installation views, mixed media
Elizabeth Cohen and Michael Talley; Random Access:
Sideshow Gallery • Brooklyn, New York
In exploring our evolving relationship to space and movement,
we were discussing the changes taking place in our culture, especially
those changes effected by advances in science and technology. We were
thinking about the shift taking place from what Katherine Hayles calls
“a paradigm of absence/presence” to one of “pattern/
randomness.” This shift is underscored by an emphasis on access
as opposed to ownership. The acknowledgement of an informational pattern
must occur in order to gain access to something, as with computer codes
and bank account numbers. In social circumstances, patterns of behavior
allow access to certain things as well. When a random event occurs within
a prevailing system, it is that element of chance that can change that
system or pattern in new and unforeseen ways, providing new varieties
of that thing.
—Elizabeth Cohen and Michael Talley
How does our relationship to space and time change in
the world of new technologies? Do these technologies create totalizing
systems for unifying all subjects in a single global network of values,
behaviors, and desires, or do they reach a higher level of diversity?
What impact does the virtual environment and computer-based design have
on our perception, motion, and processing of information? Do new modes
of communication, production, consumption, and entertainment demand new
kinds of minds and bodies? When Michel Foucault analyzed the nineteenth-century
Industrial Revolution, he claimed that Modernization produced new modes
of subjectivity through “a certain policy of the body, a certain
way of rendering a group of men docile and useful,” which “called
for a technique of overlapping subjection and objectification.”
Foucault’s notion of institutional mechanisms and rationalized mass
technologies as key instruments for imposing a normative behavior on the
subject continues to be a viable mode for examining operations of social
power in both Modern and Postmodern societies. Vis-á-vis expanding
global information industries, one wonders: to what extent do these industries
establish new, highly sophisticated, and barely visible forms of social
and political control? Do they allow new liberating experiences, desires,
and visions to emerge? Last but not least, are our emotions, bodily processes,
knowledge, and social relations really transformed when we enter a cybernetic
terrain?
In their interdisciplinary work, Elizabeth Cohen and
Michael Talley explore the ways in which science and technology change
our lives, and the questions raised above seem to have a particularly
strong resonance in their most recent collaborative project “Random
Access.” The exhibition, recently on display in the Sideshow Gallery
in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is comprised of four installation or video-based
pieces in dialogue with both one another and the viewer. Emphasizing interaction
between the work of art and the viewer perhaps seems redundant for its
self-evidence. This exhibition, however, explores the dynamics of such
a relationship as far exceeding the traditional object/subject hierarchy.
As the viewer’s body moves through the gallery, it interacts with
the works on display—be it through actual physical participation
or through subtle, psychophysical, almost unconscious responses. In “Random
Access,” one doesn’t passively look; rather, confronted with
strangers’ bodies and voices talking about daily experiences of
space and movement, one becomes more conscious of one’s own body,
senses, and gestures. Viewers start to experience their subjectivity as
something performative rather than something given.
The most striking example of such performativity is “Untitled
(Camping, 2001),” an installation piece composed of green carpeting,
tall poles from the Czech military surplus store, a US military gas can
and two small DVD-players and monitors with headphones. In this semi-military
setting, while sitting on a camping chair, the visitor watches a young
couple telling each other stories about how unexpected events, new objects,
and unknown environments (real or virtual) change their acquired modes
of inhabiting space and their regime of vision and cataloging—and,
consequently, how these random experiences and sharp breaks reconfigure
access towards their own subjectivity. These stories—funny, dramatic,
bizarre, banal, mysterious, intimate—come from Cohen and Talley’s
authentic experiences as well as from those of friends, but they could
be anybody’s. They reveal undercurrents which we usually don’t
register but which inconspicuously disrupt our habitual role in the social
network. Although no political connotation is explicitly emphasized in
this piece, the encounter of military devices from two sides of the Cold
War “iron curtain” in one camping site metamorphose the installation
into a secret spying zone, from which other peoples’ bodies and
activities are surveyed. However, considering the fact that spies are
usually also spied on, and that even the two sides of the “iron
curtain” were mirror images of each other, the spectacular economy
turns out to be much more complicated, and the observer’s agency
paradoxically becomes both mobilizing and regulating, liberating and disempowering.
How complicated and obscure the distinction between power
and powerlessness can be, not only in the immaterial field of vision,
but also in the arena of social and political practice, is manifested
in Parade. The videotape, recorded during the Fuck Parade in Berlin last
year, features a hip colorful crowd of young people, slowly moving and
dancing through the former East section of the city. Slowing down and
reversing the footage with hundreds of youngsters, musicians, artists,
DJs, and decorated parade vehicles, Cohen and Talley show a humorous dimension
of mass spectacle, in which individual freedom is demonstrated as a collective
“ornament.” As the crowd moves back and forth and repeats
the same gestures over and over again, it reminds us of how ridiculous
and funny we sometimes appear. More importantly, Parade points out how
easily a protest against co-optation by uniformity could itself turn into
what Walter Benjamin calls the “phantasmagoria of equality.”
While the corporate model of the global economy imposes on the masses
a sophisticated dictatorship of variety within sameness, the anti-corporate
reaction could, paradoxically, lead to a similar pattern of highly organized
diversity. Of course, this is not to say that Cohen and Talley disqualify
the political importance of such protests (they chose the Fuck Parade,
as a vital response to a huge, big-business sponsored Love Parade, which
took place in Berlin at the same time, and as I learned later on, they
found it to be an inspiring and liberating event). Rather, through their
ironic attitude, they emphasize that humor and criticism, or laughter
and revolution, should be seen as two sides of the same coin, and that
mimicry and mockery, when used in the right context, could maintain an
explosive and subversive politics of the body instead of shutting it up.
Although Cohen and Talley’s main concern is our
constantly changing relationship to a world increasingly dominated by
technology, the people “performing” in their videotapes—be
it actors or randomly chosen participants of urban processions—seem
to inhabit low-tech rather than high-tech bodies. They might appropriate
specific, perhaps even uniform body language to communicate (however anonymously)
with other members of a community, or they might spend 12 hours a day
surfing the internet, but they never look like programmed robots. In Numbers,
a videotape screened as a counterpart to Parade on the opposite side of
the gallery, a severe female voice commands people to imitate the form
of numbers from one to ten. Their bodies bend, twist, and wrench, creating
funny, sometimes almost acrobatic figures, and with the uncompromisingly
tough voice in the background, the entire scene reminds us of a circus
where people instead of animals are being trained to perform and to obey.
A slight tension arises between the counting commander and awkwardly staging
men and women. Their distorted limbs leave no doubt that it is a psychophysical
rather than mathematically driven relationship to space and time which
continues to govern their bodies, and through which their private “selves”
resist becoming depersonalized public property or mechanical “toys”
of instrumental reason.
If the “Camping” installation tells us stories
of our Phenomenological relationship to the world around us, and Parade
and Numbers transform the spoken word of oral history into action, the
last piece in the show expresses this relationship in a more subtle and
metaphorical way. “Untitled (Motor Scooter)” is a functional,
hybrid looking vehicle constructed from a lawn mower motor, wheelbarrow
wheels, and old refrigerator doors, and hand painted to match the braided
pattern of a rug hanging on the wall behind it. With a global positioning
system mounted on the handlebars, and the rug woven from leftover scraps
from the domestic environment, this ‘50s-style scooter embodies
both utopic expectation of the future and nostalgia for the past; adventurous
travels into hyperreality and the amicable atmosphere of the household.
However, the similarity between the vernacular pattern of the rug and
the technological pattern of the scooter bridges past and future, private
and public, slowness and speed, or even the body and technology. Thus,
it reminds us that even our patterns of behavior, movement, or body language
are more variable, diverse, communicative, and potent than they might
first appear, and that the “revolution”—personal or
social—could, after all, be done in the street, in the kitchen,
or on-line.
In the language of technology, random access memory (RAM)
signifies a computer’s capacity to retrieve any information at equal
speed and in arbitrary order. Although it is here where Cohen and Talley
got the title of their show, the pieces on display in the Sideshow Gallery
refer to a different kind of random access than the one mediated through
micro-chips and hair-thin wires. Cohen and Talley are too much concerned
with both our physiological functions (or, in fact, dysfunctions) and
our social and political agency to let us transform into perfect Post-humans
subordinated to the dictatorship of computer programs. Rather, they let
us think about our position in the Contemporary world in a dialogical
form, which doesn’t prevent mistakes or misunderstandings, but which
perpetually changes the meaning of our words, bodies, needs, and desires.
After the opening of “Random Access,” my
friends and I went to explore Williamsburg. We were passing cozy cafés,
bookstores, and groups of youngsters in funky clothes. Then, all of a
sudden, this entire noisy street hubbub was over. Crossing an invisible
boundary inscribed in the urban topology, we appeared in an orthodox Jewish
neighborhood: men in black suits and heavy fur hats, women in long skirts
with their hair carefully covered by scarves, small boys with long curly
payos, and then us—three people from Prague where Jewish culture
is either already history or an object of endless tourist exploitation.
We were thrilled by this unexpected change of ambience, but we also felt
like nasty invaders. Lost in the maze of side streets, we wandered around
for more than an hour. Our steps were reluctant, and our bodies and gestures
felt awkward, as if some inner voice imperiously commanded us to posture
and move differently in order to match our surroundings and blur in them,
but our motions stubbornly resisted. It was through randomly breaking
the “pattern” of the cityscape that our bodies and identities
became more apparent and yet less tangible for us; we were closer to,
and alienated from, ourselves at the same time. When we finally started
to ask passers-by where the closest subway station was, we got a different
direction every time. With a touch of irony and desperation, my friend
joked that we should have taken the navigating device from the scooter
in the gallery. And yet, reflecting on this experience on our way back
to Manhattan an hour later we all agreed that having access to any technological
appliance would have deprived us of experiencing unknown coordinates of
random access not only outside, but also inside of ourselves.
Martina Pachmanová
Boston, Massachusetts; Prague, Czech Republic
2001