“Apophenia” at Prop Gallery
“Atropos the Countess of Lopfen”: Apophenia Explained
In 2016 I was included in an exhibition called “New World Order” at Casula Powerhouse, which was curated by Ella Barclay. Apparently, the institution had wanted an exhibition about conspiracy theories (which seemed incredibly daggy at the time) but was subtly dissuaded by Barclay to the end of this (actually quite excellent) show also featuring the works of Hany Armanious, Simon Denny, Beau Emmett, Eva and Franco Mattes, Soda_Jerk, Jess Johnson, Alexis Mailles and Yujun Ye, Ryan Presley, Suzanne Treister and Pope Alice Xorporation. Last year I messaged Barclay upon reading an article (one of many) linking the conspiracy theory, QAnon, with a large anonymous Italian art collective from the 1990s, Luther Blisset... whose members included Eva and Franco Mattes... Luther Blisset began their work, interrupting society through art, by demonstrating how easy it is to manipulate the media. They staged fake Satanist human sacrifices, thereby exposing the falseness of the “Satanic Panic” then enveloping Italy. Of course, artists responding to such climates of fear-mongering is nothing new, one of the most famous examples being Francsico Goya’s “Caprichos”: the scholarship over which is divided into two camps, one which see the depictions of witchcraft etc. as an enlightened critique of superstition and the Catholic Church, and the other who see the depictions as expressing an ominous view of the depravity at the base of human nature. (Goya would go on to paint his paintings of horror on the walls of his own house, the “house of the deaf man”, showing no signs in his dotage of having devloped a more positive outlook on human nature. (One of these “black paintings”, “Atropos the Fates”, is chosen as the top half of the painting associated with “Apophenia” as an avatar for the needleworkings of oligarhy while the original depicts the fates as old women, somewhat removed from that original habit of spinning fate through their work, through talking, as was supposed by many cultures in which spinning was an essential occupation). It seems strange that generations of art historians would debate his intentions as though there had to be a simple, didactic answer, like trying to empty poetry of its nuance. Maybe what makes the “Caprichos” so compelling is that they both rail against the ignorance of these persecutions while simultaneously dooming humanity to its worst excesses. It seems about right to me.
Wine/Film/Fruit Flies.
Back in the recent past, the work of Eva and Franco Mattes from New World Order (and since) has largely focused on documenting the experience of the human moderators in charge of taking down explicit content from YouTube and Facebook. Most recently, they had these young Berliner moderators doing makeup tutorials as they described their experiences, the worst things that they had seen moderating Facebook, the homophobia and the violence, the things that people would say among themselves... described as “bad things” only “bad people” would say among themselves. Four of the artists involved in Luther Blissett would go on to write a book called “Q”, which, it has been suggested is the basic playbook for sabotage employed by the person or people responsible for the “Q drops” that have spawned QAnon. Several commentators, including those of the QAnon Anonymous podcast and the artist/theorist Brad Troemel have suggested that QAnon is a mass-writing project in which oblique cues are published in order to generate wild theories, usually based on a mixture of fantasy and coincidence. It certainly is a writing project, whatever else it might be... I will not necessarily comment on individual theories or the “Q drops” that however spuriously suggested them, or the quality of what is produced but rather on that of its likely antecedents in literature and art, seeing it, as a phenomenon as markedly more effective or “impactful” than the awareness-raising that makes up much of the production of “radical” Contemporary Art, though formed by the same principles (and perhaps the same people).
Detail of detail.
Reed Berkowitz, has proposed to describe QAnon as “guided apophenia”, apophenia being a term used often in game design describing the phenomenon of users finding patterns that were not designed or planned and are ultimately meaningless and misleading (as far as progressing within the game, thus something that game designers actively avoid). Instead of trying to dissuade wild theories QAnon has employed them as a feature, allowing for a great deal of creative scope for its adherents. Certain narratives are ultimately if still obliquely affirmed by “Q” in subsequent drops, apparently in order to perpetuate the notion that the same adherents are actually able to contribute to the narrative, participating in politics, culture and even society in such a way as many of the more marginalised among them would otherwise be unable (in an environment in which culture also belongs to monopolies, and few of us are able to participate in it, even within contemporary art). Brad Troemel further explains that guided apophenia: “conditions you to find whatever evidence you can to prove the conclusion you’ve already determined to be true. It’s the opposite of the scientific method, which is why QAnon has the creative freedom to bring in literally anything it wants as proof.” (I first found these descriptions unsettling as they could so easily be applied to so much Art as Research). I would argue that what is happening is not so much a conflict between rational/scientific methodology and what is basically wild nonsense about children being harvested, as it is indicative of a rejection of the equally unscientific propaganda that has more and more effectively convinced the marginalised to act against their own interests, which may have lead up to this point of the rejection of all public authority. In “Taking the Risk out of Democracy” Alex Carey charts this progression from the first decade of the 20th century, citing myriad well-funded campaigns by business interests looking to scuttle especially unionized opposition to poor working conditions and pay, even suggesting that “the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.” Further than this, it is also a rejection of the monopolistic world view of the same oligarchic business interests that pretend that everything can be known and quantified, in the same way that a Conspiracy Theory might operate (as a shadow of that model of certainty). Even within the university “knowledge production” can go against thousands of years of philosophical discourse that might encourage a healthy level of agnosticism, rejecting the ideals that universities were founded on, rationalising away “the humanities” in economic terms for failing to be productive.
I am reminded of a work by Simon Denny, “Introductory Logic Video Tutorial”, which was the culmination of his residency at Artspace, Sydney, during which time he undertook a course in “Introductory Logic” in Philosophy at The University of Sydney. (He was printing on canvas and connecting the canvases to build rudimetary sculptures that stood in for the monitors in the Artspace inventory, all of which have doubtless been replaced now by flat screens. I still remember him saying to a friend of mine something to the effect of “why would you paint when you can so easily print to canvas?” ...leading my friend to assume that he was one of my philistine philosophy major friends.) The choice of “logic” was much to my mystification, having found that particular subject utterly abhorrent in my undergraduate Arts degree, in which I instinctively rejected the notion of there being a correct way to argue, becoming particualrly annoyed by the idea that “Circular Logic” was necessarily fallacious, as will become more apparent as this text, as it were, unravels. Even those fifteen years ago when I started an arts degree, it very quickly became clear that the reserves of knowledge in the humanities were being threatened by market forces, making these latent understandings both dangerous and redundant. Humanity no longer had any use for itself. The universities were only the more honest in their modern imperialist mission as finishing schools for those who already ruled, to qualify themselves in that position in order to do exactly what they were always going to do, which was to organise society so that most of the world’s resources, often human in origin, would remain directed towards them and theirs, or more likely towards their betters (the even smaller minority of billionaires). The Philosophy department, as it then was, before the culls, was a fantastic and terrible place of the anglophone school, in which the French were seldom mentioned but to be derided, and everything could be known for certain, only to be supplanted by the next argument. In Denny’s work, the canvas prints of monitors sporting fake video, remote content, in subject matter in which contact is somehow essential, particularly disturbing after years of remote teaching... As it now also provides a paean both to the now obsolete monitors and the School of Philosophy, as it then was, at The University of Sydney (though I am sure the dubious logic of logic still remains, in what remains of the department).
Art by research, like conspiracy theories, provides a shadow doctrine of certainty made absurd. The real threat posed by conspiracy theories is not that so many are lost to them, on one level, there is some comfort that these usually marginalised subjects have found some sense of community in which they are valued, while having long since being devalued by this society (which its increasingly normalised, while more and more people find themselves poorer and poorer). The real threat is that their representation of evil, insofar as it is bad art, creates this fiction of villainy to such a cartoonish design that it makes its experience feel comparatively benign, assigning evil specifically to entities who set out to harm the innocent with malicious intent. The evil they represent harbours no self-delusions, it covers-up rather than hiding in plain sight; it is honest and earnest in its regime of terror as opposed to prone to gaslighting the greater public with its apparently altruistic intentions. The truth is worse than conspiracy. There WERE groups of men in board rooms that decided to obfuscate the climate crisis rather than address it; billionaires made the same billions with interest that the billions lost over the course of the pandemic. If only Hilary Clinton drank babies’ blood and was not in bed with Wall Street, responsible for the invasion of Libya and murder of Gaddafi after he attempted to establish a gold-backed African currency... maybe something could be done about it all. If only one could, like a singular American action hero, pick up a gun and resolve these situations, as one might have taken a gun into the centre of that pizza restaurant during PizzaGate and freed the innocent children in the basement. The very idea that all of the elite (and not simply the associates of Jeffrey Epstein) are engaged in these paedophile rings/this child harvesting, ascribes a sovereignty and preciousness to the bodies of the fictitious children being molested, while all over the world children ARE molested and children ARE murdered, they ARE consigned to refugee camps, they ARE made homeless. Children even become adults that terrible things happen to, they are put in cycles of debt by predatory lenders, now they can never find stable work, some of the terrible things just recur because their bodies hold the memories of everything that came before, they are subjected to lives of chronic illness and pain. But we do nothing for “them”. These imaginary children are rescued and require no rehabilitation, they are our redemption. There is no sanctity to human life, there is no discernible market value in studying the human, only in extracting its base desires in the service of more efficient consumption.
I like to think of conspiracy theories in terms of the carnivalesque of Mikhail Bakhtin: as an asinine mass, reflecting the world back through its debasement, just as medieval peasants might do during the “Feast of the Ass” supplanting Jesus with his donkey. These practices of making fun of power obviously had some resonance in the oppressive conditions of Stalinist Russia, but who can say if ambivalence is a political or an apolitical turn? Ambivalence is, however, where art rests. And I believe that there is an instinct toward the same ambivalence being a great casualty of our times. Not to save the world but to be able to bear it. I still harbour some strange hope that even if it is in simply this function, “Art by Research” and conspiracy theories could be powerful tools for the forming of community around ambivalence, for mobilisation against the outright lies... if only it were self-aware, and perhaps more importantly: funny. Some restoration of the centrality of the peasantry against all the meaninglessness of class, as the Social Sciences spend so much time inventing new terminology, only detracting from the actual plunder of technofeudalism. The novel “Q” is a retelling of the events of the German Peasant War of 1525, coinciding with the Protestant Reformation. (It should be noted that repetition is utilized throughout “Q” as a device for propaganda, much as is subsequently done by the person posting as “QAnon”.) In the novel, the character of “Q” is a shadowy figure loyal to the papacy who sets about sabotaging the efforts of the peasants. The German Peasant War of 1525 is a fascinating subject matter, notably written about by Friedrich Engels as a precursor to communist discourse. It was lead by Thomas Müntzer whose catchphrase was “omnia sunt communia” or everything belongs to everyone, arguing that a true Christianity would share resources among the people (in this apocalyptic doctrine coinciding with the emergence of early capitalism, which even in the 16th century seemed like the end of the world, though it could not align with the end of the world as then understood by a truly Christian cosmology). Basically, the future that Müntzer proposed was not so much a better world as equally a future as apocalypse, albeit one where there would be heaven on Earth, as was the obvious result of the radical sharing of resources, which is after all, largely what Jesus Christ had advocated for. (I would it were an apocalypse like that one that we are now facing.)
There are certainly interesting parallels between the political situation of the Reformation, of Martin Luther challenging the papacy only to side with the princes against any material reshaping of the society (reminiscent of the apparently oppositional two-party system of our own experience as receivers of North American culture), all against the radicalisation brought about by the new technology of the printing press (and in the early 2000s, the internet). Martin Luther and his enlightened and “democratic” religion now distributed in the common tongue, (Democrats to the essentially Republican illiberal stuckists of the Papacy). As I carried on in apophenic discovery, I found totems of inevitable decay across centuries of history after the introduction of complex mathematics and credit. Broader or perhaps more dubious searches of the German Peasant War of 1525 lead me to the likely apocryphal story of the other name for said war, “The Snail War”, apparently the result of a thoughtless noblewoman (the Countess of Lopfen) insisting that rather than the subsistence farming her serfs would otherwise be engaged in (the enclosure movement did not really begin in Germany until the 19th Century), they (1200 of them) would be set to work finding her snail shells to use as spools for her thread. I was not otherwise aware of this usage of snail shells, as spools, it was strangely earthy and appealing, and amazing to think that it could even be suggested that such a vast number of people could be set upon such a task. All of these material realities, the reams of thread hand-stitched into clothing and homewares... it is unfathomable how much longer the production of life once took, and yet we do not seem now to work less... In fact, we would seem to work much more than medieval peasants. Thus in the painting “Atropos, the Countess of Lopfen”, Atropos acts as an avatar for the needleworkings of oligarchy, choosing the fates/ending the lives of the (contemporary) peasantry, while the original (of Goya) depicts the fates as hideous old women, somewhat removed from that original habit of spinning fate through their work, through talking, as was supposed by many cultures in which spinning was an essential occupation.) (The word text comes from the Latin “textus”: “thing woven”,). The base of the painting depicts peasants, as we are now, accepting this work at the expense of our survival.
I could only go on. Marking the passage of time more markedly, accounting for every notion set to work, just as busy but with none of the same illusions. I hoped to redistribute my own very specific wealth of time, of my stake in that, a surfeit of unquantifiable labour and inevitable surplus. I have been working, for some time now, to buy my time back from the system.
Work titles/Information:
“Atropos: The Countess of Lopfen”, MMXXII. Acrylic (mis-tints) on (discarded) canvas banner. Approx 5400 x 2300mm.
“Apophenia”, MMXXII. Artist book, 18,000 words, thermally bound.
“Souvenir: Let No Man Steal Your Thyme”, MMXXII. Etching on (found) crystal.
“Souvenir: Omnia Sunt Communia II” , MMXXII. Etching on (found) crystal.
“Souvenir: Omnia Sunt Communia I (Janus Arch, III heads)”, MMXXII. Etching on (found) glass.
“Souvenir: Omnia Sunt Communia IV”, MMXXII. Etching on (discarded) bottle.
“Souvenir: End History Now (Upside-down Protest)”, MMXXII. Etching on (discarded) jar.
“Souvenir: Technofeudalism”, MMXXII. Etching on (discarded) jar.
“Souvenir: Omnia Sunt Communia II (Lugh, III Heads)”, MMXXII. Etching on (found) marble wine glass.
And so on and so on...
