White Fungus Issue 13:  US$15

WHITE FUNGUS MAGAZINE EVENTS IN SAN FRANCISCO

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Taiwan-based magazine WHITE FUNGUS will hold two release events for its 13th issue during their one-month residency in San Francisco at Kadist Art Foundation.

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Event #1: Saturday, May 4, 2013 from 3-5pm Reading from “The First Woman on Mars” by Ron Drummond Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars Trilogy Venue: KADIST, 3295 20th Street, San Francisco, CA 94110 Cost: Free

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By way of introduction to the 13th issue, contributing author Ron Drummond will read from his essay/fiction hybrid, “The First Woman on Mars,” a story that proposes an original Mars settlement scenario with the potential to serve as the inspirational and “dramatic centerpiece” to unite all hu- man endeavors in space. He will be joined by Kim Stanley Robinson, the science fiction writer and award-winning author of the Mars Trilogy and 2312. Together they will discuss the social, economic, and political implications of the human push into space and efforts to colonize Mars, as well as the ecological and sociological sustainability of life on the red planet and elsewhere in the solar system.

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Event #2: Thursday, May 9th, 2013 at 8pm Performances by Wang Fujui, Scott Arford, Samin Son, Mason Jones, and Betty Apple Venue: The LAB, 2948 16th St, San Francisco, California 94103 Cost: $7 (includes copy of the issue)

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To celebrate the release of its 13th issue, White Fungus is bringing the artists Wang Fujui (Taipei), Samin Son (Seoul / Wellington) and Betty Apple (Taipei) to the LAB in San Francisco for a night of sound, video, and performance art. Wang Fujui became one of the pioneers of the Taiwanese noise and digital art movement after attending the San Francisco Art Institute in the 1990’s. He will perform alongside the SF Bay Area’s Scott Arford and Mason Jones. Attendees of this event will receive a free copy of the new issue. www.thelab.org

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About the Magazine residency at KADIST

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The art magazine residency is unique among residency programs internationally. Located in San Francisco’s Mission district, the residency invites the magazine to extend their scope by investigating San Francisco-relevant people, subjects and histories; including local area content, the work of art- ists, writers and published texts broadly associated with the foundation and its networks and partners.

Magazines have served as important, if often informal, platforms for critical discourse and the distri- bution of images of art. They have also played a role in galvanizing factions and demonstrating modes of contemporary cultural engagement. More recently magazines have traced global exchange routes (both financial and discursive) and have outlined the inflections of regional or national cul- tures. Kadist seeks to support magazines through a trans-local exchange, identifying magazines with culturally sympathetic features for a residency.

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About KADIST

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Kadist Art Foundation encourages the contribution of the arts to society, collecting and producing contemporary artworks and conducting programs to promote the artist’s role as cultural agent. Kadist’s collections reflect the global scope of contemporary art, and its programs develop collabora- tions between Kadist’s local contexts (Paris, San Francisco) and artists, curators and art institutions worldwide.

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www.kadist.org

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For more information, direct emails to sanfrancisco@kadist.org or call (415) 738-8668.

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White Fungus will be be based in San Francisco for one month, starting April 14, as the fifth publication to take up a magazine residency at Kadist Art Foundation. While in San Francisco, White Fungus will release its 13th issue with a series of events (to be announced) and begin work on its 14th issue, which will be built around its engagement with the city. Previous magazines to take up the residency have been Fillip (Vancouver), Nero (Rome), May (Paris) and Taxi (Guadalajara, Mexico). You can read a profile of the residency at Art Practical.

White Fungus presents

Depopulate 02

Place: TheCube Project Space
Address: 2F, No. 13, Aly 1, Ln. 136, Sec. 4, Roosevelt. Rd., Taipei
MRT: Gongguan Station, exit no. 1, East side of Shui-Yuan Market
Entrance fee: NT$100

活動地點：立方計劃空間
地點：TheCube (台北市羅斯福路四段136巷1弄13號2樓)
交通： 捷運公館站1號出口，水源市場東側－東南亞戲院後方巷弄，韓一閣餐廳樓上
入場費: NT$100

Depopulate 02 is the second in a new series of events White Fungus is holding in Taipei. The second event will be held at The Cube on Saturday, January 12, 7-10pm. It will feature a performance by the Polish artist Zbigniew Karkowski. It will also include performances by Wang Fujui, Dino, HANHAN + VJ HaoHao, and Bu Hau People (不好人).

「Depopulate 02」是《白木耳》（White Fungus）雜誌於台北舉辦的新系列活動之第二檔。這場活動將在1月12日晚上7-10點舉辦於立方計劃空間，演出者包括來自波蘭的斯賓尼夫.卡科夫斯基（Zbigniew Karkowski），以及王福瑞、Dino、HANHAN、VJ HaoHao以及「不好人」。

Zbigniew Karkowski is one of the most influential electronic music composers working today. Linking the worlds of modern composition and industrial music he is a pivotal figure in the development of advanced noise. Constantly on the road, he is a frequent performer on the geographical fringes of experimental music culture as well as a mainstay on the established festival circuit.

卡科夫斯基是現今最具影響力的電子音樂作曲家之一。他的作品橫跨現代音樂與工業音樂，為尖瑞噪音發展過程中的重要人物。他持續於各地演出，時常在邊緣地區的實驗音樂文化場景表演，同時也出現在著名的國際藝術音樂祭裡。2002年，他曾受邀在台北的聲音表演活動「裂獸之歌」演出。

===演出者介紹 Artists

。王福瑞 Fujui Wang
Fujui Wang is one of Taiwan’s most prominent sound artists. He is currently the director of Trans-Sonic Lab at Center for Art and Technology.
王福瑞是台灣最重要的聲音藝術家之一，目前於台北藝術大學擔任藝術與科技中心「未來聲響實驗室」主任。

。DINO
Dino is the stage name of Liao Ming-He, born in Taipei in 1976. He was active in the rock and roll scene by the time he was in middle school, and played bass for the band The Clippers in his later youth. He is also considered a pioneer in his use of primal analog electronics in noise music.
本名廖銘和，台灣90年代噪音運動的先鋒之一，曾為夾子團員bass手，後期走向純類比電子噪音聲響。

。HANHAN + VJ HaoHao
A mysterious duo.
首次演出的神秘雙人團體。

。Bu Hau people 不好人
http://youtu.be/5VCY_BnTCZg
“Bu Hau People” is an experiment and electronica art group,group members are Betty Apple (鄭宜蘋) and Chen Shuhaung(陳書煌) 。
“Bu Hau ” is a Chinese Roman Alphabet way of saying ” Not Good “Which means when you say “Bu Hao People”, it will mean ” Not Good People “.Now this is not a grammatically correct way of saying such a thing but conceptually by not saying ” Bad People “, it questions what actually is “Good” or “Bad”. What if something is not “Good” but also “Not Bad”, but actually “Not Good” .

『不好人』 是一個實驗電子樂的藝術團體。成員有Betty apple (鄭宜蘋) and Chen Shuhaung(陳書煌) 。
『不好人』不是一個很正確的中文用法,源於『不好人』的一個外國朋友,在朋友間諧趣的形容”人不好 “的語誤。”不好”是『不好人』的電子聲響創作理念,是蓄意逃逸出”好”的定義系統的一款宣告。

Photos from White Fungus talk at Guangdong Times Museum. To see more click here.

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White Fungus at Guangdong Times Museum

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White Fungus founders Ron Hanson and Mark Hanson will be giving a talk at Guangdong Times Museum, in Guangzhou, China, about the history of White Fungus and their experiences in independent publishing. The talk, which will include video and images, will take place in the museum’s Main Exhibition Hall on November 24 at 3pm.

The presentation is part of a series of events accompanying the exhibition The Light of Independence, November 17-December 25. Curated by L & L Studio（钟玉玲 Lingling Zhong，蒙丽诗 Lizzy Meng), the exhibition bridges well-known international publications to the booming scene in Greater China. White Fungus is included in the exhibition, along with Waterfall, representing Taiwanese publishing.

The exhibition includes a documentary project, Chinese Books, initiated by Ameoba. It is the first-ever documentary about independent publishing in China. Other activities accompanying the exhibition include dialogues, workshops, film screenings and interactive activities.

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Watch a 2006 interview with White Fungus by Ling Liang Ling on World TV here.

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Realistic Romance

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From: sweet.owl@hotmail.com
To: ricardochapman_153@hotmail.co.uk
Subject: RE: HAPPY BIRTHTAG! (it is not too late)
Date: Sun, 5 Apr 2009 20:16:21 +1200

MR POUNDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD
MAY I JUST SAY
I LOVE YOU AND MISS YOU SO MUCH

Don’t tell Steven I mentioned this at all but last night me and him were discussing you (we do that a lot) and I said that when I listed boys and asked you to rank them etc., that he came pretty high on your list. And he was like ‘damn, I wish I’d known that when he was here”. And then we discussed how he wishes he could’ve ‘had some fun’ with you!! HAhah he is so cute. You too.
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Anywayz, my birthday was cool! Steven made me a tshirt. And last night I took him and Paige out for dessert. We got 4 desserts between the 3 of us, plus 5 ridiculous drinks with cream and funny flavours and stuff. It was SO MUCH FUN. We discussed matters of how socially and romantically retarded we are (holes in our hearts, we decided), how glad we are that we have each other because we are crazy all together, et cetera. We also made a pact that it was our last supper, and we were to lose some weight! So we three have started our weight loss thingies. I want to lose 2 kg to get to 45, then I am going to buy myself a nice pair of jeans and shock everyone by wearing pants. It will be cool. I love the two of them so much. But I love you more. I miss you. So much.

jdr49

($5)

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JDR48: Response to Cellulite Rose’s Show Hi-Vis Lo-Res at RM Gallery.

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“Is it that we code this off-ramp in orange as somehow an accident, or an accident waiting to happen, or is it that the site itself is somehow already a type of emergency. It certainly retains a kind of dormancy in its abandoned state. Could we not say then that this off-ramp is pregnant with meaning, that it hosts an emergent potential. Is it in this way that the lo-res aspect of Rose’s title refers to the unfinished quantity of the spare bridge. Is it unrealised? Briefly sketched? Perhaps then that hackneyed idea of it being a rib we can take to make new life isn’t so bad. At the very least this defunct off-ramp provides a type of nourishment, both as the motorway’s supplement, not just an exaggeration that exposes the systemic organism it is part of — how entangled that goes, like Carl Andre’s road — but also as something of a farce, something poorly resolved. Not something badly planned, nor badly implemented, but a supplement sitting there, waiting — not for absolution or an apology even — but for a kind of resolution”.

{{{{}}}}

($5).

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What Lost Pet Posters Mean

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“Representations of pet culture have long celebrated a certain kitsch sentimentality. Think of the sugary calendars depicting puppies and kittens lolling in one comical posture after another.  Alternatively, representations of human-pet companionship often mark the outsider status of the human, like that of the cat lady who prefers animal contact over humans… both of these condemnations prefer to account for the pet in a generalised abstract sense, rather than through the specificities of a lived relation capable of crossing species’ difference… unlike kitsch representations of an interchangeable figure of the pet, lost pet posters do lend us specific accounts of human-pet companionship… depicting pets as socialised entities who contribute, even in spite of their species’ difference, to notions of human domesticity. However, as compelling as this story of separation and kinship is, lost pet posters also tell a second story, one that relates to what Jennifer Wolch calls a ‘subaltern animal town’, a geography or territory that occurs within human settlement patterns, but that often exists below our (human) visibility threshold…”

JDR47

($5)

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Second chapter of master’s thesis by Ron Hanson

The Apparatus of Capture in Action

If the first chapter of this thesis wove a tangled path through the thicket of contemporary art discourse in terms of diversity and multiculturalism, while setting the terrain for any consideration of any potential moves, this chapter will develop the idea of the apparatus of capture, drawn directly from Deleuze and Guattarri, as a way of thinking about how multiculturalism is produced and administered in this global and all-pervasive context. While explicating on my working definition in philosophical and art historical terms, this chapter will also look at two instances of what I will describe as the apparatus of capture in action at the level of contemporary art, the exhibition Roundabout at the City Gallery in Wellington (2010) and the 2012 Sydney Biennale, All Our Relations – both exhibitions of which dealt explicitly with a contemporary form of multiculturalism.

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Implicit in the act of capture is the effect of that which escapes. It is in this sense that my positing of an apparatus as the defining mechanism in the production of contemporary culture is neither optimistic nor pessimistic – it is neither true nor false. Thus in building this (open-ended) construction, I admit to its limitations from the outset. And yet these limitations have the potential to also be regenerative points. It is a way of thinking (and acting) grounded in deep practice and research. It is an approach inspired by Derrida – “What is neither true nor false is reality… We must conceive of a play in which whoever loses wins, and in which one loses and wins on every turn… This concept of ‘play’ keeps itself beyond this opposition announcing unity of chance and necessity of calculations without end”- but wants to go beyond it and is more Deleuzian in terms of being constructive, while simultaneously deconstructive, affirmative in the decisions it makes, beyond mere paradox, and yet in a kind of anti-systematic system building.

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Foucault argued that it was not a matter of his writing being true nor untrue, what was important was its ability to be transformative, in terms of the processes it stimulates into action in the mind of the reader, and its ability to transform the way the reader reads. This is a different set of priorities for the writer than for a text written in the mode of rational humanist inquiry, though Foucault wasn’t against rationalism in its totality, but rather he was of the view of interrogating the systems of rational thought, deciding upon which elements pertain continued relevance and which could be disbanded with or altered in some way. It is the transformative qualities of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus that make it such a rich vein of intellectual inquiry – a book, whose time, Brian Massumi claims, has not come. This is despite its oft quoted terminology, a mainstay in contemporary art writing. In fact, one of the highest esteemed publications for writing on contemporary art, Rhizome, takes its name directly from Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical concept. But Rhizome, while perhaps one of the more adventurous and experimental platforms for writing on contemporary art, is not rhizomatic. The term ‘rhizome’ is used for the online publication and digital art platform as a signifier. It signifies the cutting edge of contemporary art discourse and philosophy. It brands itself, and situates itself within the field, as filling the niche of covering the intersection of art and culture. The brand grants the publication recognition in the art publishing scene but it also makes it a safe and predictable player by explicitly marking out its terrain and boundaries. To draw upon, for a moment, popular vernacular, Rhizome is “hot” and cannot be ignored by the more established players in the field. For a period Art in America had a link to Rhizome on the front page of its website. When Rhizome held a fundraising event in 2012, Art Forum covered it online. But by defining its niche, in relation to the laws of specialisation and in terms of the system of classification – and by positioning itself as a non-profit organisation, strategically located on the premises of the New Museum – Rhizome assures it will never intrude upon or disrupt the territory, or to use Deleuzian and Guattarian terms, the striated space, occupied by these established mainstays, which still play a pivotal role in administering the field of contemporary art. Nonetheless in the early decades of the 21st century, Deleuze and Guattari are emerging as the philsophers par excellence, in vogue in the academic and entrepreneurial fields of contemporary art. The moment presents the corpus of Deleuze and Guattari with its greatest opportunity and threat.

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It seems to me that these are no small matters – that is, to consider how we think about, critically respond to and record the phenomena known under the domain of art. It is perhaps becoming all too familiar to hear the word ‘crisis’ evoked in describing any particular phenomenon in the 21st century, and yet, as my first chapter hopefully made clear, the state of the discipline of art history is very much at a point of crisis; its practitioners moored at in ineluctable impasse, certain of their dissatisfaction with the current paradigm, but at a loss as how best to proceed. The recent passing of the conservative art critic Robert Hughes highlighted this situation. Ten years earlier, Hughes’ passing might have been met with a certain amount of cynicism in some quarters, with mention of the critic as a stubborn bastion of outmoded modernist principles. And yet the response to Hughes’ death was not met with any postmodern critique. If anything, the response was characterised by an almost nostalgic appreciation of Hughes’ rigour, depth of character and conviction. Amidst the morass of a tired postmodern art discourse, Hughes has suddenly become an appealing figure.

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And so faced with the impotence of art historical and critical discourse and the contemporary art it is associated with, there is the temptation to discard critical theory and return to simpler formulations or even values, including beauty and truth. Both the Sydney Biennale and Roundabout present themselves as an alternative to merely repeating well-worn critiques. Their solution in dealing with the impotence of the current discourse is to abandon the task of critique itself, instead stating explicitly to celebrate the connections between a diversity of artists, cultures and art practices. It is an approach that I will describe as “post critical”. This stance has the advantage of sidestepping the challenges facing contemporary art, but the perils of implementing a new regime without past or future, the consummation of the labyrinth without exits, and implementation of the end of history as our permanent reality – a finality without end. It is also the consummation of a full absorption of art into publicity and tourism. What is lost is distance. What is gained is a new universalism in its full mergence into the entertainment industry. It is a vision of having no vision, a weak utopianism. The same forces that are working upon the discipline of art history – in the drive for the discipline’s walls to dissolve and its content to flow into the more general field of visual studies – are inducing art to disavow its criticality and become one with the publicity culture; as if the logic of sponsorship could have led in any other direction. The critique against universalism and the master narrative of modernism has delivered us to a new universalism.

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If the conditions for this move into a state of post criticality have been laid by a kind of fatigue with the terms of post structuralism and the critical theory underpinning postmodernism, the question is whether or not this fatigue is due to the exhaustion or redundancy of such ideas or have the terms become exhausted though their use as symbols or, more cynically, brands, or alternatively, academic credentials in a kind of professional vernacular. The dangers of entering the state of post criticality seem so obvious that they are barely worth restating, and yet through some circuitous route this is the position contemporary culture finds itself in, assessing the precipice which can look so appealing in its appeal to “just let go”. One thinks of Walter Benjamin and his argument that the state of emergency, which appears characteristic of human society and history, is the rule not the exception. One recalls Nam June Paik’s insistence upon being at all times vigilant in the face of a technological media-scape so seductively deceptive. Rather than enter, without resistance, this state of post criticality or retreat and fall in line with untenable past positions, I will argue for a new or renewed criticality which is not averse to drawing tentative generalisations, working lines of inquiry, universalisations even, about the present, or of taking strong positions. The culture of postmodernity is not a natural outcome of the critical theory on which it is based. Rather it can be described as an act of capture in itself of this theory into a logic that is antithetical to many of its concerns.

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If the linear system of rational western thought has played itself out, the result has not been to enter into unbounded multiplicity. The fracturing of Western perspective has taken place on specific lines. Jean Baudrillard describes the end of history in his article ‘Reversion of History’: “This is the end of linearity. Viewed from this perspective, the future no longer exists. And if there is no future, neither is there an end anymore. And yet this is not what is meant by the end of history. What we have to deal with is a paradoxical process of reversion, a reversal of effect with respect to modernity which having reached its speculative limit and extrapolated all its virtual developments disintegrates into its rudimentary components through a catastrophic process of recurrence and turbulence.”

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If a linear system has played itself out, merely deconstructing that system does not present a break from linearity, but rather, reinforces its contours in its dependency on such a system. Just as deconstructing identity, and cultural stereotypes, simultaneously reasserts the centre from which these formulations emerge, and to which they are firmly anchored. Baudrillard wrote so lucidly of the exhaustion and combustion of Western linear perspective and language forms, and yet he has nothing to say about life or the potential for life beyond this construction, as real as it may be. He is meticulous in describing his own prison, and the futility of the position he finds himself in which he understands as the ground for a weak human subject, in the face of overwhelming subjectivity-producing force, an apparatus that is continually generating and administering subjectivities. In terms of the accusation of nihilism in postmodernism, Baudrillard is perhaps the most obvious culprit. And yet there is much useful in his work in its application and the thoughts it provokes, the kind of thoughts it makes possible. It is dada without divine inspiration. Nonetheless the ineffectiveness of postmodernism, ultimately, as a political and even social constructive or resistant force is more a consequence of a superficial engagement with post structuralism than the necessary outcome of a philosophical weakness. Postmodernism, as it has played out in contemporary culture, has undermined itself from the beginning, by setting itself up in binary opposition to “modernism,” which is completely antithetical to the position it maintains in regards to the decentering of hegemonic narratives, and universal superstructures. If “modernism” and “postmodernism” denote two distinct periods, then their relationship is surely not as simple as it has been put forward. The work of Kobena Mercer, in his series of books, Cosmopolitan Modernities, is instructive in its challenging of this simple narrative, by mapping overlooked  strains of modernity produced by non-western artists and cultures. What emerges in Mercer’s account is a far more complicated picture or conception than the standard posture put forward as the proposition for any non-generalising exhibition of contemporary art, particularly as it relates to the multicultural. While asserting a critique of the hegemonic Western narrative of progress, these propositions implicitly endorse the narrative they claim to undermine, or supersede, by consummating the narrative itself. Its consummation seems guaranteed by the diversity of representations found in contemporary culture. Diversity appears as an achieved state.

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Deleuze and Guattari present a dynamic vision of the world in a way that differs from the work of Baudrillard and Derrida. Its emphasis on affirmation and desire as a constructive potenza and as a potentially revolutionary force, its sketching out a universe of movement, of becoming, is far removed from the charge of nihilism that has been leveled at postmodernism, even if it is following in a tradition, a trajectory or line of inquiry directly connected to Nietzsche; and it is the neo-Nietzscheans that are placed in opposition to the continuers of humanist scholarly inquiry. It is unfair to attribute the anything-goes, laissez faire, characteristic of postmodern culture, in any way to the work of Derrida, for he demanded rigorous attention to the text. In the smoldering wreckage of Western thought after its encounter with Baudrillard, there is the faint dint of an unarticulated metaphysics, an afterglow, or future glow, which Baudrillard never addressed. Deleuze and Guattari find a new metaphysics in their immersion in immanent material. It is not one that can be pinned down or addressed in rational terms. That is what makes it metaphysical. The quasi scientific nature of their texts is the result of science, and its terminology, at the service of philosophy. Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of the binary strikes at the contradiction at the heart of multiculturalism, the multiplicity which is represented by the dualistic signifier. They describe words and signs as not belonging to the equation of signifier and signified. Rather these signs are enveloped in a vast network of relations and counter-relations in a volatile and shifting field. The signifying sign system is presented as an almost terroristic form of information conveying. Language and education do not communicate, they argue, but induct or inculcate the student into a system of co-ordinates in relation to order words. You cannot communicate with this language but can either comply or not comply.

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So in terms of the politics of recognition, the number of cultural and subcultural identities has proliferated rapidly. But to be recognised one must enter into the system of redundancy, which is the state of fixity. Deleuze and Guattari describe what they call the “war machine” as a kind of radical strain of thought which resists being pinned down into being, it is about becoming as opposed to being. A Thousand Plateaus can be described as a thought experiment. Its concepts and language weave, or flow, in and out of the various chapters, subtly shifting in modulation, reaching peaks, or plateaus, of intensity. It is a book which attempts to become the rhizomatic structure it describes. It can be entered or exited at any point, its meaning never fixed but in continual negotiation. The rhizome is contrasted to the aborescent, in the form of the tree. The classical book is the root-book, of “noble, signifying, and subjective organic interiority… The law of the book is the law of reflection, the one that becomes two…” But “nature doesn’t work in that way; in nature, roots are taproots with a more multiple, lateral and circular system of ramification, rather than a dichotomous one… Multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose aborescent pseudo-multiplicities for what they are. There is no unity to serve as a pivot in the object, or to divide in the subject.”
Deleuze and Guattari describe a dynamic situation, an interplay between molecular flows and molar forms of sedimentation. But it is not a binary relationship. The molar contains the molecular within it, and vice versa. The molecular flows are trapped or contained in the stata, which are acts of capture, like “black holes”, enveloping all that comes within their grasp. The strata are contrasted to the body without organs, “permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all directions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad transitory particles…” Transitory matter eludes the act of capture through de-stratification, de-territorialisation, decoding, and lines of flight. The plateau takes place in the middle which, not an average or a mean, is instead a pitch of intensity that is not automatically dissipated in a climax. “The heightening of energies is sustained long enough to leave a kind of afterimage of its dynamism that can be reactivated into other activities, creating a fabric of intensive states between which any number of connecting routes could exist.”

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This articulation of becoming as a process, the potenza of life force and desire in its multifarious mobilising capacity, is so distant from the notion of pastiche that has dominated postmodern artistic practice. When postmodern culture is patched together from diffuse sources, the de-territorialisation of different regional or local codes, and subsequent over-coding of them as it enters the field of recognition, curtails these codes or flows from engaging fully with their environment, from reaching the pitch of intensity required for becoming other. Instead the various strata lock together in what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the resonance chamber. The more locked a form becomes in the resonance chamber, the more rigid its sediments become, the more unresponsive the forms become to the forces of nature, but the more vulnerable they also become to violent fluctuations of force which inevitably arrive. The artisan, in Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation, is one who follows the flows. This is a useful conception for thinking about the artist, and the artwork, in relation to the art industry, and, in particular to large exhibitions, or events, which I will describe.

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The apparatus of capture in A Thousand Plateaus is used to describe the State and its forms of sovereignty. Deleuze and Guattari refer to Dumezil’s thesis of political sovereignty, of it resting on two poles: the “fearsome magician emperor, operating by capture, bonds, knots, and nets, and the jurist-priest-king, proceeding by treaties, pacts, contracts.”  The capture of the State, and its monopoly on violence, is described as a “magic capture”, as it appears as pre-accomplished and self-presupposing. In the capitalist state, work is a capture of activity. It over-codes its co-ordinates onto activity and channels its energies into the system. Also implicit in the act of capture is the notion of surplus, that which will be extracted from the bond, economically, in the sense that money becomes or replaces exchange.

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If I am to employ Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the apparatus of capture or describe the workings of the contemporary art world, as a subset of the economy, and a crucial symbolic wing of it, this employment is not a diagnosis. It is merely a way of thinking about what is happening in the course of the production of art, in terms of its inputs, outputs, rewards, limitations, and most importantly, its logic, which is one of amplified reproducibility. Rather than money, what takes place at the heart of the art ensemble or assemblage is an exchange of symbolic cultural capital. It is something that is under-theorised and needs to be better understood. I would go as far as to suggest that perhaps what is needed is a new formalism; but that is beyond the scope of this thesis. Boris Groys strikes at the misunderstanding at the heart of the conventional critique of contemporary art – that is of art as commodity. Most of the viewers of contemporary art, Groys points out, are the non-buying public. Perhaps in the history of art operating under the conditions of capitalism this has never before been so much the case. So if the biennales and large scale art shows are not primarily about dealing with art as a commodity, what exactly is taking place? I will describe it as a symbolic capture and the production of a surplus of a different kind. I will also describe its paradoxical ideological effect. So if I am drawing on the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari, I am doing so in the fashion of a leaping off, rather than an implementing of a trace, an attempt to institute a prescribed form as the afterimage of one of their philosophical encounters. After all, rather than index their thought to an assumed superstructure, Deleuze and Guattari always refer to the event.

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The logic of the apparatus of capture is one of publicity. Publicity is the defining mechanism in the contemporary distribution, dissemination and reception of our politics, education, and art. In an age of austerity, one area which cannot receive cutbacks is that of publicity. Furthermore, all budgeting decisions need to be considered in relation to their publicity effect. In his 2002 BBC documentary series, Century of the Self, Adam Curtis charts the development of publicity in the 20th century as it was used by corporations and governments alike. In the film, Curtis chronicles the little-known figure of Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who was the first to apply psychological and psychoanalytical techniques to ‘public relations’, a term he coined as it was more acceptable in the civilian context than ‘propaganda’. Bernays worked for Woodrow Wilson during World War One and was instrumental in building the public perception that the US’s involvement was about bringing democracy to all of Europe. Amazed at the success of his own campaign, Bernays wondered how these techniques could be applied to a peace-time situation.
In his seminal book, Propaganda, Bernays regarded advertisers as mere pleaders. The practitioner of publicity in contrast would create or appropriate events dramatizing new concepts and perceptions. Bernays, like his uncle, viewed libidinal desire and instinctual drive as inherently dangerous forces. But through these publicity techniques, these forces could be harnessed and channelled into the operations of production and consumption, generating profit for his corporate clients. Bernays had a utopian vision of an ordered society, made cohesive in the channelling and fulfilling of desire through consumerism and mass production. One of Bernays’ most successful campaigns was his promotion of women’s smoking in the 1920s. Bernays’ client, the American Tobacco Company, wanted to increase cigarette sales but faced a major obstacle in the taboo against women smoking in public. Women could even be arrested for lighting up in public. Bernays sent a group of models to the 1920 Easter Parade in New York and instructed them, when he gave the signal, to light up Lucky Strike cigarettes. He then informed the media that a group of women’s rights marchers would be lighting up “Torches of Freedom” at the parade. The models lit up and the press cameras were ready. The intervention was a media sensation and the number of women smokers immediately began to rise. The taboo was eventually overcome. This example of publicity is perhaps paradigmatic for understanding the kind of cultural liberation that has been produced by the consumer culture. Bernays skillfully channelled the desire for women’s rights into the expansion of the consumerist project.

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Before describing two exhibitions as acts of symbolic capture, first, what are the implications of this rhizomatic thinking for art history, criticism, and, more broadly, the discourse itself? And is this meditation on the “apparatus of capture” not an act of capture in itself? In so far as art history is based on the concept of a rooted geneology, the implications are significant. In such a concept of a universe in motion, any prescribed and pre-established form – such as the form of this thesis, with its introduction, three chapters, conclusion and bibliography – would immediately appear as an imposed redundancy. It is an admission to linearity from the outset, an acceptance of the simple narrative as the natural form suited for conducting such an inquiry. But must such a rigid and dogmatic conception of form necessarily be opposed to the laissez fair postmodernism I have described, and which needs little introduction in the face of its continued hegemonic reign? The ideas of post structuralism have been used lazily to justify the vast act of deterriolisation which best characterises global capitalism. But the act of becoming is not the same as the dissolving of all boundaries, which only produces a larger resonance chamber. My critical response to this question is better addressed in my negotiation of the aborescent form of this thesis, as I have described it, than in any analytical comments I can provide. And is this thesis an act of capture? In a sense, in its gathering and drawing in of energies and intellectual labours, yes. But in an important distinction, no. The apparatus of capture is not an open-ended process. It takes in but does not give out, or at least, anything released from the structure must immediately be re-channeled back into the system. The rhizomatic structure releases as much as it draws in; each temporary structure, dissolves as it becomes imbricated fully in the process of becoming.

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In terms of selecting a case study for demonstrating the apparatus of capture in action in the field of multiculturalism, Roundabout, held at the City Gallery, Wellington’s largest institution for contemporary art, in 2010, is perhaps a crude example. And yet it is also illuminating. As an art institution the City Gallery is very much of the contemporary era. It holds no collection, or acquisitions policy, and its shows are often packaged global productions whose genesis lies offshore. It has a minimal publishing program. The City Gallery is closer to an entertainment venue than a traditional museum. It follows the trends of global art institutions which rescind their scholarly and curatorial duties and tend to focus on the blockbuster as a means of meeting their primary objective, which is to maximise visitor numbers. The City Gallery is closely aligned with the city council and corporate sponsors. Openings for exhibitions are some of the most visible and ostentatious occasions for the city’s business and political leaders to be associated with the cultural capital being accumulated in Wellington. It is a chance for these leaders to engage with the community, their activities be seen to be contributing to the generation of cultural activity in acts of generosity. Whereas, in politics, the Republican Party describe the rich as job creators, in the realms of culture there is an unspoken proposition that these people are the art enablers. Commericial exchange appears a holistic affair, creating and sustaining communities, not just generating profits. The association with cultural activities helps to build a positive image of business and government while taking the focus away from other areas that might appear more unsightly. In a society dominated by consumer branding, where the feeling acquired by the consumption of a product has come to trump the utility of the product in question, businesses offset their weaknesses with associations that project strength. McDonalds’ sponsoring of the London 2012 Olympics is a crude example, in another field, of the offsetting of a negative image through the purchase of symbolic capital with economic capital.

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Roundabout featured 108 artists from countries including China, India, Japan, Thailand, Bhutan, Tibet, New Zealand, Australia, the USA, Israel, Russia and the UK. The exhibition included the work of many of New Zealand’s most highly esteemed Maori and Pacific artists, including Michael Parekowhai, Lisa Reihana, Jacqueline Fraser, Shane Cotton, Peter Robinson and John Pule. But this was not an exhibition that received widespread local support. The reason for this was the exhibition’s bypassing of the city’s local intelligencia as well as its obvious critical flaws. All of the works in the exhibition came from the collection of the American super collector David Teplitzky and the exhibition was a collaboration between Teplitzky and the City Gallery. It remains somewhat ambiguous as to what the curatorial process was as it was not explicitly stated by the gallery, though it is widely believed that Teplitzky curated the exhibition. The exhibition was widely criticised as allowing a single collector to impose his individual taste and will on the city’s biggest and most prestigious visual art institution. In return the gallery received an exhibition full of big-name artists in an economic package. Among those criticising the gallery for giving such easy and unfiltered access to a single collector, were the New Zealand collectors Jim and Mary Barr, who, ironically, have had their collection twice previously exhibited at the same gallery. In fact the Barrs’ exhibitions at the City Gallery can be seen as laying the groundwork for the Teplitzky exhibition.

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Roundabout is a crude example but instructive for describing a situation in which multiple cultural flows are channelled into a single production which creates a specific cultural or publicity effect. The exhibition was packaged with the intention of achieving a widespread global run. To date the only subsequent staging of the exhibition has been at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in Israel. The exhibition appears to have fallen short of its global ambitions but has nonetheless been a bounty for Teplitzky, who significantly increased his profile in both New Zealand and Israel. The exhibition has also undoubtedly increased the value of his collection. In New Zealand there was very little critical discourse generated by the exhibition. Endemic to this publicity culture, within which art is operating, is a superficial discourse dominated by the press release and the business arrangements a given gallery may have with local media. Art writers simply aren’t employed or resourced sufficiently to work their work way methodically and in a robust fashion through the voluminous amount of information being produced by the industry. In New Zealand the media response to Roundabout was dominated by the City Gallery’s press release. In most cases the press release was repeated verbatim. The exhibition was also held in partnership with the art magazine ArtAsiaPacific, which produced the accompanying catalogue and ensured that the exhibition would gain a sufficient level of visibility regardless of its artistic merits. As Roundabout is a multicultural exhibition of artists spanning the globe, determined by a single white male collector without an educational background in art, ArtAsiaPacific is the leading art magazine covering the Art Asia Pacific region, but is based in New York.

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The biggest piece of media coverage for the exhibition came in the form of a feature in the New Zealand Listener titled “Not Your Typical Collector,” which functioned as a kind of pre-emptive justification for Teplitzky’s access to the public gallery, framing it as an act of generosity. The article begins with quotes by Shane Cotton, who describes Teplitzky as “an old-fashioned patron”, and Lisa Reihana, who describes the collector as “150% character”. The article appears designed to assuage the reader of the suspicions they may have of Teplitzky and the powerful role he has come to play in New Zealand contemporary art. Reihana said that “at first I wasn’t sure if it was for real. But it was an amazing opportunity to have someone commission work and simply say, ‘Go for it’.” Cotton claimed to have overcome his initial wariness. “He was full-on American, guns blazing,” Cotton said. “But I’ve gotten to know him over the years, and his heart’s in the right place. David’s interested in people on the fringes, and most artists are on the fringes, probably because he’s a bit like that himself.” The article also described Teplitzky at his new Queenstown home and how he left the US after George W Bush’s second election. The article builds up a relationship between Teplitzky and New Zealand and New Zealand’s artists. But the reality is that Teplitzky has gained his position in New Zealand and his access to one of the country’s biggest art institutions through pure buying power.

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Besides justifying Teplitzky’s role, the Listener article also allowed Teplitzky to frame the exhibition. Roundabout is a “love story” he said. It began when he met his partner Peggy Scott in 1985 and began collecting art, an activity which has become an extremely lucrative career. “On the most personal level, [the exhibition is] about our lives, our passions, the conversations we’ve had with artists and bringing them all together in one space. But, really, it’s so little about me, and so much about the artists.” And yet the exhibition is very much about Teplitzky. The exhibition catalogue contains an interview with the collector conducted by the ArtAsiaPacific editor and publisher Elaine Ng. Teplitzky is also referenced in other articles in the publication. Whereas Cotton and Reihana employ their cultural capital to endorse Teplitzky in the Listener article, in the Roundabout catalogue, an article by Nicholas Thomas, a highly respected professor in the field of Oceanic art, is key to lending the publication some much-needed credibility.

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In one of the few published critical responses to the exhibition, Mark Amery wrote in the Dominion Post how he wished he could like the exhibition. After all it was a huge exhibition spread out across the entire City Gallery, containing many big international artists but with a core of New Zealand artists centre stage. But Amery’s “experience of the show felt akin to that of wandering around somebody’s art collection after a dinner party. You pick out some gems, notice how the art reads like an autobiography of their travels and faith, and forgive the occasional works you find twee or rather minor on the basis they probably have some great sentimental attachment to your generous host.” The other problem Amery identified was how the nuances of individual works were lost in the overall effect of the exhibition. “It raises the volume of the work’s collected common messages at the expense of appreciating individual work’s deeper complexities”.

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Perhaps the best example of this is Teplitzky’s use of a work by the Australian Aboriginal artist Tony Albert. Albert’s work, “I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear” is a sculptural piece employing for its title and visual scheme the quote by Martin Luther King. Teplitzky uses this work and quote as a kind of slogan or brand for the exhibition as a whole. It is repeated in the press and promotional materials and becomes a rallying point when he discusses the exhibition. In his use of the quote, it is an unequivocal statement of optimism. But it is without complexity and obscures the complexity of the work itself, which is far from a simple bold pronouncement. In the sculpture, Albert uses the King quote, but it is built literally upon a house of cards, formed in a pyramid shape. But it is an inadequate pyramid, perhaps closer to a triangle, slanted slightly to the right, as if on the verge of tipping over, if a gust of wind doesn’t dismantle it first. King’s bold comment is housed on a structure of fragility, vulnerable to the slightest force. There is optimism but there is also doubt. The letters forming the King phrase are adorned with what Albert describes as “Aboriginalia”, stereotypical images of Aborigines taken from mainstream Australian mass cultural products. If the King quote is a sentiment Albert wishes to push to the forefront of the work, equally important to the sculpture is the burden of this past system of representation and the uncertainty that such a position can literally stand. But of course, in Teplitzky’s use of the work and quote, all ambiguity and nuance are lost. In the exhibition itself, Albert’s powerful statement has no room to breathe, swamped by a further 107 artworks that range from traditional Bhutanese textile works to an iconic work by Chuck Close. Albert’s statement is rendered meaningless, denied of a meaningful context in which it’s nuances could be teased out or intermesh with other works exploring similar concerns. The work is rendered impotent due to the cancelling out effect which Boris Groys describes in Art Power, under a regime of aesthetic equality in which all aesthetics, styles and ideologies are equal, and as such, equally meaningless.

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The thread holding the large number of disparate works together is the force of Teplitzky’s personality, the tales of his travels, and an unabashed liberal optimism that the peoples of the world can overcome their differences and all get along, or be one. Teplitzky is unequivocal about the universalism he is promoting in the rallying of these disparate artworks. “Because essentially, beneath that veneer of difference, is a basic commonality that we all share,” Teplitzky said. “So Roundabout is about the universality of hope. It’s about the possibility of mutual exchanges without violence.” Teplitzky riffs on the exhibition’s title, Roundabout, as  a concept for mutual co-operation. Each car enters the roundabout and gets to where it wants to go without collision. Teplitzky also talks about the exhibition facilitating natural exchanges between different artists. The laissez faire element of postmodern culture remains in this exhibition, but it’s critical import, including the critique of the natural, is discarded. Again, turning to the personal anecdote, Teplitzky talks about traveling in the Himalayas and discovering the Buddist mola rosaries made up of 108 beads, which is symbolic number in Eastern philosophy. This is why Teplitzky chose to include 108 artists in the exhibition. He intends this as a statement of faith in common mutuality, but it can just as easily be read as the reduction of diversity to a single paradigm. There is much talk of faith regarding the exhibition, but it is not explicitly stated what this faith is in, other than idea that we can all be better. But the faith employed here seems to be in the process of globalisation which has allowed Teplitzky to pursue his travels and collect these various objects, which he insists he is really only the custodian of, not the owner. Roundabout is a grand exhibition of diversity and multiculturalism, but it is a display of diversity at the service of making oneself, one’s own identity by taking from a multitude of  sources to produce an individual life. It is a celebration of the rugged conquering and acquiring individual. It is diversity to be consumed. Teplitzky has had a colourful life. He previously spent five months as a stock broker for Merrill Lynch. He was also a legendary canvasser for Greenpeace who outshone all his colleagues in his ability to raise money canvassing door-to-door. In 1995 the journalist Bill Gifford  accompanied Teplitzky on his canvassing as part of his research for an article “Saving the Planet at Six Bucks and Hour” which was published in the Washington City Paper. “Canvassing is not about saving the planet,” Gifford writes, “it’s a game.” Gifford marvels at Teplitzky’s ability to connect with any kind of person and draw forward their donation by engaging their hobbies, personal interests and desires. At one house, inspired by a pair of shorts the resident is wearing, Teplitzky tells a story about biking all the way across Malaysia just to eat a Big Mac in Panang, which has his host in “stitches”. “Doors detect phoniness the way dogs smell fear,” Gifford writes, “Nobody’s fooled by a scripted rap unless they also believe that you are sincere. My mistake was to try to push Greenpeace, when nobody really cares about chlorine-bleached paper—at least not enough to write a check to a stranger. Teplitzky is selling a product he can truly be sincere about: himself.”

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While perhaps not as outwardly crude as the Roundabout exhibition, the 2012 edition of the Sydney Biennale, All Our Relations, holds much in common with Teplitzky’s enterprise. In this instance the art event was curated by professional trained curators (Catherine de Zegher, who is currently Guest Curator, Department of Drawings, Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Gerald McMaster, who has been the Fredrik S. Eaton Curator, Canadian Art, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto) – not a former Greenpeace Canvasser and stock broker – and yet viewed alongside one another, Roundabout and the 2012 biennale can be seen as marking a transition into this stage of contemporary art which I describe as “post critical”. There is a weak utopianism at play in both, a free-floating optimism, gleeful in its abandonment of the task of critique. The biennale is also another example of diversity being channelled into the apparatus of capture to create a specific ideological effect. If Roundabout celebrated the adventures of an intrepid individual, framing the endeavor as a life story, or love story, in a pattern of almost selfless acts of generosity, the Sydney Biennale is also about the traveling individual. It is an art event which strictly follows the logic of tourism (more on which, later).

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But while the biennale applies a contemporary model of consumerism and reflects the corporatisation of public institutions, it uses the progressive language of the radical art of the 1960s and 1970s to state its case; I am tempted to say market itself, more than build its argument. The ideas and language of these once radical forms have been fully absorbed into or captured by the industry of contemporary art. The biennale’s curators Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster assert that the work in the biennale is more process driven and participatory. Nearly half the works are being commissioned and will be site specific. Further, Marah Braye, the biennale Chief Executive, writes in the preface to the catalogue, the audience will be active participants in the creation of meaning and even artworks. This, it is promised, will be a collaborative endeavor. The selection, for the first time in the biennale’s history, of a pair of curators, a woman and a man, seems to highlight, or symbolise, this collaborative nature. As is often promised in large scale exhibitions of contemporary art, the event, it is claimed, will stimulate a conversation, between the curators, artists and audience.

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In the Biennale of Sydney media release announcing the appointment of the two curators, de Zegher and McMaster are quoted describing their curatorial approach: “Our curatorial approach will be shaped by a thorough engagement with the artists and their works, using a model we have developed in our practice: a process not as sequential but as consequential. It is a connective and narrative model based on relation, conversation and storytelling. Beginning with two curators in dialogue, that conversation will extend to both artists and audiences. The Biennale will draw upon these various exchanges, friendships, and sympathies and use this coming together as the material of real experience – the cellular structure and sinew of a kind of living, breathing organism from which the Biennale will grow. Audiences from different backgrounds will be part of this continual development, finding the sense of their own direction in these connections and relations. Together we will advance the proposition that artistic practices in the 21st century are becoming ever more “intersubjective” allowing for mutual recognition and working alongside each other.”

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But the claim by de Zegher and McMaster that this biennale would grow out from a “living breathing organism” seems disingenuous, as if there were no pre-existing parameters within which they were working, nor any expectations from the biennale’s sponsors, corporate and institutional partners. It assumes art is a depolticized realm without a hegemonic ideological effect. Teplitzky, regrading Roundabout, talks about facilitating “natural exchanges”. De Zegher and McMaster too seem to be asserting that this is what they are enabling through this biennale. The language of facilitation and consultation runs right through this biennale, akin to the kind of language and jargon employed by government organisations to persuade of their responsive nature. But the biennale has a very specific ideological effect.

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As with Roundabout, the biennale celebrates globalisation as the erasure of boundaries, the state upon which all this diversity can flourish, with national boundaries pushed aside. The inaugural biennale in 1973, Braye writes, “heralded a new generation of biennale exhibitions internationally, departing from a longstanding tradition of national pavilions”. Both art events proudly proclaim their transcendence of the nation state. Both exhibitions position themselves against the disruptive tactics of modernism and state connectedness as our ultimate reality and as an explicit goal for the exhibition. Whereas Roundabout expresses its notion of connectedness through employing the somewhat clumsy metaphor of the traffic roundabout and the mala rosary, All Our Relations frequently employs the metaphor of stitching; but as an exhibition that presents itself as cognizant of the environmental crisis, adds another dimension, that of healing.

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A key work in the biennale was Lee Mingwei’s “The Mending Project”, held at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Described as an “interactive installation”, the museum’s website invites us to “participate in Lee Mingwei’s The Mending Project at the MCA by bringing along a garment or object that requires mending. Connect with the artist or artist assistant mending your clothes through a surprising new conversation”. But in terms of there being a surprising encounter with Lee in his project, the parameters are strictly laid out before the “interactive installation” begins, a subject position for the audience already assigned. Lee’s project fits neatly into the contemporary art trend Relational Aesthetics which has its roots in the more radical interventionist practices of artists in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to critique and create a space outside of commercial operations, namely the commodity fetish and relation, but also wanted to collapse the division between art and everyday life. Whereas Fluxus and Situationism and the Happenings of Allan Kaprow took decades to be accepted or integrated fully into the discourse of contemporary art, Relational Aesthetics fit right in immediately. The ideas, it is based on, had been circulating for decades and in this tightly packaged commodity, Relational Aesthetics, their codification has been made complete.

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Lee and the biennale curators see this kind of work as moving beyond commercialism and the commodification of art. But as I have already stated, in reference to Boris Groys, the commodity function is not what the totality of contemporary art is directed towards. The apparatus of capture is not about producing, shifting and selling commodities, at least not in the traditional sense. What is produced, trafficked and consumed in the post-fordist de-materialised economy is relations, modes of being and subjectivities. The fetish is not necessarily for a physical entity, but for a mode of perceiving and being perceived. Lee’s Mending Project fits neatly into a consumer landscape in which consumers are urged to express their individuality. By bringing an item of clothing, Lee says, audience members are bringing something really personal to the encounter. Plus there is the generosity of his act, as if he was not receiving anything in return. But this is a highly staged affair. Audience members are not revealing themselves as much as they are constructing their identities for the occasion. And of course Lee furthers his institutional credentials which he will convert into economic capital either through teaching or selling artworks using his name. This kind of work claims to be about relations and challenging the nature of relations under capitalism and within an institutional framework. But after the installation is complete, relations remain the same. The audience member is still a consumer, the artist still a producer and an artist, the institution the enabler and facilitator of the exchange.

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As with Roundabout, the 2012 Sydney Biennale is also an exhibition which puts multiculturalism at the forefront of its identity. The title “All Our Relations” is taken from the phrase often invoked by indigenous groups in ceremonial occasions. The title signals that the exhibition will involve multiple cultures, but also draws attention to the story-telling element; it implies a level of intimacy that would put it in contrast with other institutional affairs. Further, Braye, in her prologue, asserts qualities of the biennale which has a “reputation for presenting works in alternative spaces which take the audience’s experiences of art out of museums and galleries and into special environments”. While two of the five locations for the biennale are in fact museums, The Museum of Contemporary Art and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Braye cites the World Heritage listed Cockatoo Island as her example to demonstrate the later point. The island, a former shipyard and convict penal establishment, had been closed off to the public for more than 100 years but has been revitalised and opened to the public in a tourism drive. The government website describes the island as, “Now a place to escape the everyday, a canvas for creatives and cultural events, the world’s first urban waterfront campground, home to a conference centre, businesses and holiday accommodation, Cockatoo Island has undergone a renaissance in every sense of the word.”

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While the island is cited as a case in which audiences will encounter art in different ways from if they experienced it in a museum, Cockatoo island is just as thoroughly administered at the Museum of Contemporary Art, with clear pathways, signage, cafes and other stores. Groups of tourists straddle the designated pathway as if they were visiting the Grand Canyon. The island is marketed as if visitors would be experiencing something different that has been hidden for so long from the public, but visiting the island is a standard tourism affair. (In the third chapter to this thesis I will talk about an example in a previous biennale in which the artist Vernon ah Kee disrupts or subverts this tourism drive and its sanitizing effect). The island has also come to symbolize a notion of progress or cosmopolitanism that has been arrived at in Australia. What was a prison and part of the nation’s dark history as a penal colony, is the now a cultural site, and a multicultural one at that. The island, and the current engagement with it, gives the sense that Australia has overcome its dark past. There is a sense of resolution, akin to the sentiments expressed by Fukuyama’s “End of History”. While colonialism and modernism suppressed cultural difference, here on the island, in the context of the biennale, a diversity of cultural  expressions appear to be flourishing. The island played host to artists from through the Asia Pacific region and beyond. But it is with unintended irony that visitors to the island are transported by the “Captain Cook” ferry. There is much talk about neo-colonialism it intellectual discourse but very little analysis of what this may be. Whereas colonialism seized and absorbed land and physical territories, neo-colonialism can be described as the channelling of the totality of the world’s diverse cultures into the operations of branding. The overall effect of the Sydney Biennale is to create a super brand, signifying cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism and a genera tolerance and openness.

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An ABC arts blog, in a post titled ‘Biennale of Sydney: a pleasure bender for art hooligans”, described the excursion to the island. “Catching the free ferry out to Cockatoo Island for the 18th Biennale of Sydney is a fantastic ride. Being transported literally, and metaphorically, to one of Sydney’s most unusual heritage sites to view contemporary art is like going on a treasure hunt.” And the nature of the diversity on offer is summed succinctly in the same blog posting. “With so much to choose from, there is indeed likely to be something here for everyone. By sundown, after boarding the ferry to be taken back to Circular Quay – and traveling at an invigorating, breakneck speed – we found ourselves chanting “Better than Venice” like a group of art hooligans on a pleasure bender. Not bad for a cheap day out in Sydney.”

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Conceptually, All Our Relations, is a deliberately vague but polished affair. The curators, in the exhibition catalogue, state that we are “moving on from a century in which the radical in the arts largely adopted principles of separation, negativity and disruption as strategies of change. Based on oppositional thinking, such modernist principles proved tenacious and acted as a default criticality in a world in which the drive to progress became more complicated and the consequences more ambiguous”. This biennale, the curators claim, instead reflects a changing reality in which there is a renewed attention to how things connect. This claim is backed up by an essay in the catalogue, “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionalist Manifesto’” by Bruno Latour. A compositionalist, Latour writes, does not only deconstruct but also composes. And so it is the idea of composition and enabling connections that the curators push to the forefront of the biennale. But nowhere is there a consideration of along what principles the composition or connecting should proceed. Nor is there any thought given to the nature of the biennale and the way the artworks are connected within it. As with Roundabout, the sheer number of artists and artworks – 220 works by more than 100 artists – is put forward as one of the biennale’s main marketing points. The number of artists, from diverse cultures, appears to guarantee the exhibition’s diversity. But what is remarkable is how seamlessly the exhibition holds together, without any individual works standing out in any particular way. Nor do the art works fuse together to build any kind of argument or world view, which would be seen by the curators, perhaps, as reductionist or universalizing.

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The theme of connectedness appears to exempt the curators from addressing such concerns in their “composition”. While there is the recurring metaphor or motif of stitching, the works are connected together through aesthetic commonalities. It is the typical kaleidoscopic effect which is created by this approach to connecting diverse artworks. The catalogue emphasizes this approach also. It is a feast for the eyes of diversity but at no point can any idea cohere. It is the feeling of overabundance and availability to dominate. It overwhelms the senses and our cognitive pathways in the way that a MTV music video, with its rapid cuts and over abundant mise en scene, leaves its audience passive in its ability to digest it. But these artworks are connected in a very real way under the structure of the biennale. The ABC blog posting I previously quoted from is revealing in terms of the ambitions of the biennale, particularly in the phrase “better than Venice.” The purpose of the biennale is to help Sydney compete with other cities in the context of globalisation. The huge amount of cultural production that is subsumed within the biennale structure channels an enormous amount of cultural and symbolic capital into the branding operations of the various institutions and businesses involved. Each zone in the biennale is structured along these lines. Before engaging any of the artworks, the spectator is presented with a series of brands. The effectiveness of branding is that the recipient processes the brand so rapidly that they don’t leave a memory trace of where they were encountered. But the association slips in and builds gradually over time and repeated exposure. Edward Bernays was ahead of his time in his understanding of the potency of the event. The biennale is a high powered cultural event and a bonanza in terms of the cultural capital and positive multicultural associations with which businesses and government departments can associate themselves.

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But while the curators neglect to develop the concept which they market the biennale, the idea of relations is extremely relevant and an important area to explore. The catalogue for the biennale includes articles by two of the world’s pre-eminent thinkers, in terms of this concept, Michael Hardt and Brian Massumi. The inclusion of these two gives the title “All Our Relations” weight and deflects from the otherwise flimsiness of the de Zegher and McMaster’s curatorial project. Included in the catalogue is a conversation about relations between Michael Hardt, Brian Massumi, Craigie Horsfield, Erin Manning and Adrew Murphie. Hardt begins the conversation by talking about the desire for relation, how people don’t share relations are connected by the kind of relations we despise. “It makes sense to me that a lot of the artists who come to a biennale don’t immediately feel a relation: they’ve done their own work; they’re in a context that they don’t perceive as collective. But nevertheless, I do think there is a thirst for relationality – an unmet thirst.”

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The speakers discuss at length the idea of relationality, often in reference to the idea of love, that which exceeds the individual, the coming together to go somewhere different. Erin Manning talks of the need to generate a “third space – an interval that does not fall prey to the pre-existing expectations associated to the social or individual… This invites a middling quality, to agitate, to affect… I wanted to tie that into the idea of the Biennale of Sydney concept, all our relations. I see the call as potentially activating more than individual artists and works, crafting the thirdness of a collective individuation that activates a relational field”.

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Hardt and Horsfiel are extremely skeptical about Manning’s hope that the biennale can enable such a space to occur. Horsfield states that the biennale sits alongside other biennales and isn’t so different to an art fair. What they are talking about, he says, is doing something else. Massumi takes a slightly different position. “I think what’s called for isn’t necessarily a straight rejection of the conventional models like a biennale. Given that we’re effectively complicit with them, another avenue that is open to us to is duplicity. I mean that in the most positive sense, inventing a little technique that might be embeddable in the conventional form and passes, but isn’t there to reinforce or reproduce it, but instead potentially points outward. I mean the creative duplicity of planting trigger devices that might set off an event in the emergent sense that was Erin was talking about, moving in a divergent direction.” Later in the conversation Massumi challenges Hardt’s notion that we cannot get beyond the relations of private property. Massumi talks directly about the notion of capture. “What’s destined for capitalist capture are precisely non-capitalist relations that are already in action. That’s what makes it a capture. That there are other tendencies, other movements, other lures for experience; it doesn’t at all discount the universality of capture by capitalist relation, But again, there’s no idea of duplicity, that there’s something else in play as well, something comes out on its own initiative, and keeps coming back, in different guises. Capture may be universal but it isn’t the end of the road.”

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In the third chapter of this thesis I will consider what this kind of trigger device may be and will expand on Massumi’s conception, by looking at the examples of artists who are achieving what Massumi is theorising. Massumi, speaks of these trigger devices leading outwards. I will extrapolate on the notion of a trigger device but also consider the question of just where it is exactly that these device scan lead out to.

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The Consumers of the Future

The Consumers of the Future is a commissioned project by White Fungus for Adam Art Gallery, accompanying the exhibitions We Will Work With You! Wellington Media Collective 1978-1998 and Martha Rosler, The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, 23 October – 21 December/22 January – 10 February 2013.

White Fungus Artist Statement

The contemporary era, we believe, can be best described as a full-blown state of publicity. Publicity is the defining mechanism in the distribution, dissemination and reception of our politics, education, and art. In an age of austerity, one area which cannot receive cutbacks is that of publicity. Furthermore, all budgeting decisions need to be considered in relation to their publicity effect. The Consumers of the Future explores publicity as a condition and a material.

In his 2002 BBC documentary series, Century of the Self, Adam Curtis charts the development of publicity in the 20th century as it was used by corporations and governments alike. In the film, Curtis chronicles the little-known figure of Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who was the first to apply psychological and psychoanalytical techniques to ‘public relations’, a term he coined as it was more acceptable in the civilian context than ‘propaganda’. Bernays worked for Woodrow Wilson during World War One and was instrumental in building the public perception that the US’s involvement was about bringing democracy to all of Europe. Amazed at the success of his own campaign, Bernays wondered how these techniques could be applied to a peace-time situation.

In his seminal book, Propaganda, Bernays regarded advertisers as mere pleaders. The practitioner of publicity in contrast would create or appropriate events dramatizing new concepts and perceptions. Bernays, like his uncle, viewed libidinal desire and instinctual drive as inherently dangerous forces. But through these publicity techniques, these forces could be harnessed and channelled into the operations of production and consumption, generating profit for his corporate clients. Bernays had a utopian vision of an ordered society, made cohesive in the channelling and fulfilling of desire through consumerism and mass production.

One of Bernays’ most successful campaigns was his promotion of women’s smoking in the 1920s. Bernays’ client, the American Tobacco Company, wanted to increase cigarette sales but faced a major obstacle in the taboo against women smoking in public. Women could even be arrested for lighting up in public. Bernays sent a group of models to the 1920 Easter Parade in New York and instructed them, when he gave the signal, to light up Lucky Strike cigarettes. He then informed the media that a group of women’s rights marchers would be lighting up “Torches of Freedom” at the parade. The models lit up and the press cameras were ready. The intervention was a media sensation and the number of women smokers immediately began to rise. The taboo was eventually overcome.

In terms of New Zealand cities, Wellington stands out as having perhaps the most distinctive and coherent publicity branding strategy. This approach had its genesis in the slogan “Absolutely Positively Wellington” which debuted in 1991 and continues to this day. The campaign was prompted by sluggish advertising sales for Wellington Newspapers Ltd in the recession following the stock market crash of 1987. Wellington Newspapers offered free space to advertising moguls Saatchi & Saatchi to run an uplifting campaign. “It was post-crash and New Zealand was in the deepest of depressions really,” said Kim Wicksteed, former General Manager at Saatchi & Saatchi. “He [a manager at The Evening Post] said; ‘We can give you some space, but give us some positive messages to put in the space’. So that’s how it happened… The city started to get a whole lot of pride in itself. We flew flags and wore T-shirts. It was just amazing.”

But Wellington’s publicity culture reached full bloom under the mayoralty of Kerry Prendergast and her implementation of the “Creative Capital” brand. The success of this strategy can be seen in its top down presence in the fabric of Wellington’s cultural and economic life, from Massey University’s adoption of the “Creative Campus” to a failed attempt to install a “Wellywood” sign facing incoming traffic to the airport. Prendergast and her colourful outfits became ubiquitous at nearly all prominent Wellington arts events, as she became a master of the photo-op. The mayor delivered speech after speech touting Wellington’s “Creative Capital” credentials, claiming that they gave the capital a competitive advantage over other New Zealand cities.

But the reality of Wellington for artists seems far removed from this “Creative Capital” vision. Between 2004 and 2007, the Wellington City Council demolished the city’s historic Upper Cuba Street precinct, home to many artists and creative people, to make way for a motorway extension. Grassroots infrastructure that had enabled this creativity, to which Prendergast staked her brand, was systematically ripped out. The City Council-managed Wellington Arts Centre would fill some of the void created by these evictions and demolitions, but what was lost was an independent artist community and support structure which had developed organically over the previous decades. And yet Prendergast, aided by the city’s one newspaper, The Dominion Post, was very successful in creating her political brand. She tapped into the citizens’ desire to see Wellington in a certain way, and in many ways helped to create a successful fantasy. The feeling of ‘creativity’ was so much more compelling than actually assessing in any critical detail the reality of the needs of the local arts community.

The Consumers of the Future examines this state of publicity in a series of three posters which remix publicity materials of the Wellington City Council with a 2007 quote by the current New Zealand Prime Minister, and former Merrill Lynch currency trader, John Key. Speaking to the television show Campbell Live, as then leader of the opposition, Key said, “Our children are important… they’re the consumers of the future.” Amongst the publicity materials drawn upon in these posters is an image of Wellington’s Odlins stock exchange sign, which cost the city’s ratepayers $480,000. The Consumers of the Future follows on from a series of publications, posters and events White Fungus has produced over the past decade dealing with grass roots political issues in Wellington. The Consumers of the Future critiques the state of publicity as the implementation of a weak utopia. It posits publicity as a key terrain or battleground for art today.

White Fungus, October 2012

未來聲響 TranSonic 2012
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聲音藝術現場表演年度盛事 live sound art performance annual event

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由 國立臺北藝術大學藝術與科技中心負責策劃，邀請跨國創作團隊，以聲音創作表演形式為主體，超越聲響的界限，結合聲音、影像、互動控制、器樂與裝置等多媒材 跨界聲音藝術表演，以更深入更細緻的創新實驗，突破前衛聲音美學的極限。三場極限演出由不同創作風格的藝術家擔綱，有享譽國際知名聲音藝術家後藤英 （日）、Kangding Ray（德）、eRikm（法）、dj sniff（日），臺灣最具指標性聲音藝術家王福瑞，以及臺灣最耀眼的新生代聲音藝術家張永達、王仲堃、王新仁。打開耳朵或摀上耳朵，探索你感官最幽微的潛意識。

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The Center for Art and Technology of Taipei National University of the Arts has invited an international team to produce a sound performance that transcends sound itself.  Combining elements of audio, video, interactive technology, instruments, and other devices, this multimedia interdisciplinary sound performance elevates avant-garde sound aesthetics to new heights through an even more in-depth and refined approach to innovation and experimentation.

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Three extreme performances are presented by artists each featuring distinct artistic styles. These include internationally renowned sound artists, Suguru Goto (Japan) , Kangding Ray (Germany), eRikm (France), and dj sniff (Japan); Taiwan’s most representative sound artist, Fujui Wang; as well as a few up and coming young sound artists in Taiwan: Yung-Ta Chang, Chung-Kun Wang, and Aluan Wang.  Even with your ears covered, this show will take you on a journey through your senses to explore the innermost depths of your subconscious.
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演出藝術家 Artists

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10/19(Fri.) 19:30

王新仁 Aluan WANG (Taiwan)

dj sniff (Japan)

Kangding Ray (Germany)

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10/20 (Sat.) 14:30

王仲堃 Chung-Kun WANG (Taiwan)

王福瑞 Fujui WANG (Taiwan)

eRikm (France)

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10/21 (Sun.) 14:30

張永達 Yung-Ta CHANG (Taiwan)

後藤英 Suguru GOTO (Japan)

★演後座談 Artist talk after performance | 後藤英、eRikm、王福瑞、張永達
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演出地點 Venue 臺北松山文創園區多功能展演廳 Multi-Showcase Hall, Songshan Cultural and Creative Park, Taipei

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票價 Ticket NT.350
購票連結 http://ppt.cc/gX-2

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備註 Note 本節目將有極高頻與低頻的巨大聲響以及強力閃燈，尤以兒童及身體不適者，請斟酌入場。
This program features loud, high-pitch and deep bass sounds as well as intensive flashes of light. It might not be suitable for children and adults with particular health conditions. Please watch the performance at your own discretion.

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http://zspace.pixnet.net/blog

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