No
artist has produced a more pointed, or more powerful, response to
the events of 9/11 and the debacle of the “War on Terror” than Jon
Kessler. With image-machines that are at once deeply funny, deadly
serious, and wholly anarchistic, Kessler takes bites out of the spectacle
of the Bush regime-signal images of its authoritarian politics, misbegotten
wars, and clueless culture-chews them over, and spits them out again.
The effect is one of calculated rage against the current machine of
American Empire.
Kessler is well known for his homemade mechanisms that activate found
representations, usually drawn from mass culture, often with delirious
lighting and compulsive movement. Yet over the last five years-that
is, since 9/11-a shift has occurred in his work. He has introduced
video, mostly in the low-tech form of small surveillance cameras,
some of which relay the bizarre actions of automatons on nearby monitors.
He has expanded the scale of his mechanical tableaux, sometimes to
the point where they almost engulf the viewer in a noisy tangle of
gadgets, screens, cables, and wires. And he has responded, directly
and indirectly, to the image-world of the Bush era, reworking news
bites, military reports, tourist postcards, seductive ads, and franchised
toys into delirious little dramas that deconstruct some of the political
fixations and cultural fascinations of contemporary America. Imagine
The Light-Space Modulator of Moholy-Nagy redone with gizmos found
on Canal Street by an artist who (like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork
Orange) was forced to watch the awful events of the last five years
on television, and that might conjure up some of the effects of his
two recent installations, “Global Village Idiot” (2004) and “The Palace
at 4 A.M.” (2005-06).
Even when the image-machines of “Global Village Idiot” were related
thematically, they remained discrete physically. This is less the
case with “The Palace at 4 A.M.,” which absorbs some stations of “Global
Village Idiot” and develops others into a vast, disjunctive environment.
Two of the most provocative stations in these installations are One
Hour Photo and Heaven's Gate. In One Hour Photo, tacky postcards of
the World Trade Center revolve on a vertical conveyor belt, at the
bottom of which is placed a small video camera. As each card approaches
the camera and then trips over it, an image is produced on a monitor
of a wobbly zoom toward the Twin Towers. This perverse point of view,
in which we are led to identify with what is effectively a weapon,
first became familiar during Gulf War I, with the little cameras located
in our “smart bombs.” In One Hour Photo, Kessler conjures up the perspective
of both terrorists and victims on the doomed planes-a point of view
obscured by the repeated videos of the jets seen from the ground.
In effect, Kessler, who lives only a few blocks from Ground Zero,
offers up an imagining of this other trauma, an imagining that, as
a Freudian might say, cannot be worked through psychologically and
so must be repeated compulsively. In this way, he also captures an
essential aspect of spectacular events of this sort-how they are at
once traumatically real and utterly mediated.
Just as provocative is Heaven's Gate. The video in this station flies
through a model city into a model apartment, where it zooms in on
a computer screen; here we see the ass of a doll, then pass through
it, only to emerge, on the other side, into the space of a gallery-an
anal rebirth into the art world. As David Joselit has commented of
this piece, Kessler “imagines representation as a carnal act”: In
opposition to the pervasive myth of virtual information, we are asked
to consider the material, often corporeal, effects of data (Joselit
also notes that “Global Village Idiot” appeared in the midst of reports
of the Abu Ghraib torture). More broadly, we are led to reflect on
a general condition of obscenity, in contemporary news and entertainment
alike, in which representations, bodies, and machines often converge
violently.
Kessler works by blunt appropriation and perverse refunctioning, and
this goes for his titles, too. “Global Village Idiot” is a clever
contraction of “global village” and “village idiot.” The second term
requires no explanation, while the first is drawn from Marshall McLuhan,
who, in such texts as War and Peace in the Global Village (1968),
argued that the instantaneous reach of mass communications had, for
the first time in history, projected a planetary audience. The Kessler
phrase suggests that in the global village of today, one of endless
infotainment controlled by a handful of governments and corporations,
we are actively trained to be village idiots-cultural know-nothings
and political incompetents. This insight-that technological progress
and social regression can be complements, not opposites-is key to
the critical charge of his art, and it flies out in many directions
at once. For Kessler is the idiot here; so is the viewer; Bush is
as well (one is reminded of the bumper sticker “Somewhere in Texas
a Village Is Missing Its Idiot”); and bin Laden is not excused either
(in an interview, Kessler hilariously imagines Osama, holed up in
a cave somewhere, watching Nip/Tuck, a television drama about the
trials of cosmetic surgery). In other words, “global village idiocy”
is an equal-opportunity condition from which no one is immune.
The use of video, Kessler has remarked, “freed me to think of the
machine as events and the image created as the spectacle.” This formulation
points to the circularity of his image-mechanisms, but there are also
breaks within them. For even as his machines stage events for his
cameras, the setups are rough, and the viewer not only watches the
low-tech images but also sees their madcap production, which is sometimes
so close to destruction that the two cannot be easily separated. The
automatic aspect of the image-mechanisms is thus far from perfect
or stable: Like little Frankenstein's monsters, they almost threaten
to turn, if not on their maker, then on their viewer. And this viewer
is also far from whole or secure: One not only sees but also is sometimes
seen, and no two viewers witness precisely the same thing. Machine
and image try “to complete each other, which is impossible,” Kessler
comments, and so “a puncture” is produced between the real and its
representation-a puncture that allows us to see through these setups
and, in principle, to see through others in the world. Through his
own little dysfunctional spectacles, then, Kessler suggests that the
great spectacle of American power is also in trouble, that its wizards
cannot maintain its theater of illusions forever, that wondrous new
technologies are always haunted by awful new disasters, and so on.
And in this way, he points to another crucial contradiction of the
American Empire today: Even as its power goes unchecked by its allies,
let alone by its enemies, its image, especially in the Middle East,
continues to take a beating.
In “The Palace at 4 A.M.,” Kessler pushes these concerns to a new
level. One enters this infernal world through a passage that is later
revealed to be a giant beaver-shot. (“I do want viewers to be reborn
when they enter my show,” Kessler says, “but not in a clean state.”)
One then encounters a big blowup of the trashed residence of Saddam
Hussein; the palace in question seems to be his. Yet one also sees
a huge image of Bush with the word “war” scrawled in blood red, so
the palace might be the White House as well. In short, the palace
seems to be a psychological bunker that they share-and that, too often,
they have made the rest of us share as well. At first glance, this
Gesamtkunstwerk of media overload seems to be a carnivalesque world,
turned upside down and inside out, but it soon becomes clear that
this is actually how much of our world is. Finally, then, the palace
in question might be your own home, too, say in the middle of the
night when the “War on Terror” troubles your sleep. Indeed, one experiences
an oscillation between engulfment and recoil in “The Palace at 4 A.M.”
that is a little like a nightmare.
With these installations, Kessler recalls various predecessors: Robert
Rauschenberg and his rambunctious combinations of media appropriations,
Claes Oldenburg and his regressive theater of homemade objects, Jean
Tinguely and his auto-destructive contraptions, and so on. Closer
to the present, one might also think of Mike Kelley and his inspired
reenactments of the weird things that asocial men concoct in their
basements and backyards. Other associations come to mind as well-media
theorists like Paul Virilio, filmmakers like David Cronenberg (“The
Palace at 4 A.M.” could be titled “Videodrome”), and fiction writers
like Thomas Pynchon and Philip K. Dick. However, “The Palace at 4
A.M.” also alludes specifically to Alberto Giacometti and his Surrealist
game boards, cages, and the like (Kessler borrows his title from one
such work). The general connection to Surrealism seems clear enough:
Kessler updates its strategy of pointed juxtapositions of found images
and objects, which often result here, as in the best of Surrealism,
in a “convulsive beauty” in which desire and death are bound up with
each other. The connection to Giacometti is more precise. In his own
Palace at 4 A.M., with its little figures in a skeletal house that
is also a nasty cage, Giacometti conjures up an obscure drama of Oedipal
subject formation. In his “Palace,” Kessler reflects on how we are
formed as subjects today, how we are inscribed in new regimes of global
entertainment and imperial politics.
In this regard, an element of paranoia-of critical paranoia-runs throughout
the work, as it runs throughout Surrealism, McLuhan, Virilio, Cronenberg,
Pynchon, and Dick. Dick once defined the paranoiac as the person with
all the facts, while Freud viewed the paranoiac as a subject desperate
to connect “all the facts,” often through complex conspiracy theories,
precisely because they appear so disconnected in the first place;
for this subject, the very survival of the world seems to depend on
the coherence that he or she can project on it by sheer force of interpretative
will. In a further study, the Freud associate Victor Tausk focused
on paranoiacs whose conspiracy theories took the form of control by
“influencing machines.” Clearly, Kessler plays with the tension between
connection and disconnection in the world, and he, too, constructs
“influencing machines” to do so (that could be another rubric for
his installations). At the same time, he refuses to be at their mercy;
indeed, his machines are models of how to jam, however momentarily,
the image-flow of the great machines of power.
I want to conclude with one more association that, to my mind, trumps
all the others. Nearly one hundred years ago, in the midst of World
War I, the Dadaists in Zurich developed a strategy of mimetic exacerbation:
In their Cabaret Voltaire, they took the corrupt words and images
of the powers then at war and played them back as a caustic form of
nonsense. “What we call dada,” the great Zurich ringleader Hugo Ball
wrote in 1916, “is a farce of nothingness in which all higher questions
are involved; a gladiator's gesture, a play with shabby leftovers,
the death warrant of posturing morality and abundance.” In the midst
of another war, Kessler produces a Cabaret Voltaire for our own time,
its pandemonium updated to suit present conditions; and as Ball took
on the role of the “magical bishop,” so Kessler assumes the guise
of the “global village idiot”-a shaman who seeks, perhaps impossibly,
to exorcise the pandemonium of the present, pandemonium as in “abode
of all demons, place of lawless violence or uproar, utter confusion.”