Simon Penny's Electronic Critique: Notes on the Politicization of Art against the Aestheticization of Politics
Lucia Sommer
I
Half a century ago, cultural critic Walter Benjamin was preoccupied
the problematic relationship between technology and culture. In his
visionary essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction" (1936), Benjamin explored the impact of modern
technologies of reproduction on cultural and political life, and
analyzed the role of the cultural Left in the struggle against
fascism.
1Writing in exile in France, Benjamin discerned and proposed as a counter to fascism's aestheticization of politics--whose inevitable culmination is war--the conscious politicization of art. To Benjamin, the question was not one of binarism--a choice between "political art" or "non-political art". He understood all art to be political, the creation of social actors. The choice was whether to continue to produce aesthetic products which concealed their political nature allowing them to fit smoothly into the functioning of the dominant order; or whether to render apparent the interrelationships which made up that order, and thus, to oppose it.
Benjamin's analyses of the interconnecting relations among art, culture, and technology have become bedrock influences for many of the current debates surrounding the concept of postmodernism. As the century draws to a close, it is clear that fascism has taken new forms of expression as centers of capital. Rather than incinerating their own, or dropping bombs on eachother's, citizens, the dominant military super powers now fight their (postcolonial) wars along what are sometimes referred to as their "peripheries"--meaning on the heads of people of the Middle East, Central America, or Southeast Asia. Where consent is deemed too costly to manufacture, covert military operations and funding of state terror are deployed to ensure business-as-usual. (The fact that from the window at which this electronic re-view is being written I occasionally witness people with no access to the information superhighway, much less shelter, searching through the garbage for food, while the majority of my taxes go toward the maintenance of a military state that recently killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq, seems to me proof enough of the continued existence of the aestheticization of war that Benjamin described.)
In our present context, Simon Penny's art embodies what Benjamin described as an anti-fascist impulse in its politicization of aesthetics.
II
Penny's installations foreground the political aspects of art through
the juxtaposition of their formal and textual elements. Language and
image interact to create what Barthes terms a Text: "The plural
of the Text depends, ... not on the ambiguity of its contents, but on
what might be called the stereographic plurality of its weave
of signifiers (etymologically, the text is a tissue, a woven
fabric)."2
In terms of content, the titles share a dialogic relationship with the
experience of viewing the art.The titles are prominent parts of the presentation, and highlight historical and social contexts. The title Big Wheels (a requiem for the industrial revolution) indicates the historical positioning of both the object and the viewer, while Big Father resonates with that deadly combination of hierarchies of the personal and political which is constitutive of fascism.
This artwork is formally comprised of the same electronic technologies which are generative of postmodernism. Penny uses these cutting-edge media to call attention to the changes in technology which he argues underlie cultural change. He states that "technological change has been the major force for social and cultural change for at least a century, and ... artmaking serves a social function in assessing such changes."3
Big Wheels is a pair of wood-and-steel spoked wheels joined at the axis. The 10' high, 8' wide piece is electronically powered to rotate almost imperceptibly every few minutes. Like the industrial revolution which is its referent, the experience of this installation is formed of contradictions. Standing before Big Wheels, with its sheer size and physical presence, I was at first overwhelmed by the incongruity of this powerful and inhuman machinery inhabiting the gallery space; the impact was magnified by the slow and autonomous turning of the wheels. The archaic form of the wheels caused the gallery setting to take on a museum-like role, as if the wheels had been removed from an "original" context, serving as only a memory of some now defunct and abandoned factory. However seductive the "authenticity" metaphorized in the wheels, it is put into crisis by the current technology of electronics which enables the wheels' functioning; in this way the fascistic tropes of "origin" and "authenticity" are disrupted.
The materials, wood and steel, and the archaic mechanism of the wheel, tempted me to feel something like nostalgia. Yet this response troubled me, for, though the college-bound child of white, nouveau-middle-class parents, I had in my late teens worked in light industrial manufacturing before following the trajectory of late capital and "graduating" to the service industry; certainly nothing about that experience was conducive to nostalgia. So from where this longing for wood and steel? I thought of AT&T's current TV spots for imminent technologies which will supposedly transform "our" lives, in which communication "miracles" are typically surrounded by nineteenth-century architecture, and an abundance of wood and other early-industrial materials. Big Wheels disrupts this postmodern politics of representation which uses nostalgia to sell cutting-edge technology, thereby erasing entire histories of domination, colonialization, and suffering, past and present. Its series of textual contradictions points to this erasure. In Penny's work, it is precisely an awareness of history, reinscribed by the titles and the written materials, which counteracts an unfounded and dangerous nostalgia. In place of the muteness of the work of art, one imagines the voices of the millions who have born these wheels on their backs.
Thus, questions are generated: What is being mourned--the industrial revolution itself, or its proletarian victims, or both? If we live in an information society, as opposed to an industrial one, where is industry today; someone must make these computers? Are today's industrial and post-industrial workers acknowledged in the typical gallery space, or space of re-view?
Big Father confronts the viewer with a row of five semi-anthropomorphic audio/visual stations made of steel, concrete, electromechanicals, and ultrasonic sensors, which breathe via medical hardware. This viewer was reminded simultaneously of such things as a row of soldiers; a series of electric chairs; the type of clubs used in interrogation in U.S.-funded police states like El Salvador; and an electronic assembly plant. So, as opposed to what Benjamin termed the aestheticization of politics under fascism, where war is represented as "beautiful," (patriotic, necessary, ... ) we have here a terrifying work of art that seeks to interrogate the structures of domination that deploy technology and terror alike.
As the viewer approaches each station, the station senses the viewer, and transmits audio and visual material through its speaker and video screen. When triggered, the five screens move through a series of images. Each image corresponds to one of a number of scales on which the global communications system operates, from the planetary to the microscopic. For example, one depicts a bird's-eye view of a hallway filled with people, and corresponds to the local scale--that of video surveillance systems which increasingly mark the urban landscape. Another corresponds to the personal scale with its medical imaging technologies representation of a human head, while a third operates on the global scale with a satellite-generated view of the earth.
Apprehension and shock are emotions central to the experience of Big Father, a shock which then, (as Benjamin claimed about the then-new apparatus of film) should be "cushioned by heightened presence of mind."4 Benjamin located the significance of this shock-effect in film in the historical changes in apperception brought about by technological change: "Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of perception halfway."5 In Big Father, late 20th-century technologies meet the viewer's distracted mode of perception halfway with a shock-effect of terror. This shock-effect leaves us with questions about the power relations which are presently embedded in activities of (electronic) viewing and transmitting.
Here, as with Big Wheels it is partly the interactive nature of the installation that enables its textuality. On several of the occasions that I visited the installations, they were partially disabled due to the "overzealous" interaction of viewers. While undoubtedly problematic for the artist, perhaps this is evidence of the work's success. That is, what meanings and histories do viewers in an economically devastated post-industrial context like Pittsburgh bring to this art that seeks to problematize the power relations involved in technological change?
Particularly interesting is the dialectic, in Big Wheels and Big Father, between theory and practice, and between the symbolic and the imaginary. Penny's work combines explicitly theoretical discourse with the intuitive practice of sculpture, showing that the two are not "opposed." While many cultural theorists recognize such a critique of binarism as symptomatic of postmodern practice in general, it was voiced of necessity by feminist artists.6 And, as bell hooks points out in Black Looks: Race and Representation, black artists have long constructed and employed theory in their art in order to interrogate structures of racist, sexist, and economic domination.7
Taking Big Wheels and Big Father as "case studies," I would want to argue for the possibilities opened up by what Marxist cultural theorist Fredric Jameson calls a strategic "return" to narrative; a narrative which some poststructuralist critics argue is inherently patriarchal and of the modern moment.8 These installations demonstrate how art which is undeniably postmodern and textual can incorporate narrative to enhance its questioning effect. By positioning the viewing subject in history, the critical, de-centering, and utopian effect of the work is strengthened.
These installations are examples of postmodern artistic practice at its most fruitful. This is not a hyper-relativism, which abandons all hope of transformation and is content merely to float among simulacra9. This is a postmodernism that reveals its debt to, and continuity with, those committed strands of modernism which Benjamin identified as necessary to end cultural fascism. In response to the monovocality of fascism, Penny's art embodies a critical and radical relativism, which is concerned to critique relations of power, and is rooted in a hope of bringing an end to the present reign of terror.
I wish to acknowledge the critical encouragement of Vicky Clark, Associate Curator at the Carnegie Museum of Art, who read and commented on an earlier version of this essay.
Lucia Sommer is a visual artist living in Pittsburgh with a history of activist and critical interventions.