Issue No. 15 November 2007 —
Walter Benjamin and the Virtual: Politics, Art, and Mediation in the Age of Global Culture
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Vacated Campers 2000 |
Since the mid-1990s, the Melbourne-based artist, Ricky Swallow, has created meticulously detailed 1:1 scale models of outdated mass cultural forms, all of which have been constructed from the rudimentary materials that we might find in a kindergarten – cardboard, plastic tubes, craft glue and paint. Many of the objects that Swallow has selected to model epitomise the ubiquity of the image in late capitalism and the infiltration of the commodity sign into all forms of contemporary cultural life. Most recently, he has taken particular care with outdated technologies and toys, such as the once cutting-edge 2000 Apple Power Book, the Apple Mac logo, hand-held computer games [1], ghetto-blasters, cassette tapes, a telescope, metal detector, BMX bike and Campers brand sneakers. [2] Swallow’s collections of these objects belie his preoccupation with the age of the simulacrum - most principally with his referencing of the ubiquity of the virtual commodity logo over the materiality of the product, and the object’s association with a boy’s backyard dreams of fantasy escapism and transcendence over the suburban banal. However this fascination with the de-materialised commodity image is invoked with a measure of irony, since Swallow’s process of meticulously handcrafting commodity auras thoroughly short-circuits their former virtual life by emphasizing their excessive materiality – a materiality that, in turn, evokes the timelessness of a series of ancient fossils.
This paper traces the multiple ways in which Swallow’s forms revisit debates in contemporary cultural theory, namely, questions about the commodity and its relationship to time and the virtual in postmodern art and culture. While his commodity models evoke a number of aesthetic movements from the twentieth century, namely, Duchamp’s readymades, Pop Art’s numerous interventions into commodity sculpture, and the commodity sculptures of Jeff Koons and Haim Steinbach, [3] this paper focuses on Swallow’s forms in relation to critical debates relating to the cultural permutations of capitalism. I argue that Swallow’s handcrafting of outdated commodities, as if they are objects unearthed from an archaeological dig, articulate a “timely” relation to Walter Benjamin’s critique of the ossification of time in the modern commodity. The paper contends that Swallow’s forms enact a critical distance from postmodernism’s culture of retroversion and its stagnant temporality, in the way they undertake a tactical encounter with Benjamin’s fossil metaphor – literalising it and rendering the commodity logo into concrete forms. In doing so, they address the ever-increasing speed of commodity obsolescence, the virtual simulations of the commodity and its collusion with the all-pervasiveness of the image, that, in Fredric Jameson’s words, are characteristic features of the simulations, repetitions and retroversion of postmodern culture broadly (Postmodernism 17-20). [4] Mobilising Michael Taussig’s theory of the tactics of mimesis which is understood as enabling a new reading of Benjamin’s unmasking strategy and the analysis of time, representation and the commodity in the fossil form, Swallow’s forms are understood as ironic and sincere engagements with Benjamin’s dilemma of reification; they are read as mimetic subversions of the stagnation of time in the commodity, mimetic subversions that literally draw us to our senses.
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Silence Kit / Upturned PowerBook 2001 |
That Swallow’s recently outdated commodities evoke a series of ancient fossils is a comparison that has been noted in much of the reception of Swallow’s work. Marah Braye, Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson and Justin Paton have all independently argued that Swallow’s recently obsolescent technologies and commodities appear like fossils excavated from an ancient civilization (Braye 562). Having been bleached of all colour and robbed of all sound and movement, their disquieting fragility recalls the distinct kind of hush that attends nineteenth-century museum cabinets. They are no longer at the forefront of electronic entertainment – the height of contemporaneity – but rather, the commodities rest, as Daniel Palmer notes, as if suspended “in a state of imaginatively short-circuited historical progression” (86). The primitive nature that is mapped into these technologies, and the mythic and archaic associations they give rise to, is further compounded by the crude and basic materials from which the models have been constructed. Paper, cardboard, glue, plastic tubes and paint are basic, elementary construction methods, just as they further emphasise the transience and ephemeral nature of all constructed forms. In their fragile, hollowed-out, fossilized life, the semiological and ideological narratives of these iconic objects are drawn out in explicit detail such that they recall Roland Barthes’s writings on the mythic status of the objects of mass culture, outlined in his own iconic work, Mythologies.
This fossilizing gesture is most explicit in Swallow’s rendition of the 2000 Apple Power Book, titled Silence Kit/Upturned Power Book (2001). In Swallow’s rendition, the laptop’s triumphant display of the cyber realm’s transcendence over actuality, the commodity’s final redemption from the impermanence of matter, is literally upended. Carved out of balsa wood, displayed upside down, and made to appear like an extinct piece of nature, the pattern of balsa wood grain marks the transitory nature of virtuality itself, a stark reminder of the increasing speed of commodity obsolescence.
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Apple 2000 2000 |
Swallow’s BMX, titled Peugeot Taipan (1999) also recalls the skeletal frame of a fossilised life. Stripped of its glory and speed, it no longer heralds a “coming of age” as it once did for Swallow (Repo Man) – boyhood dreams of riding “off track” and exploring/colonizing the galaxy within the infinite comfort of the suburban backyard. Bleached white, robbed of its brand name stickers and reduced to a mere frame that rests against the gallery wall, the bike is resonant with the profundity and aura of an intact archaeological remnant. As Juliana Engberg notes in “No Radio,” the BMX has become as spooky as something excavated from Pompeii (33).
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Game Boy (Concept Model) 2000 |
This catastrophe of comfort is also prefigured in Swallow’s life-sized replicas of an empty pair of Campers brand sneakers, titled Vacated Campers (2000). One of the sneakers lies petrified on its side, tragic, untouched, as if it bears the precious evidence of a civilization that once walked upright, or, as Justin Paton suggests in “The Recreation Room,” “the last upright step in the story of some evolutionary downfall.” Eviscerated of their glow as commodities and made to appear like hollowed-out fossils, the sneakers are suggestive of the downward spiral of late capitalist society bent on consuming dreams of “upward mobility;” dreams that are ceaselessly vanquished and hollowed-out in small plastic forms. They testify to history in its most petrified form, a form of history that, as Walter Benjamin argues in The Arcades Project, might otherwise be described as the commodity fetish (204).
That Swallow’s fossils should recall Walter Benjamin’s metaphor of the commodity fossil is a timely and productive invocation given that this conjunction enables us to revisit theoretical questions relating to constructions of time and commodity culture in the context of late capitalism. Benjamin develops his metaphor of the fossil in his landmark study, The Arcades Project, and it is a recurring critical-poetic figure throughout his writings on modernity. [6] The fossil metaphor is invoked in order to gesture to the stagnation of historical change in Paris’s culture of commodity fetishism in the nineteenth-century and in Europe in the early years of the twentieth century. He holds that the decaying commodity fetishes of the nineteenth-century, buried within Paris’s dilapidated shopping arcades, are critical figures for twentieth century culture because they allude to the fossilization of time in the commodity form. The fossilized commodity is a critical image for Benjamin because it captures the stagnant nature of modernity, highlighting the ways in which nature is reified as a dead and passive construct in the bid to sell the notion of a naturally unfolding historical development, and consequently, to point to the ways in which commodity culture lulls any possibility of real historical change (204, 205, 405, 461). The once-fashionable commodities of Paris are best characterized as the shells of a mythic, ancient era – extinct pieces of nature unearthed by an archaeological dig. As Susan Buck-Morss argues in The Dialectics of Seeing, Benjamin’s fossil metaphor illuminates the narcotic-like effect of the commodity and its inducement of a profound form of amnesia that enables the perpetual worship of the ever-same as the ever-new (95-6, 80). It is a potentially critical image capable of performing a withering optic upon modernity’s phantasmagoric illusions of endless progress, highlighting the ancient, utopian longings for real historical and social change that lies dormant within the commodity form – the seeds of change that are ceaselessly buried in the parade of endlessly new commodity fetishes (106-9).
Swallow’s active process of fossilizing commodities stages a timely invocation of Walter Benjamin’s critical-poetic critique of the commodity fetish. Like Benjamin’s metaphor, Swallow’s arrested commodities critically frame the way that capitalism freezes time in its process of creating endlessly new commodities. However whilst Benjamin’s fossil metaphor alludes to the stagnation of history in modernity’s worship of the ever-new commodity, Swallow’s forms mobilize the fossil in order to critically frame the icons of late capitalism specifically. They extend Benjamin’s critique of the commodity fossil into the temporal logic of late capitalism, replete with its orientation around the virtual logo as commodity par excellence, and its dizzying temporal logic of ceaseless reproduction, retroversion and the deferral of presence. [7] That is to say, they diverge from Benjamin’s critique with regard to the context in which they are situated because what is off-set in Swallow’s renditions is not simply an unmasking of the stagnation of history and time at the very heart of modern progress, but the stagnation of history and time in the ceaseless movement of late capitalism’s virtual flows, the evisceration of matter in the commodity, and the increasing speed of the product’s obsolescence. Indeed, if late capitalism is the culture of speed and the conditions of altered visual perception and stability, as Paul Virilio characterizes it in The Aesthetics of Disappearance (60), the accelerated pace of commodity culture is what is at stake in Swallow’s critique of time in the commodity, since it is the speed of change in late capitalism that allows things to remain the same. This paradoxical stagnation, crystallization and fossilization of time in the speed of late capitalism’s change is alluded to and critiqued in Swallow’s forms. The commodity’s complete stasis, and the way its frozen appearance is evocative of ancient fossilised matter, finally short-circuits the speed of commodity obsolescence and alludes to the process of fossilisation that occurs in late capitalism’s culture of obsolescence.
The timeliness of Swallow’s invocation of the commodity fossil in relation to the virtual commodities of late capitalism is certainly pertinent if we hold to Susan Buck-Morss’s argument that the increased speed of commodity obsolescence, and the dwindling possibility of an outside to the fluid, nomadic principles of late capitalism, has only served to exacerbate the stagnation of history (339). If some seek to claim radical deferral and reproduction of late capitalism as an avant-garde form of temporality that finally ruptures the stagnation of modernity, Buck-Morss argues that the celebration of radical deferral (which she also associates with postmodernism as a cultural and temporal moment, and deconstruction as a theoretical movement [8]), may prove to be the weightiest fossil of all time (339). For while “deconstruction” was presumed to be both “anti-ideological and philosophically radical” in its denial of a fixed point in the past, and in its capabilities of drawing the present emphatically into interpretation, Buck-Morss argues that these deconstructive readings of Benjamin’s critique of modernity also play into the logic of the commodity fetish (339). That is to say, radical temporal deferral is part of the logic of late capitalism. Buck-Morss writes:
Deconstruction cannot bring to a standstill what is experienced as a continuous restlessness of meaning, because there is no image of the present as the moment of revolutionary possibility to arrest thought. In the absence of any “magnetic north pole” whatsoever, deconstructionists “decenter” the texts as a series of individualist and anarchist acts. Change appears eternal, even while society remains static. Its revolutionary gesture is thereby reduced to the sheer novelty of interpretations. Fashion masquerades as politics (339).
Swallow’s fossilizations of late capitalism’s objects are timely because they historicise this conflation between postmodernism’s radical deferral, and late capitalism’s speed that Buck-Morss identifies as the prevalent form of time in late capitalism. Swallow’s fossilized commodity icons allude to the utter stagnation of time in late capitalism’s ceaseless turnover of commodity images, whilst forging a critical distance from the commodity sign. By crafting recently outdated commodity fetishes as though they are ancient fossils, we are encouraged to view the ubiquity of the commodity sign, and its colonization of all cultural realms, as if we inhabit a later cultural moment – as if this postmodern impasse in history has, in fact, passed.
This preoccupation with the markings of time in late capitalism is not only the subject of Swallow’s work, made explicit in the content of his forms; Swallow’s interest in the markings of time are also literally impressed within their method of production. Constructed from a method of hand craftsmanship that is time consuming to the highest degree, this method of commodity production is also nearly pre-historic in its own right, since it hails from a pre-industrial era that might also be thought of as a nearly fossilized moment in the method of commodity production. The eons of contact time carefully impressed within the painstaking detail of each handcrafted object sets up a sharp paradox in relation to the evisceration of time that is part and parcel of the content of Swallow’s forms, namely, his collections of commodity fetishes. The models oscillate around an ironic disjunction between the speed with which late capitalism renders its commodities obsolete, and the enormous amounts of contact-time – the care and labour – that is required to make these objects look démodé. By labouring upon the discrepancy between the acceleration of time in late capitalism (the ceaseless turnover of the commodity image) and the leisurely pace that the hobby craftsman works at in order to make concrete objects, Swallow’s forms enact a literal slowing down of time; his tactile reproductions invoke Benjamin’s dilemma of reification with both a sense of irony and sincerity – they encourage us to witness the speed with which late capitalism divorces us (both literally and metaphorically) from our “senses.” They encourage us to exercise the critical faculties that are imbued in touching and being in contact.
Swallow’s primarily tactile encounters with late capitalism’s fossils allude to another way, and perhaps a more critical way, in which Swallow’s forms extend Benjamin’s fossil critique into late capitalism’s commodity sign. His emphasis on the process of constructing the objects supplements Benjamin’s primary methodology of the fossil, namely, its orientation around the appropriation and decontextualisation of derelict objects and commodities, and in doing so, it signals a highly “crafty” and nuanced approach to the logic of reproduction that inheres within Benjamin’s commodity fossil. Swallow’s act of foregrounding the replication process as the pivotal aspect of the fossil form draws forth a highly nuanced engagement with the logic of reproduction and the politics of unmasking that lies dormant in Benjamin’s critique of the commodity fetish. His reproductions of fossilized nature animadvert any idealization of an unfettered nature that can be unmasked by appropriating a methodology of rupture, arrest and shock. Rather, by literalising Benjamin’s fossil metaphor, Swallow’s forms revisit the complex nature of “matter,” critical distance, and its relationship to ideology critique whilst also complicating social constructionist theses – many of which hold that the culture of the copy lives without an original base from which to ground a Marxist form of critical distance.
Swallow’s revisitation of the complexities of matter and its relationship to theories of representation and ideology critique can be articulated in light of the dynamic and critical potential of mimesis, which is, according to Michael Taussig’s study Mimesis and Alterity (1993) a mode of literal or realist representation which is capable of critically illuminating the frozen dialectical tensions between nature and culture, matter and the virtual, the original and the copy, that inhere within all forms, including the commodity. Drawing and extending upon Walter Benjamin’s writings on the commodity, including his essays “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” “On the Mimetic Faculty,” and “The Doctrine of the Similar,” Taussig theorises mimesis as a form of realist representation that has the capacity to illuminate the unresolved dialectical tensions through which the commodity is ceaselessly fetishised and de-fetishised.
Taussig’s theorization of the critical potential of mimesis is an important paradigm for reading Swallow’s realist copies of Benjamin’s fossil metaphor because it revisits the Marxist problematic of unmasking the commodity fetish in the wake of the various poststructuralist critiques of essentialism and originality. Mimesis, according to Taussig, exceeds naïve definitions of realism that are tied to forced ideologies of naturalism and essentialism even as it nuances the idea of replication put forward by the currently fashionable “social constructionist” theses which hold that all notions of “essence” or “nature” are mere fictions of the reproduction process itself (44). Conceptualised as “the nature that culture uses to create second nature” (70), Taussig’s theory of mimesis complicates Marxist ideology critique and its attempt to expose an essence from beneath the fetish, even whilst it also complicates the anti-ideological stance held by many postmodern/poststructuralist critics associated with the “literary turn” in the humanities (xv-xix; 22-3). Taussig argues that mimesis is a revolutionary mode of representation because it is both a “nature” and a “culture.” It is a copy or a construction of the original, at the same time that it is the original: “the mimetic faculty carries out its honest labour of suturing nature to artifice … granting the copy the character and power of the original, the representation the power of the represented” (xvii). In all forms of mimesis, “copy and contact merge to become virtually identical, different moments of the one process of sensing: seeing something or hearing something is to be in contact with that something” (21). Hence there can be no concept of nature prior to history that can be liberated through unmasking just as there can be no concept of historical construction outside of nature. Taussig notes:
… mimesis cannot be outside of history, just as history cannot be outside of the mimetic faculty. Here we take odds with the fashionable theses of construction, that nature itself is a social construction, just as we take odds with the converse, that history itself can be reduced to an essential nature. As the nature that culture uses to create second nature, mimesis chaotically jostles for elbow room in this force field of necessary contradiction and illusion, providing the glimpse of the opportunity to dismantle that second nature and construct other worlds. (70-1)
Given the Janus-faced character of mimesis, and its reconfiguration of the terms “nature” and “culture,” Taussig argues that mimesis can be used to highlight the way in which historical constructions come to appear natural even as it can be used to denaturalize historical constructions (19). The mimetic faculty’s fusion of the copy and the original, to the point where the representation may even assume the character and power of the original, enables the taken-for-granted to assume its image of validity. However, the art of exposing the mimetic faculty can out-fetishise the fetish, and unmoor the fossilization of history. Once the interrelationship between copy and original, copy and contact, nature and culture is drawn to light, Taissig argues that one is also able to “be jerked out of the complacencies of commonsense habits,” and to enliven the “fertile grounds of mimesis for wild imagining,” highlighting the fantastical in and of realist representation itself (21). Taussig claims that this deliberate display of the mimetic faculty also bears much of the disruptive power associated with Benjamin’s notion of the “dialectical image;” historicizing nature and naturalizing history at once, “dislocating chains of concordance with one hand, and reconstellating in accord with a mimetic snap, with the other” (19). It is at these dialectical intersections that Taussig sees the relationship between mimesis and alterity brought to productive fruition, sutured with the potential to rupture historical formations.
Swallow’s models of commodity fossils can be read in light of Taussig’s notion of a critical mimetic enactment because they stage a form of literal copying that draws forth a temporal distance from the constructed commodity form that cannot be dismissed as postmodern duplicity or the direct exposure of ideological constructs. By “adhering to the skin of things through realist copying,” Swallow’s forms disconcert and entrance “by spinning off into fantastic formations” (Taussig 44). In doing so, they draw a visual connection between mimesis and the critical potential of the fossilized commodity that is suggested in Taussig’s passage:
… if the magic brought about by the recently outdated is a magic achieved by framing, by highlighting the staging of second nature – its unmaking no less than its making – then this is also likely to be a privileged site for the revelation of mimesis and the flooding of mimetic excess. (233)
Swallow’s mimetic enactments of commodity fossils are timely interventions because they stage a critical enactment with the dialectical tensions between nature and reproduction that lie dormant in Benjamin’s fossil metaphor. Swallow’s literal reproductions of fossils animadvert any crude attempt to unmask the fetish and expose “nature” in its raw and unfettered state, since his reproductions of the fossil allude to the way that nature also plays an active hand in fossilization itself. Fossilisation, in other words, is not something that is done to nature by culture, but is an act of reproduction in nature. This allusion to the tactile life of the commodity is productive because it out-fetishises the very mechanisms through which the commodity fossil maintains its aura. For whilst the lure of the commodity – its brief flaring of life – is, according to Taussig, maintained by the obliteration of labour-contact, and the sensuous interaction with the object world that brought the commodity into being (22), [9] Swallow’s forms suture the tactile life of the commodity to productive fruition. Swallow’s act of literalising Benjamin’s fossil metaphor out-fetishises the commodity fetish by highlighting the very nature through which the commodity acquires and loses its elusive glow. His literalisations of the fossil highlight the magic of mimesis – the making of history no less than its unmaking, and this magic of mimesis plays itself out in the ceaseless and chiastic tensions between the handmade and the readymade, the original and the copy, the virtual and the material, and nature and culture, that are explicit in Swallow’s forms.
This reconfiguration of the matter of representation in mimesis is also arresting in the context of “postmodern” culture because it tempers the prevalence of the virtual. His tactile reproductions subvert the ubiquity of the image in late capitalism, its trading in immaterial logos and brands, and the final subsumption of the art object to capitalist design culture that, in Hal Foster’s words, mark the cynical duplicity of postmodern culture. The prevalence of the virtual and its purported transcendence over the realm of matter is perhaps best ironised in Swallow’s literal renditions of an Apple Mac logo and a power book laptop as fossilised forms. Both of these Apple icons signify what Fredric Jameson has termed the “postmodern” political economy of the commodity sign because they mark the final collusion between capital and the image. Jameson argues that the computer is the fetish object par excellence of late capitalist culture because it is no longer a sculptural solid in space, but marks the transition to “all sources of reproduction rather than ‘production’” (Postmodernism 118). Hal Foster extends upon Jameson’s passage in order to assert that the computer is emblematic of postmodernism in the way that it resists representation entirely, as does advanced capitalism in general, being all but global in its reach, everywhere and nowhere at once (Foster 105). Having eviscerated all pretences to reference and substance, the computer inaugurates the postmodern age of simulation. The Apple Mac computer epitomizes the ubiquity of the image more thoroughly. Having taken center stage in the realm of image-making, the Apple computer epitomizes the de-materialisation of cultural production in general, marking the final subsumption of art into technological reproduction and commodification. Indeed, the Apple logo has become the signature of the artist/designer in contemporary culture, embodying the thoroughgoing interdependence between the image and the commodity in late capitalism, or what Rosalind Krauss otherwise terms in the subtitle to her text A Voyage on the North Sea, “the age of the post-medium condition.”
Swallow’s mimetic enactment of the Apple icon undermines the virtual life of the logo by literalising the tactile dimension of reproduction. His allusion to the material dimensions of the commodity as its primary feature tempers postmodernism’s logic of virtual transcendence and humorously invokes the “few heavy weights” that Benjamin identifies as a critical aspect of Marxist critique, and the fossil image specifically. Swallow’s fossilised forms suggest that it is the absence of materialist concerns that has paradoxically come to “weigh” upon the present, or, to frame the argument in Benjamin’s words:
All historical knowledge can be represented in the image of balanced scales, one tray of which is weighted with what has been and the other with knowledge of what is present. Whereas on the first the facts can never be too humble or numerous, on the second there can only be a few, massive weights. (The Arcades Project 468 [N6, 5])
But there is a further way in which Swallow’s mimetic play with the commodity undermines the reification of time in the commodity, and this is the way in which Swallow’s fascination with the exact copy recalls the mimetic forms of play that Benjamin associates with the child’s consciousness, and the revolutionary forms of estrangement that are associated with this mimicry. Similar to the image of the fossil that ruptures modern constructions of progress, Benjamin holds that the child practices a unique form of mimetic play that releases new modes of temporality. The child’s capacity for suturing the thing-ness of the world through their practical form of thinking opens up new possibilities of meaning that are otherwise controlled by the rationalizing adult-bourgeois world – a world that is emblematized by the mass produced plastic toy (“The Cultural History of Toys” 116; “Old Toys” 101). [10]
Swallow’s hand-produced copies of mass produced plastic technological toys provide a visual segue between the revolutionary potential of the child’s mimetic forms of play and the critical image of the fossil. While Swallow’s series of technological toys may have once been the plastic embodiment of bourgeois ideology, testifying to the colonization of the child’s imagination and the nullification of her transformation of material forms, Swallow’s childlike play with mimesis works to destabilize the bourgeois ideology that is embodied in the plastic toys and technologies, whilst visually unplugging the toy’s drive to evolutionary mastery. His forms are no longer powered by the organized control of the mimetic faculty, but rather, petrified and scattered on the gallery floor with no coherent pattern or logical order, their defunct and copied status evoke mythic, magical worlds. We find sunken worlds in the plastic contours of a “Game Boy,” a butterfly’s wings in a pair of worn shoes, a museum in a toy shop, recalling Benjamin’s notes from The Arcades Project:
Only a thoughtless observer can deny that correspondences come into play between the world of modern technology and the archaic symbol-world of mythology. Of course, initially the technologically new seems nothing more than that. But in the very next childhood memory its traits are already altered. Every childhood achieves something great and irreplaceable for mankind. By the interest it takes in technological phenomena, by the curiosity it displays before any sort of invention or machinery, every childhood binds the accomplishments of technology to the old worlds of symbol. There is nothing in the realm of nature that from the outset should be exempt from such a bond. Only it takes form not in the aura of novelty but in the aura of the habitual (461).
Benjamin’s passage alludes to the relations between mimesis, childhood play and the unraveling of stagnant forms of time in technological phenomena that are evident in Swallow’s models. His mimetic play with outmoded technological toys unleash the submerged utopian symbols that lie dormant in constructed forms, thus enabling a measure of critical distance that Benjamin also associates with the appropriation of fossilized commodities. The small-time details impressed within each of Swallow’s hobby models – the mimetic habit and accuracy of copying associated with childhood play – unearth big-time myths and equations that are ceaselessly buried in technological phenomena. [11] These allusions to the “big time” picture prise open a distance from a “postmodern” culture that is often imagined to be eternally present.
I have argued that Swallow’s tactile, mimetic engagement with outdated commodity logos are arresting due to the way they quite literally make time within the context of postmodern culture that proclaims to mark the end of time. The skill of Swallow’s craft-based reproductions of commodity logos (what I have argued is the mimetic faculty itself) rest in their timely extension of Benjamin’s fossil metaphor into the cultural reaches of late capitalism, namely, its saturation in images and virtual flows. Swallow’s forms are tactical encounters with history’s making in a milieu that seeks to hollow out the significance of temporality itself, and whilst this entails the quickness of wit that is often characteristic of postmodernism’s play with signifiers, his pieces also evidence an arresting level of patience.
Marita Bullock was awarded her PhD (UNSW) on Walter Benjamin’s writings on trash, focusing on contemporary visual art, culture and theories of modernity and postmodernity. She is currently working on a book titled Memory Fragments: Excavations of Trash in Contemporary Visual Culture and she is a member of the Centre for Cultural History (Macquarie University) where she works as a research assistant for Dr. Nicole Moore’s ARC project on literary obscenity and censorship in twentieth century Australia. marita.bullock@humn.mq.edu.auThanks to Brigitta Olubas and Elizabeth McMahon for useful feedback on this work in its earlier form as a much longer PhD chapter.
Endnotes
- These forms are titled Silence Kit/Upturned Power Book (2001), Apple (2001), Game Boy (Concept Model) (2000). Some of the earliest exhibitions of these pieces were in an exhibition with Erik Swanson, titled Swallow/Swenson, hosted by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2001), and For Those Who Came in Late at the MATRIX 191 at Berkeley Art Museum (2001).
- These forms are titled X-Bass Woofer (1998), Stereo (Twin Cassette) (1985), The Stars Aren’t Shining On Us, We’re in the Way of Their Light (2000), Diagonal Choir (2001), Peugeot Taipan (1999), Vacated Campers (2000). Some of these pieces were exhibited in Swallow’s solo shows, Repo Man, at Darren Knight Gallery Sydney (1998), and in Unplugged, at Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney (2000).
- I have traced these connections in more detail in another paper titled “Crafting Time: Ricky Swallow’s Commodity Models” (Philament, June, 2006).
- I am referring here to Fredric Jameson’s often-cited writings on history as recycling. He writes: “[in] faithful conformity to poststructuralist linguistic theory, the past, as “referent,” finds itself gradually bracketed and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts” (Postmodernism 18). As a result of the effacement of the past as referent, Jameson claims that the postmodern present is marked by the transformation of reality into images, and the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents, such that history is little more than a dusty set of spectacles, a multitudinous photographic simulacrum (Postmodernism 20). This disappearance of the weightiness of history – the incapacity of society to “retain its own past” – prompts the perpetual amassing and aestheticisation of past fragments that Jameson terms “pastiche” (Postmodernism xii, 17-18, 4-5).
- These forms also evoke the crystal-encrusted world in J.G. Ballard’s novel The Crystal World.
- Benjamin’s allusions to the fossil occur throughout The Arcades Project on pages 204 (H1a,1), 205 (H1a, 3), 405 (L1, 1), 461 (N,2,7).
- As Jean Baudrillard suggests in For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St.Louis: Telos Press, 1981), late capitalism encourages the consumption not of objects, but of brand names and commodity logos – the commodity’s difference from other signs (108). It marks the structural chiasmus between the economy and the sign, the thoroughgoing meddling between commodity exchange and signification (114-16).
- I am wary of easily conflating the terms “postmodernism” and “deconstruction” as in Buck-Morss’s analysis, yet her critique of the convergence between the stagnation of culture in late capitalism’s speed, and the limitations of deconstruction, postmodernism and post-structuralism’s privileging of movement over stasis is suggestive and timely.
- Taussig borrows from Karl Marx’s dictate that the aura of the commodity fetish is maintained by the displacement of the social character of men’s labour into the appearance of an objective character of the commodity itself; the swallowing-up of labour-contact by its copy ensures the animation of the commodity, “its power to straddle us” (22-3).
- Buck-Morss argues that, according to Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, the child’s primordial motor reactions (that are made manifest in play) are evidence of a mimetic faculty that is more foundational to cognition than conceptual language (264). More significant, however, is the way in which the child’s active and creative form of mimesis is, according to Benjamin, linked to revolutionary consciousness. For while mimesis works by a spontaneous connection between perception and action, imagination and physical innervation, it is this tactile imagination at work in the child that the adult-bourgeois world sets out to eradicate, directing the child’s cognition into abstract-formal rationality, encouraging the child to “parrot back the correct answer, to look without touching, to solve problems ‘in the head’, to sit passively, and to learn without optical clues” (263-5). As a consequence of training “properly” rational adults, that is, in the process of destroying the tactile imagination, Benjamin claimed that bourgeois culture also inebriated the adult’s revolutionary consciousness; the eradication of the tactile imagination resulted in the inability to imagine other worlds (262-265).
- Benjamin’s conceptualisation of true childhood play – mimesis – as a mode that enables a new figuration of time is also prefigured in Rousseau’s Emile (1762), which according to Roberto Farné’s article “Pedagogy of Play,” opens up a provocation that “’the most precious rule of childhood education is not to save time, but to lose it’” (Farné 173). This notion of childhood play as a productive process insofar as the child “loses time” is based upon the notion that “the more natural and unstructured the environment is, the richer is children’s play as an educational activity” (173). It might be further suggested that this notion of childhood play as a realm unfettered by bourgeois rationaliy is the dominant representation of the artist in modern culture, and Swallow’s forms of childhood play become allegorical for the figuration of art-making in contemporary culture.
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