Josephine Meckseper, Film still, Mall of America, 2009.

Sarah Lookofsky I thought we could begin with a bit of media-specific contemplation. Here we are on a website that addresses, among other things, fashion, a time-bound commodity that your artistic practice has continually explored. I thought it might be interesting to think about this site in contrast with the “sites” you frequently assemble in your work, namely the glass vitrine and display case. The shop window is a curious recreation at this point in time, since people’s desiring (of sex as well as other consumables) and buying have increasingly moved online. To further emphasize this point, the shopping mall, in your piece Mall of America, shot at the once-biggest mall in the world, appears like a heavily discounted ghost land with a few disoriented shoppers milling about, almost as if undead. These pieces seem to recognize that the shop window and its surrounding gigantic mall, once the symbol of American affluence, are, if not obsolescent, then at least obsolescing spatial tropes. What are your motivations for adopting these forms of display, and the often out-of-date stuff you put in them, to problematize our digital age?

Josephine Meckseper, Film still, Mall of America, 2009.

Josephine Meckseper, Film still, Mall of America, 2009.

Josephine Meckseper I shot the Mall of America film just before the recession began in 2007. The focus of the film was to show the iconography of US American consumer ritual in relation to military expansion. The camera zooms in and out of the mall to then focus on an aviation store/military recruiting station. The camera captures the highly propagandistic military images further enhancing the disillusioned atmosphere of the mall. I applied red, white and blue filters to create a sense of alienation and to invert the idea of simplistic patriotism. The notion of desire in the context of consumerism is just another propagandistic mode of manipulation in a capitalist society. The shop window, like the vitrines I make, proposes that such window displays will become archeological relics, and could someday be on display in natural history museums to exemplify life around the turn of the millennium. They are meant to be understood as leftovers of a time before shopping zones and storefronts are boarded up during 99% protests and demonstrators film each other with their iPhones. The digital era does not change the basic function of capitalism to perpetuate production and consumption; only the face is changing. The paradox presented in the Mall of America film recalls Karl Marx’s prediction that capitalism cannot sustain the living standards of the population because of its need to compensate for the deterioration of profit margins by decreasing wages, cutting social benefits and practicing military aggression.

Josephine Meckseper, The Complete History of Postcontemporary Art, 2005.

SL Your practice has maintained a dual preoccupation with consumer capitalism, on the one hand, and protest on the other. Up until recently, these two remained quite disparate in the U.S. context. When large protests happened, as you have recorded, they were mainly against war; they did not imply a broader critique of the economic system “at home.” It seems to me that your work reads quite differently now–differently, say, than it would just 6 months ago. To my mind the Occupy Wall Street Movement is novel in the way it has initiated a systemic critique that attempts to connect the dots between corporate capitalism and politics, both domestic and foreign–hence the proliferation of demands (rather than a lack thereof), from “stop the wars” to “tax the rich”. As far as I can tell, these ideas are starting to make their way into political discourse and the mass media. I wonder how you think about these recent political events, since they seem to relate to the longstanding engagements of your artistic practice in a variety of ways.

Josephine Meckseper, Film still, 04.30.92, 1992.

JM Growing up in Western Germany in the ‘70s, a very similar revolt against corporate capitalism and politics was in motion and had a deep impact on my immediate environment. Namely the Red Army Faction, later renamed the Baader-Meinhof Group, declared war against the “system” — consumer society and the wealthy functionaries of the time. They were calling out for a revolution against capitalism. The fact that they were financed by the East German communist government, which came to light only a few years ago, doesn’t change the motivations of the group at the time. The imagery and sentiment of the leftist revolts of the ‘70s, but also the Situationists and the Angry Brigade (a British libertarian communist militant group in the ‘70s), had a large influence on how I started out as an artist. One of my first films is a documentation of a 24-hour happening with five fellow Cal Arts students on a rooftop in Los Angeles. The idea was to occupy a space, and inhabit it through deliberate action and accumulation of spatial and filmic materials introduced by the group members. It was based on the concept of the Situationist International who advocated experimentation with the construction of situations, namely setting up environments as alternatives to capitalist order. The goal is to point out the central roles of mass media and advertising spectacles in advanced capitalist society in simulating a fake reality in order to mask the real capitalist degradation of human life.

The recent events of Occupy Wall Street reconfirm what I have long argued in my work. I’ve set out to make a case against a celebration of the commercial value of art in favor of the flip side, of revealing modes of production that give voice to protest culture. There is a threshold even in the most complacent society.

Josephine Meckseper, Untitled (Berlin Demonstration, Fire, Cops), 2002, C-Print.

SL Until the recent upheavals across the Middle East, revolutionary change was often assumed to be a thing of the past. While social media received much credit by the media for sparking the Arab Spring, recent political movements–from Tahrir Square to Wall Street–seem rather to prove that social change, regardless of the prevalence of digital communication, still needs to be carried out in the streets and squares of real cities. That of course contradicts my earlier point, and perhaps certain indications present in your work, that city space is over and done for. This brings me to question a prevalent interpretation of your practice, specifically the claim that your work asserts the total commodification of all spheres of human activity: revolutionary protest has become revolutionary chic. I believe I detect more mixed, and less cynical, signals in your work (the footage of street protests in March for Peace, Justice and Democracy, 04/29/06, New York City, 2007, for example, strikes me as more ambiguous). Given the still-unfolding political developments worldwide, would a 2012 vitrine similarly include images of protest within them and references to revolutionary chic?

Josephine Meckseper, The Complete History of Postcontemporary Art, 2005 (detail).

JM The misunderstanding that my work should reference an idea of revolutionary chic probably has to do with a projection of that same audience of how they view their environment. Contrary to this belief, I see my work as a call for street activism, in opposition to a rarified elitist art viewership. My aim is to present consumer display systems that have an auto-critique built within. This can take place, for instance, by inserting images of the opposition produced by capitalist society, namely protestors and rioters, or by using pieces of shattered glass. As a starting point I usually work with films of riots and protests and confront them with forms that refer directly to shop windows smashed by demonstrators. The installations of display forms like shelves and vitrines represent the static face of capitalism. The collective performative aspect of consumption is frozen inside the vitrine and the flip side of capitalism (like images of exploited factory workers) is literally glued to the back of displayed objects. The concealed power structures that are the core of alienated production are made visible here. I have been filming protests in different parts of the world, and they represent a solution in form of action. I question the arbitrariness and entertainment character of news coverage. The films show underexposed civil disobedience and protest; the display works show overexposed modes of consumer society. The images and films I’ve been taking at demonstrations bear witness to the moment when oppositional forces take on a militarized arm of the state, exposing mass media and advertising’s central role in advanced capitalist society.

March for Peace, Justice and Democracy, 04/29/06, New York City, 2007, was filmed at a protest against the war in Iraq. It includes images of federal and court buildings in Foley Square that were recently activated again by the Occupy Wall Street movement. The soundtrack creates a propagandistic brain-washing undertone that evokes the repression of the Bush regime.

Josephine Meckseper Film still, March for Peace, Justice and Democracy, 04/29/06, New York City, 2007.

SL Your most recent artworks have addressed oil production and how the extraction of this natural resource has engendered a close, if largely suppressed, working relationship between governments in the US and the Middle East. Perhaps we can talk about this history as it relates to two of your recent projects? First, your most recent installation, Manhattan Oil Project, brings renditions of 20th century oil pumps to a vacant lot adjacent to Times Square. Here, the past mechanical power of U.S. wealth is brought into a present dominated by Post-Fordist spectacular culture. The depiction of oil here, as a natural resource, reminds us of the fact that the world economy is in fact dependent (to devastating ecological effects, of course) on such material commodities–something that is frequently forgotten in the current focus on pulsating mega screens and stock tickers, the immaterial “stuff” that now supposedly constitutes a solid national economy…

Josephine Meckseper, Installation view, Josephine Meckseper, 2009.

JM I am interested in making the anachronistic nature of oil and gas exploitation visible by taking the oil pump jacks out of context and confronting them with the epicenter of US American entertainment propaganda that Times Square represents. I’m also interested in the role of the artist mistaken as an infantile entertainer of some sort, completely out of touch with social and political cataclysm; a puppet and tool of a capitalist system that rewards mindless subordination and trivial gestures.

When I first exhibited the oil pump sculptures at the Migros Museum in Zurich, they tied into the overall installation that included a military bunker, films and various sculptures portraying a decaying consumer society. They expose the “endpoints” of the United States capitalistic and militaristic crusades since 2001–totalitarianism in the current era of war, globalization, and domestic crisis.

Josephine Meckseper, Installation view, Josephine Meckseper, 2009.

Josephine Meckseper, Fall of the Empire, 2008.

SL The other project I find interesting in this regard is the video included in your The Fall into Time (2011) installation at the Sharjah Biennial, which employs footage adopted entirely from the 1980s TV series Dallas and Dynasty. It includes familiar scenes of cowboy romanticism, luxury goods, New York aerial shots and oil fields, as well as scenes of protest, wherein a screaming crowd (whose members look much more like ‘70s American hippies than Middle Eastern citizens, by the way) is supposed to portray local uproar against Texan cowboys’ meddling in their region’s oil resources. Although this ’80s footage is quite defamiliarizing to contemporary eyes, it necessarily echoes the most recent Iraq War’s war-for-oil charges and the attendant caricatures of Texas cowboys’ oil grab in the Middle East.

Josephine Meckseper, Installation view, Sharjah Biennial 10: Plot for a Biennial, 2011.

JM The film focuses on the glorified depiction of the American oil industry in the light of the economic policies carried out in the early 1980s like so-called “Reaganomics,” which was supporting the wealthy by creating tax benefits and loosening market regulations, while cutting social spending for the poor. The images from the ’80s television shows Dynasty and Dallas are juxtaposed with a Detroit acid house soundtrack from the same decade, creating the context for a renewed debate on offshore oil drilling, the Deepwater Horizon disaster and the recent downfall of the Detroit automobile industry.

At the beginning of the first season of Dynasty, the oil tycoon Blake Carrington has to withdraw his oil company from a fictitious Middle Eastern country because of an anti-American uprising. This very little known scene is the basis of the movie that I created. The film as a whole exemplifies the ruthlessness of the Reagan era, but also ties directly into the present politically motivated struggle for natural resources on one side and a growing revolutionary force on the other side in the suppressed Middle Eastern nations. At the biennial in Sharjah, I found myself navigating the difficult terrain of being a Western artist in the context of a monarchic Middle Eastern country, without seeming condescending or ignorant to the local context. The idea was that the footage of the stereotypical American TV shows would invert this problem by pointing the finger back at Western clichés of entertainment and imperialism.

Josephine Meckseper, Film still, DDAYLNLAASSTY, 2010.

Josephine Meckseper, Film still, DDAYLNLAASSTY, 2010.

Credits

Scambaiting is a term used to describe the action of scamming a scammer, in particular a “419” or Nigerian fraud perpetrator. Websites like Scamtacular and 419 Eater provide open forums for scambaiters to discuss and post evidence of the humiliation inflicted on primarily Nigerian scammers. It’s difficult to parse out who is being victimized in these scenarios. Even the rhetoric used on Wikipedia and mission statements on the above-mentioned websites gets conflated, questioning its own motives. 419 Eater says:

“You enter into a dialogue with scammers, simply to waste their time and resources. Whilst you are doing this, you will be helping to keep the scammers away from real potential victims and screwing around with the minds of deserving thieves.”

Wikipedia says:

“It is, in essence, a form of social engineering that may have an altruistic motive or may be motivated by malice. It is primarily used to thwart the Advance-fee fraud scam and can be done out of a sense of civic duty, as a form of amusement, or both.”

We are reminded of Anonymous and other vigilantes who use the Internet as a means to distract or jeopardize the actions of targeted groups. With anonymity comes danger. Read all of the comments on any YouTube video with over a hundred thousand views and you will see how quickly the ethics of humans shrouded by the Internet prove to be surprisingly archaic. It is not in public school playgrounds or youth centers that we can most easily find the medieval urges of an inherently racist and homophobic man, but in online feedback. From the first sputters of cybering, chat room dialogue, and dirty chain emails we learned that talking to strangers via web brings out a side of us that we have less control over than we are usually comfortable with. And as we climb the steps of new modes and routes of communication, we see the fascinating side effects—mainly abuse.

Scam baiting is of course unethical because it is exploitative. Then again, it Robin Hoods its victims in a sense, since evidently they are all scammers. And the roles of hero and villain are skewed from the get-go: The photographic evidence of the scambaiters’ projects largely targets Nigerians in Nigeria. Recently, the media has associated this country with hustling, mainly because of the popularized email fraud scams, and because, like all immigrants, the sellers of drugs, knockoff accessories, and other illegal activities gain the most attention in foreign countries.

The conversation is further complicated by guilt. While reading emails from “large estates” asking for our cooperation in transferring funds internationally, one can imagine the emailer’s desperation, even if one is not tricked by the story being told. If Africa is mentioned, another stigma may arise. So, are the scammers to blame, if they are poor and in great need? It is a classic catch twenty-two: If one buys into a hustle, is he partially to blame? It is illegal in most public places to beg, but not to give, even though handouts end up the necessary fuel for much crime.

Scamming itself is of course unethical because it traps unwitting respondents. And often a scammer is not someone with an outlandish pseudonym living in a distant country but a Craigslist potential roommate or a phony relative with a phony fatal disease. More and more scams prey on the sensitive souls still left in this world, and on the elderly and even middle-aged or simply non-tech-savvy youth still checking their email accounts with great care or with lowered inhibitions. As we know, our relationships with the Internet are emotional rollercoasters, and none of us wants to find ourself questioning a scam on a day when we don’t feel quite like ourself.

We—the people staring into, not out from, the internet—can become what we hate or desire or fear in commentary and retaliation. And unless we are being scammed or traced, no real damage is done to our own egos when we have only put out feedback. What if we put out more than feedback, something of our personas? A letter to the editor, a video uploaded, or an article posted. If there is any response, we can often predict an rapid escalation from negativity to bigotry. Just as likely we predict a defense—by ourselves or others—but the Internet is vast, and only the waves with the highest peaks are noticed. So the most shocking comments are given credit simply by merit others’ engagement with them. The immediacy with which the most intolerable testimonies are answered gives rise to new forums for the purpose of unsolicited discussion, which makes more room for argument and verbal abuse. Once the blasé and the neutral are whittled away from the sphere of commentary, we’re left with a network of primal pissing contests.

The attention paid to the extremes feeds the extremists’ need to constantly and consistently self-publish. Now we see websites from the extremely educated and the extremely uneducated, the extremely religious and the extremely atheist. Even if we ignore the majority of the noise being made on the web, we must see that people are physically often affected by their own involvement, and this is a new fear to harbor. The Internet’s presence in our lives—sometimes a dark presence—alters the way we live, dress, and socialize.

We dress in drag. We wear a costume that is an outstretched representation of something of ourselves. The Internet’s documentation of our lives solidifies this proposal. Because what we wear is photographable, it ensures that we are more comfortable being photographed; we are on display. Exploitation of this instinct is tricky. Scambaiters snare their scammers and ask them to pose in drag, holding signs that insinuate, in English, that the scammers are being forced into homosexual encounters. The scammers are performing for the audience of scambaiters, supposedly letting their greed annihilate their dignity. But the scambaiters are performing, too, for the audience of the scambaiting forum and for the scammers they have targeted for humiliation. Scambaiting involves as much trickery as the original scam it foils. The performers are now entwined in a dance of lying, persuasion, and goading. The photos here show a mysterious comfort in the performance and a dismissal of the original arrangements. The scammers must know English if they are communicating with English speakers, and they must see the disconnect between money laundering and homoerotic voyeurism.

And thus goes our Internet lives. Scary and layered, performative and striking. It all seems fake, but the money has to be real. And then there are the real feelings, which tend to get overshadowed by circular forum rhetoric. Scambaiters persist that their goal is to distract scammers, in any effective way. The Glamour Shots-style photography, then, is only a by-product of the cause, but it is clearly symptomatic of that desensitizing role that anonymity plays in encouraging extremist and base behavior. Add the vague goal of “distraction from crime,” and we have permission to showcase our most unattractive urges and call them arbitrary or worse—virtuous.

But just because the Internet serves as a many-peaked chart of humanity’s progress and backpedaling, it is no easier to qualify any behavior as good or evil. We are still stuck on flat surfaces, searching for lists and linearity, when the Internet’s strength is not found in timelining but diversifying any one track. We try to narrate lives as story plots. We-the commenters, the website and network creators, etc.—crave linearity because we are conditioned for it, but the nature of networking is much more splayed than a line. It is a debate, but one with no moderator, so the arguments become more and more outrageous, until we see the ugliest (and prettiest) avenues the human mind is capable of. Because even if scammers and scambaiters are spending hours online robbing the next and next and next person, the imagery that comes out of it has a quiet elegance, only made more mesmerizing by its dark intentions and its stunted explanations.

As far as word trends go, the word curate still exists in a somewhat rarified air. One can use curate knowingly with tongue in cheek: “Let’s curate our spice rack!” Or, more commonly and less nerdily, in the service of specialized artisanal commerce: “curating food stands” of the Brooklyn Flea swap meet, or a site that lets women curate their own clothing store from featured brands, earning 10% on any sales from their page. Curate used pejoratively indicates The Man- “If The Huffington Post wants to curate Twitter…” [uh, users will be upset]. And then there is that other definition specific to the practice of art curating. In the past ten years, as curate has exploded in popular culture and as a consumer buzz-word, art curators have felt residual effects. Those who value curating as an actual practice are generally loathe to see it harnessed by commercial culture, and conversely, feel sheepish about some deep-set pretensions this move has brought front and center. Simultaneously, curate has become a lightning-rod in the art world, inspiring countless journal articles and colloquia in which academics and professionals discuss issues around curating with a certain amount of anxiety.

Everyone’s a critic but who’s a curator?

In current usage, curating as discipline, which involves assembling and arranging artworks, has been usurped by curating as a nebulous expression of taste, presumed to be inherent rather than learned. This presumption is of course steeped in its own mire of regionalism, class bias and aspirations towards whomever’s privileged lifestyle is currently on-trend or in power. Suffice it to say that taste is problematic. But that curating swung so easily towards taste, indicates that it wasn’t a very hard association to make.

To some extent taste has been wedded to curating since the latter’s inception. A close forebear of the modern curated exhibition was the Renaissance cabinet of curiosities. The practice of selecting finely crafted objects for display first appeared in the 15th century and extended for several centuries after. A gentleman’s cabinet of curiosities showcased treasures bought or collected during travel, and ranged culturally and from collector to collector according to his interests, from mythical?/biblical? relics to artworks to ancient and exotic artifacts. As a practice, this sort of acquisition existed separately from the tradition of patronage of a particular artist. (For a vivid and intricately rendered description of the motivations and mindset of the 18th century collector, which gives way after half the book to a tour-de-force historical novel and then finally, to a political manifesto by a thinly veiled stand-in for the author, see Susan Sontag’s weird and special novel The Volcano Lover.) In Europe and later the United States, these collections of curiosities would give rise to the culture of the museum. In an 1858 New York Times article, the sculptor Bartholomew was described as having held the position of Curator for the Wadsworth Gallery in Hartford, a post he soon abandoned to render marble busts. The Wadsworth, incidentally, was the first public art museum to emerge in the United States, and would anticipate the museum boom of the 20th century.

While the proliferation of museums has been a defining cultural feature of the past hundred years, the accredited curator is fairly new. The professional curatorial degree is partly a product of our educational arms race spurred by dwindling jobs and ever increasing qualified candidates. But as positions in museums become more competitive, many professionals see the role of the curator within these institutions to be shifting. Curator Lynne Cooke points to the rise of the experience economy, which has made subsidizing large-scale immersive exhibitions both viable and tempting to corporations, as a key factor in the displacing of curators within the sphere of production. In lieu of the ideal, and perhaps mythic, blank check patronage artists once enjoyed, companies now sponsor artists to propose unique viewing experiences based on the “perceived needs of mainstream audiences” [Cooke]. These immersive experiences may or may not include contextual clues it was once considered the curator’s job to set up, and which allow works to resonate and speak to each other. Cooke is deeply critical of curators’ attempts to claim the creative position of generating experiences themselves, as their role as assemblers and contextualizers is destabilized. And artists in Cooke’s “post-studio” position produce exhibitions themselves anyway, with or without corporate underwriting. Outsourcing the physical labor of production to assistants, the artist as producer arguably negates the need for a curatorial presence in much the same way that the curator attempts to carve a space for him/herself from the artist’s territory.

All of which begs the question: Is this just a power grab via linguistic shuffling of the privileged term? The physical action of producing remains. What changes is who is supporting it, in what way, and what everyone is called. The curator’s role in creating reverberations between works, which allow the viewer to draw new connections and conclusions, may well depend on a viewing situation that is becoming less common, as immersive theme-park-like environments overtake the giant white cube. But these situations still abound. They just aren’t where some of the biggest money is going. And, without downplaying the obvious issues around art being dictated by business in such a soul-sucking way, theme-park installations require tremendous efforts from everyone involved to facilitate, albeit one less dependent on historical context and more on production skills like those required on a film set.

We All Are! (?)

I once took a Linguistics 101 seminar with a professor who devoted an entire lesson to what boiled down to this: People who fight to preserve words from pronunciations like “libary” and “aks” are probably not only insufferable but also wasting their time. There’s a reason more recently developed languages don’t have words like kvið (Faroese for bosom) and gwsanaethau (Welsh for services). As phoneme-chains move in the direction of easier pronouncibility, terms tend to move between contexts and from use in extremely specific situations to fuzzier ones, if they don’t fade into obsolescence. Like job descriptions, words are fluid. One might wonder whether the defensiveness around the use of curate in commercial settings (usually in the applied arts of food and fashion) isn’t indicative of a greater defensiveness of curators generally. The new joke is that artists “organize” rather than curate exhibitions, neatly side-stepping the conflict of interest that occurs when one puts one’s friends and oneself in a show. But this kind of linguistic tactic isn’t all that necessary. Using a word for defensive cover is about as silly as clinging to a dying definition (or pronunciation) of a word is unadvisable. Neither tactic particularly aids the process of production.

“Let’s curate our spice rack!” is kind-of the art school equivalent of nerd humor (“There are 10 types of people in the world: those who think in binary and those who don’t”). But it’s also an essentially defensive tactic. Maybe we don’t need to be so defensive. Maybe we could put more energy into making things happen, and less into constructing and institutionalizing hierarchies around the words we use to describe them. Or maybe I’m just being defensive?

On Monday, October 10th something strange happened in the world of high finance: Goldman Sachs lost its crown. The news, despite trumpeting a major new player in the world of HFT, or high-frequency trading, got no coverage at all from popular media outlets, save for a mention on Matt Taibbi’s blog at RollingStone.com. Yet for anyone with an interest in our fragile economy, the development would have been noteworthy: a new, unheard of company listed as Latour Trading LLC had surpassed Goldman Sachs as the most active trader on the New York Stock Exchange. I googled “Latour Trading” as soon as I read the news. Besides Taibbi’s post and his original citation (hat tip to Zero Hedge), there wasn’t a single article about this new titan of Wall Street—just a few job postings for salaried positions starting at $175,000 (not including bonuses), a YouTube clip of its staff ringing NYSE’s opening bell a few weeks earlier, and up top a link to its homepage, latourtrading.com. When I clicked on the homepage, my browser window went white. I tried reloading it—still nothing. It’s a strange feeling, loading a blank web page; it doesn’t happen very often. So I checked the source code of the site. In its entirety it read:

What does it mean to be the most active trader on Wall Street nowadays? Like infinity, the breadth of high-volume trading is hard to grasp. Before computers came along, or more to the point “algorithm processors,” trading frequency had a natural limit based on two factors: the number of shares that individual traders were willing to buy or sell, and the number of trades those folks could actually book in a given day. As investor money flowed into the US economy, and the number of traders on Wall Street increased, so too did overall trading frequency. But as with so many other things in modern life, computers, to put it mildly, changed the game.

In the 1980s, forward-thinking financial innovators realized that these natural limits to trading, based on our very human physical and mental capacities, weren’t relevant anymore. Computers could trade for us, based on a set of specific instructions, an algorithm, and make a ton of money simply exploiting their speed—or our sluggishness. The beauty of this approach, for greedy traders anyway, is that it’s “market neutral.” With HFT, tech-savvy bankers realized that one could make money from the stock market despite its activity (at least as perceived by human beings). The storied profit-centers of Wall Street would buckle under the weight of sheer processing power. It was the death of investment banking as the world had known it.

Machines for High Frequency Trading (HFT)

Traditionally, legal stock trades had always been based on some form of value and/or speculative investing, in which analysts scour earnings reports and company holdings (not to mention management teams and industry trends) to determine whether a stock is a good buy or sell. This is very difficult work, forecasting future earnings and growth potential. Market neutral investing bypasses all that. If I can buy one hundred shares of Microsoft (MSFT) for, say, $270.40 and sell them less than one second later for $270.41, I’ve just made a penny, or $0.0001 per share. I don’t care how much MSFT is worth, or whether the company will make money next year. If the stock price goes up or down today, it won’t matter. I just made a profit in less than one second, and at the end of that second I have no exposure. After all I’m not holding any investments, just an extra penny. That’s market neutral investing. It replaces one kind of work—analyzing the real worth of stocks—with an entirely different kind: recognizing inefficiencies in the market and writing computer programs to make massive, high-speed trades in order to profit from them.

As in the example above, these market inefficiencies are miniscule, by definition fractions of a penny per share. To make substantial money from these algorithms, banks have to trade millions and sometimes billions of dollars worth of stock per day, all day, generally holding shares from 3 milliseconds to 3 minutes. (The blink of an eye lasts 300-400 milliseconds.) When I worked for a hedge fund in the late nineties, we prided ourselves on this: sometimes, on generally quiet days, the firm’s trading activity alone accounted for ten percent of all trades made that day. This begins to give you a sense of what it means to be the largest trader on Wall Street.

Black Friday, 1987

In theory there’s nothing harmful about high-frequency trading—some academics have argued that it improves liquidity and lowers costs—but in practice HFT algorithms have caused major market crashes and we’re still not sure how exactly. The most recent was the famed “Flash Crash” of May 6th, 2010, in which the Dow Jones Average suffered its biggest one-day point decline ever, 998.5 points, only to recover most of it in just a few minutes (a quick turnaround, yes, but plenty of people still lost money). That’s nine percent of the overall wealth in the market, over a trillion dollars, disappearing and reappearing in the time it takes to get a cup of coffee. A joint report published by two government commissions later stated that HFT algorithms “began to quickly buy and then resell contracts to each other—generating a ‘hot-potato’ volume effect as the same positions were passed rapidly back and forth.” In other words, the algorithms got away from us, and caused the market to tank. The great crash of 1987, Black Monday, is also thought to have been caused, or at least exacerbated, by HFT, but debate rages in part because humans have a hard time assessing the aggregate effects of a flood of ingeniously complex and proprietary (i.e., secret) HFT strategies throughout the markets. Surprise, surprise.

In his wonderful TED talk, Kevin Slavin, a well-known game developer with an interest in algorithms, explains why we’ll never master the ramifications of such complex math. In regards to the Flash Crash, he says,

All of a sudden nine percent [of wealth] just goes away and nobody—to this day—can even agree on what happened. Because nobody ordered it. Nobody asked for it. Nobody had any control over what was actually happening… We’re writing these things that we can no longer read. We’ve rendered something kind of illegible. And we’ve lost the sense of what’s actually happening in this world that we’ve made…

When you see this kind of behavior, what you see is the evidence of algorithms in conflict, algorithms locked in loops with each other without any human oversight, without any adult supervision.

The only power we have over these algorithms, he suggests, is to press the “red button that [says] STOP.” Unsurprisingly, most leaders on Wall Street lack this kind of humility.

So Latour Trading LLC is now one of the largest traders by volume on NYSE. I called them multiple times for comment about this piece, and never heard back (“the person you are trying to reach is not available now…”). After some digging around, I realized I’d missed something: their YouTube clip had some of its caption obscured, and those lines named a CEO, David Faucon. The only webpage in which he undoubtedly appears regards the first criminal conviction in the theft of HFT computer code. Coincidentally, an old friend of my father’s represented the defendant, who used to work with Faucon at Tower Research Capital. (Faucon was never implicated in the crime.) I called Ivan Fisher, my dad’s old friend, and asked, “What can you tell me about David Faucon?” He didn’t remember Faucon at all, but the conversation soon swelled with suspicions about Tower Research and its founder, Mark Gorton. From Tower’s homepage: “Founded in 1998, Tower develops proprietary trading algorithms by using rigorous statistical methodology to identify non-random patterns in the behavior of markets. Exploiting these inefficiencies allows the firm to earn exceptional returns while mitigating risk.”

It turns out that Tower isn’t just the former employer of Faucon. Latour Trading, LLC appears to be affiliated with Tower in some way. They share a telephone number, and both companies are listed at the same address, two floors apart. Fisher tells me this would be “not necessarily inconsistent with [Gorton’s] approach to have people spin off and form companies.” Mark Gorton is more well known as the founder of Lime Group, which owns Lime Brokerage LLC, a brokerage house, LimeWire, the formerly popular file-sharing app, LimeMedical LLC, a medical software company, and Tower Research Capital LLC. Almost immediately Fisher warned me, “I have enormous suspicions about Tower.”

The defendant whom Fisher represented is man named Samarth Agrawal, accused and eventually convicted of stealing HFT code from Société Générale (SocGen), the eighth largest bank in the European Union. Fisher claimed that “Tower held out substantial amounts of money to [Agrawal] for a raid on what amounted to SocGen’s algorithms.” He went on: “The man who designed those systems was also lured to Tower. His whole team went. The top four [engineers] all went to Tower.” Of SocGen’s engineers, Fisher said “they were a huge unit made up of young Indian professionals such as [Agrawal] who had all been educated at this group of universities in India called ITT [he meant IIT, the Indian Institutes of Technology]. These were like MIT plus—they’re regarded as superior to MIT. And these very intelligent people were taught about these strategies,” the complex algorithms at the heart of HFT.

But immediately after Agrawal’s trial, he continued, “they were all out of Tower.”

“They left?” I asked.

“They left or they were fired,” he replied. “I suspect the latter.”

When I told Fisher that Latour Trading LLC had overtaken Goldman Sachs as the largest volume trader, he gasped. “It may be they’re violating some trading regulations. They may be trading on capital that doesn’t exist, because they’re not required to put up the money.”

This is the crux of HFT. If you’re buying and selling the same stocks within milliseconds of each other, what are the capital requirements? Do capital requirements even make sense? In other words, do you have to put up the money? How do you put up money when holdings come and go faster than thought? The trading activity of these algorithms can’t be predicted. Their “decisions” rest on real-time data; they’re crunching numbers at an ungodly pace, and acting accordingly. To ascertain their output—to calculate how much cash needs to be on hand for these trades—you’d need to know an algorithm’s input; i.e., you’d need to know what’s going to happen tomorrow. This is the whole point, of course. These algorithms can’t read the future exactly, but they’re able to construct a picture of the ultra-present by analyzing so much data instantaneously. They “see” what’s happening long before we do, and on a far wider scale. Financial requirements, then, must be stipulated after the fact. And this is indeed what happens: banks with HFT desks generally pony up the cash for their trades on the following business day. It’s a wait-and-see approach. If my algorithm loses $100K on Monday, I’d owe that amount to my broker-dealer on Tuesday morning. But this belies the extent of my activity: that Monday, I actually purchased $312M worth of stocks and managed to sell them all for $311.9M. Ultimately, this cost me $100K. Seems okay when it’s a loss, right? But now consider gains: what if I can make $300K in one day by trading, say, $400M worth of stocks? What do I have to put up? How much do I have to invest in order to earn that money? You might’ve guessed it: absolutely nothing.

Banks will object to this—we can’t trade for nothing, they’ll insist; we have to put up collateral; we have to have money in the bank! This is misleading. Any broker-dealer will demand “collateral” for HFT, but how much is up to that institution. Whatever it chooses, the actual figure must be, by definition, both a tiny fraction of daily stock purchases and a somewhat arbitrary number (as HFT is unpredictable). In other words, this collateral doesn’t function like true collateral, as an asset meant to replace the value of a failed investment.¹ Any broker-dealer underwriting HFT assumes a fair amount of risk. In the end, it’s a question of trust. Do I, as a broker-dealer, trust you, as a bank or hedge fund, to effect such massive trades? Obviously, major broker-dealers aren’t going to let any Joe Schmoe engage in HFT. Then again, who is Latour Trading LLC?

Leaving aside the question of whether we should ever trust bankers, it seems rather obvious that we can’t trust them today—and that we can’t trust broker-dealers (like Bear Stearns) to trust bankers. Furthermore, these algorithms are highly coveted, as Agrawal’s crime suggests. Banks divulge nothing about them. Even if a broker-dealer has a math whiz on staff (unlikely), he or she will never get access to the computer code, or even a whiff of its variables. From every angle, then, risk assessment is impossible. But it’s worse than that: were the opposite true, Wall Street would abandon HFT. It’s so lucrative because it’s so arcane. We can’t demand more transparency in HFT; this would be like calling for more transparency in poker. Hidden knowledge is crucial to the functioning of the system.

Much of Wall Street now works this way. Where banks generate astronomical profits, you can bet on secretive, arcane practices. The mortgage bubble, too, thrived on a lack of transparency. For all the similar arcana of highly structured mortgage-backed securities, they were exceptionally lucrative for a simple reason: banks didn’t have to divulge prices. They controlled the market for MBSs, and kept it secret by design. They could set arbitrary prices without fearing angry customers, because no one had access to pricing data. Of course, it’s no coincidence that these securities were themselves super-complicated, and evolved to be ever more so. The harder it is to understand a given market, the more power the market makers have. It’s the economic equivalent of divide-and-conquer: obfuscate and rake in.

I don’t mean to suggest that bankers are sinister, intentionally creating complexity to pillage the economy. Mostly, bankers are just great salesmen, and like all great salesmen they believe their own bullshit. Bankers continue to trust the “quants” on Wall Street—the kids pouring out of MIT to write these algorithms—for the same reasons that we do: trusting them lets us off the hook. It’s a crowded world out there; we’ve got a lot to manage. We farm out our mental capacities all the time: calculators to do easy multiplication, Facebook to juggle our friendships, algorithms to mitigate financial risk. But Democracy demands something of us; if we farm that out, we cease to live in one. Early innovators on Wall Street knew that HFT would look like magic, creating a major profit center out of thin air. The audience—first their peers, then the world—would be impressed by the math, impressed by the technological prowess, but the profits would be most impressive of all. Like teenagers at a magic show, the delight on our faces is finally beginning to fade. In the meantime, we’ve allowed Wall Street to walk away with billions.

Servers for HFT

This isn’t just unfortunate or unfair. Systemic secrecy on Wall Street enables vast disparity of wealth, and this in turn creates a bifurcated society in which the notion of “common good” becomes something of a mirage. To quote Joseph Stieglitz: “Of all the costs imposed on our society by the top 1 percent, perhaps the greatest is this: the erosion of our sense of identity, in which fair play, equality of opportunity, and a sense of community are so important.” This is what our founders feared the most. They celebrated freedom far less than George W. Bush would have you believe. They were much more paranoid about its absence, and did everything they could to prevent the concentration of power. What happens on Wall Street isn’t just a question of equality; it’s a question of Democracy. Capitalism isn’t at odds with human freedom. But what about HFT? Is it even logical to align HFT with capitalism, seeing as it depends so heavily on secrecy, and trades in a world so utterly beyond our faculties? Does Wall Street have the right to make money wherever it can?

Don’t let your iPhone fool you: the digital revolution has just begun. Computers have changed everything, but only a little. The sophistication and complexity of our world is about to become immeasurably, unimaginably richer. But human beings, in one way or another, will always be at the helm (if only with our finger on the kill switch). The wizardry of this new world—in which, for example, our brightest mathematicians spend their time skimming billions of stray pennies from the market like voracious soda-can collectors—may intimidate us. But if we fail to assert ourselves, if we lose faith in our own wisdom and common sense, we’re destined to suffer. The more strange and arcane things seem, the more we have to trust our own, limited judgment. This is the essence of Democracy: faith in the wisdom of common men and women. We may not understand HFT algorithms or MBS tranches, but this isn’t a reason to give up on oversight and defer to experts. After all, were it not for our taxes, these experts would have plunged 6 billion people into the worst financial meltdown in history.

Latour Trading LLC—its shrouded profile, shady history and massive trading schemes—underscores much that’s wrong with Wall Street today. But it would be foolish to vilify this one firm. Investigating them, and prosecuting them if necessary, won’t solve our problems (not that this shouldn’t be done). Other mysterious firms would no doubt follow. The tough questions are for us. Wall Street won’t be forthcoming about the dangers of HFT, but in one unusual circumstance, Goldman Sachs shared its concern. After its employee absconded with precious HFT code, Goldman called the government to warn us. According to a federal prosecutor, “The bank has raised the possibility that there is a danger that somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways.”

1. Again, banks will cry foul. HFT strategies may purchase hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stock on any given day, but their holdings at any given moment may be limited to a smaller number—ten million, say. Banks and broker-dealers could base their collateral agreements on this lower limit. This is still somewhat arbitrary. Even if my holdings never exceed ten million, that figure has little bearing on risk. HFT algorithms trade furiously. During a market crash—especially one exacerbated by HFT—these algorithms could lose staggering amounts of money each minute, far more than their fixed holding limits each day.

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   ]]> http://dismagazine.com/discussion/26423/htmlhtml/feed/ 0 http://dismagazine.com/discussion/25750/disorganized-part-1-of-3/ http://dismagazine.com/discussion/25750/disorganized-part-1-of-3/#comments Tue, 15 Nov 2011 19:42:29 +0000 DIS http://dismagazine.com/?p=25750 [read more »]

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   Credits

   Douglas Faneuil designs databases in Brooklyn. He writes about politics to keep from kvetching.]]>

   These days civil disobedience feels like a given. Though rare and often unsettling, it never looks alien to us. As early as kindergarten we learn to venerate its most dutiful practitioners: Gandhi, MLK and Mandela.

   We bind our history and our values to their greatest triumphs. On the National Mall, MLK now towers among our gods: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt. Even when civil disobedience takes root overseas, in places as unfamiliar as Iran, we see ourselves in the throngs; perhaps we feel a little pride. Of Iran’s recent Green movement, President Obama said, “The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.” We tie a tight knot from the ends of American freedom and peaceful protest. And as is our wont in America, we flatter ourselves.

   The idea of nonviolent resistance isn’t American or particularly Western. It developed over time, in the mind of Mohandas Gandhi, who named his new practice Satyagraha, Sanskrit for “insistence on the truth/soul force.” While educated as a Westerner, Gandhi fought valiantly against the two great pillars of modernism itself: nationhood and industry. It’s easy to forget this, as even Indians call him “Bapu” or “father” (of the nation). Gandhi demanded independence of course, but he never wanted to replace British colonialism with a powerful nation-state of India. He rejected the notion of a centralized government—even a fairly representative one—as a bankrupt choice, one that expressed undue admiration for Western values and stripped India of its defining strength, what Gandhi called Swaraj, or the self-rule of small communities:

   I would say that if the village perishes India will perish too. India will be no more India. Her own mission in the world will get lost. The revival of the village is possible only when it is no more exploited. Industrialization on a mass scale will necessarily lead to passive or active exploitation of the villagers as the problems of competition and marketing come in. Therefore we have to concentrate on the village being self-contained, manufacturing mainly for use. Provided this character of the village industry is maintained, there would be no objection to villagers using even the modern machines and tools that they can make and can afford to use. Only they should not be used as a means of exploitation of others [source].

   We’ve buried Gandhi by praising him, glorifying nonviolence at the expense of its raison d’être. Thus a harsh acknowledgement: despite his genius, his enlightenment, despite his leadership and at times frightening ambition, despite his heroism and his place in the pantheon, Gandhi failed. True, he “invented a completely new and humane means for the liberation war of an oppressed country” (Albert Einstein’s words)—and we rightly celebrate this—but in doing so we tend to whitewash the reality that Satyagraha, the notion of civil disobedience itself, developed in opposition to the West, not in support of it. “The ideally nonviolent state would be an ordered anarchy,” Gandhi said.

   Ordered anarchy—sounds a lot like Occupy Wall Street, doesn’t it? This is the most surprising, romantic thing about the current movement: in its form and expression, it stretches back nearly a century and reflects the genesis of active, nonviolent resistance. It rejects the fallacy of peaceful protest as a homegrown philosophy, in perfect harmony with American values, and embraces much of Satyagraha and Swaraj. How many political protests in this country have taken the form of a village, one with its own medical center, library, clothing exchange, food production, press office, newspaper, sanitation department, power station, government and even its own riches ($500,000 and counting)? I’ve yet to hear anyone invoke Gandhi explicitly in Zuccotti Park, but a sense of community at OWS is clearly fundamental to its message, goals and survival. Jason Ahmadi, appearing on NY1 as a spokesman for the movement, put it nicely:

   One thing that’s really important to understand is this horizontal organizing structure that we have—in which no person or no organization is a leader over anyone else. People have the ability to act like leaders, and people have the ability to rise to tasks, and to get things done, and to have people follow their ideas. But no one is demanding anything from anyone else… A big reason in my mind why a lot of us hold this organizing model is that we want our means to reflect our ends [emphasis added].

   In other words, OWS rejects the professionalism and officiousness—the careerism—of the ruling classes. These organizers consciously sacrifice the trappings of “advancement” in order to faithfully represent their values. Image and efficacy take a back seat to genuineness and community. This is radical! A slap in the face to the corporate way of life! And it grosses people out.

   I’ll be honest: the park does look like a mess. Unfashionable sweatshirts abound. That’s been the core complaint since the start of the protest—that OWS isn’t “put together,” that it resembles nothing like a responsible and capable social movement. Negative attitudes range from the playfully dismissive (“From the looks of the youthful, costumed characters swaying to the music and flying colorful balloons, it was hard to tell if Occupy Wall Street was a street fair, a ‘60s-style love-in or a protest rally.”) to the condescendingly snide (“There’s a difference between an emotional outcry and a movement. This is an emotional outcry.”). Anyone who has spent real time in Zuccotti Park knows better. It’s about as disorganized as Macy’s. (If you’re having trouble, just visit the resource center.) The individuals comprising OWS are energetic, focused, intelligent and pragmatic. They’re hungry for results. And all of them, including those far from the press office—even a group of twenty year-olds living under a tarp—remain strictly on message.

   This is striking. I expected OWS to be full of opinion, reflecting a range of goals and ideals. It’s been misrepresented this way, and if one stands at the park’s edge and reads the protests signs, it’s easy to see why. As I began to speak with demonstrators, though, I found nearly all of them saying the same thing:

   —I’ve lived the typical American Dream process… I did well, but I couldn’t find anything above bare minimum.

   —I have debt. My job prospects were none… I was let down by the system.

   —It’s money over people now; that’s all there is. Greed has taken over. I’ve been looking for a job for eight months.

   —Everybody wants to come up in life. Everyone wants to climb the social ladder… I really don’t have much hope for our country.

   —I want to live in an apartment one day, have a job five days a week. Especially at my age in this city [20], everything is very expensive.

   —Right now we’ve got a lot of nothing.

   This palpable sense of a future in check overwhelmed other issues, to their near total exclusion. The OWS press office had more to say about transparency and policy, but for the most part protesters seemed defeated. Undoubtedly, that’s why they’re there; far better to feel defeated among friends. And surely the movement, with its focus on fairness and community, is restoring their hope. But over a few days of reporting, I was struck by a lack of idealism. At one point, feeling this viscerally, I asked a group of young adults—the twenty year-olds with the tarp—“What’s the ideal outcome of all this?” I looked around and swept my arms out to encompass everything in the park. They thought for a while, not looking lost but perhaps afraid of sounding foolish. Suddenly a young woman named Dee spoke up.

   “The least I can ask for,” she said, “is for politicians to represent us a little more than they do regular corporations.”

   In my notepad, following her words, I scribbled, “the ideal outcome???”

   There’s a tension here between form and content. On the one hand, OWS expresses a powerful rebuttal to corporatist values in its insistence on a particular form, its “horizontal organizing structure.” This form and its consequent “messiness” give the movement enormous strength; plainly the occupiers cherish it. On the other hand, in speaking with me, protesters downplayed this; they refrained from celebrating their subculture (unlike the Hippies) as an alternative, better way. ‘The American Dream,’ ‘full-time jobs,’ ‘climbing the ladder’—we all want the same things, they suggested in chorus. This reluctance to alienate anyone feels both shrewd and heartfelt, a big key to the success of OWS thus far. Even its main policy initiative, reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, signifies accord. On paper at least, OWS is fighting for a return to precedent, agitating to reestablish a series of regulations passed eighty years ago by a bunch of white men born in the 19th Century. Really, what could be less radical?

   There’s a debate raging about this question: Is OWS radical or conservative? Does the movement want to overthrow the system or return us to the rule of law? If you come down on either side, you’ve missed the point. It’s both. In this sense, critics of the movement—those put off by its radicalism—aren’t totally off base. OWS isn’t just a reform movement, or a grab at lost opportunity. It’s a quest for social change, an attempt to reprioritize the values of a nation. Much of the language of OWS belies this. In words demonstrators paint a Walker Evans-like picture, full of heartache and personal anguish, with a wonky assist from the press office. This strategy has merits; it’s working. Still, OWS and its skeptics are talking past one another.

   This can’t last. The movement isn’t going to affect change with a few legislative victories, no matter how significant. The fundamental shift that’s needed to break the stranglehold of corporate dominance will require the support of more Americans—many more. OWS has done an excellent job of expanding its reach. The question now is how to win over its detractors. At some point, the occupiers will have to confront their radicalism head-on; they’ll have to convince a majority that its values need shifting; they’ll have to lead. What a pity, how so few are left to inspire them. No wonder it looks like they’re starting from scratch.

   

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   Credits

   Douglas Faneuil designs databases in Brooklyn. He writes about politics to keep from kvetching.]]> http://dismagazine.com/discussion/25750/disorganized-part-1-of-3/feed/ 0 http://dismagazine.com/discussion/23379/boinas-and-berets-a-little-history/ http://dismagazine.com/discussion/23379/boinas-and-berets-a-little-history/#comments Mon, 24 Oct 2011 18:06:48 +0000 By Patricia Yagüe http://dismagazine.com/?p=23379 [read more »]]]>

   Jean Borotra at the net, French Championship 1924, La Croix Catalan Stadium in Paris

   French-Basque tennis player Monsieur Jean Borotra, member of “The Four Musketeers” (including Jacques Brugnon, Henri Cochet, and René Lacoste) would stop in the middle of a game to put on one of his famous black berets (or blue, other sources disagree—then black and white pictures don’t help to clarify). Borotra, a native of the seaside town of Biarritz, reigned on the tennis courts in the late 1920s. He won 15 Grand Slam, Wimbledon in 1924 and 1926, and single titles at the French Championship (1924 and 1931), the Australian Championship (1928), and the United States Championship (1926). His charisma and professional success brought his trademark headwear into the spotlight in Europe and the United States.

   Borotra’s hometown is located in Aquitaine, southern France, a region that lies in Basque territory (Spain). Basque flags and emblems adorn the city. Understanding this crisscross of French and Spanish symbols is key in following the winding routes that took the history of la boina, Spanish term for such a hat, or txapela, as they refer to it in the Basque Country.

   

   Young boy wearing a Petasos (Greece); Los Tres Reyes Magos (The Three Wise Men) wearing Pileus; Odysseus weaing a Pileus

   First off, the beret led us on a trip around Europe; Italy and Denmark during the Bronze Age (3200-600 B.C.) Austria (400BC), Germany (12th Century), France (1280), and Spain (13th Century and so forth)… Archeologists found traces of hats similar to berets in Bronze Age tombs, as well as representations in figurines and sculptures in western and northern Europe. These pieces of headwear differed slightly in size or shape, but there was one characteristic that linked them all: felt.

   Felt is the simplest and oldest form of cloth. It’s a non-woven material made from matting and pressing wet fur, generally wool, a material that twines and grips easily due to the inherent nature of the hair. Fate helped humans to discover felt; shepherds used to fill their shoes with wool tufts for commodity and weather protection. Thus, sweat moisture, and walking pressure helped the natural process of creating the felt. Pastors would stumble upon a piece of compact cloth after a long walking journey.

   

   The simplicity of felt’s making process and the quality of the material made it an optimum textile for weather protection. It was commonly used for dwelling, clothing, and head decoration around the globe for many centuries, especially in cold regions such as central and northern Europe. In fact, hats similar to Basque-French berets were worn in European countries such as Italy, Netherlands, and Scotland. However, we find differences among them, most of all the inward shape of the Spanish version and the txertena, a half-inch tail sewn on the top. Another difference to consider is the way the hat was worn: pulled all the way down in northern Europe, loosely placed on top of the head in the Pyrenees counterpart.

   In the 15th century, farm workers from the French region of Bearn (southern France) used to wear a type of beret that became very popular among the French Pyrenees population. Then, it jumped to the Basque region of Guipúzcua by way of the French/Spanish Bidasoa River. Since then, la boina became the Basque headwear symbol par excellence.

   

   Rembrandt, Self-Portrait, 1659; Portuguese Artist Amadeo de Souza Cardoso; Basque Carlist Ignacio Baleztena aka Premín de Iruña

   In October 1830, the (soon-to-be) only Spanish female monarch in modern times, Isabella II, was born. Her father, King Fernando VII, aware that his crown “prince” was not going to be male, canceled the Salic Law of 1713 that excluded females from inheriting a throne, months before his daughter was born. But not everyone agreed with his decision. King Fernando VII’s brother, Carlos María Isidro, later Carlos V, successor to the throne of Spain up till then, denied his brother resolution and kept his heir rights. His reaction culminated in the last major European civil war in which opponents fought to establish their right to a throne; the Carlist Wars.

   Carlists (defenders of Carlos V) and Cristinos (defenders of Isabella II, called “Cristinos” in reference to Isabella’s mother’s name Maria Cristina) divided Spain. The Basque Country backed Carlos V. The United Kingdom, Portugal, and France helped the Cristinos.

   

   Painting of a Carlist; Tomás de Zumalacárregui y de Imaz; Portrait of a Carlist

   During the Second Carlist War (1846 -1849) French txapelgorris, or “red hats”, entered the Basque Country to aid Cristinos in the area. Cristinos started wearing red berets; however, the red berets became a carlist symbol when Zumalacárregui, Basque Carlist general and one of his most important figures, was seen and portrayed with this type of beret.

   In the Oscar-winning Spanish movie Belle Epoque (Fernando Trueba, 1992), the Carlist uniform is worn by one of the main characters during a carnival scene, where we can see locals wearing black berets too; it was a peasant symbol. But to add more confusion, we also see it as an emblem of the extreme right when worn in the Carlist manner.

   The beret is a distinctive item in military clothing, particularly associated with elite units in nations such as Denmark, Angola, or United States. Therefore, another path crosses our history.

   

   French Army captain with Afghan National Army officer; French Chasseurs Alpins (Infantry)

   

   The ETA's last video message, 2011

   The petasos, a floppy sun hat made out of felt (leather and straw were common materials, too) was a ancient Grecian headwear generally used among travellers and peasants, worn by Hermes the messenger god. This headpiece seems to be the direct origin of our beret, although historians keep referring to the pileos, a conical hat used by sailors and the military, as the one. Ancient Romans adopted the pileos, historians say, and changed its name to beretino, thus beret (although here, once again, my skepticism is aroused: I haven’t found enough evidence that such a name was really coined).

   It’s interesting to find a clothing item that represents such antagonistic cultures: the war and the arts. Either artists or the military wear the beret, and both give it their own (and often opposite) connotations. And we understand those connotations too. Jazz trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie wore it often, and so did Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, the Beat generation, French Infantry Commandant Soutiras, mega star Pablo Picasso, existentialist Simone de Beauvoir, and American writer Ernest Hemingway—and many peasants all around the world.

   

   Dizzy Gillespie; John Lennon; Jack Nicholson and Angelica Huston

   

   Che Guevara 1960; Black Panthers 1966; Pablo Picasso

   ]]> http://dismagazine.com/discussion/23379/boinas-and-berets-a-little-history/feed/ 0 http://dismagazine.com/discussion/best-and-worst/24006/best-and-worst-spring-2012/ http://dismagazine.com/discussion/best-and-worst/24006/best-and-worst-spring-2012/#comments Wed, 12 Oct 2011 16:24:21 +0000 DIS http://dismagazine.com/?p=24006 [read more »]]]>
   

   Miu Miu
   If gag reflex was your first response to Miu Miu’s latest concoction, you are not alone, but you’re also wrong. Pretty and gross collided to make an altogether confusing collection that felt at once homespun folksy and completely glitchy CG. Perhaps it was originally designed in Second Life for a greasy middle parted teenage avatar. What we do know is Miuccia took years off the shawl and in doing so, somehow made it feel young and sexy. The miniature shawls and off-the-shoulder coats tied with bows of thick velvet ribbon worn over midriff-baring bra tops and high waisted patchwork A-line skirts and dresses were positively unhealthy. The side effect was adorably perverse and slightly Rodarted.

   

   Heidi Leung
   Here Leung is getting flirty with an aversion to commitment. Shirts hang from straps as though you almost want to wear them but can’t be bothered to put them on completely. Likewise the footwear doubles as cleaning supplies—because bending over would mean exerting energy. Lazy substitutes for “effortless” chic, and as champions of the Chinatown aesthetic, this hits all the right notes. With layers of competing textures and an ambiguity of meaning, Leung offers placemats as bibs, decorative wall hangings as dresses, ribbed knits with Mandarin collars, capris with ruffles at the hem, and flaps of fabric swinging. Elegant!

   

   Celine
   While everyone is talking about couture shapes this season, they’re missing a key point. The proportion, the peplum, the use of brocades, the dimensional, the architectural, the sculptural, the 1950s; these observations are neither notable nor new. We’ve got a better keyword: crotch! Activating the space between the chest and the crotch. These ladies are crotchety. Meanwhile, we will use the word proportion to talk about the belts, which are seriously wide. Whether being worn under the bust, cinching the waist or way downtown on the hip, these belts are taking up a lot of middle and we like it.

   

   Hussein Chalayan
   This collection was very ‘07. It seems recent history, developments and trends have little influence over this designer, and his pre economic meltdown bubble suits him just fine. Chalayan was giving major back with reverse coattails, pleated drapey backs, cropped blazers and cut out dresses. Soft curves replaced right angles, flat layers sat upon full skirts and fabric trailed behind pantsuits giving the illusion of a dress. Best of all, terrycloth dresses and tunics were adorned with the most standard hand towel ribbing at the hem, turning them into the perfect poolside look.

   

   Margiela
   Here we have the slinkiest, lowest effort look. It’s barely executed. She’s that depressed divorcée who covers all her furniture in plastic and doesn’t take it off when guests come over. She’s too sleepy to get dressed so she belts a satin sheet and holds the top up as she answers the door. Here is a human who has succumbed to its context and is barely able to hold it together. She wouldn’t make it a single step out of the apartment if it weren’t for her addiction to Margiela and Flintstones chewable vitamins. These are practical garments used for dragging the listless to and fro. Sequined Persian rug outfits in dry cleaner bags, easy-clean condom shoes, inside-out dresses, velcro-covered shirts to support floppy silk aprons, and a ring that looks like you’re holding a dead leaf that just fell off your house plant. Each piece is a prototype of itself. It’s so self-aware it’s practically 2D. It’s so spelled out it’s almost retarded.

   

   Jil Sander
   Who is this OCD woman? She is most likely a professional organizer with a clinical disorder and a penchant for hand washing, but we love her all the same. This collection is nothing if not neat and orderly. The efficiency of a jacket that buttons onto a dress, the rigid equestrian power of a horse-shoe shaped heel. It’s almost antiseptic. The sparseness of embellishments was fundamental to the collection’s reductionist aesthetic. The few charms in the collection were quietly placed at the corners of the waist, a twist of fabric to accentuate the shoulders or the simplest bow wrapped around the waist of one of the wedding gowns made of poplin dress shirts. But don’t be fooled; this girl has crazy eyes and wears beanies with net veils in the summer. She’s on medication or she keeps forgetting to take it, can’t remember which.

   

   Blumarine
   After 17 looks of relatively sane, wearable, pleated and ruffled dresses, Anna Molinari switched gears and turned it out. She went straight to Wet Seal with her 90s-loves-the-60s fluoro floral, hula, neoprene insanity. The flat daisy prints—a big fuck you to the digital print pandemic—were cleverly topped off with matching 3D flower accessories. There were arm bands, neoprene leg warmers, and floppy newsboys with daisy prints, evoking the band Soho’s seminal hit single “Hippychick.” This tween fashion movement gradually transitioned into its evening version of sequined capri pants, two-inch thick bandeaus, undercleavage, track pants trimmed with fake flowers, and glimmering black raffia hula skirts. Although there’s a chance these garments will only be seen on Ashley Tisdale in US Weekly’s Fashion Police section, we truly hope Molinari keeps it up!

   

   Pucci
   We’ve always despised Peter Dundas. But this season he’s found the right direction for Pucci. It’s a free-er, sluttier, less hygienic Pucci. This new Pucci girl sleeps in a tent at week long music festivals in southern Germany, she gets seriously into medieval fairs, wears adhesive fangs, drinks mead and eats Dragon Bones. Plus, she’s really hot and knows how to wear a choker.

   

   Kanye West
   Looking beyond the insignificant “clothes” in Kanye West’s debut collection, this runway show was a success. A front row lineup that included Lindsay Lohan, Jared Leto, the Olsen twins, Sky Ferreira, Carine Roitfeld, and Ciara ensured that it would be talked about all over the Internet—but aside from that, the real triumph here is that virtually anybody can have a collection and show at Paris Fashion Week. Isn’t it awful? It’s Lady Gaga’s spiritual message of “anybody can do everything” and “everyone is an authority on anything” come true. In terms of celebrities, however, we would love to see this—the catastrophic, cosmic follow-up to Lindsay Lohan’s rapetastic slutway sashay at Ungaro—as a breach of the floodgates in terms of cross-cultural celebu-ture fantasy. Who might attempt a collection next? We nominate Courtney Stodden, Bai Ling, Trina, or Dennis Rodman.

   
   

   Missoni
   Still got TARGET on the mind. WTF. In the past couple seasons Missoni has created incredible lifestyle collections where you really felt you understood who this woman is. One season she couldn’t stop dancing in the desert, another she was in pastel pajamas and floor length snakeskin jackets. But this season the girl is drunk. She may have already passed out and woke up puking on herself. Don’t drink Margheritas before going trim shopping. The combination of colors and patterns look like they were dragged out of wholesale remnant bins and the shapes are utterly unforgiving. Multi-tiered ruffles, fringe galore, asymmetrical everything and the most hideous zebra prints imaginable. The fringe necklace is deeply disturbing because it looks like something Urban Outfitter’s ripped off from Margiela or Helmut Lang in the mid ‘00s and now Missoni is stealing it. Actually the colors look like they could be an homage to Urban Outfitters. No disrespect for UO they’re not this bad. And it’s safe to say that Angela Missoni’s outfit is the best look on the runway.

   

   Giles
   “This is so not a collection about Black Swan,” -Giles Deacon

   The fact that Giles felt the need to confront this issue directly following his show really says it all. On one hand, we should probably congratulate Giles for finally having a color scheme and some thread of consistency. But this theme is literally 3 seasons ago (see Black Swan, 2010, John Galliano Menswear Fall 2011). It’s just over. Embarrassing references aside (which included the Warhol Factory because he really wanted a silver stage set), it’s plain to see this collection is just ugly. We won’t even mention the red swan, his tragic addition to the exhuasted swan canon.

   

   Limi Feu
   Enough is enough Limi. You may think you’re cute, with a hot pink star pasty, and American Apparel two tone tights, but it’s time you dissolved the company for the greater good. Emo, Electro-clash, 80s revival is not “in” yet. Never has a designer tried and failed so hard. This is like fashion spam. Delete.

   

   Ruffian
   Sometimes we pick on the ill fated looks of an otherwise mediocre collection (see Altuzarra). But in this case, there’s not one acceptable garment. Maybe it’s the fact that Ruffian’s clothes are utterly unphotogenic, and naturally we’d never be at the show, or anywhere these clothes exist in person. We were so curious we wound up on a Fashionspot forum and apparently Ruffian is sold at Neiman Marcus Dallas, and possibly somewhere in Canada (they’re Canadian). Anyway the fact is, these appear to be the grossest, must unwearable garments ever made. We can’t even go into detail, it’s that bad.

   

   Rodarte
   The Mulleavy sisters have always exuded an essence of etsy, but their craft store Van Gogh sunflower and starry night motif and bizarre Barney the dinosaur/Sleeping Beauty color regression was too much information. Some infantile infatuations should probably be kept private. The boxy cuts and conversely, flowy, semi-sheer pieces packed no potency, a difficult season to remember off the style.com stream. Considering the atmospheric settings and innovative collections of seasons past it was a generous disappointment, a simultaneous journey to both antique store geriatrics and daycare juvenalia.

   

   Altuzarra
   Joseph Altuzarra is arguably the most hyped (and overrated) designer in New York. This says more about New York than it does about Altuzarra. It doesn’t matter if you’re indistinguishable from Doo Ri or Philip Lim because if you’re trendy, commercial and you sell at Barney’s you’re one to watch. This collection may as well have been a graduate show with the prerequisite geometric, graphic, Givenchy inspired, poorly constructed, badly designed and ill fitted clothing. Rave reviews? Really?

   

   Paco Rabanne
   Mansih Arora’s Paco Rabanne is the hideous result of Fashion media, Project Runway, editorial anxiety and a distinct McQueen retrospective jealousy. Ok, so he digitally mapped the body to recreate Rabanne’s classic plastic chain mail dress. Whatever! Everyone else has realized that structured exaggerated hip is not cute right now. One body-con asymmetrical black dress was split at the side with beads bleeding out. Arora is in desperate need of aesthetic guidance, a designer perhaps? Maybe he can construct giant pleated paper costumes that won’t collapse, but honestly, who cares? Maybe he should be designing for Cirque du Soleil or Carnivale. Paco Rabanne exclusively for Carnivale. Whoever has a vested interested in Paco Rabanne’s successful revival better wake up and hire someone with taste.

   ]]> http://dismagazine.com/discussion/best-and-worst/24006/best-and-worst-spring-2012/feed/ 0 http://dismagazine.com/discussion/22974/waving-or-drowning-art-and-protest-in-the-uk/ http://dismagazine.com/discussion/22974/waving-or-drowning-art-and-protest-in-the-uk/#comments Mon, 03 Oct 2011 14:48:56 +0000 by Claudia Firth http://dismagazine.com/?p=22974 [read more »]]]>

   Currently the UK seems to be witnessing some interesting crossovers between art and radical politics (and while there are parallels internationally, I will concentrate here on reporting from the UK). Since the new coalition government came into office last year, the cultural landscape has changed dramatically. The implementation of drastic cuts to the public sector and the ideological rolling back of the state have kick started a wave of cultural and political action. Politics is being discussed in art spaces; art methodologies are being used to enact politics on the street. This is a moment of particular significance both for the wider political picture and for me personally. As author I inhabit a number of different identities that seem pertinent. Those of theorist, artist, and activist crossover and create the dialogue within which to frame and contextualize the current situation.

   What I can see happening now is something of what I was looking for but did not find when I attended art school back in the 90s. For this angry teenager, going to art college was an act of rebellion rather than a career trajectory. Art college had a kind of punk mystique about it. Many of the punks had gone to art school or were associated with art schools. Adam Ant went to Hornsey Art College, and the Sex Pistols’ first gig had been at St. Martin’s. Looking back, I can see that I was looking for people who were questioning the system and not just wanting to be part of it. The hope was that I would find the energy, anger, and desire to question and transform society there. However, my training as a professional artist during the 90s emphasized ambition rather than critique. Some of the punk ethos was indeed taken up by the artists and art schools of the 90s, but they were inspired by the entrepreneurialism of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren and aspired to the rock star model of success. The promise, of coursem is very seductive. It is all or nothing. Now, with rising rents in the housing market and wages staying pretty much static for the majority of workers, it has become even harder to support yourself while trying to become established as an artist. The precarious lifestyle that you invariably take on leaves you both free and not free, eternally hoping for the promise of some well paid creative work that you might get eventually when you “make it.”

   

   Tracey Emin, Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made, 1996

   The Young British Artists (Damian Hirst, Tracey Emin et al) were just coming to prominence when I was in the second or third year of my undergraduate degree. These were the role models that were held up as examples. They were working class artists who were making a living in an elitist world, and they were becoming very rich. Their predominance meant that certain conceptions of what we were being trained for also dominated. I remember in particular being criticized for not being ambitious enough. I had never associated ambition with art before and, being young and a little naive, did not have a conception of what becoming a professional artist might mean.

   While I was at Chelsea in 1997, New Labour got into power. This heralded “Cool Britannia” and the seeming centrality of culture and the arts to public policy and economic growth. Although there was growth in the cultural sector, New Labour exaggerated how much the cultural industries actually contributed to economic growth that was probably more due to the deregulation of the financial markets. During this time student numbers in general—including those attending art colleges—increased massively. This explosion of people being trained in the arts meant that, although it was no longer an “elite” occupation in one sense, competition steadily grew.

   With the increase in student numbers and competition, there was also a general increase in the precarious lifestyles of cultural workers, particularly the vast numbers of artists working in other sectors, such as the service sector, in order to sustain their lives as artists. It can be argued that this precarity has become a model for the rest of the economy, and indeed we are starting to see this played out at the moment with the increase in internships, casual working conditions, and free labour across the wider economy.

   At the end of my time on the MA at Chelsea College of Art, there were several competitions we were encouraged to apply for, one of which was for a studio space for a year. As a sculpture student that used assemblages of found objects, sound and video installations, I probably had a good chance of being successful. However, the way in which I applied for this competition says a lot about my feelings towards the art world at that time. Having felt ambivalent about being at art college anyway, I applied for the studio space as if I were part of a collective. Looking back, I think this act came from a critical impulse in response to being made to compete with my friends and colleagues from the course. This in itself might have been a great exercise as many artists groups and collectives are often fictitious and some are made up of only one person. Artists have often used other identities to mask or play with their own. There was evidently some desire on my part to counter the highly competitive, market-driven celebrity culture that I was about to enter by being part of a collective group. It also came out of feelings of insecurity and uncertainty as to my own value as an artist, and I applied as if I were applying with two other members of the course who didn’t know that I had written the application in this way. They certainly hadn’t agreed to be part of a collective with me. The application obviously failed, and I have often regretted what I did as a foolish act of self sabotage. I was still a young woman angry both with myself and with the system, and I was not able to separate the questioning of the system from the questioning of myself. However, as a failed act of defiance, it deserves to be acknowledged and recognized in some way.

   The vague idealistic desire of being part of a collective movement of like-minded questioners was, at that time, quite at odds with the reality of being ejected from art school into a hierarchical and paranoid art world. Acceptance on the scene was predicated on being seen to be successful. Other artists were rivals and competitors over and above being friends. In the years following Chelsea, I have been looking for something that might provide clues on how to live within a system that I don’t agree with.

   The current climate has created a situation in which many of the things I was looking for are now happening. Numbers of artistic and activist collectives are being formed with an increased sense of solidarity. Fighting against something often creates solidarity, and students and artists are defending their interests whilst fighting the cuts. The sudden devaluing of culture that has happened following the change in government has inevitably led to anger on the part of the creative class. However, not only are these collectives being formed as a response to dwindling resources but also to counter exactly the celebrity-driven culture in the art world that we’ve seen over the last fifteen years. Alternative ways of being an artist in London—as opposed to the rock star model exemplified by the YBA’s—are appearing. Alongside the debates about how to survive within the current financial climate, students, artists, and activists are also looking at alternative models of artistic production. The state of precarity that many artists and cultural producers find themselves in is being critiqued in and of itself as much as these producers are looking for a new language or aesthetics. Models of self-organization are being explored in an attempt not just to go back to a pre-cuts world but to use the situation to critique the present mode of capitalism and to try to create something different. Even the word capitalism itself has had a resurgence in its usage, having been outside of any debate during the 90s.

   This current wave of resistance and protest has therefore created spaces in which these issues are being openly debated by a larger number of people. The fact that different kinds of public space and particularly cultural public spaces are being used in these ways is an important dimension to these developments.

   

   Claire Fontaine, Golden Parachute, 2011

   Now, with education being steadily more instrumentalized and the arts and humanities taking the brunt of the cuts, the resistance has taken a number of different guises. Marxism, anarchism, and the political economy of the creative industries are being discussed inside cultural institutions such as the British Film Institute, the Chisenhale Gallery, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Artists are using the language of radical politics in their work, art colleges are being occupied, and collectives are being formed. Creative methods of protest are being explored, with the use of Situationist tactics by activist groups such as the University for Strategic Optimism, UK Uncut, and Arts Against the Cuts. A general re-appraisal of radical politics seems to be taking place. However, several points of tension can be identified. As artists, for example, appropriate the language of Marxism, this raises questions about whether the political ideas will be aestheticized and emptied of meaning or signify some real shift. There seems to be a spectrum of how these ideas are being used, from more aesthetic work (arguably more easily appropriated by the market) to cultural spaces being used purely for political debate. For example the collective Claire Fontaine produced a show in reaction to the banking crisis that included a golden parachute and a neon piece that literally illuminated how much someone was paid to create it; yet their work exists in commercial gallery spaces. Turner Prize nominee Phil Collins’s film Marxism Today, about former teachers of political economy in the GDR, was the last thing shown in the gallery at the British Film Institute in London before it closed due to the cuts and was accompanied by a day-long symposium concerning the future of Marxism. Another major gallery in London, the ICA, programmed a “season of Dissent” that coincided with much of the radical student activity and included the Russian collective Chto Delat (What is to be done?). Some practices are obviously easier to marketise than others.

   

   Phil Collins’ film Marxism Today, 2010

   Another tension that the current situation raises is that of the avant-garde, which has received renewed attention following postmodernism. The concept of the avant-garde is an important one here. Originally meaning the vanguard of an army, it can be applied to small collectives opening up new cultural and intellectual terrain. There is tension between the idea of an avant-garde and the desire to create a mass movement. Within some of the smaller, more radical arts-based activist groups, I have detected some resistance to making links with local activist groups and disdain for the majority of protestors on the trade union demonstration earlier in the year, for example. This links to a more general disillusionment by younger activists regarding the power of mass demonstrations to engender change. There is a re-enactment here of an old set of tensions that have existed within both political movements and artistic discourse, raising questions of “elite” and “mass” culture and/or politics.

   

   Chto Delat, Activist Club, 2009

   It also raises questions about how social transformation actually takes place and what role the arts might have in relation to this. How might we evaluate this current conjunction between art and politics? Can art ever really move beyond the aesthetic and effect social, political, or economic change? As French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have argued, capitalism often subsumes and may even thrive on artistic critique. One way this can take place is through a moment of fashion. It could be said that it is currently fashionable for artistic practice to use radical political ideas and that at some point it will become unfashionable again. Fashion is a contested field. Whilst new juxtapositions of recycled or retro images and ideas can enliven, shock, and disrupt, they can also be packaged into kitsch: empty, ironic, and meaningless and ready for future consumption. Perhaps capitalism is just reconfiguring itself.

   Alternatively, moments such as this, when art comes closer to activism, could be seen as stemming from the blockage of art’s own political potential within the context of cultural capitalism. Both artistic and activist activity can be seen as essential for the health of a society and its potential to change. Suely Rolnik (cultural critic and psychoanalyst) suggests that collaborations between artists and activists become necessary at these times for effective critical intervention. These collaborations have the potential to go beyond the rift between micro and macro politics that characterises the relationship between artistic and political movements, a rift that is responsible for the past defeats of attempts at collective transformation. However, she also suggests that it is necessary to maintain the tensions and differences between the two so that both potentialities are kept active.

   Likewise, it seems important to maintain the dialectical relationship between the personal and the political without confusing the two as I did at art school. This is easier when surrounded by other people who share a similar perspective. Extreme individualisation can cause you to blame yourself if you don’t fit in with the current milieu. My recent experiences of collective working have shown me that different kinds of social relations are possible and that there is indeed strength in numbers.

   Whether this is a moment of a passing fashion or the clearance of a blockage, we need to ask what happens to these political ideas once they have passed through the cultural sphere. The economic climate does not look set to improve in the near future. This is just the first wave of cuts; there are more to come. Rather than draining meaning, the big hope is that a major social transformation will take place that builds from a groundswell. Perhaps this appearance of radical political ideas within the arts is a prelude to them being discussed in more mainstream arenas. Mainstream politics and mass media in the UK have certainly failed to take up ideas from the radical left that desperately need to be reassessed in the light of the financial crisis. Perhaps cultural spaces are the only public spaces left in which ideas from the “loony left” (a term coined by the UK right-wing press) can be debated with any seriousness. This may breathe new life into otherwise static or solidified ideologies, reinventing language on the left that is necessary to renew politics in a real and meaningful way. The important task is to attempt to create new worlds and not just new gestures.

   ---

   1. Boltanski, Luc, & Chiapello, Eve. The New Spirit of Capitalism, Verso, London, 2005.
   2. Rolnik, Suely. The Body’s Contagious Memory, 2007.
   ]]> http://dismagazine.com/discussion/22974/waving-or-drowning-art-and-protest-in-the-uk/feed/ 0 http://dismagazine.com/discussion/22772/behind-beneath-and-between-tracing-the-thong/ http://dismagazine.com/discussion/22772/behind-beneath-and-between-tracing-the-thong/#comments Tue, 20 Sep 2011 13:16:37 +0000 DIS http://dismagazine.com/?p=22772 [read more »]]]>

   I can still remember being confused by the thong when seeing it in stores. Once, in Victoria’s Secret, as a teen, I asked a clerk how one should wear an example of the strand- of-pearls thong.

   “You just, put it on,” she said.

   There was something too real about the way those pearls would have to expand the crevices about which I was conditioned to try to forget.

   The thong brings up anxiety. Like all studies of fashion, that of the thong is intrinsically connected to the history of humanity. But certain areas of study wish they weren’t wrapped up in the thong’s basic shape, it seems. Although it lies beneath the thinking behind so many historical moments, it is underrepresented academically. As goes its popularity, the thong has suffered peaks and valleys, but however argued-for it is, the small piece of fabric will always be argued over. The very form of the garment, which relies on oppositional tugging to gain its preferred shape, even seems to suggest this.

   The origin of underwear is a foggy topic, and even further disputed is the origin of the thong. In the Western mind, Eve’s first bite into the forbidden fruit constructed the fig leaf, which logically must have been somehow tied to the wearer. In most cultures, a type of loincloth originated before a more complicated brief or bikini pattern, but this is still a shockingly under-researched topic. Anthropologically speaking, the loincloth and all of its forms are synced with the apparent barbarism viewed by European voyagers in nearly every continent they colonized. Slaves and servants in Europe and in Euro-colonized countries were forced into wearing loincloths—while their masters dressed in many starched and ruffled layers—to display subservience, even though the loincloth was originally a garment of function in hot climates and of practical crafting in locales where the buttocks were no more taboo a display than the arms or legs.

   The Japanese thong-style fundoshi, for example, was originally the only style of underwear worn in Japan and later became the classic garment of powerful warriors—samurais and sumo wrestlers. It is still worn by average male citizens during traditional ceremonies, and while swimming, as outerwear. The fundoshi loincloth comes in a few forms, including a new female version, and is, according to the Tokyo Times for the past few years, making a comeback, being called “power underwear.”

   Professor Otto Steinmayer says the reason behind a lack of research in the area of Eastern undergarments is the Westerner’s lack of understanding of the loincloth, due to personal history. In his essay, “The Loincloth of Borneo,” he refers to European men’s dress as “arctic” and inherited from the Roman style of trousers and shirt. “The only thing in Europe which resembles [the loincloth] is underpants, a garment that has a history of scarcely a thousand years and whose dignity and consequent esthetic value has been nil.

   “Europeans have always considered the loincloth an immodest garment” because of what it leaves bare. Most cultures have at one point come up with a standardized shame concerning the nakedness of genitalia, but “it seems to be a peculiarly western trait to feel equal shame about the buttocks, probably from a fear of homosexuality, an anxiety which also seems to grow with civilization.”

   

   The thong has come to represent more than primitivizing a culture’s misunderstood dress. It is brought up in the conversation of objectification, too. A thong bathing suit, like the ones Coco Austin, star of E!’s Ice Loves Coco, famously wears in her “Thong Thursdays” Twitter updates, has become representative of air-headed hyper-sexualization and material concerns.

   The question of whether a feminist can wear a thong is, according to Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, “symbolic of young people’s relationship to feminism: meaning that the relationship is often personal, invisible, and uncomfortable.” In fact, Baumgardner and Richards call this question “The Number One Question about Feminism” in a similarly titled essay.

   

   Asia Argento

   The word “feminism” has undergone a transformation as interesting as the history of the undergarment. Its relationship to dress is undeniable, but the blurred lines between gender studies and fashion design sometimes make themselves clearer by drawing attention to the differing priorities on either side. Sex is fashion and fashion sex; gender is sex and sex gender. Still, fashion can try to ignore gender, and gender can discriminate against fashion. It’s okay for a feminist to wear a thong, but is it okay for a thong to be representative of feminism? Perhaps more importantly: Can a thong be representative of anti-feminism?

   Fashionably, the thong changes its mood every few years and represents something new. The thong is rebellious: It sticks out, hides again, becomes functional, emerges as decoration, and stretches itself thin.

   When I was eighteen, my first real boyfriend asked me if I wore thongs. No, I never had, I said nervously.

   “Good. A thong is like a railroad track for bacteria to move back and forth between cultural centers.”

   So, why do people wear thongs, besides tradition or rebellion? Maybe a more important question is why people wear underwear at all. But do we really need to start asking that again? Underwear is hardly functional. That a type of underwear is at any given time more stylish than another is never based on function. The most basic panties and bra do at least make sure nothing of a body is illegally displayed in case of clothing malfunction. But that we prefer boxers of briefs, low-cut versus high, etc., is based on whims of fashion. What we wear under our clothes, whether it is displayed while we are clothed or for the short period of time between when the clothes come off and the next step, becomes decorative if it is adhering to any trend—which it must, in order to have been made in the first place. Going without (a.k.a. “commando”) has come in and out of style as well, with stars like Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan flashing their genitalia while getting out of cars.

   A cheap thong looks to me like something that has washed onto a shore and dried out. It looks uncomfortable. But more expensive ones worn right are unforgettable, suggestive, and I would even say endearing. Conversations about thongs, in groups or women, range from the I-don’t-care-I-like-the-way-it-feels attitude to the I-have-to-wear-one-to-avoid-panty-lines complaint. But ever since its first rise to popularity in the twentieth century, the thong has been dragged through the mud. It is still considered uncouth (and is still discussed in many communities as an issue of legality) to wear thong bikinis at the beach. Thongs signify strip clubs, over-sexed teens and the lower class—Frederick’s of Hollywood stores and Hustler magazine online as compared to the more family-friendly Victoria’s Secret runway shows on network TV and the Playboy channel.

   The thong doesn’t need to fight for a better reputation, because it sells, and it is its hidden agenda that gives the style popularity. Even in junior sections of mall department stores, there are often as many thong options as non- (I am combining the categories of boy-cut and bikini but leaving out the now ubiquitous control-top panty). When one wears a thong, she or he can feel the secret throughout the day. The wearing of the thong can mean a multitude of deviant actions. It is strangely at once conservative and reactionary, for example, that so many feel the need to hide panty lines by creating the illusion of going underwear-less.

   + + +

   Even in the 1990s, a new wave of popularity and mass-acceptance was brought on by a linguistic adjustment in mainstream understanding. In 1992, MTV played Kyuss’s grungey “Thong Song,” which contained the lyrics, “My hair’s real long/no brains, all groin/no shoes, just thongs/I hate slow songs.” In 1999, this title was already dated enough to allow a new song with the same name to play on MTV and become a huge success. Kyuss’s understanding of the word was now laughable, while Sisqó’s was the agreed-upon definition. In his video, clearly, the focus is on a female’s ass. Comparing the two videos provides not only an illustration of the changing definition of the word “thong,” but of the changing expectations of music videos on MTV.

   Kyuss’s video is simplistic and dimly lit, with band members slowly fading in and out of view. A narrative is built into Sisqó’s “Thong Song,” starting with a film-like intro that includes a subtitled location shot, a dialogue between the protagonist and his on-screen daughter, a comedic 1990s-typical zoom to a distraught facial expression, and an expositional monologue before the onset of music. The dancers of the video have their own narrative, which involves getting out of tour buses, playing on the beach, and then dancing on a black-lit floor. The differences between 1992’s and 1999’s videos are higher production value, higher attention to an average viewer’s attention span (a dramatic structure, made up of a protasis, epitasis and catastrophe), and sexual stimulation.

   Sisqó’s and Dru Hill’s “Thong Song” was only regarded as a danceable summer joke, but its video was typical of not only the cheesy R&B seducers and the hair-metal womanizers of its time in terms of objectifying women. In fact, I remember hearing (and making) the complaint that for a song about thong underwear, the video was far too tame, with too many skinny dancers wearing boy-cut briefs. Censors must have pushed all of the actual thongs into the blurry background of the black-lit scene, and completely out of the beach takes.

   1999 was also the year Juvenile’s “Back That Azz Up” came out on CD, and the radio-friendly version, “Back That Thang Up” came out on MTV (and, in my staticky memory, became the most requested video on network TV’s experimental all-request channel, The Box). This video’s devoted anti-high-fi look accepted the task of depicting the lower class at a block party. This approach spurned a generation of sexually explicit rap content dealing with women wearing Walmart brand outfits or cheap exotic dancewear to perform for music videos. The extreme slow motion of the ass-centric shots made it undeniable that these women were wearing either nothing or a thong under their thin denim and khaki shorts, thereby making this video far more sexual in nature than Sisqó’s beach party.

   Three of the most notable after-effects of “Back That Thang Up” are Nelly’s 2003 remix “Tip Drill,” Ludacris’s 2007 single, “P-Poppin’,” and Sisqo’s 2000 follow-up to 1999’s “Thong Song.” In the video for this newer version of “Thong Song” (featuring Foxy Brown and exclusively created for the film Nutty Professor II: The Klumps), a notable change has occurred. Video girls in these shots parade in thongs and matching tops on an outdoor runway. The “Back That Thang Up” slow motion ass-take is in full effect here and the focus has changed from a glance at a group of partying girls to a long stare at each girl’s thong, one at a time. The video still has a narrative, but more attention is placed on texture: the clothing worn is beaded, scaled, and lacquered, shimmering slowly and dramatically for the viewer.

   “Tip Drill”—the chorus of which is “It must be that ass, cuz it ain’t your face”— uses a similar style of cinematography. It was highly censored but hardly played on air even still because of its controversial lyrics and video content, which takes the theme of voyeuristic intrusion one step further. “Tip Drill” speaks of and shows women wearing thongs and taking them off, whereas “Thong Song” only asks a person to show the thong itself. “P-Poppin’”—the chorus of which is “Get down, pussy, pussy-poppin’ on a handstand,”—became “Booty Poppin’” for MTV. The video, which tells the story of a p-poppin’ contest a the notorious Magic City strip club got limited air time for obvious reasons. The TV-friendly video is so blurred, it becomes an advertisement for the original version. The video was one of many markers that spoke of a move to internet-interest as opposed to television. “P-Poppin’” is not available on YouTube, either, so the amount of plays it has gotten is hard to tell. The video responses—search: booty poppin, twerk, drop it low, etc.—however, speak loudly about the amount of influence this and similar videos have had on a generation.

   Low-fi big productions speak of yet another stage of the thong’s existence in popular culture. The thong is a hidden object, squeezed between lobes. The realness of these videos could spare no sensitivity to subject—women here are stripping in a club, competing for a famous rapper’s attention at a pool party, or table dancing at a sweaty party. In the two newer videos I have mentioned, the women are wearing g-string thongs, clapping, topless much of the time, and bottomless for split seconds. Also, they are getting money thrown at them, and camera-light is shed on female faces infrequently. These videos were marginalized because they were so obviously celebratory of demeaning behavior, but also because their edits of reality were stark and uncomfortable.

   The thong, too, is marginalized for obvious reasons: it hides itself, becomes obscure (unable to fight the battle of visibility because of the very position that defines it), and therefore misunderstood (semi-illegal). It denotes sexual deviance while it suggests an understanding of realness. The thong is closer by centimeters to the areas of arousal, which means it is that much closer to the truth behind our obsession with underwear. It is at once decorative and invisible, like the selling of sex itself. It asks what sex would feel like without censorship, what pornography would look like without an underground industry, and how far one can be pulled in any one direction.

   

   

   

   

   ]]> http://dismagazine.com/discussion/22772/behind-beneath-and-between-tracing-the-thong/feed/ 0 http://dismagazine.com/discussion/21416/tools-for-collective-action-precarity-the-peoples-tribunal/ http://dismagazine.com/discussion/21416/tools-for-collective-action-precarity-the-peoples-tribunal/#comments Mon, 15 Aug 2011 14:16:47 +0000 by The Precarious Workers Brigade http://dismagazine.com/?p=21416 [read more »]]]>

   The following co-authored account introduces and reflects on the people’s tribunal as a format for examining systemic problems of precarity. Based on the example of Precarity: A Participatory People’s Tribunal, carried out by the Precarious Workers Brigade (PWB) at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, UK in March 2011, we make a special reference to this event in an attempt to troubleshoot any future iterations of such an action. This account is also an open invitation to adopt and adapt this tool from the PWB’s toolbox, to address the ethics of collective action and institutionalized precarity. People’s tribunals, like the one proposed here, can be applied in work-related situations where systemic injustice, normalized to the point of intractability, lies beyond the reach of existing labour and employment legislation and policy.

   

   Precarity is an adjective referring to a set of conditions, such as insecurity, instability and vulnerability, affecting both life and labour of an individual. The expression has its roots in the notion of ‘obtaining something by prayer’. The condition of precarity plays out via short-term contracts, no-contract work, bad pay, deprivation of rights and status, vulnerability to mobbing, competition and pressure, high rent, lack of accessible public services, etc. Precarity is not linked to a specific type of employment status, but manifests itself through an insecurity whereby one is at the mercy of others, always having to beg, network and compete in order to be able to pursue one’s labour and life. Precarity is the paradoxical state of being both overworked and insecure at once, regardless of being employed or not.

   The PWB is a UK-based group of precarious workers in culture and education organised around the issue of precarity. We call out in solidarity with all those struggling to make a living in the current climate of instability and enforced austerity.

   We come together not to defend what was, but to demand, create and reclaim:

   EQUAL PAY: no more free labour; guaranteed income for all
   FREE EDUCATION: all debts and future debts cancelled now
   DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS: cut unelected, unaccountable and unmandated leaders
   THE COMMONS: shared ownership of space, ideas and resources

   The PWB’s praxis springs from a shared commitment to developing research and actions that are practical, relevant and easily shared and applied. If putting an end to precarity is the social justice we seek, our political project involves developing tactics, strategies, formats, practices, dispositions, knowledges, etc. for making this happen. We inherited this hands-on, action-oriented approach from the Carrot Workers Collective (CW).

   Over the past five years, this self-organised, London-based initiative has been active around issues of free labour, particularly internships, in the cultural sector. However, several circumstances converged in the spring of 2010, prompting the CW to seek solidarity with other like-minded groups. The massive bank bailouts that followed the inconceivable mismanagement of the banking sector by the previous Labour governments led to unprecedented cuts to public spending being introduced by the recently elected coalition (Con-Dem) government. Research funding cuts were only the beginning of a wider project, which appears to lead to an effective privatization of culture, arts and higher education sectors in the UK. Beyond these changes to the situation in the UK, there was a desire within the CW to broaden the group’s remit beyond internships, by framing precarity as a systemic problem present in all aspects of cultural and educational work. The reliance on a willingness to work for free in the arts, for example, means those who can afford to work unpaid are at a distinct advantage in this sector. This leads not only to the exclusion of those who cannot afford to work for free, but also perpetuates a culture of poor working conditions where unpaid overtime is the norm, the minimum wage regulations are often ignored and competition among peers becomes even more fierce.

   A residency invitation from the ICA in autumn 2010 offered the CW an opportunity to open the group to other individuals and collectives. This lead to the CW putting out an open call for contributions, which brought together a diverse group of artists, activists and educators who began to map their personal experiences of precarity. The Precarious Workers’ Brigade was born. As a fledgling collective we had come together to try to deal with the many facets of precarity and at the same time investigate how, through working together as a group, we could counteract our own individualised precarious conditions. The discussions we had were heated and complex as we reflected on, for example, the romanticised view of privileged artists in search of a precarious existence and our own complicity in the reproduction of our own precarious condition. We began to gather testimonies of other people’s experiences, used forum theatre exercises and co-counselling techniques and discussed relevant film and video materials to further our understanding of the matter at hand.

   We wanted to share our research and experiences in a public arena and considered the format of a people’s tribunal as a method of continuing a collective conversation that would reflect our interest in recognising the characteristics and repercussions of precarity, as well as holding the conditions that allow it to continue to account. We hosted Precarity: The People’s Tribunal at the ICA on 21 March, 2011.

   

   What is a People’s Tribunal?

   A people’s tribunal is not a trial. People’s tribunals have been used in circumstances where legal norms do exist, but their breach is not being prosecuted by the courts, for example, if the identified injustices are not illegal per se, but could and should be outlawed or if injustices cannot be grasped by the law because the existing law is unable to identify structural causes that lead to an unjust situation. Our understanding is that precarity is not a perpetrator, person, nor a crime. It is a condition brought on by a set of interrelations that connect the deeply personal and the systemic, the political and the economic. As a result, in the condition of precarity there are regular breaches of legal conventions, such as failure to provide payment, to provide proper contracts, to comply with oral agreements and to provide safe working environments. These injustices are often not prosecuted for a whole host of reasons. While some of the aspects of precarity are covered by existing law and are therefore illegal, the vast majority is not. Therefore the condition of precarity seems to lend itself to the form of a people’s tribunal that can provide a public space where voices of the implicated can be witnessed, for example, by listening to the stories of precarious workers in their own words, gestures, sounds and images.

   

   The more we worked together to understand the complexity of precarity in tandem with the tribunal format, the more we recognised the value of the tribunal’s structure for organizing, presenting and activating the form and content of our research. Rather than taking on a role that is already scripted, the tribunal format allowed us to adapt and script our roles ourselves, as we went along. We received an overwhelming amount of personal testimonies leading to questions concerning how they could be used in the tribunal. We were keen not to abstract them into bullet points or sound bites, draining them of the real-world significance of the contributors’ lived experience. Rather than merge many testimonies together to create more generic/fictional ones, we chose a few pertinent accounts. The rest will provide the basis for an archive, which we continue to add to and/or use in future tribunals.

   Throughout our workshops and preparations, four themes emerged when organising the tribunal’s content. These themes formed the basis of four cases. The cases were scripted using some of the collected testimonies and presented by and to the participants in the tribunal. Evidence was brought to bear in the form of images, transcripts and objects. In some cases, the lack of evidence itself was acknowledged as significant by its very absence. Expert witnesses also testified in relation to each of the themes.
   The four cases presented at the tribunal were:

   The underpaid and the unpaid.

   This section was concerned with the casualisation of the labour force, whose contracts are shorter and less reliable and often only exist in the form of spoken agreements. It also looked at the commonly held misconception that people should work for nothing.

   Institutionalised precarity.

   In this section, we talked about institutionalised precarity in terms of the role of institutions in the production and self-replication of different aspects of precarious life, for example, poor or no pay; the exploitation of cultural workers’ willingness to work for free; the false promise of future opportunities; the expectation of long working hours; the lack of resources for production and artists’ fees; and directorships being led by marketing and branding strategies, de-prioritising engagement in the work their organisations supposedly support. We looked at both the situated and the systemic aspects of precarity that arise in our work and life experiences.

   Immigration.

   In this case, voices of absent contributors related experiences of precarious realities arising from constantly changing immigration policy. We looked at how visa and residency issues intersected with the other themes and compounded the difficulties faced by individuals.

   Affect.

   This section presented several cases that illustrated how precarity impacts on the body, mind and soul. Testimonials broke the silence on the physical and mental symptoms caused by long term casualisation and uncertainty of working conditions. As each person told their story, they asked: ‘why did I accept this situation?’

   After hearing the cases, tribunal participants organised into breakout sessions to discuss the evidence, share their own experiences and begin to collectively formulate responses, judgments, proposed remedies and demands. While this public manifestation of the people’s tribunal at the ICA has come to an end, the PWB are interested in the notion of a permanent people’s tribunal and we consider our research and actions on these issues to be ongoing. We would welcome others to develop and rework this tool so that we can build further solidarity with other precarious workers, continue to highlight and hold to account, the conditions of our ‘employment’. Based on what we have learnt from our experiences of developing the tribunal format in this context, we would like to offer some points for further consideration.

   

   Points to consider when developing a people’s tribunals on precarity:

   Retain the multitude of voices, whilst ensuring the evidence is treated seriously.
   The collective research process and the tribunal itself mapped multiple ‘truths’. Voices were amplified through anonymous testimony, which was heard by an audience of witnesses who became active participants in the tribunal, contributing their own experiences and reflecting on those presented. The tribunal format allowed us to keep the research alive and open to a collective process of re-reading, re-writing and re-imagining. Drawing on methods of forum theatre and the concept of law as being performed, this performative aspect allowed us to open up the evidence for further discussion. We were also concerned, however, with turning this ‘serious research’ into a spectacle, performed in a theatre space at the ICA. How can you keep the balance between the politics and poetics offered by the format of the people’s tribunal so that the evidence being presented cannot be easily ignored?

   Say the unsaid – go public with what we can’t usually talk about by speaking collectively.
   The whole issue of precarity relies on its normalisation and acceptance by all parties. We chose the people’s tribunal format precisely because it is useful in exploring such systemic issues and allows those who have been silenced to speak. The position of victim is one of being wronged, characterised by power structures weighted against an individual – it can be empowering to speak from this position, especially if the conditioning is not to acknowledge what is going on and to remain silent. It is also vital to implicate ourselves in institutional and other structural aspects of the issue. How can we avoid being debilitated by such an implication?

   We did not anticipate the strength of the emotional aspects of the tribunal – the anger, relief, anxiety, fear. It can be difficult to talk about such issues and even more difficult to listen. It is particularly empowering to speak and listen collectively.

   Create a space for the audience to become participants in the tribunal process.
   When preparing for the event, we thought about the tribunal’s audience as participants. The tribunal appeals to its public through its open format allowing a direct engagement in social justice. We moved back and forth between group discussions and breakout sessions in order to create a space for voices to be heard beyond those of the facilitators, the PWB. We were there to learn from each other, through the testimony and contributions of our peers, articulated through the performative format of the tribunal. Those who attended seemed to have broadly familiar and commensurate thinking and concerns. We were united in our conviction that precarity is unacceptable. There was a yearning to move beyond consciousness raising – to move beyond representing politics and to do politics more directly.

   Find ways of productively implicating yourselves and the staff of your host institution, in the tribunal process.
   How can we highlight working conditions without exacerbating them? The people’s tribunal is a sensitive format that can support the anonymity of precarious workers. We intended to productively implicate the ICA in our discussion around precarity and to do so in ways that might change policy or other managerial approaches and advance the struggle against this issue. Unfortunately, this was not something we were able to explore and the initial idea of working with the ICA staff over the course of several months was never realised. The ICA managed the residency process in such a way, that we could never interact with its staff until the day of the tribunal. For us, in the entire involvement with the institution, this was the biggest missed opportunity.

   Continue to open the process up, so that others can carry out their own people’s tribunal on precarity.
   We invite others to develop and improve the people’s tribunal as a tool. Use our experience outlined here to add to the research and host your own tribunal. We would like to learn how you are mapping, articulating and collectively and confidently rejecting situations affected by the conditions of precarity. Perhaps in this way we could raise awareness of these increasingly prevalent conditions and have a direct input in improving our own and our fellow workers’ circumstances.

   ---

   
   Precarious Workers Brigade have a policy of including information on the context in which their work appears:
   text written July 2011; by 6 people of PWB; published in Dis magazine; text online available for free; writer fee total $0; Dis magazine employed 1 interns in 2010; 0 interns collaborated in preparing this text for publication; they are paid at $0 per hour. This text is licensed under a Creative Commons non-commercial, share alike, accreditation license.

   

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