‘Q: Weren’t ideas sufficient to sustain themselves? Was their embodiment in fetishes a necessary extension? When everything is digital why do I still drag this mime/corpse around?’
‘A: If you Google image search “why do I drag this corpse around", it pulls up some pretty harrowing images (obviously), but also loads of Grand Theft Auto screenshots, like this baller! ’
Culte Cargo
Melody Nelson is dead. She is killed when her commercial flight crashes in the Pacific Ocean, a Nabokovian nymphet drowned in the wreck of a plane. Her Humbert Humbert1 mourns her in the tragic finale of Serge Gainsbourg’s 1971 concept album Histoire de Melody Nelson. The album creates the myth of a relationship between an older man and a girl: its genesis in an automobile accident through to her premature death. In ‘Cargo Culte’ he charts his grief, he ruminates – perhaps she is the victim of foul play? ‘Je sais moi des sorciers qui invoquent les jets dans la jungle de Nouvelle-Guinée2’. The narrator’s fantasy comes to ruin in paradise, he yearns for her broken body and he yearns for something to aid his survival. Melody, the object of his paedophile desires, is wrecked on some distant archipelago.
When anthropologists first encountered what they called ‘cargo cults’ in the late 19th century, they were confronted with socioreligious practices formed in response to the introduction of European colonial projects to native Melanesian culture. The routine arrival of cargo destined for British and French colonial authorities sparked movements such as the Vailala Madness of Papua New Guinea and Fiji’s Tuka. Communities developed spiritual practices that connected local custom to non-native western colonial practice and what natives saw as a defining characteristic – western-manufactured goods, which they in turn called ‘cargo’. In the wake of WWII and the American war in the Pacific, these practices took on a distinctly militaristic flavor with cults such as the Prince Philip, John Frum and Tom Navy movements of Tanna Island in Vanuatu. The construction of simulations such as fake airports, grass airplanes, mock barracks and offices became tropes attracting ethnographers from around the globe.
‘On April II, 1947,a group of natives invaded a European store at White Sands, leapt over the counter, and pulled the tickets off the goods. The instigator was Iokaeye, of the village of Latabü. He said he had received orders from a spirit and passed them on to other natives. This spirit, Isac, had the voice of a man; he was the son of John Frum, “our master.” He spoke only to Iokaeye on Thursdays, towards evening, before sunset, in a secret place in the bush where the latter met him. In the first conversation he said he did not want the colours red, blue and yellow; red was the sign of blood, blue of sickness, and yellow of death. The women should no longer dye their grass skirts with these colours, the only two permitted were white and black.’3
The term ‘cargo cult’ is problematic due to analytical and ethical inadequacy but Otto Ton claims ‘the study of cargo cults provides a vantage point for a culture-critical approach to Western society, as it challenges the sharp distinction between religious and economic values that makes it difficult to understand contemporary moral paradoxes’4 As the doors are locked in Old Europe, and a debauched Young America5 prepares to stage a federal episode of The Apprentice, challenging the values of that Western society seems pertinent – if not urgent. As I browse for a second holiday, high quality mediated signs shift and contort on my screen. An economy fuelled by desire and lack keeps moving the signs and I think I am getting sick.
‘It's interesting to think about 'cargo' not as a physical supply, or trinkets, but as an idea or possibility of something and how the perceived promise of something holds more power than the thing itself.’
6
Agent Orange
In 1939 Barbara Hepworth published a series of photocollages in an edition of the Architectural Review that reimagined her sculptural works as scaled-up versions dressing well-known modernist houses and gardens. Hepworth was adept at experimenting with photography, producing a range of experimental works, employing a variety of photographic techniques. Crucially, she recognized ‘the importance of photography in shaping the public reception of her work and her reputation as an artist. 7’ She networked with photographers, filmmakers and publishers and gave precise instructions on the conditions of her works dissemination. These conditions introduced a carefully constructed illusion that both artist and practice would enter. Her 1939 photocollages shed daylight on this illusion and on the nature of Modernity’s symbolic and economic value.
The collages claim lives of their own – a kind of resistance – a vitality that haunts the paintings of Road Runner enthusiast Wile E. Coyote. As in Andy Holden’s 2013 Laws of Gravity in a Cartoon Landscape the Road Runner can enter Wile’s painting of a tunnel but the physical laws of a cartoon universe prohibit Wile from doing so. Although the author of the work, he cannot enter the illusion of his paintings, a point continually exploited by the Road Runner and one that Wile is incapable of grasping. This incapacity drives his almost rhythmic physical humiliation episode after episode ad nauseam. Whilst Hepworth’s collages are not subject to the laws of a cartoon universe there is a transactional comic effect as the collage inflates the economic value of the sculpture whilst inversely deflating its symbolic value.
Are the collages guilty of cynicism? Are they a compromise to the institutions of the time –functionary procedures? Or are they an odd sparkling in the margins of her practice? They sit within the oeuvre of a woman who achieved international prominence at a time when women in the European Avant-garde were rare as hen’s teeth. Her art is exemplary, canonical and she is hailed as a great Modernist. As I scroll through a list that reads ‘Inspired By Your Browsing History’ I am moved to ask – what does this mean? Her sculptures speak to a presence of being but her collages could be read as the symptoms of a collective anxiety. The coyote knows his paintings are just paintings but when he sees the object of his desire run through a tunnel he cannot resist, he follows. Mark Twain described the coyote as “a living breathing allegory of Want”. 8 The coyote’s unquenchable desire – his sickness –propels him to invent incrementally more ludicrous schemes in pursuit of success. When he forgets he is entering a painting and not a tunnel, he has been lured by an illusion of his making. This is his sickness. Today he selects layer, scrolls to transform, scrolls to scale-up and flattens layers but he still yearns for meat he cannot taste.
2
‘I particularly like these images and the way they're photographed - like they're in a vacuum.’
Horsefeathers/+Add to Cart
We continue to make art at the edges and centre of a material culture. Negotiating what it means to produce in an age marked by juxtapositions of lack with vertiginous excess, we are still making, moving things around, and selling. Art circulates in myriad ways; it swells with meaning and absurdity, oscillating between free range, more road and calamity. Jan Verwoert has spoken of seduction value and metabolism in contemporary art practice9. In the context of a metabolizing economy and zombie culture, Hepworth’s photocollages unwittingly ‘go zombie’. Verwoert claims the function of art is not to redeem, he urges practitioners to ‘re-enter an autonomous metabolism’ eschewing non-metabolizing zombiedom in favour of sensual action, activities that glue community, that bypass the predictable hegemony of Modern myths and the socio-economic channels that sustain them. The problem of fighting zombies is echoed in Marc James Leger’s writing on a neoliberal undead citing George Romero’s 1978 film Dawn of the Dead. Leger claims ‘cultural production, associated with creative thinking and innovation, has been conflated with new industries, mostly in the area of communications technology, and deemed a catalyst for economic growth.’10 Leger is critical of those who protest against prevailing socio-economic channels of art production but only serve to legitimize the focus of their criticism.
The oral history is passed in transactions between persons, it is remolded and endlessly recycled, it is infectious, fragile and it transforms each carrier, rewarding its vehicles with knowledge transfer and something in the way of wisdom. Hosting the knowledge object inevitably infects with the vital signs of what it means to be human and the possibilities for being human. The infection of the oral history is reliant upon a living host. The transmission charges the host and she in turn re-charges the knowledge object. It is the size of a municipal museum, thirty years in the making, but traverses easily through time, decade and century little more than hoops through which to – why, can I not ‘try again, fail again, fail better’? We are movers and shakers, but we haven’t left the room. We have done everything we were told and we haven’t – left the room.
(We thought it would come. When it didn’t we were disappointed but through disappointment something flourished, something new – something anticipatory. As the sun was rising I caught my first glimpses of you in an island paradise digital dream – full of wreckage – I saw you. You told me to gather up all the dream money and that I should throw it into the sea. You told me to come to the volcano, to come in through the door in the volcano. You were a serviceman, your eyes shining like yellow Suns, your skin the colour of chocolate. Drilling and dreaming, drilling and dreaming, you took me to America. Horsefeathers! Horsefeathers on the banks of the Hudson River. ‘Horsefeathers!’ you said. I will walk through a door into the Volcano. He says, ‘you see smiling wretches in cardboard booths pimp zombie things, and you will see me and I will see you, and we will be in the booth and I will see you and you will see me and the booth is on fire.’)
Conor Kelly
May 12, 2016
(Quotations taken out of context and courtesy of artist Kari Stewart)