, the creation of representations that are circulated amongst an abstract audience—the art world or the World Wide Web, in the case of the broadcasting of one’s life via cameras, phones and online services such as Facebook. This public is abstract in the sense that it is mediated to the degree where the medium itself becomes fetishized—becomes the actual address. The medium embodies the idea of a public. This “public,” however, is in my impression not a discursive realm but a market, its principal category being visibility. Its operations are ranking, quantification and statistics, not argument or communicative exchange. Arguably, art (or life, for that matter) is increasingly produced to circulate in this realm, and thus increasingly reduced to its exchange value. Against this tendency, Exhibition shifts the emphasis to what one could call the use value of art—artworks as props for concrete human relations and for communicative exchange. That said, I pass my turn.

Nathalie Anglès

Indeed, how to address the format of the magazine within the context of the invitation that is extended to us, and whether it is relevant within this framework to remain consistent with the process and mechanisms we have established for Exhibition, were my own first thoughts. No conclusive argument was drawn from our numerous discussions on the topic. But these back-and-forth discussions only reinforce my conviction that the most significant part of this project—beyond the material results generated in the space—is the continuous flow of immaterial conversation between organizers, contributors and visitors.

Eric Anglès

Thanks, Warren, for bringing up the dice! I must say that for me they’re definitely something to avoid fetishizing. A look around and it’s pretty clear already that while the dice do guarantee outcomes, they don’t necessarily guarantee exceptionally interesting outcomes. Nor do I find chance mechanisms all that interesting in and of themselves. But that’s precisely the point, isn’t it? The “interesting” is another one of those abstract categories that I think Jakob is talking about. There’s this kind of anxious relief that’s delivered by a common verdict of how wonderfully interesting something is that thwarts the concrete human relation that you are both calling for. And yet, while dice aren’t interesting, they’ve been such a uniquely liberating tool in this process. They free us, if only temporarily, from the pressure of the many irreconcilable interests colliding in this experiment: our individual projects, those we invite, “career” stakes, the expectations of the developers lending us the space, which we might otherwise feel an awkward pressure to internalize. The interests of the editors and readers of Art Lies, which of course we could never manage to anticipate. In the end, these dice are a game of movement, color and laughter that, for a fraction of a second, rip us from the sphere of self-involvement into a present of pure possibility and projection.

Elena Bajo

The other day in our preliminary/tentative conversation, we couldn’t agree on common issues of interest in Exhibition, and we couldn’t agree on a common format to talk about the project. We tried to come up with common questions that would summarize these interests, and we failed again. Then I said very spontaneously: “Our strength is our weakness,” just like that…I think I was referring to the fact that in this project, we are managing to preserve our five individual voices (even if this is a generator of constant conflict) but that we still share a common mechanism by which the project functions. The power and strength of Exhibition is that individuality is preserved. We are against individual voices being lost in favor of the group, but this actually benefits the project. On the other hand, we provide a space free of restrictions (except the structural rules of the game) to be intervened in by artists. The interventions in the space are traces left behind after engaging and questioning the space, the project and us. The fruits of those questions are left in the space. At the same time, the state of the space is such that if I were a visitor who doesn’t know about the project and I came in and looked around, I would not even know what question to ask.

Jakob: Dear friends, I’m still conflicted about this double address, but since I really want to ask you these questions at this point in our correspondence—and since we all agreed on this format for discussion—please insert this: what status would this visitor’s question have? One of the contributing artists was very critical of our project because we’ve established rules that the participating artists have to submit to—because we are exerting power but conceal this fact by referring to “external” laws and the “impartial” dice. What you are describing, Eric, really is an outsourcing of decision (to the dice) and our own submission to this law. (I say law rather than rules, thinking of Warren’s “state of exception.”)
Now, that artist’s critique was that we’re not equals in our relation to this law. What are we? Sovereign? Police? I think this makes up a big part of the project. Aren’t we staging and framing processes that are structurally analogous to political problems of a democracy? I’ve been thinking about art in political terms recently, especially about the sovereign power of the artist and the possibility of a non-sovereign force. (In a talk, Boris Groys theorized the constitutive violence rendered visible in installation art—especially when it stages the democratic processes.) What kind of power is at work in Exhibition? What is the status of the “continuous flow of conversation” with regard to this power? Eric, you often insist that we are not curators but artists. In a conversation with a participating artist, asking what kind of work you do, you said: “You’re in it.” I think this is a crucial statement regarding the status of our conversations. Does that mean that the installation or conversations that are Exhibition are based on a sovereign authorial decision—are subject to the law this decision posits—which eventually need not justify itself? With regard to our discussion the other night about the curator becoming artist—yes, many curators become reflexive of their decisions and no longer claim objectivity. But aren’t they still obliged to justify their decisions rationally, in discourse, while an artist’s decisions can only be rejected as a whole and cannot be subject to discursive negotiation? And if that’s not the case here, what are the implications of Exhibition with regard to this model of the artist, which arguably still structures the field of art? Is this where the agonistic principle that Elena called “our strength [and] weakness” comes in?
Warren: I think that many of these concerns are concretized in another issue that has become a focus of our conversations at Exhibition and has relevance for this conversation in Art Lies: I am speaking about the archive. If Exhibition is a space in which each gesture is an event, ephemeral and in some ways performative, then what form would an archive have here? How would it assemble the myriad of gestures into a narrative or story? These gestures can at times be destructive, parasitic and autocatalytic, leaving works broken, fragmented and hollow vestiges of themselves. How would power relations come into play? Especially in terms of how forms of cultural hegemony influence the conditions of the decision-making processes at work inside the parameters of Exhibition as it functions as a social condition between its initiators. How would that archive therefore be constructed? What texts and images would be included or excluded? How would the history of the space be remembered—and for whom? First, as a series of stories generated by a storyteller sitting in the gallery who through an oral diatribe recounts the history of each work in the larger context of the space in different terms at each recount; a virtuoso performance that has no material basis except in the memories of each visitor. Or, as a series of photographic documents taken at the time of each gesture and then assembled into a book that could then be used as a visual aid to guide visitors who enter the space and want to know what it is they are looking at and need physical evidence to feel secure. Each form has the potential to be affected by different kinds of administrative procedures that must themselves be questioned. Finally, when this experiment closes on the last day of August, what traces will be left for future audiences now transformed into historical readers? Is having a physical archive a complete contradiction to the spirit of the project? Or is it a form of generosity?

Elena: Jakob, I see us as a group of five artists who share a common mechanism of action when we find ourselves within the Exhibition territory, limited to its physical premises. We function as a collective in this project. The fact that today “colIectives” in the art world have become institutionalized tokens that generate the interest of curators and museums looking to demystify the idea of the Modernist individual genius has affected our approach to this way of working, perhaps making us a little too self-conscious of our every intention and action. Perhaps limiting actions to a specific site, which is free of rent, and creating a temporary timeframe of six months and a set of rules in which chance and conversation play a significant role frees us from the dangers of capitalistic assimilation that beset most large cultural institutions that rely on private funding. It is within this set of parameters that other artists are invited to intervene as excess collaborators: as individuals within our collective. The original conversation mentioned earlier, in which the rules of the project are elucidated, is more than an invitation to participate with us in the space. It is an invitation to become part of our collectivity and enjoy our freedom. In this way, the rules of sovereignty incorporated into Exhibition’s procedures are dispersed beyond the original initiators, and our project becomes an experiment in nongovernmental agency. In other words, it functions in accordance with a multitude. And, Warren, the issue of the archive is a delicate and intricate one. Who has the power to tell the story of what really happened? Who has the power to rewrite history, the power to manipulate memories and the power to retell a story? This has been an issue in the history of the world, and perhaps Exhibition is a microcosm in which displays of the micro-politics of that larger condition can be enacted, reflected upon and critiqued.
Eric: A microcosm, indeed…make that an aquarium! What is beyond doubt is the amazing density of heady conceptualizing and self-reflexive musing this echo chamber has been injecting into our daily conversation. Elena, Jakob, Warren, you each bring up the politics of this experiment. I too wonder where that is located. My view is that we should not exaggerate the significance of these funny rules of engagement we’ve cobbled together, either as vectors of “freedom” or of undue “sovereign power” on our part. What is it that has been happening in this room, first and foremost? Social encounters. Honestly, so far I have not found the nature and quality of these encounters to be under the gun of our eccentric little structures—catalyzed, yes, just as they are by the work on the walls and those floppy balloons in the air, but not determined. Every time it’s my turn to sit at the desk, talk to an artist, greet a visitor or sit with the four of you to decide how to proceed, the most urgent and incredibly exacting demand I experience is to make myself open and available to whomever is there before me. Am I listening? Probably not so closely. Am I cutting you off? Likely. How distracted am I by my desire to see my argument carry the day? What am I assuming and presuming? What kinds of crutches am I relying on to get this conversation safely over and done with? To what extent am I projecting myself into an abstract future only to stare right back at my own image from the nonexistent vantage point of the “archive” of an experience that has not yet merited its name? This is an experience I could instead be trying to manufacture in the company of a stranger, at the risk—in the hope—of historical invisibility. This, in a nutshell, is where the politics of this experience lie for me. Those are the pragmatics of any experience, I guess…but this particular site we have constructed has been precipitating—wittingly or not—a bewildering concentration of spontaneous, ethical micro-dramas of this nature. So what might at first glance look like a theater of freedom and constraint, the rehearsal of a tired dialectic between an artist/curator enforcing the law and an artist/Houdini dancing her way out of those shackles, is far more immediately and compellingly an experimental site where each one of us present in this space is made to decide, over and over again, how to face one other.

I.
In the landscape of contemporary artistic and critical operations, by which we can understand those practices that seem increasingly difficult to separate from theoretical work, as well as those theories that refuse the state of merely abstract reflections on already existing practices, the diagram—a writing or drawing “dia,” ”through,” a schema that is worked out or traversed by lines that are not only physical but also immaterial, lines of flight as well as lines that constitute dead ends and machines of capture—has become an eminently useful concept. From visual arts to architecture, from philosophy to theories of organization, the diagram has escaped the condition of something merely graphic, a representation of a set of relations established elsewhere, and has become more akin to an instrument of thinking, or even something that engenders thought itself.1 In Warren Neidich’s “Diagrammatic drawings” we find a distinct take on this theme, a way to use the diagrammatic mode of thinking in order to connect areas of research, discourse, and practice, which in the contemporary division of labor between on the one hand the sciences, on the other hand the humanities and the arts, seem destined to either remain deaf to each other, or produce the fantasy of asymmetrical reductions and appropriations. Bringing together concepts from neurology and the life sciences, political philosophy and aesthetic theory, theories of immaterial labor and post-Fordist production, Neidich creates a maze of concepts and connections that may at first sight seem bewildering, and even more so since he explores them not just as theoretical concepts, each located within their particular sphere, but as physical and corporeal zones that we can and indeed do inhabit, and that we traverse in the most minute of our everyday activities. But in doing so, he suggests that the transversal activity of the artist is a highly productive way of transgressing such limits, not in order to simply undo them— which most often means that one domain overtakes the other—but to produce certain resonances and encounters, captures and assemblages that extract a power from each domain in order to project it into a new sphere. Philosophy, science, and art, Deleuze and Guattari claim in the final collaborative work What is philosophy?, each have their distinct properties and procedures—philosophy constructs concepts, science establishes functions, and art tears perceptions and affections away from the subject in order to elevate them into “percepts” and “affects,” composites that have their own temporality and a proper way of “conserving” experiences in a virtual state—they are parallel activities none of which is inferior or superior to the others. But as three distinct modes of approaching “chaos,” they also extract things from each other, they discover zones of indistinction, and it may be the task of all three to reflect—in a way that at a certain moment must suspend the securities and professional assurances of each—on such unforeseeable encounters. It is to such encounters that the practice of “diagrammatic drawing” may be related, in marking limits, thresholds, and breaks, but also establishing connections and allowing remote areas to communicate; it delves into a peculiar potential of the diagram that has attracted the attention not only of practitioners within the visual arts, but also philosophers and social scientists.

II
The word “diagram” seems indeed to have entered current thinking about art, architecture, and the visual/spatial arts through then influence of Deleuze, and particularly his book on Foucault (although the concept had already been used extensively both by Deleuze himself and in his collaborative work with Guattari, as we will see),2 which picked up and extended a few seemingly off-hand remarks in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, which describe the relations of power in Bentham’s plan for a Panopticon prison as a “diagram.” In his analysis of the carceral and disciplinary techniques of the late 18th century, Foucault stresses that we should not see the diagram as a merely geometrical entity, and thus as connected to any particular form of architectural or spatial shape, but as a more abstract way of ordering, a “type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centers and channels of power, of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons.”3 Or, formulated in the terminology that Deleuze and Guattari had already developed, the diagram can be understood as an “abstract machine” out of which relations of power emerge, and which is capable of assuming many different physical morphologies: it is the very condition of possibility of a stable physical order, but also that which envelops every order with a “becoming” of forces, a dimension of the virtual that makes all stable forms susceptible to change and disruption.

In the specific case of Bentham, the essential feature of the Panopticon diagram is its capacity to exert a maximal influence over a population by the minimal use of physical force, or, more precisely, to situate the prisoner within a permanent visibility that renders the application of power automatic. The Panopticon does this by transferring the active force to an “object” that thereby becomes individualized and “subjectivized” as the bearer of responsibility and locus of agency, which also means that the subject becomes endowed with a certain freedom. This is why Bentham can suggest that the Panopticon’s outcome is a global increase in freedom and prosperity for all individuals: it invigorates economy, perfects health, and diffuses happiness throughout the body politic by installing a reflexive capacity in its subjects that renders them more productive.

Deleuze picks up on this—probably incidental—use of the term “diagram” in Foucault, and wittily connects it to a probably just as incidental use of the word “monogram” in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The Kantian monogram is used to characterize the temporal schema projected by the imagination— ”an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to open to our gaze,” Kant says—that ensures the passage from intelligibility to sensibility, or more precisely, from the categories of the understanding to the manifold of intuition. In this sense, the schema is not simply an empirical image, but, Kant proposes, “a product and, as it were monogram, of pure a priori imagination,” and as such it is that “through which and in accordance with which images themselves first become possible.”4

If the Kantian monogram is the purveyor of a certain unity of knowledge, the Foucauldian diagram (at least as developed by Deleuze) is rather what makes possible a manifold of practices, but also, through linking these practices together, that which transforms the fleeting and ephemeral events of discourse into stable “archives.” Power can be understood as a diagram that moulds and formalizes matters (the visible and the sayable, light and language, the two pure “Elements” of knowledge that Deleuze perceives as the Foucauldian sequels to reason and sensibility in Kant), and Deleuze likens it to a “cartography” coextensive with the social field, a mapping of those forces that traverse it, hold it together, but also provide it with a mobility and possibilities of reversals and disruptions. “A diagram is a map, or rather several superimposed maps,” he writes,5 the “the map of relations between forces, a map of destiny, or intensity, which […] acts as a non-unifying immanent cause which is coextensive with the whole social field. The abstract machine is like the cause of the concrete assemblages that execute its relations; and these relations take place ‘not above’ but within the very tissue of the assemblages they produce.”6 If this machine, like Kantian schematism, can be said to be “blind”, it is precisely in the sense that it is what makes us see and talk. Power is always actualized as a form (knowledge as structured into archives of light and language), otherwise it would remain in a pure virtual state, but inversely there would be know stable forms of knowledge unless they were immersed in relations of power. But if there is a mutual imbrication and “capture” between knowledge and power, this does not mean that they can be reduced to each other (a frequent misreading of Foucault is that he would say that knowledge is nothing but power)—in fact they remain irreducible to such an extent that they only communicate via a “non-place” or “disjunction,” Deleuze suggests, which is why no assemblage of knowledge and power ever remains stable, but only exists in relation to those singularities that it attempts to capture and formalize.

Understood in this way, the diagram always has two sides. On the one hand, it integrates singular points by binding them in a curve or form in general; on the other hand it is an “emission” of singularities, and as such it is connected to a more profound Outside (le Dehors), a chaos or an “abstract hurricane” out of which it emerges through “draws” (tirages). This connection to the outside it what makes the diagram akin to philosophical thought, Deleuze suggests, which is why the act of thinking in itself constitutes an act of resistance: it is open to a formless future, to those virtual forces of becoming that constitute the “double” of history, but in this it is also and always a perilous act, with the risk of plunging us into mere chaos and death. Here, Deleuze notes, there is an encounter between Foucault and Heidegger, in that they both determine the possibility of thought through a fundamental relation to an Outside that is an un-grounding, that dispossesses consciousness.7

This aspect of formlessness and chaos is in fact reminiscent of an earlier use of the concept of the diagram in Deleuze, in book on Francis Bacon, Logique de la sensation. The reading of Bacon’s diagram prefigures the analysis of Foucault, but also points in a slightly different, although perhaps eventually complementary, direction. The context is the painter’s resistance to photography: the ubiquity of the photographic image in contemporary culture, Bacon says, tends to fill the canvas with clichés and readymade forms. This means to reduce “sensation”—which is what Bacon attempts to capture, in a quest for a “logic” that (at least in Deleuze’s reading) leads him to an incessant and critical dialog with phenomenology and with Cézanne—to one singular level, and renders invisible those intensities and transformation that produce violent differences and spasms, sudden drops and increases in energy.8 The problem for Bacon is thus never the empty canvas, as in the drama of reduction to flatness in modernist painting that had developed on the basis of Clement Greenberg’s theories, where the reduction to the materiality of the support and the act of inscribing marks leads us from late modernist monochromes back to Mallarmé’s pristine sheet of white paper that both calls upon and rejects the act of inscription. But neither is the issue to get “into” the painting—as in the opposite existential rhetoric of Harold Rosenberg, whose idea of “action” emphasized the other side of Abstract Expressionism, the self-creation of artist and artwork in the same ambivalent movement of expression. The painter, Deleuze says, is already inside, and fundamentally so against his will, because of the world of clichés, and the question he faces is rather how he, at a certain moment before painting, can get out of it. The strategy that Bacon adapts for attaining such a distance is to reintroduce a moment of chance in opposition to the merely “probable” (before we start to paint it is probable that we will reach certain forms, given what we have set as a task, for instance to paint a portrait), a chance that operates through the distribution of singular marks and allows the energy of the “figural” to erupt at a level situated below the form or the figurative.9

Bacon’s technique is to use such randomly produced marks and stains of color in order to disfigure the alltoo probable figure based on resemblance and representation, and Deleuze suggests that this should be seen as a “diagram,” or a freely produced schema of possibilities that makes the initial and familiar form deviate from itself. The term appears occasionally in Bacon’s conversations with David Sylvester (which are Deleuze’s primary source), but its strategic importance seems to be an invention of Deleuze. The diagram is a “catastrophe” of the canvas, Deleuze proposes, in the etymological sense of an “overturning,” an event that violently disrupts forms: “It is as if one would suddenly introduce a Sahara, a Sahara-zone, into the head; is if one introduced a rhinoceros skin, seen through a microscope.”10 These marks are non-signifying traits, attacks, or random inscriptions, and understood in terms of the diagram their task is to introduce new possibilities— indeed a chaos of sorts, but also the beginning of a “rhythm” that allows the painting to integrate, hysterically, its own catastrophe, as Deleuze puts it. The painter passes through a catastrophe in his use of the diagram, but in the process of retrieving the form, he discovers the Figure, liberated from the confines both of abstraction, where the hand is subordinated to a higher signification and an “optical” order governed by binary or digital codes (with Mondrian as the paradigm case), and from the temptation to allow the diagram as such to take over, which produces the opposite descent into a purely manual space (with Pollock as the paradigm case). Bacon’s path— which should obviously be seen not in terms of any aesthetic or artistic superiority, but simply as his own path, where he discovers a “logic of sensation” peculiar to his work: Deleuze always stresses that great artists are incomparable—is to preserve and enhance the tension between form and disfiguration, instead of transcending it in either direction.

This, Deleuze suggests, is why Bacon and those that follow his path focus on color, as an intensity that acts directly on the nervous system. It is also why line and drawing in a particular and restricted sense. i.e., as disegno opposed to colore within the system set up by the Renaissance theorists, can be understood is secondary to color as intensity, and the reason for Deleuze’s emphasis on the primacy of the haptic over the optical. This distinction, with roots in Alois Riegl and Wilhelm Worringer, is however here given a new twist that eventually overcomes the division between the terms. The haptic is all about proximity, the fusion of painter, object, and spectator in an “aformal” element—which for Deleuze must be distinguished from the “informal” in postwar French abstraction (to which much of his rhetoric may seem close, at least if viewed from a more “normal” artcritical perspective)—that introduces a Sahara of continual variations: to paint Sahara, nothing but Sahara, even in a single apple… The optical would on the other hand entail the emphasis on the distance in figure-ground relations, the introduction of narrative content and a whole space of representation. But if opticality traditionally asserts a priority of the line, then Deleuze, drawing freely on Worringer’s Abstraktion und Einfühlung, finally discovers another type of line that no longer connects pre-existing points in a system of coordinates, but becomes a nomadic force that generates the points rather then joining them within an already given grid (which is one of the ways in which Deleuze describes the difference between a “smooth” and a “striated” space, in the vocabulary he borrows from Pierre Boulez). An instance of this he also finds in Klee, whose Schöpferische Konfession contains the famous phrase that Deleuze cites on many occasions, and which here too guides the aesthetic of force developed in the particular reading of Bacon: “art does not render the visible, art renders visible” (“Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar”).11 The eye and the hand, the optical and the manual, are then finally superseded in a third element, to which Deleuze points in the concluding paragraph, where he speaks of ”the formation of a third eye, a haptic eye, a haptic vision of the eye, a new type of clarity. It is as if the duality between the tactile and the optical had been visually transcended in the direction of a haptic function that emerges from the diagram.”12 Color and line can finally not be opposed, since they are part of one and the same event, one and the same logic of sensation.

If the Foucauldian diagram has to do with the formation of archives of knowledge, and as it were constitutes the differential element of force into which practices and discourses are located, but also points in the direction of an act of thought, a “Fiat” that exceeds both knowledge and action, the Baconian diagram can perhaps be taken as a particular version, a local practice, whose condition of possibility however resides in the general, “aformal” dimension in which it always plunges.

And finally, if we were to lead both of these versions of the diagram back to their common root, we should go back to the most general presentation of the term in A Thousand Plateaus. In the fifth plateau, ”587 B.C.— A.D. 70: On Several Regimes of Signs,” it appears to be a particular aspect of the “abstract machine”, and here we get a series of definitions, the most succinct of which is perhaps that the diagram is that which has “neither substance nor form, neither content nor expression,” and “retains the most deterritorialized content and the most deterritorialized expression, in order to conjugate them.”13 Understood in this way, this diagrammatic and/or abstract machine “does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality. Thus when it constitutes points of creation or potentiality it does not stand outside history but is instead always ‘prior to’ history. Everything escapes, everything creates — never alone, but through an abstract machine that produces continuums of intensity, effects conjunctions of deterritorialization, and extracts expressions and contents” (p. 157). But in traversing the different “plateaus,” we also encounter many other instances of diagrams, related but surely not identical: the “short-term memory” of the ”rhizome or diagram type” opposed to a ”long-term memory” that is ”arborescent and centralized” (p. 17); the abstract machine which ”cuts across all stratifications, develops alone and in its own right on the plane of consistency whose diagram it constitutes” (p. 62); a Foucauldian use which inverts the terms, and defines the diagram as ”a single abstract machine for the prison and the school and the barracks and the hospital and the factory” (p. 74); “the abstract Machine, or abstract Machines, insofar as they construct that body [without organs] or draw that plane or “diagram” what occurs (lines of flight, or absolute deterritorializations)”; a “true abstract machine [that] pertains to an assemblage in its entirety” and which is ”defined as the diagram of that assemblage” (p. 101; cf. 110f); a diagram that is opposed to a stratified semiotics, although ”even an asignifying diagram harbors knots of coincidence just waiting to form virtual centers of signifiance and points of subjectification” (p. 153); the list could go on. A close analysis of the minute shifts in terminology throughout the book, or any precise distinction between diagram and machine, would however probably lead us astray and simply create a kind of pseudoclarity: the terminologies of Deleuze (and Guattari) remain in constant flux where old terms are picked up in new constellations in which their significance is enriched, and what we should attempt to catch, is rather something like a tension or a movement toward a certain experience of thought, and not a precise definition that would immobilize the movement.

III
How can we make use of this manifold of possible diagrams, which in itself seems to be diagrammed, or The following quotes from this book are given with page reference in the text. traversed by a kind of diagrammatic movement? Warren Neidich’s drawings, multicolored abstract schemas containing large subsections connected by multiple passages and sometimes minute connections, have gone through various stages, from the physical to the immaterial. As an ongoing mapping of our cultural condition, they are necessarily interminable, and even called upon to exist in terms of various supports and framing. Connecting continents with names like the Cultured Brain, the Global Generator, the Becoming Brain Drawing, and finally the Earthling Drawing, they resuscitate some of the humor of the variously named parts in Duchamp’s Large Glass, but perhaps even more the infernal logic of Öyvind Fahlström’s attempts from the later period of his work to produce flow-charts, for instance in the form of Monopoly games, which would map the world of capital and politics. The world system is both a paranoid machine revolving around the law of a Symbolic order (the flag, the nation, the president, the phallus, the great Signifier…) that constantly reproduces binary forms, closed segments, discontinuous architectural and organizational fragments, as well as a schizoid undoing of the machine—the other side of the diagram, which makes all the segments resonate, opens transversal communications, and shows us that a system is defined more by its leakages and lines of flights than by its hard and “segmented” order.14

The diagram has its pedagogical dimensions, it is an index or a “showing,” which is why the act of pointing, the indexical movement, is an integral part of the artist’s strategy to lead us into the diagram. From a random point of departure—all introductions to the labyrinth are of equal value, just as every exit is an entrance and every entrance an exit—we are lead onwards into an encyclopedia, which takes us from the “extensive” to the “intensive,” from a space that contains the world, to ideas of the world, to techniques for altering both of them, and finally to modes of resistance to such transformations.

Much of Neidich’s work takes its departure from the idea of “noology” and “noo-politics,” as this has been developed by for instance Maurizio Lazzarato, but he extends and radicalizes it into his own idea of “neuropower.”15 Moving from the theory of cognitive capitalism to neuropower, Neidich invites us to reflect on the way in which images, brands, and various visual technologies impact directly on our brain, bypassing the censorships and reflective mechanisms of consciousness, but also on what kind of “image of thought” that this makes possible, not just as a passive causal effect, but as an active and constructive response. In a wider context, the visual arts, architecture, advertising, and media in general can be seen as part of the same process, whereby our minds are “sculpted” in order attain new levels of action and reaction. The neural interface—and we should remember that the science of neurology is precisely contemporary with cinema, which is surely not coincidental: the most powerful image technology for the re-visioning of the outer world is intertwined with the tool for investigating the substructure of our inner mental space—has become a site of conflict, even of political struggle, at a level which extends below that of human subjectivity and integrates consciousness in a process of transformation which is neither nature nor culture. Neuropower, as Neidich understands it, would inscribe itself on the most fundamental level of mental life, where our most basic affects and ideas are organized, where memory, fantasy, and intelligence emerge, and where a certain “neural plasticity” is at work.16

To such a process one might react differently—from the rejection that any artistic engagement in a domain such as “neural plasticity” no doubt provokes within a traditional humanist culture, to the complete immersion one encounters in the contemporary neo-Futurist techno-culture. Warren Neidich’s way into this universe seems to be a kind of reflective fascination, combining both a theoretical desire to conceptualize and a profound physical attraction. For better or worse, we are inside a violent mutation of our sensorium, and there is no way back to a theory of subjectivity and experience that would remain untouched by it.

The question that his work poses is a crucial one: what position do the visual arts occupy, indeed what position can they at all occupy, in this vast transformation, which concerns not only images as we normally apprehend them through media or in institutionalized spaces of art, but in fact extend into the sphere of what used to be called the unconscious, the articulation of life and consciousness on a pre-subjective level, and even into the basic biological features of living beings? Should art and artists attempt to provide pockets of resistance, residual modes of experience that yet remain to be colonized by technology; should they inversely intensify these processes, perhaps in the sense of the “nihilism” earlier encountered by Nietzsche, and show us that the death of the supersensuous world opens up a world of perspectivism ruled neither by God nor Man, but by chance and necessity; or must they be content with simply recording and reflecting on a process whose determining factors are located elsewhere, in the flows of Capital itself, which then would appear as the successor of God and Nature, as the great Other to which we all must subject, both in the sense of mere subjection and the active response of becoming-subject?

The option suggested by Warren Neidich’s work seems to be that there must be some other way to enter into this process—or better, since we are ineluctably part of it, to inhabit it, with body and mind alike—to steer it into the direction of a possible General Intelligence. Here he draws on ideas that have been developed by Paolo Virno in his analysis of post-Fordist labor as subjectivity and the development of a new “virtuosity.”17 The idea of inhabiting, although doing so in a more thoughtful and reflective way, perhaps indicates that the model of resistance and dialectical negation is no longer directly useful here (although I think it would be premature to simply abandon it). Since late modernist theory, the capacity of the work of art to open up a space freedom has predominantly been understood in terms of its interiorization of the formal contradictions of society, whereby it would create a reflective distance towards the real. Today, the rethinking of critical theory that has been underway at least since the 1970s and posthumous publications of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, to some seems to necessitate a dismantling of the very idea of resistance and the critical, which in many cases (for instance, in the ideas of the “postcritical,” the “operative,” and the “instrumental” in recent architectural discourse) appears to border on sheer acquiescence and subjection to the forces that be, although dressed up in a vocabulary of networks and intelligent production. Beyond such alternatives, the proposal of these diagrammatic drawings, as well as of those diverse theoretical models that they engage, must be understood in terms of a mutation into some other stance, based neither on rejection or affirmation, but on the possibility to release a different potential inside the forces of Capital.

Warren Neidich’s diagrams insert themselves in this complex and still highly indeterminate mutation of Capital and its concomitant modes of perception, experience, and action in an active fashion, and their suggestion seems to be a demand that we should not only think more intensely and question our own propositions, and that we should not be afraid to discard inherited ideas of what constitutes mind, subjectivity, and experience, even the “human” as such, but that this rethinking as such is already an act of resistance, albeit in a new way, and that it invites us to conceive of artistic work as a tool for thinking that goes beyond the institutional framework of art and artist alike. The “redistribution of the sensible,” of which Jacques Rancière speaks, and to which Neidich refers in several of his texts, must in this perspective be understood as transcending the sphere of art as well as politics, since it eventually affects the very fabric of life, the underlying substructures of the mind. The political challenges of such a redistribution are of course formidable: how should we conceive of an ethics or a politics, how should we account for the formation of a possible ethical or political agency, when the “multitude” that it must organize and integrate—without reducing it into the all-too classical form of a subject, individual or collective—extends beyond what we normally circumscribe by the use of our inherited humanist categories?

In asking such questions, and doing so within a horizon of certain optimism, Warren Neidich shares the utopian convictions of many of today’s radical political thinkers, which call upon he “virtuosity” inherent in “immaterial labor,” or the potentials that are set free by the advent of “Cognitive Capitalism.” Whether this is a radical shift, or a mirage produced by the inexorable logic of Capital itself, as many of those who uphold the ethos of the traditional Left have argued, remains to be seen. Suffice it to say that whatever it is that is happening to us, it releases a certain transformative energy that needs to be cultivated, and that plunging into chaos may be a risk that we may need to take.

Warren Neidich’s diagrammatic drawings are schemas for thinking, ways of connecting parts of our culture and history which for those entrenched in the average curricula of academic thought appear as hermetically sealed off from each other. Charting new and even non-existent territories—for to think, write, and create, as Deleuze and Guattari says, has to do with mapping and measuring territories, and above all those that do not yet exist—they incite us to trace new connections, although without providing any definite answer to what the outcome will be. The artist points his finger and leads us into the diagram; it is up to us to perform the rest.

Notes:
1 The division between mere representation and the capacity to engender thought was of course never clearcut, and the current extended use of the idea of the diagram may be seen as an actualization of possibilities that were there from the start, in the first Greek experiments with representation through graphs and letters. For a fascinating study of this topic, which traces the role of the—today no longer extant—diagrams in the texts of Greek mathematics, see Reviel Netz, The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. chap. 1, ”The lettered diagram.”
2 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). Following Deleuze’s book, the diagram has been used extensively in architectural theory; among the first to do so was Greg Lynn in a discussion of the work of Ben van Berkel, “Forms of Expression: The Proto-Functional Potential of Diagrams in Architectural Design,” El Croquis 72, 1995. For an survey of recent uses, see the contributions in Any 23, “Diagram Work” (1998).
3 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1991), 205.
4 Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp-Smith (London: MacMillan, 1929), A 142/B 181. Further on, in the section on the Architectonic of Pure Reason, Kant makes use of the schema as a way to formulate the structural and not simply aggregative unity of reason, and distinguishes between a schema whose unification is “empirical” and only yields “technical unity,” and one “which originates from an idea [and] serves as the basis of architectonic unity, that which we call science, whose schema contains the outline (monogramma) and the division of the whole into members in conformity with the idea” (A 833/B 861).
5 Deleuze, Foucault, 44.
6 Ibid., 37.
7 A further and final encounter would be located at the level of the necessary return from such an Outside, where a relative and precarious interiority must be constituted, if death and dispersal is not to have the final word. In Deleuze and Foucault, but to a certain extent also in Heidegger, this return is made through the figure of the fold, although each of them determines this in a different way. For a discussion of the idea of folding in this respect, see my Essays, Lectures (Stockholm: Axl Books, 2007), 150ff.
8 The reading of Bacon is in fact one of the places where Deleuze engages in one of his most productive debates with phenomenology, although it is only rarely named in the text. For a discussion, see Alain Beaulieu, Deleuze et la phénoménologie (Mons: Les Editions Sils Maria, 2004), 160-169.
9 The idea of the ”figural” is derived from Jean-François Lyotard’s early work Discours, figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971), where Lyotard attempts to combine, but finally also transgress, phenomenology and psychoanalysis. Lyotard would later abandon these theories, and their potential for articulating a theory of the visual arts has remained strangely uncharted. Together will Daniel Birnbaum I hope to be able to explore these issues further in a coming book; a brief sketch of the argument can be found in our essay “Thinking Philosophy, Spatially: Jean-François Lyotard’s ‘Les Immatériaux’ and the Philosophy of the Exhibition,” in J. Backstein, D. Birnbaum, and S.-O. Wallenstein (eds.): Thinking Worlds: The Moscow Conference on Philosophy, Politics, and Art (New York and Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2008).
10 Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1981), 65. Bacon himself refers to his fascination with the texture of rhinoceros skin in the interviews with Sylvester. The idea of “Sahara” is also the organizing idea in one of the best monographs on Deleuze’s aesthetics, Mireille Buydens, Sahara: L’esthétique de Gilles Deleuze (Paris: Vrin, 1990).
11 Cf. Paul Klee, ”Schöpferische Konfession”, in Schriften. Rezensionen und Aufsätze (Cologne: Dumont Verlag 1976), 118-122. On the idea of line in Klee, cf. Deleuze, The Fold, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), chap. 2.
12 Logique de la sensation, 103.
13 A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 156.
14 This too is of course one of the great themes of Deleuze and Guattari’s work, from the 1975 book on Kafka, through A Thousand Plateaus and onwards. For a discussion on segments vs. lines of flight, cf. in particular plateau 9, ”Micropolitics and segmentarity.” I have attempted to develop this theme in relation Fahlström’s idea of games in “Every Way in is a Way out,” together with Erik van der Heeg, in Öyvind Fahlström, exh. cat. (Valencia: IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez, 1992).
15 Here I draw on a manuscript by the artist, forthcoming in Atlantique in spring 2008. Many works and reflections that address these issues can be found in Neidich’s earlier book Blow-Up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain (New York: DAP, 2003). Deleuze and Guattari develops the idea of “noology” particularly in What is philosophy?, but then theme is announced already in works from the late 1960s, for instance The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition. For Maurizio Lazzarato’s idea of “noology” as a “second bios” relating to the brain, cf. for instance La politica dell’evento (Cosenza: Rubbittino, 2004), and Les Révolutions du capitalisme (Paris: Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2004). For a discussion of these themes, as they have been developed by Lazzarato, Paolo Virno, and a whole series of thinkers and activist in the Italian “post-workerist” (postoperaista) movement, see the translations and introductory essays in SubStance, #112. Vol. 36, no. 1, 2007. For a discussion of the related idea of “autonomy” in relation to Italian architectural debates, se Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Project of Autonomy, The: Politics and Architecture Within and Against Capitalism (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008)
16 Here too there is decisive inspiration from the work of Deleuze, particularly the two books on movement and time in cinema. Cinema, Deleuze argues, does not accommodate itself to pre-conceived theories of perception and synthesis, such as phenomenology and psychoanalysis, it traces and establishes new connections in the brain itself, and this is why it always has a close connection to philosophy. In producing new space-times, cinema forces us to once more ask Heidegger’s question ”what is called thinking/what calls upon us to think?” (”Was heisst Denken?”), not as a resistance to technology, or even as an attempt to think the “unthought essence” of technology, but as a way to intensify the possibility of expanding thought on the basis of the most recent image technologies, which obviously have developed a long way since Deleuze’s two books were first published in 1983 and 1985. For a recent discussion of image, time, and perception in relation to post-Fordist capitalism, see also Maurizio Lazzarato, Videofilosofia. La percezione del tempo nel postfordismo (Rome: Manifesto Libri, 1997).
17 See for instance his A Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004).

Warren Neidich’s work as an artist, writer, educator, and theorist explores the potential of Neuroaesthetics, a field he began to formulate in the mid-1990s, as a paradigm capable of describing the complex conditions of the ‘now’—a moment in which global technological networks and novel potentialities for subjectivity are coming into greater focus and correlation to each other. As knowledge becomes ever more commodified, and labor increasingly immaterial, our notions of art, work, and politics call for a ‘redistribution of the sensible.’ Theorist Jacques Rancière described ‘the distribution of the sensible’ as “…the system of division and boundaries that define, among other things, what is visible and audible within a particular aestheticopolitical regime.”1 However, the condition of ‘immaterial labor’ itself (work as potential, not yet objectified, constituting labor as subjectivity) insinuates a high level of mutability, adaptability, and contingency that characterizes current cultural production, giving rise to new forms of intellectual coherence.

Neidich’s decades-long project seeks to discern these simultaneous transformations, occurring in a seemingly endless and indiscernible feedback loop state, which impact both the cultural, social, and political realms and the networks of the brain, due to our distinctive neural plasticity. He has noted: “…the combination of new social definitions, the disembodied kinesthetic logics they engender, and the response in the fields of artistic and architectural production, for example, of ‘trying to keep up’ with these new compulsions brought about by revolutionary technologies, redefine our cultural context and call out to the brain’s inherent dynamic architecture.”2 Historically, Neidich cites the transition that occurred at the turn of the last century as one of analog (extensive) to digital (intensive) culture, but also, taking cues from Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, acknowledges that the subject formed by “the space of high modernism” lagged a bit behind, and did not previously possess the “perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace,” imagined long before its current full-blown actualization.3 It seems a new equivalence is at hand, and the ‘now’ is about ‘becoming.’

2. Power Up

Power Up is a phrase I first heard when Julie Ault, founding member of the New York art collective Group Material (1979–1996), organized an exhibition for the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, CT, entitled Power Up: Sister Corita and Donald Moffett, Interlocking (1997). This was the first time I became consciously aware of Corita’s work (which I had often seen in the form of public works—a painting on a natural gas tank along the Southeast Expressway in Dorchester, MA, and her 1985 Love stamp for the US postal service). This pairing of two artists separated by generation but joined by their integration of popular culture, graphics, and art for the purpose of addressing social change, highlights the cultural affinities of the 60s and 90s, perhaps illuminating the critical junctures that preceded, and at which we arrived, roughly following each of these decades. Corita’s use of the words “Power Up” in a 1965 serigraph, like many of her pop graphic slogans, utilized the vernacular of the day to motivate political action (the phrase was borrowed from a gasoline ad and paired with text concerning hunger and class disparity by poet and peace activist Daniel Berrigan). Moffett’s work as an artist, cofounder of the design firm Bureau, and member of the collective Gran Fury, utilized various advertising strategies to bring messages concerning HIV/AIDS to largescale public audiences. Although aesthetically different, both Corita and Moffett used the apparatuses, materials, and production skills of their day to reach audiences defined by specific perceptual habits, to instruct and disclose the conditions of power and their biopolitical import.

A borrowing between aesthetics and politics is perhaps characteristic of these two particular decades, the 60s and 90s. In observing movements that preceded each of them, it is interesting to note that certain prior developments also called for a more extensive engagement, reflected in the cultural realm. In this context, the field of culture can be understood as a viscous medium that supports political, social, economic, historical, and spiritual languages, and allows for a certain degree of interactivity. As such, these languages form an amalgam of shifting concepts and conditions in which we are immersed. The 60s and 90s are reflective of preceding compositions, but display important shifts. Like the conditions of ‘the image of thought’ to be discussed later, these shifts represent the projection of circumstances imagined by artists, for example, echoing the historical transition, which began in the late 19th century, from an ‘extensive’ culture with its linear, hierarchical characteristics, to a non-linear, rhizomatic ‘intensive’ culture. This transition makes possible the elaboration of display tactics—the opportunity to imagine and create slogans and iconography representative of this new space.

Looking at the micropolitical events that shaped the characteristics of many waves of Modernism (Constructivism, Impressionism, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, etc.) mitigates their repetition as eternal return (in which Color Field painting, for example, simulates early Constructivist painting) and instead suggests the actions of the avant-garde are instituted upon the nature of subjectivity itself. In his discussion of postwar American and Latin American art of the 1950s, art historian Benjamin Buchloh explains: “These practices appear no longer to originate in the cultural matrix of the nationstate, or in the fictions of national identity as their ultimate social anchoring ground. […] Their ‘international style,’ by contrast, seems to have shifted (perhaps already starting with Abstract Expressionism) toward a model of cultural production that is ultimately grounded in the economic structures of advanced global corporate capitalism that have definitively left those conditions of traditional identity formation behind.”4 Neidich elaborates that the conditions and contextual frameworks of the classic avant-garde and that of the neo-avant-garde are entirely different, making primary and secondary iterations unique. In his words, there is no reason to account for the eternal return as degenerate. His project as a whole points to the fact that this is not only a cultural and philosophical argument, but a neurobiological one as well.

“The avant-garde can never be understood in terms of reductive, empirical material paradigms because the nature of the avantgarde itself is always about the sublime conditions of the work of art, which are always beyond the recognition facilities the perceiving subject has on hand. As such, the avant-garde is essentially a future-oriented paradigm of what is not obvious in the deep substrate of meaning, what is ‘yet to become’ in the vast milieu of significance. Culture as it was in its social dreams, and as it will be in its future prognostication, constantly unwraps the possibilities that lay inherent in the history of the species itself, collaged as it is upon the matrix of evolving memory as it is positioned in artworks, buildings, urban and virtual spaces.”5

While acknowledging the seemingly forward-looking nature of prior aesthetic movements (for example, abstraction in the 50s), an engagement with overt political realities was similarly absent in the 50s and in postmodernism of the 80s. For once again, in looking slightly backward and slightly forward, postmodern theory, in an attempt to level such categories as aesthetics and politics altogether, also may have missed the point. As Neidich has noted: “Perhaps the initial reception of […] avant-garde excess proclaims a misrecognition; [further] postmodernism’s misunderstanding of this misrecognition, in its attempt to understand the work of art in an expanded cultural and social field, led to its demise as a condition  of social change.”6

In his 1982 lecture, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” Fredric Jameson defined postmodernism as a “periodizing concept” that is characterized by “the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture,” and “whose function is to correlate the emergence of new formal features in culture with the emergence of a new type of social life and a new economic order—what is often euphemistically called modernization, postindustrial or consumer society, the society of the media or the spectacle, or multinational capitalism.”7 In addition to the rejection of prior modernist values and forms that sought to embody truth, originality, and universality, he goes on to outline key features of postmodernism such as pastiche, mimicry, schizophrenia, and their reflection of a fragmented sense of space and time, characteristic of the postmodern moment. Doubt is cast, as well, in Jameson’s figuration of the individual postmodern subject: “[I]n the classic age of competitive capitalism, in the heyday of the nuclear family and the emergence of the bourgeoisie as the hegemonic social class, there was such a thing as individualism, as individual subjects. But today, in the age of corporate capitalism, […] of bureaucracies in business as well as in the state, […] that older bourgeois individual subject no longer exists.” He notes a poststructuralist position would add, “…not only is the bourgeois individual subject a thing of the past, it is also a myth; it never really existed in the first place; there have never been autonomous subjects of that type.”8

Jean-François Lyotard in his essay “What Is Postmodernism?” argues that postmodernism is merely and already “a part of the modern,” caught in a dialectical process whereby “…in an amazing acceleration, the generations precipitate themselves.”9 This conflation is perhaps aptly demonstrated in the contradictory conservatism of the art world of the 1980s, characterized by an increasing over-valuation of media attention and the aggrandizement of wealth, which precipitated an elitism that postmodernism (and Pop Art before it) initially sought to remedy. Jameson ended his landmark lecture with a question: “We have seen that there is a way in which postmodernism replicates and reproduces—reinforces—the logic of consumer capitalism; the more significant question is whether there is also a way in which it resists that logic.”10 To this question, Neidich’s work may propose: Neuropower Up.

3. Political Art of the Sixties was About Delineation, Political Art Today is About Differentiation

One of Neidich’s recent drawings, Political Art of the Sixties was About Delineation, Political Art today is About Differentiation (2008), originally existed as a drawing on paper, constituting the left margin of a larger wall drawing of the same name, initially installed at IASPIS Studio in Stockholm. The right margin was fitted with a white neon sign that read: “If it looks like art it probably isn’t.” Later, the drawing resurfaced in a projected installation at Onomatopee in Eindhoven under the rubric, Lost Between the Extensivity/Intensivity Exchange. Here, the larger handmade drawing was fragmented into a series of smaller drawings, photocopied on clear plastic, and distributed onto a number of overhead projectors dispersed throughout the space. Some of the drawings projected onto the walls of the space, others onto participants wearing white shirts, and some onto the white surfaces of pedestals borrowed from galleries and museums. Given the relative obsolescence of the equipment used (the overhead projector) and its institutional style, paired with the educational directness of a diagrammatic method of drawing, this immaterial mapping spelled out a complex historical transition. On the one hand, its initial inspiration was the psychogeographic mappings of the Situationists, and on the other, “the dynamic qualities of the signals of the brain during thinking, like a mental map, in which the present is recategorized in relationship to multiple memory maps distributed throughout the brain.”11 Further, this combination of equipment and image elicited the relative speed with which we shift from past to present, also reminding the viewer that this knowledge is cumulative, as the past is not replaced or obliterated, but rather becomes folded into an understanding of the present.

Political Art of the Sixties… seeks to outline the implicit power relations that surrounded artistic production in the 60s, against which practitioners of conceptual art and institutional critique, for example, sought to delineate their work, as if they could somehow operate from outside this sphere of relations. However, as Andrea Fraser has recently noted, “Moving from a substantive understanding of ‘the institution’ as specific places, organizations, and individuals to a conception of it as a social field, the question of what is inside and what is outside becomes much more complex.”12 This question of inside/outside has consistently beleaguered modernism, because it is undermined by the very dialectic of extensivity/intensivity prompted by modernist thought. Dan Graham, in his “My Works for Magazine Pages: ‘A History of Conceptual Art’,” cites his early experience, in the mid-60s, as manager of the John Daniels Gallery in midtown New York, and his exposure to a group of artists, including Sol Lewitt, Donald Judd, and Robert Smithson, but particularly Dan Flavin, as instigation for his subsequent interest in “the possibility of dematerialized, noncommodified art forms and a more politically engaged role for the artist.”13 He noted: “The fall after the gallery failed, I began experimenting with art works that could be read as a reaction against the gallery experience, but also as a response to contradictions I discerned among gallery artists. While American Pop Art of the early 1960s referred to the surrounding media world of cultural information as a framework, Minimalist art works of the midto- late 1960s seemed to refer to the gallery interior cube as the ultimate contextual frame of reference or support for the work.”14

However, these frameworks could not long maintain the structural transparency necessary to distinguish critical artworks within an economy that consistently sought to assimilate them, giving them value within the very structures they sought to critique. Perhaps due to the fact that Graham “…seems to have acknowledged that their original radicality in questioning the role of the artwork in its social context had been given up and that minimal works had been restored easily into the commodity status acquiring exchange value inasmuch as they gave up their context-bound idea of use value…”15 he instead adopted a form that made “no claim for itself as ‘Art’,” selecting the “informational frame” of the magazine.16 But information itself is the currency of intensive culture. Intensive culture is characterized by nonequivalence and difference. Whereas extensive culture produces the commodity as a form of equivalence, intensive culture is described best by the idea of the brand: “Products no longer circulate as identical objects, already fixed, static and discrete, determined by the intentions of their producers. Instead, cultural entities spin out of the control of their makers: in their circulation they move and change through transposition and translation, transformation and transmogrification. […] In global culture industry, products move as much through accident as through design, as much by virtue of their unintended consequences as through planned design or intention.”17

Following in a long tradition that spans the disciplines of art, architecture, philosophy, linguistics, and science, Neidich has chosen the intensive logics of the diagram, a format laden as much with information as it is with shape, color, and line, to aid in the production of ideas. Like the pages of a journal, Neidich’s drawings, mappings, and diagrams resist easy categorization within a given field, and can recall a range of references from Jacques Lacan’s “Schema L” (1955) to Warhol’s “Dance Diagram” (1962). Deploying this format toward future-oriented action reflective of the current cultural moment, Neidich points out in Political Art Today… “[art] must address the homogenizing effect on culture of Neo-liberal Global Capitalism, which through the creative industries, art market, branding, and advertising has created a crisis in the production of difference and variation. Art must resist this homogenizing condition. […] Art is a condition of the future and must await parallel and commensurate changes in the social, psychological, spiritual, economic, and historical fabric before it can obtain full meaning.”18

4. Diagram as Thread or, Conceptual Art as Neurobiological Praxis and its Antecedents

My engagement with Neidich’s project began around 1997, as a newly appointed curator at Thread Waxing Space, New York. In taking this job, I inherited a rather large box of unsolicited exhibition proposals to review. Known for exhibition projects that favored curatorial experimentation in an alternative, large-scale context, Thread Waxing Space’s stash of proposals read like an archive of reiterations of what had come to be considered “pathetic art,” a term made distinct by curator Ralph Rugoff in the early 90s. As art critic Irving Sandler noted:

“Art of the end of the 1980s took three diverse directions. The first extended available twentieth-century styles in personal ways, disregarding social issues. The second—which commanded the most art-world attention—dealt directly with newly urgent social problems, and the third was aptly labeled abject or pathetic art. […] Ralph Rugoff wrote, […] ‘Bereft of irony’s protective distance, pathetic art invites you to identify with the artist as someone [not] in control of his or her culture…. […] Pathetic art knows it doesn’t have the strength; its position of articulation is already disabled and impaired….’ Rugoff concluded that pathetic art was a reflection of a society and a culture that were dysfunctional and out-of-gas and whose future did not seem to offer any improvement.”19

Perhaps it was its optimism, or the marked difference between the strains of pathetic art and the sense of intellectual agency attributed by Neidich to artists and works, that drew me to his weirdly uncomplicated proposal, entitled Conceptual Art as Neurobiological Praxis. It also could have been the visual material included—not necessarily that of the artists in the exhibition—but diagrams roughly drawn by Neidich, illustrating neologisms drawn from concepts of neurobiology as they might correspond with historical and contemporary art. The exhibition was divided into three parts, according to the diagram: the Retinal-Cortical Axis (visual processing); the Word-Image Dialectic; and Global Chaosmosis (a term invented by Neidich referring to the operations of the entire brain, derived from both Gilles Deleuze’s notions of chaosmosis and the rhizome, and Gerald Edelman and Jean-Pierre Changeux’s ‘global mapping’ in relation to the development of the brain as it is shaped by experience). This category is the foundation of Neidich’s more recent arguments concerning the ways in which intensive culture sculpts the brain.

The diagrams and proposal posited that conceptual art was/is not “a linear practice [but instead] emerges in the context of many streams of art practice including Lettrism and Situationism; philosophy including Structuralism and Phenomenology; Infomatics like Cybernetics; psychological discourses like psychoanalysis; as well as Marxism and political activism of the late 60s.”20 In retrospect, Conceptual Art as Neurobiological Praxis seems to envision the advance of prior iterations of immaterial labor, including conceptual art, as inseparable from current understandings of art and its relationship to popular culture, media, politics—and the significance, for new generations of artists, of historical predecessors who imagined this hybrid state. As Neidich noted in relation to the exhibition project: “For it is within this complexity [of folded structures] that other forms and other meanings hibernate, latent, remaining in a state of hypothermia and very slow metabolism, waiting for the proper set of conditions in which to emerge and once again ‘become,’ only slightly changed, especially in regard to interpretation. […] Some would argue that an explanation of this phenomena can be found in the way that the social, political, historical, psychological, economic conditions of the late 90s and early 21st century share important qualities with those of the late 60s and early 70s, such that certain works [which have gained renewed interest] express key insights common to both eras.”21

5. From Hybrid Dialectic to Dynamic Collage

Neidich has recently directed me to his videos as a fundamental framework for all his work, “slipping into the spaces between the lines as if they were an architectural edifice by Cedric Price,”22 an architect driven by the goal of nurturing change. His goal was “enabling people to think the unthinkable. Through projects, drawings, and teaching, Price (1934-2003) overturned the notion of what architecture is by suggesting radical ideas of what it might be.”23 Coincidentally, at the time of our initial meeting, I was involved in an exhibition project concerning architecture of the 60s, Research Architecture: Selections from the FRAC Orleans Collection (co-curated with Philippe Barriere and Bill Menking, organized by Thread Waxing Space in conjunction with Pratt Institute and the University of Kansas). The exhibition project was based on the premise that an engagement with the imaginations of the past, during moments when technological advances render increasingly tangible the theoretical experiments of prior generations, is reflected in contemporary practices—another aspect of catching up with a future imagined in the past.

Research Architecture posited that against the repressive forces concretized in institutional architecture of the 60s, for example, futurisms of the past and the visionary authors who imagined them existed—with or without the actual technological means to realize their dreams. The availability of tools that enable the rendering of widespread hallucinatory spectacle, global communications, etc., across real space and time doesn’t necessarily make them better, or more real, than the speculative projects of the 60s by Archigram, Utopie Group, Superstudio, or Buckminster Fuller. These artists and groups integrated themes from popular culture and politics within radical intellectual frameworks to expand the fields of art and architecture, mainly through works made of paper and cardboard, and unaided by computers.

These predominantly ephemeral histories of utopian art and architecture run parallel to the still-persistent inheritance of modern rationalist methodologies—outlining that there were other, less tangible, societal dreams at play. Not always explicitly oppositional (although hostage-taking did occur at conferences involving Utopie, Archigram, Superstudio, and Archizoom), these projects were oriented toward a different future than the one we typically experience today, and they achieved this alien status by challenging the accepted links between artistic forms and representation—seeking, instead, to demystify the objects of art and architecture.
“Basically [Utopie] attempted to transcend architecture itself, as they transcended urban planning itself, like the Situationists could scrap the university milieu itself…. Everyone found himself at ground zero of the destruction of his own discipline. There was a kind of dissolution by excess on which everyone could agree. […] Within the framework of Utopie—and that’s what Utopie was, too—we were searching for an intellectual center of gravity from where we could branch out to all the other disciplines.”24
The potential for catching up from lag times, and the complex processes of recuperating from cyclical approaches toward perceived annihilation of prior understandings, are precisely what gave Conceptual Art as Neurobiological Praxis its unusual optimism. Rather than the failure or death of previous movements, Neidich’s thesis pointed to the ways in which these repositories of knowledge and action fuel the present, as they are folded into any potential that art, architecture, etc. may still possess as productive forces. This potential, shared by a newly conceived ‘multitude,’ could be described as the neurobiological sublime: “The lack of register between new and old forms of spaces and the lack of computability of a mind adapted to the conditions of the architectural past produce a new form of the unconscious and uncanny.”25 In his discussion of the ‘multitude,’ philosopher Paolo Virno also addresses the ‘uncanny’ as a key element:
“Thus, there is nothing more shared and more common, and in a certain sense more public, than the feeling of ‘not feeling at home.’ No one is less isolated than the person who feels the fearful pressure of the indefinite world. […] ‘[N]ot feeling at home’ is in fact a distinctive trait of the concept of the multitude, while the separation of the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ […] is what earmarked the […] idea of people. […] The multitude […] is united by the risk which derives from ‘not feeling at home,’ from being exposed omnilaterally to the world.”26

Accelerated circumstances, a lack of register between old and new, and an uncanny sense of the obsolescence of the present (such as Walter Benjamin’s arcades—already replaced by department stores) were, perhaps, all foreshadowed in the landmark essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in which new technological conditions of reproduction or “post-production” were received with optimism. For Benjamin, the mediums of photography and film promised a democratized, participatory audience, necessarily operating in “an immense and unexpected field of action.”27 The significance of cinema and early cinematic devices in Neidich’s work has taken various forms, including his video investigations such as Brainwash (1999), in which audience and actor view the turning of a black and white striped drum. Neidich’s interest in this instrument emanates from its twofold purpose, as both an early cinematic zoetrope and a diagnostic neurological tool. On one hand, it is a device used by artists to create another kind of reality, and on the other, it is a device used by doctors to document and diagnose conditions of the brain. The video presents these two functions, with their distinct histories—one presumably subjective and the other objective—as inseparable. He has noted in relation to this work: “The body is part of the world and that world is to a certain extent formed by new technologies. These new technologies, especially as they affect time and space, affect the production of subjectivity. […] The drum represents the effect of a new sublime condition brought about by cinema in the early 20th century; a condition that is related to the perceptual and cognitive systems of time and space.”28 Marcel Duchamp, fascinated by the congruencies of art, cinema, technology and science, exemplifies the link between transgressive artistic gestures and the positivistic advance of technology, moving toward a reorientation of the conditions of knowledge. Neidich’s work emphasizes, as well, that art can and does investigate areas most notably relegated to science, like perception, and arrives at radically alternative paradigms.

In his discussion of Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of cinematic time, philosopher John Rajchman makes reference to Duchamp’s cinema books as a means to introduce a “new psycho-mechanics, a new way of affecting our nervous systems. […] At the heart of Deleuze’s analysis of cinematic images and their dispositifs, we find the problem of a determination of a time no longer defined by succession (past, present, future); of a space no longer defined by simultaneity (distinct elements in closed or framed space); and of a permanence no longer based in eternity (instead given as form of a complex variation).”29 By overlapping creative technologies with those of a scientific nature, Neidich proposed a new assemblage, which he refers to as ‘hybrid dialectic,’ a new strain of the history of thought based on a novel set of perceptual conditions. In his video works Kiss (2000), 360 degrees (2000), and Taos, Pueblo, Looping (2000), which all involve pointing with a cane designed for the visually impaired, Neidich’s investigation is based on infirmity and disability. He chooses medical instruments used to diagnose maladjusted perceptual systems in order to conduct artistic research in direct opposition to modernist requirements of perfect coordinates. Similarly, more recent works attempt to combine overlapping subjectivities, reminiscent of cinematic consciousness.

Neidich’s Earthling series of photographs and videos of improvised performances by amateur actors taking place in cafes (2006) makes reference to the role of media (newspapers, magazines) in “producing new subjectivities in the context of evolving global identities.”30 After collecting an archive of images sampled from newsstands, café tables, etc., around the world for about a year, Neidich began to frequent cafes, asking strangers if they would perform in his work. When someone agreed, he or she was given a choice from the collection of magazines and newspapers Neidich carried with him. Each had an image of the face of a notable person and a headline. Neidich then measured the size of the participant’s eye or the distance between the eyes, in order to match holes cut out of the magazine or newspaper image—aligning the optical axis of the actor with that of the image on the page. The actor then improvised a performance, looking from behind the newspaper or magazine as if it were a mask. The photographs and videos that resulted are called ‘dynamic collages,’ drawing attention to the fact that the inanimate newspaper was superimposed upon a living human being. Although sharing similar intentions with, for example, the political collages of John Heartfield or Hannah Hoch, Neidich’s political images and videos look very different. Like Corita and Moffett previously mentioned, these artists have used similar methodologies to describe extremely different times.

The photographs and videos that comprise Earthling, like other serialized projects by Neidich, insinuate the connections between “the history of apparatus, the history of the images they create, the history of the ‘thought image’ which results, as a way of the mind making sense of the new landscape of images that make up visual culture. That history has become condensed in the new logics of global media in which the nation state has been replaced by global culture and the apparatus to administer those new conditions has changed as well.”31 If postmodern thought rendered impossible any sense of progress or transgressive individual agency, signaling a form of ‘apocalyptic pessimism’ described in Jameson’s conclusion as symptomatic of late capitalism, and thematized as a disappearance of history, perhaps it was best exemplified by the news: “One is tempted to say that the very function of the news media is to relegate such  recent historical experiences as rapidly as possible into the past. The informational function of the media would thus be to help us forget, to serve as the very agents and mechanisms for our historical amnesia.”32

In Neidich’s once again somewhat optimistic figuration, the postmodern aesthetic of ahistoricism seems almost old-fashioned, and nothing is forgotten. If news images are the lens through which we understand the world and our place in it, amidst today’s maelstrom of information— images streaming past us, disappearing as quickly as they appear—a major transformation must be occurring. With Earthling, Neidich expands upon the ‘hybrid dialectic,’ with “the objective dispositif of the newspaper now directly linked to the organic body mind in a collaged interface.”33
“By collapsing the historical dimensions of time—recollection of time past and projection of the future—into an empty play of euphoric instants, post-modernism runs the risk of eclipsing the potential of human experience for liberation. It risks cultivating the ecstasy of self-annihilation by precluding the possibility of self-expression. And it risks abandoning the emancipatory practice of imagining alternative horizons of existence (remembered or anticipated) by renouncing the legitimacy of narrative coherence or identity. […] The danger stalking the post-modern labyrinth is nothingness. The empty tomb. The paralyzing fear that there is nothing after postmodernism.” 34

6. Neuropower

Perhaps it is in Neidich’s diagrammatic drawings that novel possibilities for the subject most freely float. Outlining in-depth studies, new orders, rhizomatic processes, “the diagram is indeed a chaos, a catastrophe, but it is also a germ of order or rhythm.”35 It is here that branching histories and concepts of art, work, and politics play into mappings that suggest expansive potentialities, tracing past intellectual actions with arrows pointing to a future. As Neidich notes: “This goes to the very heart of Neuropower, as the site of control has now moved into the very brain centers that form our goal-directed habits and that influence the decisions we make before we even encounter the streaming conditions of the world that, in the end, we sample according to these internally generated conditions.”36

In his forward to Paolo Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitude, Sylvère Lotringer describes the important historical context from which the ideas of abstract intelligence and immaterial labor were born, in Italian ‘workerism’ (operaismo) or the Autonomia movement of the 70s. Linking labor, politics, and intellect, Autonomia sought, through researched activism, pirate radio, and direct actions, to develop alternative theories concerning the self-organization of labor. They articulated a diverse series of experiences based on a fundamental refusal of labor in the traditional sense. A sharp assessment of capitalist society, its powers, and its protagonists, Autonomia outlined new forms of communication and knowledge beyond the social relations dictated by waged labor. Based particularly on the conditions of factory workers, workerism maintained that workers’ knowledge of the productive cycle resulted in the possibility to stop, to sabotage, to withdraw. Further, the absence of work becomes a time of communication, exchange, and social knowledge. Their theories grew away from the traditional Marxist notion of ‘the people,’ with its implication of a separation between inside/outside, and instead viewed the expanded field of social intelligence as the new labor force.
“The multitude is a new category in political thought. […] It is, Virno suggests, open to plural experiences and searching for nonrepresentative political forms, but ‘calmly and realistically,’ not from a marginal position. In a sense the multitude would finally fulfill Autonomia’s motto—‘the margins at the center’— through its active participation in socialized knowledge. […] Everything has become ‘performative.’ Virno brilliantly develops here his major thesis, an analogy between virtuosity (art, work, speech) and politics. They all are political because they all need an audience, a publicly organized space, which Marx calls ‘social cooperation,’ and a common language in which to communicate. And they all are performance because they find in themselves, and not in any end product, their own fulfillment.”37

In Neidich’s performative lecture, Some cursory comments on the nature of my diagrammatic drawing, (first presented in the studio at IASPIS in which his wall drawings were made in 2008), the artist is blindfolded. With the aid of an assistant, Neidich is spun around, but left facing one of the walls. Pointing, he walks toward the wall and lands on a word at random, which the assistant calls out. Turning toward the audience, Neidich then recites from memory all of the interwoven connections, definitions, and significations mapped out in the drawing for the duration of about one hour and a half. As Peggy Phelan has noted: “Performance’s only life is in the present.

Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s being, like the ontology of subjectivity proposed here, becomes itself through disappearance.”38

Much like Autonomia’s notion of immaterial labor, Phelan’s concept of performance as non-reproductive insinuates a new form of subjectivity, liberated from the “machinery of reproductive representation necessary to the circulation of capital. […] Without a copy, live performance […] disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation and control.”39 Neidich’s project takes these ideas into the area of Neuropower, which he defines as the means through which a constantly transforming cultural milieu sculpts the differences inherent in the nascent neurobiological potential of the brain, a process mostly occurring right after birth, but also continuing throughout life. “Neural Plasticity’s potential as a field of differences can be molded according to the new conditions of post-Fordist deregulation, acting upon the conditions of the matter of the brain itself. I would like to suggest that this reconfiguration is actually the site of performative gestures, the non-reproductive labor of communicative virtuosos.”40

Perhaps it is only when we move from the individual to the audience that these two theoretical frameworks, Phelan’s concept of performance and Virno’s notion of the virtuoso, merge. As a population of singularities, the audience of the multitude is a heterogeneous sampling machine. As such, the summated condition of an unstable fluid social mind, the resultant of the combined dispositions of its individual members, is the true site of action of the virtuoso performance, which is now about the stabilization of anarchic dispositions in moments of synchronous appreciation. This, for Neidich, is the true condition of intensive culture that now acts to synchronize thought and consciousness. It is only in the last century with the emergence of intensive culture, computer and Internet technology, social networks and social orders, and the production of the multitude that new forms of biopower and administrative techniques have emerged.

7. Conclusion, Redistribution of the Sensible

If the now is about becoming, then the artist’s task is “…concerned with aesthetic acts as configurations of experience that create new modes of sense perception and induce novel forms of political subjectivity.”41 Neidich’s work, perhaps, reinforces the fact that artists have always created their own distributions of the sensible. Taking this as its curatorial subject, Neidich’s recent exhibition project, The Re-distribution of the Sensible (Gallery Magus Muller, Berlin, 2007), reminiscent of Michael Hardt and Tony Negri’s ‘society of control,’ deals with the issue of sovereignty: “Sovereignty, utilizing the methods of the global marketplace with the help of scientific research on perception and cognition, has conspired in creating complex networks of attention, which allow for the manufacture of explicit ‘connectedness’ that today defines the distribution of the sensible. […] These networks form a hegemonic cultural syntax, which is inscribed on society as a whole, producing new forms of subjectivity and, in the case of a world tuned into global media, a bounded multitude.”42 Artists, as well, utilizing their own historical referents, materials, processes, and performances, create “complex assemblages that together compete with institutional arrangements for the attention of the mind.”43 Again, this work is optimistic, concerned with an imagined future, not destined to be a repetition of the past.
“[T]he essence of politics consists in interrupting the distribution of the sensible by supplementing it with those who have no part in the perceptual coordinates of the community, thereby modifying the very aesthetic-political field of possibility. […] Those who have no name, who remain invisible and inaudible, can only penetrate the police order via a mode of subjectivization that transforms the aesthetic coordinates of the community by implementing the universal presupposition of politics: we are all equal. Democracy itself is defined by these intermittent acts of political subjectivization that reconfigure the communal distribution of the sensible.”44

This is central to the argument of Neidich’s Neuropower. In the end, the brain and its collaborator, the mind, are the products of a multiplicity of culturally formed congruencies to which they are coupled. On one extreme is the institutional understanding that produces ‘people’ as a homogenous entity, easily controlled and manipulated within the confines of the historic nation state. On the other extreme are the conditions of aesthetic production itself, which produces another distribution according to its own rules, manufactured by alternative methods. Both extremes and all that falls in between function to form the conditions of the brain/mind interface. The power of art operates through this redistribution of the sensible, in spite of the institutional tendency to co-opt. Redistributed sensibilities, produced by aesthetically driven systems, sculpt new forms of neural networks, attempting to make sense of a newly configured distribution. Potentials locked in older configurations are released. This newly organized neural substrate, as it is modeled upon the new conditions of culture itself, creates new possibilities for creativity and imagination, elaborating new forms of the image of thought.

Notes:
1 Gabriel Rockhill, “Translator’s Introduction: Jacques Rancière’s Politics of Perception,” Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, The Distribution of the Sensible, (London: Continuum, 2004): 1.
2 Warren Neidich, “Neuropower,” draft of essay to be published in Atlantica (forthcoming 2009).
3 Fredric Jameson, “Culture,” Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1991): 38-39.
4 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry; Essays on European and American Art from 1955-1975, (Cambridge, MA and London: October Books, MIT Press)
5 Warren Neidich, correspondence with the author, January 2009.
6 Warren Neidich, “Political Art of the Sixties was About Delineation, Political Art today is About Delineation,” artist’s description, 2008.
7 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983): 112-113.
8 Jameson: 115. 9 Jean-François Lyotard, “What Is Postmodernism?” Art and Its Significance: An Anthology of Aesthetic Theory, ed. Stephen David Ross, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994): 561-64.
9 Jean-François Lyotard, “What Is Postmodernism?” Art and Its Significance: An Anthology of Aesthetic Theory, ed. Stephen David Ross, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994): 561-64.
10 Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”: 125.
11 Warren Neidich, email correspondence with the author, 2008.
12 Andrea Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,” Artforum, September 2005: 281.

13 Brian Wallis, “Dan Graham’s History Lessons,” Rock My Religion 1965-1990, eds. Brian Wallis and Dan Graham, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994): viii.
14 Dan Graham, “My Works for Magazine Pages: ‘A History of Conceptual Art’,” Rock My Religion 1965-1990: xviii.
15 B.H.D. Buchloh, “Moments of History in the work of Dan Graham,” Dan Graham Articles, (Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 1978): 75.
16 Dan Graham cited in Buchloh: 73.
17 Scott Lash and Celia Lury, “Introduction: Theory-Some Signposts,” Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007): 4-5.
18 Neidich, “Political Art of the Sixties was About Delineation, Political Art today is About Delineation.”
19 Irving Sandler, “Into the 1990s,” Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s, (Westview Press, 1996): 547-548.
20 Warren Neidich, “Conceptual Art as Neurobiological Praxis,” The Alternative to What? Thread Waxing Space and the 90s, (Foundation 20 21 and Participant Inc, forthcoming).
21 Neidich, “Conceptual Art as Neurobiological Praxis.”
22 Neidich, email correspondence with the author, 2008.
23 Cedric Price, Architect (1934-2003), Design Museum, London, website, designmuseum.org.
24 Jean-Louis Violeau quoting Jean Baudrillard in, “Utopie: In Acts,” The Inflatable Moment: Pneumatics and Protest in ‘68 (Princeton Architectural Press and the Architectural League of New York, 1999): 53.
25 Neidich, “Neuropower.”
26 Paolo Virno, “Beyond the coupling of the terms fear/anguish,” A Grammar of the Multitude, (Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext[e], 2004): 34.
27 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968): 236.
28 Warren Neidich, Brainwash, project description, 1999.
29 John Rajchman, “Deleuze’s Time or How the Cinematic Changes Our Idea of Art,” Art and the Moving Image, A Critical Reader, ed. Tanya Leighton (Tate Publishing and Afterall, 2008): 310.
30 Warren Neidich, Earthling, project description, 2006.
31 Neidich, Earthling.
32 Jameson: 125.
33 Neidich, Earthling.
34 Richard Kearney, “The Crisis of the Post-modern Image,” Modern French Philosophy, ed. A. Philips-Griffiths (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987): 120.
35 Gilles Deleuze, “The Diagram,” Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003): 83.
36 Neidich, Neuropower.
37 Sylvère Lotringer, “Foreword: We, the Multitude,” in Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext[e], 2004): 13.
38 Peggy Phelan, “The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction, Unmarked, the politics of performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993): 146.
39 Phelan: 148-149.
40 Neidich, “Neuropower.”
41 Jacques Rancière, “Foreword,” The Politics of Aesthetics: 9.
42 The Re-distribution of the Sensible, press release, Gallery Magus Muller, Berlin, 2007.
43 The Re-distribution of the Sensible 44 Rockhill, “Translator’s Introduction: Jacques Rancière’s Politics of Perception,”: 3.

Neidich went on to challenge the viewer with concentration exercises that begin where Jasper Johns leaves off: In Red-White-Blue, 2007-2008, three canvases each display the name of a color, written in neon tubing whose hues contradict the names that they are spelling out: Green neon read WHITE, red neon BLUE, and the blue neon RED. The work alludes to the Stroop test for attention deficit disorder, perhaps leading us to wonder how bad it is if, confronted with this contradictory perceptual information, we read and even perceive the blue as red for a good two seconds: too long? The last work on display was Infinite Regress, 2008, a large pavilion with automatic sliding glass doors that are each tinted a primary color. The movement of the visitors cause these colored panes to overlap, forming secondary mixtures of violet, green, and orange.

Plato noted with disapproval that artists tent to favor appearance over essence. Pliny, too, considered illusion one art’s defining characteristics. According to his famous account of the contest between two Greek painters of the fifth century BC, Zeuxis painted grapes so realistic that birds flew up to peck at them, but Parrhasos outdid his opponent with a picture of a curtain. Zeuxis impatiently demanded that Parrhasois pull back the curtain to show him the picture-Zeuxis has fooled the birds, but Parrhasios fooled Zeuxis. Descartes’s distrust of sensory perception prompted him to find certainty in thought alone. Since ancient times, thinkers have viewed art as inferior to rational knowledge, but Nietzsche inverted the hierarchy: Knowledge itself is an illusion, he argued, and art acknowledges its own illusory nature.

Neidich’s playfulness in approaching visual “apparatuses” gives the viewer an active role in producing the illusion. These pieces lead the viewer to test out the different positions in the room; is is in these interstices of self-observance that the show’s power emerged. Neidich works his way through various forms in which our senses are manipulated and culturally coded, challenging us to rethink our ideas about color in art.

The work of Warren Neidich lies at the crossroads between different fields: art, biology, and neuroscience. The neon installation Resistance is futile/Resistance is fertile, placed on the roof of the Kunsthalle in Graz and made for the exhibition “Protections”, curated by Adam Budak and Christine Peters, is an example of the way in which his work attempts to construct a critical space that makes us reflect on the mechanisms of contemporary society. His work examines how art today can be an instrument of resistance to a contemporary reality in which every experiemental idea seems to be blocked. The underlying question is thus: “Is art today still an experiemental field or is it just about producing objects for a specialist sector?” According to the artist, art can actually produce new forms of connection in the field of visual arts that generate critical thought.

Warren Neidich’s photographs comment on media events. They expose the way experience is mediated through the complex apparatus of contemporary culture industries. In addition, they engage self-consciously with the history of photographic precepts that come from fine art, conceptual, and documentary traditions. These images argue for a formal dialogue with culture and art history and for a new aestheticism as a basis on which to discuss the relation of fine art images to mainstream culture. But the only way to understand the assertion of a “new” aestheticism is to place it in the context of older precedents. In Neidich’s case, that requires attention to the specifics of photographic traditions as well as to the features of engagement and affirmation that position his work within artistic practices in the 1990s and 2000s

Neidich sees his work in a postmodern frame, following the historical lineage laid out by Hal Foster and others.[63] That sequence describes a first wave of postmodernism that broke with high modernism’s focus on formal properties of media, a second wave that occurred with the theoretically inspired work of the 1980s, and a third, more recent, wave in which the artist functions as cultural critic or “anthropologist.”[64] Neidich sees himself in this final role. But is this accurate? The cultural critic posited by Foster retains the distanced stance of modern and postmodern aesthetic negativity. However, Neidich’s work suggest a complicity-not so much with the values of mainstream culture and the entertainment and media industries as instead with the enjoyment these provide. Such observations return us to question the way a new formalism raises issues of reflective engagement through its manifestations. This apparent contradiction between an attitude of critical disjunction and one of positive interaction with mass culture is sustained in Neidich’s work. His visual approach argues for a subjectivity that distances itself from mainstream values and provides a point of view rooted in the real and mythic idea of individual artistic perspective. But he also makes use of the complicit pleasure that saturates media production values. The powerfully present tension between these two elements (disjunction and engagement) in Neidich’s photographs foregrounds visual form as aesthetic argument in contemporary art. This extends the arguments I’m making for sculptural work, painting, hybrid media artifacts, installation and video work, and digital art and the way these work out an admitted, self-conscious relation to the culture industry through similar reinvestments in aesthetics.

Center stage in the discussion of aesthetics in the last few years was an argument put forth ardently by Dave Hickey. At the beginning of the 1990s, Hickey’s pronouncement that “beauty” was to be the overriding concern of the decade resonated through an art world that took up his charge with varied agendas. To the visually starved, theory-weary audiences for whom the 1980s had been a decade of mixed difficulties, the very idea of “beauty” was a welcome, if insidious, relief. The critically overdetermined new conceptualisms of Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and other artists had prepared the ground for this backlash. Receptivity to Hickey’s notion was accompanied with a certain smugness and satisfaction at seeing the theory cart overturned in the name of something reassuringly old-fashioned and familiar.

But the very familiarity of the term “beauty” belied the complexity of concepts-and art political agendas-that it concealed. For whose beauty were we to take as the standard? Whose aesthetic investment was to be used as a measure against which new forms might be assessed? In The Invisible Dragon, Hickey dismissed this question are irrelevant, intent as he was on resurrecting the potency of visual persuasion.[65] Hickey succeeded by elegant argument. He made comparisons, for example, between images by Mapplethorpe and Caravaggio, using the seductive idea of a regime of aesthetic submission that carries sexual as well as artistic overtones. By selecting such canonical and highly aesthetic works to demonstrate the power of images to engage the viewer in a ritual surrounding the “arrested moment” enacted therein, Hickey was able to campaign for the salvific capacity of “beauty” to resurrect the old notion of the “transcendent” value of fine art. Beauty was not an index to circumstances of cultural production, in Hickey’s argument, but a way out of context in the name of aesthetic form. A clever approach to theory-bashing. Hickey’s work undercut political correctness through indirect means, never mentioning identity politics agendas but sidestepping them entirely with a retro-conservative position that appealed by appearing to be above the fray of art world culture wars. The aesthetic sensibility that Hickey prescribes is strictly formalist, a stripped-bare closing of the circle of art into itself as a field of reference.

But the aestheticism that we find in Neidich is quite at odds with the “beauty” promoted by Hickey. Neidich’s aestheticism can’t be cast into an old-fahioned formalism. His is not a retro-gesture, a claim to ideal beauty through the purity of form or out of history through a transcendent image. In this regard he joins those artists of recent years for whom formal properties have become again an invested instrument of communicative efficacy. I would hesitate to cast all of 1980s postmodernism into a completely unaesthetic category, through the “anti-aesthtic” announced in Hal Foster’s anthology of that title of 1983 indicates the attitudes of new York-style postmodernism that were birthed under its shadow.[66] Emphatically true, however, is that in the critical climate of the 1980s and culminating in debates around the 1993 Biennial, appreciation was never articulated as a formally based enterprise, this supporting the sense that artists’ work led with issues and ideas rather than through a materially based rhetoric.

A substantive change occurred through the course of the 1990s. Formal values were given a serious charge to carry meaning through the capacity of material to communication semiotically and sensually. The new aestheticism is a formalism informed by conceptual art, critical theory, identity politics, and the satifactions of studio practice in dialogue with media culture. In other words, this is not revival of modernist formalism with its belief in the inherent properties or purity of media. Neidich’s work exemplifies the hybrid integration of these once utterly distinct, even antithetical lineages, an integration that prevails across the broader field of art production in recent years.

Placing Neidich properly within the history of contemporary art required a sketch of photographic practice fraught with historically charged concerns, each of which has its own relation to aesthetic properties. The Camp O.J. series produced at the end of his cross-country, Kerouac-inspired, mythically heroic journey (accordingly to the narrative supplied by the artist), is composed of large-scale color images of the media camp struck up around the O.J. Simpson trial (fig. 21).[67] The title of the series alludes to the central reason for the existence of the site and it appurtenances, but nothing in the images refers to the trial or its issues in any significant way. This could be a media encampment for a presidential race, a royal wedding, or any of the other incidents that are daily fodder for the broadcast industry. Since the mediation apparatus, not the event, is Neidich’s subject, this is part of the point, O.J. is very far off camera in the series, which makes sense.
21 Warren Neidich, Vanishing Point, part of the series Camp O.J., 2000, photograph.

The thematic obliqueness is matched in formal characteristics of the photographs whose aesthetic precepts violate the standard conventions of fine photography. Such systematic violations are very old news, of course. The lack of focal emphasis, absence of hierarchical distinctions, fragmentation of the scene, use of framing that is neither snapshot incidental nor fine art fetishized, disregard for the protocols of photographic production with no absolutely clear undermining of them, a sense of the documentary impulse but without any statement of principles or editorial position-the list of traits could go on. But they are used in Neidich’s situation with a very self-conscious sense of their history (and their cognitive effect- Neidich’s interest in vision and brain function is a developed part of his approach to image production).[68] Yes, he seems to be saying, all of this has been done and will be done. In doing it himself he is not claiming invention or transgressive violation of the terms of aesthetics. Rather, he acknowledges that since those transgressions are now part of the stock-in-trade of photographic practice, they are themselves highly coded aesthetic gestures. From the moment of its invention in the early nineteenth century, fine art photography’s bid to “art” status depended on the elaboration of a set of legitimizing aesthetic conventions (a capacity to demonstrate its formal and expressive values). But the history of photography since its acceptance as fine art in the twentieth century was characterized by the same kind of medium-specific self-consciousness that occupied other “modern” art. The elaborate taking apart of these conventions derives from a dialogue within that tradition of the “composed” versus the “found.” Just as the fate of narrative within high modernism improves in the postmodern condition, so the implied narratives of Neidich’s images engage the combined character of found and contrived work. Their allegiance to the “found” gives them their documentary credentials. Their engaged contrivance allows them to self-consciously play with the frames and devices of postmodern artifice, made conspicuously, visibly, present. Even the use of the fish-eye lens, with its distorting gaze, calls attention to the fact that these are contrived photographs, not mere “documents” pretending to transparent record.

Many of Neidich’s apparently anti-aesthetic features can be traced to conceptual art, which gave photography another kind of legitimacy as “document” of the “immaterial” acts and objects central to its rhetoric. The aesthetic force of conceptual art art, its striking distinction between idea and artifact, became the basis on which fine art could presumably eliminate production values. The emphasis on “non-aesthtic” properties gave conceptual photography distinction. Three decades later, this position has been reintegrated with the suite of production tools available to an artist.[69] The necessity for an anti-aesthetic is not as stringently defended-or defensible-within the current cultural climate. We are weary of the empty, unconstructed image that pretends not to care about its visual appearance. Neidich’s images contain that disregard as a posture, seeming not to give in to the requirements of careful composition or traditional aesthetics-but at the same they make every effort to fascinate through visual means.

The editorial point of view in these images demonstrates Neidich’s participation in mediated culture. Neidich doesn’t position himself outside or above the life that he observes. His depiction of persons, for instance, the newscaster, camera crews, other technical and editorial members of media teams, is clearly without malice of grotesquerie. Neidich is not cynical, but he is critically concerned with how media fascination is produced. At the same time, he is careful to make use of those principles to attract and keep his viewers’ attention. A photograph of a woman broadcaster, preparing herself for the camera, shows her at the moment of taking on the persona she projects through media. Her body is awkward, almost not her own. Her costume is vivid, mall-bright, and her face and hair perfectly cosmeticized to read into the technological feed. Yet she is vitally present as an individual person whose is to perform a role. Her presence splits between self and image, between embodied consciousness of the role she performs and the role itself, hanging on her like her outfit, and yet, less separable from her than those professionally coded clothes. A certain tragic tone attaches to this image, and the mood casts its pall through the series as a whole, showing that the process of producing “fascination” is a complex activity of sleights and feints and duplicities performed with earnestness and distance, professionalism and ironic recognition in active, simultaneous contradiction.

Neidich cannot be simply pigeonholed within a single historical tradition, which also speaks to the contemporary condition of his aestheticism as a new formation rather than as a retorgressive gesture. His work makes use of the full history of effects, in a highly self-conscious manner, producing in the viewer an awarenss of critical concerns as well as perceptual ones, all through properties of the images. For instance, the obvious “unconstructedness” of these images, the fragmented, ordered-disordered, apparently uncomposed and yet elaborately selected, produces a visual field that has to be pierced back together through a combination of looking and reading. Legible but not immediately apparent, the structured bits have a random “life captured unawares” aspect that is actually as artificially constructed as any tableau vivant.[70] The prints are saturated, rich with embedded color. But for all their large scale, they are not fetishized, deep-focus detailed works, and they flaunt their allegiance to a fast-moving, on-the-fly, journalistic mode with a deliberate disregard for either fine art quality or documentary craft. Taken in sum, the aesthetic characteristics of these photos are a series of sidesteps that jump off and away from quite recognizable points of tradition.

The notion of laying bare any device whatsoever carries with it the echoes of early twentieth-century avant-garde practices whose earnest naiveté was suffused with belief in the possibility of revealing the mechanisms of illusion in order to raise political consciousness through aesthetic means. The current condition of media saturation, of image glut and visual overstimulation, denies us the luxury of such easy critical operations. We cannot simply “take part” an image, any image, or work of art to show that its conceits are merely a means of deception. The structures of engagement are too complex in current (or indeed, in any) culture. The means of elaborate production involve us through already internalized spectacular experience. We are so inhabited by the images of media life and so complicit with their fascination that taking them apart would serve very little function. How does one undo the image according to which the very terms of self and culture are constructed? An impossible task, like perceiving oneself as whole from within the embodied mind. We are fully interpolated subjects. The deconstruction of the spectacle in many ways just reinforces our subjective and complicated relation to its many layered, interlocking systems. In it, and of it, we are mediated creatures in our early millennial lives. Neidich’s images show this, claiming along the way in his particular vocabulary of scientific, neurobiological critical parlance, that this is a feature of the cultured brain in its specific historical moment. Rather than ignore the potency of mediation, Neidich intends to engage its affirmative capacity, its ability to seduce us through consumable sensation.

Thus the avant-garde, with its resolutely critical stance and distancing mechanisms of image production and execution, is only a residual specter as it appears in Neidich’s lens. This is a quoted avant-garde, a citation and reference, not a living, pulsing presence in real form. As a quotation, it marks our distance from the historical moment of its appearance on the artistic stage and to give us purchase on the distance from that point of origin. Neidich’s rhetoric embraces Foster’s reinvented version of the avant-garde artist, that savvy cultural critic. But the addictive capacity of media productions translates into his own visual work. A fascination in looking at the process of production permeates his photographs, and through the production values they embody are far from those of mainstream media, they are antithetical to it. Quite the contrary, if Neidich quotes the avant-garde and its stance of critical interrogation, he also quotes and participants in the look of trendy publications who photographs are produced for entertainment value within the mainstream zones of spectacular consumption. The glitz and celebritization, the exploitative voyeurism and journalistic assertion into realm usually left invisible, unrecorded, are all present. Neidich is playing paparazzi freelancer, professional with bulbs flashing and an entrepreneurial instinct, seeking out events on which to feed his appetite for anything that can be transformed into a photograph for sale. The images are not “life taken unawares” but rather life made aware in order to participate in the world of media and mediated images. Living to be image, the media subjects of Camp O.J. are well suited to such an approach.

Neidich’s Camp O.J. series also shows us the world in which “image” is always being produced and put into circulation, but the angle through which Neidich looks at that world inflects his images with a gratification that wasn’t allowed within the postmodern photographic photographic canon. Neidich knows that his images are framed by the voyeuristic obsessions that the media produced and fostered around the O.J. incident. By not showing the chief protagonists of the tale and focusing instead on the mediating structures through which the event of the trail is produced for spectacular consumption, Neidich participates obliquely in the same system that he is slightly to the side of. These images could be (and have been) published in a photo-essay in a mainstream lifestyle magazine. They could be-and are-also shown in galleries and museums. In this era of fine art fashion, the slick products of Richard Avedon have claimed space on the museum and gallery walls. The glamour industry’s inroads into the citadel of fine art may stir protests in certain quarters, but Neidich doesn’t shy away from this compromise. His “art” production, occurs in a variety of site. This distinguishes him from those photographers who do commercial work as a “day job” but preserve their “own” creativity for fine art. His work also moves away from the affectless stance of canonical postmodernism (Levine, Prince, Kruger) emblematic of the “already produced” image-in-circulation sensibility. Like these postmodern artists, Neidich clearly has a sense of mission. Art have something to do, something it can do, and that only it can do. What has changed is that his mission may not longer be fulfilled by opposition. Quite the contrary. The most subversive act that fine art can currently perform may well be to show its own complicity with mainstream culture.

Fine art photographs provide a specifically aesthetic form of mediation. To do this, of course, they be aesthetic objects. They demonstrate that subjective affectivity can be inscribed within an image. By showing that possibility they appear to preserve the last vestige of a romantic sensibility in which the artist is the line voice, the individual talent. After all, Neidich chose that quintessential late-romantic on-the-road outsider Jack Kerouac as his mythologized model. Doesn’t that put Neidich right back into the stereotype of the artist-hero, alienated in his own individualism?

Yes and no. Neidich’s series positions itself not simply in relation to fine art but also in relation to media and the experience of existence mediate through images. The struggle the fine artist faces is to find a formal vocabulary through which to be distinct from mass culture while competing with it. How does one engage the viewer outside of mass media while acknowledging the fully colonized condition of the imagery? Perhaps very simply, by making artifacts our of that experience, ephemeral testimonials to its having passed through us. Contemporary existence is fully mediated, and through all the systems described by critical opponents of the culture industry. Fine art imagery, such as Neidich’s, occupies only only a tiny, rarified endangered zone in visual culture. Any functionality that attends to such imagery, besides the immediate insight to the viewer, comes through the set-aside to-be-seen aspect of its identity-as it does here-show us something. That it shows us the backstage of the culture industry is hardly a surprise. what else there to deconstruct? To interrogate? To take apart and put before and audience? These gestures are not simply an imitation of the visual culture production system, they are also part of the culture’s self-conscious reflection upon itself.

Mediation as a social process is crucial to the artist’s work, an object of fascination not only as an image, but as a process of image production. Media trump fine, they overwhelm it. The aesthetic force of these images is not what they depict, but their demonstration of the way mediation can itself be captured as an image and then cast back into the culture as a momentarily reflective frame. These photographs affirm the seductions of the mass-produced imagery and spectacle. The aesthetic of tine art if not “other” than that of mainstream culture but exists as a space within it.

63. In a panel discussion about his work Camp O.J. held at Bayly Museum at the University of Virginia, November 2000.
64. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), especially “The Artist as Ethnographer,” 171-204.
65. Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1995), 35.
66. Hal Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983); Ann Goldstein and Mary Jane Jacob, A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation, ed. Catherine Gudis (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).
67. Warren Neidich, Camp O.J., intro. by Stephen Margulies, essays by David Hunt and Charles Stainback (Charlottesville: The Museum, 2000).
68. Warren Neidich, Blow-Up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain (NY: Distributed Art Publishers, 2003).
69. Lucy Souter’s dissertation addresses this relation in detail, comparing the work of fine art photographers and conceptual art photography and assessing their formal and idealogical connections within shared lineages/traditions and shared contemporary concerns. See Souter, “The Visual Idea: Photography in Conceptual Art” (Ph.D diss., Yale University, 2001).
70. The phrase is, of course, from Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov. See Annette Michelson, ed., Kino Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

Neidich: I have been working quite a lot with the history of apparatuses and technologies as they intervene in photography and new media. The history of photography, cinema, and new media is a history of the production and reinvention of time and space. These new forms of temporarily and spatiality become imbedded in architecture, fashion, design, and aesthetic practice and, as such, create new kinds of network relations, for instance in the visual-cultural field. These new networks relations in the real world, which might be called the real-imaginary-virtual interface, can configure neural networks in the brain. These networks are dynamic and as they reconfigure the matter of the brain, they produce new possibilities for the imagination and creativity. They allow the mind to become perceptual in a very different way. This latest work deals with, what I call, the “Earthling” and looks the “construction of global subjectivities” formed through the apparatus of global media.

HUO: Where does the name come from?
WN: The name came from two sources, though this work is about of other things as well. The first is science-fiction movies, where a visitor from another planet addresses those who have come to meet him or her as “Earthlings.” The second is Sun Ra’s sci-fi-blaxploitation-jazz film, Space Is The Place, in which Sun Ra and the Intergalactic Solar Arkestra descend on forties’ Chicago from Saturn to enlighten “Earthlings” about an alternative planet built on good vibrations. I am also very much attracted to magazine culture, which is a kind of distributed information system. you can go through these magazines and DJ or VJ them; you can chose them, post-produce them, edit them.

HUO: What is you relation to them? Do you collect them or do you buy them everyday? you have something of an archive, though I’m not exactly what you’d call it. You deal so much with information. Do you have an archive for processing, for testing everyday information? Do you have a kind of art lab?
WN: I do have a kind of art lab. This project started in a very different way and then it changed midway. It began with going to cafes, as all these pictures take place in cafes.

HUO: And you were recording in cafes?
WN: Yes, I was very interested in this idea of indeterminate spaces, spaces where people kind of linger and then move on. Tourists always go to cafes, the bohemian culture started in cafes, and I wanted to connect with that. In the beginning of this series I started using whatever magazine I found at the cafe as a readymade or found object. It operated as a kind of fetish of the cafe. Then, as the project progressed, I became more interested in magazines in general. It was then that I started collecting them. The project started about two years ago, and about a year ago I started realizing that I was missing some of the great headlines: this one about Tony Blair in the Morning Star, for instance, concerns the idea of the delusion. I didn’t find that one in a cafe. I saw it on a newsstand and realized that I really wanted to utilize all the information available and not restrict myself to a certain set of rules or regulations.

I think that artists have to put some regulations on the projects they do, otherwise they become unfocused. In this case, I changed the rules and started collecting the magazines from anywhere and anyplace. A lot of different things started happening when I made that decision, and that is when I really got into the language of magazines. How funny they can be. How funny certain juxtapositions of headlines, titles, and advertisements can be, like Surrealist/Situationist jokes. I became interested in how headlines were use in different ways, in the multiple layers of textuality, and how they relate to different kinds of temporality. For instance, the headline is something like a sound bite. It has a very quick temporality. Then you have the subtitles, which are read in a different amount of time. You can read the newspaper in different temporal zones and you can utilize different methodologies to access the information. You can read each article through and through and in a serial way, moving from one article to another, or you can read it randomly like a dérive.

HUO: What interests me is that you are always bridging to other disciplines: you have a great and interesting connection to science and architecture. Can you tell me a little bit more about how you came into this contact zone, about how it started?
WN: Well, I have always been interested in history and critical theory. I have believed from the beginning that art should produce new sensations, new kinds of perceptions, new kinds of imaginings.

HUO:

 Like Felix Gonzalez-Torre’s art produces extraordinary experiences?
WN: 
Or hallucinatory experience. Let’s go beyond that. Art is a kind of exercise for the possibilities of the mind. It’s like break-dancing or ballet.
HUO: Like a non-chemical LSD?
WN: Yes, like a non-chemical LSD. That could get me into my theory called the “Society of Neurons,” which is a different question and one I’m not sure I want to trip into right now. But since you asked, here is a little of that theory. Different kinds of artistic experience stimulate or call out to different populations of neurons which produce signals utilizing different neurochemistries, like dopamine, acetylcholine, etc. In some cases, artists take specific drugs, like peyote, as part of the rituals surrounding their art production. Ecstasy, an exhibition currently going on at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, addresses this very issue that the experience and the consciousness it facilitates is the product of what I am referring to as “Society of Neurons” and how they all act in harmony at any moment of awareness. They express themselves differentially depending on context in a ratiomatic manner. The ontogency, or individual development, of the nervous system and the subject may be a result of a coevolutionary process by which certain kinds of cultural context call out to the developing nervous system differentially and favor the selection of certain kinds of cultural context call out to the developing nervous system differentially and favor the selection of certain neurochemical systems over others. Each culture may provide a stable enough network or symbolic ecology, which has evolved over thousands of years and which produces individual subjectivities generation over generation through sculpting networks of neurons, spatially and dynamically, preferentially. Art affects visual, auditory, and haptic culture. Art, like cinema, accordingly to Deleuze, may create new forms of connectivity possibly affecting the distribution of neurochemical systems in the brain. This theory gives a powerful new important to art.

My ideas about art and the brain are not intended to illustrate concepts and ideas of neuroscience, which can be a problem for art-science intiatives. They are about importing a new vocabulary that artists can fold into their art practice, as a way of energizing it through the production of difference and hybridity. If anything, my work is not about perception of sensation but rather about evolution and ontogeny. Artists like Seurat, Duchamp. Cézanne, the Futurists, Richard Hamilton, Bridget Riley, Gary Hill, and Dan Graham were all interested in science. Olafur Eliasson, Matthew Ritchie, and Carsten Holler are artists today who also share this interest. I once talked to Dan Graham about the early seventies and he told me that all the artists were reading electronics and science magazines. What I am trying to say is that many artists have folded concerns with science almost imperceptibly into larger networks of culture, sociology, psychology, economics, and history to produce a Gesamtkunstwerk.

HUO: Marina Abramovich’s interest in Tessler and so on…
WN: Yes, absolutely. Artists have always worked that way. It’s also interesting what happened post 1992/1993, after the internet explosion. What happened was that all the barriers, all the specificity of materials, started breaking down. Whether you are talking about art or you are talking about the barriers between different knowledge fields like science, cultural theory, or critical theory, they all started breaking down.

HUO: Has the internet changed the way you work?
WN: I already had a history of being a scientist, having studied neurosciences and been a doctor in the eighties. After completing a project called Camp O.J, where I photographed the press at the O.J. Simpson trial as one would a rock-and-roll concert for Spin Magazine. I felt that I had nothing more to say about the relation of the production and mediation of the real using the theoretical tools that make up the toolbox of art. I realized that it was time to embrace my past as a scientist in order to inject a new vocabulary into my work, as well as perhaps to discover the neurobiological roots of what I was observing in the macrocultural field. Perhaps I felt the need to reinvent myself as well. Perhaps political and social systems were operating at the level of the neuron network, and biopolitical through, as in the “Society of Control” outlined by Foucault, was being directed toward the brain. The Earthling series and a recent text I wrote for a forthcoming book edited by Deborah Hauptmann called The Body in Architecture and my essay therein is called “Resistance is Futile: The Neurobiopolitics of Consciousness” are to some extent the culmination of this project…

HUO: Have you ever thought about memory in your work, because memory has always been considered static, whereas in actuality it is a dynamic process?
WN: I have done a number of projects concerning different aspects of memory. Artists have always embraced memory and one could say there was an aesthetic memory. For instance, Christian Boltanski and Annette Messanger have explored cultural memory and traumatic memory for some time now. American History Reinvented (1986-1991), Collective Memory-Collective Amnesia (1990-1994) and Beyond the Vanishing Point: Media and Myth in America (1996-2001) were three projects I did in which memory was a preponderant interest. The Earthling project riffs off these and concerns the construction of a global memory in the sense of what Paul Virilio called “phaticity.” The word phatic is the root of the word emphatic. The history of the image, coevolving with that of the imagination, is one in which images are being produced that are more and more attention-grabbing, more phatic. These images are in competition with each other in the visual-cultural field, and over time they are becoming more refined, or what I call cognitively ergonomic-the images that most successful in drawing the attention of the observer are the ones that take advantage of the dynamic ontogenic proclivities of the nervous system. What I mean is that the static condition of photography has been superseded by the linear dynamic time of cinema, which has been remediated by the non-linear digital time and space of new media (non-narrative cinema is a transitional phase). The addition of dynamic aspects has made images more and more phatic, more and more cognitively ergonomic. This refinement is the product of the image-industry, of collusion between advertising, cinematic special-effects, and now the political propaganda machine. …

HUO: In your work you use photography, video, sculpture, installation, and drawing, even the reinvention of photography. If you look at the work of Ed Ruscha you could say that the car is his medium. What is your medium?
WN: What is my medium? Well, I started as a photographer. By the way, Rirkrit Tiravanija started as a photographer too, I don’t know if you knew that.

HUO: He wanted to become a documentary photographer like a Magnum photographer.
WN: Well, in answer to your question, if Ruscha’s medium is his car mine might be the brain. I mean that as a joke. Anyway, what is very important to understand about my work is that since I began as a photography I tend to think of all mediums in terms of photography. For instance, in London I did this project called Blindsight in which I used the machine they paint streets with to paint a green line from the subway station to Moorfields Eye Hospital, so that partially sighted people could find their way there. It was a kind of Situationist project about nested perceptual realities within the larger framework of the urbanscape. In the end, however, the line became something that I photographed and that generated images. Beyond the photographs of the document of my performance I actually made images that recounted the very nature of what it is to be blind and described the limits of the camera as image machine. Could the camera act like touch and construct a total image from a multiplicity of possible focal points in time, in memory?

I did another work called Silent in Madrid. My partner, Elena Bajo, and I bought something that’s usually installed in suburban communities-a highway sound barrier- into the center of Madrid. It was a 70m sculpture that created a space of solitude and mediation in the middle of the city. For me, it ended up as something to photograph. It was reminiscent of a large earth work like Spiral Jetty, which became known more as a series of documentary images. I mention this because I am still very much a photography. No matter what I do, it always comes down to the static image of the photograph or the video. The difference between myself and Nan Goldin, and what make me very close to somebody like Thomas Ruff, it is that I am not so much interested in the image. I am not a photographer that explored the image and tried to construct a specific style: i am more interested in artists who use different mediums within photography itself. I used many kinds of historical processes in American History Reinvented, from Platinum to albumen prints. In the O.J. Simpson and Beyond the Vanishing Point projects I cross-processed the photographs. I am much more about mediums than actual images, although I do think there is always a perfect process for a particular group of images. I am also about apparatus. Like Jean-Luc Godard, I use different apparatuses. I am interested in how an image is produced. I am making the production of the image transparent. I am not interested in dislocating the viewer from how the image was made, but want him or her to feel part of the process. In Godard’s Mépris, for instance, the first scene opens with a man holding the microphone for the actress and the next scene is simply the camera lens. In the middle of the film Godard stops the action and interviews himself.

HUO: It’s very much like Lars Von Trier, but in an interesting way he creates a different situation.
WN: Lars Can Trier is very much like Godard in that he dispenses with all the high-tech paraphernalia of cinematic production, leaving you with the grain of the film, poor lighting, and camera movement. So, by complete denial, you affirm what is it you want to relinquish. As I said, everything is Godard.

HUO: Everything is Godard.
WN: Yes, everything is Godard. If you look at what many artists are doing today, so much is influenced by him.

HUO: I think that is a great conclusion. Thank you.
Warren Neidich is currently a visiting art and research fellow at the Center for Cognition, Computation and Culture at Goldsmiths College, London.
Hans Ulrich Obrist is co-director of the Serpentine Gallery, London and curator at the Museum of Modern Art Ville de Paris, France. He curated “Utopia Station” at the 2003 Venice Biennial.