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Action Melancholia
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Action Melancholia
Florian Cramer
Sept. 2006
From Katherine S. Dreier's and Marcel Duchamp's
"Société Anonyme" to Res Ingold's
"Ingold Airlines," many artists have posed as corporations;
since Kurt Schwitters' "Merzreklame," artists have
worked as P.R. agencies, and since Johannes Baader's Dadaist
interventions in the Weimar Reichstag parliament and Berlin Dome
church in 1918 and 1919, artists have physically, and subversively,
intervened into the public sphere. Contrary to initial expectations,
the rise of the Internet as a mass medium and of Internet art in the
1990s did not yield an aesthetics of "virtual"
disembodiment, but quite to the contrary help to escalate and
radicalize artistic interventionism.
Through official-looking web sites and domain names, groups
like the Yes Men could believably pose as the World Trade
Organization and instigate communicative processes that allowed them
to be invited as WTO representatives and pull off critical pranks at
highbrow economic conventions. Similarly, the mass availability of
software design tools and skills equalized the means of corporate
identity production between artists and companies. Thanks to
professional-grade graphics and web design, the "Nike
Ground" project of the artist collective 0100101110101101.org
was a believable simulation of Nike's corporate identity. The
alleged renaming of Vienna's Heldenplatz into "Nike
Ground" managed to confuse both a common audience - which took
the project literally - and gullible leftist critics who failed to
get the ambivalence of the project, as something that simultaneously
subverted and reinforced the Nike brand.
In the 1990s, there was much talk in Internet art-related
discussion forums and conferences about "tactical media," a
concept that is not quite clear in its mere words. It took artists to
go from actionist performance into the Internet and, eventually, from
the Internet back into the non-electronic public sphere to give the
concept a meaning: as communication technology being cleverly used as
a door-opener to otherwise inaccessible social spheres. In comparison
to Res Ingold's awkward pretension of an airline through a series
of dinner party receptions, the Yes Men's fake WTO and
0100101110101101.org's fake Nike websites tactically used
advantages of the Internet for more elegant and thus more efficacious
simulations, realizing at the same time that the simulacrum isn't
powerful unless it leaves the realm of the symbolic and affects
face-to-face social situations. This approach to "interactive
art" is squarely opposed to the mainstream "media art"
notion of the same term as cybernetic feedback devices, or, in other
words, the pseudo-interactivity of Pavlovian stimulus-and-response
systems forcing the audience to act within the constraints of
programmed machine logic.
The Yes Men, 0100101110101101.org and the - tactically no less
proficient - Viennese Monochrom collective form closely linked nodes
of the artistic and personal network of ubermorgen.com. The
development of artistic approaches is similar, too, from an early
embracement of the Internet in the corporate over-affirmation of
etoy.com to its dystopian tactical use as ubermorgen.com. From a
realm that was open to be appropriated by self-designed corporations,
the Internet ended up being artistically perceived as corporately
controlled territory. This change of perception proved to be
productive and, as the comparison between Etoy's (ongoing
low-brow) work and ubermorgen's reveals, a leap in artistic
quality.
Unlike the WTO web site fake of the Yes Men, ubermorgen's
Internet is thoroughly dystopian. It is not even a corporate space
that can be hijacked for a morally good cause, but the hijacking is
no less dark and abysmal than its object; there is no way out the
system. Unlike the Yes Men's subverted WTO, no parodistic or
utopian device exists that disrobes corporate logic like the
emperor's new clothes. Instead, a project like "Google Will
Eat Itself" (GWEI) just lets it run amok.
Beyond that, ubermorgen.com's dark humorism has a side that
transcends corporate identities and ostensible impersonality.
"Psych.OS", a series of video and images subconsciouly
recorded as an audiovisual "écriture automatique"
inside a psychiatric hospital, at first doesn't seem to be
related to projects like GWEI or www.vote-auction.com at all except
that it was created by the same artist. The correspondence between
the former's highly subjective and the latter's highly
corporate art consists of more than the former depicting the
individual inside yet another controlling institution and the latter
injecting imaginative hackerdom into a corporate cosmos. In 2006,
ubermorgen.com was part of the "Smile Machines" exhibition
during the transmediale festival in Berlin, a show on humor in
contemporary and computer-based art. Ubermorgen's piece
"G3-Bureaucrazy" consisted, among others, of a web-based
psycho drug recipe generator. After filling out a multiple choice
questionnaire of psychotic symptoms, users would receive a hardcopy
of an officially looking prescription for strong psycho drugs,
complete with a fake doctor's signature. Combining the psychotic
and the corporate and turning it into a business, this piece bridged
the gap between GWEI and PSYCH.OS, precarious machine logic and
precarious subjectivity. It is the most concise present-day update to
reflections of psychoses in modern art, bare of all the romanticizing
that marked surrealism from Breton to Artaud, and bare of the
bourgeois "art brut" aesthetization of undrugged psychotic
expression.
The contemporary artist no longer works on the grounds of
deliberately unrestrained and self-fashioned `craziness,' but,
having turned into a marketing director and self-managing freelancer
in the art world, on Prozac or Effexor. But ubermorgen's piece is
not just a satirical reflection of a contemporary world where you
find, such as in L.A., billboards for "South California's
favorite antidepressant." It also is a very personal piece that
evokes abysses of one's individual condition, precisely by
depicting it not as an unpredictable psychotic, but as impersonal
software automatism.
What in Renaissance art and philosophy was known as melancholia
first transformed in early 20th century modernism, from Surrealism to
the Vienna actionists, into violent psychosis and finally into
self-controlled conditioning and chemical self-normalization in our
time. Nevertheless, ubermorgen.com's art remains actionism even
in such a formal piece as the recipe generator. First of all, the
recipe printed from the web site can actually be used to alter
one's condition, just like the Yes Men's WTO site has been
tactically used to intervene into business congresses; and finally,
the work has a more profound personal dimension. ubermorgen's
humor is existential, unlike the lighter-weight humorism of, for
example, Kurt Schwitters or Robert Filliou. It also transcends the
mere pose and postmodern play with signs that still seemed
characteristic for etoy.com. In combination, humorism and
existentialism create a powerful mixture in ubermorgen's art. It
is simultaneously reflexive and actionist, introverted and
extroverted, melancholy put into action: an "Action
Melancholia," performed at high personal risk in its conflict
with lawyers and courts and in the danger of personal burn-out.
Unlike academic artists who call themselves "critical," but
shout foul once they actually get in trouble, there is a silent
melancholic feedback loop in ubermorgen's actionism between
troublemaking, being troubled and getting into trouble.
In Renaissance emblems, the melancholicus was depicted as
someone with a gagged mouth sitting near a river and reading in a
book. In ubermorgen's art, he sits in front of a computer near
Internet data streams and wears a corporate mask.