Instructions Missing

When we think of assembled objects, we are not likely to think of a concept of self. Instead we picture things like an IKEA bookcase or a model plane or a real-life car, objects that are put together from a finite and pre-determined set of pieces in a particular order and according to specific instructions. The bookcase frame precedes the inner shelf; lose a dowel and the object cannot be completed. There is usually only one way to put the object together and pieces are not usually interchangeable, so assemblers such as DIY enthusiasts, factory workers or robots have very little, if any room for creativity in their projects. Indeed, robots are ideally suited for the low-level tasks of executing the series of straightforward, single instructions that make up the process of assembly.

Barbara Bloom, The Reign of Narcissism, 1988-89

If the self is assembled on social media, it is not done by design from a pre-ordained, fixed collection of components. There is also no manual, much less an image of the finished product by which to check one’s work. It is do-it-yourself without a set of instructions.However, that is not to say that there is no goal that guides the selection and presentation of identity statements on social media, only that the hoped-for possible self that these statements serve to foster is known in outline alone.

This desired self is perceived obliquely, in broad lines of character that suggest such traits as affability, compassion, resourcefulness, or humor. The assembler may have only the vaguest sense of the entity she is piecing together. It may be the well-liked, triathlete lawyer or the bright, cultivated non-conformist, but a sense of a goal exists, however dimly perceived this persona is. I’m reminded of the iconic scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind in which Richard Dreyfuss sculpts a mound out of mashed potatoes. It is the model of a place he has never seen and still does not know even exists, but the general shape of this squat peak has been implanted in his consciousness (you’ll also recall that his models get more accurate and significantly larger as the film progresses).

Given the considerable number and range of digital artifacts that the assembler could find, retrieve or create, it would be surprising if the small subset of pieces that she eventually brings together and puts on exhibit were selected randomly. But they are not. Of the 50 photos taken on a weekend kayaking trip, 5 will uploaded. Not all causes are supported, not all quotes shared.

The discrete items of social media content that find their way onto timelines, feeds and blogs,—the reposted Soundcloud set, say, or the photo from yoga class and this morning’s giraffe pancakes—clearly serve an immediate communicative purpose. They provide our friends and acquaintances with information on what we are doing. At the same time, however, these bits of content make evidentiary statements about a desired identity we wish to present. Indeed, the exhibition space of the Facebook timeline was explicitly designed to showcase such statements. It was also conceived as a posting board for similar statements generated by activity in other social apps, provided that the assembler has allowed to post on her or his behalf (“Noah Mason is cooking quinoa pilaf on Foodily.”, “Liz Angelou is reading Hilary Mantel in Goodreads”). In the words of Facebook itself, the timeline “lets you express who you are through all the things you do.” [emphasis added]

As these collected or crafted digitalia are brought together into one exhibition space—and here we can use the term assembled—they eventually yield a distinct and characteristic image. That they do so is partly a function of the curatorial activity of the assembler. No discernible image would emerge if the uploaded items were entirely random or too wide-ranging. Instead, we have the structured chaos that the legendary Ausstellngsmacher and curator Harald Szeeman claimed was the essence of a good exhibition. In this instance the structure is provided by the image of the desired self that is being presented. Items of content must fit in some way with this image, which, since Facebook in particular is a denominated rather than an anonymous medium, must in turn be broadly credible in the eyes of the friends and associates called upon to endorse this image. And the more focused the material, the better.

In assembling these digitalia the assembler is half engineer, half bricoleur (to borrow a distinction from Levi-Strauss). Like the engineer, the assembler can deploy a specific task-appropriate set of tools to create the artifacts needed for the project at hand: a photo of the first runner beans in the garden, a mixtape of edited in mashup software, an uploaded summary of a 10k run recorded on a heart monitor. Like the bricoleur, however, he will also have a (recently culled) store of materials at hand that can be used for a task unrelated to their original purpose, even when they still bear by the history of their previous use. A video of Andy Warhol’s ‘screen test’ of Bob Dylan or a fundraising call for an anti-bullying organization can be appropriated and inserted into a new context where they acquire a new meaning: evidence of coolness or social concern. Naturally this need not mean that the assembler is not interested in the early Dylan or does not actively support anti-bullying initiatives. It does mean, however, that these shared or re-located items function in some instances as borrowed insignia with symbolic power. As it is uploaded into the assembler’s personal online exhibition space, the object becomes imprinted with the likeness of its appropriator.

These borrowed insignia  bring to mind the contents of Barbara Bloom’s installation ”The Reign of Narcissism.” In this work, Bloom fashioned a hexagonal space in the form of a salon, which she furnished with period furniture, plaster casts, cameos and vitrines with chocolates, books and porcelain cups. The upholstery, the face of the chocolate, the teacup—each object in the room bore the artist’s image or some other mark of her identity such as her signature or astrological chart. The installation is an acerbic comment on the fetishism of collecting and, in the perfect symmetry with which the furnishings and statuary in the room have been placed, on a pointless obsession with order. But it also serves as a striking visual metaphor of how the self is presented through the conspicuous display of collected objects.

Notes

I first encountered Barbara Bloom’s work in James Putman’s remarkable study Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium, in which (among many other things) he discusses artists who have exhibited personal collections of objects as “museums”. (ed. Thames & Hudson)

Cover Shot

I’ve also tried to think of exhibits featuring only two or three works, or even one work, and some unusual comparisons. I’ve othen thought Vermeer’s work would fit in this kind of show.
–Walter Hopps

Among the things we own there is perhaps no greater touchstone of authenticity than the coffee table book. Ostensibly a means to spark conversation but more than often not something to occupy guests while the host is in the kitchen stirring the risotto or refreshing drinks, these large-format, visual-heavy albums are a witness to the interests, education and indeed character of the host. Or—and here lies the question of authenticity–what the host desires to be. 

Ferdosi and other poets at the court of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna. by Hadi Tajvid

Of all the books that line the bookcases and shelves in the house and could have been selected, this handful of books occupies the most highly charged and prominent of positions in the entire house—directly in the middle of the company that has gathered for the evening, squarely set on display between guest and host. Of all the books that the host could have pulled from the bookshelves or bookcases, these few are the ones that say, “Yes, this is me. I find these books so interesting that I think you might find them interesting as well.”

They are canonical books of identity. They remind me of oversized missals on the altars of the Catholic churches.

It is never a chance selection. The books on the coffee table are always a deliberately curated exhibition of one’s self. And it doesn’t matter if it’s only a handful of books, as legendary curator Hopps might say.

These books are meant to be viewed in the same way that the single page of an illustrated manuscript displayed in a museum case is—as an index pointing to the whole. Similarly, the single book on the coffee table affords us insight into the library and character of the host. A kind of profile cover.

Social media have their own coffee table books: the Facebook cover and Twitter header are the most representative. They are the book-covers of our digital selves.

The much smaller profile photograph, the reproduction of the literal face of the presenter, can also make statements about things other than physical features: clothes, pose and smile say much, as does the presence or absence of company, human or not. It can be sexy, somber, contemplative, raucous. But most of all it is small. A tiny avatar at best.

The large-format wallpaper-ish cover and header, on the other hand, give us an opportunity to include more details, to experiment, to play. You no longer need to be the subject (just as we don’t expect an author’s photo to appear emblazoned on the front cover but instead discretely boxed on the back inside leaf). Setting and background, pattern and lighting and color all can play a role. But most of all it is content: the image itself. And what it reveals of our sense of self and our priorities.

Take a quick inventory of your friends’ Facebook covers. You will quickly discern that the images fall into certain categories: the ones that speak of passion, the joy of riding or traveling or building things; others, with children or lovers or home and country, that say this is where my heart lies. There are still others that witness sensibility, taste, resourcefulness or wit.  These covers—windows to our presented self—declare what we find important, beautiful, worthy.

It is bad form for a guest to actually read a coffee table book.  Instead one leafs through it while the tea brews or in the intermission between cocktails and soup. This is perhaps why the genre is so heavily dependent on visuals and so light on text. They are books for the eye rather than the mind, gorgeously if not beautifully photographed albums printed on glossy high-quality paper and covering topics ranging from the expected, like the aerial photographs of Our Planet Earth and illustrated histories of rock bands, to the more esoteric titles of The Art of Boxing and Science on the Nanoscale.

Our Facebook cover or Twitter header is even more devoid of text. It is impression management in its most visual moment. It is the book cover of the story we narrate online. And we get to design it ourselves.

Notes

Hadi Tajvid was an early 20^th century master of the traditional miniaturist painting of Persia. The choice is not coincidental. Islam prohibits the depiction of actual portraits,so miniaturists traditionally painted idealized human images rather than actual likenesses.

A part of this text appeared in altered form in a post called “I-Books” on my blog What’s Left of Nathan, a 30-day project in objecthood and dispossession.

The Hopps quote appears in Hans Ulrich Obrist’s classic collection of interviews with renowned curators, A Brief History of Curating. A must read.

Piece Work

Armelle Caron is an artist with a passion for dismemberment. With the scholastic precision of an anatomist at the dissection table, Caron disassembles iconic images—I won’t spoil the fun by telling you which right now—into their component blocks. One by one she carefully dislodges the blocks and arranges them by shape and size, a taxonomy of polygons that gives only the vaguest of hints as to the identity of the composite from which these limbs were severed. It is reverse practice of the paleontologist who seeks to reconstruct a pterosaur from a stash of bones, or the archaeologist the culture of a settlement from a heap of artifacts. It is the opposite, too, of what we do when piecing together the tweets, shares, comments, and status updates of an acquaintance online.

Armelle Caron, detail from her series, Tout bien rangé

Hard as it is to recognize the original from Caron’s shards (and to be fair, the artist exhibits both the pieces and the composite together), it is even more difficult, if not impossible, to reconstruct the whole. Having a photograph of the original that we must assemble doesn’t help much, either.

Perhaps it’s the sheer number of pieces that need to be put in place before the image begins to cohere, or the fact that many shards resemble one another, like the pieces of a monochrome jigsaw puzzle. And taken on their own as individual items, the shards do not convey much information. But then again, one track of trip hop is not all that different from the other, one workout post bleeds into another, one cause is as worthy and distant as the other. And there are just so many things that a cat do without repeating itself (as a dog-lover I tend to think that this is a single-digit number).

How then can the digital shards that we display, post and share ever serve the purpose of shaping an online identity, that is, a coherent image of the presented self? How do they coalesce into something meaningful?

The analogy is somewhat forced, I know. One never starts with a thousand disparate pieces. The scale is smaller, more neighborhood than metropolis. The interests we promote online more or less belong together—or in close enough proximity. A few pieces of connotative potential suffice to trigger associations and start building impressions. Repetition is part of the practice. Though iteration robs later items of their impact, much like an aroma or scent fades soon after we first detect it, they nonetheless serve to reinforce impressions. A 40K bike ride that is logged once a season conveys something quite different from a daily workout log shared online. Besides, there’s always someone new online.

Walter Hoffman, the founding Director of the Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts in Vienna and one of the great curators of the 20^th century once said, “It is much nicer to create an exhibition than a book, because you can see everything together.”

But this is precisely what you cannot do when forging an online identity: you cannot put up it all out front and together with one go. The digital self is narrated piece by piece, tweet by tweet, update by update. Of course, at some point it is more or less all there, the shards that make up the image of the self you present online. But who will wander through the months and years off of posts and likes and photos of your Facebook timeline and albums, the gallery rooms of your virtual self?

Our exhibition is a travelling one, more diorama than static canvas, and most of our audience will hop on and off at will and at random. Ours is a story that is revealed in the telling. And we tell it all the time.

The other half of Caron’s graphic anagram

Notes:

More of Caron’s wonderful city anagrams (and not only) on her site

Up for Grabs

I can no longer tell a photograph of an ancient Greek bas-relief from a satellite image
of Zuccotti park, pitted stone from digital bits. Time and place are up for grabs.
— Dennis Adams in “Malraux’s Shoes”

In 1923 at the age of 23 the young writer André Malraux set sail with his wife and a friend, Louis Chavasson, for Southeast Asia with a plan to make a great deal of money in a very short period of time. Malraux intended to steal statuary from a little known sanctuary in the complex of temples around Angor Wat in Cambodia, and ship the pieces to New York where they would be sold to collectors. Malraux and Chavasson succeeded in removing about 20 bas-reliefs from the temple in Banteay Srei, a ton of stone in all, and boxing them in crates they had marked “chemical products”. The crates never got to New York. Malraux and Chavasson were arrested in Phnom Penh before either they or the goods could leave the country.

Dennis Adams, “Malraux’s Shoes” (2012). Video still.

It is perhaps, then,ironic that Malraux’s vision of a museum without walls should also involve the notion of detachment. For Malraux, the mechanical reproduction that photography liberated–detached, one could say–the  object of art from the physical confines of the museum, and, by extension (since the paintings in a museum are usually grouped in rooms by period), from their history as well.  The painting, flattened, reduced and denatured by virtue of its (often quite imperfect analog) reproduction, was now an image accessible to all. Though stripped of its aura, the image in its myriad reproductions acquired a new revelatory power. Detached and de-contextualized, these reproduced images could then be shuffled and rearranged to reveal affinities of style between works from disparate periods and continents.Or, one could add, to reveal something about the person who creates such a montage.

The detached and reproduced image—one could include here video-clips as well—is one of the most common elements in the online self we assemble. Though we do upload our own photos, the great majority of material appearing in the feeds and timelines of social media are not personal artifacts but found material that is appropriated to forge or reinforce an online identity. And not in a few cases, if one holds to a strict interpretation of copyright law, stolen as well.

Sharing this material, naturally, need not be a conscious act. Unlike Malraux, we do not sit in a studio amid a sea of reproductions of images, culling and collecting the bits and pieces that together make up a coherent picture of the self we wish to present. The image of the self that we foster online is rather a slow, accretive process, a mosaic-in-the-making of disparate parts—a James Blake video followed a clip of a young giraffe who then cedes his place to a picture of blackberry muffins. In the end, however, these juxtaposed images tend to suggest a more or less coherent self.

“My friends would like this.” we think when sharing a photo or video or quote, but the very act of selection is a statement in itself. It says something about who we are or claim to be. It says something about our taste and mood, our generosity and sensitivity towards our audience. It reinforces—or, when unsuccessful, compromises—the impression others have of us as a happy, smart, caring, fulfilled or adventurous person.

Malraux’s floor of images, detached from their museum walls and reproduced in print, have lost their narrative context as well: the viewing guide and the exhibition catalog, the explanatory texts provided on the museum walls. Similarly, the now digitally reproduced images we share in our not quite so self-conscious effort to foster our online identity are also relatively devoid of commentary. The self we present online is rarely one of extended prose. If we  narrate ourselves, we do it not in stories but in captions and comments and terse introductions to the material we share. Our assembled self can only be convincing to the extent that it appears unstudied. The less annotation, the better.

Notes:

Milton Osborne provides a fascinating account (to which I am indebted for this piece) of the theft and the aftermath of Malraux’s arrest and detention in Cambodia in his book, Phnom Penh : A Cultural History. Most of this account can be read online. .

“Malraux’s Shoes” is a single-channel video written and performed by conceptual artist Dennis Adams. Visually inspired by the well-known photograph of Malraux sitting in his studio surveying plates from his Imaginary Museum of World Sculpture is a 42-minute monologue, the work is grounded in Malraux’s theft of the Cambodian statuary and explores ideas of appropriation. For more on the performance, see the interview Adams gave to Thomas Miccheli in Hyperallergic.