Thank you. is finitude and certain violence that comes along with the notion of infinite potential or inexhaustible power, infinitude. And one of the reasons why I've come to this question,
why I'm interested in the work I'm going to talk about, is because for the last few years I've been engaged with the question of realism in philosophy. As David said, there's been a kind of revival of interest, which some of you may be aware of, in what's become known as speculative realism, the question of how we can think a reality that is not dependent on thought, a non-human reality. And I think there's a certain timeliness to this return to realism in that ecologically we're compelled to contemplate the prospect of a world without us. and therefore we're led to question the subjective tendency of much 20th century philosophy,
which tended to focus on questions of the subjective constitution of knowledge, rather than the real of which knowledge was a knowledge. So I'm not going to talk in detail about that, But just to say that there's this question of realism, and I suppose there are a number of chance encounters with artists that led me to start thinking about the way in which perhaps contemporary art has already thought through this question of realism in certain ways. it's already questioned the limitation of realism to the visual, the limitation of realism to an accuracy or an indexical relation. It's also, at the same time, acknowledged within a work
an interrogation rather than an occlusion of the real status of the work itself, that the work is part of a reality outside its author's intentions, often bringing in materials, its material contingency, its connectedness to an outside. So through publishing the journal Collapse, I've come into contact with various contemporary artists who are interested in the way their work intersects with these philosophical concerns. And I'm going to talk about John Gerrard, whose work I think has a very immediate and obvious realism, as we saw with one of his works that we saw at the beginning there.
But as I'll try to show, I think this realism is one that goes far deeper than its superficiality, its image. Or in some ways it's a deep realism because of its superficiality and the way that this immaculate surface in his work is produced. So I'm going to start with a video of a 2011 work. based originally on these reference images. Hopefully I can get this to play. Do we have any sound? traditional boundaries and he was also very interested in very ambitious collaborations. So I think the idea of pairing a choreographer with an artist is already kind of in the tradition of Manchester International Festival.
So I worked with a dancer called Davide Pretoro and he rehearsed these actions and then we brought them to a company in Prague who have what's called an optical tracking system. So he wears a very special suit which has these little balls on it that are very luminescent. and the computer tracks the position of these balls in XYZ space. So what you get is you get a very precise record of maybe about 50 points in space on ankles and heads and arms, and then there's a special piece of software that sort of strings all these flows of information together to give you an accurate set of positions. We built a virtual portrait of this dancer, and that's the figure you're seeing, the sort of everyman soldier figure is the dancer. and then he can choose from these kind of vast motion capture data pods to make the actions in real time.
So he makes these scenes as he goes along. All the actions of the soldier are mimicking the actions of soldiers releasing mortar fire. So, you know, that's all the crouching. So I found several thousand images of soldiers releasing bombs and they have this very particular set of actions that they do, you know, crouching, sheltering. So the choreography in a traditional sense, the shapes are derived from military documentation. I think it's very impressive. I saw it from a... We won't listen to the audience response. So I'm going to start off just briefly talking about the way in which this brings together a global technologized violence.
the control of the body, choreography, which is increasingly a part of John's work, which was not always the case. There weren't always human forms in the work. But also, I think, a certain note of tragedy, perhaps, in what I would call a Beckettian sense. So I'm going to read from a short text I wrote at the time, which sums up for me the link between the world John is becoming interested in, and the peculiar convergences of military precision, choreography, performance, spectacle, and simulation that seem to be an inherent part of contemporary power. And the delusional way, in a sense, in which this infinitude, this infinite vocabulary, this inexhaustible figure,
contrasts with what we actually know about the resources of the world and the situation of the human race. So, in his account of the architecture of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, I.L. Wiseman recounts that in the late 70s, Ariel Sharon's partner in developing the crypto-militarized spatial logic of the West Bank settlements was Avraham Wachman, co-inventor of the Eshkol Wachman movement notation, a system for writing dance, which realizes literally the notion of a choreography, the writing of dance. In Weizmann's observation, Chiron's plan for the colonization of the West Bank emerged out of the meeting of the architect of dance notation with the architect of manoeuvre warfare. And Wachmann's subsequent protestation that political violence
can be unproblematically separated from the spatial and material practices through which it's exercised. In this contention, we can already read some of the stakes of infinite freedom exercise. As soon as a graphism, a writing, provides a function of notational recording, it produces a virtual space of infinite exercise. So the very concept of writing is continuous with the creation of an in-principle inexhaustible virtuality. And as Badiou has pointed out, in the Turing machine, Alan Turing's theoretical prototype of every computing machine extant today, in the Turing machine, the infinite potential of carrying out any operation whatever is grounded theoretically on a real infinity. In Turing's machine, the availability of a limitless length of tape
used to record and read data. And I think our spontaneous attitude today, faced with today's virtual spaces and their extension into reality, is to collude with this supposition of infinite availability. So the seduction of these spaces of procedural graphism, whether literary or electronic, tends to occult their relation to the outside. So what happens if we think about a realism of the virtual? We would have to address, on the one hand, an energetics or an economics of virtuality, accepting that every virtuality is dependent on a source of energy. On the other hand, the metaphorical transport that makes the abstract space of writing a real agent in the world it's sought to notate.
Such a realism would refuse the representationalism that claims that virtual worlds are mere models, whether descriptive or prescriptive, exercises, practices, games, simulations. Now, literary notation becomes obsolete, that is the dance notation on paper becomes obsolete, when digital technology can meticulously motion capture every significant aspect and movement of a body. In Infinite Freedom Exercise, the performer, like the landscape, follows a text assembled, Frankenstein-like, but seamlessly, out of the data trails of anonymous sources.
An oil refinery burning uncontrollably, as inexhaustible as the technology that allows its depiction, belch of smoke in the distance. The uncanny perjurance of this scene and its tirelessly graceful inhabitant suggests the originary violence of virtuality in a world where its exercise has become inextricable from reality and where its infinite freedom has become a political model and the case for war. This is a background against which I now want to discuss some of John's earlier works.
and I think from the point of view of today we can call it a completed cycle of his earlier work. And it begins with this work, Lufkin. The artist himself calls them portraits. These isolated enigmatic structures whose interiors remain hidden are real sites. They're surface captured by John Gerard in thousands of digital photographs. These are actually the photographs, which are virtually indistinguishable
from the virtual models, in fact. These are photographs of the sites. These photographs are then employed in a painstaking virtual reconstruction The mastery of the medium that Gerard and his production team have developed enables him to distance their work from any conspicuous emphasis on its new media credentials and their cultural associations. While utilising software designed for intensively interactive gaming environments, the works revoke the gamers' freedom of movement to explore virtual space. Their immaculately rendered environments refuse to deliver the vertiginous fly-throughs, descents and dizzying perspectives that movies have taught us to associate with CGI, leading us instead on slow orbital paths around isolated structures which offer a bare minimum of action.
Nevertheless, much of the significance, I think, of Gerard's work pivots on the technical nature of its medium. The digital computer and its generalized capacity to model any system whatsoever is the crucial enabler, not only of the hyper-realistic rendering of his subjects, but also of the globally coordinated networks of production and distribution that they invite us to consider. Accordingly, these portraits embody a tension between a realism that's pictorial, illusionistic, offering us a precise image of a reality remote-controlled by virtualities, and a realism that would liquidate the artwork's autonomy, reminding us that the work, too, is of that same reality. In this sense, the work can be seen to span two moments,
precisionist and literalist, of a specifically American realism. That is, a realism allowing the artist to subtract himself from European artistic tradition, the subtraction necessary to address the new realities, themselves quintessentially American, of a world dominated by objects and environments that appear as uncanny, alien presences. A realism, then, for those realities of a new world whose aesthetic and social meaning has not yet crystallized. Charles Shaler records that his exposure to European avant-garde painting at the 1913 Armoury Show provoked a realization that, quoting, a picture could be as arbitrarily conceived as the artist wished.
Shaler abandoned his early painterly experimentation, however, instead developing a rigorous realism in his recording of the industrialization of the American landscape. This is the style that will become known as precisionism, characterized by its exaggerated sensitivity to machined forms and their sharply delineated geometrical and modulated surfaces. The pursuit of precision was also determined by Shaler's professional involvement in photography. The formal qualities accentuated by photography, diverging from those emphasized by pictorial tradition, hasten the conclusion that rather than exploring the essential elements of the pictorial through painterly experiment, one might instead discover the articulations of the real
by, as Shaler says, removing the method of painting as far as possible from being an obstacle in the way of considering the content of the picture. Working as a commercial photographer, Shaler was commissioned in 1927 by an advertising agency to document Albert Kahn's 1,100-acre Ford Red River plant in Michigan, then the largest industrial complex in the world. The plant was the product of a new heavily planned functional architecture of production devised by Ford engineers for increased efficiency. The single-story steel-framed glass-walled structures, free of all superfluous adornment, ensured that, to quote, the imperatives of management were conveyed not merely by foremen, but by the architecture of the workplace.
Shaler's passion for his subject here, he called it, incomparably the most thrilling I have had to work with, is reflected in the heroic cast of the images, which would be a determining moment in the development of his later painting. Contemporary critics shared Shaler's own understanding of his style as essentially American. Its ultimate literalness, as they said, its extremely simplified realism were seen as echoing the clear-cut fineness, the cool austerity, the complete distrust of superficialities, sorry, the complete distrust of superfluities, of the shaker furniture that Shaila so adored, as much as the industrial might of the Red River plant. In the former, as in the latter, Shaila was to divine a classicism,
a classicism, he says, that he associates with Greek sculpture's facade of realism, behind which is skillfully concealed an ideal structure. So that despite Scheler's claim that, as he says, my things don't go beyond the boundaries of the actual, precisionism ultimately is an idealism. Its crystalline semi-abstractions argue that the corn silos, factories and machines generated through the sole concern for function and efficiency participate in the same spirit as the early products of American handicraft. And Shailer says that he requires every picture should have a steel structure. He also requires, however,
that the steel structures of his subjects be understood as extensions of a nobler armature. The high point of precisionism is 1940s series Power, Shailer's series of paintings commissioned for a Fortune magazine feature that breathlessly vaunts the marvels of technology to a still largely rural American public. Fortune was cautious enough about Shaler's work at this time, which was by then attracting criticism for its affectless representations. Not only to head the article with the one painting in the series that features pre-20th century technology, a water wheel entitled Primitive Power, but also to equip the reader in advance with a reassuring interpretation of the remainder. This is what Fortune says.
Shaler shows them for what they truly are, not strange, inhuman masses of material, but forms that are deeply human. They trace the firm pattern of the human mind as it seeks to use cooperatively the limitless power of nature. In the text alongside Shaler's Yankee Clipper, His cropped portrait of an aeroplane propeller becomes a symbol of identity and popular freedom. The text says, The people of the US have achieved their latest and greatest freedom through the use of power. The internal combustion engine has given them a new and highly personal mobility. It allows a man to go as he pleases.
He loses old realities and gains new ones. The internal combustion engine has suddenly expanded his adventure in space. Scheler has expressed the new portent in this poised and infinitely precise propeller. At the same time, however, in the text, the propeller can be read as threatening the usurpation of the artist by the engineer. The airplane, it says, is the highest art of the engineer. His, like all great art, is an art that largely conceals itself. Shaler believes that the pursuit of function reveals principles of beauty that will retrospectively absorb those of the restricted practices of art. And yet, this is paradoxically conjoined with an attempt to redeem functional beauty through
an art that measures itself of this task by erasing all trace of its mediation. Doesn't this uneasy alliance merely hold at bay the more fundamental shift in the relation between art and the real that such infinitely precise creations call for? Thierry de Douze recounts that in 1912 Duchamp, who had not yet invented the ready-made, went to the Salon de la Locomotion Aérienne and to Léger and Brancusi, who were accompanying him, he offered this verdict. Paintings washed up. Who will do anything better than that propeller? Tell me, can you do that? This designation ready-made of Bleriot's airplane
and propeller, as quoting Daudot, worthy of supplanting painting under the title of art, of course anticipates Duchamp's ambiguous declaration that the only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges. Duchamp seconds fortune's recognition of what the Duve describes as the imminent and involuntary beauty of the modern machine adapted to its function. But Shailer's representation of this new art still retains a certain autonomy of means beyond mere selection and nomination. That is, re-presentation for Shailer is still necessary even as he strives to negate this mediation so as to reveal the underlying structure of the new aesthetic.
Shaler's dogged pursuit of this goal renders his work at once urgent and opaque. The subtraction of all facture and ornament presses the viewer against the real as if willing it to secrete some clue as to its inner structure. but its faithfully reproduced cryptic surfaces seem to offer no satisfaction. In his 1965 essay, Specific Objects, Donald Judd sets out the motivations and the criteria for a new art that would escape the constraints of both painting and sculpture.
Recent work having consigned these given forms to a determinate lifespan, as Judd puts it, we need to look to works which, no longer generating autonomous illusionistic space, now inhabit three dimensions, real space, whose materials are simply materials, used directly, aren't obviously art, and whose qualities are no longer determined by the relation of their parts since they tend towards singleness, being an entity, one thing. And Judd contends that this, what he calls new three-dimensional work, moves towards the possibility of artworks that are nothing more than themselves,
qua specific objects. In a famous critique of this position, Michael Freed finds the most important clue to the stakes of Judd's literalism, or as it would later be called minimalism, in Tony Smith's anecdote of driving the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. Smith says, This drive was a revealing experience. The road and much of the landscape was artificial, And yet, it couldn't be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had never done. Its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I'd had about art.
It seemed that there'd been a reality there that had not had any expression in art. The experience on the road was something mapped out, but not socially recognised. I thought to myself, it ought to be clear that that's the end of art. Most painting looks pretty pictorial after that. There's no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it. Judd, then, insists on liberating art from its painterly and sculptural circumscription through a confrontation with the literal object, and of course, in Judd's work, through repetition. Robert Morris, at the same time, argues that the inexhaustible number of possible relationships between viewer and object becomes a part of the work
in a minimalist situation. But what Freed wants to argue is that we can squarely align these claims with Smith's non-art experience of driving the turnpike. In effect, Freed claims that the former is merely an encrypted form of the latter, that what Judd and Morris invoke is the same experience, quoting Freed, of endlessness, of inexhaustibility, of being able to go on and letting the material itself confront one in all its literalness, its objectivity, its absence of anything beyond itself. So according to Fried, the literalist work is a compaction of the deracinating but somehow exhilarating experience
of inhabiting a system of objects whose forceful but meaningless presence seems to obtrude on experience from elsewhere. an object reality without semantic or social correlation, and therefore hollow. Precision engineered to be nothing but what it is, permuting the facts of modern reality, as Fried says. We might say that the specific object invites the hypnotic fascination enjoyed by that man in a car driving on a concrete highway to an unknown destination, nominated by J.G. Ballard as the key image of the 20th century. Perhaps a more appropriate 21st century image would be that of a teenager wrapped before the screen
as a console unfolds from its memory chip, tracks a virtual highway, producing in a state of total immobility the endless and vacuous interest that Freed derides so strongly in Judd's objects. As Fried anticipates, the form of experience he identifies has become so common as to be banal for us. The best indicator of this would be the uncontested hegemony of various derivatives of techno, that music originating in the motor city Detroit, in which abandoning form and development consists apparently of laminar repetitive continuo that the listener enters and leaves arbitrarily.
Thinking of Smith's turnpike experience, this is perhaps best exemplified by the British duo Orbital, who, in homage to Kraftwerk's seminal electronic highway hymn Autobahn, named themselves after the M25. For the inexhaustibility of the literalist object is precisely of the orbital type. According to Fried, the intensity of the encounter it embodies, the speed of the turnpike cruise, engenders a hallucinatory sensation of progression and repletion. Whereas, in fact, the literal is inexhaustible only, according to Fried, because there is nothing there to exhaust. Fried says, it's endless the way a road might be,
if it was circular, for example. Which is why it must be polemically opposed by the work of art, whose value lies precisely in its ability to defeat or suspend its objecthood by generating autonomous spaces. Smith's turnpike, I was just going to add here, it was after I wrote this that I read an interview with John Gerrard where he says his understanding of the medium that he works in is profoundly orbital. I think it was very interesting that he chose that word as well. Smith's turnpike experience, then, is conditioned by the reorganization of the environment
through the mass production of modular, repetitive forms. Entry into this environment is marked by new modes of experience. Those which, according to Freed, most deeply excite literalist sensibility, and that literalist artists seek to objectify in their work by the repetition of identical units. Unlike in Shaler's quest for ideal classical form, this order, according to Judd, is not rationalistic and underlying, but is simply order, like that of continuity, one thing after another. What Fried calls literalism's theatricality, then, consists precisely in its relaying modernity unreflectively,
since it's already corrupted or perverted by it. It lies in its submission to its seductive cryptic threat or promise of inundation by alien objects. And it relays this in a way which Shaila was unable to do. In his 1966 account of a car trip with Judd, The Crystal Land, Robert Smithson replays Tony Smith's epiphany, reimagining the production of these forms as glacial, inorganic, terrestrial processes. Smithson further develops the link between the machined industrial environment
and the nature of the literalist object, whose creation he reimagines as an unnatural crystallization, putting space down in the form of deposits. Following a glaciologist's statement that ice is the medium most alien to organic life, Smithson observes how the highways crisscross through the towns and become man-made geological networks of concrete. In fact, the entire landscape has a mineral presence. From the shiny chrome diners to glass windows of shopping centres, a sense of the crystalline prevails. At this point, where mankind is besieged, like the hero of Ballard's contemporaneous crystal world,
by some uncontrolled, inorganic infestation, It's no longer a question of tethering this adventure in space, in which man loses old realities and gains new ones, to some kind of social project. Beyond Shaler's complicity with the symbolic domestication of the machine, and Duchamp's nomination of it as art, the literalist object now indexes something mapped out in advance, but which is no longer for us. and alien regulation and reorganization of space. This sentiment is attested to not only by Smithson's candid associational reading of Judd's work. He says, the first time I saw Don Judd's pink plexiglass box, it suggested a giant crystal from another planet.
But also, for instance, by the work of John McCracken, whose account of his own work slides easily from their existing between two worlds of illusionist painting and three-dimensionality to being actual alien life forms from another dimension or from the future, channeled by the artist. Not to mention, of course, the impenetrable, cosmically cryptic monolith, Morris-like space station of Stanley Kubrick's 2001. So it's in the context of this development, and finally in the context of Smithson's journey, with its affect of inundation by the inorganic, that we can come back to John's work.
In the context of Smithson's journey, he finds what he says is a grey factory in the midst of it all that looked like architecture designed by Robert Morris. In this context, we can offer an interpretation of John Gerrard's methodology. In particular, the facility that features in Grow Finish Unit was spotted soon after Gerard had visited the artillery sheds at Judd's Chinati Foundation at Marfa. This contingent double encounter of Judd's permanently installed serial forms and those deposited in the landscape by agro-industry gives a supplementary dimension to Gerard's selection.
the isolated silently operating production site and just to give you a bit of detail about what this structure is, piglets are delivered here, they're fed automatically by the hoppers and their waste flows into a lake which is next to it and then a few months later someone comes back and collects them and in between it's unmanned. And these are placed in the corner the corners of the fields which have a circular irrigation system that goes round. So they use up the unused parts of the Midwest, which aren't reached by the irrigation. So this isolated, silently operating production site,
I would suggest, functions as a cynic doc for a system that re-synthesizes the planet's resources and reconfigures space according to a functional criteria that ultimately has very little to do with humans. But the site is not merely an allegory or a symbol of the type found in Shaler's Power Series. It's simultaneously a literalist ready-made, just like the factory that Smithson found in his car trip. This duality corresponds to a splitting within the work that obviates or at least complicates its apparently theatrical nature.
Because Gerrard's reconstructed model itself no less than virtualizes the entire literalist situation fast forwarded through its evolution into monumental land art, The recurring camera path orbiting the building at walking pace automates the viewer's inexhaustible surveying of the permanent installation. The impenetrability in principle of the superficially reconstructed building and the durational nature of its virtual environment re-emphasize this inexhaustibility. But this proxy experience is complicated by the physical form of a work that constitutes both its technical support and an installation into which it's embedded. So this is an installation shot in the installation of Cuban School at Simon Preston Gallery in New York.
A Morris-esque slab is suspended parallel to the wall, of a thickness that makes it a volume rather than a mere screen. The digital projection is precisely congruent with the face of this white monolith. So the projected image vacillates between being a portal, a view into another world, an autonomous space, and a superficial covering. So the theatrical situation of literalism, including its beholder, in the form of the virtual camera viewpoint, is set at a distance, and the archetypal minimalist hollow volume becomes a host body, a vehicle freighted with the illusionist space that literalism wanted to liquidate.
The doubling of the real 3D presence of the screen volume and the virtual 3D presence of the school is further echoed by the similar dimensions of the space itself, which, for the purposes of designing the installation, was itself modelled using the same software. Tony Smith's 1962 work, Black Box, implies a relation between the enigmatic hollowness of the minimalist object and the cybernetic conception of a modular processing unit whose mechanism, accessible through input and output ports, is sealed off and closed from view, a black box. This hint indicates, I think, the shortcomings of Judd's conception of objectivity
in terms limited to physical and spatial presence. In order to participate in reality, an object must be considered not just as a spatial unit, but in its productive interactions with the environment. Furthermore, any contemporary conception of space must take into account the non-physical but effectively real electronic spaces that increasingly organize and reformat physical space. This expanded notion of objecthood is insisted upon most strongly in the other form in which Gerard's work is presented, the physical presence and gravity of what he calls his art boxes, formerly floor-standing tables fabricated in the featureless abstract white industrial material Corian,
more recently wall-mounted forms in rolled steel, which decisively prevent the works from being read as merely virtual. At the same time, the on-screen virtual environment makes it inevitable that the hollowness of the white box is perceived and experienced as being full, filled out with circuitries, hooked up to the grid, becoming a black box. Fittingly for works that are the result of a collaboration across many disciplines, industrial design, software engineering, CGI modelling, a piece like Lufkin conspicuously exposes its complicity in the same network of production and in the same contingent history of geosynthesis
as the industrial facilities it depicts. This draws attention, in my reading, to the pervasive technological illusion of freedom from time and contingency that is the essence of the heightened literalist experience of its virtual mise-en-scene. While the virtual scene uses the digital medium to accentuate the implacable, apparently limitless cycles of industrial technology. The installation reveals it, along with the digital black box and the art object itself, as synthetic, finite, and resource-consuming. From the silent processing that happens in the seven-month interim between the delivery of piglets and their pickup, to the slow-motion plutonic vampirism of the oil pump,
Gerard recognizes that to properly consummate the literalist encounter with the alien requires that this synthetic, processual, and ultimately finite aspect of the object also must be brought to the surface. Gerard's two 2011 works, Cuban Schools, share with earlier work the aspect of being entities from outside, space invader-like, the buildings crouch on concrete feet that give the impression they've just landed, but from which alien planet, from what dimension? The schools belonged to a period of the island's history when the optimism of early revolutionary socialist models of housing gave way to large-scale mass housing models.
This phase began with the US embargo and the need for high-tech solutions to see through the revolutionary project. And a decisive moment came in 1963 with Hurricane Flora, after which there was the building of a large panel concrete prefabrication factory in Santiago. Over the following decade, a growing network of prefabrication facilities throughout Cuba slowly locked in the commitment to this technology. The socialist project in fact became virtually synonymous with state-centralized fabrication. But the huge investments brought at best mixed results with very poor finish and dubious build. The infatuation with these capital-intensive prefabrication methods owed less to their results than to the notion
that only industrialization would help Cuba escape under development, industrial development as the cornerstone of the socialist revolution. But the stimulation of this situation and the exportation of architecture and planning were also part of a deliberate transformation of the post-colonial South or the Third World, defined in relation to the socialist capitalist alternative into a battleground in which technology transfer and knowledge distribution were ideological vehicles and planning and architecture were exported as instruments of Cold War politics in the belief that the organisation of space and of dwelling could determine the political destiny of territories in the balance. There's no wonder then that in El Bloqueo
showed at the third Havana biennial the Cuban artist Antonio Fernandez, Tonel, uses breeze blocks to spell out the work's title, which means the blockade or the embargo, but also, of course, the block, and to construct this squared-off map of Cuba. Made in the year the Berlin Wall fell, Tonel's work anticipates the problematic legacy of these imported Soviet models, whose forms left their impression on the lives of the whole generation in Cuba. It was Giron style reinforced panel of prefabrication that permitted the mass construction during the 60s and 70s of the aspects or the schools in the countryside which are a very painful memory for Cuba's generation Y.
Of course the brutal reality of life within these alien shells bore little relation to the principles supposedly embodied in their prefabricated slabs. When Soviet funding dried up, the shortcomings of the model were, of course, all too evident. So the question of actually existing versus real socialism here is perhaps subsidiary to that of the sacrifice of the contingency of place in history to the prefabrication of ideological models. In aligning the incongruous presence of the Cuban schools, appropriate emblems for this attempted political remote control. With the equally remote-controlled industrial facilities of his previous work,
Gerard reflects on the universality of the functionalist legacy of modernism. Because we live today among the ruins of the belief that in the fascinating formal possibilities that emerge from new technology, there is a latent possibility of twisting free of tradition and creating forms of life that, since they directly confront reality, are universal. Of course, the Fordist principles of utility and efficiency, embodied hyperbolically in industrial facilities, such as the Grow Finish Unit, belong to the same Fordism that was instrumental in exporting structures for living and that employed precisionist painting to promote its efficiencies.
But we should also recall the close relation between literalism and constructivism's transformation of art into production through the extirpation of ideologies. Its effects are as manifest in the Cuban schools as in the literalist object. Furthermore, the depersonalized and de-ideologized productions of constructivism, informed by the precepts of tectonics, that is, exploitation of the newest materials and techniques, facture, the non-bourgeois use of materials, and construction, the efficient and functional fabrication. Aimed to produce in their proletarian audience precisely the same type of excitement described by Fried as theatrical. Like Smith and his students on the turnpike,
this audience, the Soviet audience, was supposed to come face to face with a reel that was beyond anything art had previously had to offer, to enter directly, participatively into it, rather than contemplating and reflecting on its meaning. From this point of view, it's instructive that immediately after the recounting of his turnpike experience, Smith moves from these Ballardian wastelands, he talks about abandoned airstrips, artificial landscape, created worlds without tradition, to the architecture of Le Corbusier, praising it as a similarly accessible experience of a reality that breaks the circumscribed bounds of art. Le Corbusier, who, like Scheler, discerned a classical beauty
in what he calls the American grain elevators and factories, the magnificent first fruits of the new age. and whose call for standardization, industrialization, tailorization as the most urgent program of town planning echoed from east to west during the 20th century. The dream of an art equal to the real itself always addresses itself to a type that it hopes to engender, either a rational observer who discerns an ideal order or a pragmatist who sees works of art as nothing more than objects and acts on material facts. What Fried identifies as that which excites literalism
can't be reduced to merely a matter of experience, conviction, sensibility, for it also provided the stimulus, the fascinated compulsion that drove nations to participate enthusiastically in the construction of crystal lands and of monoliths. So Freed's question is apt. If the turnpike, airstrips and drill grounds are not works of art, what are they? What is the nature of this reality that compels art to respond to it, that seems to run of its own accord without human intervention? And of the depiction of which, Shayla says, perhaps only half-jokingly,
it's my illustration of what a beautiful world it would be if there were no people in it. They are the ruins of something whose cryptic promise seduced the human race into assisting in its emergence, but which conspicuously failed to engender a new human to inhabit it. The Cuban schoolwork has one person in it, caretaker, she walks out twice a day to switch the lights on and to switch the lights off. I think of her as a caretaker tending to the enigmatic remainders of this hope. In the works whose realism, this time, announces itself explicitly as temporal, finite and synthetic.
So I was kind of interested, perhaps form some preconceptions about what this talk might be. And I was very interested that you start to, how you start to run the theme of precision through the history of art coming through to literalism as a kind of autonomous or autonomous world, it's not art but if someone said to you that minimalism is kind of understood as the moment when the body enters art by most people it kind of leads to another question to see
I think these literalist artworks and these spaces, these precision spaces like the silo, as kind of autonomous. I'm wondering if that leads to fiction. That's my first question. I would say that ruins only exist through a kind of fiction. I was wondering about that, whether you would recognize that. But also in relation to the quality, I've always understood minimalism as being this discovery of, and maybe the term pipe road is a good example, of a kind of well-being created by industry, which almost becomes something that evolves the body. I could think of the term pipe road as a technology,
but also a vision in a way. I was thinking that a lot about the term from industrial to the post-industrial, to the digital. It's almost like we're going through an evolution. So they're kind of like, I don't know, I find this quite fascinating. But you're basically saying that there's a precision produced by thought, produced by technology that humans produce, and they start to create a world that's in humans, that's autonomous. that kind of sci-fi crystal world. But do you think it could, my reading of it, could also be true that there's a kind of feedback loop aspect to it?
I certainly think that's still in minimalism. Smiths and things are always activated by you. I guess for me, I think very much about this watercolour that John Stone had commissioned about, of the Bank of England in ruins in the future because he was so narcissistic. Can you imagine his designs were as good as anything right in the Greek? So he wanted to see it ruined. He meant it in the future with these people walking through. It seems to be a very fictional thing, in ruins, which is hard to equate with the idea of a reel that's autonomous. and human.
That was my... It's not that I'm not fascinated. What are the ruins? The ruins are not the ruins of the structures. The ruins are the ruins of the hope that somehow this relationship, this theatrical relationship of excitation by the object, which is nothing more than what it is, will somehow produce a new human. So the ruin is the ruin of that hope rather than the ruin of the structure. I did talk about this duality of minimalism. I absolutely agree. It wants to do with this hyper-objectivity
and to do with this activation, which is the theatricality that Fried talks about. And in a way, what I'm interested in doing is agreeing with Fried's diagnosis, or agreeing with his reading, but disagreeing with his diagnosis, that therefore it's not interesting as art. I think that's precisely why it is interesting as art, is that there is this tension between the real and the theatrical experience of the real. So what I'm trying to do is then say, well, it's this affect, this theatrical experience, this excitation, which indexes something inhuman, obtruding upon the human mind and human culture.
So there's something that Freed has got hold of and in a way kind of eerily dismissed. The way he understood. Hmm. Yeah. So just for me, so you are suggesting that to a certain extent this experience of the rule does affect or not affect, does actually have some kind of effect on it? Yeah, but in a sense it's a more passive affect than the grand narratives of its hoped-for effect. I'm not sure passive is the right word, but it involves a passion, exactly. Is it a kind of silencing maybe?
Certainly, in the face of this, I think this is the first thing that people respond to in John's work, is this kind of violence of these virtual structures that are our means of support and our empire, if you like. And yet they're in the middle of nowhere, unmanned, desolate, and they have this kind of eerie presence. Oh yeah, in the Cuban school, yeah. No, she lives there, I think, in this piece. I mean, in a way, it wasn't a good idea to start with the Infinite Freedom piece,
because that has a figure in it. And the use of human figures and the use of motion capture in John's work has kind of happened over the last couple of years. And the most recent piece he did is almost entirely of human forms. So then it becomes something quite different, I think. That's why I wanted to talk about this as being a completed cycle. I think the role of the humans in these pieces, when they appear, is ambiguous. I don't think he quite knew what he was doing with the people or what their role was, but he was interested in making that leap, which takes it beyond the minimalist object.
Really quick one. not fundamentally in terms of human experience, but especially given that you spoke so much about the materiality of the materials used to build the real reason. Yeah, but are they so different?
This is my whole point, and this is what I think is important and interesting about the way in which John presents his work, which could so easily be a complete... I mean, the fact that I'm showing it here betrays it in a way, because the whole point about his works are that they're not simply virtual experiences that you watch on any screen anywhere. They are presented as objects. And I think one of the points I'm trying to make is that there isn't that great a difference in the two experiences of a passionate engagement with a kind of abstract space. It was there, where he was taken, rather than in his reconstruction.
Sorry? It would be a very different experience if I'd gone to that site, rather than seeing it on a great screen in an art way. Yeah, but in terms of the objecthood and the interactions going on, if I'm playing Grand Theft Auto, So if I'm actually driving, I'm engaged in a passionate relationship with an abstract space constructed by these processes I've been talking about, which is consuming energy from the earth. So in a sense, what I find compelling about John's work is that he presents the reality of the virtual and the virtuality of the real, and if not erases, kind of smears that boundary
so that we reconsider the apparently infinite, inexhaustible nature of these virtual worlds. Yeah? I was wondering how a video like this might survive if these races were to be renovated and upgraded and that they were on their end. Yeah. First of all, I've just got to say, I kind of regretted that I didn't put in more time right at the beginning to describe the medium of works, but it is really important to know that they're not videos, they're not time-based works, they're not films. The images, the work itself is a virtual model,
and the images are created and discarded 60 times every second. So there is no permanent image. It's being created all the time by this virtual model inside the computer. So I think that in itself is another subject, but it's a very different kind of image. As to, do you mean if we were to make another model of this and it had been painted up and looked nice, would it be different? Yeah. Right. Yeah, that kind of touches on something that in a way I feel slightly uneasy with in John's work,
which doesn't quite fit in with what I've said. I don't really see how you can avoid it. And that is the fact that there is a certain kind of monumental quality. They are, in a sense, he's making these monuments to the 20th century that he's, you know, the optimism that he's seen and the world that's now kind of slowly crumbling around our ears. So they do have a kind of monumental quality and perhaps there's a certain kind of nostalgia involved in the predilection for a ruin. Having said that, once the works exist, I've actually never asked him how he thinks about the relationship between the
work and the original site once the work is finished, but I guess that he would say that that relation ceases to be important at the moment that the work becomes an autonomous thing in its own right. It's not. They are based on actual sites, but at the same time, they have a certain generic quality. And often, I think, in modelling, they will... Again, we refer back to this question of monumentality. I think details are changed. Although the models are built from extremely detailed photography of the actual sites,
they're not meant to be absolutely accurate like architects' walkthroughs. They're portraits with the kind of possible distancing that that might suggest. so if you paint someone's portrait and they die I guess that would be the same question and I don't know exactly how you'd answer it I would like to ask about the netco-based relation because I try to research it in scientific research and we understood that the place of perspective
to really use philosophy is to give an option for philosophy to imagine beyond the, to imagine again what we hear and what we experience through the creation of the senses of a wider society. And those works looks and they look representational of certain ideas rather than spectrific of what could have been. I'm wondering where that's perspective, how can art be spectrific to create reality that
is beyond what would be mediated by representing what it is? Well, what I've tried to say is that it's both. Obviously, it's representational. It's working at the highest level of representation possible, in a sense, using the most advanced technologies and the most precise modelling in order to represent. but at the same time precisely the work wouldn't be interesting to me if that's all it did and that other aspect of it which is that the work is presenting itself as real and as part of the same networks
and synthetic processes that it's talking about is what interests me there are both of these levels of realism at work but as to what does it how does it address realities that aren't human is that your question? No, I mean the synthetic reality is the reality that describes in relation to human relations Yeah?
And I don't know, that particular piece of work seems interesting because of the loaded history of it. Like if you didn't know that and just walked in, it would come across like, well I think, just like this is a structure and this is you. And also, if technology gets you a little bit better, like representing the spaces, then it's like, I don't know, then why don't it become obsolete? Yeah, well, yeah, John's always worked. Well, I think, you know, he originally discovered this kind of technology when he was the Ruskin, and he became interested in it. He made several pieces with what the technology was available at the time.
And luckily, he's quite a successful artist and he's able to have a production team and to work at the cutting edge of what technology is available. So yeah, the earlier works don't look as good, but he's just working with whatever's available at the time. The question about whether it's interesting or relevant is a good question, because I think precisely, yes, your town centre redevelopment has been planned and executed using precisely these tools. Everything that you watch on TV using CGI has been made with these tools. The games that you play on PlayStation have been made using all the same processes. Our world is a world that runs on digital models.
and what John has quite courageously done, I think, is to say, if I want to talk about this, the contemporary reality, I'm going to talk about it using the same language that it's subjecting us to every day. So I think precisely that's the interest in, that's why it's interesting, because it is similar to all these other things. Now you can then make your own judgment as to whether it does something worthwhile with that technology. But for me, I think what's interesting is the use of this technology in a way that is non-instrumental. So it's still... I think that's a brilliant thing to say.
Realism has always been seen in the way that maybe... It makes me wonder, is this not really more of a critical realism? critical realism yeah yeah yeah as one of those realities. Is that more of a critical...
I think perhaps one way of looking at it is certainly that it enables you a kind of distance from that technology and a different way of relating to it, which in one way you could say it was more passive because you don't... In the early works, in fact, John did have devices where, as the viewer moved around the room, the scene would shift, and he very quickly cut those out. I think partly to do with wanting to distance himself from a new media art agenda, but also I think he discovered somehow that not being able to interact was more powerful
than interacting. so yeah I think that's certainly a way of reading it as well but again I'd say what would be interesting is that it's compacting all these different senses of realism at once so it's creating a very kind of complex relation to the real We've only got about 15 minutes left, but there are three questions on that side. So, I don't know if anyone's starting. Yeah, go ahead. Can I talk a little bit more about the real reality? Yeah. If I said that without real consciousness, there would be no reality, at least with the computer.
There would be no reality. Well, there would be no computers left to become intelligent. Yeah, that's precisely the position which, in theory, theoretically speaking, speculative realism has tried to combat, is the human conceit that reality is formed, synthesized, substantively created by its human mediation. And there are various reasons.
I mean that in a sense though I have to say at that point that speculative realism is kind of founded on a caricature of That position I don't think that position as such ever existed in the history of philosophy Except in two circumstances, but it's a general tendency that philosophy in the 20th century has focused more on what we do with reality and trying to think reality itself. So, what was I going to say? Yeah, so there are several different reasons why it seems to have become imperative to re-establish this possibility of thinking a reality
that would still be there if we weren't there. And to me, one of the most compelling reasons is that if we don't believe it's possible to do so, then all of scientific thought becomes essentially mysterious. We just don't, I mean, we don't understand why anything works. If we actually don't know anything about reality, then how do computers work? How does any built engineered object work? unless we understand scientists and engineers to be speaking about a reel that would exist whether we were there or not. So it becomes an extremely problematic proposition to make
for many reasons. And therefore I think more and more people are interested in various ways and it's not just one school of thought. There's various different ways in which people have tried to re-establish the possibility of human thought, thinking something that's not dependent on the human. And after all, it's not such an unreasonable proposition, if you think about it, that humans are not the centre of the universe. And also, as I said, I think there's a kind of timeliness to it, the fact that we're contemplating the planet without us.
We're contemplating that real possibility right now. So there's no workers in the specialized space. We love to make these fantastical games on this area, right? And so, and this is the thing with Charles Schumer is that he was trying to depict a form of corporate realism.
That's like the statusization of the factory, which is deported workers. So you're unable to speak of like a factory inside of exploitation. Right, yeah. So I wonder, I guess what we could say, if the whole worker is, especially with this case too. Yeah, well I think that this is part of this kind of mysterious, mysterious thanatropic drive is how does a whole race become
caught up in these machines and drained by them. Well, I wonder whether looking at human beings would give us more of an answer than looking at the structures. Yeah. Yeah. But in a certain sense,
a lot of these sites are not activated by human presence. You know, the oil pump, there's no one there. So in a way the human agency and the agency of the worker is occluded in those spaces. It needs maintenance though, isn't it? Probably, yeah. Yes, that's a non-practical. It's not like we all became extinct, it would just keep going and producing oil and it would just become a mess.
presented in order to say, you know, scientists speak every day about... This is the same thing I was saying to the question over here. that scientists speak every day about realities of which there was no manifestation to any consciousness. If they talk about supernovas that happened 400 million years ago, then how are we able to even make sense of that without taking the leap of accepting that there are realities even when there are not humans there to perceive them. So that is a kind of, thinking about that kind of object is a kind of leverage to prompt us to understand
that if we do take the position that nothing exists without being manifest to consciousness, we get ourselves into some serious problems. That's okay, we can have a couple more. yeah yeah yeah yeah the oil stick work yeah I was just wondering like all these pieces that you've shown especially the ones that I'm talking about now there's always a strong presence of a person in this kind of utopian land
that you created with no man. But there's always this purpose that you can't be raised. I'm fine with that, but I want to know about what's John Gerro or his role in this kind of world. But is he still the hardest thing? Okay, well, to be pedantic about it, the works up to oil stick work, there was never a human figure. Oil stick work was the first time he put a human figure in. In that work, the man comes out of the barn, and he's painting this barn with an oil stick, a tiny bit every day. And the work is programmed to last, I think, for 30 years, after which the barn will be completely painted. So, yeah, there's this kind of Beckettian performance.
And as I said, I think at that point, the work begins to change because it brings in this kind of choreographic element and the question of the relation of the body to these remote-controlling technologies. But as to John's role in the work, I think, yeah, I can answer that. I'm not sure interestingly, but I can answer it, is that his method is to just be in landscapes he finds interesting. He kind of just does research, finds somewhere he thinks has interesting potential, just drives in the landscape until he finds something that seems like a Gerard ready-made. He takes literally thousands of photographs, very detailed photographs to site,
and then he supervises the reconstruction in the studio. He has a production team of two programmers. So, yeah, his role is really interesting because in one sense it's like a Duchampian role, it's a nomination, it's saying, okay, this one, this structure becomes a work. But then in another way it's intensely pictural. It's capturing the entire scene, the ground, the sky, everything. No, none of them have ever had sound in.
Thank you. Oh, absolutely. I mean, there's no question. It's absolutely connected. You know, pork futures. What about this return to figuration? Not necessarily after, but it's non-figurative.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. and so that created the oldest action. And I wonder what you think of this and it's going to make that a more portable tool. Right. Yeah, certainly the central point about these pieces is that the structures, the real structures out there in the world are already, in a certain sense, virtual. So as I said, it's to do with this kind of blurring of the virtual and the real. I've forgotten what the first point was now. Figuration, yeah.
So yeah, I mean, I'm really interested in that question about whether figuration precludes minimalism. So if you have a piece that has a figurative or pictural element, Does that preclude it from being a specific object in that sense? Does it preclude it from being nothing but what it is? Or is it possible to create a figuration that's also what it is and nothing else? And that's what I think John is presenting, is a kind of oscillation between something which is the autonomous space that Fried talks about, which is what art is supposed to do, is create this autonomous space, but at the same time, it's the machine that's plugged into machines
that forms a part of the typical contemporary reality of what we call the real. Well, reality is already virtual, but the virtual is already real. Well, it's a reproduction and figuration, but at the same time it's adding another machine part, right? So it's flat with the rest of reality at the same time as having a
picture or representative relation to it. Could you not be more formal than kind of suggested, like this is a space that, whilst being also productive, is also kind of characteristic as well, right? Because of course it's left there as a function, but in the end it's not just providing such a human function, it's also the existence of the life. And there's something of a reflection of that in the work of art, because it is kind of like auto-product in the way that it shows you, the way that you might get into this space is a virtual kind of dialogue. Right. Yeah. There's your answer. Yeah. No, I think what you're asking
comes back in a way to this question of the monumental aspect and how that disrupts my reading of it. And I'm very aware of that. Yeah. Okay. Yes, I'm afraid we all have to. Well, go on then, one more. One more. Well, could you take two? Okay, yeah. Are they good? Yeah, I was going to ask... Can I ask? Sorry, not Santa. I was thinking about the question of functional analysis in objects.
And how certain point you mentioned that what the outcome is from artists real. Yeah. Yeah. Part of this challenge becomes a record or suggest, maybe in a really separate way, function. And I wonder whether you mentioned maybe functional music, and I wonder whether this is functional aesthetics, not just as a part of art history, but maybe whether from a perspective of a personality you talked about, or perhaps people can grow to be that art. It is a great thing. Functional...
Right, yeah. Do you mean in terms of the human perception, perceptual apparatus? Yes. Yeah. It wouldn't be already in our mind in each other objects which is a area which will be as a real
Yeah. That's a complicated one. I'm not sure what to answer. There's a question of whether there's some suspicious weakness in the human perceptual apparatus that lays it open to being lured by this kind of repetitive, modular aesthetic. like yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
that's exactly the way I'm thinking about it really I think I think I do have to go thanks very much sorry for whoever didn't get to ask the question Thank you.