books, catalogs

The Tumblr Room

The image repertoire can be seen today not as the image alone, isolated, but as a social currency that forms collectives and shapes desire and identity. In the milieu of social media, visual imagery is attended by annotations and exchanges. They are the currency of networks and social relations that form around them. In the tendrils of the network images of fashion, celebrity, pornography, anime are circulated to express a great many feelings of desire, abjection, fear, loathing, joy and a great many networks and social relations formed.

What at first glance might appear to be what we see on the internet on an everyday basis, is more than that, and exactly that. If for example, Richard Prince took away the tag of Marlboro, from the famed western cowboy, so we could see the cowboy, it is precisely that tag and other annotations that are of interest here. The viewer, the reader, the reading, all of it is presented in this work, all at the same time. It is a work about seeing, and reading as seeing and the emergence of the public image archive.

An Anatomy of Pictures

From this view, a fish — a shell, a leaf of grass — is a self-construing work of art. It gathers together diverse elements from its environs and transforms them into itself — kelp, water, ripple, bubble, pebble, rock become gills, tail, slime, teeth. Every fish construes itself differently. A species is a school of art, all the fish following the same basic premise and rules, a kind of Dogme 95 as the species, in the words of Deleuze and Guattari, plants its placard. This is us! We flow like this!

Marc Lafia moves from the classic desire to represent the world to the modern practice of steering flows. The modern artist is not a master. He does not as much create as he does hedge: Pollock letting paint fall as it might; Duchamp putting a bicycle wheel in a museum; Goldsworthy making the tides his collaborator.

And Lafia, gathering these multi-layered genealogies of art and making them move, making them flow, with the elaborately pleated bodies of shells and fish to forge these...what? What are they? Photographs? Paintings? Sculptures?

No, none of these old world terms apply because Lafia is not using a medium to represent the world. His work — like all modern art — re-architects, re-engineers, the relationship between human and inhuman becoming, between nature and artifice. Lafia is not representing the world but putting on the world, putting images to work with images. Lafia, alas, is an imagist, an image-maker, an agent of the image. Like our fish-artist, he gathers elements from his environs — books from the Wellfleet library, debris from the beach — and steers them, massages them, folds them into this placard, into this anatomy of pictures.

Eternal Sunshine

In Eternal Sunshine Marc Lafia presents a series of works that reflects network culture’s restructuring of the subject in contemporary society. In network culture mankind’s relationship to media has changed
from one of representation to presentation; and from contemplation to embodiment. In the main space of the exhibition, the artist has transformed the virtual domain of online social networks, e.g. facebook,
twitter, weibo, etc. into a large scale, interactive installation. This vivacious work involving video, sculptures, and audience participation brings together a number of techno-social concerns that have been
central to Lafia’s long career as artist, filmmaker and information architect. In particular his interest in how we are all part of an elaborate program that is as real as it is virtual. Presented along with this installation, specially designed for the Minsheng Art Museum, are Lafia’s print and video works that investigate how subjectivities, once constructed through nation states and cinematic representation have changed over time to become a global condition in which the individual now represents him/herself through social media in the network.

All of the works in Eternal Sunshine are active metaphors of a technocratic society enmeshed in online media. They critique this new cultural order as an ecstatic artifice. In this order, mediated by personal
computer networks, normative values are reproduced as consumable objects and the individual’s identity is played like a pawn. On the one side we see the community, empathy and transcendence that the
global network inspires. On the other side we see how yesterday’s dystopic world looks utopic today and how concepts such as open, transparent, non-hierarchical, and participatory are mere pretenses to empowerment and inclusion. Moreover Eternal Sunshine looks at how we produce and constitute a new community, and how representation therein is a condition that is always and already performative and how our network world has created new senses of ourselves, of history, time, desire and love.

Memories of Photography

The digital both mimics and imitates photography, never quite being photography and becomes some thing of the uncanny of photography.

For me digital photography becomes a beginning and the image of photography’s disappearance. It is the recording of recording.

All photography now is in a sense conceptual and about materialization, the materialization of something in the event of a kind of appearance.

With the digital watch-camera, time, memory, photography, all collapsed in this instrument. What is a camera but a watch seeing time, seeing seeing. With and through it, I could see the memory of photography.

Sites

There are errors in every endeavor of recording. And in these errors, there is an abstraction and fragments that take hold of me. In accidents of recording, when the shutter commits before it is intended, what it captures is a fracture of the screen, not quite a glitch, but partial
markings, lines and gestures.

The accident cannot be planned. Its result is unknown,
until it happens. Yet when we see it, we can take hold of the accident and make it a procedure to produce what we liked in the accident.

From accident to chance that knowing and not
knowing exactly what will happen becomes a
method to go forward.

The sense of accident becomes a procedure, an
algorithm, a controlled chaos, an event of possibility.

The image accident becomes a design, a grammar, no longer an index, but a reading of lines of force.

Seeing

Seeing is not about distorted traces of reality but realities unto themselves. Realities of the apparatus of the camera, its program.

If the camera is used to see through the lens an image and bring back through recording an equivalent to my human vision, something recognizable by sight,
something that gives the coordinates of space - is the camera seeing or me, human vision seeing - of course the camera is different - how to find the many ways the camera can see.

hyper hyper the unbounded wor(l)d

hyper hyper: speed instantaneity, all-at-once, form un(making) form
the unbounded open-ended, unlimited, unenclosed, in-finite-ly un(know)ing,
wor(l)d word


what follows is an anti-book if you like
it is rather a context of intersecting thoughts
using the beauty and ease of the book to carry itself around


warning:
language is the mediation through which we know ourselves.
when we speak of life it is ‘life’ as put forward in language.
poets, authors philosophers, scientists, work with language and all its
permutations to express and make life. but they express language expressing life.
an underneath and beyond language we can only imagine and give voice to through language. in some sense it is only through language we know and express ourselves and give definition to our world. as such ‘ourselves’ ‘our world’ ‘language’ ‘life’ are words that signify concepts that afford us a poetics and utility to express and exchange. they intimate ideas, feelings, systems we sense we know. but the more we examine them the more they slip away, deferring themselves in a lateral play of endless supplementarity. any ‘great truths’ man expresses in language are ‘truths’ made within the rhetoric of language leaving us with an unstable perhaps adventurous sense of ourselves as fabricators of significance in the continual process of unmaking. as such we embark upon the mobeuis trip of cyborg narration and the post-ever-human.