Meaningless Protest in The Name of Art

NOTES ON ASSEMBLY, 2010

Chronology of events:
1. October 19: ASSEMBLY is posted to JstChillin.org as part of the website’s ongoing artists’ projects series
2. October 21: Dreamhost deletes JstChillin for hosting ASSEMBLY
3. October 22: ASSEMBLY moves to Jogging
4. October 22: Tumblr officials give Jogging a 3-day ultimatum to delete the project or be removed from their service
5. October 22: Jogging holds a poll to decide what to do in response to Tumblr
6. October 25: The poll closes, voters choose to leave the project up and face the consequences
7. October 25: Jogging is deleted by Tumblr
8. October 28: ASSEMBLY is re-opened at http://assembly.typepad.com/, and NOTES ON ASSEMBLY is distributed

INTRODUCTION
At the moment of this writing ASSEMBLY is unfinished. Nonetheless, I believe it’s necessary to help further contextualize this project in light of its complicated narrative of events and the confused publicity it’s since received. I will first address the structural components of ASSEMBLY then move to the implications of the project’s existence within digital media. This essay is not an attempt to convince readers of the qualitative merits of ASSEMBLY. Instead I wish to provide a theoretical and art historical framework of understanding that has thus far been absent from a brief but pointed discourse surrounding the project.

What is new about technology is often deceiving. Against its novel appearance, ASSEMBLY is a project constantly indebted to the past. It first owes Conceptual Art, Institution Critique, and Relational Aesthetics’ contributions to history before even considering the intended dependence it has on those most recent digital participants who have came to define the project since its debut. Regarding Conceptual works, Sol Lewitt famously explained, “The idea is the machine that makes the art,” in the June 1967 issue of Artforum. Conceptual Art may be viewed as a dialectical progression of Marcel Duchamp’s attempt through the readymade to all but entirely remove the author from the subjective pitfalls of gestural visuality. Lewitt’s positivist Conceptualism was founded in his belief that through aesthetic empiricism there would be a final destiny for art. ASSEMBLY maintains Lewitt’s empirical starting point through textual clauses and a digital ballot, while foregoing his tautologically flawed ending; the destiny of ASSEMBLY is subjectively defined and willfully unknown to its creators in advance. Referring to the importance of textual contracts in works such as Robert Morris’ (Untitled) Statement of Aesthetic Withdrawl, 1963 or Piero Manzoni’s 1960-1961 certificates defining persons or partial persons as temporary or lifetime works of art, Benjamin Buchloh explains:
Just as the readymade had negated not only figurative representation, authenticity, and authorship while introducing repetition and the series (i.e., the law of industrial production) to replace the studio aesthetic of the handcrafted original, Conceptual Art came to displace even that image of the mass-produced object and its aestheticized forms in Pop Art, replacing an aesthetic of industrial production and consumption with an aesthetic of administrative and legal organization and institutional validation.

ASSEMBLY begins with two diametrically opposed clauses as a preface for participants’ willful involvement. One clause considers the virtual sit-in (a term coined and developed by Critical Art Ensemble’s Ricardo Dominguez) as a political protest that makes use of legal means to over-populate the amount of traffic a website is capable of and debilitate it. The second clause describes the artificially produced ‘mass migration’ of traffic as a tributary event, framing the possibility of the chosen website going temporarily offline as a chance to meditate on the importance of its social function. Each clause contained in the contract is numbered ‘1’ so as to provide no chronology in the viewer’s agreement to the stated terms.

Combined, each opposing clause functions as a polemic used to exemplify the paradox of their dependence on one another as feasible outcomes. Criticism of an object is simultaneously reaffirming. Baudrillard writes,

One can see that the iconoclasts, whom one accuses of disdaining and negating images, were those who accorded them their true value, in contrast to the iconolaters who only saw reflections in them and were content to venerate a filigree God.

ASSEMBLY’s art-contextualized dichotomy of protesting versus supporting institutional bodies is most closely related to the history of Institutional Critique. The previously mentioned paradox made apparent by this project is that of IC’s hopes to separate institutions from art by exposing the flawed logic of art’s presentational bodies. Conflating the two clauses as identical number 1’s rejects the possibility of their feigned separation, reflecting the problematic logic expressed by Andrea Fraser when she says, “We carry, each of us, our institutions inside ourselves” .

If the opposition of intentions outlined in ASSEMBLY’s clauses is an impossibility, so too is the belief that their identical method may carry out only one of the two intended results. Despite the project’s incompletion, I’d like to present the hypothetical situation that ASSEMBLY does freeze or crash a website. There would automatically be a great amount of public sympathy hoisted upon the victim of such digital ‘violence’. The symbolic suicide of a body that “rediscovers a glimmer of its existence and legitimacy” through death finds even greater legitimacy in an unwarranted symbolic murder. The only strategy better than Faking The Suspension to garner public support is To Be Wrongfully Suspended– the latter lies about nothing and may never be revealed for doing so. Protests responsible for symbolic death lead to reactionary support for the fallen victim, just as the ubiquitous support of an institution leads many to assail its critical weak points. Polemics tend to cause the greatest friction; this is why they are so naturally rounded off and fall into the same pile of dust as their opposites when put through the grind of use.

After these clauses, ASSEMBLY’s participants are able to offer URL candidates of their choosing and vote on which of those websites will be visited en masse November 1, 2010. The passivity of ASSEMBLY’s organizers in allowing multiple (or no) conceptual-political intentions for participating in the show’s finale, combined with the agency granted to participants to define which site will be the object of that DDoS event recalls Benjamin Buchloh’s term the aesthetic of indifference; a tendency started by John Cage and Marcel Duchamp premised on “the commitment to an antihierarchical organization of a universally valid facticity, operating as total affirmation.” ASSEMBLY’s conclusion is determined by the results of a consensus democracy; here facticity exists as the empirical register of calculated group opinion. Similar to Hans Haacke’s MoMA-Poll, 1970 the URL candidates submitted and voted on through ASSEMBLY figure less as objects of critique themselves than as containers in which the largely abstract and invisible forces and relations that traverse particular social spaces can be made visible. The first of these invisible forces brought forth is the flawed, if egalitarian methodology of public opinion itself and its effects on determining the course of an artwork’s validity. Boris Groys explains:

[…] it is often overlooked that in the modern period, the artist has always been delivered up to the mercy of public opinion – if an artwork does not find favor with the public, then it is de facto recognized as being devoid of value. This is modern art’s main deficit: the modern artwork has no “inner” value of its own, no merit beyond what public taste bestows upon it.

Instead of the project strictly being determined by such outer opinions (as according to Groys, all works fall victim to or are bolstered by) ASSEMBLY internalizes a range of potential differences in finalities that may take place, employing democracy as both a mechanism for production and an aesthetic object. By considering the combined social interactions of its participatory body a dimension of ASSEMBLY’s aesthetic whole, the project shares tendencies with Relational Aesthetics. As such, ASSEMBLY should be understood not only for its proposed DDoS result, but as a site of production where a tool (the ability to determine and disperse a DDoS attack) is placed at the public’s disposal in a way similar to how Seth Siegalub’s art events placed information at the disposal of the visitor.
Though the voting process has not been completed, the language of ASSEMBLY’s existence has already created two definitive events. Each of the websites that hosted the project where deleted by corporate authorities shortly after security officials were made aware of the potential for a DDoS to occur using their server. The most curious of the two officials to remove ASSEMBLY’s host website was the Web 2.0 blogging service Tumblr, who deleted Jogging on October 25, 2010. In an e-mail sent on October 22, 2010 Tumblr official Marc LaFountain ordered Jogging’s organizers to remove the project or be permanently suspended from posting on their website. The decision was turned over to another voting process where a consensus was formed to leave the project up on Jogging and face the consequences, continuing the participant-defined path set forth by the original poll.
The aim of Web 2.0 technology is to obfuscate its own existence so as to allow the greatest amount of streamlined use possible for profitable datamining and/or advertising exposure. Judging by the lightning fast 4-hour window it took to identify the language and polling presented on Jogging as a potential threat and send out an ultimatum to such an obscure blog, the surveillance mechanisms of Web 2.0 function as a panoptic nightmare. The authorities of Web 2.0 platforms market their purpose as something similar to Santa’s elves– to be helpful, efficient and ultimately invisible. They have no reason to present themselves as the disciplinary figures they are because the majority of possible subversions by users have been curtailed by the protocols of Web 2.0’s interactive design. The greatest source of concern for these platforms is that the efficient communication systems they’ve built be used as a middle ground to encourage participation in an unlawful decentralized act. The source location of illegal files or events may be in constant flux, but with forms of communication capable of making so many people instantly aware of any sudden change there is no need to establish a permanent site for anything prohibited . By disciplining the linkage of information, Web 2.0 authorities must conflate language and action, signifier and signified, the imagined and the real. An HTML link functions as a parody of a website or file by assuming a semiotically abstracted form that depends on its relation to an actualized object for meaning. The danger of a digital parody– that which describes or organizes what it is ultimately not– is why, despite Tumblr’s ban of the software necessary to enact a DDoS attack properly, Jogging was deleted for acting as a facilitator of an unrealized event implied by ASSEMBLY’s clauses. Baudrillard says,
Parody renders submission and transgression equivalent, and that is the most serious crime, because it cancels out the difference upon which the law is based. The established order can do nothing against it because the law is a simulacrum of the second order, whereas simulation is of the third order, beyond true and false, beyond equivalences, beyond rational distinctions upon which the whole of the social and power depend.
What the deletion of JstChillin and Jogging make visible is the antiquated method of corrective public discipline. ASSEMBLY’s brief existence on Tumblr was a slippage in Web 2.0’s structure of pre-emptive user limitation. Forcing the unseen hands of Web 2.0 law to symbolicly strangle one of its own subjects was surely a punishment for both parties– what lives in the shadows is injured by daylight.

(to view essay with proper citations and formatting download here: http://www.mediafire.com/?zaom1oas2y2hlej)

Thanks to Brad Troemel for confirming that the goal of the project was to shut down Rhizome.org (for the greater cause of ambiguity). But everyone knows you can be denied access to a plane for talking (or joking) in the security queue about a bomb, and threats of cyber-mayhem similarly have hosts in a panic–this is not a stunning insight about the modern world. References to Duchamp, LeWitt, Morris, Manzoni, Buchloh, Dominguez, Cage, Groys, Haacke, Bourriaud, Baudrillard, and Fraser do give the project more torque, though.

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