William Clark
The Clandestine Caucus

Francis McKee 
Culture of the copy

Chris Byrne
Crowd Control

Robert H. King
New Music

Matthew Lewis
Duane Hanson

David Burrows
Open War

Sean Cubit
LEAF Conference

Lorna Waite
Women on Art Symposium

Roberta McGrath
Surplus Bodies

Gavin Jones
Art, Science, Economics & Nuthatches

Michele McGuire
Virtue & Vice

Oliver Sumner
When we were two little boys

Leigh French
Party Swings & Roundabouts

William Clark & Robert Doohihan
The scum also rises

James Kelman
Freedom for Freedom of Expression Rally

Ian Brotherhood
Tales of the Great Unwashed

John Beagles
Your place or mine

Peter Suchin, William Clark, Leigh French
Hal Foster Interview

____________________________ 

The Clandestine Caucus
(Anti-socialist campaigns and operations in the British Labour Movement since the war)
Robin Ramsay
Published by Lobster, 214 Westbourne Avenue, Hull HU5 3JB Price £5 (32 pages)
William Clark

"The plea in extenuation of guilt and mitigation of punishment is perpetual. At every step we are met by arguments which go to excuse, to palliate, to confound right and wrong, and reduce the just man to the level of the reprobate. The men who plot to baffle and resist us are, first of all, those who made history what it has become. They set up the principle that only a foolish Conservative judges the present time with the ideas of the past; that only a foolish Liberal judges the past with the ideas of the present." 
Lord Acton, Inaugural Lecture On The Study Of History, Fontana, 1960

The point of view that the modern Labour party has 'sold out' its socialist beginnings, while being a common enough accusation, is not the starting point of the Clandestine Caucus. Its analysis of secret and semi-secret groups and factions within the larger political party provide an insight which casts serious doubt on the Labour Party ever having had much of a socialist foundation in the first place:
"The history of Britain's union and Labour movement is one of continuous conflict between socialist and anti-socialist wings; and within that conflict the bit of the story that is usually not told is that describing the relationship between the anti-socialist section of the Labour movement and British and US capital and their states."
This relationship, which is comprised of elements which remain largely suppressed in modern history, begins at the period just after World War 1, alongside the origins of the British state, particularly in the context of the state's response to Bolshevism. It is identified in the various groupings which comprised the early British corporate movement, around the period of 1918 to 1926. That movement's failure to produce a more integrated society; a society which could prevail amidst the emergent struggle between domestic capital and international finance capital, is, it is suggested, the basis for the initial co-operation between the state and the British Trades Unions, principally the TUC. The TUC, or more accurately, the political beliefs of its leaders and their factions, formed something of a 'praetorian guard' against the left, and were increasingly motivated by fear of a communist conspiracy. Links - one could easily say partnerships - developed between the TUC and state agencies, particularly with the Foreign & Colonial offices. This was extended with the first two Labour governments and 'solidified enormously' by World War II and the coalition government.
"Into this domestic anti-Communist climate came the USA's loans - and the people and ideas, the strings attached to the money."
While early post World War II history is usually summed up by the catch-all phrase the 'Cold War', what actually happened in the take over of Europe carries with it complex covert political, military and economic drives (which still continue), all amidst the general chaos of a destroyed Europe. This is complex and murky ground. Robin Ramsay, while avoiding a debate on the origins of the Cold War, focuses on the origins on the Marshall Plan. He identifies the Council on Foreign Relations1 (CFR) as the main vehicle (albeit somewhat informally) for co-ordinating the US take over of non-communist European countries via covert means; the British Empire having lost its imperial strength in the post-war years. In defining the 'strings attached to the money,' we have the CFR as some form of overseeing body: working alongside it, engaging in psychological warfare operations was the Economic Co-operation Agency (ECA) and alongside them the Office of Policy Co-ordination (OPC).2
"What we think of as the CIA, that is the covert operation, intervention arm of US multi-national capital--the post-war bogey man supreme for the left--
began as the enforcement arm of the Marshall plan, engaged in operations against the left and the trade unions of Europe, communist or non-communist. The OPC was the US administration's recognition that the ECA alone couldn't 'get the job done' ".
The 'job' in this case includes the US post-war penetration of the British Labour Party and Trade unions. One key point in the text relates to the extent US labour attachés developed influential contacts with the Labour leadership, particularly Hugh Gaitskell. Here the distinction between whether the attachés were CIA agents or not becomes academic, both would report to the same boss, the State Department. It should also come as no great surprise that such close associations were formed, the Americans were after all perceived as allies, but then again so were the communists.
Ramsay shifts slightly at this point to provide parallel information on the survival of UK 'private sector propaganda organisations', such as Aims of Industry and the Economic League; noted here because of their networks' pumping of anti-left, anti-nationalisation briefings into the British press. These resurrected the propaganda systems and organisations of the period surrounding the general strike. This section also serves to introduce the Information Research Department (IRD), a key organisation in unravelling the State's own covert operations and whose layers Ramsay has peeled back over the years:
"IRD was a triple layer. On the surface was its formal cover within the Foreign Office as an information and research department. Beneath that was IRD's role as a propaganda organisation, dispensing white (true) and grey (half true) propaganda in briefings to journalists and politicians. But beneath that was the third layer, the 'black' or psychological warfare (psywar) tier."
He presents convincing evidence that at about the same time IRD came into existence, the union leaders themselves willingly nudged closer to the covert world and the right, and again, through a shared and mounting commitment to anti-communism, instigated various more or less interlocking projects, such as the avowedly clandestine AEU's 'club', Common Cause and the Industrial Research and Information Services (IRIS), the latter being set up in the Headquarters of the National Union of Seamen. 
Among the embarrassments of IRD are:
"1. The extent to which the British print and broadcast media of the 1950s and 60s recycled IRD material. When IRD was formally closed in 1978 it still had 100 British journalists on its contact list, including correspondents for the Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph, the Observer, Sunday Mirror, News of the World, the Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, The Times, Financial Times, Soviet Analyst and the Economist.
2. The revelation that IRD was a full-blown Political Warfare Executive, with all that implies, despite the fact that no government--no Cabinet--had ever authorised the creation of such an organisation.
3. Most sensitive of all, IRD used 'black propaganda' in 'political warfare'.
Ramsay's tentative and careful analysis of the IRD, has been confirmed and extended by fairly recent (official) revelations. The same could be said of his interpretation of the revelations of Colin Wallace: an ongoing assessment going back some ten years. Wallace worked at 'Information Policy', long maintained to have been an Northern Ireland based Army press office in the 70s, but identified here as the last sighting of IRD in its 'black' role:
"Information Policy was constructed in the same way as IRD, concealing the psy-war role behind the cover role of a propaganda unit, which in turn, was concealed by the formal information role ...Disinformation was planted in the media; foreign journalists were taken into back rooms and shown 'secret' documents - diaries, leaflets, minutes of meetings; some genuine, many forged. IRD tried, yet again, to establish the insurgents as part of the Soviet global conspiracy, but after the re-election of the Wilson government in 1974 they also began to try to show support for the IRA from a Labour Party influenced by the CPGB."
Information on IRD's operations in the mainland is not only scarce but (naturally) riddled with disinformation and evasion. To penetrate the fog has required tenacious research and evaluation. Ramsay makes the important observation that his initial research looked for MI5 operations, he now accentuates three British Intelligence agencies:
"There was a group of MI5 officers, led by Peter Wright, who were plotting against the Wilson government and, for example, trying to use the Information Policy unit in Northern Ireland to spread disinformation about Wilson and other British politicians whom MI5 regarded as 'unsound'; there was also a group of ex-SIS and former military officers, led by former SIS number two, the late George Kennedy Young, operating as the Unison Committee for Action; and there was the Crozier-IRD subversion-watcher network."
The main 'influence' on the work seems to be Richard Fletcher's work.3 This is most evident in his focus on the rise of the Social Democratic movements, which again show the insidious nature of the right-wing of the Labour Party. The movement centring around Gaitskell and the CIA funded Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), was massively overburdened with individuals and organisations with connections to the secret state and its operations; too many people taking the money and not asking too many questions. While aspects of the CCF were exposed in the 60s, Ramsay would seem, by putting the emphasis on Brian Crozier, to indicate how its operations (in more than just the capacity of a 'news agency') survived, developed and continued. A picture emerges of interlocking organisations--'private sector' intelligence operations. The preceding accounts of 'anti-communism' among the union bosses connects with 'anti-communism' amongst agents of the secret state through several organisations such as the IRIS. Crozier's publication "British Briefing" (re-running IRD material on subversion and funded by the Industrial trust) was published by the IRIS, thus:
"What began a quarter of a century before as an anti-Communist caucus among the AUEW's senior officers, had ended up fronting for Britain's leading anti-socialist psychological warfare expert ...Three anti-socialist, senior trade union leaders, fronted the clandestine production of an anti-socialist bulletin, written and edited by former intelligence officers, financed by British capital. This anti-socialist mechanism also involved the connivance of the Charity Commission which allowed the Industrial Trust to operate in a breach of the charity laws."
It is here Ramsay takes an overview of the period, noting that if we can still partially see the remnants of these operations in 1989, we must question how large the whole operation was in the mid-70s; we must re-question its nature and the role of what are perceived to be solely propaganda operations, such as Aims of Industry. Furthermore he calls for a clear-sighted approach by the Labour left towards the commonplace mechanism of British Capitalism to fund its opponents with a view towards subversion. What all this comes down to is that whatever evidence to the contrary, a significant part of the British right;
"...in the propaganda organisations of capital, the state and the Conservative party, believed that the CPGB was part of a global conspiracy, directed and financed by Moscow, which was working in the union movement and wider society to undermine capitalist democracy in Britain. And it is no longer self-evident that this was complete nonsense."
The latter part of that statement relates to fairly recent discoveries in Lobster and elsewhere concerning the "Moscow gold" issue and in tandem with this the issue of "secret" communist Party members in high places. Hitherto regarded as fictitious, it transpires that the CPGB was to a limited extent funded by the Soviet Union: as a form of compensation, after a large drop in membership as a result of Soviet foreign policy. The money came in the form of used notes which were amateurly laundered into party funds. While the mainstream media touched on this as a tidbit from a bygone era, Ramsay has - using the similar example of the American Communist Party's relationship to the FBI - discovered something widely overlooked:
"In the 1970s, the anti-subversion lobby, orbiting around IRD, and presumably informally briefed on the reality of the 'Moscow gold' by MI5, took the picture of real--and arguably, increasing--CPGB influence on the trade unions, and added KGB/Soviet control. To this theory the Communist Party contributed by occasionally boasting of its influence on the Labour Party; with the Labour Party itself unwittingly adding the final touch by abolishing in 1973 the Proscription List of organisations - mostly 1950s Soviet fronts - that Labour Party members could join, thus convincing the paranoids on the right that the mice were in the pantry. Unaware of the 'Moscow gold' evidence, the left dismissed the right's Soviet angle as manifestly nonsense."
He makes the key observation that MI5 had been aware of the 'Moscow gold' almost as soon as it began, and further knew who the intermediary was: Reuban Falber. One of the interesting passages in SMEAR! (The book written by Ramsay and Stephen Dorril) drives a coach and horses through Peter Wright's account in Spycatcher, of an MI5 break-in to a house where CPGB files were kept, he picks this up again here:
"Wright tells us that MI5 planned to burgle Falber's flat but their plan failed - and leaves it there! To MI5 the proof of the Moscow gold must have had something of the status of the Holy Grail; and we are to believe that having located it they made only one attempt to get it? Wright really wants us to believe that for 20 years, aware that the CPGB were getting actual cash money, MI5 were either unable to detect the pay-offs in London, or, having made one failed attempt, just gave up? This is simply not credible."
His main point is that had the existence of Soviet funding been revealed in the late 50s, the CPGB would have been perhaps irreparably damaged. For MI5 this 'secret' link to the Soviet Union became an increasingly useful weapon to use against the left in the UK, particularly the Labour party. These are his concluding remarks:
"Since so much of the British Left came either from, or in opposition to, the CPGB, it is impossible to even speculate convincingly how the British Left - or British politics - would have developed if the 'Moscow gold' had been exposed in the late fifties. But it certainly is possible that the anti-union hysteria of the late 1970s, leading to the catastrophe of Thatcherism - and the subsequent collapse of the Labour Party into its current vacuity - could have been avoided."

notes
1 The CFR is totally ignored in most official and semi-official versions of events; John Ranelagh's long work on the CIA, The Agency, Sceptre, 87, completely fails to mention it in this and any other context. He has the OPC as the work of Dean Acheson (p116), then as Kennan's proposal, "...after George Marshall and Dean Acheson had both backed it." (p113); then the case for covert action is stated to have been made by Dulles "...and some other influential men outside the administration"(p134). Christopher Simpson in Blowback, talks of members of Kennen's Policy Planning Staff (PPS): "...Officially a somewhat egg-headed institution." Dedicated to planning US strategy for 10 to 20 years in the future. Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks' The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, gives something of a revealing account of the relationship with the CFR in their reproduction of the 'Bissell Meeting' from 1968. This is a talk to The CFR by a top CIA executive and reads like a shareholders meeting.
2 The CIA themselves were bitterly fought against by these and other Intelligence agencies in the US, particularly Hoover's FBI.
3 Fred Hirsch & Richard Fletcher, The CIA & The Labour Movement, Spokesman Books, 1977. Another influence is Phil Kelly's essay in The Leveller (a now defunct radical magazine), which aimed to detail links between the CIA and the Social Democrats, although Ramsay is critical of its claims.
 

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Paper jam: call engineer
Francis McKee

The Culture of the Copy: 
Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles
Hillel Schwartz
Zone Books, New York, 1996, 565 pp

Hillel Schwartz must be impossible to live with. In The Culture of the Copy, he manages to crowd over five hundred pages with enough facts to found a new planet. The sheer energy of the text is exhausting, the number of examples and anecdotes cumulatively overwhelming.
The book opens with a chapter on the Real McCoy and Schwartz treats us to a thumbnail biography of one Elijah McCoy:
"...born 1843 into a community of African-Americans who had escaped from slavery in the South. Taking ship to Scotland, McCoy apprenticed to a mechanical engineer. Upon his return across the Atlantic, the job he found with the Michigan Central Railroad was a fireman, stoking the engine, but between 1872 and 1900 he was awarded patents on automatic engine-lubricating devices of such reliability that they were known to the industry as "The Real McCoy". He became a patent consultant to the railroads and moved to the Detroit area, where after a long life he died alone in an infirmary in 1929."
This seems totally convincing until Schwartz introduces his next contender for the title--Bill McCoy, who is quickly followed by Kid McCoy aka Charles McCoy aka Norman Selby. The Kid, married ten times (four times to the same woman), was successively a boxer, an actor, a bankrupt, a diamond dealer, a superintendent of the National Detective Agency, a car salesman, a racing driver, a boxer, a bankrupt, a smuggler, a car salesman, a soldier, a film maker, a three-time jealous murderer, a model prisoner (pardoned) and a suicide.
So much for the preface. This vertigo-inducing prose never lets up and the characters Schwartz describes in passing only get stranger. As the book progresses, however, it becomes clear just how important the author's style is to the subject matter. The very idea of a copy, replica or duplicate seems to spark deep anxieties in our society while, at the same time, we breed reproductions on a dizzying scale. Schwartz points to the inherent paradox of our culture in which: "The more adept the West has become at the making of copies, the more we have exalted uniqueness. It is within an exuberant world of copies that we arrive at our experience of originality." The amphetamine rush of his text parallels this "exuberant world of copies" and simulates the mental upheaval we experience when confronted with an exact copy of an 'essentially' unique object.
One of the great shocks of the book is the extent to which the copy and the technology of copying has permeated our culture. Schwartz touches on the obvious landmarks, such as identical twins, photocopiers, mass productions, forgeries, photography, plagiarism, virtual reality, recording, self-portraits, doppelgängers, decoys, models and carbon copies. Beyond this, however, he multiplies the everyday acts of copying we perform--memorising faces, events or telephone numbers, pressing the save key on a computer keyboard, wearing spectacles to standardise our vision.
The ubiquity of the copy is humbling and in danger of disheartening the reader. To counteract this possibility, Schwartz peppers the text with a series of beautifully researched biographies of the key players in the culture of the copy. Whether it is the skewed imagination of the book's author or sheer luck, many of these characters led lives Fellini must have scripted.
Take Chester Carlson, for example, a bumbling lab worker, crippled by spinal arthritis. One of his early diary entries reads "Pa gone crazy 1924-26". Later in life he contemplated writing an American Dictionary of Quacks and Fakes and eventually he invented the Xerox out of his frustration with the need to copy specifications for patents of his other inventions.
Other, better known, characters also appear in Schwartz's story but in new, unexpected guises. L. Frank Baum, writer of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, surfaces in a chapter on shop dummies where he is revealed as editor of The Show Window and author of The Art Of Decorating Dry Goods Windows. Schwartz then interprets the Emerald city as a large show window, creating a sudden and plausible source for the Tin Man and the Scarecrow as fantastic mannequins. Deeper in the text we come across Martin Luther King Jr. carefully 'integrating' passages verbatim from the theologian Paul Tillich into his thesis after his academic adviser explains that "all modern theology which is competent is essentially derivative."
These biographical snapshots are deliberately quirky, emphasising the finicky, irreproducible eccentricities of a multitude of individuals. Each bizarre detail of their lives is quietly celebrated by Schwartz as another example of a world untouched by the copy. In his use of biography he is consciously arguing for the value of the individual voice and the positive rewards of tolerating difference. Coming to the heart of his argument he states that:
"Telling true spirit from false has never been simple. Our culture of the copy further discourages discernment, unless it be a kind of doubling back. The more we attempt to tell things apart, the more we end up defending our skills at replication. The more intrepid our assertions of individual presence, the more makeshift seem our identities, the less retrievable our origins. There may come a point of no return."
To illustrate just how makeshift our identities can be, Schwartz cites Kid McCoy's accidental meeting with Charlie Chaplin in a courthouse. While McCoy was there on a count of murder, Chaplin was suing an impersonator who had imitated his character and costume. While Chaplin could defend the creation of his costume, the creation of his character was a different matter and he testified that "I'm unconscious while I'm acting. I live the role and I am not myself."
The difficulty in pinning down any 'essential' personality runs as an undercurrent throughout the book. In a fascinating discussion of artists using photocopies to produce work, Schwartz describes male artists approaching the machine as an instrument of salvation only to confront existential crises, as in George Mühleck's black works Copy of the Moon and Copy of the Stars - made by leaving the copier glass open to the night skies. In contrast, he points to women artists' use of the copier to celebrate multiple identities or to question imposed identity as in the work of Pati Hill who praises the copier because: "It is the side of your subject that you do not see that is reproduced..."
Schwartz obviously takes Hill's comments to heart in the construction of his own book. After 382 non-stop, fact-filled pages the main text finally rolls to a halt. Flip the page and you are then faced with 'The Parallel Universe'--a further 150 pages of endnotes, a glittering display of reference and arcane comment that provides almost as much enjoyment as the earlier prose.
Philosophically, the endnotes also question the originality and 'essence' of the main text, acting as a critique of Western Scholarship while encouraging the reader to delve further into a plethora of detail beyond the book's own framework.
In the end, perhaps, the book itself serves the reader best as a reference tool. Taken as a series of micro-essays on a wide array of subjects each meditation can stimulate a whole field of work. Taken as a whole, in one sitting, the reader's head may explode.
 

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Crowd Control
Andrew Stones, Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow, 6 May - 7 June 1997
Chris Byrne

On entering Street Level, conscious of hope in the air following the general election, it was remarkable to see 'Bothered (Black Rod)', which made direct reference to the symbolic opening of parliament.
I was confronted by an array of black and white video monitors, the type used to display images from surveillance cameras, positioned above head height. The screens peer down at the viewer from both sides of the gallery, like an audience. On each is displayed an identical image of the Queen's face, only her eyes and forehead showing. The Monarch looks out through her glasses, as when reading the customary speech at the beginning of each session of parliament. 
Like a gunshot, the silence is punctuated by the hollow ring of Black Rod on the doors of parliament. At precisely this moment, the multiple images of the Queen's face look slightly askance, a sidewards glance giving expression to the unease that this sound generates in the head of State. 
Multiple readings of this work are possible: however I prefer to deal with the artist's inferred critique of the institution of governmental power. The martial spectacle of the opening of parliament, with the MP's advancing side by side in ranks like a military brigade, is evoked by even such minimal fragments. Concentrating on this ritual, the piece reminds the viewer of the symbolic nature of the handover of power in Parliament. The opening of the House of Commons itself symbolises the hierarchy that places limits on the power of the Commons. Black Rod, the usher of the ancient Order of the Garter, represents the Lords or nobility and the Crown, and by implication the military through the Knighthood. His presence is a reminder of the struggle in the executive between the Commons and the State. Given the loaded significance of the imagery, Stones manages to be subtle. Possibly he is attempting to express the ambiguous relationship between the three elements of the medieval institution of Parliament: Crown, Lords and Commons. 
The position of the viewer in relation to the piece is also open to question: images of the Queen are reproduced through the mechanisms of surveillance, but the Monarch stares unblinkingly back, distracted only by Black Rod. The method of replication - black and white television - refers to the first mass television spectacle, the Coronation 44 years ago. Back then, the live broadcast was said to herald the arrival of the new Elizabethan age, echoing the beginnings of English imperialism and conquest at a time when the empire was collapsing. The authority of the Crown extended and reinforced its dominion through myriad television receivers in its subjects' living rooms. The use of a recorded video image, looped through a closed circuit, seems to mimic the changed relationship between Crown and parliament since that time: the supposed democratic power of the people still in thrall to the spectacle of monarchy, yet critically monitoring, watching for any slip in the mask. 
Situated in the second gallery space, 'The Nature of Their Joy' seems to share an approach with the first work: that of scrutiny of a face, trying to unlock the emotional significance of an ambiguous expression. At either end of the gallery are two large-scale transparencies, mounted on light boxes, the images follow a concave curved plane, like the surface of a lens. Superimposed titles inform the viewer that these are images of crowds celebrating in London at the outbreak, and cessation of the first world war respectively. The photographs have been manipulated, the artist framing certain faces from the crowd, picking them out from the mass in the picture field. 
I found myself going back and forth between the two, trying to discern any differences in the expressions on people's faces. A fruitless task: there are differences between individual faces, but these are diluted by the crowd, and by the granular distortions of the enlarged images. The artist is exploring the difficulty of interpreting media, in this case the photographic document. 
To the right, on plinths ranged along the gallery space, is a series of cases housing portable microfiche readers. They are connected by a loop of transparent plastic tubing, which passes through the projection beams intended to illuminate microfilm. Clear fluid from a large bell jar in the centre of this strange apparatus is pumped around the loop. On closer inspection, the jar is seen to contain tiny negatives. Carried by the current, faces are seen fleetingly, magnified on the small screens. They trace paths across the screens in turn, like figures passing a window, never quite making a clear, still image. 
A label on the jar announces 'images in solution'. As the pieces of film are washed, rub against each other and the pipes, they literally begin to disintegrate. Symbolically linking the two polar opposites, war and peace: with an arcane, obsolete apparatus allowing the viewer to inspect and magnify image fragments. The use of mechanisms that simulate scientific processes of observation, analysis and evaluation posit the masses as data. The behaviour of crowds, and of society, the process of history itself as a fluid dynamic, particles in movement. 
The soundtrack that accompanies this installation was constructed from two recorded loops, rainwater on a roof and a football crowd. Both are slowed down, mixed together to form a wave like roar. A melancholic ambience fills the space, articulating a sense of loss, of inevitable change and decay. The artist has described this piece as an attempt to express society's loss of control to the machine. The mechanised slaughter of the war replaced humans and horses, allowing the fighting to continue much longer, beyond human limits. He points to the use of redundant technologies such as the 'Commuter II' microfiche readers, replaced by laptop computers almost as soon as they were manufactured, as evidence that this process continues to accelerate. Images, people, societies, are transformed into just so much information.
Despite their apparent simplicity, these are complex, multi-layered works. They act like catalysts for thought - the viewer making links between the images, sounds, materials, and apparatus. As such it would be easy to criticise the artist for leaving meaning too 'open to interpretation', but Stones has focused on a narrow range of imagery, successfully directing the viewer gently towards certain conclusions. Stones is questioning the authority and veracity of the media and image making itself, the impossibility of a fixed meaning in art or science.
It is genuinely refreshing to see an artist working through political issues, yet not succumbing to glib posturing, or single issue tub thumping. It has been some time since I have experienced works by an artist this rigorous in intellect, and conveying a powerful yet subtle political critique.
 
 

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Gimmie two sounds and I'll make you a universe
Robert H. King takes a stroll through the new electronic soundscape

Live, experimental music has not had much of a presence in Scotland and given the number of people involved in one way or another (musicians, DJ's, record labels, magazines, fanzines...) it is an area that needs promoting. Stirling Arts has realised that locally, and within Scotland, there are many people (of all ages) involved in technology driven music. Working from this grass roots base, and as part of their arts development plans for Stirling, they have embarked on an ambitious concert programme that aims to bring together local and international musicians and champion a new approach to music development in an area often considered difficult and elite. They hope to work closely with other like-minded organisations such as the London Musicians Collective, in bringing many artists to this country for the first time. This is something which paid off recently with two sell-out performances from Death Ambient (USA/Japan) and Ground Zero featuring Otomo Yoshihide (Japan).

Over the past few weeks the more discerning music magazines have carried articles on the 'invisible soundtrack' or what might be described as the art of composing sound for the 'inner cinema'. This is nothing (entirely) new, musicians have been working in this area for a great number of years but with the more recent developments in portable digital recording technology, and indeed with the miniaturisation of the everyday walkman, the potentials of recording the environment and incorporating this within studio-based work to have it played back in the soundscape are only now starting to make a notable impression. Reading through the press releases and sleeve-notes of the majority of the CD's that arrived for review revealed a wealth of sound sources other than the lists of conventional instruments. The works reviewed here are pushing the envelope of established idioms and act as pointers to new possibilities in sound.
"Relief from the racket of everyday life" proclaims a flyer accompanying an impressive batch of CD's from Nottingham based Em:t. Housed in luxurious nature photography Digi-paks, these recordings have been spatially expanded: a 3-D sound imaging system which when listened to with headphones (or on your walkman) give you a sense of being placed inside the recordings. The seamless compilation Em:t 1197 is an excellent introduction to the sonic world of this innovative label, opening with a spiralling Laurie Anderson-esque piece of pop narrative groove from Richard Bone that flows into inner gamelan atmospherics courtesy of Woob, pulsing electro loops and onboard jazz tactics from International Peoples Gang and 'Waterpump' by Dallas Simpson: a field recording of Simpson walking through the undergrowth and over stones to an outdoor waterpump which throughout its 12 minutes does have you feeling that you are there, involuntary scratching at the sounds of insects and constantly removing the headphones convinced that there really is running water in the house. This set of 9 aural snapshots has been curated with an attention to detail that is sadly lacking in a great many similar ventures. Essential.
Also from Em:t is the debut album by Slim, 0097 (there are no titles for these releases, just name and catalogue number) a smooth, seductive collection of polished urban exotica that blends drum 'n' bass, slow funk, hazy ambient textures and lush keyboards with hauntingly evocative female vocals. Another aspect of this album that sets it apart is the careful use of incidental sounds and voices that float teasingly in the background, again taking us back to the cinematic angle hinted at by many musicians. Instant and irresistible.
Last years Freeform album Elastic Speakers was criminally overlooked by the supposed 'forward thinking' alternative music press, but despite this Simon Pyke has returned with a continuous stream bombardment of hyper velocity textures and impressions in the shape of 'Heterarchy' (Worm Interface SE01CD). Pykes skill lies in his ability to hijack sounds from the real world (the sound of bottles vibrating together on 'Late Surface' for example) and mutating them in ways that push the technology to new possibilities. Heterarchy creates a personal inner space with slabs of noise expanding and contracting with each digital minute ushering the listener into something vast and at times claustrophobic, whilst probing microscopic rhythms get under the skin and implode at uneasy intervals. Freeform are taking a fresh route in the path of experimental electronics and as this does not embrace current trends and fads he has a difficult journey ahead of him, but this lack of engagement with any 'scene' is precisely what places Heterarchy in a class of its own. Challenging and vital.
The work of Benge is on similar ground to Freeform in that he is producing material that refuses to be labelled, although he does go part of the way in helping by titling his album 'Beautiful Electronic Music' (Expanding Records- expandcd 296) and EP 'Polyrythmic Electronica' (expandcd 397). Listening to these I am reminded of an old Japanese custom (no longer practised as far as I am aware) in which prior to an outdoor gathering, the host would place chirping insects and small birds in bamboo cages which in turn were hidden amongst the gardens display so as to relax the guests with their lilting sounds. Benge takes you on a stroll through his electronic garden and invites you to listen out for the gently spiralling pulses and tones to be found amidst the floating textural soundwalls and rapidly shifting cross fades of loops, pulses and heartbeat rhythms. Each track (identified only by its time) is a different caged sound that continues to evolve with each passing, catching the possibility of something if it was left to escape. Repeated listenings outdoors on a walkman revealed new insects previously unheard but most welcome. Engaging and one to watch out for.
Brume vs Aphasia (Atmoject, AtmoCD1) can only be compared to what it must be like having an eardrum removed with no anaesthetic whilst someone whispers words of comfort in the other. Harsh, intense waves of electronics flow into moments of almost sheer silence and calm. Digital surgery being performed on naturally occurring resonating chambers soon make way for the post operative relaxation sounds of fire, wood, stones and melting snow. "Use volume with caution" advise the sleeve-notes, too late, my ears may never be the same again.
Sheffield based Discus have been quietly producing a steady flow of non linear improvised, experimental recordings for a number of years now but the release of Martin Archer's 'Ghost Lily Cascade (Discus 4CD) should see them making in-roads to a wider audience. Archer has taken the structure of solo synthesiser pieces and distributed these to nine other musicians to create instrumental lines 'in their own time, in their own locations' then re-assembling them in a series of 'chance' encounters with his computer. What has emerged is a rich, complex, yet at times simplistic miasma of timbrel soundscapes. Sustained echoing chords and computer based drone reveries interweave perfectly with the dark, subtle improvisations of the source recordings. Archer has managed to produce a unique blend of control and spontaneity that remarkably manages to stear clear of studio constraints. 
Bruce Gilbert (of the seminal, Wire) has taken the concept of the spoken word album to another level with 'The Haring- (WMO5CDL). Exquisitely packaged in a luxurious box with Polaroid inserts this is an intriguing collage of Gilbert's own readings, recordings of market stalls, unidentifiable noise, stream of consciousness dictation into a hand held recorder and voice manipulations. What Gilbert has achieved here is a confusing but compelling 'sound diary' that can only be likened to picking up tantalising snippets of conversations as you pass through a crowd, honing in on one only to be led of with another. Gilberts voice is relaxed and indeed he has mastered the art of lulling the listener into a false sense of security before rushing in with shards of electronic noise. Baffling but compelling.
WMO is a label that has been set up to make available the archive recordings from the various members of Wire. To date they have issued a stream of early recordings, previously unheard slices of pure experimentation and embarked on a series of 'various artists play Wire' CD's, the first being 'Whore' (WMO4CD) featuring Lush, Main Scanner and 18 others which demonstrates the impact and influence the band have had for almost two decades.
'Brawling in an art hangout' (Lime Green Yellow Recording Company- LGY005) by Pan Techno Icon is a quirky blend of abstract pop electronica and techno minimalism that has been influenced by the transatlantic ideas of American and European music exchanges. 'Brawling...' has discernible traces of the US club scene but what is more prevalent perhaps is the influence of mid eighties electro-pop experimentation from the likes of The Normal, Fad Gadget, The The and even Blancmange. This is no slight, for that period produced some ground breaking work that paved the way for a great many artists today. A refreshing mix of contemporary beats and hazy nostalgia. Also from Lime Green is 'Experimental clothing stories' by Ch.... Inspired by cartoons and animated violence this is the berserker animators machinations of break beats skipping along the malevolent yellow brick lane whilst loony tune drum 'n' bass and inwardly spiralling dark ambient textures force their way into moments of surreal quiet all fuelled by low level bass frequencies and brain pounding beats. Bedtime stories for the deranged.
Always to the rescue of your inner calm are Tuu whose latest offering 'Mesh' (Fathom- 11078-2) is 52 minutes of drifting cavernous spatiality. The layers of ancient bells, bowls, flute, clay pots and water drums flow along on a tide of harmonium and synthesisers creating a soothing shamanistic tranquility. Tuu have shaken of the 'ethno-ambient' label that had been placed on them and moved into a new space entirely their own, one where the ever present repetitious water drum pulses are interspersed with the faint chimes of Tibetan singing bowls and the breathy insistance of the ney flute, perfectly interweave to create sensations of light, space, colour and harmony. They are absorbed in the idea of creating the perfect inner sanctuary where drones and resonant loops suspend time just long enough for the listener to restore their mind to some semblance of order in a chaotic world. This is their most accomplished work to date and worthy of everyones attention. 

Contacts:
Atmoject Aldersyde, Station Rd, Banchory, Kincardineshire AB31 5XX. 
Discus P.O. Box 658, Sheffield S10 3YR. 
Em:t Square Centre, Alfred St North, Nottingham NG3 1AA.
Expanding Records P.O. Box 130, Loghton, Essex IG10 1AY. 
Lime Green Yellow Recording Company 
P.O. Box 2023, Glastonbury, Somerset BA6 9FE. 
Tuu Archive, P.O.Box 1035, Windsor, Berks SL4 3YP.
WMO P.O. Box 54, Hitchin, Herts SG4 7TQ. 
Worm Interface 4 Berwick St, London W1V 3RG. 
Title appropriation courtesy of DJ Spooky.

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Duane Hanson(1925-96)
Saatchi Gallery, London April 1997
Matthew Lewis

The security guard in the gallery leans awkwardly against a wall. His eyes are not vigilant but distant, reflecting, perhaps, on the miserable existence which has led to his present state of being. Not far away, an American couple, kitted out in the garish colours of their Summer clothes gaze upwards to an exhibit, their faces belying no emotion other than boredom. To this extent they are like many tourists, force feeding themselves with culture for which they have no genuine interest but which they will enjoy talking about in retrospect in the comfort of their own home while passing the photos around. It's Sunday: it must be the Saatchi Gallery.
If you follow the tourists' line of vision, you will notice that there is no exhibit in front of them. They, like the Security guard, and 15 other life-size characters are the exhibits: sculptures made from varying combinations of polychromed bronze, polyvinyl, fibreglass and everyday accessories. Duane Hanson's ordinary Americans are frighteningly realistic replications of people whose complacency with their own meaninglessness has bypassed angst to arrive at a condition of accepted pre-mortal purgatory.
The resemblance to real people is so acute that one feels uncomfortable looking at them closely, as though one is invading their personal space. Unlike most works of art which, when put in a gallery, are emphasised as being just that, Hanson's figures blend unobtrusively with the often unanimated visitors. The tourists, the guard and the cleaner fit into the environment very easily but even the sunbather, with her subtly reddening tan, is such a presence that it is easy to exclude the gallery environment from the overall effect. Most of the visitors - cultured types of course - ignored the stare of the flea-market vendor and peruse, from a do-not-touch distance, with fidgeting hands, the books on her table. This is quite different from the hyper-real parade of stars at Madame Tussauds. Static sculptures cannot be animated, so Hanson has overcome this obstacle to his pursuit of Realism by depicting people who have become, through the weariness of life, unanimated. For this reason, the baby in the stroller, too young to have lost her soul, is the least effective of the pieces.
Hanson's attention to detail was enabled by making full body casts of his subjects and extends to the tiny lined squares on the skin which we only notice on ourselves if we peer closely and, apparently, to the genitalia, although the most intimate glance I got was of Rita the waitress's breast and bra cup exposed by an undone button on her overalls.
Apart from admiring Hanson's extraordinary 'craftsmanship', we must question our intentions in visiting this exhibition and the unquestionable satisfaction in doing so. These ordinary people are not unlike the ordinary people we have sat with on the tube and walked past on the street in order to come to the gallery and pay £3.50 to see more of the same. And, for the financially insane, a £15 catalogue to see photographs of models of people. One reason, after overcoming the initial embarrassment of offending an inanimate object, is that we can confront them at point-blank range and scrutinise them with the intensity of a philatelist as we have probably never done to a living (or dead) human being.
It is not the age-stretched elbow skin or the jogger's veined and freckled balding head which declare the humanity of the sculptures, but the forlorn expressions of people consumed by their mundane jobs and routines. Even the young shopper, laden with bags of new clothes, looks quite unmoved by her day out. The old couple on the bench sit quite apart, looking as though they left each other years ago. The jogger, who is keen on keeping his health and the only exhibit which is not overweight, is going bald, needs glasses, is about to become sunburnt and has had his run curtailed by a blister.
These are unheroic mortals who have been made immortal by being frozen in a moment of time, yet their expressions are unafraid, ready for death whenever it may arrive. If the sculptures were aware of their entrapment in this permanent moment one feels they would not care.

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Open War
David Burrows

12.30, May 2, on a visit to Material Culture at the Hayward Gallery I was greeted by a considerable police presence at the door of the exhibition. Insults and expletives were being exchanged on this sweltering day. A bomb scare? No, just some disgruntled Marxist students from Middx. University who on expecting to find in Material Culture, at last, an exhibition with a dialectical twist, discovered instead a show about sculpture. Their noisy impromptu protest was short lived. I paid my £5 and went in.
Material Culture promised a survey of British object-based work spanning 1980-97, a period that seemed to have a special significance given the fall from office of the Conservative party the night before. The security guards appeared menacing: nervous and unsmiling, bulges under their left armpits, they watched through the narrow slits of half closed eyes. The most alarming feature of Material Culture was not the impression of increased security but an intense feeling of deja vu; an effect created firstly by the familiarity of the art works on display and secondly by the customary pluralism of exhibitions payrolled by the big cheeses of the London art world. Special agents Greg Hilty and Michael Archer, the curators of Material Culture, attempted to iron out the contradictions and approaches.
The resources of the South Bank were put at the service of the two masters of mis-information. Their numerous acts of propaganda included an affordable catalogue which contained a user's guide explaining the themes of the exhibition. Small, square in shape and containing 45 black and white photographs of artworks from each participating artist, this catalogue was widely sought and read. Not everything went according to plan though. Hilty's and Archer's hidden agenda contained within (the reading of recent artworks through an 80s agenda in support of flagging quasi-formalist sculptural tradition of 'questioning what an object is') was beginning to implode. Material Culture received criticism from all manner of publications.
The curators suggested that the exhibition was staged as a conversation between works. An example of one such imagined conversation was described as follows:
"Wilding's Echo and Turk's Pimp, while not necessarily shown side by side, demand to be compared here. Both are sculptures of highly polished metal, occupying similar floorspace and volume; both cold and highly sensual, they combine transparency and containment, in an emotional and not merely formal sense; both have been made with the help of industrial manufacturers, and both are among the respective artists' defining works."

Hilty's and Archer's conspiracy was beginning to come apart at the seams. The comparison between Wilding and Turk was a desperate choice as Turk is part of a recent initiative among artists to address questions of identity and, in Turk's own specific project, to address the legacy of the readymade and past critiques of the culture industry; while Wilding makes sculptures exploring interior and exterior space. Echo, constructed from slotted metal strips, is a sculpture concerned with volume, mass and infinity. By comparison, Turk named a large, black roadside skip Pimp, a reference perhaps to the expensive cars with smoke black windows that cruise the streets of London? While Turk's use of this stereotype is alarming, it does place him firmly in a discourse that is a million miles away from Wilding and her fellow travellers (Marcus Taylor; perspex fridges, Rachel Whiteread; negative sculptures of domesticity, Richard Deacon; formalist garden sculpture, Kapoor; mystical phenomenology). This negative-formalist faction has close ties to the Revolutionary Army of Structuralist Formalism (RASF) whose commander in chief, Richard Wentworth, had a high profile in Material Culture. The RASF were strongly represented by Abigail Lane, Damian Hirst, Ceal Floyer, Julian Opie and Simon Patterson. Sitting uneasily along side these artist's work were contributions from Susan Hiller, Lucia Nogueria, Sarah Lucas and Rebecca Warren, but any conversation between the artworks in the exhibition was governed by post-modernist protocol. By placing the various artworks in seemingly random relationships, any shared or contradictory contexts, attitudes and influences were carefully erased: the discourses that have evolved around artists' works over the last two decades were effectively silenced.
Despite the smell of panic in the air the Hayward did feature significant and engaging works. Bill Woodrow's early disfigured consumer objects and Tony Cragg's rainbow plastic floor piece Spectrum stood out as did Roderick Buchanan's Chasing 1000 and Sinn Féin. In this latter piece from 1990 Buchanan upset the geometry of a white plinth by inscribing the Gaelic phrase in pencil upon the face of the plinth. The accent above the 'e' creates a ridge on the top of the plinth unsettling a white tea cup which balances precariously.
Sarah Lucas and Rebecca Warren both showed pieces that suggested narratives of domestic life. Is suicide genetic? by Lucas presented a motorcycle crash helmet made from cigarettes placed on a smoke blackened arm chair, a burnt offering to her interest in clichés about life, pleasure and life harming habits. Rebecca Warren's Every Aspect of Bitch Magic was a spell made out of household debris arranged on a plinth that included a shard of green glass, a bee in a jar and pants stretched around a stiff white envelope. Warren had made an artwork that appeared to be the kind of construction made when bored or when wasting time. A spell that has significance only for its maker? These last two works refreshingly showed little interest in craft, skill or Radio 4 poetics that dogged some of the other works in the show.
Material Culture, however, was not staged to open up these issues but to maintain an uneasy peace. That the exhibition has so little to say and no position on the differences between the works revealed a lack of nerve. The market success and media status enjoyed by some young artists, who have little in common with the likes of Deacon, Gormley, Opie or Davey, has been troublesome for many commentators and curators. For this reason Material Culture is a timely, if dismal, failure at attempting to deal with art produced in the last 5 years. Diverse practices have emerged in circumstances shaped by a growing interest in vernacular culture and identity amongst artists (which has unfortunately seen the adoption of stereotypes by some), and an unprecedented media interest in young artists, often seen as unproblematic by many of today's practitioners. This change in circumstances does represent a generational shift of positions and concerns which Material Culture was not keen to explore. Others have been more forthright.
Peter Suchin, when writing on Live/Life, astonishingly chastised much of the art on show for being amateur and badly made, and praised work whose production values matched the rigours of critical thought. A misguided nostalgia for the 80s and the professionalism of Neo-Conceptualism perhaps? Adrian Searle, writing about the same show worried about beauty and brevity and many thought that too much attention was being given to a scene rather than concentrating on the quality of the work, Live/Life being a telling example of this.
Quality is the issue here. It unites those who might under other circumstances find themselves in opposing camps, and behind this call for quality is a belief that the production of art and culture is an ethical activity. In comparison to Material Culture, Live/Life, despite its faults, placed an emphasis on the contingencies of recent art production by involving independent art spaces, exhibiting magazines and connecting different generations of artists through collaboration. Material Culture had little interest in such a dialogical space despite the claims that it was structured through conversations.
20 seconds of my visit to Material culture will stay with me for a long time. One of the Middx. University students managed to regain access to the exhibition; dressed in denim and wearing Dolce and Gabana sunglasses he passed easily for a German tourist. The student joined a group being conducted around the gallery by an artist. He listened intensely and then raised his hand to ask a question.
His dry lips parted: "A large percentage of the works on show are either owned by the Saatchi Gallery or the property of the Lisson Gallery, I've heard of a one party state but..."
He never finished his sentence. Ten bullets were pumped into his chest raising red craters on his denim shirt. In slow motion he fell against the white wall, smearing a path of red blood as his dead body fell to the floor. Gasps from the group were quickly silenced. All exits were sealed. Two security guards stood motionless, arms outstretched holding objects of highly polished metal, occupying similar volume: both cold and sensual. They had delayed shooting only for a second and then carried out their duty, just as they had been instructed. One guard, his mouth covered by a bushy ginger moustache, raised his radio to his lips and croaked: "Dead terrorist in gallery one." Within the hour the only trace of the event were the small blood speckles that now decorate Richard Deacon's Art for Other People. It never made the papers.
 

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LEAF: Liverpool East European Electronic Arts Forum
12-14 April 1997
Sean Cubitt

Alexei Shulgin, the first speaker at the conference organised by Iliana Nedkova for the Foundation for Arts and Creative Technology, described himself as "the director of a fake organisation I established myself". It was a good introduction to the East European world of electronic media arts, a combination of rough pragmatism - being 'director' of anything is a godsend for visa applications - and unreality which pervaded the debates and presentations of this two-day symposium over the first weekend of Video positive 97.
Shulgin's astute classification of net art into those that respond to the net and those that intervene in it - his examples were JoDi and Heath Bunting's irrational org - was the thin end of a very large wedge. We are still at the beginnings of genuine internat internet, and the US domination of the scene has closed our eyes, especially in the UK, to what options other traditions can open up for us. Perhaps this is the legacy of the cold war. We never knew, or scarcely got a chance to find out about, the massive surrealist cultures of Eastern Europe. We were told by our own cultural commissar that socialist realism ruled the roost, that we wouldn't be interested, that it was all escapism and propaganda. As a result, we only saw those miserable movies by Wajda and Zanussi, and never saw the glorious surrealism of Wojceck Has. Svankmajer was the only representative of Czech surrealism with a rep in the West, and that really only after the beginning of the velvet revolution. Our sense of Eastern Europe has been tarnished by our artistic customs officers: galleries, museums, critics, distributors. The net begins to change this, perhaps, but only if we can reorganise our mindsets to grasp that there is something quite different, quite novel, quite surprising and, to use one of the conference's buzzwords, quite estranging about the emergent East-West relation.
Shulgin comes from a delirious legacy of anarchistic nihilist comedy, and authentic and living Dadaism, of which punk's po-faced situationism was only a pallid shadow. This kind of reverent play, this artful cunning, a million miles removed from the fatuous postmodernism of Koons and the neo-dada of the wealthy and fashionable galleries, kept on re-emerging in the oddest places. Tomas St. Auby presented his project for an International Parallel Union of Telecommunications (IPTU). The real International Union allocates the electromagnetic spectrum on an international basis in the interests of trade and governance. The IPTU sees this as Big Brother, and itself as Big Sister. In place of the promotion of consumerism, it calls for a general strike of consumption, seeing in the deaf-blind the new core of a new humanity. Taste, you see, has not much to do with it.
Marko Peljhan, arguing that Bosnia is currently the most surveyed patch of ground on the planet, proposed a counter-surveillance based on the military principles of the 'peace-keeping' force, the weak learning from the tools of the strong. Strategy, command, control and communications, surprise, initiative, mobility and the simple goals of an army: these would be the watchwords of an independent satellite communications network. Serious? Or a dark comedy? Both, especially in what, from the floor, was described as the commodification of space in the nation state.
Nationality too was a central factor in the new Europe. As your correspondent began to learn something of the difficulties and opportunities facing our colleagues, some of the mists began to lift. About the Soros Foundation, and the network of centres it has established across Eastern Europe, for example. George Soros, the billionaire trader, has set up centres where training and access, and the possibility of achieving substantial works, have become available to a large number of participants. But in certain cases, notably in Croatia, the centres have become the targets of verbal and occasionally physical attack. They have been identified as invasive purveyors of ideologies and attitudes at odds with the nationalist ideologies of power blocs and political formations, leading youngsters away from traditional cultures and values.
You have to sense a certain ambiguity among even the beneficiaries of the Soros Foundation. Is it true that the West is driving a vast wedge of individualism and exploitation through the narrow wires of the internet? Eric Klutenberg from Talinn raised these questions poignantly, critiquing the February 1995 Cyberspace Declaration of Independence penned by John Perry Barlow and published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Their attack on the US Telecommunications Reform Act in the name of a post-national, post-legal, post-political individualism was naive, simplistic, reactionary, even Cartesian, linked to gnostic hatred of the body, and profoundly anti-social. These values, too, have a claim on Eastern Europe, where freedom has become an almost theological category of thought, something perpetually demanded, yet never experienced.
Conflictual intellectual traditions demand new modes of cultural evolution. If 'communication' was, under the old regime, synonymous with propaganda, and the 'public sphere' with the state, what can be made of a new order in which the commercialisation of the media means that papers will not run stories critical of advertising or advertisers? Where the old state supports for artists have crumbled, but no new commercial infrastructure has come about? In which, after all, the state TV is often the best channel for the distribution of new work, despite everything that it has been associated with in the past?
What else has been lost? A number of speakers made pointed calls for a recognition of the changed experience and role of women in the old Comecon societies. Nina Czgledy noted the loss of women in public life; Mare Tralla noted the loss of an old, paternalist and tokenist but nonetheless effective Communist Party commitment to women's representation. Now, she identifies a 'culture of silence', in which representation in the political sense is replaced by representation as 'toys' and 'spinsters', leaving open only an ironic space for womens' engagement in public culture. Without, as Nina Czegledy again put it, "a conceptual apparatus to name what I would now call gender politics".
Geert Lovink traced us a history of 'independent' and 'alternative' media, arguing that the former came to an end in 1989, when the samizdat logic (whereby cultural power was inversely proportional to economic scale) became a victim of its own success. 'Alternative' media was always a journalistic tag. In their place, he called for a tactical media, democratised, flexible, diffuse, semantically defined and independent of platform, demanding a kind of sharing of resources which neither corporate nor individualistic models can offer, and requiring a plurality of financial models. In the case of Bulgaria, investigated by several speakers, there exists a software infrastructure. But the authoritarianism associated with being Comecon's central economy for software development also led to a culture of hacking and copyright theft (not to mention viral programming). On the one hand, this allowed a thriving electronic music culture, seen as innocuous by the authorities. On the other, it leads Luchezar Boyadjiev to another Dadaist art-plot: why build new networks and online exhibition spaces when you can hack into the Virtual Louvre and hang your works there? Why defend human rights alone, when the internet is clearly the beginnings of a trades union movement for computers?
Speaker after speaker, especially on the second day, offered insights in the form of demonstrations, performances and screenings. Janos Sugar voiced a doubt many of us felt, and feel at such occasions: were we building a new East/West, rich/poor paradigm, an impoverished and stereotypical multiculturalism? The best argument against this doubt was the work that followed it. Riszard Kluszinski showed pages from a group project which included some of the most intelligent hypertext I have yet to see, a graphical animation stack of e.e. cummings' 'leaf' poem. Kathy Rae Huffman and Eva Wohlgemuth talked about their online dinner parties, which take the convivial space of women's talk and the from of the recipe book as cultural record to build new feminist technological connectivity. Representatives from www.opennet.org talked about the importance of Real Audio in the fight against state censorship of the airwaves, Lev Manovitch described his Diamat Productions, with their Theory plug-ins, and Melentie Pandelovski presented an interactive net project based on the premise that Alexander the Great survived long enough to secure the bases for a unified Empire, neither Christian nor Judaic, East of the Bosphorus. The site raised questions of nationalism again, especially in the heated zone of dispute between Greece and Macedonia (FYROM): the map excludes both territories, and asks about a Europe whose hearty is neither Mediterranean nor Atlantic.
But perhaps of all the screened works, the one that made the most immediate and perhaps the most lasting impression was the talk by Enes Zlatar, who showed two pieces. The first was a banal piece of home video, two lads skiing down a street to the accompaniment of some dweebling pop tune. It was only as Zlatar explained that the music hid the silence, punctuated only by machine gun fire and cannon, of the height of the siege of Sarajevo, that the street should have been busy with shoppers but was covered with snow, and that skiing was an expression of longing for hills and pleasures put out of bounds by the war, that his exordium made sense: 'Video became our dream'. By contrast, we then watched a tape of a guy talking to camera, outdoors, about his desensitization to the suffering of the war; cut to scenes of hospital wards and fearful amputations; cut back to the monologist, now indicating a prone figure behind him in the middle distance of the shot: 'You know, I don't even know if that body is alive or dead, and I don't seem to care. And you know what's really strange', he added, with a pause both chilling and exhilarating, 'I feel GREAT!'. For Bosnians, even after the war, there are only three countries you can visit without a visa and all the hassle that goes with them. In this context, the internet takes on these dimensions of the siege: of the dream of escape and virtual travel, and as the site of an intensely local working-through of the particularities of a very specific culture --one from which the artists had already fled, leaving the people to make their own art.
Discussions raged, over drinks, in bars, through the night, at performances and at the special screening of work from Eastern Europe held as part of the festival at the Cornerhouse, Manchester. As Mike Stubbs from Hull Time Based Arts said on the second morning, "This is the first time I've woken up on a Sunday morning saying, Oh Good, the conference is still on". You felt that the moves between political platforms and computer platforms was moving the ground under your feet. Screened works like Czegledy's 'Tryptych' and Peter Forgacs' 'Wittgenstein Tractatus' would blow your socks off one way; the interplay between artistic ambition and pragmatic doggedness in the establishment of the Maribot women's festival would blast them back on again. Not a penny dropped without the floorboards being removed first. We have a huge amount to learn about the relations between nationalism and art, internet and communication, software theft and dadaism.
Perhaps nowhere more than in the UK, or more specifically in its little nations, do we have need of these experiences, where the ingrowing national ideologies of Little Englanders and the more kailyard wings of Scottish Nationalists have come so close to power. An early contribution from the floor suggested that the transnational, the parochial and the individualist need to be rethought in a new way: as the translocal. we have so much to learn. and we need to offer help gracefully. PDQ.

END NOTE: Edited proceedings from the LEAF97 conference are available at http://www.personal.unet.com/~gas/leaf.htm , complete with hotlinks to sites and contact addresses. The next major event discussing these issues will be Ostranenie, to be held in Bauhaus, Dessau. It is hoped that there will be a major Eastern European strand at ISEA98 in Liverpool and Manchester.
Sean Cubitt
(s.cubitt@livjm.ac.uk)
 

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Women on Art Symposium
Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow
Lorna J. Waite

The passage of the last century has been a long journey in the history of the writing of the consciousness of women. This consciousness is both historical and particular, recurrent and mutable, heterogeneous, in relation to the particularity of the political, cultural and economic contours of the inscribed mores of women's lives.
Every struggle, language of resistance, so to speak, is of its time and place, an echo, a continuity with past struggle, but reactive, responsive to other external forces which do not solely originate with questions of gender; but with other categories of identity which shape the expression and reception and production of power in myriad forms in public and private life.
The articulation and evolution of feminist thinking this century is often a fragmented story, always being found again and restored to a significant place which may ensure its recovery and endurance but perhaps not. Structural inequalities which effect women's lives remain persistent despite obvious changes in their form and maintenance, Virginia Woolf's assertion that women require 'a room of one's own and £500 a year' still holds true but perhaps translates into the contemporary equivalent of 'a right to a house, no glass ceilings, support for carers, job security and decent wages for work'.
The desire to discuss the contradiction between historical progress by women and the success of the women's movement set against the persistent presence of the institutionalised sexism was the premise of the Women On Art Symposium held at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow. The Symposium, it was claimed, would be the place to discuss such continuing inequalities and gendering of power relations within 'cultural industries' which undervalue the major contribution of women's labour, to their social, economic and cultural function and value. It would aim "to address a number of key challenges for women working in the cultural industries at the present time. The main areas of debate would cover areas such as:
-- Gender and segregation; why certain jobs within the cultural industries are automatically sanctioned as 'female' and others, frequently those with greater promotional prospects, creative input and financial rewards as 'male'.
-- Working within the cultural industries in Britain today in relation to other European countries; are women forced to adopt a male pattern of working life which does not accommodate their roles as primary carers? Research has shown that the majority of women are demanding a personal/professional balance to the quality of their lives; what are the steps towards changing this culture?
-- The importance of creativity and lateral thinking for women within their own professional cultural environment; are women influencing methods of training and education within this field to the extent of changing the working culture? Can we look at role models for women within cultural industries from outside Britain, in particular the USA and Southern Africa.

The creation of a public space to debate such questions concerning women is necessary, particularly given the promise of the socio-economic analysis which underpinned the rationale of the symposium. However, before discussing some of the features of the symposium, the socio- economic audit of gender equality must be applied to the symposium itself. Simply put, why was it so expensive to attend? How many women working in Glasgow and other locations in Scotland could afford to attend the conference when the fee was so prohibitive? If one purpose of the symposium was to form some continuing forum then it ought to have striven to include the participation of as many women as possible in as many roles and relationships to the arts and particularly from within the city to which it has civic responsibilities. Attendance fees of this sort smack of the spectacle of a middle class philanthropy which eschews the economic and financial austerity, funding cuts and under-resourcing which characterises the working lives of people in organisations the symposium was meant to target. The symposium therefore excludes those with the least economic resources. An ironic fact.
Anyway, if you somehow could afford to be there, the essence of the symposium's themes were perhaps most effectively and interestingly explored in the contributions of Sue Innes, Carol Becker, Angela Kingston and the Goat Island Performance Group.
Sue Innes' talk, Widening the Cracks and Avoiding the Chasms, was a scholarly presentation of a sociological analysis of the types and forms of social change which have happened in the working and domestic lives of women since the advent of suffrage. This was set against both the cracking face of the dominant hegemony, male defined, with which it is in conflict and its recurring features of exclusion despite advances by women to break down its appearance. She quoted from her book Making It Work, 
"what has changed least...is the habit of measuring things against a male defined standard; we still use definitions of work and progress, what counts as success, the place of caring, and appropriate behaviour along a false axis of reason to emotion, which are a consequence of male pre-eminence (dominance) in the public sphere".
The split between public and private life is still considered the role of women to resolve. State legitimisation of equality issues has the face of ineffective equal opportunities legislation exacerbated by the continuing lack of flexible, adequate childcare and employment practices which take account of the care responsibilities of its employees. Despite this discrimination, women's relationship to themselves, she argued, "had changed but an awful lot hadn't, re women's family work and responsibilities and access to resources (low pay etc.) and also questions of backlash and the 'crisis of masculinity'".
Paradoxically, the grater presence of women in the labour market is synchronous with the redefinition and redistribution of capital and the creation of the flexible, multi-skilled, multi-part-time, contract culture of the present pay-as-little-as-you-can labour economy. Economic differentials between women have been exacerbated and there is a widening gap between women defined by class, ethnicity, age, and motherhood and use value of their particular occupation.
Despite the contradictions of the economic evidence, Sue Innes argued there has been an 'epistemic shift' which had seen perceptions and values change and spaces, psychological and material, where women could assert new values which are neither drawn from traditional prescriptions of 'femininity' nor from uncritically adopting male personae in working life which alienates other women.
This latter point--of the nature of female behaviour in positions of power--is the meeting place of the public and private self for women. The qualities, tensions and relationships between the inner self and internal authority and the external self and female expressions of leadership were one of the areas of analysis undertaken by Carol Becker, Dean of the Institute of Chicago, in her inspiring talk which, for myself, was the key contribution of the symposium.
The power of her thesis lay in the importance of a psychological analysis of institutional behaviour by men and women and the exploration of the symbolic meaning of those institutions to the identity of its community. It is one of the tasks of a feminist project to encourage imagination of leadership roles, yet in a manner that does not collude with patriarchy nor use power in an unconscious, unhealthy dynamic to repair unacknowledged wounds which result in bullying, harassment, emotional abuse at work, hierarchical non-nurturant ego-laden environments in which people in power project onto others their unresolved conflicts. If women and men were to be good leaders, they must be conscious of their own symbolic role. What is a psychologically healthy working environment for a woman to create? It was essential for women she argued, to develop a public self. A woman in a leadership position must demonstrate her lack of fear of men to other women. She must show other women her comfort with her own authority, owning her decisions and responsibilities. She must not be the 'psychoanalytic monstrous mother' for women will look to her for guidance of how to be comfortable with their own creativity and through this her own sense of entitlement, a giving of psychological permission to be, to develop power and creativity.
Carol Becker articulated her thoughts on leadership with reference to her working class background and her relationship with her father. It was for her more significant in an adult sense: the assumption of equality which characterised her father's treatment of her. In her conjoining of the psychodynamic and the public, her work is reminiscent of Valerie Walkerdine and Carolyn Steedman, work through which women from working class backgrounds can find themselves included.
Other highlights of the symposium were contributions by Angela Kingston and the Goat Island Performance Group from Chicago. In her paper Brushing Sindy's Hair, Angela Kingston informed her ideas on the interiority of 'girlhood' from a psychoanalytic perspective, tracing the lineaments of female identity in its totality as expressed, rehearsed and displayed in the act of play. This centredness of identity was not of an essential femininity, but a deeply sensual and active engagement with the meanings of imaginary places in which the self kept order, was in charge and effective, had power. The sustaining of this sense of self-assurance and efficacy can be difficult for women to do, the obstacles to healthy self-esteem are numerous. It is important for childhood parts to be integrated into the adult woman to create the good mother internal object which it is vital to feel if you wish to mother your own creativity and sense of value despite the fact this does not translate into economic well being for most women.
Lin Hixson and Mathew Goulish of the Goat Island Performance Group from Chicago articulated the phenomenological, philosophical method to the theory and practice of their group. They explore the aggregates of consciousness; sensation, perception, association are the objects of subjective analysis, the constructed unconsciousness the source for the taking apart, digestion and rebuilding of ideas which generate performance work. This 'first principles' approach to creativity eschews an essentialism which interprets experience as solely prescribed by gender and was a contribution to the symposium which had its intellectual and linguistic roots in phenomenology and spirituality.
The symposium featured contributions from many other women across diverse fields of interest; Janet Paisley talked of her life in balancing writing and motherhood, Paddy Higson displayed a shocking lack of preparation and any interest in even thinking about womens' issues in relation to the economy of film and television, Sam Ainsley talked of the lack of women teachers at Glasgow School of Art.
Women On Art is to be welcomed because the paucity of public and political spaces with power which are effective in the elimination of inequalities requires some form of initiative, action, forum for analysis at least. The economic rationalism and the turning of all processes of culture into products in a market place has dominated the economy of the arts, education and health; has created new forms of poverty, inequality, criteria of value. The inequalities in distribution of wealth in the arts merely mirrors the broader societal context in Scotland within which it is located. Curiously, the symposium felt placeless as the particularities of the social, political and economic base of power in the arts in Scotland and the consequences of not having a parliament did not feature much in discussion. If there is to be any radical change in eliminating discrepancies in power, the wider political picture is of great significance to women living and working in Scotland. The potential for a new social and political formation in a Scotland with a parliament should have excited greater enthusiasm in the minds of the organisers.

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Surplus Bodies
The Real, The Virtual and the Work of Witkin
Roberta McGrath

Virtual Reality: the place where flesh goes to die and the electronic body struggles to be born at the fin-de-millennium...1
In this essay I want to think about the fascination contemporary culture, particularly photography, has with the visceral and virtual body. The body is now in a very real sense 'hot' property. No longer marginal it lies at the very centre of scientific and cultural discourse and political and ethical debate. Kroker and Weinstein's definition of VR (cited above) as a transitional space might be as good a place as any from which to consider the current status of the human body and technology. New technologies, that is opto-electronics and their application in science and culture, which increasingly becomes a merging field, raise fundamental questions about who we are, and how our world might be. The body is, along with cyberspace, perceived as a final frontier and increasingly what the body is will depend on how it is represented; on how it is understood; on how we negotiate meaning. 2 This means not just thinking about how we are positioned by discourse, but how we might position ourselves within discourse. 3 It means taking responsibility for the knowledge we produce. Moreover, if we are to provide knowledge adequate to the demands of the present then it is in the here and now that we should begin.
Current discourses about the body and technology are for the most part fetishistic and reductionist accounts of the present; it is not accidental that biological essentialism has been superseded by a facile genetic essentialism which is rarely questioned. Similarly, visual work that takes as its subject 'the body' is on the whole assumed to be politically progressive. I am as wary of this as I am of the critical or historical writing that accompanies the exhibition and publication of such images. This is to say that within postmodernism such questions are repressed. However, they are important if we are to make some sense of the ways in which responses to what are called 'new' (although more accurately not so new technologies) run simultaneously in opposite directions: a projection into the future and a regression to the past.
Few would dispute that we live in a period of rapid social change which has produced a crisis in the real; in representation. If the present seems 'out of control' one assumption is that if we are not in control of the present, then at least in employing the latest electronic technology we can be involved in directing the future. We can be masters of a virtual universe. This is a question of power. It is the mark of a lack of political imagination and a naive faith in the emancipatory qualities of technology that computers have been seized upon as if a postmodern life-raft, a Star-ship Enterprise to beam us out of the present. Within the realm of visual culture a long-discredited essentialism of political commitment has been resurrected arguing yet again that in the right hands, if the right people are wired, freedom is just around the corner.
At the very same moment there has been a plea for a return to the past, to a craft-based master photography as if we can escape from the present through a naive, nostalgic and regressive return to the authentic experience of the photographer-as-sovereign-author working in a pre-postmodern garden before the Fall. These positions are two sides of the same coin. Both are marked by 'nostalgia' whether for future or past. Both share in common the desire to transcend the present by swiftly dispatching all those tiresome economic, political, philosophical and ethical questions that haunt our times, which we seem unable to think about, let alone answer. In this essay I want to explore the ways in which our present postmodern culture is haunted not just by fantasies about the future, but by pre-modern, that is medieval beliefs. I take as my examples medical imaging and art photography. While bodies and technologies have no origins, they do have histories and these need to be traced.
I want to argue that what is repressed in medical imaging returns in the realm of contemporary art. As medical imaging has become more abstract, less meaty, art has become more visceral; more bodily. The techno-futuristic realm of medical imaging provides a framework in which to consider the photographic images of Joel-Peter Witkin. The first epitomises a nostalgia for the future and the latter a yearning for the past. Both are characteristic of postmodernism. Witkin (and many others) exercise tight authorial control. It would, for example, be impossible for the critique that follows to appear alongside his photographs. This is undoubtedly a form of censorship. I primarily focus upon his work and his use of cadavers and body parts as a means to discuss what is a more general trend within the art market. Broadly, the arguments presented here could be applied to other artists such as Hirst or Serrano; to recent publication of photographs from medical and police archives or to artists' illegal acquisition of body parts from morgues in order to make work. Witkin's work is only distinguished by its extremity. Whatever way you look at it there is a market, a trade in bodies and they are not virtual.
This might tell us something about the present popular fascination with medical images of the human body. Medical images, especially abstract images produced by such methods as photomicrography or radiography have largely been ignored by historians of photography. Where they are used by historians of medicine, these images are usually treated as unproblematic illustration. These images have been located in archives; their authors are usually anonymous; access is restricted. Recently, however, computer generated medical imagery has become widely circulated to a keen viewing public. Ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging, tomography are remote technologies with a history rooted in techno-military warfare. The images they produce are seductive and because they offer us so much to see, we marvel at their beauty and so tend to overlook what has been excised. On closer inspection we begin to notice that all traces of bodily disorder, mess, chaos are removed. The desire here is for clean-cut, flattened, soft, seamless imagery. The result is a highly sanitised, orderly vision of the body. A simulated depth is complemented by, which is to say aestheticised by, the use of electronically generated colour, providing an almost hallucinogenic quality. Moreover, vessel, cell or gene is isolated from its ground so that the object in view seems to float alone in space and allows our eye only to focus on this or that element as if totally unrelated to the body. Flesh is reduced to abstract information. It is no longer that the body is fragmented but rather it is dematerialised (technologies such as x-ray and electron microscope played an important role here) and finally disappears, as if the visceral is what we most fear. We could describe this as a kind of postmodern flaying where we are now eager participants in such disciplinary processes and therefore medical images once circulated to a private audience can now be safely shown publicly. They appear in everyday culture as a display of power, not of humans but of intelligent machines. It is the body that becomes a ghost while its pictures are living, teeming with life, even after death.
This more anonymous context is important to an understanding of Witkin's work. He argues that he wants his prints to "look like old photographs that have been hidden in someone's attic and suddenly brought to light". 4 To this end he employs formal theatrical props of nineteenth century photography: the proscenium arch; the use of the curtain, the fetishistic techniques of a dark photographic and fine art printing. The space within the frame is compressed, congested with detail, depthless. This is further emphasised by the use of collaged backdrops. In neo-medieval, or neo-neo-classical spectacle, he conjures up the spectres of Dürer or David, as if to flatter the viewer's art historical knowledge, but also to make us intelligent consumers of what has already been consumed.
This formal ordering is combined with a grotesque content of sutured foetuses, stumps and cadavers in various states of decay thus producing a powerful mingling of the aesthetic and the medical which verges on the pornographic. What once coalesced on the anatomy table, now congeals in the bloody tableaux created in Witkin's studio. This work has a history in anatomical dissection (a more adult version of infantile sadism), religious iconography (with its simultaneous elevation and degradation of women), and pornography (the body as meat). But it is a history of which Witkin cannot speak. Such a history can, however, be traced in wax Venuses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The pose of these female dolls closely resembles that of swooning saints, as well as the standardised pose of pornographic models. Laid out on velvet, satin or silk, like toys they could be opened up and the viewer could see the mysterious organs of the interior, particularly reproductive. For Witkin, the past, like the body can be cut just how one wants. Witkin is also an editor of privately printed books: Masterpieces of Medical Photography, 1987; Gods of Heaven and Earth, 1989; Harm's Way, 1994. In a process of representational asset-stripping, images are wrenched from archives of police, medicine, asylums. Re-assembled and re-contextualised they are beautifully re-printed on matt art paper, bound in cloth and produced in 'limited' editions of 5,000. Witkin is keen to display his academic credentials and commissions scientists, art historians, medics to write essays which lend a specious credibility to his art. Those who had remained below the threshold of vision until the nineteenth century; those classified as 'other' were brought into view so that they could be made to disappear into 'ignoble' archives in what was an act of representational liquidation. Here they are resurrected. What was once tragedy becomes farce. The dead or merely different return not as subjects in their own right, but only as so much grist to the mill of art.
Witkin's preferred technique is to gouge, lacerate, scratch the negatives; the prints are then toned, death is warmed up, faux-foxed, spattered with potassium cyanide, which gives the appearance of decay. The result is a stained and abused image. It shares this distinguishing mark with the pornographic image. Finally, with the use of encaustic the prints are redemptively polished in a bogus act of reparation and sanctification. 5 This simulates the fate of bodies. Witkin becomes a kind of textual anatomist. The skin of the photographic emulsion stands as metaphor for human skin. Bodies once wounded, bound, masked or gagged, are finally killed and chopped up like so many pieces of meat. 6 This is a metaphoric and literal scavenging; a cannibalisation of styles and bodies; a chilling universe in which bodies are collapsed into texts; reality into fantasy.
But bodies are not texts; aesthetics are not ethics any more than virtuality is reality. The bodies and cadavers come from the geographical margins and the recently deregulated markets of eastern block countries which have recently become a sort of playground for Western artists. 7 Bodies become commodities, articles of trade, like any other. They are easy to come by for those with money and power. These bodies, cadavers or human remains, alive or dead, are objects with one last value which can be bought whole or in part. There is a trade in bodies, whereby the poor, while still alive, are forced to sell their organs, their bodies, their children, sometimes their lives. What Witkin produces is a system of representation that reinforces the mercenary logic of a global market economy which is little more than a form of corporate feudalism.
The lie of voyeurism is, of course, that the object agrees to its exhibition. These 'other' surplus bodies, with heads laterally or literally severed can't look back. Those who were once subjects become objects, and in an act of subjugation are made to bear the burden, the sheer material weight of corporeality and finally death so that the artist, and the viewer, can have eternal life.8 In the killing fields of central Europe, or central America, maiming, torture and death are all too close to home and so we prefer our corpses, like history, dressed up.
This is the final irony: Witkin's world is a universe where all boundaries are gone and yet such a world can only exist in one of the most hidebound of institutions: the art gallery, which in the late twentieth century is little more than a showroom for the art market. This market is one with a voracious appetite for indelicacies. The 'waning of affect' as we approach the end of the millennium has led to an increased and as yet unsatisfied demand for butchered bodies and strong meat, so long as it is well hung. We should be more critical.

notes
1 A Kroker and M Weinstein, Data Trash, 1994, p162
2 See D Haraway, 'A Manifesto for Cyborgs', Socialist Review, no. 80, 1985: R Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 1994
3 See S Hall, 'Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation', Framework, no. 36, 1989
4 Interview, Border Crossings, Winter 1990, p17
5 It is Witkin's wife who carries out this last rite.
6 Witkin is keen to emphasise that he does not tamper with the bodies, as if the process of choice of object is not part of the process of making work.
7 Witkin claims his 'moral and ethical stringency' in obtaining access to bodies. Permission, where it cannot be agreed by the person because of reasons of insanity or death is always sought and agreed by doctors as 'representatives of the State'. J-P Witkin, public lecture, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, October 1995. These are bodies which no one has claimed; Head of a Dead Man was a victim of police brutality in Mexico City. More recent pictures are of asylum inmates in Budapest, Hungary. This exhibits a truly remarkable lack of moral judgement and artistic responsibility.
8 '[T]ruthfully they are aspects of my own self', Journal of Contemporary Art, op. cit. 
p112. There is a world of difference between trying to understand the self as other and the narcissism of viewing others as part of oneself.
 

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Art, Science, Economics and Nuthatches
Gavin Jones

Introduction
This essay morphed (cool, I'm in with the under fives) out of the research Marc Lambert and I did for the Edinburgh International Science Festival lectures. Rather than cack-handedly present a précis of all ten lectures, I thought it more appropriate to focus on one of the "emergent structures" of the lectures, a sub-text that ran through all: the epistemological divisions within science. On the one hand there were those whose work seemed to me more akin to the artistic (i.e. assimilative, analogical and essentially--as opposed to peripherally--interdisciplinarian). On the other, there were those whose work was firmly embedded in the laws of (as Richard Dawkins terms it) 'hierarchical reductionism.'
This dialectic (examined in the first part of this essay) is far more applicable to art and artists than any naive description of science's gizmos and weirdness. Boy's toys may be fun for some, but they are best fiddled with behind closed doors.
The distinction between a rationalist determinism and libertarianism has underpinned economic debate for over 200 years now. One of the most curious aspects of the science/arts debate over the last 20 years is how the most vociferous proponents of scientific, hierarchical determinism have tended towards extreme conservative libertarianism in economic areas (Matt Ridley being one of the best examples of this tendency). Visual arts provision, and in particular in the public arts, would appear to be an exact inversion of this tendency: state sponsored libertarianism. In the second section, I argue that current practice would be improved by a lessening of the current pseudo-competitive environment in which the public arts function.
1. Beauty is the Beast
"Art does no longer serve any institutions; it has become autonomous. I can not describe the new situation, since art can not be described. It proves itself only in its performance. First of all, I can feel that something is expected of art and of me, some sort of hope."
Gerhard Richter Interview in Noch Kunst
"So what is reflexivity?...Social scientists have long been concerned that their discipline is markedly different from natural science because the very act of observing economic and social life changes what is being observed."
Will Hutton paraphrasing George Soros 
The State To Come
"...the hierarchical reductionist believes that carburettors are explained in terms of smaller units ...which are explained in terms of smaller units ...which are ultimately explained in terms of the smallest fundamental particles. Reductionism, in this sense is just another name for an honest desire to understand how things work."
Richard Dawkins The Blind Watchmaker

Hierarchical determinism is merely a procedure. It is not, as Dawkins points out akin (in itself) to baby eating or sin. As a procedure it is morally neutral. When applied appropriately it has proven an invaluable tool for our understanding. It is however not the only intellectual process, nor is it the summation of everything that is intrinsically human. In discussing the interface between art and science one needs to be aware of the pitfalls of such an approach. One needs to be aware that whilst morally neutral in itself, the implications of hierarchical determinism are political in the extreme.
In its end oriented, obsessive and exclusive application of the truth, (the truth in this sense being the method of observation as opposed to the observed) the mechanistic wing of the science sect displays its limits. This approach, whilst providing the logos necessary to cohere seemingly disparate phenomena and observed magnetic phenomena), proves hopelessly inadequate when applied to self-reflexive phenomena (things which "bite back": artists for example). John Barrow's floundering (though honest) attempts to understand how visual art works in terms of our inherited aesthetic preference for certain landscapes is an eloquent testament to this. The determinism is exemplary: art ...artist ...artist's propensity for certain aesthetic judgements ...artist's evolutionary lineage ...genetic basis for artist's production. This approach, of course, explains nothing beyond a tautological elucidation of its own procedures.
As proof for his argument Barrow examples only works showing traits of his argument. This kind of selectivity of evidence would be a mere curio were it not symptomatic of the wider problem in science's approach. By a generalisation of the particulars of artistic production (in any way that is meaningfully scientific according to Dawkin's rules of hierarchical reductionism) one fundamentally misses the importance and veracity of any visual culture, composed as it is of constantly shifting significance, both personally and historically.
It is this peculiarly "general" nature of the determinist process, which both underpins the success of science writing (it is easier to sell a commodity if the spin is generally applicable), but has also proven the bête noir of determinism itself. Whilst science is great at building planes, for example, it is singularly incapable of understanding the particularities of the complex vortex mechanics that enable it to fly. Art also relies on the particular: each and every human has their own artistic inclinations and motivations and this is the capitalist realist logic lying behind the quote of Gerhard Richter cited earlier. On this level the form of science in question can be illuminating if only to throw into perspective the deeply moral, political and economic heurism of the artistic approach. In highlighting the difficulties of a process which has led humanity so wildly astray in so many areas, one can easily fall into the trap of a nihilistic rejectionism. The creative possibilities of recognising a valid pluralistic counter-ideology are great and offer a positive alternative to such nihilism, albeit one far more difficult to sell to a public weaned on sound bite polemicism, and, whose idea of anti-science stops at such inanities as the X-Files. Just to stay true to my 'hypocritical oath,' here are a couple of polemic sound bites for you.
Two outcomes of determinism: mass slaughter and great writing.
Mary Midgley recently told me of a thing she witnessed at a science and theology conference in Oxford. An eminent biologist delivered a speech in which he decried the teaching of subjects which, as he saw, offered non-scientific "falsehoods". A kind of scientific correctness. Certainly, whilst this is an extreme example, there is a pervasive fundamentalism at the heart of the world's most influential ideology: scientism. (If you want to get irrationally worried about this inexplicable and seemingly amoral new sect, the Gulf War did happen, the erasing of Basra and its people did happen, and it was an "achievement" of science. Compared to the scientific fundamentalists, the various nationalists and religionists are but pups in arms).
Since the mid-late 1970s science has had more than its fair share of eloquent spokespeople. From Carl Sagan, through Richard Feynmann, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawkings, Steven Jay Gould, E.O. Wilson, etc. These were not the eccentric boffins of yore plying their wares on the OU at 3 in the morning with Kipper ties. These were multimillion copy selling authors, lean marketing dreams, on the cutting edge both of science's ever advancing new dawn and of popular culture.
Such a marketing phenomenon has not happened in art writing. Indeed, for reasons quoted previously, it may prove impossible. The political fall-out from this however is that art, such a potentially and essentially hopeful endeavour, may be forever marginalised somewhere between pop-videoism and client led fascism.
Not wishing to play the role of excuser for bad writers, there are real problems for anyone wishing to "sell" art. Paradoxically, chief among the problems is art's great strength: namely its particular nature. Whilst science writers can appear coherent by applying general principles across the board, art writers have no such luxury. The tendency, therefore, is to concoct general principles (to play the science game. My own possible hypocrisy), or to get bogged down in terminological semantic/pedantic arguments, pat historicising, or vain attempts at neutral description. All these approaches may be (but rarely are) interesting in themselves, but they miss the point. Art is analogical and assimilative, concepts and arguments are drawn together (as opposed to analysed or dissected). Art exists in dialogue only. This communicative (discursive) principle has been largely ignored by art writers (scientists and economists have however long been fascinated by it: David Bohm, Noam Chomsky, Danah Zohar, Will Hutton to name but a few). Considering the central role it plays at all levels of artistic production/dissemination such an omission is surprising.
In the second section of this essay, I wish to focus on the system within which, in Scotland at least, most contemporary art is shown, namely the public gallery. The implications I draw could equally be applied to science's equivalent to these spaces, i.e. the research department.
2. Towards a Stakeholding Arts Community
"Mechanism stresses hierarchy. It structures existence according to ever-descending units of analysis. Molecules are more basic than neurones, atoms more basic than molecules. We structure power and organisation in the same ladder of ascending and descending authority."
Danah Zohar & Ian Marshall The Quantum Society
"Mechanical methods and models of simple causal explanations are increasingly inapplicable as we advance to such complex phenomena. In particular, the crucial phenomena determining the formation of many highly complex structures of human interaction, i.e. economic values or prices, cannot be interpreted by simple causal or 'nomothetic' theories, but require explanation in terms of the joint effects of a larger number of distinct elements than we can ever hope individually to observe or manipulate."
Friedrich Hayek The Fatal Conceit

Public galleries are in a curious position at the moment. Ostensibly they are publicly funded bodies whose income is allocated by a quasi-governmental organisation, and who have to unofficially compete for funding whilst officially keeping up the pretence of autonomy. This means that all competition takes place well out of the official channels: a cosy but none too dynamic situation. To further understand the problems and implications of this a general overview from a neo-Keynsian perspective proves illuminating. Firstly however, a word about nuthatches.
High in the Petite Kabyle Mountains of northern Algeria, in pine forests that form the upper limit of the tree zone, there lives a small and incredibly scarce bird: the Kabyle Nuthatch. It was discovered in 1975 and is one of the rarer birds of the world. Taxonomically it is very similar to the Corsican Nuthatch, varying only in the markings of its cap. Both are examples of divergent evolution in closed gene systems. Isolation is the key to their species status, it could also be the key to their extinction in years hence. Isolates are constantly under threat of extermination from environmental change. If gene pools are small, they are also highly susceptible to genetic ossification, i.e. the entropic propensity of any closed system: in this case a heterogeneous species. Such a situation makes the "sufferer" far more likely to succumb to an inherited disorder. Mutations of this sort multiply rapidly through a small population. The effects can be devastating. In human group dynamics, whether on a personal or economic level, factionalism can have just as destructively an ossifying effect.
Economically, of course, factionalism cuts two ways. In a competitive environment it can be beneficially motivational. However, in sectors reliant on the nurturing of creative endeavour, the effect will be similar to that of isolation for a species: potentially catastrophic. And herein lies the problem with the current quango led pseudo-community public art system. The problem is one of emphasis at the funding level. Instead of engendering a "malicious/competitive" climate, the funders should be no less than demanding the creation and maintenance of an open community policy in the arts, where stress is laid firmly on the interdisciplinary and the inter-organisational. Only by doing so will the arts move away from the 1980s, in which they have remained, along with much of British "industry". The key to such an approach is that of social sanction and motivation, a principle which can only succeed if built upon bonds of trust within a community. A digression is important here to set this in a wider context.
In the past, and in certain cutting edge industries today, similar interests have built up around each other. London is a working embodiment of this principle. The City, Fleet Street, Soho, Westminster, all are areas designated (by the invisible hand of the old market) to a particular "industry". This does not happen by magic. Business is conducted by people. People talk, that's how business works at its best: mouth to mouth. Businesses are built on related businesses. Such networks prove more efficient if they are proximate. In the 1980s this simple logic, under pressure for fast dividend return, was rejected. However, what was gained in short term "competitiveness" has been more than matched by what has been lost, namely the communication infrastructures, the social and commercial accessibility of related industries and businesses, and possibly more importantly, the workforce security.
Of course proximate industries are not the only ones where the vitality of interaction is an essential prerequisite to success. Within any given sector, the possibilities are there for communities (i.e. groupings of companies sharing information for the common good of all) to arise. The public arts and the research sciences are two such "communities".
In loosely affiliated interest groups there are two forms of motivating and regulating principles: competition and social sanction. The first as explained earlier, is reliant on division, distinction, leading to a disintegration of services (or an increase in choice depending on your personal inclinations in spin-phrasing). More importantly, it is reliant on a separatist view: us and them. For the second to work, separatism is anathema, bonds of trust must be created and built on. Both organisational principles have their place. Competition motivates industry and retail in ways that the old collectivist principles simply couldn't. In publicly funded organisations and in research, however, social sanction is more appropriate: competition is far too brutal in "its" treatment of failures. People must be provided the space to fail in: this is the key to innovation. "Fail again, fail better" as Beckett would say.
Where there is no share pressure (e.g. in the publicly funded cultural industries), the creation and maintenance of the underpinning of bonds of trust should be a priority. Once instigated, those in their communities of production should explicitly utilise the benefits offered, by talking and working together. Without such crossover, communities are rent asunder as surely as if they had been bulldozed. And that brings us neatly back to the cultural debate and to nuthatches, a long digression but necessary.
The arts "community" in Scotland, and this applies to Britain as a whole, because of the peculiar "fictive free-market" within which it operates, seems to exhibit many of the features of the nuthatches: namely, small isolated groups of mutually antagonistic factions. Interesting in themselves, but with so little contact between them that any innovation in one is seen as a threat by the others. There is no cross-pollination of ideas, no serious "joint initiatives". Pride and puerility keep the factions apart. If the potential of all is to be realised, a little humility must be exercised by all. No single faction or individual has in its grasp the panacea, the way towards a cultural utopia. We learn from each other or we cease to learn. The factionalism in cultural quarters is, to an extent, inevitable if left unchecked. The public funding bodies have in the past been far too lax at regulating their market. The result is, as an outsider, obvious: far too many individuals seem to be crassly following the narrow dictates of their own career paths, heedless to the needs of artists and public alike. They appear not to care whether they hold a stake in Scotland's future cultural development. If, as Pavel Buchler intimated in Variant 2, (Vol. 2) such development does look bleak, the primary reason will be because it is in the hands of people unwilling to talk without bitching, or to act without back stabbing. It would indeed be an unnecessary shame; what a waste of a valuable asset.
High in the Kabyle Mountains of northern Algeria is a dwindling population of reasons why the individuals who live by factionalism should have a rethink.

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Virtue and Vice
Derivations of Allegory in Contemporary Photography
Site Gallery, Sheffield 11th March?10th May
Michelle McGuire

'Allegory means 'other speech' (alia oratio), from allos, other, and agoreuein, to speak openly; it signifies an open declamatory speech which contains another layer of meaning.'1
The connection between words and pictures has been prominent in western art since the European Renaissance. The Church used symbolism in Religious Art, with the intention for an interpretation by all. This was based on the notion of universal references and the power of propaganda. At the same time, the Neo-Platonic educated minority of the Italian Renaissance used visual allegory to open a range of interpretations, only fully legible by the cultured elite.
The evolution of photography has seen a progression in the autonomous form of image-making. Over the last hundred years, visual language has evolved and the mass saturation of images has been complicated by 'the fact that less than at any time does a simple reproduction of reality tell us anything about reality', therefore, 'something has actually to be constructed, something artificial, something set up' in order for it to relate within contemporary society.2
The theory of allegory is concerned with centrally placed objects, persons or personifications intending to represent one thought by way of another. These thoughts open many dimensions. The substance of photographic allegories consist of visual images which encompass an entire entity of a concept and is more than just the reinterpretation of words. The surrealist artists pioneered the concept of creative and constructive photography, yet, allegory has been largely suppressed in modern creative practise. This is redressed in the exhibition Virtue and Vice at the Site Gallery in Sheffield. The show includes work from Helen Chadwick, Sorel Cohen, Karen Knorr, Dany Leriche, Paloma Navares, Bernhard Prinz and Olivier Richon.
The work shown in Virtue and Vice slips neatly into several categories. Sorel Cohen, Karen Knorr and Paloma Navares explore issues within feminist critical practice. Bernhard Prinz and Dany Leriche demystify the notion of the human form as cultural language. Olivier Richon's concepts derive from historical and literary sources which are then transformed into philosophical and rhetorical statements. Helen Chadwick uses 17th and 18th century allegorical symbols and produces ambiguous compositions that re-present allegory in contemporary photographically based work.
Within these texts, the relationship with a painterly language is always apparent. These constructed images revel in stillness. The compositions are quiescent, captured by the camera prompting an awareness of the optical unconscious with the business of technology recording a segment of time. Yet, the content of the work is firmly based in an established allegorical aesthetic.
The act of looking at an image, which by its very nature is open to alternative readings, is one which can be daunting. It plays on the insecurities of understanding and can be compared to seeing an actual photograph for the very first time. The photographer Karl Dauthendey comments on one of the first forms of photography, the daguerreotype: 'People were afraid at first, to look for any length of time at the pictures (he) produced. They were embarrassed by the clarity of these figures and believed that the little, tiny faces of the people in the pictures could see out at them, so amazing did the unaccustomed detail and the unaccustomed truth to nature of the first daguerreotype pictures appear to everyone'.3
The digitally produced photo-work Isabelle et Dominique (1995) by French artist Dany Leriche contains a literal search for truth. Leriche has referred to Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors (1533) which acts simultaneously as a double portrait and a memento mori containing a skull in the foreground that only comes into perspective when seen from an angle. In this contemporary reworking, as well as questioning gene manipulation and atomic energy, Leriche has also included a life-size model of a human skull in the form of a digital 3D illusion. This 3D image is supposed to act as a reminder that there are other ways of seeing the world and other dimensions existing within this one. This actual physical 'allegory' has, for myself, posed the question as to whether I can really see the skull image or not and if I cannot see the 3D illusion, am I effectively excluded from the work?
The exhibition at the Site Gallery opened with a conference aptly titled, "I Can't Explain it all Myself". Speakers included Fred Orton, Rosemary Betterton, Karen Knorr, Dany Leriche, Bernhard Prinz and Olivier Richon. The conference aimed to investigate further the notion of allegory in current photographic practise and in doing so, opened up an arena for conceptual conjecture. One of the issues which was questioned was the relationship between form and content. The concept of ideal forms and forms of reality: ideas and images, sign and text. According to Olivier Richon, allegory has 'hidden intentions' in contrast to symbol, which is seen as 'pure and traditionally opens the area of aesthetics.'4
Symbol in photography is viewed for itself and for an immediate emotive sensational response. Allegory, then, is a perversion of symbol, a conceptual remote unemotional commentary. Yet, by the very nature of photography, symbol is always present. Olivier Richon's The Academy (1995) is a parody of Cesare Ripa's 16th century book. The six-part series includes animal and vegetable objects in a bizarre twist on the theme of still-life, placing it within the discourses of art and art history while exploring the visual statement and its values. An object as symbol, however, will always be viewed as an object, and as part of a composition an object can also be used to represent allegorical meanings.
Angus Fletcher commenting on allegory has suggested that 'while allegorical intention is usually under a high degree of authorial control, means are available whereby the controlling rigours are softened or the simplifying effects of control are counteracted by various devices of complication, chief of which is an ironical gaze turned in upon the work itself'.5 This depends on a common system of reference, with the viewer actively engaged in decoding the signs as the site of questioning. It is a rendition from the visual experience to the textual experience and by drawing our own interpretations, variability is increased as well as the aesthetic value of the allegory.
Gay Clifford expresses in his book Transformations of Allegory (1974 Routledge) that the very labour of working things out is a part of the pleasure. This is also based on an assumption that an allegorist has access to an audience prepared to undertake the task, in a desire to know and understand. Mediaeval authors believed it was their function to assist moral speculation and decision through the allegorical interpretations of the Bible and they reached their audience from the pulpit. The Renaissance allegorists used the form in an aridly scholastic mode which was regulated by the literate and cultured elite. The ambiguity surrounding an allegorical style has bred condemnation and denunciation throughout history precisely for its apparent exclusion and substitute meanings. 
So what place, if any, does allegory hold in contemporary photography? The works in the Virtue and Vice exhibition could be described as catering for a knowing audience, which to a certain extent, is true. Karen Knorr's series Academies (1994-95) comments on the status of women within the Royal Academy and follows a general theme which explores rigid ideas of the privileged elite of British Society. Knorr cleverly deconstructs the indulgence of this social and cultural class with such subtlety, the full extent of the irony can only really be appre