Incentives for quitting

    4-Day MoMA special edition t-shirt sale at Uniqlo:    

•   Lawrence Weiner t-shirts in clay, grape or charcoal 
•   Ryan McGinness in Lilac 
•   A variety of Andy Warhol favourites 

   and others, offer expires May 12th, 2014   

"Gambling has also had an unexpected impact on Japanese ethnic politics and foreign policy. Pachinko has become a backbone for Japan’s Korean community. Estimates are sketchy, but Prof. Toshio Miyatsuka, the leading authority on Korean-Japanese, believes that three-quarters of the 17,000 pachinko parlors are run by ethnic Koreans. Koreans also control many of the pachinko manufacturing companies. Koreans entered the pachinko business soon after World War II because it was one of the few industries where they could compete fairly with Japanese. Japanese shunned the business—it had such an air of seediness about it. As a result, pachinko and Korean BBQ restaurants built a prosperous entrepreneurial Korean business community. 

 But the Korean pachinko connection fomented a disturbing foreign policy crisis for Japan. Many parlor owners come from North Korea, have families in North Korea, or sympathize with the North Korean regime. In the 1980s, as pachinko grew, parlor owners increasingly funneled pachinko profits to North Korea. No one has any idea of the exact amount—estimates range from tens of millions of dollars per year to more than $1 billion per year. Some of this cash probably went to North Korean relatives, but much of it fed North Korea’s awful communist dictatorship. Pachinko, in fact, became a critical source of hard currency for North Korea, probably subsidizing arms purchases and military research. This was awfully embarrassing for Japan. It got so bad that the CIA, according to the Wall Street Journal, pressured the Japanese government to stop the flow of yen. The Korea-laundering led the National Police Agency to impose “card-readers” on the pachinko industry. The card readers served to measure the amount of money flowing into parlors, which enabled tax authorities to make sure owners weren’t siphoning off cash for illicit transactions. By most accounts, the Korea cash stream has dried up in recent years to a trickle. Card readers cut the flow, as did the pachinko industry’s own quest for respectability (The industry has been trying to polish its image. It wasn’t good PR, to say the least, to be propping up a nuclear weasel like North Korea). Other Korean businesses may have picked up the slack. Some of the Korean credit unions that recently collapsed seem to have sent cash to Pyongyang."

— David Plotz, Pachinko Nation

Arrangement

Perhaps it is time to decide who these students are, and what a (future) teacher is. Deleuze and Guattari invoke a conceptual persona (personnage conceptuel) from Greek philosophy: the teacher. In the face of that tradition, I end on a figure of the teacher that is both a traditionalist and a theatrical gesture.
In philosophy, this figure is usually the lover. In her book What Can She Know? Feminist Epistemology and the Construction of Knowledge, Lorraine Code takes this tradition and turns it around. For Code, the concept-metaphor that best embodies her ideal is the friend, not the lover. Moreover, the conceptual persona of the friend - the model of friendship - is not embedded in a definition of philosophy but of knowledge. This definition is necessarily one that takes knowledge as provisional. If the authority of the author/artist, as well as that of the teacher, is unfixed, then the place it vacates can be occupied by theory. Paul de Man defined theory long ago as 'a controlled reflection on the formation of method'. The teacher, then, no longer holds the authority to dictate the method; her task is only to facilitate a reflection that is ongoing and interactive. Knowledge is knowing that reflection cannot be terminated. Moreover, to use Shoshana Felman's phrase, knowledge is not to learn something about but to learn something from. Knowledge, not as a substance or content 'out there' waiting to be appropriated but as the 'how-to' aspect that the subtitle of the present book indicates, bears on such learning from the practice of interdisciplinary cultural analysis.
Within the framework of the present book, and of Felman's description of teaching as facilitating the condition of knowledge, Code's apparently small shift from lover to friend is, at least provisionally, a way out of the philosophy/humanities misfit. Friendship is a paradigm for knowledge-production, the traditional task of the humanities, but then production as interminable process, not as preface to a product. Code lists the following features of friendship, as opposed to the lover's passion, as productive analogies for knowledge production:

• such knowledge is not achieved at once, rather it develops     
• it is open to interpretation at different levels     
• it admits degrees       
• it changes      
• subject and object positions in the process of knowledge construction are reversible      
• it is a never-accomplished constant process       
• the 'more-or-lessness' of this knowledge affirms the need to reserve and revise judgment.      

—Mieke Bal Travelling Concepts in the Humanities

handiwork of her mother's sister's daughter's husband's good buddy

The Brazilian

"The neoliberals have won, even against themselves. The national state has been cleared away. The social state is in ruins. But it is not a non-order which prevails. In place of the legal and power structures of national players, there are many conflicting units of rule that set themselves up as separate and fight against one another. Between them are a number of legal and normative no-man's-lands.
In the dangerous inner cities, employees wearing ties live and work in video-monitored edifices that have been closely packed together according to the old fortress principle. These are veritable castles, equipped and rules by transnational corporations.
Nearby there are parks and nature reserves occupied by militant Greens (so-called 'terrorist germs') and defended by force of arms.
In some areas, drugs are freely advertised and consumed. In others, cigarette-smoking already carries the death penalty. Armed pensioners regularly patrol the borders of their well-maintained settlements.
There are expressways for super-limousines, but in their eternal roundabout they have to satisfy each other's flashing-light requests to overtake—something that the sporty little numbers hardly notice.
Moreover, these roads border on cycling districts where not to travel by bike is severely punished—with all the conflicts that break out daily as a result. For all have to answer the conundrum in this way: How can I get off my bicycle without, at least momentarily, breaking the law that forbids being a pedestrian? In these districts the steps and staircases have been designed so that bicycles can negotiate them, and both marriage beds and writing desks have pinned beside them official advice on how to position vehicles and how to switch in a non-pedestrian manner to other of life's functions (such a sleeping and working). Not perfect, but then nor is life.
Public means of transport are under a cloud, because they recall the dinosaurs of the national state. Their insignia can in fact only be visited in well-guarded museums.
Those who enter the still-functioning underground lay themselves wide open to attack, so that to be mugged is tantamount to putting oneself in the dock. The rule is that people who are mugged are themselves guilty of being mugged.
Between these unclearly differentiated jurisdictions of companies, associations, drug cartels, salvation armies, militant naturalists and cycling societies, on the one hand, and opportunities to let oneself be voluntarily robbed, on the other (perhaps because one's therapist thinks it is necessary for one's personal development), there is no more of that proud nation-state for which people riddled one another with bullets and blew one another up by the million. States represent particular interests among those who have particular interests.
If one takes any transnational corporation—the 'Deutsche Bank', for example, which is now called the 'World Bank'—it becomes clear that the power relationship has been reversed. One has to put a little statelet under a magnifying glass to recognize it; whereas corporations have to be looked at through the wrong end of a telescope if one is to see them at all.
Similarly, in place of the United Nations, and organization has appeared which calls itself United Coca Cola—or something like that. The remnants of the state also raise taxes, or should one say: they make demands for taxes. So it goes. But tax payments have, at least de facto, long been a matter of voluntary contributions, as it were.Besides, they have to be creamed off and allocated in competition with all the other protection money and tributes that the units of personal rule demand with the help of their gun-toting security services. For the state's monopoly of violence, like all monopolies, has been abandoned."
—Ulrich Beck What is Globalization? (2000)

Duke

In the same week of December 1924, in which he formally launched the Duke Endowment with an initial gift of $40,000,000, Buck Duke propped his game foot on a pillow and dictated a last will and testament to his legal fidus Achates, the little Virginian, W.R. Perkins. This document, conceived and executed by a layman, has since won admiring, if a bit envious, comment from leading corporation lawyers and other authorities in testamentary dispositions. For, by the simple expedient of linking the inheritance of his daughter and chief legatee to his charity trust, Duke sought, so far a humanly possible, to insure for his only child a continually increasing fortune. By willing large and similar blocks of tobacco and utility securities both to the Endowment and to his daughter (and interrelating these bequests), Duke felt that North Carolina would hesitate in imposing future burdensome taxes upon his tobacco and power holdings, since, in effect, the State would be taxing its own educational and charitable institutions. Thus far, the stratagem has worked brilliantly. The thirteen-year-old Dors Duke of 1925 is now, at thirty and as the wife of James H.R. Cromwell, mistress of wealth estimated at $250,000,000.

Having insured his daughter's future, Duke prepared to ring down the curtain on his own turbulent career. Lying on his rare Louis XV bed in the white marble mansion on Fifth Avenue in the heavy, muggy days of September, 1925, realization came to the farmer's son that he was not to recover from the debilitating and mystifying disease the doctors called pernicious anemia. There was one unfinished piece of business on his mind. On the last day of September, he summoned his executive handyman, George Allen.
"Allen," he said, "I don't think I've given Duke University enough money to complete the building program I have in mind. I figure they'll need about $7,000,000 more. Get Perkins up here tomorrow."
Hence, under date of October 1st, Duke executed a codicil to his will, providing an additional $7,000,000 to the institution which his enemies said was the ace card in his campaign to become a saint.
This was Duke's last exercise of authority over his own destiny. Hypostatic pneumonia had set in and, though there was a momentary flutter of parent improvement, the patient gradually slipped into a coma and died at dusk on Saturday, October 10, 1925.

On Monday a private funeral service, without sermon or eulogy, was held in the Fifth Avenue mansion for the family, friends and business associates, to the number of several score. Ben Duke, ill at his home near by, was unable to attend. The Reverend Dr. Raymond L. Forman, pastor of St. Paul's Methodist Episcopal Church in New York, read Whittier's poem "Eternal Goodness," the Twenty-Third Psalm and the fourteenth chapter of St. John, and, in his prayer, spoke of Duke as one who "out of a wise mind and compassionate heart invested his goods to serve generations to come."
Outside a great crowd had gathered, attracted by the richly dressed mourners, the long line of waiting limousines and other panoply of wealth. It was then, while the police held in check the curious and the morbid, the Lillian McCredy Duke mounted a knoll in Central Park, directly across the way, impelled by memories and uncontrollable emotion to witness as much as she could of a ceremony in which she was permitted no part. Through tear-dimmed eyes, the divorced wife saw the huge bronze casket lifted laboriously into a hearse and the start of an impressive procession that would escort the body to a special train bound for Durham. Then, scarcely able to walk, she made her way to the meagre chamber in a west Side rooming house which she now called home.

The seven-car funeral special arrived in Durham early on the morning of Tuesday, October 13th. The citizens of the town, to most of whom for many years Duke had been merely a financial abstraction, and the 1,400 students of Duke University, until recently Trinity College, had been prepared for a great event. Mourning bands and wreaths of flowers had been distributed among the students. The Durham public schools were closed, and stores and factories requested to suspend business during the hour of the funeral. Under a blanket of orchids, ferns and yellow roses. the benefactor lay in state in East Duke Building for an hour and a half while students and faculty filed past. A dozen of the huskiest athletes were assigned to carry the 1,500-pound casket into the Duke Memorial Church, where brief services were solemnized at eleven o'clock. All seat in this small edifice, a stone's throw from Wash Duke's first "city" factory, were reserved for the family, members of the Duke endowment, trustees of Duke University and important faculty members. There was no room for the general public.
As the family entered the church, a selected choir of Durham's best voices sang "How firm a Foundation." Dean Edmund D. Soper of the School of Religious Education read the Methodist funeral service. the congregation sang "Abide with Me." As the casket was borne out, the choir rendered "Nearer, My God, to Thee." The procession passed through a double line of Duke students to Maplewood Cemetery, where the body was placed in a mausoleum which contained the remains of Washington Duke, his son Brodie, Elizabeth Roney (Aunt Betty) and several other members of the family. At signal, the Duke students banked their floral offerings about the tomb while the choir sang "Lead Kindly Light."
Tributes and appraisals of Duke poured in from a thousand sources.
"With Duke's passing," said the old and distinguished trade journal, The Tobacco Leaf, "there goes out of this world the most remarkable figure that the tobacco trade has ever produced. Nor is that phrase entirely apt, because it was James B. Duke who developed the tobacco business, and not the tobacco business that developed Duke. Without a doubt it was James B. Duke who started the cigarette industry on its upward climb in this country, for he was the first in the tobacco business to vision the possibilities of big and costly advertising. We believe that occasionally advertising actually develops national characteristics; and as Wrigley may be said to have made the United States a nation of gum chewers, so James B. Duke pioneered in the process of making America a nation of cigarette smokers. Not only is his influence on the mechanics and merchandising of tobacco products, but his influence on the personal habits of the people will be manifest for years and perhaps through many forthcoming generations."

The New York World commented editorially:

"The late James B. Duke's fortune was built by business enterprise upon a scale unique in the South. The family of which he was the ablest member began establishing the Piedmont tobacco industry in the same post-war years in which young Carnegie in Pittsburgh was revolutionizing the steel business, in which Rockefeller in Cleveland was organizing Standard Oil, in which Frick was making Connellsville the nation's coke centre, in which Agassiz and Higginson were building the Michigan Copper Industry. Duke consciously took Rockefeller for his model. He saw no reason why the tobacco business could not be organized with the same boldness as the oil business.
The qualities of shrewdness and energy that stamped these Northern men marked Duke as well. He was quick to seize opportunity in such shapes as the pasteboard cigarette box and the cigarette-rolling machine; he saw the value of nationwide advertising, and he pushed his consolidation schemes until the Government had to break up the trust he headed. More than any other man he made America a nation that smokes cigarettes by the hundred million. Having given the South a tobacco industry it had never dreamed of, he turned to other fields of Southern development.
Indeed, Duke will be longest remembered  as one of the builders of the new South and especially of the new North Carolina. It would be hard to name a rich American who has done so much to re-crete his native State. He gave $40,000,000 to a university he hoped would yet rival Harvard and Yale. He led development of its water-power and helped make it second only to Massachusetts in the number of its cotton spindles. North Carolina, recently one of the poorest and most backward of States, is now one of the busiest and most progressive. Duke may yet stand as the first representative figure in a great Southern industrial era."

While the name and fame of Duke were echoing throughout the land, a tragedy of peculiar poignancy occurred in his first wife's shabby studio at 125 West 88th Street, New York. Following her return from witnessing the passage of her former husband's funeral cortège, Mrs. Lillian Duke suffered excruciating headaches, culminating in a cerebral hemorrhage. Hours later fellow lodgers discovered her unconscious and summoned her neighbourhood physicians, who said her condition was hopeless. They said, too, that the stricken woman was evidently suffering from malnutrition. The only food in the room was a single egg, though a pet Mexican hairless dog seemed well nourished.
 
—John K. Winkler Tobacco Tycoon: The Story of James Buchanan Duke (1942)

God

"The panorama is paradoxical: topographically "complete" while still signalling an acknowledgment of and desire for a greater extension beyond the frame. The panoramic tableau, however bounded by the limits of a city profile or the enclosure of a harbor, is always potentially unstable: "If this much, why not more?" The psychology of panorama is overtly sated and covertly greedy, and thus caught up in the fragile complacency of disavowal. The tension is especially is especially apparent in maritime panoramas, for the sea always exceeds the limits of the frame. 
It is in early seventeenth-century Dutch legal theory that the sea is emphatically understood to exceed and even resist terrestrial boundaries and national proprietary claims. Writing in defense of the interests of the Dutch East India Company against Portuguese claims to exclusive trading rights in the southwest Pacific, Hugo Grotius spoke, perhaps somewhat cynically, of

... the OCEAN, that expance of water which antiquity describes as the immense, the infinite, bounded only by the heaves, parent of all things. ... the ocean which... can neither be seized nor enclosed: nay, which rather possesses the earth than is possessed.

Thus the sea's infinitude gives rise to a doctrine of free trade well before it provides a basis for eighteenth-century aesthetic notions of the sublime. Panoramic maritime space in Dutch painting is implicitly "open" in this pre-romantic sense: open to trade, a net cast outward upon world that yields property but that in its idealized totality is irreducible to property. When proto-romanticism is later confronted with this uncommodifiable excess, it transforms it into the sublime, taking it initially as proof of divinity; only later is the category naturalized and psychologized (...)" 

—Allan Sekula

Modern Poetry

Agender
Androgyne
Androgynous
Bigender
Cis
Cisgender
Cis Female
Cis Male
Cis Man
Cis Woman
Cisgender Female
Cisgender Male
Cisgender Man
Cisgender Woman
Female to Male
FTM
Gender Fluid
Gender Nonconforming
Gender Questioning
Gender Variant
Genderqueer
Intersex
Male to Female
MTF
Neither
Neutrois
Non-binary
Other
Pangender
Trans
Trans*
Trans Female
Trans* Female
Trans Male
Trans* Male
Trans Man
Trans* Man
Trans Person
Trans* Person
Trans Woman
Trans* Woman
Transfeminine
Transgender
Transgender Female
Transgender Male
Transgender Man
Transgender Person
Transgender Woman
Transmasculine
Transsexual
Transsexual Female
Transsexual Male
Transsexual Man
Transsexual Person
Transsexual Woman
Two-Spirit

It is a familiar fact that colors of a landscape become more vivid when seen with the head upside down.

"My means: expression, my awkwardness. The ordinary condition of life: rivalry between various individuals, striving to be the best. Caesar: "... rather than be second in Rome." Men are such—so wretched—that everything seems worthless—unless it surpasses. Often I am so sad that to measure my insufficiency of means without despairing wears me out. The problems which are worth being considered have meaning only on the condition that, posing them, one attains the summit: Mad pride necessary for being torn apart. And at times—our nature slips into disso­lution for nothing—one tears oneself apart with the sole aim of satisfy­ing this pride: everything is ruined in an all-absorbing vanity. It would be better to be nothing more than a village pedlar, to look at the sun with a sickly eye, rather than . . ." 
and later he says: “One has egotistical satisfaction only in projects; the satisfaction escapes as soon as one accomplishes; one returns quickly to the plan of the project-one falls in this way into flight, like an animal into an endless trap; on one day or another, one dies an idiot.”

—Georges Bataille

Green revolutions

“The Defense Department has already become a leader in some areas of renewable power,” noted the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 2008. “The U.S. Navy is powering its base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with a 3.8 megawatt wind/diesel hybrid plant, the largest in the world. The Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake, California, uses a geothermal energy plant (built in the 1970s) and is a net contributor to the local commercial electric grid. A project being tested at the Diego Garcia Naval Base in the Indian Ocean will generate electricity from temperature differences between the ocean’s surface and deep water. And a 14.2 megawatt photovoltaic array, again the largest in the world, became operational at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada in December 2007.”

—"Using Military Might for a Cooler World," Rocky Mountain Institute, 2010

The only ones more fervent than the capital are the colonies

1. The Rogue Film School will be in the form of weekend seminars held by Werner Herzog in person at varying locations and at infrequent intervals.
2. The number of participants will be limited to a maximum of 65.
3. Locations and dates will be announced on this website and Werner Herzog's website: www.wernerherzog.com approximately 12 weeks in advance.
4. The Rogue Film School will not teach anything technical related to film-making. For this purpose, please enroll at your local film school.
5. The Rogue Film School is about a way of life. It is about a climate, the excitement that makes film possible. It will be about poetry, films, music, images, literature.
6. The focus of the seminars will be a dialogue with Werner Herzog, in which the participants will have their voice with their projects, their questions, their aspirations.
7. Excerpts of films will be discussed, which could include your submitted films; they may be shown and discussed as well. Depending on the materials, the attention will revolve around essential questions: how does music function in film? How do you narrate a story? (This will certainly depart from the brainless teachings of three-act-screenplays). How do you sensitize an audience? How is space created and understood by an audience? How do you produce and edit a film? How do you create illumination and an ecstasy of truth?
8. Related, but more practical subjects, will be the art of lockpicking. Traveling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own shooting permits. The neutralization of bureaucracy. Guerrilla tactics. Self reliance.
9. Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth.
10. Related, but more reflective, will be a reading list. Required reading: Virgil’s “Georgics”, Ernest Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, and Baker's "The Peregrine" (New York Review Books Edition published by HarperCollins). Suggested reading: The Warren Commission Report, “The Poetic Edda”, translated by Lee M. Hollander (in particular The Prophecy of the Seeress), Bernal Diaz del Castillo “True History of the Conquest of New Spain”.
11. Required film viewing list: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948, dir. John Huston), Viva Zapata (1952, dir. Elia Kazan), The Battle of Algiers (1966, dir. Gillo Pontecorvo), the Apu trilogy (1955-1959, dir. Satyajit Ray), and, if available, “Where is the Friend’s Home?” (1987, dir. Abbas Kiarostami).
12. Follow your vision. Form secretive Rogue Cells everywhere. At the same time, be not afraid of solitude.

Methodist Centre

Bernard Controls

The Office Sublime (screen savers)

 

the office sublime

  

meteors

 

 on the way to work

The bodies for bodiless beings

Soft Power

ME: Can you please explain your first television?

ZXM: There was no trademark, because it was DIY. It was 1975, in Nanjing. Some engineers in the danwei of my father—

ME: Which kind of danwei?

ZXM: It was a high tech danwei of its time, they had one of the first computers downtown. The size of one of these computers was like a cathedral, the size of a church, about 8 metres high and 80 metres long. It was a whole house, and we walked between the different machines on the metal frames.

ME: Did you go inside?

ZXM: Yes, people worked inside the machine, not outside.

ME: Was it loud or hot?

ZXM: It was not very loud, no, because it was so huge. It wasn’t concentrated. The controls were based on certain very long ribbons of paper with holes in them. It was a common system. They had some, let’s say, screens, different screens for different purposes. And 2 or 3 naughty engineers made a television just for fun; they knew how to make televisions but it was not their job to make them. They were naughty, and wanted to have some fun, so over several days they made a television—not like one TV set, but open with different parts on the table; however, it worked so they didn’t care.

ME: Did they use the tube for something in the factory, what was it used for in the computer?

ZXM: Yes, in the computer and even in other machines. This was long before DOS. There were computers with sending-out possibilities, but there were also a lot of tubes or monitors, used only as surveillance for different parts of the machine. They had some of those tubes that had either been used or not for the big machine, but they had other smaller machines as well. You know, in an office job, it is always boring.

ME: But you could go into that big machine, that was no problem?

ZXM: I could only go once into that big machine.

ME: What were they using it for?

ZXM: They were using it to produce other machines! The most useful machines produce other machines.

ME: This thing on the table was the first television you saw?

ZXM: Yes, and the engineers kicked me out.

ME: What were they watching?

ZXM: I don’t know, I didn’t understand, they were laughing, but they saw a small kid so they turned it off. “We shouldn’t let a child know that we were making fun of ourselves,” it was a bad image of their work. I went to the factories especially because there were some empty areas for sporting events and so on, but to go into the big machine or the offices was just by accident, they didn’t want us in there. Perhaps the program was the “Red Detachment of Women” (红色娘子军) ... perhaps it was that, because there were women dancing...

ME: So you remember something. Was it clear?

ZXM: No, not at all! It was very small, not clear at all, the music was very noisy, with static, and the workers barely looked at it. They smoked, they talked. I think they made this TV only because they were bored by their daily work. My father was not so happy with that.

ME: Was he the manager?

ZXM: Yes, he was Director of the factory, not an engineer at all. He understood a little about it, but he was not a technical guy. He wasn’t happy. He said, “Zhang Xianmin, you shouldn’t tell others. Actually it’s not really a television.” But the idea didn’t go away. The problem was also that everything was under a quota system, even pork; each one had the right to a half-kilo of pork. The big things like bicycles or watches, a factory worker would have to accumulate 6 months of work in order to have one bill marked “Bicycle from the city of Nanjing,” to go to buy the bicycle. Money wasn’t enough. But the TV was so rare that its quota system wasn’t yet invented. So my father wasn’t sure that we had the right to own a television. The TV wasn’t yet on the market. But he wasn’t so much against the idea, he said, “oh, let’s see.” And fortunately nobody understood what I tried to tell them.

ME: How did you describe it to people?

ZXM: Yes, that was the problem! My friends didn’t catch it! They thought it was an imaginary invention, that Zhang Xianmin made it up!

ME: But what was so crazy, that there people dancing on this little screen, is that what you told them?

ZXM: I tried to pronounce the word television, saying that it was perhaps an upgraded radio system—

ME: So you had a theory about how it worked.

ZXM: Yes, I tried to be reasonable about it.

ME: Were you a technically-minded boy?

ZXM: No, not at all, but there was a noise and an image, and everything apparently had been transmitted from somewhere, and transmission was radio’s idea. But the image part, they didn’t believe it.

ME: But people had seen films, right? There were film screenings at that time, of news and stuff, right? But did they relate it, or did you relate it, to film at all at that point, the idea of a moving image?

ZXM: Yes, people had this idea. But the image in film is from a projector, and everyone could see the source of the image. The idea of transmission was a mystery; and anyway, it was a moment in my primary school when I was among the privileged families, meaning that perhaps 70–80% of families still didn’t have radios. At that point, there was a transition to transistor radios, and we began to see smaller pieces, not on a tube; but this only began in 1972, just 3 years prior. Some teachers understood it, and they tried to know if it was possible to know more about it.

ME: They heard you talk about it?

ZXM: Yes. Later, at the moment of Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, my father tried to popularize the idea of television to try to make it politically correct, and perhaps from this, we hoped to have the chance to have a TV without any problems.

ME: How did he popularize it?

ZXM: Afterwards, I thought the problem was that he had been pushed by his colleagues and the neighbors, because people were talking about it... the majority of people had never seen one but were curious about it. So he found the proper moment to bring home a TV, with the reason, “Ah, we will show everyone the funeral of Mao Zedong.”

ME: Did you have a house where a lot of people would gather?

ZXM: We shared a courtyard with 4 families, each of whom had 3 rooms. It was like a 四合院, but not exactly, it was a southern style of building. Some neighbors talked about it; one was a former Shanghai industrial capitalist, another was an artist family with one designer of radios. So they knew a little bit about what a television might be, and there was a little pressure from their curiosity. My father found a reason to bring back a television—a true television, with everything in a box.

ME: A wooden box?

ZXM: Probably plastic, not metal. Black plastic. He brought it back and he said, “We will see Mao Zedong’s funeral, a big moment that everyone has the right to see.” Other neighbors also came to our courtyard to watch, probably 80 people came to see this very small television. Everyone was crying and bowing to the television. The TV was black and white, but quite clear and the sound was also clear. The day after the funeral, we brought the TV into our home after the transmission—transmissions were only 1 or 2 hours a day—but during transmission time, we had to bring it out, and the neighbors tried to close the door to the courtyard, too many people kept coming. We did this for 15 days, and finally the programs became less and less serious: at the beginning there were no movies, no operas; but 15 days later, there was a little singing and dancing. My father became worried, and said, “Oh, the programming is becoming really not serious, we should no longer continue to watch it.” So he turned off everything and brought the television back to his danwei. The whole street knew about that, and said, “he is a really corrupt guy,” having the TV those 15 days; but on the other hand they also watched the TV. It became another kind of pressure. Finally 6 months later, my father made a concession, saying “perhaps we’ll make it ourselves,” and got some advice from his engineers.

ME: But did he change his mind about the content? It turned out he liked the songs?

ZXM: Perhaps—but it was too dangerous. Nobody could evaluate the risks if he kept the TV in his home. Anyway, it wasn’t ours, it was one of the televisions the engineers made on their vacation time. Perhaps it was the only TV for 10,000 people in this 3 or 4 block radius. We had heard of nobody with a television at that moment. My father made a calculation based on buying all of the electronic components at the market. The main problem was the tube, it was impossible to buy on the market; so at that moment, it may have been a small problem of corruption... He tried to buy some used major components, but if they were really used we wouldn’t have been able to see anything on the TV. His calculation estimated it would cost 6 months salary for him. We worked very slowly on it, because we got different pieces at different moments over these 6 months. My father didn’t really have time to work on it, so especially my brother and sister did the main jobs and I helped (at 12 I was considered too young to use the electric tools on my own).

ME: To whom did they sell these parts at the time, hobbyists?

ZXM: For example, model airplanes needed electronics, as well as radios, both allowed by law. We tried to make a coil and other components ourselves because they were too expensive. But it never worked as well as the readymade pieces. Several months later we had a television in a box.

ME: In that case, what was the box made of? Did you find a box or did you make it with wood?

ZXM: I forget. Also plastic, I think.

ME: It had buttons and everything?

ZXM: Yes... I do not remember clearly... Three buttons perhaps...

ME: And you didn’t invent a brand for it? 张家?

ZXM: No. And I am not sure how many years we used this—

ME: You watched it regularly?

ZXM: Yes, and it was the same story at first, the neighbors came to watch this television, but very quickly, perhaps 2 years later, people began to have Japanese televisions. It was very fast, like the I-phone; once one person has one in China, then every person has one.

ZXM: But why didn’t they make them in China?

ME: They also started to make them, brands like 牡丹, 熊猫 from Nanjing, but it was all still in the quota system, and one had to wait a long time to buy one. But, if someone had foreign currency, he was basically free at any moment to buy a television, with a very high import tax.

ME: And the content, was it basically like today’s content from the very beginning, war dramas and such?

ZXM: News reel, operas, some sports like volleyball, and a lot of ping pong... and it became boring very fast.    

interview with Zhang Xianmin, Beijing, February 6th, 2013

Smoke Signals

Remember Wu Yulu, the farmer robot inventor?
He is still going, and more popular than ever on the art circuit, with participation at an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, and a touring exhibition organized by Cai Guoqiang. This particular model is used as an anti-smoking educational aid for children, who talks to his audience as he lights his own cigarettes, whose detrimental effects are demonstrated when his chest flips open to reveal glass lungs. Wu Yulu was more than accustomed to being photographed, taking off his hat as the camera was lifted in his "museum."

Other robots on the premises:

 

Automatic Massage Table

Writing robot

Monster

unknown child robot

 

Walker

# Sals Cafe

Video Installation for designated Smoking Room, Sals Café Antwerp

Stroom (5min loop, HD, 2012) is a video made by Nina Könnemann to be shown in a bar’s designated smoking room. It will be presented for the first time at Sals Café, Antwerp and was developped during her residency at AIR Antwerpen earlier in 2012.

Stroom extends the logic of Könnemann‘s earlier work Apple Car (2000), another video made for a specific place and its visitors. This video was installed in a taxi company’s waiting room, where it was intended to be seen by young people on a night out in a state of fatigue and drunkeness.  

The target audience for the video presented at Sals Café are people who smoke tabacco. In front of the smoking room´s six standing places, the video will function like an artificial window, an otherwise missing place upon which to rest one’s gaze.

Opening Wednesday 10th of October at 8pm. Runs until Wednesday 24th of October in Sals Café, Groenplaats 11, 2000 Antwerp.

http://www.airantwerpen.be/en/content/air-tailor-made-nina-k%C3%B6nnemann-sals-caf%C3%A9

peace out artworld

no questions asked

Il signore della seta

"The last key link is the Canada Council. In 1970 the Canada Council instituted the travel grant, which allowed artists to travel for projects, openings or research to other parts of the country (and elsewhere). Now much has been made of the Canada Council as the enlightened institution it is, largely because of its funding of artists and artist-run spaces, but at this time the crucial elements in creating a Canadian art scene was the travel grant. Suddenly we were all traveling. Now Image Bank's image network weakened as it was replaced by actual contact, actual projects together. And this possibility of traveling across this five-thousand mile linear network, this possibility of traveling in a straight line and meeting almost everyone made the art scene in Canada what it is today: now suddenly all these characters in this epic plot began to intertwine into that Rococo form of bureaucracy called Canadian art today. Suddenly we had a sense of seeing ourselves as beings seeing each other, sensing each other as beings sensing themselves as beings seeing each other. And that is the importance of travel."
— A.A. Bronson, The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat

PLEASURE PRINCIPALS LIQUID LUNCH

"The party for Gorbachev dribbled on for awhile. Eventually the opportunity arose for some small talk. Here at last was my chance to clarify everything. To my astonishment, someone introduced me as 'the German Vyssotski'. My name seemed to trigger a memory - perhaps the scandal of my expulsion from the GDR more than fifteen years ago - and I was excited and happy and solemn. My heart beat in my skull, my brain was overwhelmed by a tidal wave of emotions. In such circumstances words of conversation are, anyway, only crude identification marks amid the headlong rush of protocol. How are people supposed to talk to one another, if they don't even have the time to be silent together? Which is all to say: I embarrassed myself. I said to this complete stranger a sentence which I had believed could never pass my lips again. My four words were spoken as a kind of reflex action, like a dying soldier giving a password; the thirteen letters fell from my mouth like teeth that had been knocked out. Before me stood the last torchbearer of Communist ideology. I said: 'I am a Communist.'

Years of despair and hope culminated in that moment: Gorbachev embodied all the wild thoughts and shouting matches of three decades. A film was running inside my head, beginning with my first doubts after the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 and ending with the crushing certainty that the Communist heaven on earth could be nothing but perfect hell.

But as failed Communists is our place in world history therefore as contemptible as that of our old great enemies the Nazis? Of course not! We were always better and always worse. Put more precisely: Our crimes were all the worse, because they stemmed from a better tradition. The Nazis grew out f the blood-stained stupidity of racial delusion, and they remained true to their colours. Hitler honestly promised the extermination of the Jews and held onto it. When the war was already lost, when he needed every truck and every locomotive to supply the Wehrmacht, he still requisitioned enough trains to transport the Jews to death camps. If that was not devotion to principles!

We, however, betrayed everything that we ever promised. We emerged from the humane tradition of the Enlightenment. Our intellectual fathers were the radical democrats of the French Revolution, our poets Heine and Buechner, our thinkers Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg. Communism and Social Democracy were siblings in the same historical family: but the intolerant son became a much-admired murdered and the prim sister and unloved wallflower.

It causes me the deepest sadness and it is to our everlasting shame that no one liquidated so many Communists as the Communists. Hitler murdered 64,000 German Communists. But Stalin's executioners murdered almost the whole of Lenin's Central Committee and liquidated a couple million cadres as well. The Nazis did not butcher their own people, apart from a few individual cases. And what was butchered in the Communist workers' movement was a fundamental humane tendency, which historically never existed in Fascism.

We failed. Now any kind of hope for a more just society seems to be discredited until the end of the world. Despite all that, this ruined childish hope is still close to my heart. The best and the bravest and cleverest people who created me were almost all left-wing rebels and undogmatic spirits, all of them burnt children of Communism. And when I met the last representative of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the old wounds burst open again and bled. And it was far from melodramatic, on the contrary; it was a confusingly pleasant pain.

'I am a Communist.' And see: Gorbachev responded to the stimulus like a Pavlovian dog in the Party academy. The little red bell struck, and the old ideological saliva flowed. It seemed to me as if a romantic revolutionary spasm passed through his body. He had evidently not been expecting this signal from the past here in Hamburg. Suddenly he gained a firmer grip on my hand and, looking through my eyes deep into my heart as if through reversed opera glasses, he squeezed meaningfully and tragically, communicating what we both knew very well: it doesn't matter anymore.

Am I exaggerating? No, Gorbachev's handshake was really something! It was a worker's handshake. No, wrong! Real workers shake hands without the noble proletarian emphasis, which Gorbachev had.

One often hears the claim that at the very last moment of life, all of the past rushes through the dying person's head again as a compressed, abbreviated film. I did not at all feel like dying, but I did see a speeded-up film as Gorbachev gripped my hand in a vice: a film of the death of the Communist idea. Our handshake lasted at most three seconds - but for me it became an epic to fill a whole evening.

It was a remarkable handshake; it bore no resemblance to the ones I knew from officials of the labour movement, who shake hands to show that inside they are still workers. Intellectuals who had picked up important posts in the Party or the trade unions exaggerated the proletarian manner, disguising their genteel mitts by gripping all the more resolutely. They took the hand of the unsuspecting so skillfully, that with a relatively small expenditure of energy they could still crush the victim's fingers. This hyper-proletarian trick worked especially well on women. The loyal party handshake also had a formative effect on the arts. Party artists painted monumental workers' hands, with which no real worker could compete. State actors, playing class conscious workers in Socialist Realist films, shook hands with this gusto.

The true Noble Proletarian Handshake begins long before the actual pressing of flesh. It is clearly developing as the proletarian handshaker approaches the person to be greeted. The proferred arm arm displays two indispensable components: it must be extended somewhat further than normal, and the elbow must point outwards and upwards a little. This signals the strength of the working class hidden beneath the jacket, the mighty arm and the shoulder muscles of the steelworker or miner. At the same time it's noticeable that the fingers are unusually far apart. This gesture has its origins in the fact that the reliable comrade worker is distinguished by the noble mark of primitive manual labour: his massive hands. These calloused digits have only a moment ago laid aside shovel and spanner, hammer and sickle for this greeting. Siberian frosts and the fire of the blast furnaces have hardened his skin. The delicate articulation of the finger joints has been restricted as if by a gouty stiffness. This clumsiness acquired through labour must make every heart beat faster that beats honestly on the side of working people.

By contrast, of course, the political body language of the Heil Hitler greeting was entirely appropriate to the class enemy: the slippery smooth fingers are pressed together and are slightly bent. Petty bourgeois pen-pusher's hands. The honest heavy hand of the class conscious worker does not get up to such tricks. Its vigorous grip signifies a feeling of grass-roots heartiness which is foreign to the decadent class and its intellectual parasites. All the effeminate elements hostile to the Party, the work-shy sceptics - the whole bourgeois rabble - betrayed itself by its limp body-language, even before it had uttered a single word.

At the moment of our handshake Gorbachev stiffened meaningfully. We were silent for a brief eternity. I even had the feeling that the habit of this rite of fraternal affection practised thousands of times would propel Gorbachev into giving me a fraternal kiss. Elevating my cheeks to the ranks of Erich Honecker's and Jew-hater Yasser Arafat's. Fortunately this chalice passed me by. So we stood there, two survivors by the open grave of a fixed idea. Then we went on our way."

- Wolf Biermann, Shaking Hands with the Zeigeist