Photograph of President Obama's inauguration by Doug Mills/The New York Times.

This continues my previous post about the laptop DJ/performance artist Girl Talk, in which I situate him in a lineage of intersections between art and music and suggest a link between his concert on November 16, 2008 at Terminal 5 in New York and the election of Barack Obama a week and a half earlier.

Girl Talk’s referencing of Obama through video projections at this performance made explicit his connection with the then-president-elect—not a personal but a formal affinity. The form in question is, simply put, miscegenation: the elimination of difference through the blending of categories. This form was stressed throughout Obama’s campaign, both as a personal attribute of the candidate himself and as his fundamental message that he would transcend Bush-era ideological polarization and unite the country behind common goals. Likewise, in Girl Talk’s mixture of fragments of highly recognizable popular songs, different genres coexist in delirious combination—an effect exploited in his concerts, in which the crowd is invited onstage to take up the role of performer. This is from the opening moments of the 11/15 show at Terminal 5:

Why compare an arty DJ and our current president? To make a case for the value of art that entertains.

In some cases it is the most vituperative polemic that best articulates an aesthetic strategy. In a meandering and expletive-laden screed on the blog Riff Market, “NBS” argues that the recognition that Girl Talk has received thus far is scandalous. Girl Talk’s approach to music, he contends, lacks the basic tenets of DJ-ing skill, among them seamless transitions or combinations of songs, changes in tempo and sound levels that create a sense of dynamism over the course of the mix, and, most scandalously, variation in the recognizability of his samples.

Although Girl Talk has a few choice moments… he relies on pitch-shifting and time-distorting everything to fit within the same BPM—cramming all his various found elements into the same one-size-fits-all bed… Are we a pop culture generation easily placated to hear our ‘references’ bounced back to us, no matter the context or skill?…Is the whole game now: “Hey, I know what that is!!”? …This project …he calls a celebration of pop music. What he himself doesn’t know is we already had a name for it: la danse macabre.

For me the above is a brilliant diagnosis of precisely what is both novel and artistic about Girl Talk. NBS is explaining how Girl Talk deskills the art of DJing. Using programs that run on a PC laptop, he makes deliberately amateurish choices of songs— well-known instead of obscure. The end effect is closer to a house party than a professional DJ set that aims to enlighten or challenge the listener. The house party host plays all the hits to please everyone, to, as it were, “feed the animals“—those with broad taste who merely crave the next thrill. Deskilling, whether in high art or popular music, is always a form of effrontery to a previously established skilled medium or practice. Punk, for example, deskilled rock and roll, making a virtue of the fact that many of its musicians barely knew how to play their instruments when they began and a democratic ethic of “do-it-yourself.”

It is the manipulation of beats-per-minute, which lends the effect that any given song is interchangeable with any other, that is Girl Talk’s most subversive gesture. It completes the journey of the popular song begun with the advent of the compact disc, from analog to digital. The digital, which homogenizes information through an underlying, uniform code, is what allows songs and styles to be locked together at the same tempo—miscegenated, as it were. Genre is bred with genre, undoing their respective uniqueness, destroying specificity. In music, codification is literalized in tempo; the very element that in pop music provokes dancing, physical movement. Girl Talk’s stroke of genius is to use the very motor of our pleasure in pop music to tear down pop music’s basic—and racialized—categories.

Writing in the early 1980s, Hal Foster noted the emergence of a new artist who would be a “manipulator of signs,” using already-existing and highly recognizable informational material to produce commentary or veiled critique. One of the first records to feature disjunctive samples, Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, recorded at this moment, corresponds to this logic, layering televangelists and other disingenuous voices of spectacle culture over computerized dance rhythms and samples from non-Western music. Girl Talk similarly forces highly racially coded aural signs together. At Terminal 5, the Time magazine image of Obama was periodically subjected to an alternation between negative and positive that rendered our president black, then white, then black again.

Two moments from the 11/16/08 Terminal 5 show that I attended speak to this dialectic of utopian miscegenation and spectacle, and in doing so stand as evidence of just how relevant popular art can still be—what it can still tell us, even as it entertains, about the social and mediatic conditions in which we are ensconced.

The first is a particular mashup that played during one of the times that Obama’s image was projected on the screen behind the stage. This graphic had already appeared numerous times, but in this case the point was particularly clear. The background melody and beat of T.I.’s “What You Know?” was matched with the chorus of DJ Unk’s “In Yo Face.” This was not a frission produced by two disparate or oppositional genres, merely a rearranging of two quite similar examples of Southern hip-hop that are grounded in signifiers of power: bass and braggadocio. But the original version of the T.I. song celebrates a lone voice, whereas the supplanted lyrics of “In Yo Face” sound as though they are yelled by a crowd of kids, voices in unison, calling out all four cardinal directions: “West Side! Hey! We ready! We ready! East Side! Hey! We Ready!” and so on. The combination can be heard in this footage from the previous night at the 2:30 mark, reposted below:

“What You Know?” is undone as a personal anthem and refigured as a universally inclusive one. The panoply of voices, so they claim, speak for everyone. What do we all say? “We ready.” Ready for what? Obama’s grinning face was spinning around like an oversize screen saver, and this chorus sounded like the voice of the Multitude.

It is not clear what the Multitude—a kind of global constituency that philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri predict will emerge to challenge globalization—will be ready for, or indeed, who they are going to be. Was it the Multitude that elected Obama? Has this constituency already begun to form? Or could they represent something far different, far more radical, even violently so? We don’t know what is going to happen. We can only be ready for it.

The more millenarian potentiality of Multitude was conjured at the very end of the Terminal 5 show, of which I could sadly find no footage. After a finale in which the tempo was pushed to a breakneck pace, the mashups abruptly ceased in favor of an almost inaudible wall of noise. It was not feedback, precisely, but what sounded like a blown speaker, or a song incorrectly downloaded, a broken file—digital information that could not cohere. Girl Talk, who had been standing on his DJ table, continued to act as though a crowd-pleasing song was still playing, bobbing up and down to an absent beat. This went on for more than ten minutes—a move possibly inspired by the recent reunion tour of the British band My Bloody Valentine, who have reinstated their practice of a concert-ending “Holocaust section,” in which an intensely loud barrage of feedback is directed at the audience for ten to fifteen minutes, as seen below:

On the screen there was now an image of Girl Talk’s face, clothed in a mask reminiscent of Dr. Jonathan Crane’s in the film Batman Begins. Dozens of computerized skulls danced around the image, recalling a cheap video game that mocks the player when his or her character dies. And that was it; the concert was over. The crowd filed out, bewildered; some sort of pleasure had been withheld at the last possible moment.

What had happened? It was as though Gillis had pulled away the veil of spectacle, leaving only the code of his music. His relentless undoing of genre was revealed as no-genre, indeed no-music: music without figure and ground, in which all distinction—necessary for vocals, melodies, and beats can be perceived—is lost. This is perhaps what NBS is referring to in calling Girl Talk’s music a “danse macabre”: it ultimately destroys the very genres that it seems to celebrate, and thereby portends a further breakdown of pop music in general. It is, in fact, a funeral for all specificity, for the categories that have come to define popular music as we have known it: good and bad, indie and sellout, black and white, hip-hop and arena rock. It is a funeral that sounds like a party, a parade of past moments, dismembered and reconstituted for a present and future necrophagy. Even the virtuosic DJ who once made elegance out of this practice is condemned to the past; the Multitude is poised to take his or her place, with its demands of collective pleasure and immediacy. Democracy revealed as such is liberating, terrifying, and above all unknown; it is futurity itself.

Daniel Quiles was our guest blogger in the second half of January. Find all his posts here.

Lize Mogel, Mappa Mundi, digital print, 2008. Courtesy Melville House and iCI.

Melville House and iCI recently co-published the exhibition catalogue for Experimental Geography, an exhibition of contemporary art that engages geography organized curated by New York-based Nato Thompson and organized by iCI. It will be on view at the Rochester Art Center in Minnesota from February 7 to April 18 and then travel to other institutions. The following interview about the project was conducted with Thompson over email.

Daniel Quiles: How did the idea for the Experimental Geography exhibition come about?

Nato Thompson: I have long been a friend and colleague of the artist Trevor Paglen, who has been quite influential in the development of this practice. As an artist and geographer, he is often borrowing from these fields in order to produce methods for interpreting space. As much as the world at large still believes firmly in the categories of the Enlightenment, such severe distinctions between fields of study can be unhelpful if not absolutely misleading.

Looking around the contemporary art world today, we find numerous practices interested in experimental methods for understanding space itself—from the important work of the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Culver City, California, to the experimental walking tours of Francis Alÿs in Mexico City, to poetic interpretations confounding body and place such as with artist Ilana Halperin. The practices are out there and it felt as though the often used lens of art history was simply clunky in interpreting this work. So the exhibition is an opportunity to construct a new lens from an emerging form.

Trevor Paglen, The Salt Pit (Shomali Plains northeast of Kabul, Afganistan), Chromogenic print, 2006.

DQ: A number of the artists and collectives involved in the show trace their roots back to Chicago, in particular the School of the Art Institute of Chicago,and some of whom were featured in the recent group exhibition you curated at the Armory, Democracy in America. How would you say the Chicago milieu conditioned the formation of some of the practices outlined in Experimental Geography?

NT: Well I will admit I went to graduate school at SAIC and also remain an avid admirer of the non-object-based collectivist practices that have been maturing in Chicago for over a decade. Artist and activist Daniel Tucker started a phenomenal journal titled AREA, which looks at urban space in Chicago from a variety of lenses including art but also those of race, gender, policy, minority histories, and on and on. This magazine has allowed numerous communities to come together under the specific frame of the city they live in. It’s a compelling umbrella that has many associations with Henri Lefebvre’s approach to geography in the 1950s.

But I should also say that the Center for Urban Pedagogy based in Brooklyn is doing important work as well. In their case, they are focusing on pedagogy and urbanism. And then we would also have to look at the incredible work of the Italian collective Multiplicity, who utilize aesthetic considerations of contemporary art to interrogate specific spaces from the Mediterranean Sea to Israel and Palestine.

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The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Project Poster, inkjet print, 2007. Courtesy Melville House and iCI.

DQ: What is the place of form in contemporary art that is so closely wedded to other fields, such as journalism or activism? Do you feel that the traditional opposition between “form” and “content” still holds, or that contemporary artists have found new ways to integrate them?

NT: As much as the onslaught of cultural production over the last fifty years has radically altered capital’s relationship to aesthetics, it has also made us much more aware that knowledge has a form, and that there are a myriad of forms for the delivery of information and the production of knowledge. Basically, knowledge is a performance, whether it is the stage of the classroom, or the aesthetics of a typeface in a book, to the performance in a street, to a multi-channel video projection. Now that many forms of anthropology and geography tend to be more reflexive, we find more room for ambiguity, which typically is the purview of artistic practice.

There are many types of work in the exhibition, ranging from some that are deeply poetic while others are slightly more didactic. These approaches can still remain under one umbrella but their sense of urgency and their techniques of information delivery vary.

DQ: In your introductory text for the catalogue, you write, “The field of experimental geography (and many other interdisciplinary practices) derives from…moments of theoretic rupture. They are born when the extant frame is not wide enough and we must begin to understand the mechanisms of power, finance, and geopolitical structures that produce the culture around us” (p. 16). Your argument here seems to be about the field of art itself—that the exigencies of the larger economic or political sphere force art to expand into other disciplines. Would you argue that many artists today actively search for such areas through which art’s scope might be widened?

NT: It is in the modernist tradition of the arts to forever try to explode the scope of art. It has an historic negative logic that has been both constructive and obviously destructive. I think this tendency certainly drives much work by artists, but I don’t want to completely hand it over to this impulse. Equally, I think there is a skepticism of the traditionally conservative foundations of art (the fact that the economy of art is ultimately home decoration) and to what degree it is productive to be connected to this discourse.

We live in contingent and flexible times. This is the nature of what is referred to as the neoliberal economy. Cultural producers today are always hedging their bets and playing numerous games at once. That is to say, the growth of experimental geography could have as much to do with expanding art as it does with artists wanting to have two potential jobs at the same time.

And finally, smart people out there know right now that many of the supposedly distinctive fields, such as art and geography, are outmoded ways of thinking. They operate more in a world that has jobs and institutions but may not ultimately allow for better thinking. Many artists, thinkers, creators, and cultural producers are simply looking for the most evocative way to consider the world we live in. These are the forms that this line of inquiry has produced and they hope that the institutions and world will catch up at some point.

Yin Xiuzhen, Portable Cities: Singapore, mixed media, 2003. Courtesy Melville House and iCI.

DQ: I am interested in how a more traditional art object is retained in much neoconceptualist practice. That is, the artist undertakes a project that perhaps encompasses activities outside of the sphere of art—elements of service, research, journalism, or activism—but finds a way to produce marketable objects such as works on paper, photographs, sculpture, and the like. In this way the art object is not necessarily the result of the project, nor a stand-in for its totality; it is merely a partial offshoot. Can we conceive of the map in a similar way for some of the artists in Experimental Geography?

NT: Well, there are a few things to untangle here. First of all, objects are not uninteresting nor without pedagogic capacity. Think of the wunderkammen with its unicorn horns, mollusks, and paintings on the head of a pin. The original museums were set in motion by a profound curiosity (mixed with deep-seeded colonialism). Curiosity is a productive force in the development of thinking/being/becoming. So, we need not write off objects altogether. Maps have materiality and well, they are a useful form in experimental geography. Yin Xiuxen, a Chinese artist in the exhibition whom I am convinced would not consider herself an experimental geographer, nonetheless sews suitcases together from fabrics in order to discuss manufacturing, materiality, and globalism. It is a poetic object.

But the next part of your question pertains to economies where we often find artists need to produce something that sells in order to subsidize their life. Somehow they need to dovetail their desire to communicate with their desire to pay rent. Sounds like the information economy to me. I don’t have a problem with such things as long as folks are more transparent about it. The best types of work use the form directly for the purposes of making their effect as interesting as possible. This sometimes isn’t as possible when you put that ol’ “I have to sell this as well” into the mix. What I don’t like is when artists pretend that these dual desires are never in conflict in their work, that they don’t have to wrestle with these competing needs. Such blatant myopia is rampant in contemporary art. Of course, contemporary critics are so complicit in it you would think they have never heard of the idea of political economy. Oh well.

Deborah Stratman, image from Park, Polaroid print, 2000. Courtesy Melville House and iCI.

DQ: Many of the practices featured in Experimental Geography owe a clear debt to the Situationists, the radical pan-European group that explored artistic and political interventions in the city throughout the late 1950s and 1960s. In what ways would you say that they break with the Situationists? One convention that strikes me as somewhat un-Situationist is the guided tour that is utilized by groups such as the Center for Land Use Interpretation and e-Xplo. If the dérive provides an open-ended discovery of capitalism’s effects on the wandering urban subject, the guided tour hints at something far less spontaneous, however poetic its readings of the city may be.

NT: You are absolutely correct that the Situationists are highly influential in numerous of the practices discussed. It is an interesting question to see where the breaks can be located. I must first say that there is so much of what I like to think of as Situationist-lite work out there. Lots of psychogeographic practices, which consist of tagging on billboards and uninteresting walking tours or pointless interventions in space, are in line with the practices put forth by the Situationists. Of course, they typically lack a reasonable class analysis and ultimately use the Situationists as a sort of fad to draw upon.

But enough with being a hater; the question you ask is much more interesting. What are the breaks? I would like to think that there is a healthy skepticism of avant-garde movements now. More and more, the type of declarative bombastic language so espoused by the post-’68 radical communities just do not appeal to activists today. They sound like white men leading the charge and well, many folks have productively moved past that. I think that is why people get confused about where the leaders are today. People are skeptical of leaders. I guess we are inherently more anarchist today (which the Situationists liked in theory but were too snide to question their own male power). I also think there is a healthy pragmatism working today. I never felt like the Situationists were really trying to build alternatives so much as they were in love with some of their poetic revolutionary language. This was the spirit of the age, but it really caused such a backlash against pragmatists. With “poli-city”-oriented educational groups like Center for Urban Pedagogy and AREA magazine, I feel like a community is evolving that wants to dirty itself with not just sweeping theories but also sweeping floors.

On February 5, the New York University Hospital Library will host Interior Life, an exhibition of Ana Blohm’s photographs. They consist of geometrically organized shots of spare interiors, typically with beds and couches in the foreground and isolated details of decoration, such as framed pictures or light fixtures.

Born in Venezuela and based in New York, Blohm’s work represents a complicated case. She is a working doctor at Mount Sinai Medical Center who trained in photography (with Jack Lueders-Booth and Chris Killip) while studying biology at Harvard University. Her images document the interior spaces, with their drably functional objects, of the East Harlem and Washington Heights residents who are her patients. Sinai is one of several institutions currently pioneering programs that restore the “house call,” or home visit by a physician, in an attempt to save resources and manage chronic illnesses outside of the hospital.

Blohm represents an important limit case for art. This is an artistic practice that is an offshoot of medical labor. Unlike the many practices of the past two decades that have been labeled “relational” or “service aesthetics,” the service here is resolutely in the category of “not art.” Art is only produced at the point at which Blohm feels the impulse to represent something, in a mode of representation that is not of conventional use for medicine.

In some cases, Blohm includes her subjects in the photographs. As in the above image, they are turned away from the camera, refusing its gaze. It is here that the difficulty of her project is most apparent. In the instant of the photograph, she is no longer a service provider, but a documenter of a normally invisible group. Representation is not, in the end, the beneficial service that medicine is ideally supposed to be; it is not “for” someone, but “of” him or her. Art takes something, and brings into view for others. It is in precisely this sense, however, that art might be of use for medicine itself, offering a moment of self-reflection on the who and how of treatment.

Let’s start with the “Flash Points” question of the week: how can art effect political change? I worry that this question is a bit loaded. Ordinarily useless and “unreal” art is placed in a subservient position to political “reality,” which demands use value from cultural production. Art has to “do” something for politics; it has to serve the political. But one finds that the political “does” politics much more directly and efficiently than art. Thus the question is whether we can take art and aesthetic experience on their own terms, as valuable in themselves. I am not arguing for a conservative notion of “art for art’s sake,” but a more paradoxical proposal: art’s political contribution is found in art itself, in art’s ways and means. So, to rephrase the question: what does art do with politics, or alongside politics? What is its value as a parallel practice that perhaps intersects but never fully becomes politics (at which point it would cease to be art)?

These are big questions, and I’ll spare you their exhaustive discussion within art history and criticism. Instead, I offer an example that I see as relevant to the present shift in American politics. At a Girl Talk concert at Terminal 5 on November 16, 2008, an image of Barack Obama on the cover of Time magazine was insistently and repeatedly projected on a screen behind the performance. This was more, I contend, than a crowd-pleasing gimmick a little more than a week after the euphoric outcome of the presidential elections. Girl Talk, a.k.a. Greg Gillis, was connecting his form—that of his music and performances—with that of our new political world, and its leader.

Terms for a debate over the canonization of postwar intersections of music and art are now coming into view. On the side of an interdisciplinary redefinition of “high” art is Branden Joseph’s recent book, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (A “Minor” History), which positions the artist, filmmaker, and musician Conrad as a profoundly influential figure in postwar cultural production, albeit one who kept a quite consciously low profile to avoid assimilation into late-capitalist “spectacle.” Joseph’s approach represents the austere side of the debate in privileging works of art that look critically at their own means of production, and in the process unveils a wealth of relatively overlooked collaborations between artists and musicians. The effect of this text has been swift; Conrad is featured in MoMA’s latest reconfiguration of its contemporary collection.

Conrad, along with his frequent collaborator Tony Oursler, also appeared in Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967, an exhibition of collaboration between artists and musicians and art-about-music curated by Dominic Molon, that recently ended its run at the Musee d’Art Contemporain in Montreal after opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago last year. In contrast to Joseph, the curators’ understanding of appropriate material here was far more democratic (although it was an conspicuously white selection of musicians, lascivious Funkadelic posters notwithstanding), ranging from promotional posters and album covers designed by artists to Dan Graham’s video Rock My Religion, from art star Christian Marclay’s use of records and record covers as materials to the ‘zine production of Throbbing Gristle in the 1970s, which bears a striking incorporation of conceptual art’s design and humor. Molon gave equal time to both experimental and popular music, treating both as fair game for artists.

If Joseph relies on the caché of the “experimental” to separate Conrad out from a crowd of interlopers between art and other fields of cultural production, Molon places his faith in the interruption, through aesthetic contemplation and the creation of a “work,” of the immediacy or myth that allows popular music to operate and dominate consumer taste. Art (or the figure or imagined intellect of the artist) mediates, as “not-music,” between music and the listener. Both projects speak to the staggering volume of material that is only beginning to be unearthed in the interstice between contemporary art and music.

Within these coordinates, Girl Talk presents a “problem.” He is an increasingly popular figure (the categories of “musician,” “DJ,” or “artist” do not quite fit) who uses avant-garde aesthetics to produce highly accessible music and a mode of performance grounded in ecstatic and collective immediacy. In short, he enters the forbidden territory of “fun” anathema to many cultural critics, for whom all forms of leisure are mere complicity with the overarching capitalist machine.

Girl Talk first appeared as a “laptop artist” in 2000, using a computer to create manipulations of popular song fragments mixed with noise. As late as his appearance at the CMJ Festival in New York in 2006, he would sing along to dissonant alterations of these sounds, but soon after he refined his project to exclusively combining elements (isolated vocals, drum beats, guitar riffs) of highly recognizable radio hits—hip-hop, 80s, classic rock, and so on—that is characteristic of the “mashup” approach to DJing. This approach has characterized his two most recent records, Night Ripper and Feed the Animals, which have brought him considerable fame and attention. The ultimate effect is a combination of two or more immediately recognizable samples, as in “Smash Your Head,” a track from Night Ripper that combines a Nirvana drumbeat, a speeded-up Elton John vocal and a Biggie Smalls verse (listen below at the 1:30 mark):

Of course, Gillis is not the first to appropriate, in a conspicuous manner, the production of others; this practice has a massive history far beyond the scope of this post. The use of “found” materials—not constructed by the artist but purchased or acquired fully made—in art goes back to Cubist collage and Dada; the usage of found recordings goes back as far as the audiotape experiments of John Cage, musique concrète, minimalism, and Brian Eno; and, in popular music, by dub reggae and early hip-hop producers. The deliberately pirated use of licensed pop songs also dates back in some cases to artist and experimental music collectives, among them Plunderphonics, Negativland and the Evolution Control Committee. This interview with Pitchfork Music discusses a number of Girl Talk’s immediate influences.

Other artists have at times effectively straddled the worlds of art and popular music. In the early 1980s, for example, Laurie Anderson famously “crossed over” with her album Big Science, fusing synthesizer-based experimental pop with performances and music videos that incorporated ideas circulating in conceptual and video art circles and the Pictures generation of New York-based artists.

Girl Talk, however, enjoys a significantly different level of popularity and dissemination, thanks in part to video-sharing websites like YouTube, where there are dozens of homemade videos of songs from the albums and footage of concerts such as this one:

Spliced from successive moments of his concert at Webster Hall in New York on September 15, 2007, this footage is a good example of Girl Talk’s simple performance idea of allowing his fans to do the performing. As has become customary at his shows, the frenzied crowd gradually takes over the stage, spilling in around Gillis as he tinkers with different pieces of songs on his laptop. By the end it is as though he has been swallowed up by the audience, in a quite literal disappearance of the author.

I hope this serves as a sufficient introduction. In Part 2, I will go a bit deeper into Girl Talk’s performance aesthetics and their connection with our newly inaugurated president.

Reality Check: Truth and Illusion in Contemporary Photography, curated by Mia Fineman, is currently on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it seems intended to serve as a counterpoint to the nearby 19th-century galleries and typical Met fare such as Art and Love in Renaissance Italy. The show unites heterogeneous tendencies in contemporary photography under the banner of a play between reality and illusion, one perhaps inspired by post-structuralist discussions of the unreliability of the photographic document in the 1970s. While there are some examples of portraiture, the dominant genre here seems to be landscape, and in particular the alienated “late capitalist” landscape of corporate architecture, malls, gas stations, and the like that has been a point of fascination for a number of German photographers, some of whom studied with Hilla and Bernd Becher at Künstakademie Dusseldorf.

Where the Bechers spent many years making serial black-and-white photographs of defunct industrial architecture that foreground the photograph’s status as a document of what was before the camera, their more recent inheritors, among them Frank Breuer and Thomas Demand, have created a body of images in which either real spaces appear unreal or fictional spaces are made to look believable. While Demand typically photographs models of indoor spaces, a number of these artists engage landscape photography. In Julian Faulhaber’s Tankstelle (Gas Station) (2008) above, a newly completed gas station looks like an enlarged Lego set; the photograph is used against itself to produce a glossy world that could not possibly be populated by human beings. These photographers have frequently praised for their savvy questioning of photographic truth and confrontation of the hyper-real alienation present in our contemporary land- and cityscapes.

In this quasi-canonization at the Met (all the works on view are in the Permanent Collection), one is particularly aware, however, of just how painterly these large-scale photographs are, and how elegant. Their proximity to the austerity of Ingres and Whistler feels appropriate; art, it would seem, still prizes the same values of pristine pictorial organization and sober contemplation. The “alienation” of the contemporary world, it would appear, is merely a requirement to get in the door. The truth is that no matter how depopulated, how overrun by capital, this “postmodern” world of ours can still be made to look beautiful and thereby hang on the wall; a source of comfort, however cold.

It was therefore a relief to me to find the image below, Israeli photographer Shai Kremer’s Panorama, Urban Warfare Training Center, Tze’elim (2007), included in the show. It is here that a different sort of “reality” intrudes: that of the political present. Kremer has photographed Baladia City, a site used for military training by the Israeli Army (built with U.S. funding) that simulates an entire Muslim urban area, complete with apartment blocks and minarets that play recordings of prayers. Sampling the 19-century tradition of the panoramic image and utilizing the minarets as a central vertical around which the shorter buildings seem to pivot, Kremer organizes our vision through a history of earlier images of cities. The eerie lights in place of windows in the minarets signal the simulacrum at hand, yet at the moment that we intuit the unreality of the site, we cannot help but think of the real lived spaces and their inhabitants upon whom this training will, and has, been used. It is only a slight shift to move from aseptic spaces that banish human presence to focus on the literal violence implicit in certain false landscapes. The power of the documentary photograph is thusly restored within this very back-and-forth between real and unreal. Here Kremer has lit a path by which sophisticated photographic techniques might inform a new hybrid of art and journalism.

Hello everyone. I’m writing on an enormously significant day not only for United States governance and politics, but for its future cultural production as well. It is no great leap of faith to note how many key shifts in art have resulted from major changes in political context, and one can only hope that the present one is both dramatic and positive for the creative worlds that we hold dear and rely on for insight.

In my week-and-a-half of guest blogging, I will be endeavoring to shed light on practices and trends that highlight ways in which art is at present intersecting with other fields of production. I will also do my best to report on some of the best exhibitions currently taking place in New York City, where I am based.

A longer entry is coming tomorrow. For now, enjoy the inaugural glow!