MY IDEOLOGICAL MOOD

To Matthew Jackson who knows all the books Ilya Kabakov illustrated.

Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square came from the set of Russian Futurist Opera Victory Over the Sun that premiered in 1913 at the Luna Park in St Petersburg. This moment identifies a theatrical narrativity at the heart of modernism. The primary meaning of this gesture is the announcement of a new totalizing social project and a projection of the same into the realm of the social reality with all its possible outcomes. This moment of unknowing and potentiality of new lifeworlds inside the social is synonymous with the demonic behind romanticism of every Hegelian social gestum—namely the conception of the aesthetic state. The feeling that accompanies this kind of moment is the feeling one must aim to invoke within artworks.

The anxiety that we feel today comes from a dark lack- a nervousness that bubbles on the surface of things that is almost atmospheric¹. This anxiety comes primarily from the lack of totalizing social project. The discomfort is subtle but ever present. It is also subconscious since capitalism does not have knowledge of proposals for working socialism or a historical memory of what that means. Another anxiety comes from the chiastic tension between what saturates the capitalist visual field (what we see) and what we do not see and know is happening—namely outcomes of western mastery of death: torture, rape, murder and the rubbling of landscapes by blowing up of buildings, aerial bombardment and ground invasion.

The lack of sight or the presence of filtered vision presents the affect of the falsely enlightened, a borderline melancholy that keeps the symptoms of depression under control with engagements: getting on a train to go to work in spite of anything that might happen and after everything that might happen². All energy is invested in repelling the memory of childhood naiveté that imagines the extraordinary and denying the somatic reality of this symptom. The real and mediation of the real have no effect on this kind of body. I have realized that appropriating images from the culture industries does not do the work of politics. The gestures of slapping a couple of TV moments together into an ironically clever comment on pop culture as well as sole imitation of sleek production techniques is highly suspicious. Even the images of real violence do not inspire anything but closing of the eyes. I do not believe these kinds of gestures can be political because the subversiveness of these gestures is suspect due to their tendency for endless consumption, regurgitation and reingestion.

I propose the gesture of critical regression through false enlightenment by the means of reenchantment. I propose the futurist minor gesture that will inhabit the space between modernism and post modernism--of anti-spectacular unfulfilled futures (future interiors). Theatricality of modernism can be transposed from its own time where it could be understood as a kind of touchy-feely globalism into the present where it will point to a lurking catastrophe. Only by using history as an elastic topological object—namely employing spatial narrative to embody the failures of twentieth century can we begin to advance toward the political. The approach of this kind of modeling is to produce truth through hallucinatory aspects of media without reducing the same to surface effects of an interface³. This kind of work must use the material form to create separate worlds with separate rules of gravity where politics are enacted to produce a kind of mental theatre. This work creates anti-spectacular hermetic worlds that describe archaeologies of futures that did not happen. Enter the materialized spatial event.

1. Sloterdijk, Peter: Spheren III

2. Slpterdijk, Peter: Critique of Cynical Reason

3. Kittler, Friedrich: Gramophone, Film, Typewriter