Florian Cramer

An Amediaite's Mediated Anti-Media
(review of
Florian Cramer's Anti-Media: Ephemera on Speculative Arts)
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 6-11, 2014

Important bks deserve lengthy reviews. The full review of this one is here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/367743-an-amediaite-s-mediated-anti-media

Ok, I've been friends w/ the author, Florian Cramer, since I rc'vd a friendly letter from him dated August 27, 1990. He was probably living in Berlin, Germany, at the time. We 1st met in person when he came to visit me in BalTimOre in January of 1993. On January 16th, 1993, we made our 1st collaboration together: a movie entitled "What's Your Fucking Problem You Bloody Gash" (you can witness that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXwhuBr3iD8 ). This pretended to address the issue of why there are so few neoist women.

Since then, I've spent time w/ him in Berlin in 1994, 1997, & 2004; in Hungary in 1997; & he's visited me in Pittsburgh in 2003 & 2012. In the fall of 1994, he was probably the 1st person to publish writings of mine online. In September, 1996, he was also responsible for having many or all of these same writings published on the "of(f) the w.w.web" CD-ROM. He currently hosts many of my websites: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/ .

I consider Florian to be one of the world's leading intellectuals. I consider him to be a great scholar. I consider him to be a prominent neoist. I consider him to be one of my best friends. He has a meticulously analytical mind. He's not easily taken in by hype. I think of him as someone who's highly interested in making infrastructures evident, perhaps as a form on 'enlightenment'. He strikes me as always searching for a hidden essence. "What is a hacker?" [..]:

"1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary." - from "the famous self-written Internet dictionary of computer hackers" (p 220)

In Anti-Media, in the article entitled "In Some Respects Reversed: Georg Philipp Harsdörffer's Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele" (2004) Florian writes: "Contemporary digital artists such as jodi work" [..] "making the formal systems underlying computer games legible." (p 197) "Seeming to go against the understanding of Spiel (game) as an artificial thing, Harsdörffer etymologizes the word as an onomatopoeic term for flowing water. In doing so, both the signified of the word 'game' as well as the word itself become a sort of game. Or, to use the terminology of Schottelius' linguistic theory, which was published at the same time as Harsdörffer's Gesprächspiele, the word becomes a 'stem word' in which the essence of the thing that it expresses is inscribed." (p 197)

In footnote 13 of the section entitled "Poetic Art of Wisdom: Quirinus Kuhlmann's '41st Kiss of Love'" the reader learns that "Together with Schottelius, Harsdörffer pursued his poetic study of language as part of the Fructiferous Society. Kuhlmann dedicated his '41st Kiss of Love' to a patron who is likewise a member of this literary society." (p 254)

The Fructiferous Society, Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft in the original German, "was a German literary society founded in 1617 in Weimar by German scholars and nobility. Its aim was to standardize vernacular German and promote it as both a scholarly and literary language, after the pattern of the Accademia della Crusca in Florence and similar groups already thriving in Italy, followed in later years also in France (1635) and Britain." [..] "It disbanded in 1668." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_Fruitbearing_Society ) Florian revived this society in 1997 or thereabouts & invited me to be one of its only members (despite my essentially not speaking German). I went on to make a movie entitled "Story of a Fructiferous Society". Interested readers can read my article about that movie in OTHERZINE issue 17 (Fall, 2009) here: http://www.othercinema.com/otherzine/archives/index.php?issueid=22&article_i... .

"A die in the middle of ornamental vines that outline the perimeter of an overturned triangle; above this, the line, 'Auff manche Art verkehrt' (In some respects reversed). This is how the 'Haubtregister' ('index') of the eighth volume of Georg Philipp Harsdörffer's Frauenzimmer Gesprächspielen ends." [..] "Does the emblem represent the Gesprächspiele itself, which appeared in eight volumes between 1641 and 1649, or does it represent the author, Harsdörffer, who as a member of the Fruitbearing Society was given the name of 'The Player'?" - p 193 Florian is "The Forked One" & I'm "The Ballooning One" - both of our names refer to specific plants.

Given my whole-minded endorsement of the fruits of Cramer's labor, I'm nonetheless uncertain about this bk's title: does it really address & define "anti-media"? Are the writings really "ephemera"? Is the subject really "speculative arts"? I reckon I have to write this review in order to answer these questions. Cramer's introductory paragraph holds great promise:

"While this book was in the making, an article in the online arts journal Triple Canopy almost destroyed it. "Speculative" turns out to be one of the most fashionable buzzwords in what authors Alix Rule and David Levine call "International Art English' ('IAE').' Rule and Levine analyze the lingo of 'the art world press release', particularly on the e-flux mailing list, and reconstruct how in the 1970s, French structuralist and German Frankfurt school jargon was imported into the canonical American arts journal October. From there, it mutated into today's globalized, pseudo-scholarly contemporary art English. Rule and Levine predict the 'implosion' of this 'decadent period of IAE' along with art biennials and the globalized 'curatorial' art discourse." - p 7

In my review notes I referred to this as an "hilarious beginning!" Now, after many mnths have elapsed since I started reading the bk, I'm not totally sure why I found it so "hilarious" - perhaps simply b/c Florian seems to be effacing himself from the get-go, perhaps b/c he's immediately acknowledging the pitfalls of language that has the appearance of intellectual substance but that may really be more of a lingo-smokescreen behind wch emptiness hides. University art students are taught to embellish their work w/ the appearance of heavy theory thru the use of jargon known only to elites - but does the mere use of the jargon inevitably signify a parallel degree of specialization in the work itself? Or might the jargon just be the Emperor's New Clothes intended to make anyone who points out the substantial nudity seem like an intellectual child?

Now, I have my very sizable collection of magazines in my personal library organized into 2 areas: read (& that means read as completely as whatever my knowledge of the languages involved enables me) & not-read (meaning not read at all or only partially read). I find that I only have 2 issues of October, #3 (Spring 1977) & #17 (Summer 1981), & that I haven't read either of them (or, perhaps, only an article here & there). Somehow, October (1976-the present) has never appealed to me in the way that, say, Art-Language: The Journal of Conceptual Art (1969-1978), Avalanche (1970-1976), General Idea's FILE (1972-1989), The Fox (1975-1976), High Performance (1978-1997), lightworks (1975-2000), semiotext(e) (1974-1984?-the present?), View (1978-1993), & VILE (1974-1983) did.

semiotext(e), at least, started introducing French philosophy to the US slightly before October came around but their style was so flagrantly radical queer that I was impressed by the sheer audacity of it. I've always imagined that their "Man/Boy Love" issue from Summer, 1980, & their "Polysexuality" issue from 1981 probably put a substantial damper on their academic distribution - no more cash-cow university bookstores. &, indeed, while I still see "Polysexuality" available from The MIT Press, the "Man/Boy Love" issue is nowhere to be found - perhaps this is b/c it was newsprint, perhaps not. October is also distributed by The MIT Press.

It's tempting to slanderously hypothesize that the reason why something like October endures is b/c it's such a dry academic journal that the likelihood of its ever making any significant political difference in the world, despite its possible Marxist orientation, is nil. In other words, my ongoing (&, perhaps, increasingly tedious) contention is that the more IAE people use, the more funding they're likely to get b/c the more obvious it'll be to funders that the blah-blah stays safely in la-la. Alas, that's an oversimplification. October, obviously, thrives b/c it's the most entrenched in academia & academia thrives when it's the least threatening to the status quo.

Moving on: Florian continues in his introduction to say that "Joseph Beuys, a highly problematic figure with his left-nationalist missionary aspirations, summed it up in his formula that everyone was an artist, and accepted — among others — cooks and nurses into his Düsseldorf academy class." (p 10)

This issue of "everyone['s being] an artist" seems to have run thru, at least peripherally, my entire life. At some point, I might've found the notion challenging &/or exciting &/or radical: What if everyone's creativity were encouraged? Wd we have a more playful, a more flexible society? Maybe - but, 'when it comes down to it', not everyone wants to be an artist, not everyone gets the stimulus from it that people that it comes more naturally to do. Furthermore, the more 'art' is promoted as something that everyone can 'do', the more creativity seems to become undervalued.

I remember working in a bkstore in BalTimOre: I was playing the music of Anthony Braxton, a musician of consummate skill. A customer came in & sd: "My grandson could play better than that!" I replied: "You must have a very talented grandson." This imbecile didn't know shit from shinola but she was sure her ignorant opinion was unassailable. I prefer a society where skill is recognized & appreciated.

If "everyone['s] an artist" is everyone also a murderer, a car mechanic, a cook? I find it easy enuf to believe that all of us have some latent potential along any of those lines - but that doesn't mean we shd delude ourselves into thinking we're the 'real thing'. By all means if you want to be an artist & everyone's discouraging you as lacking talent, do it anyway but, please, I hope that you don't perpetuate the notion that critical standards are absolutely disposable.

Florian, like myself, is a neoist. Neoists may be almost entirely 'white' males from 'western' backgrounds (wch is unfortunate) but that doesn't really mean we're all the same.

"A 1985 issue of SMILE — a zine that could be published by anyone, thus anticipating the shared identity of 'Anonymous' — contained an aphorism that is quoted elsewhere in this book:

"Anti-art is art because it has entered into a dialectical dialogue with art, re-exposing contradictions that art has tried to conceal. To think that anti-art raises everything to the level of art is quite wrong. Anti-art exists only within the boundaries of art. Outside these boundaries it exists not as anti-art but as madness, bottle-racks and urinals.

"A book called 'anti-media' can't help being about 'media' for the same reasons. The only difference is that 'media' lack boundaries where 'art' — in the sense of contemporary visual art rather than in the broadest sense — has to draw them out of its own systemic and economic necessity. In both anti-art and anti-media, a love/hate relationship is undeniably at work." - p 14

Some people call me an "artist", some probably call me an "anti-artist". I don't consider myself to be either - much like I don't consider myself to be a Christian or a Satanist. One advantage that I can see to the term "anti-media" is that I'm not likely to be called an "anti-mediaist" or an "anti-medium". How about Amediaite?: a person who tries to avoid the propaganda traps of mediated existence - akin to an Atheist.

"In their research on International Art English, Rule and Levine note that: 'Usage of the word speculative spiked unaccountably in 2009; 2011 saw a sudden rage for rupture; transversal now seems poised to have its best year ever.' It was too late to change the subtitle of this book as it had already been announced by the publisher." - p 15

Yes, in IAE there are fashionable words wch, as in clothing fashion, are meant to make the user seem up-to-date. It doesn't pay to not be on top of the latest art trend. But what about the people who make their own clothes, who coin their own neologisms? The fashionable people are just buying into a system that rewards them in the same way that going to an elite university & getting a degree from there does - but it doesn't make them creative people. The mere fact that Cramer is even willing to criticize the language of his own bk's title rather than to try to further milk a particular word's recent IAE popularity cd be construed to mean that he's abandoning a sinking ship to try to stay fashionable OR that he's maintaining his integrity. I believe the latter is the case.

"One ought to think that it's a waste of time to give 'interactive media' and 'interactive art' any more serious thought, that there's a broad consensus that these were false promises and sunken big budget ships of late 1980s and early 1990s institutional laboratory art founded on such wacky ideas as — in the case of the German ZKM — 'the Bauhaus of Second Modernism'. We should be only a couple of years away from a time where these monstrosities will be turned into pop culture and celebrated as period kitsch, with the installations of Jeffrey Shaw and company representing 1990s retro kitsch next to Star Trek props for the 1960s, flokati rugs for the 1970s and Commodore home computers for the 1980s." - p 20

I get the impression that the above critique is Euro- &/or Internet- centric. IE: that rather than addressing the concept of interactivity in a broader sense, Florian is reacting against specific instances of "'interactive media' and 'interactive art'" in his immediate environment. Herr Stiletto Studios, another neoist based in Berlin, (probably) coined the term "interpassivity" wch pokes fun at the underacknowledged limits of the not-very-active 'interactivity' that Florian critiques. IMO, if the "'interactive media' and 'interactive art'" doesn't live up to its promises that doesn't invalidate the term, it invalidates the execution in its name.

"While there is, in other words, no such thing as 'interactive media' or 'interactive technology' if one doesn't reduce the notion of interaction to machine feedback, interaction technology and interaction design can and do exist — that is, technology and media that enable and constrain particular human interactions. Language might be the first and most important technology to be named here, architecture is a close second: the possibilities opened up and constraints imposed upon human interaction and communication by language, the constraints and options of human interaction created by the architecture of buildings, cities and landscapes. Nowadays, this also includes information protocols and information architectures, such as the famous 1990s example of AOL chat rooms being limited to 12 participants and banning conversations on AOL. In other words, information technology is 'interactive' only to the degree that it defines platforms of interaction — making it, just like architecture, both powerful and limited." - p 21

Ah ha! That strikes me as a great clarification: "that is, technology and media that enable and constrain particular human interactions." Has there ever been a debate where the ways in wch the debaters use their vocabulary aren't subtly at odds w/ each other?

"While 'interactivity' remains the radioactive cadaver and zombie that never seems to die, its rhetoric has been largely replaced by that of 'openness', in notions such as Open Source, Open Content, Open Access, open technology and even open society. 'Openness' is the biggest red herring of the IT industry. Software like OpenVMS, HP OpenCall, Apple OpenFirmware, Novell Open DOS, SCO OpenServer, file formats like Microsoft Office Open XML and websites like OpenBC and OpenID demonstrate how the word 'open' is the standard newspeak for a product not being open. But ultimately, the ideology that equates technological openness with social openness is based on cybernetic thinking just as much as on the ideology of interactivity, since it flatly conflates society and technology." - p 22

What Florian doesn't mention here is the definition of the collective identity, Monty Cantsin (&, perhaps only by implication, its successors), as an Open Pop Star - a notion conceived of by mail artist David Zack in 1978 or thereabouts & then developed thru neoism. One might explain this omission by saying that a name (& its attendant 'naming' subtext(s)) is not a 'technology' but given his statement from p 21 that "Language might be the first and most important technology to be named here" that explanation probably doesn't fly. Given that Monty Cantsin is the foremost collective neoist identity, Anti-Media is salted & peppered w/ references to it:

"The name SMILE is a travesty of FILE, a paper published by Canadian artist group General Idea that originally imitated the graphic design of LIFE magazine. FILE in turn had been parodied by Anna Banana's mail art periodical VILE and Bradley Lastname's fanzine BILE in the early 1980s. SMILE mutated, among other things, into MILES, SLIME, LIMES, LISME, EMILS, C-NILE and iMmortal LIES. As an 'international magazine of multiple origins', it appeared in more than 100 known issues published by different editors in Europe, America and Australia, many of whom adopted the collective pseudonyms Karen Eliot and Monty Cantsin." - p 26… (más)