The complete ubiquity of video – and other
digital forms – within contemporary art has rendered discussion
about it, as a medium, obsolete. There is no longer anything singular
about video. Images are everywhere. To attempt any one definition of video
would be as meaningless as asking ‘what is contemporary art?’
All art now is conceptual, defined by its stance in relation to other
art and its place in the market. It would be more fruitful and interesting
at this point to ask how can an image transcend other images, how can
the market be used to do what art used to do?
Baudrillard
speaks of the ‘transaesthetic’: the mechanism through which
contemporary art raises everything to aesthetic banality. What, he asks,
could art possibly mean in a world that has already become hyperrealist,
cool, transparent, marketable?1 The depressed
anti-hero of Eldon Garnet’s satirical novel Reading Brooke Shields
gets picked up by Lisa and Bob, two earnest Canadian swingers. Once inside
the apartment, he’s shown a seat on the couch. Bob grabs the remote
and turns on the couple’s widescreen TV. On the
screen, a blond woman is sucking a penis. Moaning. Lisa is leaning back
against the screen, crackling electric static, wrapping her body up against
it. Moaning. Is there no escape from the image? 2
Video –
moving digital images – now comprises a part of most art installations,
although equally and increasingly the artist’s videotape –
sold to collectors in limited editions that render modernist questions
of authenticity completely banal – have become stand-alone works.
The art world is now the venue for works that, two decades ago, would
have screened as ‘experimental cinema.’ The flat monotony
of Andrea Fraser’s Untitled is viewed on a monitor set
into the wall of a gallery, but its polemic-durational quality has much
in common with films made by Guy Debord, Chantal Ackerman. Andrea Bowers
spends months taping interviews with veteran activists from Greenham Common,
but the finished work – a documentary film, really – is shown
as an art piece. A slight shifting of emphasis. There is no longer an
audience, no system in place, for non-narrative film, but its affects
have migrated into the art world. Consequently, the film becomes less
an autonomous act – a thing hurled into the culture – and
more like an artifact, a branded product, viewed through the career of
the artist.
The New York
artist’s collective, The Bernadette Corporation found this to be
true when they produced Get Rid Of Yourself two years ago. The
tape is a feature-length, neo-Godardian interventionist work about the
Genoa anti-globalist riots. In it, high fashion images are cut against
hand-held street footage of anarchist youths smashing ATMs, looting supermarkets.
In the 20th century cinematic tradition, Get Rid Of Yourself
provides a startling snapshot of somebody’s present. Still, its
makers soon discovered their movie was completely un-showable outside
the art world. There is no longer a first-degree context for activist
film. A film like Get Rid Of Yourself can only truly be viewed
when re-contextualized as a conceptual art work, a part of Bernadette’s
overall project performed in the shadow of Situationist art.
This is very
complex, but in a good way. With conceptual art, there’s always
a bottom; or, if we think hard enough, the concept always loops back to
its origins after moving through multiple tropes, like an old-fashioned
well-crafted story. Immobilized as we are, it is more pleasurable to think
along these lines than to ponder the workings of the World Trade Organization.
Outside on
the South Loop Chicago street where I live, students flip open their cellphones
and gaze at the tiny rectangular screens as if they were oracles. Cellphones
are the most brilliant invention. Youth culture is seized and sold back
to itself, you can talk to your friends. Urban youth can no longer expect
to have their own rooms, let alone their own apartments, but you can carry
your personal space in the palm of your hand. Since Bernadette formed
in the late 1990s to investigate forms of blankness, and adopted their
name as a fuck-you to contemporary art’s star-system of branding,
the film’s inevitably ironic cast wasn’t lost on them.
***
The video frame is not a rectangle, the
godfather of structuralist film Hollis Frampton observed less than one
decade after Nam June Paik first picked up a Sony video Porta-Pak. It
is a degenerate amoeboid shape passing for a rectangle to accommodate
late night TV’s cheap programming.3
Film, Frampton
believed, looks at itself: the frame’s radiant rectangle asserts
its perimeter. The rectangular edge of the frame marks the boundary
between the known and the unknown, the seen and the unseen, what is present
and what is completely elsewhere. Looking into the degenerate amoeboid
box of the video monitor, Frampton saw “a mandala of feedback.”
Feedback feeding back on itself … 525 lines of pixels thrusting
and closing. He was the first person to look at video’s electronic
surface and see a covert circularity, a fabulous orgy of onanism between
image and mind. It was a romance, Frampton feared, doomed to end badly:
the mandala turns into a navel, a sucking and spitting vortex into
which the whole household is drawn.4
The same year
that Frampton published these observations, Nancy Holt and Richard Serra
acted them out in their 10 minute videotape, Boomerang. In this
tape, Serra records Holt in a tight close-up, wearing a headset. She’s
asked to speak, continue to speak, while her own voice feeds back at a
fractional second delay through the headset. She struggles against her
own voice, loses her place.
In her 1976
essay Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism, Rosalind Krauss describes
the terror of this: The prison
Holt both describes and enacts, from which there is no escape, could be
called the prison of a collapsed present, that is, a present time that
is completely severed from a sense of its own past. We get some feeling
for what it is like to be stuck in that present when Holt at one point
says, “I’m throwing things out in the world and they are boomeranging
back … boomeranging …. Eranging …angining.” Through
that distracted reverberation of a single world – and even word
fragment – there forms an image of what it is like to be totally
cut off from history, even, in this case, the immediate history of the
sentence one has just spoken. Another word for that history from which
Holt feels herself to be disconnected is text.5
Video enacts
a collapsed and continuous present, a perpetual motion of things feeding
back on themselves. To be smothered by one’s own image. Krauss watches
Vito Acconci’s Air Time and sees the artist skewered on
his own image. She likens this state to that of Lacan’s analysand,
forced to speak into a vacuum of silence until his most heartfelt confessions
become no more than air, until all sense of him ‘self’ is
thrown into question. For both Frampton and Krauss, the loss of ‘self’
and of ‘history’ was a thing to be feared.
This grim
totalitarian prison of self was a far cry from Nam June Paik’s delirious
vision of a future (our present) when “TV Guide will be as thick
as the Manhattan phone book.” (Global Groove, 1973) Nam
June, an early member of Fluxus, saw the “mandala of feedback”
as a gateway to ecstacy: My TV
is NOT the expression of my personality, but merely PHYSICAL MUSIC,
he wrote in 1963. My TV is more than the art and less than the art.
I can compose something which lies higher than … or lower than …
my personality.6
Perhaps video
is not very different from any other art object. Perceptual historiography.
The object alone doesn’t move us, what matters is what we project
onto it. Like the Talmud, all the action lies in the analysis and counter-analysis.
But this, too, is old news. Sitting out World War I at the Cabaret Voltaire
in Zurich, Hugo Ball, a founder of Dada, read Kant and looked at a shoe
polish can and threw up his hands in horror. “Today I saw a shoe
polish with the inscription, ‘The Thing In Itself.’ Why has
metaphysics lost so much respect? The citizen nowadays is a commodity,
too. For the state.”7
***
I live on the 28th floor of a building that’s
managed by Wackenhut Prisons. The guards down in the lobby – tough,
middle-aged black women – wear the tight navy blue trousers and
shirts of police officers. Each guard wears a shiny aluminum badge with
the company logo - a triangular hut, shaped like the dollar-bill pyramid
– over the left breast pocket. Wacken-hut. Whacking off in the hut?
There’s a cheap calendar hung up over the guard desk with an American
flag superimposed over dreamy American grain fields.
Founded by
former FBI operative George Wackenhut, the company pioneered outsourced
surveillance and terror. During the 1960s, they gathered files on 4 million
suspected American dissidents, and went on to open privatized prisons
all over the world and six immigrant detention camps in Australia.8
In the early 1980s, Wackenhut entered into a partnership with the Cabazon
Indians to build a munitions factory on sovereign Indian land. This factory
supplied covert shipments of weapons to the mideast and Nicaragua.9
In Texas, Wackenhut prisoners build Microsoft circuit-boards for $1.25
an hour.10 Intensely supervised and centrally
located, Wackenhut prisons compete well with outsourced assembly in the
global south. Since 1999, the company has appeared in US Federal court
62 times on human rights charges lodged by present and former prisoners.11
I’m
not in prison, but in the faculty apartment of a Chicago art institution.
When I remark on the Wackenhut presence I’m told: “Oh, but
these guards have different training.”
***
In 1965, Nam June Paid pointed a new Sony Porta-Pak
outside a New York taxicab window. He was the first person to purchase
and use this equipment, which had just been launched in the US for the
consumer market. Suddenly everyone could make movies, and within a few
years thousands of hours of tape had been shot by new documentarians.
The equipment was awkward and heavy but the process was instant. Because
of the extremely difficulty of editing 1⁄2 open reel tape, most
of these works were composed by stopping and starting the camera. Video
collectives like Raindance, TVTV and Videofreex produced alternative news
shows, street tapes, tapes about childbirth, alternative soap operas like
The Continuing Story of Carol and Fred, about the marriage between
a porn star and a bisexual junkie. 12
The aesthetic
was process, and for a short time many people truly believed that this
new technology would transform media culture into an open, interactive
democracy. Alternative media access systems were being proposed
via the proliferation of channels on cable. What happened was history
– a history to be repeated in similar words during the early days
of the internet – but public access TV (finally put out of its misery
by Reagan’s deregulation of cable) died a slow death because, given
the choice between it and CNN, HBO, MTV, no one wanted to watch it.
What happened instead was that the visual style pioneered by these early
collectives -jumpcuts, hand-held verite, reality shows –migrated
to mainstream TV along with some of its makers.13
The credits of Confrontation, an early HBO reality-show in which
crime victims confronted their jailed assailants, read like a Who’s
Who of Global Village and Film/Video Workshop, two long defunct early
non-profits.14
I recently
re-watched Chris Burden’s 1971 videotape, Shoot. What makes
the work thrilling four decades later is not the smeary black and white
lines of the video, or the act itself, but the willfulness with which
it is executed. The friend’s words - Are you ready? –
just barely audible, Burden’s tense Yes go ahead –
the way his body freezes just before impact. The fractional second before
the bullet grazes his arm holds all the drama.
I traveled
in January to Puerto Angel, a small Oaxacan beach town that was the scene
of my friend, the late David Rattray’s story, The Angel.
David and his best friend, Van Buskirk, went there in 1961. They were
both 25, Van was dying of a rare strain of leukemia. Their general plan
was to live there and write books. Forty-five years ago, Puerto Angel
might as well have been on the moon. Power lines weren’t run out
to these towns until the late 1970s. Puerto Angel got its first payphone
two years ago, and this phone is shared by four coastal pueblos. In his
story, David recalls the flickering light of a kerosene lamp at a beach-side
café. He imagines himself engraved in a pictorial magazine feature,
circa the 1870s. Déjà vu of another century.
“As
I pause from writing,” David notes, “I can look straight up
into the Milky Way. When I climb into the hammock, my feet will point
west, towards the Pacific. Van says poetic license is the freedom to do
exactly what you feel like doing from one minute to the next.”15
Time still
moves at a different rate in southern Mexico. There are internet cafes
and hotels, but the houses behind the main street are still made of palm
leaves and wattle. Staying 15 miles north in Mazunte, it took over an
hour to reach the payphone in Puerto Angel. First you flag down a taxi
truck into the next town, Zippolite; then you wait for for the collectivo
taxi, that won’t start its run with less than five passengers.
Two hours
inland outside the village of Santa Maria, an American botanist who’s
building a field research station in the jungle tells me the workers he
hired spend 45 minutes to straighten a single bent nail. Living without
running water in wattle huts and working for $10 a day, they have all
the time in the world. Nails are a rarity.
“The
only wars now are not of space, but of time,” says the philosopher
of speed, Paul Virilio. Last year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
allocated $35 million – money accrued, in some small way, through
the labor of Wackenhut prisoners – to purchase mosquito bed nets
for 80% of the people of Zambia. Although bed nets have long been acknowledged
to be the single most effective means of preventing malaria, no one, ‘til
now, has addressed the spread of this disease so directly. Simply give
nets away. With this and a half dozen other programs, the Gates Foundation
has become the single largest provider of African aid in the world. It’s
a strangely utopian image, this transfer of capital, i.e., of energy,
across the matrix. Stranger still that these funds are derived from the
sale of computers, the single most powerful agent in the collapse of space/time
at the end of the 20th century. Technology changes the world, and for
the better. Technology changes the world into the matrix.
Some of us
- mostly those born in 1966, or before - who work in the conceptual echelons
of the first world maintain a faint vestigial awareness that life was
not always this way. We remember that cigarettes once took the place of
cell phones, and if you wanted to reach someone quickly you would not
instant message or voicemail but actually leave your apartment
and knock on their door. We recall an intricate, unwritten protocol surrounding
the visit, the duration of face-to-face meetings in domestic
settings measured out in consumable signifiers: one or two cigarettes,
a fresh pot of coffee versus what was left in the pot, a cold drink or
a bottle of wine. We have an awareness that the most envied, desirable
consumer items – plasma TVs, houses and cars, all these possessions
– are not an end in themselves, or even a trigger to increased consumption.
They are the tools of increased mobility, an eternal conduit used to enhance
the transaction of business, keeping things moving. Therefore, the most
desired plateau is not the stability once implied by the object, but perpetual
flux. Far more creativity goes into the marketing of products than into
the products themselves. Likewise, the fact of the disappeared object
is key to conceptual art, a term that is oxymoronic: all art now, is conceptual,
deriving its value only through context, at a second remove.
The first
structuralist film that I saw was Chicago Loop, James Bennnings’
nine-minute fixed-tripod shot of steam rising out of an industrial chimney.
It was a strange and primitive thrill, the idea that you could sit and
watch nothing, a film about nothing. The image gave what it could, but
what happened was all in your mind.
A decade ago,
the structuralist moment returned, slightly revised, to address the new
formal properties inherent in digital video. The phenomenological question
“what does the world look like through a video camera?” engaged
this new generation of artists. Attending graduate programs on the west
coast that sought to distance themselves from yesterday’s ‘criticality’
by celebrating essentialist qualities like beauty and the sublime, they
embraced the fluidity of digital video. The coolness of ambient art defined
the aesthetic, the equipment was cheap, the Los Angeles spaces were massive.
Far better trained than the original structualists, the next generation
devised a rhetoric completely devoid of structuralism’s wit and
original charm. Whereas the films of Hollis Frampton, James Benning, Ken
Jacobs, Stan Brakhage seemed to speak, on some level, to our incredulity,
asking the obvious question – Why are we watching this?
– with a measure of self-deprecation, the new video structuralists,
steeped in critical theory, were very well armed.
“Just
as the structuralist film makers used ‘film’ in such a way
as to reveal a materiality, a shape and a form that characterize it, so
must we be able to make the material ‘video’ speak of a signal,
tape, camcorders, monitors and projectors,” the artist Diana Thater
wrote ten years ago, reinventing the structuralist wheel.16
Video, enthused Jessica Bronson, offers a whole “different kind
of happiness that has to do with shining surfaces or spinning movement.”17
The critic Peter Lunenfeld praised Thater’s use of the “techno-sublime.”18
Her multi-channel installations of dolphins and flowers are notable for
their “displacement of narrative onto separate textual systems.”19
For a while, it seemed as if the liquidity of digital media itself was
once again news. The critic Christiane Paul describes “a paradigm
shift in which the artworks cease to embody ‘artistic truth’
and become ‘conditions of possibility,’ that is, fluid interactions
between manifestations of information.”20
Deeply reactionary,
these works cob together bits of phenomenology and post-structuralist
theory to propose that the dematerialized nature of digital media itself
is a worthwhile subject of scrutiny. By observing video’s properties,
Thater concludes, “we may better use the latent qualities of the
medium which in and of themselves, resonate.”21
But do they? And how, against what? The critic Bruce Hainley watches Bronson’s
world picture 1998, a video installation of a Los Angeles police
car chase and wonders at its utter exclusion of race, class and humor.
He sums the project up in three words: “Vroom fucking vroom.”22
“Van’s
mind is like an all-night movie house,” David Rattray writes in
The Angel. “I sleep, then wake up, the bus standing still.
Van tells me there was a couple fucking in the driver and his Cuban assistant
joked about the floor show. We just reached the head of the pass. From
here on, until we reach the coast tomorrow morning, it’s downhill.”23
Back in LA
after visiting his family in Lima, Peru, the filmmaker George Porcari
looks at the framed photographs of coffee plantations that decorate Starbucks
and finds them predictably blank. In one, a dark-skinned man stands in
a sea of coffee beans and squints at the camera. He’s reminded of
Sharon Lockhart’s series of photos shot in Brazil, the ones where
a dark-skinned woman holds various kinds of fruits in her left hand. “She
is self-conscious,” Porcari observes, “complicit like the
man in the Starbucks picture.”24
Both sets
of images seem to reference a 20th century humanist genre, The Photography
of Concern, while deliberately placing themselves outside of it. Both
sets of images co-opt that visual language yet share none of its intentions,
none of its content. Comparing Lockhart’s photography with the pictures
at Starbucks, Porcari sees the images mirror each other, “but as
in any mirror everything is reversed. What,” Porcari asks, “is
everything? Why is one picture in a coffee shop and another in an art
gallery? Where is the difference, how can we find it?”25
As art becomes
a corporate enterprise, it could be that corporations like American Apparel
now fill the vacuum left by contemporary art. The favorite leisure pursuit
outside the home in the US is shopping. And from its manufacturing philosophy
to its ads and its marketing, to the gallery-esque design of its stores
and their deliberate location in changing neighborhoods, American Apparel
resonates within the culture like a large-scale work of conceptual art,
breathtakingly brilliant in scope.
“We
called ourselves Chia Jen, or The Family,” the choreographer Simone
Forti recalls of the collective she lived in during the late 1960s. “The
life we lived in common provided a matrix for the profuse visions we lived
out in various twilights.”26
Similarly,
American Apparel galvanizes the lives of some 5000 employees across the
globe.27 Money, the movement of capital,
is just one of its mediums. The company keeps apartments in dozens of
cities where employees hang out and take retro-porn pix of each other
that will be used in company ads. Business is transacted as flow.
Founder Dov
Charney and his colleagues have ingeniously channeled the most loaded
social concerns of the decade into the ‘work,’ which is much
more than the production of t-shirts. At the dawn of the century, when
artists like Bernadette Corporation expressed their generation’s
disgust with the proliferation of brand: “there is no where to go
or hide or to remain untagged, unlogo’d, undiscovered, unstamped
… Names and tags will hover over every cosmic labyrinth,”28
Charney launched the un-branded t-shirt, creating his own anti-brand.
When young consumers organized boycotts against outsourced sweatshop production
by Nike and Gap, Charney introduced “sweatshop-free” manufacturing
in downtown LA. Based on a high-wage system of piecework, this move at
once established the company as a hip anti-brand and effectively pre-empted
unionization. If (often undocumented) immigrant assemblers could earn
$15 an hour, why pay union dues?
The ‘vertically
integrated’ American Apparel plant has done more to broadcast the
obvious cultural links between LA and Mexico City than any municipal government.
Advocating more open borders, the billboard above their Echo Park storefront
says “Legalize LA.” Discourse transcends the limits of objects.
It took Los Angeles art institutions until last year to mount a major
exhibit of art from Mexico City. Meanwhile, American Apparel produces
a free cultural ‘zine from its apartment in Mexico City. The art
work displayed in its stores (produced by ‘amateurs’) reprises
most of the high-points of past and present conceptual art. The Echo Park
store has two series of ‘found’ archival images (mug-shots
of women arrested during the 1960s by the LAPD; bikini-clad students on
Spring Break), evoking Mike Kelley, Christian Moller. In Hollywood, a
surveillance camera pointed out on the street feeds back passers-by to
themselves on a monitor, just like the early video work of Dan Flavin.
And in an homage to MFA work produced in the 90s, there’s a series
of blown-up cibachrome photos of interstitial car hoods and trees.
American Apparel,
says its founder Dov Charney, “is a fantasy. It’s make-believe.
We can do whatever the fuck we want.”29
“We knew one another, trusted one another’s range of possibilities
… There was no yardstick to measure individual achievement,”30
Squat Theater collective founder Eva Buchmiller recalls. “We all
have our fucking dick in it, it’s not just any one person,”31
Charney says of his corporate philosophy. Recruiting talented young women
as both content advisors and sex partners, Charney creates a paradigm
for how life can be lived a different way. The purchase of an American
Apparel t-shirt is more than a purchase – it’s an endorsement,
a means of participating in the brand.
Video art was once seen to ‘enact a collapsed and continuous present.’32
This now universal, collapsed present might now best be seen in the action
of commerce. Using conceptual art’s self-reflexivity, anti-brands
like American Apparel reach more deeply into the culture than art ever
can.
“Objective
perception never reflects anything beyond itself. To know what is there
is not to know what isn’t. The makers of television-present-tense
are fully as intelligent as those who criticize it. They know what we
know. Therefore. It is my task – your task – to act beyond
the medium, from within ourselves,” Douglas Davis wrote in The
End of Video: White Vapor, in the mid-1970s.
While the neo-formalist celebration of video’s liquid and transient
properties during the 1990s didn’t yield many new ideas, we still
live amongst images, saturated by images. The philosopher Avital Ronnel
looks at the video-chip implants used to engender memory in Total
Recall and sees that they co-exist with a condition of stated amnesia.
Images come to infuse an amnesiac subject. But these images aren’t
the same as remembering; rather, they help keep their subjects in a state
of eternal amnesia, channel-surfing through blank zones of trauma.33
Video works
like Candice Breitz’s Mother and Father (2005) show that
it might be possible – with great difficulty, and by reaching within
ourselves – to dislodge chunks of these coded images and allow them
to act out other stories, sub-textual stories which have always been there.
It’s a little like William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s idea
of the textual cut-up, developed in magnificent leisure at West London’s
Beat Hotel the same year Nam June Paik bought his first Porta-Pak. Burroughs
and Gysin believed that by folding in pages, manipulating fragments of
text, the true hidden message of the once-opaque text will arise. In Breitz’s
work, the earnest clichés of parenting spoken by Hollywood actors,
once abstracted and recombined, become cries of unspeakable terror.
In his short
videotape Flex, Zwelethu Mthethwa abstracts the bodies and faces
of weightlifters in a lyrical collage the flows between body and mind.
The Israeli artist Guy Ben-Ner uses video to produce a series of ongoing
domestic dramas that arise from his decision to work at home while taking
care of his children. His work – which conflates sexuality and domestic
entrapment – is a hilarious flip on feminist work. Flatting his
penis with a rolling pin in Untitled (1998), Ben-Ner leaves himself open
to the same charges of self-indulgence and narcisism that feminist works
have traditionally borne. No matter how many references critics make between
it and conceptual body-art classics, the tape is a pungent one-liner,
proving that contradictions between family, self and desire are more circumstantial
than gender-defined.
“Know all you wish about video,” Douglas Davies admonished
in 1975. “Its privacy of perception, its line, color and tone, its
symbiotic link to living time – and you still cannot change it until
you bury it.”34 But while we may know
all we that we need to know about the phenomenological nature of electronic
media, we don’t know what video has to tell us. In their brilliantly
curated 2004 Time Zones film and video show at the Tate, Jessica
Morgan and Gregor Muir assembled ten moving image works by international
artists from countries as far-flung as China, Albania, Turkey and Indonesia.35
A discreet manifesto of the persistence of cultural difference across
the globe, Time Zones slyly suggests that our perception of ‘hot’
new technology will, for the foreseeable future, be undermined by how
different parts of the matrix live and experience time. Walking through
the large galleries, Anri Sala’s ghostly durational video of sunlight
hitting two Albanian billboards plays on one wall, while NASCAR-style
monster trucks in Yael Bartana’s Kings of the Hill futilely
claw their way up an Israeli sand dune across the hall.
At once documentary and formal, these modest non-narrative works are not
easily described. Facts are presented only as they arise; the camera insinuates
itself within its surroundings, forlorn, steady and vibrant. They are
indelible videos, in which video finally gets rid of itself and acts as
a spy.
—————
1 Jean Baudrillard,
The Conspiracy of Art, page 26, Semiotexte: Los Angeles, 2006
2 Eldon Garnet, Reading Brooke Shields: The Garden of Failure,
Semiotexte: New York, 1992
3 Hollis Frampton, Circles of Confusion, Visual Studies Workshop:
Rochester, 19??
4 Ibid
5 Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism” October,
Vol. 1 No. 1, Spring 1976, reprinted in Battcock, Gregory: New Artist’s
Video, pp 48-49, E.P. Dutton, New York: 1978
6 Nam June Paik with Charlotte Mormon, Videa, Vidiot, Videology, Fluxus
Newspaper, June 1974: New York, reprinted in Gregory Battcock, New
Artist’s Video, p. 130, op.cit.
7 Ball, Hugo: Flight Out of Time, edited by John Elderfield,
translated by Ann Raimes, p 12, University of California Press, Berkeley:
1996
8 Arun Pradhan: Wackenhut: prisons, profits and golf umbrellas
in The Green Left Weekly, www.greenleft.org.au
9 Wackenhut, p. 2 of 40 in “Top Secret Military Bases, www.geocities.com/
Area51/ Shadowlands/6583
10 Arun Pradhun, op cit.
11 Greg Palast: Gilded Cage: Wackenhut’s Free Market in Human Misery
12 Deirdre Boyle: A Brief History of American Documentary Video,
pp 51-55, in Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art,
edited by Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer, Aperture in Association with Bay
Area Video Coalition: 1990
13 Deirdre Boyle: op cit, page 59
14Chris Kraus: Torpor, p. 249, Semiotexte, Los Angeles: 2006
15 David Rattray: The Angel, in How I Became One of The Invisible,
p. 35, Semiotexte: New York, 1992
16 Diana Thater: I wanna be your dog, p. 12 in China,
exhibition catalogue published by The Renaissance Society at the University
of Chicago, Chicago: 1996
17 Jessica Bronson, Conversation with Jan Tumlir, cited by Intra, Giovanni
in Interruption, catalogue essay for Jessica Bronson, New Zealand
– Govett Brewster, 1999?
18 Peter Lunenfeld: Constraint Decree, Art/Text No.
62, p. 68, Los Angeles: August-October, 1998
19 Ibid
20 Paul, Christiane: in Anton, Saul: Net Gains, a roundtable on new
media, Artforum International, V. 39, N. 7, March 2001 p121
21 Diana Thater, op cit.
22 Bruce Hainley: Jessica Bronson, MOCA exhibition review, Artforum
International, Vol. 37, No. 6, page 103 February 1999
23 David Rattray, op cit. page 30
24 George Porcari: Playing Out the Photography of Concern: Starbucks
in LA, “Teatro Amazonas” in Brazil and Wener Bischof in Peru,
Artnews,??
25 op cit., page?
26 Simone Forti: Handbook in Motion, p. 17, The Press of the
Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax and New York University
Press, New York: 1974
27 American Apparel website, www.americanapparel.com
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29 Josh Dean: Dov Charney, Like It or Not, in Inc. Magazine,
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30 Eva Buchmiller, and Ana Koos: Squat Theater, exhibition catalogue
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31 Claudine Ko, “Meet Your New Boss,” Jane magazine,
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32 Rosalind Krauss. Op cit
33 Douglas Davis: The End of Video: White Vapor, in New Artist’s
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33 Avital Ronell: Finitude’s Score: Essays for the End of the
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34 Douglas Davis: op cit, page 35
35 Jessica Morgan: Time Zones, exhibition catalogue, Tate Publishing
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