Note- this was the introduction I gave during a recent online discussion with Verena Voigt ( https://www.verena-voigt-pr.de/) as part of Fubar 2024 which in turn reflected the theme of this years Fubar - Archives and
failure in archiving, and it's interesting to me personally that in
the last year or so a number of initiatives have started within the
glitch art community to archive work of the past that we as
community find important or significant , in part before it
disappears due to the often ephemeral nature of digital media,
storage strategies ( or lack of) and the internet in general. It
seems that we as an art movement have woken up to the fact that what
we are doing / have done may have some historical importance.
In
light of that it also seems that there are the first tentative
movements towards us as artists to find some kind of framework in
which to view glitch art and its offshoots , not the traditional art
historical framework based in 19th/20th century art criticism and
political theory ( the last thing we need are more scholarly isms )
but rather an attempt from within our own community to define what we
are, what we have been and what we will be , that implies a knowledge
of the past and a hope for the future .
Introduction
I’m going to start with this
quote from 1891 which comes from a speech made by Missouri Senator
George Graham Vest, a former congressman for the Confederacy
‘“In
all revolutions the vanquished are the ones who are guilty of
treason, even by the historians,” Vest said, “for history is
written by the victors and framed according to the prejudices and
bias existing on their side.” ( from the American newspaper The
Parsons Daily eclipse Friday Aug 21 1891)
https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/419139525/
This
idea, that history is written by the victors, is a fairly common one
and has been used by various figures good and bad through the last
few centuries, from Churchill to Goering and so on.
After
the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, the collapse of the soviet union
and the end of the cold war Francis Fukuyama published a book in 1992
titled ‘ The end of history and the last man’ in which, to quote
from Wikipedia, Fukuyama argues
‘that
with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy—which occurred
after the Cold War (1945–1991) and the dissolution of the Soviet
Union (1991)—humanity has reached "not just ... the
passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of
history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological
evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as
the final form of human government." -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man
If
the victors write the history it can also be said that the victors
also create and maintain the archives on which that history is based,
what is left in, what is left out, what is purposefully destroyed or
rewritten – if we cannot write our own history and keep our own
archives others will do the writing and maintaining for us, to quote
Vest again ‘framed according to the prejudices and bias existing
on their side’.
To
rewind a little, my perspective as an artist ( and most artists ) is
coloured by the era in which I grew up. I was born in the late
sixties and started school in the last dyeing days of the post war
settlement in Europe we can call Social democracy, a system with
public provision for universal education, Healthcare, a program of
easily available and rentable social housing, easy access to Higher
education via a system of means assessed grants which benefited the
less well off and rebalanced the arts and public services away from
middle and upper classes in a democratic way.
I
say the last dyeing days of social democracy as post 1979 and the
election of Margaret Thatcher in the UK And Ronald Reagan in the US
this idea of social democracy was superseded by an economic theory
called neo-liberalism hatched by a group of economists nicknamed ‘The
Chicago boys’ taught by the economist Milton Friedman ( Wikipedia
has a great article on the Chicago boys here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Boys)
which was initially trialled in Chile under General Pinochet which
rejected the post war consensus and as that article says
‘They
sponsored state run policies to decrease national spending, end
inflation and promote economic growth. They promoted a policy of
strict austerity and cut government expenditures substantially. Free
trade agreements and the breakdown of barriers to trade were also
promoted to help Chile compete in the world market. They also
privatized public companies and used the free market rather than
government rule to promote their economic policies.’
In
other words privatisation, free enterprise, an end of access to
education via grants , a gradual return of the arts to those who
could afford higher education and not those who had merit – a
recolonisation of the arts by the upper and upper middle classes with
their attendant biases and agendas.
But
before that happened there was still, in the U.K at least and
elsewhere in western Europe, the last vestiges of the the old social democratic system
and a final generation gaining access to an arts education through
merit and this is where Mark Fisher comes in and what he talks about
in various chapters of his book ‘Ghosts of my life’
What
Reagan and Thatcher and neoliberalism represented was a paradigm
shift and rejection of the political thought and consensus that came
before, this was also reflected in the arts as a crisis within
modernism ( the prevailing artistic movement since the beginning of
the 20th
century) there were no more isms left and modernism (the pursuit of
the new and the pursuit of innovation over the form that might take)
had itself become tired, elitist, overly academic and increasingly
obsessed with ideas both esoteric and irrelevant outside the circle
of those in the know, essentially cutting itself off from audience
and accessibility.
Paradoxically
the last generation to make it through art colleges or higher
education on grants, many from the working classes created something
new when exposed to modernist ideas, exemplified in a new style of
music, post punk which came out of the ashes of punk turning
modernist ideas into a new form of what Mark Fisher calls ‘Popular
modernism’ exemplified by groups such as pre sparkle in the rain Simple Minds, Joy division, pre Midge Ure Ultravox ( see also John
Foxxs' Metamatic) , Siouxsie and the Banshees , The Cure , Echo and
the Bunnymen, Clock Dva, The Teardrop Explodes and The Chameleons,
awkward angular music made by awkward people. Music both a promise
and a death knell for a time about to be consigned to the scrap heap
as neoliberalism gradually colonised culture and the arts returning
or rehashing old ideas and old forms , and in relation to that
another point that Mark Fisher makes is that neoliberalism cannot
invent or innovate.
If,
as Fukuyama states, this is ‘the end of history’ nothing new can
be created, all we have left is a rehashing of ideas, a recycling
of forms and consumption ( see Mark Fisher on his shock at realising
that ‘valerie’ as sung by Amy Winehouse and produced by Mark
Ronson was not an original sixties era song covered in imitation by
the band The Zutons but in fact the other way round – a modern
Zutons song sung in the style of a sixties soul singer by a modern
singer imitating a sixties style, imitation upon imitation but almost
undetectable as we only exist truly in this neoliberal now, we have
become unmoored in time ( see also the slow cancellation of the
future) as the band the chameleons said in the song Caution from the
1986 album ‘Strange times’
‘We
have no future, we have no past
We're just drifting ghosts of
glass
Brown sugar, ice in our veins
No pressure, no
pain
Everybody looks the same to me
Rows and rows of
faces on a balcony
I can hear them calling down to me
"Come
up here, set us free"’
Or as Japan state in the chorus of their 1981 track 'Ghosts'
'Just when I think I'm winning
When I've broken every door
The ghosts of my life
Blow wilder than before
Just when I thought I could not be stopped
When my chance came to be king
The ghosts of my life
Blew wilder than the wind'
The
problem with ghosts or ideas is that even though a paradigm may have
been killed off by a competing paradigm it doesn’t make those ideas
disappear, if we look at China Mievilles book ‘The city and the
city’ we can see two parallel systems existing side by side ,
deliberately and purposely ignoring each other even though they may
be in touching distance co-existing ( it could be argued that even
though the Berlin wall fell and communism ended the wall in fact did
not fall at all even with German reintegration ) in ‘The city and
the city; there is also the shadow of a time when the two parts of
the same city existed as one , a third city and this is at the heart
of the book and possibly the heart of the situation we who make
glitch art find ourselves in – we are a third city which exists
within the wreckage of two old opposing systems of thought.
To
quote from wikipedia again
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_%26_the_City
‘The
City & the City
takes place in the fictional Eastern European twin
city-states
of Besźel and Ul Qoma.’
plot
outline:
‘Inspector
Tyador Borlú, of the Extreme Crime Squad in the fictional East
European city-state
of Besźel, investigates the murder of Mahalia Geary, a foreign
student found dead in a Besźel street with her face disfigured. He
soon learns that Geary had been involved in the political and
cultural turmoil involving Besźel and its "twin city" of
Ul Qoma. His investigations, which start in his home city of Besźel,
lead him to Ul Qoma to assist the Ul Qoman police in their work, and
eventually result in an examination of the legend of Orciny, a
rumoured third city existing in the spaces between Besźel and Ul
Qoma.’
and
‘These
two cities actually occupy much of the same geographical space, but
via the volition of their citizens (and the threat of the secret
power known as Breach),
they are perceived as two different cities. A denizen of one city
must dutifully "unsee" (that is, consciously erase from
their mind or fade into the background) the denizens, buildings, and
events taking place in the other city – even if they are an inch
away. This separation is emphasised by the style of clothing,
architecture, gait, and the way denizens of each city generally carry
themselves. Residents of the cities are taught from childhood to
recognise things belonging to the other city without actually seeing
them. Ignoring the separation, even by accident, is called
"breaching" – a terrible crime for the citizens of the
two cities, even worse than murder. The origin of this odd situation
is unclear, as it started at an uncertain time in the past, perhaps
before recorded European history. Residents of the cities speak
different languages that use distinct alphabets. Besź is written in
a Greek-derived alphabet resembling Cyrillic while Illitan, the
language of Ul Qoma, is written in a Latin alphabet. However, Besź
and Illitan have a common root and share a degree of mutual
intelligibility. The cities also have different religions: Besźel's
state religion is the Besź Orthodox Church and there is a small
Jewish and Muslim community, while Ul Qoma is officially secular,
though religions other than the Temple of the Divine Light face
discrimination.’
We
can think of the two art movements - modernism and postmodernism as
being the two separate cities within the one city and glitch art
being the rumored third city .
Art
under neoliberalism is post modernist – art talking about itself
and feeding upon itself allied to the biases and agenda of the system
that it arose from saying nothing new picking over its own bones but
re-presenting them cyclically in the same way that Hollywood has
been rebooting the same ideas and films over the last few decades –
The fall of the Berlin wall and the end of communism did not bring
about a bright new era of freedom but instead a deeper slavery to
ideas which have become harder and harder to think around because if
there is no future there is no destination, no escape, no possibility
of escaping the locked room in which we find ourselves.
We
can also see across Europe and America the slow falsification of the
past, the demolition of buildings, especially in the United Kingdom,
built post world war two that represented the post war consensus,
brutalist buildings are either demolished (see the wholesale
demolition and rebuilding of Birminghams bull ring centre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bull_Ring,_Birmingham
or its brutalist library
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Central_Library
or the East German Berlin Palast
der Republik
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_the_Republic%2C_Berlin
which was replaced by a facsimile of an old Berlin palace that had
been bombed during the second world war and subsequently demolished.
Or the co-option and gentrification of publicly funded and owned
housing and its wholesale sell off and consequent purging of local
populations ( the unworthy poor) to make way for the worthy rich (
see San Francisco, London etc ).
The victors write the history but also demolish that which does not
fit into their idea of the past or sell off public goods to private
hands ( Birmingham city council is controversially at the moment
going through a bankruptcy under circumstances which are disputed but
as a consequence one of the biggest publicly owned collections of
pre-raphelite art may be sold, neo-liberalism cannot abide the
thought of publicly owned assests for the benefit of the public thus
the slow war of attrition on libraries and public spaces such as
parks and amenities) .
How
then can we look at the ideas and cultural analyses of Mark Fisher as
exemplified in his book ‘ Ghosts of my life’ , use them to look
at glitch art and hence reboot the cancelled future to break out of
the locked room in which we find ourselves?
Escaping
the trap that sapphire and steel find themselves in as Mark Fisher
writes in ‘The ghosts of my life’ on sapphire and steels final
episode -
‘The
problem that Sapphire and steel have come to solve is, as ever, to do
with time. At the service station, there is a temporal bleed through
from earlier periods: images and figures from 1925 and 1948 keep
appearing, so that, as Sapphire and Steels colleague Silver puts it
‘time just got mixed, jumbled up, together, making no sort of
sense’. Anachronism, the slippage of discrete time periods into one
another, was throughout the series the major symptom of time breaking
down………….’
‘In
this final assignment, the anachronism has led to stasis: time has
stopped. The service station is in ‘a pocket, a vacuum’. There’s
still traffic, but its not going anywhere’: the sound of cars is
locked into a looped drone. Silver says ‘there is no time here, not
anymore’.
I
can make parallels with culture and art under neo-liberalism ( as
does Mark Fisher) within this trap , culture isn't over, art isn't
over, it is still happening but it is in stasis without the future it
is constantly flicking through and re-presenting past modes, there is
nothing new . Like the characters in the city and the city we can see
this but are taught to ignore it from an early age, no other system
or escape can be seen because we are locked into the room of
capitalism which is eternally stuck in 19th
and 20th
century economic and political ideas, because for it the future is
over and whilst it would like us all to believe in that the
democratisation of artistic and cultural production via the web,
opensource/floss software and the diminishing costs of devices and
access recreates the fertile grounds online/offline that post punk
grew within .
To
write our own history's, to keep our own archives is one of the ways
we can find our way out of this locked room – like Post punk in the
past we can forge, through glitch art, new ways seeing and new forms
of culture , within a framework which is open and denies the power of
neo-liberalism and its self contented end of history. Through glitch
can we un-cancel the future.
