Noise Culture and the Tenor of Rupture
2009
Nukta Art, Karachi, Pakistan
Noise Culture and the Tenor of Rupture
by Nico Wheadon
Canonical rupture has historically been the SOS alerting culture that the social is in turmoil. This is an outdated model based on absolutism and acceptance of the hegemonic construction and branding of counter- or ¬subculture. The new model—ushered in by a shared exhaustion with outdated notions of universal experience, understanding and truth—is noise culture, or a collective consciousness of and reaction to the ways in which the social is both augmented and suppressed by media. Traditional modes of dissemination are altered in this new structure where visual representations reign supreme and are mediated through technologies and forums that network rather than estrange the social. The tenor of rupture is no longer the symptom of dying histories and rather becomes the mode by which the social contemporary can engage in the authoring of its own canons and traditions.
Noise culture is this rewriting of tradition; it rejects outmoded concepts of truth and encourages an active awareness of relative truths, information sources, and approach. Art is approach and it reminds the social that it cannot exist isolated from culture and politics. Art discusses both the individual and the global simultaneously and is the amalgamation of personal and collective memory. Operating within this understanding, absolute identity no longer drives conciseness in noise culture; virtual displacement, simulacra, and a new consciousness of relativity prioritize interpretation and what were once fissures in social, sexual, and racial territories become absorbed in—and consequently redefine—the mainstream.
Faced with the daunting task of pushing inward from the periphery of the this so-called mainstream, White Lies, Black Noise—a group exhibition featuring works by Ricky Day, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Anthony Fuller, Shani Peters, Amin Rehman and Philip A. Robinson Jr.—extracts the subtext from the mediated documents and visuals of our collective memory and inserts its constituent parts into a dialogue of the social contemporary that discusses its own political and cultural roots. These six artists share an emphasis on dissolving binaries and each hones in on the prescribed silence—or black noise—surrounding real issues. In straddling the nospace inhabited by noise culture, memory and identification, White Lies, Black Noise rewrites the vernacular of art historical discourse to include contemporary languages, optics and tonalities and challenges our willingness to internalize without questioning—the ultimate white lie.
Ricky Day employs iconic imagery from art and political movements to construct new representations with loaded signifiers and potential interpretations of both history and the future. In Elect, 2008, Day presents a seemingly random number matrix rendered in black acrylic on canvas from which the numbers 11.4.08 emerge by contrast in the colors red and green. Day’s subtle yet bold rendering of the date Barack Obama was elected president of the United States recalls the colors of the black nationalist flag and hybridizes past and future to open up a new space for creative inquiry in which we can reexamine a once divisive history in the context of an increasingly hopeful collective consciousness.
Latoya Ruby Frazier’s The Notion of Family: Family Work 2002-2008 recalls the tradition of social documentary work to redefine portraiture in both its private and politicized manifestations. The series captures the artist’s family in simultaneously organic and postured routine, evoking a new type of viewer that is engaged and questioning the line between public and private, points of identification and points of discomfort. It is this oscillation that deconstructs the notion of mainstream taboo and recognizes the fundamental overlaps—such as childhood, obstacles, and old age—that bind the human experience. In Grandma, JC and Me in the Bathroom, 2007, Frazier captures the recognizable moment where a child is being bathed by someone close to her. In the same way this dependency is articulated at the beginning of life, it too is mirrored by the end; Grandma Wiping Gramps, 2003, captures a similar unconditional love born from dependency and this inevitable moment reaches forward back within both personal and collective histories to foster a situation of sharing where the gaze of traditional portraiture becomes the sightline that links us to those closest to us to strangers to the rest of the world.
Anthony Fuller similarly employs voyeurism and the gaze to deconstruct the tobelookedatness of traditional viewing paradigms and collapse the dividing line between the taboo and the ordinary. His video How Much is the Dog, 2008 postures the artist in stark isolationism, lying seemingly naked on a bed talking and looking directly into the camera. The viewer interpolates this as an intimate conversation, maybe even one that shouldn’t be had in public. As Fuller asks repeatedly, “How much is the dog?” the viewer begins to wonder if it is in fact possible to purchase undying love and affection. Fuller’s photographic series further introduces commodity culture into the seemingly private by rendering an outdated model of retail communication –the greeting card. So cute so cud so yours, 2007, questions the nature of sincerity and whether or not message—and meaning—can be bought and sold and Fuller urges us to question the levels of interruption we permit in the exchange of ideas and affection.
Shani Peters—who in her own words is interested in “the power of collective activity, the identification of the self within the whole, and in cyclical patterns throughout history and generation”—collapses the divisive line between fiction and history and the possible and the probable in ReProgram, 2008. Through both manual and digital collage, Peters combines mediated visuals of black political icons and fictional media characters within a single video and inserts conversations initiated by these icons of a racially divided past into a contemporary pop culture discussion about semiotics. The rapid succession of images and mash-up soundtracks mimic the information overload of contemporary news media and assert that definitions are fleeting and that to understand one’s own relation to history, one must simultaneously understand the processes by which we are constantly generating records that will one day be the relic.
Philip A. Robinson Jr. also discusses semiotics, the construction of knowledge and the subsequent relationship between the achievement gap and pop culture. WITNESS 1,2, & 3, 2008—a series of modified school chair desks endowed with pop culture symbols of success and upward mobility like the Nike swoosh—exposes a fixation within popular culture to replace memory and learned associations with idol worship and mimicry. Robinson Jr. diminishes the oppositional relation of education and celebrity by physically affixing the dream within the educational foundation.
Amin Rehman infuses this discussion of noise culture with a sense of immediacy and scope by invoking issues of globalization, trans-nationalism and diplomacy. In Black Hole, 2008—a 14’ text-based vinyl installation employing maxims, media jargon, and political rhetoric borrowed from media reports on the war in Iraq— partial signifiers such as HUMAN COST and ALMOST THERE take on distinctively unique and transient meanings in relation to the surrounding words. The original message context and content is deflated and refilled with possible meaning, bizarre truth and literary confusion. The result is an assault on prejudice—or the lack of any real observation—forcing the viewer to engage by reading and consequently reexamine his or her own affiliation with these words. Communal narratives spawn from the flat wall and the viewer starts to rework his or her identification with these familiar words, fears, and hopes on a global scale.
White Lies, Black Noise is a tuning in to the static that is the subtext all around us. It is a necessary recognition of rupture and a translation of this rupture into a post mainstream. The six artists in this exhibition are bound by an insuppressible urge to sound off about frequently tabooed subjects and approaches and this collective response is neither countercultural nor subcultural. It is the construction of a new frontier that embraces the avant-garde as fundamental and nothing more than should be expected of creative production and visual representation. With all of its grand political ramifications, this exhibition is equally personal and subtly boasts a new global citizenship in which people want to understand and position themselves within a changing globe and increasingly unstable notions of homeland, family and the self.
by Nico Wheadon
Canonical rupture has historically been the SOS alerting culture that the social is in turmoil. This is an outdated model based on absolutism and acceptance of the hegemonic construction and branding of counter- or ¬subculture. The new model—ushered in by a shared exhaustion with outdated notions of universal experience, understanding and truth—is noise culture, or a collective consciousness of and reaction to the ways in which the social is both augmented and suppressed by media. Traditional modes of dissemination are altered in this new structure where visual representations reign supreme and are mediated through technologies and forums that network rather than estrange the social. The tenor of rupture is no longer the symptom of dying histories and rather becomes the mode by which the social contemporary can engage in the authoring of its own canons and traditions.
Noise culture is this rewriting of tradition; it rejects outmoded concepts of truth and encourages an active awareness of relative truths, information sources, and approach. Art is approach and it reminds the social that it cannot exist isolated from culture and politics. Art discusses both the individual and the global simultaneously and is the amalgamation of personal and collective memory. Operating within this understanding, absolute identity no longer drives conciseness in noise culture; virtual displacement, simulacra, and a new consciousness of relativity prioritize interpretation and what were once fissures in social, sexual, and racial territories become absorbed in—and consequently redefine—the mainstream.
Faced with the daunting task of pushing inward from the periphery of the this so-called mainstream, White Lies, Black Noise—a group exhibition featuring works by Ricky Day, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Anthony Fuller, Shani Peters, Amin Rehman and Philip A. Robinson Jr.—extracts the subtext from the mediated documents and visuals of our collective memory and inserts its constituent parts into a dialogue of the social contemporary that discusses its own political and cultural roots. These six artists share an emphasis on dissolving binaries and each hones in on the prescribed silence—or black noise—surrounding real issues. In straddling the nospace inhabited by noise culture, memory and identification, White Lies, Black Noise rewrites the vernacular of art historical discourse to include contemporary languages, optics and tonalities and challenges our willingness to internalize without questioning—the ultimate white lie.
Ricky Day employs iconic imagery from art and political movements to construct new representations with loaded signifiers and potential interpretations of both history and the future. In Elect, 2008, Day presents a seemingly random number matrix rendered in black acrylic on canvas from which the numbers 11.4.08 emerge by contrast in the colors red and green. Day’s subtle yet bold rendering of the date Barack Obama was elected president of the United States recalls the colors of the black nationalist flag and hybridizes past and future to open up a new space for creative inquiry in which we can reexamine a once divisive history in the context of an increasingly hopeful collective consciousness.
Latoya Ruby Frazier’s The Notion of Family: Family Work 2002-2008 recalls the tradition of social documentary work to redefine portraiture in both its private and politicized manifestations. The series captures the artist’s family in simultaneously organic and postured routine, evoking a new type of viewer that is engaged and questioning the line between public and private, points of identification and points of discomfort. It is this oscillation that deconstructs the notion of mainstream taboo and recognizes the fundamental overlaps—such as childhood, obstacles, and old age—that bind the human experience. In Grandma, JC and Me in the Bathroom, 2007, Frazier captures the recognizable moment where a child is being bathed by someone close to her. In the same way this dependency is articulated at the beginning of life, it too is mirrored by the end; Grandma Wiping Gramps, 2003, captures a similar unconditional love born from dependency and this inevitable moment reaches forward back within both personal and collective histories to foster a situation of sharing where the gaze of traditional portraiture becomes the sightline that links us to those closest to us to strangers to the rest of the world.
Anthony Fuller similarly employs voyeurism and the gaze to deconstruct the tobelookedatness of traditional viewing paradigms and collapse the dividing line between the taboo and the ordinary. His video How Much is the Dog, 2008 postures the artist in stark isolationism, lying seemingly naked on a bed talking and looking directly into the camera. The viewer interpolates this as an intimate conversation, maybe even one that shouldn’t be had in public. As Fuller asks repeatedly, “How much is the dog?” the viewer begins to wonder if it is in fact possible to purchase undying love and affection. Fuller’s photographic series further introduces commodity culture into the seemingly private by rendering an outdated model of retail communication –the greeting card. So cute so cud so yours, 2007, questions the nature of sincerity and whether or not message—and meaning—can be bought and sold and Fuller urges us to question the levels of interruption we permit in the exchange of ideas and affection.
Shani Peters—who in her own words is interested in “the power of collective activity, the identification of the self within the whole, and in cyclical patterns throughout history and generation”—collapses the divisive line between fiction and history and the possible and the probable in ReProgram, 2008. Through both manual and digital collage, Peters combines mediated visuals of black political icons and fictional media characters within a single video and inserts conversations initiated by these icons of a racially divided past into a contemporary pop culture discussion about semiotics. The rapid succession of images and mash-up soundtracks mimic the information overload of contemporary news media and assert that definitions are fleeting and that to understand one’s own relation to history, one must simultaneously understand the processes by which we are constantly generating records that will one day be the relic.
Philip A. Robinson Jr. also discusses semiotics, the construction of knowledge and the subsequent relationship between the achievement gap and pop culture. WITNESS 1,2, & 3, 2008—a series of modified school chair desks endowed with pop culture symbols of success and upward mobility like the Nike swoosh—exposes a fixation within popular culture to replace memory and learned associations with idol worship and mimicry. Robinson Jr. diminishes the oppositional relation of education and celebrity by physically affixing the dream within the educational foundation.
Amin Rehman infuses this discussion of noise culture with a sense of immediacy and scope by invoking issues of globalization, trans-nationalism and diplomacy. In Black Hole, 2008—a 14’ text-based vinyl installation employing maxims, media jargon, and political rhetoric borrowed from media reports on the war in Iraq— partial signifiers such as HUMAN COST and ALMOST THERE take on distinctively unique and transient meanings in relation to the surrounding words. The original message context and content is deflated and refilled with possible meaning, bizarre truth and literary confusion. The result is an assault on prejudice—or the lack of any real observation—forcing the viewer to engage by reading and consequently reexamine his or her own affiliation with these words. Communal narratives spawn from the flat wall and the viewer starts to rework his or her identification with these familiar words, fears, and hopes on a global scale.
White Lies, Black Noise is a tuning in to the static that is the subtext all around us. It is a necessary recognition of rupture and a translation of this rupture into a post mainstream. The six artists in this exhibition are bound by an insuppressible urge to sound off about frequently tabooed subjects and approaches and this collective response is neither countercultural nor subcultural. It is the construction of a new frontier that embraces the avant-garde as fundamental and nothing more than should be expected of creative production and visual representation. With all of its grand political ramifications, this exhibition is equally personal and subtly boasts a new global citizenship in which people want to understand and position themselves within a changing globe and increasingly unstable notions of homeland, family and the self.
