Theoretical Physicists: The real artists of the 21st Century

Art & Science Are Theoretical Physicists the only true artists left in the 21st Century? Conceptual jester Jonathon Keats has suggested that the science fiction of the future will be written in mathematical equations but sci-fi, speculative fiction and futurism are all now things of the past: We are the future and the romantic idea of the artist is dead, politics is a fiction, and the only space where the Absolute, the Sublime and Beauty remain possible is within the theoretical micro equations of the quantum physics.

Jail Rebecca Brooks and Andy Coulson, now!

Politics Irrefutable evidence from Channel 4’s Dispatches that both the two main political parties and the police are in the pocket of the Murdoch Clan/News International. Former NOTW editor Andy Coulson and current NOTW editor Rebecca Brooks (Wade) were/are engaged in systematic criminal activity including blackmail, phone tapping, illegal payments to police, and perjury. Those in a position to expose News Internationals criminal activities have been threatened, either explicitly or implicitly, with retribution using the very tactics that are currently destabilising our Democracy and legal system. If British Democracy and the rule of law are to be seen as anything but farce Coulson and Brooks should face criminal prosecution and ultimately jail.

Private View: Thursday 27th 6:00pm - 8:30pm

Central Saint Martins’ MA Fine Art - Interim Show 2011
Description: Showcasing the work of Central Saint Martins’ MA Fine Art students
Continues: 28 January - 30 January 11am to 6pm
Location: Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf, Bargehouse St, South Bank, London, SE1 9PH

020 7021 1686
http://www.coinstreet.org/

Transport: Tube: Blackfriars, Southwark, Waterloo; bus: 45, 63, 100

Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five: Live on The Tube (1983)

Nostalgia Remember watching this at the time - People retrospectively hype The Tube as hip and cutting edge but it hardly ever had any black acts when hip-hop/electro and funk/soul/boogie where by far the most innovative forms of music during the period (early 80’s). For more classic electro links, mixtapes and re-edits join the Facbook group Let the music play - a homage to electro-funk. For westlake72’s take on the Message mashed with the Clash’s Guns of Brixton go here.

Chuka Umunna

Politics I believe the next Labour PM will be Streatham’s current MP: Chuka Umunna. I was extremely impressed by Umunna’s performance while grilling the vile Bob Diamond. He exhibited three vital qualities that Ed Milliband distinctly lacks: i) Clear, concise, communication skills, ii) A passionate, and authentic, sense of right and wrong, and iii) the appearance of a sharp, intelligent, confidence while still managing to appear ‘normal’. Roll on 2020… Mr Umunna also fancies himself as a bit of a Soulful House DJ. Click here some of his choices.

Sarah Palin: No sense of dignity, No sense of shame.

Politics In Sarah Palin’s video responce to the Arizona shooting it only takes Ms Palin 1 minute 30 seconds before she forgets about paying tribute to the Liberal senator Gabrielle Giffords, who lies fighting for her life and the lives of 6 others (including a 9 year old girl who she neglects to mention), and starts to make excuses for herself, and her hate filled friends in the media: Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh et al and their rabble rousing  rhetoric  'tageting’ Liberals such as Gabrielle Giffords who they attempt to portray as “anti-American”. Rather than show grace, humility and dignity she bizarrely chooses to attack others for “irresponsible statements” while refusing to accept that her, and her cronies, statements could have in anyway have created an atmosphere where violence is used to attack Liberals. If this was a one off incident she may have got away with it but this is only the latest and most serious example of violence directed against those Ms Palin and her supporters in the Media and the Tea Party view as “enemies”. Gabrielle Gifford herself had already warned about the danger posed by Ms Palins tactics:

Gabrielle Giffords warns Sarah Palin there will be consequences (video)

as had others:

Elizabeth Hasselbeck: Sarah Palin's Crosshairs Ad ‘Despicable’ (video)

Even the Republican Judge John Roll had previously received Death Threats from right wingers who objected to his ruling on immigration:

Reports: Judge Roll Received Threats (text)

There are too many instances to list here of right wingers threatening, or using, violence either explicitly or implicitly against their Liberal political opponents so Ms Palin hasn’t got the excuse of hiding behind her own ignorance. In the wake of this paradigm shifting incident she had the opportunity to demonstrate both courage and humility by paying respect to the dead and injured by drawing a line in the sand, acting responsibly and pledging to refrain from using inflammatory language in the future and encouraging her supporters to do the same. Did she choose to show such courage and humility? No, she chose excuses, self justification and cowardice.

Increase the Peace

Music an hour of chilled out sun-kissed soul from my podcast.

Horny Chic (Flying Away)

 Music Horny Chic (Flying Away) by westlake72

This Trumpet lead, soulful, nu-disco groover is the most popular download from my Soundcloud page.http://soundcloud.com/westlake72/horny-chic-flying-away

Glen Campbell: Wichita Lineman (westlake72 remix)

Music Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman given an old skool jungle drum’n’bass remix by westlake72 with accompanying mash-up video.

Future Now Exhibition

‘We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us’ - Marshall McLuhan (1964)

All paradigm shifts in art emerge in response to social change and technological innovation. In the last 15 years information technology, particularly the emergence of the internet, has began to touch, and often reshape, every sphere of our lives. It is the electronic inter-connecting network potentially linking every human being directly to every other human being on planet. As human beings we are essentially social constructs – that is we are defined by our relationship to others – any fundamental shift in these relationships mediation is a fundamental shift in what it is to be human. It has been argued that the emergence of the internet is either A) the biggest technological innovation since Guttenberg’s movable type printing enabled the reformation, the scientific revolution and the birth of modernity B) A system as transformative as the very emergence of the written word in Mesopotamian 4th BC, or even C) a biological shift in human kind on a scale of the emergence of language itself. Therefore we are currently living through an age of technology-lead social change so all encompassing that we are presently unable to grasp the full implications of what that change may mean, other than to state simply that this social change will inevitably lead to a fundamental change, not only in what is meant by the term 'art', and what it is to be an 'artist', but what it actually means to be a human being in this emerging post-Gutenberg galaxy.

Future Now is an online exhibition featuring 5 emerging artists working with digital print, video projection, sound performance, text, digital programming, and drawing . This exhibition will create a dialogue with the monumental technology-led social/cultural shifts that have emerged in the last 10 to 15 years focussing on our changing relationships with technology and each other within the birth of the information age.

Of Grammatology

Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology as Word Cloud

The English and Football

The World Cup I feel most sorry for the English underclass whose lack of economic power disbars them from fully participating in a culture based on self actualisation through conspicuous conception. Enticed by multination corporations' advertising and sponsorship they attempt to overcome this humiliation through the purchase of cheap, third world produced, sporting apparel in order to try and forge a link between themselves and multi-milionare sportsmen. They hope this tenuous link will give them a sense of power and success that will obliterate their everyday reality of disempowerment and failure. England then lose 4-1 to Germany.

The Future of UK Politics

Politics The LidDems should not coalition with the Tories as the Tories won't seriously offer them any real chance of PR (it would be electoral suicide for them to do so). Instead the Libdems will agree to back them over the Queens speech and budget to allow the Tories to govern. This will allow the LibDems to remain untainted by the savage cuts the Tories will make. Meanwhile Labour under Alan Johnson will be revitalised and discover their radical sense of purpose. After a couple of years of Tory cuts as a minority Government the Tory government will fall allowing the emergence of a centre left coalition who will introduce PR resulting in the Conservatives being denied forever the chance to govern the country again.

Update** A week Tory government relying on the LibDems to keep it in power is by far the best outcome we could have realistically hoped for but Clegg has made a mistake entering a formal coalition and accepting cabinet posts as the LibDems will now be tarred with association with the cuts that are coming so will probably get annihilated at the next general election that won't be far away.

Britney Spears: Toxic (westlake72 Remix)

Here is a dub remix I have done for the Britney Spears track Toxic synced with the original video.

Live at the Lotus Lounge

Music The latest edition of my podcast is now available to stream or download. This a live set featuring myself and New York's legendary DJ Sims (Sarah Sims Erwin) live at the Lotus Lounge NYC circa 2003. It starts with about half an hour of chilled-out Street Soul from myself followed by an eclectic mixture of Gangster Rap, Latino flavoured Jazz, and Loungecore from Sims before I come back with some Dancehall and Classic Jazz-Funk. Enjoy... Live at the Lotus

Some brief notes on Time

Time: the socio-political
The ways we have marked out time, from the obelisks of ancient Egypt and Babylon to the atomic super-clocks being developed today that are said to be more accurate than time itself, the socio-economic system in place and the way human beings experience time have always remained inter-linked. It is perhaps not surprising that slave based societies such as the ancient Egyptians, owing their power to the systemization of social relations enabled by the development of mathematics, also appear to be the first societies to deploy time keeping devices. In the middle ages where man’s still relatively direct relationship to the land meant that the seasons and weathers fluctuations informed his working patterns, the micro-management of time was unnecessary. But as feudalism began to be replaced by capitalism during the Renaissance our relationship with time started to shift. In 1584 Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar that we use today propagating the centralization of papal power. Somewhat ironically Rome had been systematically replacing the God given circadian time as churches were turned into giant sundials by the drilling of a hole in its roof in order to predict the arrival of Easter. When the Gregorian calendar was finally adopted in England in 1752, in order to catch up with this now standardized European calendar from which it was lagging behind, Wednesday September the 2nd was immediately followed by Thursday September the 14th. This apparently resulted in widespread riots by angry mobs chanting ‘Give us our eleven days back!’.

The political nature of time was made explicit in revolutionary France when gunshots were fired at town hall clocks to mark a radical break from history. French Revolutionary Time was subsequently introduced where, in the enlightenment spirit of obsessive rationalization, the 24 hour clock was replaced with a decimalized system dividing the day into 10 decimal parts each of these 10 parts were divided into ten others and so on, so the hundredth part of the hour is the decimal minute and the hundredth part of the minute was the decimal second. With the emergence of globalized trading, precise time keeping for navigation became a priority. As a ships position at sea could only be determined with accuracy if a navigator could refer to an accurate clock, the then standard pendulum-based clocks originally conceived by Galileo were unsuitable for the task. In 1714 after the loss of numerous cargos (and lives) the British government offered twenty thousand pounds to whoever built a clock that would keep accurate time at sea. A young man took up the challenge by the name of John Harrison, a carpenter at the time, who on hearing of the competition dedicated his life to this quest and eventually succeeded at his 4th attempt. The government originally refused to pay up, but, after the intervention on his behalf by King George, Harrison eventually received his payment at the age of 79, becoming a multi-millionaire in today’s money.

The phrase time is money represents the commodification of time as an object to be exploited in the accumulation of greater capital, and it was capitalisms transformation during the industrial revolution that brought about the now normative adherence to clock-time we observe today, as a synchronic form of time and work discipline was imposed on workers. Up until the 19 Century British cities ran to local solar time and it was only with the introduction of the electric telegraph that enabled the imposition of a standardized single time zone (GMT) that industrialists demanded despite much local opposition. The emerging power and influence of rail companies such as the Great Western Railway sped up the rationalization and standardization of time to increase the efficient distribution of goods and materials. To placate local objections many cities ran, for a period, a dual time system. The clock at the Exchange in Bristol for instance, which is ten minutes behind London Time (or London is 10 minutes ahead of Bristol), still features two minute hands: one showing GMT the other Bristol Time.

A hyper-rationalization of time management was developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor In 1911 reaching its apex in the industrial mass production methods of the Ford motor company in Detroit. It involved scientific analysis of the time/productivity relationship in pursuit of the maximization of profits e.g. the screwing of a single bolt being calculated at 15.2 seconds. Capitalisms other has a less historically linear relationship with time. The Soviet Union fetishized production as much as America and adopted an equally technological view of time. Aleksei Gastev, an avant-garde poet who wrote futurist prose eulogizing industrialization and the coming era of the new man, advocated Taylerism through ‘the movement for the scientific organization of labour’, or NOT (nauchnaia organization truda), which he described as his last artwork. These ideas, imported from capitalist America, underpinned the Soviet commodification of time epitomized by Stalins 5-year plans 1928 and 1932. Unfortunately for Gastev his own time ran out in 1938 when he was arrested on false charges of counter-revolutionary terrorist activity and shot by the KGB, and as Heidegger and others have observed death is the limit point of our social temporality.

Year Zero was declared by Pol Pot when his Khmer Rouge completed their take over of Cambodia in 1975. It was George Orwell who observed Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future. Here, a pre-industrial agrarian utopia was founded where history not only ended but ceased to exist and time stood still. Cities were forcibly emptied as the entire population was made to farm the land in organized labour camps and any expression of nostalgia for pre-revolutionary times was referred to as memory sickness and could lead to execution. This anti-technological state existed as the antitheses of the Soviet/American view of time as a site of progress – here you would be killed for simply owning a wristwatch. When the regimes rule ended, after eight months and 20 days, one quarter of the country’s entire population of about seven million were dead.

Re-posted from Time: a group exhibtion

Time: A Group Exhibition

I am curating a group exhibition featuring 11 artists exploring the nature of Time from a variety of perspectives including the social, philosophical and scientific. Utilising a variety of strategies and media including interactive software, sculpture, digital print, performance, sound and text this exhibition will feature new works by:

Paul Abbott
Kate Barsby
Josh Baum
Peter Caul
Stephanie Dickinson
Tracy Gentles
Alan Jones
Carlos Monleon Gendall
Beatrice Loft Schulz
Emily Paige Short
Dan Westlake

Private View
6:00pm - 8:30pm Friday 19th of February
Exhibition open daily from 11am - 5pm
20th until the 26th February

We Are Arts Gallery, First Floor Red Lion Square
Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
Southampton Row, WC1B 4AP

Funky Good Times!

I've uploaded a new podcaste: a funky Rare groove mix I took out to New York on one of my DJing trips in the early 2000's. The pic I took at block party I played at during one of those trips, Good times indeed, nostalgic sigh...

I am participating in Some You Win, Some Deleuze a group show by a selection of MA Fine Art students at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design. It is the culmination of a month long project, ArtSpace 2010, which saw this group utilise Collective, a former industrial space on Camden High Street provided by Camden Council and Camden Town Unlimited, as open studios, information hub and live art venue. The show will also be featuring new work Paul Abbott, Carolina Ambida, Kate Barsby, Fagner Bibiano, Omar Castaneda, Coral Churchill, Pallas Citroen, Andrea Giulivi, Catherine Hieatt, Autumn Marlayne Jensen, Iyvone Khoo, Tom Mason, Georgina McNamara, Ben O'Connor, Eilidh Short, Helene Sorensen, Ben Turner, Melania Yerka. The Private View for this exhibition is Friday 22nd of January, 6pm - 9pm and the exhibition continues 23rd - 29th of January, opening daily 11am-5pm. The adress is 'Collective', 37 Camden High Street (Entrance on Symes Mews), NW1 7JE

Roland Bathes: The Death of the Author

The last line of Bathes text is 'the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author' and it is the reader referred to in the first half of this sentence that this essay really focuses on NOT a call for the annihilation of the author referenced in the second (French theorist tend to utilise bombastic leading statements to grab the readers attention and shock them out of complacent common sense readings i.e ‘The Gulf War Did not Take Place’ Jean Baudrillard or ‘There is nothing outside the text’ Jaques Derrida). Having said that it is not difficult to see why a flamboyant celebrity theorist such a Barthes would promote the role of interpreter over the role of producer. When published in 1968 the standard academic approach to literature in French academia at the time was based on the presupposition that there was a real, singlar, and fixed meaning to a piece of literature and that this singular meaning was the one intended by an author who was fully conscious of this meaning and his (it was usually a ‘his’) reasons for producing such meaning. It was the readers role simply to unearth what this meaning was. To destabilize the above can be seen as a radical gesture given the time and context (though it had been somewhat predated in less ostentatius terms by Wimsatt and Beardsley’s essay ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ published in the United States in 1946). Barthes key points are:

• The idea of authorship is inherently unstable (a text always appropriates previous texts)
• The idea of an author is inherently unstable (the 'self' is a site of permanent flux)
• Authorial intentionality does not define meaning
• An authors personal history is not the key to understanding a text
• There is not a fixed true meaning hidden in a text waiting to be discovered
• The reader is the ultimate arbiter of meaning

These central ideas espoused by Barthes during this period were a general feature of all post-structuralist critique and were actually pushed further by Derrida. The idea that a texts meaning is never entirely fixed so is therefore open to multiple readings was not just a comment on authorship but ultimately an anti-theological attack on the idea of authority (author-ity) itself (this position can be traced back to Nietzsche’s Death of God and is part of the general distrust towards meta-narratives that came to be known as post-modernism following the carnage of the second world war. This in turn lead to the vulnerability of theory to the charge of the type of nihilism and moral relativism that has lead to the emergence of religious fundamentalism). This position was the critical orthodoxy of the day by the 1980’s with the rise of critical theory and cultural studies in both Anglo-American academia and contemporary art discourse. It was then fashionable to dismiss the idea of universal values as hegemonic often leading to simplistic declerations such as ‘there is no such thing as truth’ and knee-jerk dismissals of any actual position being take as being authoritarian or even totalitarian. This line of argument taken to its absurd yet logical conclusion views the espousal of human rights as an act of fascism!

By the 90's in the context of contemporary fine art practice positions that challenged these assumptions became of interest whereby the simple restatement of these assumptions themselves was not. One of the reasons curator/critic Nicholas Bourriaud, for instance, rose to prominence was that at the time of writing the essays they came to be published as Relational Aesthetics in the 1990’s contemporary art had reached a point of postmodern inertia therefore it was seen as a refreshingly radical act to be taking an ideological position by promoting work that had a social (and unapologetic) agenda. Theory itself also began to look at a returned to direct political engagement and a return to universal or even transcendental values in the works of, for instance, Badiou, Zizek and late Derrida. The artworks that have provoked the most passionate and engaged critical engagement in the last 15 years or so are works that contain a level of explicit social intentionality with various degrees of tension between the polarities of didacticism and openness. Artist who have produced such committed pieces include Jeremy Deller, Santiago Sierra, and Mark Wallinger all of whom have not been afraid to take a position (though this does not necessarily negate a level of ambiguity or even ambivalence in the works) and artist-writers such as Liam Gillick, Dave Beech have to a degree wrestled the agenda from non-practicng critics and theorist with practices that demonstrate a reflective awareness, socio-political engagement and an embracement of authorial responsibility. The days of Marcel Duchamp’s dumb painter are over.

PS.This text has been appropriated and re-posted at the Madame Pickwick Art Blog without attribution to me - how ironic…