Henceforth, my dear philosophers, let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject”; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as “pure reason,” “absolute spirituality,” “knowledge in itself”: these always demand that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity,” be. –Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

 

The Minimalists appear to have realized, finally, that the far-out in itself has to be the far-out as an end in itself, and that this means the furthest-out and nothing short of that. –Clement Greenberg, Recentness of Sculpture

 

I

INTRODUCTION

While developing his theory of the Naturalist, objective novel, Emile Zola came up with the idea of the “barely perceptible gesture.” In this case, Zola was trying to capture human psychology and investigate how the slightest human gestures; the flare of a nostril, a twitch of a finger or the glint of an eye can betray desires and instincts normally hidden by bourgeois decorum and etiquette. After careful observation of these phenomena in life, Zola applied his findings to the characters in his great serial novel Les Rougon-Maquart. After reading Zola's works, I began to wonder if there was such a thing as a barely perceptible perception ? That is, just like hidden gestures, those perceptions which lay almost hidden just on or past the edge of the normal perceptual field. Do perceptions of this kind exist and if so, can they be consciously perceived and quantified? For instance, there are those perceptions which exist only in the eye of the observer. These are common and well known. Since at least Newton and Goethe, the phenomena of color luminosity, after-images, simultaneous contrast etc. have been studied and well documented. Other types of barely perceptible phenomena could include illusions, failed gestalts, perceptual overload and hallucinations. This type of perception may be harder to describe.

Like Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, it may be useful to begin this investigation with a short catalogue of subjective experiences. When I was small, I would conduct small experiments with my eyes. At night, laying in bed, I would try to understand the image of the perceptual field I saw with my eyes closed. I wondered at the surging field I beheld simultaneously dark and luminous. Has that phenomena ever been accurately described? Similarly, I would stare at a blank field and after a while begin to see specks or streaks floating across my eyes. Was it dust floating on my eyes? Were there scratches on the surface of my eyes? Did those spots even exist?

Much later, I have became increasingly conscious of other strange and interesting perceptual phenomena. One winter evening I was running an errand with a friend. I was still in the store, but my friend had left and was in the vestibule. We were separated by an automatic glass door. It was cold and we were both wearing black. At a certain moment, I failed to see my friend. Perhaps I only saw my own reflection, or perhaps I confused seeing my friend through the glass with my own reflection, or perhaps it was a case of camouflage, where I saw my friend through the glass, but did not register her in my perceptual field. Whatever the cause, I was completely disoriented and confused when my friend disappeared. When driving on the expressway under an overpass, one can perceive a strange luminous parallax that occurs between the two chain-link fences on either side of the overpass. I doubt I am the only one to have noticed this. Sometimes when you look into the light of a digital video projector, one can perceive a flash of pure Red Green and Blue light refracted in the eye. As De Quincy famously writes, intoxicating drugs can provide hallucinations. What is interesting about hallucinations is their simultaneous veracity and falsehood. That is, when experiencing a hallucination, you are conscious of the fact that you are having a hallucination and that it isn't real. Yet, you're awash in it and experience it as real; it overtakes your perceptual field all the way down to the emotional and logical centers.

I have had several interesting perceptual experiences this past year in the realm of art as well. Since the Museum of Modern Art has re-opened, I have experienced Barnett Newman's great, red painting Vir Heroicus Subliminus. What particularly interests me about this painting is that it fills the entire room, including people and other paintings, throwing reflected red color- energy everywhere. Several months later I saw another large Newman in Berlin which reflects color-energy to an even more powerful degree: The painting is a large, red square on the left, a wide, dark blue stripe down the center and a large yellow square on the right. It is hung in a hallway such that a viewer cannot back away more than a few feet. The result of being so close is that if one turns around to look at the wall, one's shadow will be split violet and green by the reflected red and yellow-energy coming off the painting. These physical phenomena are easily explained according to the laws of color-theory and our physical understanding of light, but experiencing the painting provided me a feeling of wonder, joy and beauty which surpass my understanding of color phenomena.

Similarly, at the most recent Open-Studio event at Hunter College, I displayed a large horizontal grid painting. The grid is painted day-glow florescent rectangles composed randomly. A visitor said to me: The colors are points of light; which are pleasure to me. All of these subjective experiences have led me to increasingly question the nature of our perceptions and the epistemological understanding we can have of our world. At Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof, a Dan Graham sculpture left me confused and visually disoriented. It was a free-standing triangular solid constructed of mirror, two-way mirror and glass. Each of the three sides had circular inserts of one of those materials. The sculpture, then was an interplay of reflectivity and transparency. The perceptual result was total confusion. My confusion, I think, was a combination of a failed gestalt,and perceptual overload. For example, the Donald Judd plywood boxes installed at Dia Beacon provided a foiledor defeated gestalt. That is, when one first sees it, one has an understanding of identical boxes lined up on the floor. Upon approaching them, however, one finds that each box is unique with hidden features below their tops. Judd, then, problematizes the gestalt by hiding details and changing or defeating your expectations. The Dan Graham sculpture, on the other hand, problematizes the gestalt using quite different means. With the Graham, everything is hidden in plain sight. That is, the formor gestalt is quite obviously a free-standing triangular solid. A viewer is able to understand that and hold the formin his or her head. Yet, the combination of various levels of reflectivity and transparency certain details being reflected illusions, others being realimages seen through transparent glass, operate in such a way that the visual perception is totally confused. In other words, the Graham sculpture provided a concise mental pictureor gestalt, but defeated my visual perception of it through confused spatial readings from the layers of transparency combined with an overloadof visual stimuli while trying to decipher just what it was I was looking at what was reflection and what wasn't.

That same afternoon at Hamburger Bahnhof, I saw Dan Graham's video Rock My Religion. Dan Graham is an artist whose work one sees too rarely, even if articles, such as Homes for America are well known. In total I have seen the Rooftop installation at Dia in New York as well as two Pavilion Sculptures and one free-standing Sculpture, the I video, the Café at Kunst Werke, and have read several early articles. What little I knew of Graham's work I found profoundly interesting. This project allows me to engage and extend my understanding of this artist and an opportunity to look at articles on perception and epistemology which explore some of the implications of Graham's work. My interest in rock music, minimalism, and visual perception as well as the opposition of subjective epistemology and physical facts combine in Graham's work. I hope to synthesize some of the concerns of Graham's work with the historical and philosophical implications of Jonathan Crary's essays and provide a model which may be helpful in today's climate as well as filtering these works through personal experiences, illustrations and anecdotes that help relate art and theory to a lived world. So this essay will be part art history, part confessional, part art theory. I will begin by discussing Dan Graham's oeuvre.

II

DAN GRAHAM

In Double Intersections: The Optics of Dan Graham, Birgit Pelzer presents a survey of the development of Graham's career. Pelzer presents a foundation upon which to build. The essay begins with a discussion of Homes for America and the early period of Graham's production in magazine works. The piece is a photo-essay showing prefabricated post-war houses accompanied by a text discussing them. Graham's magazine works were a continuation of the reductive logic of minimalism and conceptual art. On the one hand, Homes for America continued the minimalist interest in seriality and prefabrication, while on the other explored the implications of conceptual art's dream to dematerialize the art object. At the same time, Graham was exploring the idea that works of art are mediated and legitimated not through their material existence, but through their publication and circulation in art magazines. This insight seems true today Homes for America may be Graham's best known work and it is not for nothing that one most often end ups having conversations about the artists featured on the cover of Artforum. On another level Pelzer points out that Graham took the view that artistic work offered no socio-political solutions, but could pinpoint the artifice of ideological representation. His effort hits home. As a teenager growing up in the suburbs, I realized that meandering streets and culs-de-sac with sidewalks leading nowhere were a means of control over the flow of individuals on a super-architectural scale. At the same time, strict zoning of residential and commercial areas as well local and feeder roads ensure only certain spheres of activity occur in certain spaces human activity and space are delineated. In Homes for America, Graham writes, The owner is completely tangential to the product's completion. Again, growing up, I witnessed the bulldozing of rich Illinois farmland for the building of housing developments in our burgeoning town. In these instances, as Graham points out, the owner doesn't matter: The state pays to improve and widen the expressway, the city pays for the new roads and lays the utilities, the developer will profit from the new homes, factory orders are filled for water heaters and washing machines. A measure of the economy is Housing Starts, how many homes are built each month, regardless whether there is an occupant.

Pelzer continues to discuss Graham's early video and performance work. These works are less well-known than the magazine works. An example is Project for a Slide Projector (1966), where slides are taken of a glass box. Consecutive layers of glass are added until transparent glass sequentially becomes a mirrored surface. This is an early manifestation of concerns that span Graham's career: luminosity, transparency, mirrors, temporality, sequence and subjective experience. Graham was questioning the objectivity claimed by Minimal art. It can be argued that Minimal art also sought a temporal-phenomenonological subjectivity. But the point is taken that here, experience is not specific. My work at the time was about how the model that Minimalism took up was a failure, about how the phenomenological Ihad been questioned and eroded elsewhere in the culture. Similarly, Graham's concern with transparency and mirroring show a return of illusion which refutes both modernist and minimalist accounts of medium and materiality because they function simultaneously, or almost simultaneously, and only alter in the viewer's own subjectivity. Pelzer defines Graham's non-specific, subjective opticality as specular misrecognition.This is her version of the failed gestaltwith which I opened this discussion. In Public Space/Two Audiences, exhibited at the Venice Biennale, 1977, for instance, audiences can enter a hallway from one of two entrances. The entrance is divided across the middle by a pane of sound-proof glass. One end of the hall has a mirrored wall. Here, the audiences mirror one another, yet their subjectivities'are separated by an insurmountable gulf. Similar to the perplexing experience I had in Germany, the images in the glass and in the mirror are altered. These interactions set up strange inversions and equivalences between visual proximity and distance.

Graham continues to explore these strange spatial inversions in his pavilion sculptures (of which I have seen two.) Beginning in 1980, these open-air glass and mirror structures simultaneously integrate and exclude. They integrate through their passive reflection of the surrounding environment, yet they exclude any preconception. Like the failed gestalt which inspired this paper, the pavilions defeat Descartes' Cogito: While a mental concept can be made of the pavilions form, a concept cannot be drawn of their surface until they are seen and experienced. Experience then, is contingent upon fluid, temporal conditions; not a priori concepts. Like Voltaire's edict to tend your own garden, Graham's work is grounded in a pre-romantic tradition. They echo pavilion architecture of the English Picturesque and spatial organization of the French Rococo in their mirroring. Another historical connection closer to our own time, Graham's pavilions give substance to the modernist myth of transparency: that glass hides as much as it reveals. While glass'changing surface is a fact, I will argue a point with Pelzer: in Germany I remarked how every structure built since the 1991 reunification was made of transparent glass. In an effort to overcome that country's dark past, transparent glass is now the architectural vernacular and metaphor of young democracy; of which the recently completed Reichstag dome is an example. It is like a Bauhaus dream come true. While glass can hide as much as it reveals,glass reveals more than bricks. I couldn't help but remark the difference between German glass institutions and our opaque, fenced off edifices such as the White House and Pentagon.

In his earlier video work, Graham used time-delay loops to explore the idea of the just-past. That is, video-screen representations of what had recently occurred in a continuing present situation. For example in Present Continuous Past(s) (1974), a video monitor mounted in the wall plays back on an eight second delay in a mirrored room. Here, time-delay and the memory of the just-past are used as a potentially revolutionary tool. As we will see later, memory, reverie and subjective imagining may be our most powerful weapons. Graham's pavilions push the time-delay question to the level of Special Relativity: the reduction to surface reflection highlights the gap between the here and now and the specular image, or virtual image. What is that gap? The gap between now and its reflection is the speed of light; a temporal scale beyond human imagining.

Next, I would like to discuss Dan Graham's relation to popular culture and pop music in the 1981 video Rock My Religion. Again, Graham's art relates back to my teenage experience. In highschool, our teen angst was vented in house parties, skateboarding and punk-rock. Every Friday night we would go see $5 shows. These improvised concerts provided a night's entertainment, a sense of community and adventure and a sense of belonging to a scene. Most importantly, these shows kept us out of trouble. Last winter, my best friend and I were listening to old Chicago-scene 7" 's and we realized these records were no longer our lives; but had lapsed into history and legend. Rock My Religion operates the same way, but on a much deeper and important time-scale. I feel privileged having been able to see this film in a museum setting: I know it is rarely shown. The story begins with 18th century radical Protestant movements. Especially the Shakers. This cult practiced strict celibacy, separation of the sexes, temperance and sobriety. Yet, to achieve religious ecstacy, they would form a ringed circle-dance until they would shake and roll. From here Graham's Rock n'Roll narrative passes to Slave Hymnals and 19th century Protestant Revivals where the guitar, banjo and piano replaced the traditional organ. This type of music evolved into Southern Blues which migrated North after the Civil War with the changing economic structure of the United States. Around this time the Blues was stolen by whites and became early Country and Western, such as the Carter Family and Hank Williams. Up until this point, this account may sound like a Ken Burns documentary: the essential difference is that Graham discusses the music with a critical eye, always keeping the economic, political and cult-value of Rock n'Roll in mind. After the Second World War, the GI Bill and other factors of economic recovery created a new leisure class: the Teenager, a class Karl Marx hadn't predicted. Teenagers were not expected to produce, only to consume. This way, the economy could continue (and continues) to function at war-time levels of production, but instead of producing armaments; people could consume a plethora of new products. One such product was pop music. Engineered to unite teenagers and terrify the conservative orders, Rock n'Roll of this period includes Jerry Lee Louis, Elvis, Chubby Checker, et al. as well as the radio broadcasts of Rock n' Roll DJ's such as Wolfman. Rock preceded Pop art'by 15 years in that the listener could discern in its ironies the nature of its compromised position. That is, the teenager, then as now, was aware that Rock music represented marketed rebellion. Parents and authorities feared the delinquency and mysegeny that Rock represented. Rock lyrics such as Be Bop A Lula' and choruses like Papa Mu Mu Maw, 'suggested a return to the Stone Age. As Professor Katy Siegel points out: Barnett Newman said the first man was an artist. Graham seemingly might say the first man was a teenager.

A parenthetical note, I hope, will prove that Rock does suggest a return to the Stone Age: I attended a party in Boston with old college friends. All of these people have or do attend prestigious universities such as Harvard, Boston College, and Cornell. Two are Phd scientists in Chemistry; one is a lawyer working in the United States Capitol. The point is not to chalk up the pedigree of my friends, but to demonstrate the reversion to the Stone Age that Rock does induce. Specifically, as the party went late into the night and we were dancing to Rock music, two of my friends, a couple soon to be married, picked up pairs of antlers that our host happened to have, and holding the horns to their foreheads began dancing ritualistically. One may blame this on drunken hijinx, but I hope to suggest that it is much more important than that: It was like a Jungian dream returning, an un-self-conscious gesture that occurred naturally, easily. If I remember my history correctly, one of the earliest known representations of a human being is a cave painting of a Shaman wearing an antler head-dress. A repetition of that ancient image occurred one recent night in Boston. Or, as Melville put it eloquently:

Tell me, why this young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley of Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey why is it that upon the sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him, so that he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal muskiness why will he start, snort and with bursting eyes paw the ground in phrensies of affright? There is no remembrance in him of any gorings of wild creatures in his green northern home, so that the strange muskiness he smells cannot recall to him anything associated with the experience of former perils; for what knows he, this New England colt, of the black bisons of distant Oregon? No: but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the knowledge of demonism in the world. Though thousands of miles from Oregon, still when he smells that savage musk, the rending, goring bison herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of the prairies, which this instant they may be trampling into dust.

The 1960's saw the emergence of the Rock Star. Figures such as Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger and Led Zepplin are exemplary. These figures were unrepentant sinners and their personae and music celebrated their virility. At the same time, Rock music and the Hippies united to form the counter culture in order to protest the Vietnam War and the Establishment. Significantly, 1968 saw the first manifestation of a world-wide youth culture. From Berkeley to Chicago, to swinging London to Paris, to Prague, even to Beijing (if with different concerns) there was a youth revolution everywhere. The Class of 1966 shocked the world by saying that it felt no special loyalty to its families, its university, its state, or its nation...They were no longer the victims of local class or race bias. Their Idealism was skillfully exploited by the psycho-guerrilla warfaring of communist-capitalist secret operations. Soon the young realized they were using their heads for punching bags and cudgel targets instead of for thinking (Fuller 232). By the 1970's, however, the youth-revolution had mostly receded and Rock music had solidified into a static, academic field. Bands such as Pink Floyd and Emerson Lake & Palmer represent music of this period. In the 70's punk rock questioned the notion of the 60's rock star. It saw the rock star entrenched in corporate rock show biz, Punk Rock emerged as a reaction against academic Spectacle Rock. Punk Rock saw Spectacle Rock for the marketing tool that it is and attempted, like Malevich, to form a start from degree zero.

The beginning of Punk Rock is interesting because its British manifestation, The Sex Pistols and The Clash, was yet again another mediated creation. Rock Producers such as Marshall McLaren produced punk rock as a subversive strategy. McLaren's strategy was to focus on the economic contradictions within the corporate entity, instead of on the star or the music, and to self-consciously use the media to achieve (media) success, only to expose the machinations of the corporate system. Graham qualifies the political implications of McLaren's work, saying, it is hard to tell whether McLaren's attitude is cynical or revolutionary. Prophetically, at the Sex Pistols last show, Johnny Rotten's last words were: Ever feel like you've been cheated? But in the United States, Punk Rock was a genuine manifestation of Rock, uncontrolled by media companies or record producers. The history traced in Rock my Religion comes full circle in the juxtaposition of stadium rock against the emergence of Minor Threat. Minor Threat was THE Hard Core band.

In an interview about those times Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth said: "Circle dancing and the way these teenagers were going for it seemed very authentic and not very premeditated." Dan [Graham] was really interested in how something like this could happen and he was relating it to this very base ritualistic practice. Relating to base ritualistic practiceis very similar to my recent experience in Boston.

Now I hope to expand upon Graham's account of Rock history. There are many Rock critics and historians, such as Grail Marcus, who know much more than I do. Yet, I would like to relate how strains of music presented in Rock my Religion relate to my life growing up in the video's aftermath. Hard Core music is closer to the Shakers than either Graham or Moore admit in the video or interviews. Not only did Hard Core have a frenzied circle-dance, Minor Threat also adhered to a strict code of celibacy, temperance and sobriety\ even though they were committed atheists, known as Straight Edge.

You call it religion you're full of shit! You call it romance you're full of shit! (Minor Threat Filler) I don't smoke I don't drink I don't fuck! I cant keep up Out of step with the world! ... There's no set of rules I'm not telling you what to do. All I'm saying is I'm bringing up three things that are like, so important to the whole World; I don't seem to find much importance in: Whether it's fuckin'or whether it's playin'golf. -Minor Threat Out of Step

By the time I was 16 or 17 and took an interest in Hard Core, that music had already become mannerized. Examples include seeing Rock shows in a strange sub-culture called Krishna Core at Chicago's infamous Fireside Bowl. Here, the Hare Krishna cult, attracted by Hard Core's Straight Edge message of sobriety and celibacy and realizing the cult-value of the form, took over the scene. Although I resisted their cult message; the exhilaration of the stylized mosh-pit in front of bands such as Earth Crisis, Shelter and Snapcase was an ecstacy and revelry on the level of that which Graham describes of the Shakers I have a chipped tooth because of it. Glenn Braca said of Graham's work of this period: "historically, it's got to be very important, if anyone gives a shit about Hard Core anymore." I do. Another Baroque variant of Hard Core are Speed Metal bands such as Slayer. Here, a death-obsessed cult replete with images of skulls, Satanism and war replaces the concern for the maintenance of the integrity of the self seen in Straight Edge. This could be a prioritizing of Freud's Thanatos, or an historical echo of pagan cults.

Graham deserves some criticism, however, for ignoring an alternate wing of Rock in Rock my Religion's history. If Punk and Hard Core represent the pure, raw,and emotional,there is another history that exemplifies the synthetic and reproducible in contemporary culture. By the middle 1970's bands such as the Velvet Underground, Siouxsie and the Banshees, David Bowie, Roxy Music, and Brian Eno, were producing records about themes such as sexiness, advertising, consumption, media, androgyny and fashion. These musical paradigms relate to 1980's artistic systems such as appropriation, replication and simulation. Just as Rock music Preceded Pop art by 15 years, so did this alternate branch of Rock music precede appropriation and simulation in fine art by 10 years.

This provides a brief overview of Dan Graham's vast work. As we have seen, Graham's body of work covers many fields architecture, music, media, video and discursive articles to name a few. A much more profound study could be done of any one of these areas. Next, however, I would like to turn my attention to some of the philosophical implications of Graham's work and how this relates to the way subjectivity is constructed and the epistemological opticality of Graham's sculptures and installations. Looking at essays by Jonathan Crary will help us do this.

III

EPISTEMOLOGICAL OPTICS / OPTICAL EPISTEMOLOGY

Can we know what we see? This is a pressing question since vision is the primary human sense. Yet, as we saw in the introduction, opticality often fails; it is befuddled and beset by illusions. Graham's art pushes this question to the fore. Crary's essay Modernity and Problem of Attention is a good place to start an investigation of the historical and philosophical implications of vision.

Crary's thesis is that attention, or the ability to apply focused concentration on a particular task or detail, requires that we simultaneously exclude the rest of the perceptual field. In other words, perception occurs on a scale between attentionand distraction that is constantly shifting or in flux. This construction of perception, Crary argues is historically and philosophically grounded in modernity.

While modernization sought to rationalize and quantify the world in the expansion of Capital, vision was paradoxically found to be contingent upon the observer faulty and unreliable. Attentionwas pressing because work, production and efficiency had to be made systematic. Researchers and philosophers realized the implications this understanding of faulty vision has for the construction of the Subject: von Helmholt and Fechner had defined the contours of a general epistemological understanding in which perceptual experience had lost the primal guarantees that once upheld its privileged relation to the foundation of knowledge.The Classical model, typified by the Camera Obscura, held that an ideal observer had the capacity to apprehend instantaneously the unedited contents of the visual field. A fluid and atomizedperceptual field also had implications for Kant's a priori universal cognitive field. How can the fragmentation of the perceptual field and the Subject be synthesized?

Philosophers found the answer in the creative will. For Nietzsche, synthesis, was no longer the constitution of Truth, but rather a shifting alignment of forces that was endlessly creative and metamorphic.This seems to me (at this time in my life) to be a very accurate account of a subjective perception where peripatetic vision shifts through time and space and choosesthe objects of its attention and where a trained eye can create new and meaningful experiences. As the creative will accepts primary perceptions, it must at the same time exclude and relegate others to secondary importance. If the will did not suppress perceptions, consciousness would be at the mercy of external impressions...thinking would be made impossible by the noisiness of our surroundings. Graham's art, it seems, operates for Subjects constituted in this way. Similarly, the problem of attention and the will was addressed by von Kleist in On Thinking Things Over: A Paradox. Reflection, or thinking something over, finds its proper moment after rather than before an act. If it comes into play prior to it, or in the very moment of decision, it seems only to confuse, to obstruct and to repress the power to act, which flows from the glorious wellspring of our feelings...Likewise, the subjective ordering of the perceptual field occurs spontaneously and under normal circumstances is not a problem of deliberation.

In the 19th century mania to classify the world and understand human psychology, many new and strange psychological disorders were identified. These have been investigated at length by Michel Foucault. One such disorder was called Agnosia.This disease resulted in the Subject's failure to synthesize the perceptual field. Objects were perceived as objects, without any relation to the symbolic order. At the time, it was thought that this malady resulted from not being able to cope with the modern, fractured perceptual field. Here psychologists identified a mental disorder that corresponded directly to the pressing perceptual problems facing scientists, philosophers and artists of the time. Today, Agnosia seems like the apotheosis of a minimalist fantasy, where literally, what you see is what you see.

In Crary's writing, the newly constituted creatively willing and perceiving Subject is opposed by the simultaneous deployment of spectacular technological culture. Spectacular culture is not founded on the necessity of making a subject see, but rather on strategies in which individuals are isolated, separated and inhabit time as disempowered. Spectacular culture then, is the deployment of any technology that serves to isolate and divide individuals in alienation and an atomizedself. The problem, then, is not technology itself, such as the computer, but the function technology serves in Capital, such as corporate environments with compartmentalized cubicles and isolated work stations, where a worker is attached to a screen for eight hours and returns home at the end of the shift to watch television for several hours more. This technological architecture divides individuals and prevents people from realizing their potential.

In The Painting of Modern Life, T.J. Clark locates the beginning of spectacular culture in two phenomena: Haussmannization and the development of the department store. While the reorganization of Paris from a medieval warren to a modern capital and the first implementation of marketing and consumption are important developments, Crary on the other hand, gives the deployment of spectacular culture a specific date: 1927. That year saw the first technological perfection of television. The Jazz Singer, the first sound film, was produced in 1927. The new synthesis of image and sound demands attention from the viewer in ways that silent films did not. Walter Benjamin was working on his Arcades Project in 1927 which declared a crisis in perception itself. By 1927, Fascism was on the rise. The Nazis were the first to exert mastery over all mediums. The first television large-scale broadcast was a speech by Hitler. The Nazis simultaneously employed TV, radio and campaigning by airplane. The autobahn was also perfected at this time. (Robert Moses' scorched-earth urban renewal policies can be seen as a synthesis of Haussmannization and the autobahn.) Crary notes that the Nazis originally hoped to make TV Halls for mass viewing, but manufacturers realized that individual screens for home consumption would be more profitable and contribute to a controllable, atomized individuality. By 1927 spectacular culture had been created, all its forms persist today.

What is our relationship to spectacular culture today and what do we do to confront it? Any real hope for a World-Revolution ceased in 1936 with the Spanish War debacle and the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact a few years later, (or maybe 1848 with the destruction of the Paris Commune.) Even the Student Revolution of 1968 has today been largely rolled-back. Today, we are in a period of paradigm shift. September 11, 2001 effectively closed the post-World War Two historical chapter, which had been a relatively stable period, despite disasters like Vietnam, because of its closed-circuit, two-power logic. Stasis in the Thucydidean sense, was maintained through the purging of excess Capital in the techno-invention of never-to- be-used doomsday arsenals. Even the collapse of the Soviet Union did not prevent the post-war system from continuing. The 1990's, exemplified by the Clinton Administration, were a period of peace and prosperity, with the exception of barbarism in the Balkans. All that has changed. The world today is in the process of restructuring. Artists and individuals today are in a state of crisis because the models which had operated for the previous sixty years no longer apply. When Walter Benjamin was in Paris at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, did he already know what dark days lay ahead? Today, perhaps, we are in a similar position: each of us anxiously wants to know the outcome of this chapter of history, but we are too afraid to look: Like in a scary movie, we are peeking through our fingers and holding our breath.

Spectacular culture is more and more firmly entrenched. What are the implications of the current Administration's rhetoric of Freedom? Is it a freedom of conscious individuals coming together through their creative will and relating to one another as equals? Or does it represent the freedom to consume more images and products? We know the answer... The two most recent symptoms of Spectacular Culture are the September 11th attacks and the Iraq war. Yet, on a technological level, the dizzying proliferation of the flat plasma screen and the iPod player are the most visible. In almost any public space in New York there is a flat screen. The flat screen is a determined site for the gaze to consume advertisements (not images of what is really happening.). The eye is naturally attracted to its luminosity and color. At the extreme, Times Square is an illustration of contemporary optical overload. The iPod is just as interesting. Individual players such as the Walkman have existed for at least twenty years, but the iPod is remarkable because it is practically infinite in the variety of audio-information it plays. If Spectacle is defined by divisive technologies, the iPod reigns supreme. Every day I consciously choose to wear an iPod as a way of walling myself off from others in the subway and elsewhere. I am aware that in my life this gadget has thwarted conversations and encounters with others that could have been interesting and fruitful.

IV

CONCLUSIONS AND POSSIBILITIES

Since the possibility for the Global Utopia envisioned by twentieth avant-gardes has long past, what are artists and individuals to do? Is there a cause worth fighting for? Artists such as Dan Graham make an art that is egalitarian and utopian, but on a small scale. His mirrored Pavilion Sculptures challenge our assumptions about everyday perceptual subjectivity. Graham's Rock criticism and videos demonstrate that it is possible for genuine communities to spontaneously exist outside a Spectacular Economy. Graham's early sound and video performances and installations explore the relationship that individuals maintain with each other and with their technological surroundings. Unlike divisive technologies such as cable television, works such as Public Space/Two Audiences explore an inter-subjectivity that is potentially unifying and radical. Likewise, the earliest conceptual art magazine pieces explore the way people access and dissimulate information. At the end of Unbinding Vision, Crary advocates that the daydream and reverie are sites of resistance against routine and coercion. In other words, the daydream is when we are not paying attention when we are not keyed into daily systems of production and consumption. In this case, we have gone from fighting for world utopia to just dreaming about it for a moment. Is this all that remains? Graham's art, also provides a small site of resistance. In the specular misrecognitiono of Graham's work, optical perceptions occur which cannot clearly be defined and which oppose everyday notions of rationality and perspective. From here, the next step is individuals'awareness of that which lies outside perception or behind the eyes. Here, individuals become grounded in their own subjectivity not in the interest of selfishness, but in order to encounter others'subjectivities equally. Walter Benjamin, in his day, would have labeled any concept so thoroughly grounded in subjectivity reactionary. In today's topsy-turvy world, however, this form of subjective equality seems to make sense. Unity exists in diversity.

Nicolas Bourriaud writes: Social utopias and revolutionary hopes have given way to everyday micro-utopias and imitative strategies, any stance that is directly critical of society is futile, if based on the illusion of a marginality that is nowadays impossible, not to say regressive. One such micro-utopia, as we have seen, is Rock n'Roll. Another micro-utopia is the international art scene of the Northern world-capitals. Another micro-utopia is the band Stereo-Total. Representing the positive aspects of Globalization, Stereo-Total makes re-appropriated songs that ironically quote early 1960's pop naivete and la chanson francaise. They sing in French, German, and English. American and European friends avidly listen to this band in New York, Paris, Berlin and London. So, like art, this band represents a dialogue of multiple subjectivities united regardless of national origin or politics. Micro-utopias certainly exist on many levels. A simple dinner-party is enough to unite diverse individuals in friendship and pleasure.

In today's art scene, I would like to identify those artists I consider successors to Dan Graham's work. Banks Violette synthesizes Graham's interest in architectural-scale sculpture and Rock n'Roll. In Violette's work, however, black high-gloss surfaces replace mirrors and instead of looking at Rock as a general field, Violette focuses specifically on the aesthetics of Speed Metal. Like our earlier discussion of Speed Metal, Violette is known for all-black sculptures... that refer to a death-fixated youth culture inspired by certain forms of pop music. Holland Cotter of the New York Times asserts that Violette moves beyond the youth-cult images he is associated with toward some further dimension of the nihilist sublime.

Like Graham's videos and performances, Cory Archangel's work investigates a relationship with spectacular technology. Archangel's hacked video games operate on the level of contemporary mythology. Everyone has a relationship with Mario Bros. and Tetrris and Archangel's subversions of Nintendo games acknowledge these totems for what they are. The epic Super Mario Movie, synthesizes Homer and after-school diversions. Archangel's latest show at Team Gallery also included references to Speed Metal: There was an unintelligible recording of a voicemail sent from a Slayer concert. There were also burned cd's available for $5 of bands such as Iron Maiden.

Kelley Walker takes an interest in the mirror. One body of work consists of mirrored Rorschachs. Here, mirrored iridescent plexiglass is cut into strange techno-rococo Rorschach patterns. Another body of work seeks to explore the condition of advertisement. In a recent collaborative installation at Greene Naftali Gallery, Walker re-appropriated popular vodka advertisements accompanied by images of skulls and bones and a mirrored partition. Another piece, featured on the cover of April's Artforum, re-appropriates a fashion advertisement and ridicules expressionist gesture. Walker's art mirrors Glam Rock in its compromised relationship with media: re-appropriating a sexy advertisement only re-affirms that ad's sexiness. Roxy Music and Brian Ferry operate in a very similar way. At the same time, there is a post-punk Gothic darkness in this work along the lines of Joy Division.

All three of these young artists treat themes of technology, advertisement, pop/youth culture and a subjective ambivalence toward it all. This technophilic art provides a way around the slacker style that has been dominant the past few years. That these young artists are keyed into the institutional gallery system is not problematic: everyone needs to earn a living. Graham advocates a notion of aaestheticized playto replace art.Here, games, inquisitiveness and imagination replace the traditional mediums. Our imaginations and lapses in unified perception along with our memories form sites of resistance against a totalizing condition of productivity and consumption in an eternal present. The meeting of creative wills in inter-subjective dialogue makes models of micro-democracies. Today we may be playing, but in our current climate, does play result in cheerful-nihilism, empty hedonism or a utopic pipe-dream where art is funand rock n'roll is cool, but where actual conditions continue to degrade? When the ice caps melt; the polar bears will go extinct. Graham's art is powerful and has been worth exploring because when his sculpture defeated my optical perception that day in Berlin, it forced me to ask these questions and re- assess my relationship to the universe.