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Action Melancholia
Florian Cramer
Sept. 2006
From Katherine S. Dreier's and Marcel Duchamp's "Société Anonyme" to
Res Ingold's "Ingold Airlines," many artists have posed as
corporations; since Kurt Schwitters' "Merzreklame," artists have
worked as P.R. agencies, and since Johannes Baader's Dadaist
interventions in the Weimar Reichstag parliament and Berlin Dome
church in 1918 and 1919, artists have physically, and subversively,
intervened into the public sphere. Contrary to initial expectations,
the rise of the Internet as a mass medium and of Internet art in the
1990s did not yield an aesthetics of "virtual" disembodiment, but
quite to the contrary help to escalate and radicalize artistic
interventionism.
Through official-looking web sites and domain names, groups like the
Yes Men could believably pose as the World Trade Organization and
instigate communicative processes that allowed them to be invited as
WTO representatives and pull off critical pranks at highbrow economic
conventions. Similarly, the mass availability of software design tools
and skills equalized the means of corporate identity production
between artists and companies. Thanks to professional-grade graphics
and web design, the "Nike Ground" project of the artist collective
0100101110101101.org was a believable simulation of Nike's corporate
identity. The alleged renaming of Vienna's Heldenplatz into "Nike
Ground" managed to confuse both a common audience - which took the
project literally - and gullible leftist critics who failed to get the
ambivalence of the project, as something that simultaneously subverted
and reinforced the Nike brand.
In the 1990s, there was much talk in Internet art-related discussion
forums and conferences about "tactical media," a concept that is not
quite clear in its mere words. It took artists to go from actionist
performance into the Internet and, eventually, from the Internet back
into the non-electronic public sphere to give the concept a meaning:
as communication technology being cleverly used as a door-opener to
otherwise inaccessible social spheres. In comparison to Res Ingold's
awkward pretension of an airline through a series of dinner party
receptions, the Yes Men's fake WTO and 0100101110101101.org's fake
Nike websites tactically used advantages of the Internet for more
elegant and thus more efficacious simulations, realizing at the same
time that the simulacrum isn't powerful unless it leaves the realm of
the symbolic and affects face-to-face social situations. This approach
to "interactive art" is squarely opposed to the mainstream "media art"
notion of the same term as cybernetic feedback devices, or, in other
words, the pseudo-interactivity of Pavlovian stimulus-and-response
systems forcing the audience to act within the constraints of
programmed machine logic.
The Yes Men, 0100101110101101.org and the - tactically no less
proficient - Viennese Monochrom collective form closely linked nodes
of the artistic and personal network of ubermorgen.com. The
development of artistic approaches is similar, too, from an early
embracement of the Internet in the corporate over-affirmation of
etoy.com to its dystopian tactical use as ubermorgen.com. From a realm
that was open to be appropriated by self-designed corporations, the
Internet ended up being artistically perceived as corporately
controlled territory. This change of perception proved to be
productive and, as the comparison between Etoy's (ongoing low-brow)
work and ubermorgen's reveals, a leap in artistic quality.
Unlike the WTO web site fake of the Yes Men, ubermorgen's Internet is
thoroughly dystopian. It is not even a corporate space that can be
hijacked for a morally good cause, but the hijacking is no less dark
and abysmal than its object; there is no way out the system. Unlike
the Yes Men's subverted WTO, no parodistic or utopian device exists
that disrobes corporate logic like the emperor's new clothes. Instead,
a project like "Google Will Eat Itself" (GWEI) just lets it run amok.
Beyond that, ubermorgen.com's dark humorism has a side that transcends
corporate identities and ostensible impersonality. "Psych.OS", a
series of video and images subconsciouly recorded as an audiovisual
"écriture automatique" inside a psychiatric hospital, at first doesn't
seem to be related to projects like GWEI or www.vote-auction.com at
all except that it was created by the same artist. The correspondence
between the former's highly subjective and the latter's highly
corporate art consists of more than the former depicting the
individual inside yet another controlling institution and the latter
injecting imaginative hackerdom into a corporate cosmos. In 2006,
ubermorgen.com was part of the "Smile Machines" exhibition during the
transmediale festival in Berlin, a show on humor in contemporary and
computer-based art. Ubermorgen's piece "G3-Bureaucrazy" consisted,
among others, of a web-based psycho drug recipe generator. After
filling out a multiple choice questionnaire of psychotic symptoms,
users would receive a hardcopy of an officially looking prescription
for strong psycho drugs, complete with a fake doctor's signature.
Combining the psychotic and the corporate and turning it into a
business, this piece bridged the gap between GWEI and PSYCH.OS,
precarious machine logic and precarious subjectivity. It is the most
concise present-day update to reflections of psychoses in modern art,
bare of all the romanticizing that marked surrealism from Breton to
Artaud, and bare of the bourgeois "art brut" aesthetization of
undrugged psychotic expression.
The contemporary artist no longer works on the grounds of deliberately
unrestrained and self-fashioned `craziness,' but, having turned into a
marketing director and self-managing freelancer in the art world, on
Prozac or Effexor. But ubermorgen's piece is not just a satirical
reflection of a contemporary world where you find, such as in L.A.,
billboards for "South California's favorite antidepressant." It also
is a very personal piece that evokes abysses of one's individual
condition, precisely by depicting it not as an unpredictable
psychotic, but as impersonal software automatism.
What in Renaissance art and philosophy was known as melancholia first
transformed in early 20th century modernism, from Surrealism to the
Vienna actionists, into violent psychosis and finally into
self-controlled conditioning and chemical self-normalization in our
time. Nevertheless, ubermorgen.com's art remains actionism even in
such a formal piece as the recipe generator. First of all, the recipe
printed from the web site can actually be used to alter one's
condition, just like the Yes Men's WTO site has been tactically used
to intervene into business congresses; and finally, the work has a
more profound personal dimension. ubermorgen's humor is existential,
unlike the lighter-weight humorism of, for example, Kurt Schwitters or
Robert Filliou. It also transcends the mere pose and postmodern play
with signs that still seemed characteristic for etoy.com. In
combination, humorism and existentialism create a powerful mixture in
ubermorgen's art. It is simultaneously reflexive and actionist,
introverted and extroverted, melancholy put into action: an "Action
Melancholia," performed at high personal risk in its conflict with
lawyers and courts and in the danger of personal burn-out. Unlike
academic artists who call themselves "critical," but shout foul once
they actually get in trouble, there is a silent melancholic feedback
loop in ubermorgen's actionism between troublemaking, being troubled
and getting into trouble.
In Renaissance emblems, the melancholicus was depicted as someone with
a gagged mouth sitting near a river and reading in a book. In
ubermorgen's art, he sits in front of a computer near Internet data
streams and wears a corporate mask.