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Signals Diversions of Ruark Lewis
I asked Ruark Lewis if he had written anything on his signals and decoys; and as he said he did not, I decided to write at my own risk to misinterpret them, but the misinterpretation is what they are for anyway. We cannot let things speak for themselves anymore. Since Heidegger's project, salvation has been whispering, but we have proved to be too poor listeners to the whispers. It is too late for us to learn to listen and to read, because we will die tomorrow, because we will die today, because we are dying every minute, with the strings and threads of the fabric of simulated reality pulling and vigorously mesmerizing the limbs of our empty shells. We may need to surrender, because the revolution failed. The only significant revolutionary project, Marxism, was a negative mold of industrial capitalism. The modern communist countries are megaliths at work, living fossils of the 19th-century capitalist economy and politics. Maybe that's what makes today the dialog between the Western neo-conservatism and China relatively natural. The revolution has failed. Rebellion without revolution is longing for the womb, for the re-creation on the earth without form, and void, for the original undifferentiated state mistaken for pristine. It is animal in us. (What is better: be animal or dead?) We may need to surrender. It is impossible to build a new world from inert material, because exactly this idea created capitalism, while such a material never existed anyway. There is no material apart from the encounter with material. We make sense of the encounter with material. The material makes sense of the encounter with us. It does not bear in itself any sense of itself, but it always bears in itself some sense of us. The encounter with material is the horizon of meaning. The encounter with material means matching. On the other hand, moving along the surface, along the row, matrix, or sequence of objects or images means pointing (positioning oneself); referring (moving from one position to another); and selection (the representation of our special position as an observer supposedly wielding power over things by assigning differential value to them). Selection can be done only among many things which are similar enough to the extent to allow their substitution, i.e. symbolic exchange, but slightly different to produce an excess of value, so that the skillful exchange would be profitable and thus motivated. Therefore, the surface of any material, the surface (in fact, a fabric of surfaces) we are embedded into is a cultural, economical, aesthetic, or sexual system of simulacra. Once we start appreciating certain things, they quickly become a valuable currency ("value" is just another word for "appreciation") and it immediately plugs them into the cycle of symbolic exchange. The system of simulacra or capitalism even does not need to adapt to protect itself from new dangers. By appreciating something, we reproduce a simulative pattern: Baudrillard [Baudrillard 1976] shows how graffiti in the American cities could destroy the simulative sign code. He gives it as an example of reclaiming oneself from the system. However, his hermeneutics of graffiti assigns symbolic value to it. No surprise that since long ago graffiti is nicely appropriated by the capitalist culture: its revolutionary energy discharged into macho or teen vitality; works of Banksy are traded at Sotheby's; and academic works on the subject including Baudrillard's are selling well. The attempt to turn one's head away from the simulacra and get through to the things themselves fails for the same reason. Say, the popular history of Zen in the West is a joke. Therefore, finding "true values" or "true beauty" (whatever it means) to defy the simulated ones and move beyond the latter becomes contradiction in terms. Once they are proven and recognized as such, by that very fact they get involved into symbolic exchange. And you cannot keep them secret, either. Whatever cannot be Googled does not exist. We need to surrender, which means the dubious courage to stay and work inside of the system of simulacra, be part of it, enjoy it (as many find it enjoyable), and perhaps make a decent living out of it. The strange part is that the art, which used to be about something like beauty, suddenly would acquire another weird quality that has somehow to be aesthetic (as long as it is about feeling), and yet does not fit into the scale between the beautiful and ugly (as long as the oppositions of aesthetics are concerned). The encounter with the material, matching, may tell us more about this strange feeling. Matching is not just random or passive conformity of two things, like two pieces of a broken jar. Matching is an action (of course, it puts matching in a dangerous relationship with the activism of simulated reality), it is purposeful and it matches its purpose. Therefore, something that matches is a tool. Tools are meant for something. They have to refer to some activity during which they play their role as tools. As tools necessarily refer to something, they are signs. They don't have any resemblance of their referent, they refer by their matching quality: a hammer matches nails (and hand), the aerodynamic outline of a car matches streams of air, alphabet somehow matches sounds. We can feel the tool-ness of tools, their matching quality itself, when their referent is absent. Then, their quality suddenly remains lingering and gets strangely exposed. In daily life, we have this weird and often charming feel, when the tools are at rest: a shovel in the shed, weapons in the storage, objects use of which we don't even know on the shelf in the shop, words of foreign language, conceptual art work with its title and description missing. Heidegger places tools and utilitarian pieces of craft between nature and work of art. Nature and work of art just stand by themselves, while tools and materials don't belong to themselves: "Craft-ness of a crafted thing (das Zeugsein des Zeuges) consists in its use." [Heidegger, 1960]. They always are about something else. Leaving tools at rest allows them to stand and extend a bridge between the nature and art. But as I tried to show, leaving them at rest is different from trying to turn "back to things as they are". (Still, what creates such a special aesthetic experience? To make a good tool, we need to make sure that it is placed exactly under the horizon of meaning. This gives the tool such a power. Say, by moving speech representation below the horizon of meaning, i.e. decomposing the speech exactly until the point where its meaning first disappears revolutionized circulation of knowledge and defined the ways of humanity in the West: first phonetic alphabets - splitting words into sounds; Guttenberg's invention - splitting words into letters, hypertext - marking and mapping text as abstract structure, splitting text into formally interrelated tokens.) The tool-ness of tools gets revealed the better the more they are devoid of anything what does not belong to their function, but then their referent also is absent. This kind of experience of tools is experience of signs with the absent meaning. Their own material qualities are at their best to serve their reference, but the reference is concealed, unknown (as for letters of a foreign language), or destroyed (like a metaphor of shipwreck in Ruark Lewis's Raft [Carter, Lewis, 1999]), we catch the tools exposed. This is the most bizarre, surreal feeling of a peaceful presence of something that is right here, but cannot be revealed or described without destroying it, because description presumes words and signs working, referring to each other, telling the story, whereas here the feeling is achieved by the total removing of the referent and thus reclaiming the sign. In the Raft, the text is irreversibly ciphered in the assemblage of the debris of a symbolic shipwreck (debris of symbols, as Raft itself is perfectly organized for its purpose, salvation). It refers to a particular text, but it's impossible to reconstruct to which one, also showing that the entropy in language cannot go beyond certain critical point, at which language suddenly acquires (or just exposes) new generative qualities. It represents the crash of the missionary journey of the Western discourse possessed and driven by the power of logos [Carter, Lewis, 1999]. The ship hits the boundary and collapses; and its transformation into the Raft is its salvation by de[con]struction. Benjamin wrote:
The whole project of Raft is well-pronounced by the authors as the work of translation and transcription [Carter, Lewis, 1999]. Here the genetive seems to emphasize as the goal of their work not the result of translation, but the translation process, i.e. it's the toolness, being-at-hand, being in the gap between "the mute" and "the sonic", and then between one sonic and another, preserving this interplay by stepping back from the temptation of named (as it adds knowledge [Benjamin 1916, p. 326]) back - but not the whole way back - to the nameless (God did the same, creating the world by logos, but giving it nameless to the Man for naming [Benjamin 1916, p. 326]).
Thus, in Lewis's works half of the way has been made to the toolness of the language, its being-at-hand. Tools always are meant to be used, but their usage immediately includes them into the chain of symbolic transformations in materials, signs, and social circulation depending on their function. Breaking this chain gets their basic consumption cycle suspended. However, once tools go out of use, they assume the charm of patina; of their texture; their connotations of a stable, tranquil, or traditional; their story-telling. Without mentioning that stability and tradition presume repetitiveness, which is immediately connected to the signs and the circulation of ideal things [Derrida 1967], the nostalgic and aesthetic qualities of old mass-crafted objects are a perfect selling point, which includes them at once into the economics of appreciation and exchange. Ironically, the best market place for their uniqueness is a simulated system in its purest: Internet trading. Thus, to achieve the unique suspended feel of the material and tool-ness, we need to break the consumption chain of higher order - or even of the highest one, as the aesthetic consumption is self-referent. Neither discursive nor aesthetic means will work. Therefore, we need a gesture. Lewis's installations feature loud sounds and bright objects. Can some of them be examples of such a gesture? Probably, no, if they are perceived, in the modernist manner, as wake-up calls or koan-like acts. Instead, they are a post-modern maneuver, which Lewis calls signals (or decoys). The rest of the installation may (or better, has to be) be very discreet, but signals in it always attract attention (unless the whole piece offers a system of signals, simulacra simulated). They grab us and without hesitation start telling the story or even give us instructions. It may be brightly painted picturesque rocks or small striped plaster sculptures placed here and there; or a collection of old pictures from newspapers, whose captions play the role of signals, explaining why such and such photograph was taken; or bright posters with trite sayings (Silence is Gold). Lately, Lewis's favourites are objects covered with red and white stripes. He calls them "municipal colours" and they are meant to map and demarcate in the clear neighbourhood-style manner.
As long as they tell stories or demarcate, the signals are ready for consumption in striking contrast with other parts of Lewis's works that carefully conceal the text right below the horizon of meaning. This is suspicious. Signals are not meant to misguide or deceive, though. They are bright in colour and pleasant in shape, like the modern medicine. And their action is therapeutic: cooling us down and distracting us from the things on which we could not concentrate anyway. (Could they be called placebo, instead?) Their only role is to divert us from something, to take, like a dog for a walk, the part of ourselves that cannot help following all the tantalizing aromas at the backyard of logos.
As we cannot resist our sign-making activism anyway, signals are a drainage fixture, discharging it back to system of simulacra. However what they leave behind are not just "things as they are" removed from the consumption chain. As they take over the task of bearing meaning, they thus help dereference words or objects and restore their senseless tool-ness. Signals as a maneuver are simulation of simulacra. Perhaps, the beauty itself is a signal. It most fully (and, well, beautifully) diverts us to the simulative rhythm and pulsation, concealing and preserving things (which already cannot even be called things), saving us from ourselves, and letting us partake of we don't know what.
Appendix.
Decoys of Fairytale I would like to show how the concept of signals could be used as an analytical tool for a work of art, using Ai Weiwei's Fairytale, a monumental project, a part of Documenta in Kassel, Germany, 2007. I won't discuss the aspects of Ai Weiwei's work related to politics or power, not because they are irrelevant, but because they are too important for his projects. Fairytale, as it is represented in a three-hour documentary, consisted in selecting 1001 people randomly picked from various, sometimes most remote, places in China and bringing them together for a few week to Kassel, Germany, placing them in a dormitory, a re-designed warehouse with small regular cubicles separated by light curtains. Some of the people were art students from Shanghai, but many others had little experience of life even outside of their village. The Chinese were supposed to experience Kassel, a typical German city of some 200 thousand people. With their little exposure to other cultures, all kinds of emerging cultural and social effects and encounters were expected. The first half of the documentary shows the selection process with the most insightful episodes from daily life in China and beautiful shots. The second part is about preparing the arrival of the 1001. Besides, we see a massive timber construction built for the event out of the re-used old Chinese timber. The construction hardly had been mentioned in the first half of the film, which was meant to explicate the ideas of the project. Then only a very short footage of the event itself is shown, followed by brief interviews with the audience. Strangely, we see the slow and monumental development of the project in China, assembling and gathering lives of most unlikely people to the focal in Kassel. This culmination appears to be elusive, though. All the preparations, conceptually, aesthetically, and anthropologically rich and logistically immensely laborious result in nothing. Moreover, Ai Weiwei explains that 1001 was chosen to symbolize uniqueness of each participant, expressing it in the formula 1=1000. However, any personal touch is completely omitted, when the event itself is shown. We see so little that we are inclined to think that the whole idea failed. However, most probably, Ai Weiwei gives us a hint that the failure is not the case, when in the first interview with participants, two older Chinese ladies, in the very beginning of the film he says to them (and to us): there will be no show, no gala concert, no beauty pageant. The matrix of 1001 individual lives creates a silent and concealed texture, text and (wen in Chinese means "text" with etimology of "texturized surface", "surface covered with traces", as well as "culture"). They are placed in a matrix as characters (in all the senses), first, of the selection process, the paperwork, roster, and arrangements to take them to out of China, suspend - achieve epochè of - the flow of their lives, preserving their quality of human characters; and then into the concealed, physically veiled matrix of the improvised dormitory in Kassel, which does not have the structure of Chinese-styled totalitarian barracks or a Western panopticon or glass house. The dividing unbleached curtains, moving and waving, rather remind empty calligraphic paper scrolls. The texture, text of the 1001 is deliberately hidden. The mentioned timber structure apparently becomes one of the main visual attractions on the site in Kassel, while very little is said about the individual experiences of the 1001 people, which had been the centre of the project. The structure is prominent, reminiscent of the Chinese culture and spirituality (the void in the middle of the structure has the negative shape of a temple or a traditional pavillion). The object seems to be there to - intentionally or not - distract viewers' attention from the 1001, leave them alone. The structure is allusive not only to a temple, but also to a watchtower, to the administrative demarcation, both in space and time; and telling thousands of stories. However, it is not conceptually connected with the presence of the 1001 participants, but rather distracts the attention from them, while the audience still disturbingly feels their unexplained and unveiled presence. In the middle of the event, after a heavy rain, the structure collapses and the artist decides not to restore it, supposedly because "the nature has done something more beautiful than a human could do". However, apparently, after the collapse, its story acquires unexpected continuation. This watchtower is meant to be watched and thus, drain the aesthetisized attention from the carefully shaped and concealed textual human matrix. This is exactly how Lewis's signals work, and I think, it is a magnificent example of a signal. References [Andrews 1999] Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art - Oxford University Press, 1999. [Baudrillard 1976] Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death - Sage, 1993. [Benjamin 1916] Walter Benjamin, On Language as Such and on the Language of Man, in Walter Benjamin, Reflections. Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Schocken Books, New York, 1989. [Carter, Lewis 1999] Paul Carter, Ruark Lewis, Depth of Translation - The Book of Raft. 1999. [Derrida 1967] Jacques Derrida, La voix et le phenomène: introduction au problème du signe dans la phenomenology de Husserl. - Presses Universitaires de France, 1967. [Heidegger 1960] Martin Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes. [Jones 1999] Philip Jones, A Raft of Allusions in [Carter, Lewis, 1999] Sydney, 2008 |
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| Signals. Diversions of Ruark Lewis © 2008 Vsevolod Vlaskine |
