On HOW ARE WE
June 25, 2020
Birdsong and sirens, mask-muffled breathing, whispers to children, dogs barking, dogs sleeping, running water, thoughts racing, the rustling of leaves, silence, a stillness permeating everything. How are we? Close your eyes and listen.
Los Angeles does not readily reveal itself to strangers; it sprawls, eludes comprehension. The public life of Los Angeles is modest. For a city so prominent in the popular imagination, it is a place of surprising interiority. Everything happens in somebody’s backyard, garage, living room.
When social-distancing and “safer at home” measures were imposed in Los Angeles, and so much of daily life moved online, the barriers of traffic and distance dissolved, making possible a new kind of connection, with a newfound sense of quiet urgency.
Suddenly, in a world that had been defined by accelerating, innovating, disrupting, and finding ever-faster ways to do just about anything, we slowed down; the kind of slowing down that distorts time because there is no known end. We are confronted with repetition, life in a loop, nothing to be done, Samuel Beckett territory. We are compelled to turn inward.
HOW ARE WE is a collection of juxtaposed interiorities, a performance of an artistic community that might not be legible to the outside observer under normal circumstances. It is both a vivid portrait of life in Los Angeles during quarantine and a snapshot of its collective artistic stance. Each individual work has a distinct tone, voice and perspective; the order, pacing and rhythm of the video is a choreography of moods, attitudes, spaces and experiences.
Here. Meet some people. Maybe they’re your people but you don’t know it yet. Welcome into their homes, thoughts, lives, madness, humor, regret, loneliness, frustration, joy, lassitude, impatience, love. This intimacy, this vulnerability? Here’s what happens when we stop:
The now-uncanny experience of public solitude. Heyward Bracey sitting silently on a river bank, a handful of paper scraps (butterflies?) being taken up by the wind; Jay Carlon lobbing tennis balls at us as sirens blare in the background; Emily Mast & Yehuda Duenyas’ solitary stunt woman running on abandoned streets among sirens, tumbling down the steps at the city courthouse; Stacy Dawson Stearns sprawled on stone steps, neither descending or ascending, apologizing to an unknown future listener, “Such a society disrupted.”
Surreal Humor. Darrian O’Reilly in a bathing suit performing a “magic trick” with craft paper, spoon and giddy acceptance speech, a kind of hilarious terror; Shannon Hafez’ light-hearted duet with her dog in the backyard; Dorothy Dubrule dancing in her backyard with digitally-created multiple selves and voices, are we becoming un-civilized?
Liminality. Jessica Emmanuel and Barnett Cohen, each engaging with embodiment in profoundly different ways, both of them superimposed on verdant foliage; Mireya Lucio, too, at once in her office and among effusive greenery against a backdrop of clear blue sky.
Intimacy, stillness and domesticity. Jennie MaryTai Liu’s elliptical view from the bedside (legs under a comforter? Mother and child?); Luke Johnson’s Sunday morning in Silverlake, an inventory of objects and memories; Hana van der Kolk’s dog, sleeping and dreaming; Constance Hockaday & Faye Driscoll’s conversation told by gazing; David Adrian Freeland Jr., a virtuosic dancer, struggling against the physical and emotional constraints of small space.
Everything is always awesome in Los Angeles. Everyone is always killing it. Perhaps that is why some artists here, even before the pandemic, embraced vulnerability as a resistance to the relentless narrative of American positivity. The pandemic revealed once and for all the fissures in the American Dream. HOW ARE WE captures the moment when the illusion gave way to a new, if uncertain, sense of clarity.
There is a naiveté at the beginning of any new moment, any tentative venturing into the unknown, that gives rise to courage. We are not yet proficient in the new ways: we experiment, we stumble, we try again. This is the moment of the most possible, where we have not yet allowed striving for perfection or success to divert our gaze from the essential thing that art does: create new worlds.
In the few weeks since the videos in HOW ARE WE were created the American landscape has changed dramatically. Uncertainty has given rise to action; people are in the streets demanding change. Acceleration has returned; the stillness and isolation of mid-May already seem like a long time ago.
Always intended to serve as a time capsule, HOW ARE WE now stands as evidence of an inflection point, the moment just before everything changed once again.
Art, Collaboration, and Blockchain Technology
June 26, 2020
In thinking about writing for the collaborative project HOW ARE WE by Emily Mast and Yehuda Duenyas, I asked those around me—virtually—what they know about blockchain technology. Most understood that it is connected to cryptocurrency, namely Bitcoin, but no one knew its purpose or how it functions. To the general public, blockchain—the underlying distributed ledger technology that records and powers transactions—was just another complicated and obscure new technology.
But that was before the COVID-19 pandemic, daily protests, and extended periods of social unrest. Now, after months of global upheaval and uncertainty, we are waking up to the results of years of ignorance and complacency in the face of structural inequalities. The current movement for Black Lives demands transparency in the operation of institutional structures that shape our lives and safety. Blockchain technology proposes to offer that transparency, revolutionizing transactions ranging from banking to voting by providing an open-source ledger that cannot be altered, only amended. These records cannot be hidden from the public as long as they know how to access the blockchain.
Now does not feel like the right time for a deep dive into tech news – aside from understanding how social media platforms are the lens through which we view and perform our current isolated existences – but if Blockchain is a possible remedy for structural inequality, then it should not be allowed to develop in a vacuum.
This technology has the potential to level the playing field for artists working in the art world’s broken system, where handshake deals are common and breached contracts are part of an artist’s professional education. Mast and Duenyas see an opportunity to test the blockchain and its ability to ensure ethical operations because it is designed to monitor and execute digital agreements in a way that automatically holds all parties accountable. Working with blockchain engineers to tokenize the project, the artists challenged the general understanding of blockchain as a tool for amassing capital. With this project, the artists are utilizing the new technology to disperse ownership and hold themselves responsible to others. The contract embedded in the project of HOW ARE WE offers a model for equitable partnerships among artists and requires technology developers to work with artists in a social application of the technology.
Collaboration among artists is historically a tricky proposition. For centuries, in traditional disciplines like painting and sculpture, artist’s studios have included apprentices working alongside the master artist without recognition. It is now accepted in the contemporary field that uncredited fabricators, consultants, and assistants may be involved in the process and the concept, but the rights of authorship belong to the hiring artist. In these cases, the companies or individuals were paid for their labor during the process and have no rights to the artwork.
This becomes more complicated in collective works like HOW ARE WE where Mast and Duenyas invited fourteen artists and duos to contribute a single original performance to an anthology that would include their own work. The artists of HOW ARE WE have all agreed to share the commission fee and collectively own the compilation. Currently, in the contemporary art world, there are few mechanisms for control of the future of the work and any further income after this initial payment. Mast and Duenyas seek to remedy this by turning to blockchain technology as a transparent method for managing the future of the work.
In addition to ensuring that all of the collaborators can share in any future proceeds from the work, the blockchain converts the time-based work into a digital record and verifies the ownership of that work in a fully transparent digital ledger. The authenticity of a nonphysical artwork is a common question and can be remedied by the blockchain’s decentralized network and systems of corroboration. It also challenges potential venues and buyers to engage with the technology as custodians of the work. This will require some understanding of the blockchain and perhaps even consultation with an engineer to maintain the work and its distribution. This collaboration between art and technology could help shift the conversation on blockchain to fair practices and away from the maintenance of wealth. Instead of continuing to prop up the structures of a broken world, blockchain engineers and critical thinkers, like artists, could work together to create more projects that apply this seminal technology to social action as in HOW ARE WE.
HOW MUCH ARE WE?
June 29th, 2020
The Post Performance Future questions the impact and legacy of "performance" from its origins to its dematerialization in the society of the spectacle. Based on a poststructuralist and post-medium approach, this research was conceptualized in 2012. Mixing theory and practice, it gave rise to a first colloquium in 2012, followed by an exhibition LA EXISTANCIAL, at LACE in January 2013. My relationship with the Los Angeles art scene was consolidated through partnerships with UCLA (Andrea Fraser, Brennan Gerard, Ryan Kelly) and of course Emily Mast, who participated in all these events including C'BARET What Not /Speak Easy at LAXART in 2019.
The question of the dematerialization of performance is linked to a consideration of the objects produced by this practice, but also to that of the mythical "here and now", and the use of the term “performance” by the world of work. The HOW questions the mode of production.
In addition to the two usual etymological sources of performance: theatricality (stage, set, props) and language (in its consideration of action by analytical philosophy/Austin and psychoanalysis/Lacan), is added that of an operal form (operativity, perfournir/perfurniture), often neglected in favor of a notion of an ephemeral, temporal, invisible art.
Little by little, this notion of plasticity has slipped from the field of art to that of work, as the philosopher Catherine Mallabou has shown. Operativity, which comes under the open form, is diverted to the benefit of performance at work, a sign of efficiency for profitability. At the same time, the notion of contract and score come together, like the two sides of a certificate of authenticity. The speech act joins the notarial deed.
The question of the symbolic part of the commercial exchange re-enacts that of the artistic act. The latter has become volatile since 1971, with Richard Nixon‘s decision to de-link the dollar from the gold standard, making it a free-floating fiat currency. As a result, paper money no longer has its gold equivalent. This comes at the exact moment of the emergence of the term "performance" in visual art, and the semantic shift is worth noting.
If we compare the evolution of the modalities of performative practices in art and the political and economic context, we note that the end of the 1980s, as marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), is contemporaneous to the appearance of the first crypto-currencies. Between 1989 and 1998, Digi-cash, an early form of electronic money, gave way to B-money, a conceptual precursor to Bitcoin.
Corollary to the dematerialization of money at this time, the late 1990s saw renewed interest in performance by the art world. The first experiments in re-interpretation that emerged at the end of the 1990s questioned the notion of the author, left free by the first experiments with Happenings and Events, which were intended to be participatory but were only legitimate because of the artist's operation.
As volatility and fluidity migrated from art practice to the exploitative notion of “flexibility” at work, online performative forms responded with invisibility and frivolity. The mythical here and now of the Happening has given way to a now that is no longer here, and which can be replayed, dematerialized and perhaps disembodied.
In 1998, the exhibition NE PAS JOUER AVEC LES CHOSES MORTES, at the Villa Arson, questioned the status of objects produced by performance: relics, waste, fetishes, artifacts.
Mercantile fetishization has become the commodification of beings, and the division of labor has seen micro-tasking disincorporate work. Thus EXFORMATION - a term that first appeared in literature in 1998 referring to that part of information which is not given, not visible - is gradually drifting into the invisibility of the "online" worker, who is now just a finger, or even a phalanx, whose pulp is worn out on keyboards all over the world. The impossibility of "becoming one body" corresponds to the impossibility of being able to claim a social class. The Lumpenproletariat [exploited working class] no longer has a face, only nameless fingerprints.
The deviation of the notion of author, from the death of the author enunciated by Roland Barthes for Aspen in 1967, and which is in the line of Joyce, that is, the end of ONE author in favor of the reincarnation of the VOICES of the readers, is reduced to a right of reproduction, of copying, material. The immateriality of copyright, as Beaumarchais, for example, imagined it, is inalienable and non-transferable; it is not linked to the possession of the object but to its conception..
It is interesting to question this today, at a time when COVID has made us all invisible, and when much of what we do is already invisible.
The question of value and added-value in art is then, through a collaborative project such as HOW ARE WE, shifted away from the mere value of the commercial object (the video work) to be seen and sold, or its production, but towards a shared consideration and valorization of the entire work, ultimately restoring to it a value that is not ephemeral, but expansive. The fluctuation in value is no longer solely that of the art market but of the group’s attention and care, all bound by a contract that is, indeed, intelligent.
A Conversation with Mark Beylin and Rob Solomon
June 22, 2020
What drew you to this project?
ROB: Digital art forms have exploded in recent decades. Technology enables today’s artists to mix otherworldly music, draw up complex illustrations, and produce impossibly augmented films. Someone with a smartphone and wi-fi can make something incredible and share it with the world in seconds.
While we’ve dramatically advanced the means by which art is created and shared, we’ve yet to adequately advance the means by which legitimacy is proven and artists can own, and be compensated for, their work.
MARK: As for me, I studied classical ballet when I was younger, so I’ve always felt a close connection to the arts and artists. I’m excited about the HOW ARE WE project because it pushes the boundaries of the digital art world by embedding digital media on the blockchain, and using tokens to distribute royalties in an automated fashion. This is accomplished by creating a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) which embeds a unique signature of the video in its metadata….
[ROB INTERJECTS] At its core, digital artwork is code. If you ever want to see it for yourself, just right click on a video or image file and open it with your text editor application.
[MARK CONTINUES] …. thereby memorializing the piece on the Ethereum blockchain, allowing its owner to easily sell or transfer the ownership rights to the piece to anyone they please.
Can you explain that a bit?
ROB: To put that in simpler terms, we’re taking a fingerprint of the project and attaching that to a single blockchain token that can’t be replicated. In its original form, the video will always produce the same fingerprint, and it will always be possible to see that the token was the first token ever to be linked to that fingerprint. It will then be possible for individuals or groups to irrefutably prove that they own that token and, therefore, the artwork.
And how do the artists participate in that?
MARK: At the moment when the piece is launched on chain, so are a series of artist tokens (called HOW tokens) which are distributed to the project’s contributors as compensation for their work. HOW tokens represent a portion of royalties which the piece might earn throughout its lifetime.
ROB: Notably, the artists and collaborators behind the HOW ARE WE project will share 100% of the sale price the first time the piece is sold. Even more notably, every time the piece is sold again in the future, the creators will receive another 10% of the new sale price. The creators can also receive donations forever, regardless of who happens to own the piece (via the NFT).
How does that work, practically speaking?
ROB: For example, imagine Alice owns 5,000 HOW tokens (5% of all tokens) and the piece is sold for $1,000,000. Alice receives $50,000. If the new owner sells HOW ARE WE to a new buyer a few years later for $2,000,000, $200,000 is distributed back to the creators, of which Alice receives $10,000. If fans of the artwork donate $50,000 before it’s sold the first time, or after it’s been sold to its fourth owner, Alice will still receive her share of $2,500.
MARK: This is also exciting – especially in the context of this piece that was made in response to a very specific moment in time, the COVID-19 crisis — because it creates an immutable time capsule that’s sealed onto the Ethereum blockchain, one which can be continuously dug up by anyone with an Ethereum address, but cannot be changed by anyone.
And how is this relevant to the art world?
ROB: While cultural institutions have been slow to adapt to the changing landscape of the digital art world, this project forces them to come to terms with the reality that the digital art world is growing in scale and importance, and that technology like blockchain might make them irrelevant, or at least diminish their role as intermediaries between artist and collector, or artist and audience.
MARK: And by forcing any future donors, licensors, or owners of the piece to interact with HOW ARE WE directly on the blockchain, wielding addresses and sending tokens, a semblance of difficulty is created: akin to wielding a spade to physically dig up a time capsule that’s been buried deep in the ground.
And what might this mean to artists?
Although the project is a collaboration among over 15 artists combining pieces of themselves in video form into a larger work, the distribution of HOW tokens makes it easy for them to be compensated fairly, even when the value of the work remains unknown. This creates a series of invisible and unbreakable cords which tie the artists back to the parts of themselves that they put into this piece.