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.
