Exhibition SMILE MACHINES

Exhibition
SMILE MACHINES by Anne-Marie Duguet
(from the exhibition catalogue)

In 1897-98 Alfred Jarry invented a nice example of black humour, the debraining machine. To be precise, in a song of Ubu Cocu (act 1, scene 2) in which debraining is a popular spectacle seen by the whole family on a Sunday:

Look, look the machine is turning,
Look, look the brain is spurting,
Look, look the Pensioners are trembling...
Chorus: Hooray, cuckold-in-the-arse, three cheers to father Ubu

In 1970-72 Georges Maciunas invented a smile machine, a little instrument with a spring to put in the mouth in order to show the teeth and to keep the smile. Without patent or charitable status it is nevertheless very useful in unpleasant times when the declared and controlled form of happiness becomes the way of making one believe in one's own reality, "equally" shared by all.
From one machine to the other, from pataphysics to Fluxus there is the same mental state to use derision in order to question evidence, to demystify myths and self-important idiots, and to show things many prefer to keep hidden. Today Jarry’s machine and Maciunas’ instrument are replaced by "machine-like" structures of quite another scope, building the whole mediatic and technological complexes destined to mould desire and behaviour, perhaps invisibly but even more effectively. (…)

The smile produced by the Flux Smile Machine of Georges Maciunas is in fact a terrible grimace. The smile forced upon six young women for one and a half hours in Cheese, an installation by Christian Möller, is tragic. Here, the smile-training is assisted by the media-machine and supported by digital technology made to recognise and control expressions that at the slightest decrease of "seriousness" emit an alarm signal.
The "oversmiling" is a means of market economy (in which the first ones to bear the costs are the women), and as Gilles Deleuze says: "nowadays marketing is the instrument of social control".
The excess in signs of politeness in the commercial realm, the constant greetings and kisses on television, all this is proof of the increasing misery of human relations. One has to play into this display of happiness supported by the promises of continuously advanced technology. The irony of Cheese is caustic, pitiless.

Since the system is determining scientifically and statistically the margins of freedom necessary for its own functioning, it is within these margins that artists are inventing violations and producing accelerations of the fundamental virus, by overexciting the forced, calculated game or by playing it in another way. Robert Filliou proposed this principle of permanent creation: "Whatever you’re thinking, think something else. Whatever you’re doing, do something else." A steady exercise in the shifting of ideas and getting out of the way, moving aside, against the current, deviating, "going downhill" – that are the procedures of humour.

Humour – this term becomes generic in the end and covers a wide range of different behaviours and procedures. Derision, irony, mockery, parody, satire, caricature, play on words and images – they do not all always show the same critical degree or incidence, but they all are working in the same distance from reality by playing with it and finding pleasure in this game. Since this is a suspension from our connection to the course of events, the momentary loss of emotional investment, which is temporarily necessary in light of the context and the joke itself and has a great power of de-dramatisation, relief and stimulation.
(…)
Thus, the finesse of humour, the audacities of derision, the points of irony charged with a potential criticism more or less subversive according to historical, geographic and cultural contexts, but they also depend on the will to push further dissent, or simply to play the game.
(…)
"Smile Machines" is not an exhibition about humour, but it is traversed by a common spirit, by an attitude of disrespect and provocation, and above all under the traits of derision and irony. The proposed regroupings don’t have the value of a thesis. Rather, they are insistences, sometimes in view of the targets aimed at art, media, technology, daily routine, sometimes with regard to a certain kind of humour: black humour or rose-coloured humour.

The techniques are manifold: from embroidery and the wheel of a bicycle to video, robotics or digital identification systems. Since the critical and humorous attitude is not related to a specific media, it is worth the effort to consider – in a society largely modelled or "modulated", in the words of Deleuze, by digital technologies – in which way this technological development is kept in a distance by the operators themselves.

Derision of technology by itself

Nam June Paik demands from technology that it be something else than that which it is, and that is does something else than that which it normally does. When he says "I make technology ridiculous" this self-described "techno-idiot" means what he says. In his work Paik desecrates technology and systematically breaks up the uniformity of technology. With an absolute idea of relativity, provisionality and variability, Paik scrutinises the elementary components of electronic machines, and in fact in contrast to the technical standard configurations that stop the flow, blocks the possibilities of transformation, and forces a state of imaginary under-exploitation. Without the slightest scruple he is playing with the machines, and above all he is playing with undisguised pleasure.

With a similar attitude of distant and amused implication regarding technologies, developing a project out of curiosity, experimenting, looking and learning, several artists here are working on the demystification of technology. They relativise its heroic feats and functions, scoff at the salutary promises attributed to them, and thereby ultimately end up inadvertently showing its capacities.

Whether proceeding by deregulation, accumulation, exaggeration up to the absurdity (Jodi), or by infiltrating surreptitiously a controlled reality in an illusion of the virtual (Videogame by Stéphane Gilot), all these works are an exercise concerning the latent chaos of systems, a comment on the rupture and rapture of the emptiness of societies rolling in material goods.

The actual technological developments, thanks especially to the support of cognitive sciences and research on artificial intelligence and artificial life, invite us to reconsider the question of the mimesis traditionally related to the image. The realisations resulting from advanced robotics thus introduces into the domain of art, a conception of autonomy that no longer sees the mechanical autonomy of the automaton. Simulating logical procedures specific to the human, and with a degree of complexity that it may be provided with, i.e. the ability of analysis and initiative, the work is no longer representing an appearance, an attitude – it "is" behaviour.

The "robots" produced by artists since the sixties (…) hardly evoke that which one usually refers to. They don’t have a function or at most, only a symbolic one, serve no purpose, may not replace a person, and are neither games nor toys. They are splendidly useless, never trustworthy, and have only limited capacities.
(…)
Petit Mal by Simon Penny and The Helpless Robot of Norman White are exposed to disturbances and "absences". However, the part of indetermination conferred to Petit Mal is no dysfunction but rather an element of its perfection, since "it’s the margin of indetermination that allows to a machine to be receptive to an external information" as Gilbert Simondon shows.
The complexity of procedures and the level of abstraction of the program do not render technology and handicrafts as simply opposing forces. On the contrary, humour emerges from the explosive conjunction of both, and exactly in their confrontation may invent unique and surprising systems. Norman White and Simon Penny are the artist/craftsmen of their robots: the first one is recycling a computer, the second is reducing the basic elements to those strictly necessary for the functioning of the system. They don’t have any anthropomorphous aspects: The Helpless Robot looks like a coffin and Petit Mal like a wheelchair, but whenever something comes to life in them, the agility of the movement or the spoken language, as soon as a trace of autonomy is perceptible, all this non-resemblance falls into oblivion and a "human effect" is activated, inciting the viewer to project endlessly. Thus, the object of humour may become the viewer himself interpreting a slight step back as fear, and a step forward as curiosity. Sensitive to the environment, capable to diversify and to involve its reactions, the robot tries to have a relationship to the human being, and this relationship is constituted from the beginning as a human relationship, one of domination or of sympathy. The robot is no longer the slave, it enslaves the other. This kind of reversal is a satire of human psychology and of the expression of the platitude of the threat that represents the development of such autonomous "creatures" for the human being.

This do-it-yourself creative methodology is surely one kind of resistance to the technological oversupply and simulation, and thus the machines of Jean Tinguely always provoke a smile because of the ingenious simplicity of a sometimes complex functioning that seems again and again to be some sort of miracle. Remue-Ménage of Jean-Pierre Gauthier elaborates on the base of the recycling and rearrangement of everyday objects, and explores the astuteness of the transparent thread to create the illusion of an autonomy of its elements, transforming itself in front of the viewer’s eyes and without the artist's intervention. The utmost consequence of this autonomy is evident in the video Before Television by Ximena Cuevas in which the artist is dogged by her vacuum cleaner, a complete nightmare of the rebellion of household objects and a parody on slapstick films.

Still art?

Though artistic practices for the most part have left the institutional scene, and although the criticism of art is no longer a preoccupation of young artists, the humour of some works, even of those dating back to the seventies, has not lost its relevance. The Thinker by Nam June Paik is a statue of Rodin contemplating in live-broadcast its own image on a video monitor. This mediated introspection – paradoxically consisting of the use of the closed electronic circuit to capture the immobility of a statue of the last century – is a good example of the humorous incongruity confronting techniques and epochs. But above all the scepticism of the pose characterising every respectable thinker, is here addressing the television and, by extension, technology itself.

The tautology, the short-circuit of the system, is a critical procedure accompanying several works with different modalities of self-derision and self-centredness.
"Apparently that’s not a pipe." Here, there is only the work and nothing else. Cela/That/Dat by Michael Snow (2000) is describing in a score for three languages and on three screens simply what you are seeing – simply the work itself, exhibited, being about to be taken-in or maybe not, here and now, and that’s it. Playing with the evidence and the literality of designation, Michael Snow profits from shooting arrows wildly here and there towards traditional methods, expectations and codes regulating our relationship to art. Les Levine is heaping scorn on modernist positions of the sixties stating that the problems of art have nothing to do with those of the society: "I’m an artist, I don’t want to be involved", and Robert Filliou is demonstrating mathematically the principle of the balance of forces in art (And So On End So Soon, Done Three Times) in order to declare that everybody is able to make art. The principles of non-judgement, non-admiration and non-comparison come to support this irrevocable abolition of the criteria of recognition. This "genius without talent", founder of the "Territory of the ingenious Republic", creator of the project "COMMEMOR/ Commission Mixte d’Echanges de Monuments aux Morts" [Mixed Commission for the Exchange of War Memorials] between Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, also derides frontiers, flags and nationalities. This Flag is Meant to Straddle... is an empty frame, an open and fragile frontier to cross without realising it...

The rumination in the media

"The encratic language (the language produced and spread under the protection of the power) is, in its statutory basis, a language of repetition; all official institutions of language are ruminating machines: school, sports, publicity, mass-produced goods, songs, news – all of them repeat always the same structure, the same sense, often the same words: the stereotype, the principal figure of ideology."

Thus the whole field of media is serving as a reference and reservoir of figures and messages from which artists acquire in order to deride its procedures and to emphasise its objectives. Taking out of this reservoir fragments of images, recomposing and repeating them in order to let the discourse stutter so that it becomes absurd, they reveal the insignificance and at the same time the fact of repetition constituting its power. Dara Birnbaum for example, isolates short sequences from the TV series Wonder Woman, splitting them up to still frames and repeating the key moments so that they show their flagrant disregard of stereotypes. Beom Kim practises a very precise surgery in the discourse of some presenters of TV news and composes with these micro-elements a paratext consisting of personal day-dreams of the TV viewer, without any relation to the presented events; a consequence of the saturation of information. As for the mirror machine Slogans of Antoni Muntadas, so it moves the viewer in a universe of publicity slogans in three languages that are reflected and multiplied ad infinitum in a labyrinth of mirrors. Since bombardment by advertising is ever- present, it invites us to escape from the daily routine, to take a dream holiday, and to enjoy the dubious pleasures of consumption. But by the means of repetition and intensification, the message itself is annulled, absorbed and abstracted in the digital patterns constituting it.

Infiltration and simulations as critical strategy

The Yes Men no longer act within the confines of the arts-sphere but rather at the scene of the crime itself, putting on their masks in broad daylight. Their bag-of-tricks consist of using the arguments of the adversary, and in appropriating the identity of persons having some criminal or hidden responsibility in order to "correct" them, simply insisting on certain economic and historical facts and carrying its profit-oriented way of thinking to its logical conclusion. So they present, with great seriousness, in front of an assembly of bankers and managers of large corporations, a revolutionary technique that makes it possible to calculate the "acceptable degree of risk" that a company takes in different countries, especially in terms of casualties. The best decision in this regard is rewarded with a Golden Skeleton!

The perfection of social and political control by the bureaucracy is held up for criticism in the G3-Psych|OS Generator by the artists’ group ubermorgen.com inventing generators of identity and banking documents, authentically forged, that is, technically as authentic as the supposed originals – an indication that information technology is inevitably invalidating the concept of original. And regarding the Emotional Vending Machine by Maurice Benayoun, it’s an analyser of the emotions of the world by means of a search machine, of course in English, that explores systematically emotional means of expression on the internet. This inventory of emotions of which one may select the right dosage before downloading it in the form of a musical composition, is an ironic comment on the cynicism of mass media.

In search of life forms in the depths of the earth, Agnes Meyer-Brandis explores subterranean icebergs with the help of sensitive interfaces navigated by the fingertips or at the end of a thread in order to make obvious a combination of scientific and fictitious circumstances. A performance and installation, SGM – Iceberg Probe comes from "vertigo-technology", a humorous arrangement aiming to parody the myths and the ideologies of the conquest of space (and their cinematic representation) for the technological and social methods of scientific experimentation.

Black humour vs seeing life through rose-coloured glasses

At one end of the spectrum is the black humour. The humour that aims at war, sex, death, religion, childhood and all that is holy and taboo, and that makes light of the most tragic things. Black humour is an art form moving the dramatic to the side of a feigned indifference in order to survive, and that more than any other form of distance makes it possible, in the words of Freud, "to economise the affects we are usually expecting in an certain situation". The jokes of Suljo and Mujo in regards to the Bosnian war assembled by Maja Bajević for Black in Black, is apparently a method to get over the horror by laughing about it. Black humour is pure dynamite, it allows us to say embarrassing truths, to transgress the social and individual repression by joking with total abandon. Thus the videos of Tamy Ben-Tor about Hitler are a suite of caustic, brazen parodies playing with the shame of the viewer caught at laughing.

"Torture is based on a whole quantitative art of pain." Death is Certain by Eva Meyer-Keller produces a calculated death executed slowly, meticulously, inexorably. She transfers the sadistic coldness of torture onto the pretty cherries. With the help of everyday instruments they are scorched, drowned, hung and destroyed whereby the artist respects a perfectly regulated ritual amplified by the strict focus of the camera on the dissecting table. Thus, mediated by the seduction of aesthetics, the video is built upon the metaphor of sadistic and political crime throughout all of history and in all nations.
(…)

A strange humour emerges from the piece by Paul DeMarinis, Grind Snaxe Blind Apes, a tribute to his deceased friend, the artist Jim Pomeroy. To revive the memory of a dead person with a portrait, a photo or a film, is a common thing that doesn’t provoke a joyous reaction. But if it is the hand of a monkey tracing out the portrait of the deceased with a laser pen, and if there’s a lack of realism in the portrait, and if a sound reproduction makes perceptible the snore of the dead person, then this tribute is not without humour after all. And Jim Pomeroy himself was also not without humour. In his texts, performances, videos, in his often sophisticated handicrafts with all kinds of 3D systems, 4D glasses and musical hats, he demystifies technology itself, its origins and its economic bases, and by this he is mocking all forms of authority, patriotism and imperialism. The war in Vietnam and the first steps on the moon create the context of a great portion of his activities.

At the other end of the spectrum is the other extreme: rose-coloured humour. Here one moves to the side of the affirmation of happiness and to the excess of delight and well-being by the derision of the commonplace. C’est bien la société [That’s what society is] of Valérie Pavia is resumed by its title.

Annette Messager has collected proverbial sayings from century to century that have formed the image of women in society. Here, she has embroidered them onto cloth. The collection as such is already a humorous act that confers onto the nature of the stereotype another spin. Even if embroidery is a job traditionally assigned to women this is no reason to make an inscription of that which is oppressing them. (…)
Together with his principal protagonist, the dog Man Ray, William Wegman produced in the 1970s a series of short video scenes. By means of excess, surprise and incongruity, a satire of the commonplace and of human behaviour is created: integration of the publicity discourse (Deodorant), fascination of the viewers of a tennis match (Dog Duet), learning at school (Spelling Lesson), etc. The projection of human psychology onto the animal, more unforeseeable in its reactions than the robot, remains a sure thing in terms of arousing humour.

All these artistic propositions in their extreme diversity do not in each case reveal the contradictions of a society largely formed by technology. However they do make it possible to get out of the pathetic realm and to put into perspective its capacities and rethink its basics. The humorous attitude releases an energy capable of stimulating the perception of things, and most importantly of creating a desire without which change is not realisable. To defend the possibility of irony, persiflage and humour means to defend our little bit of freedom.