Herman and Herbert:
The Frye-McLuhan Force-Field
(c) 1999, Vera Frenkel
The following text is based on a presentation given during Podium 1: The Place of Media and the Question of Art, at the Konfigurationen: Zwischen Kunst und Medien Kongress (Configurations: Between Art and Media) Kassel, 4 September, 97, and again later, somewhat revised each time, at the McLuhan Program Coach House Festival, Toronto, 21 X 98, at the Institute for Studies in Women and Gender, SUNY, Buffalo, March 15, 1999, and at the National Institute for the Arts, Hamilton, Spring 2001.
In the Fall of 1997, I was startled to find myself with others at a podium in Kassel, in Germany, invited to discuss the place of media and the question of art, and to consider specifically, in public, how I came to be engaged in an interdisciplinary practice centering on video which involves both working with and critiquing what are referred to as new media.
Mapping my formative Toronto years for a foreign audience may have seemed strange, but in some ways it feels even stranger to do this in an English-speaking city close to home. In either case, standing elsewhere and looking back at an era that one has lived through unthinkingly, as if it must be perfectly natural, has a tendency to reframe things in unexpected ways. With the play of time and distance, the familiar can seem foreign and vice versa.
For me, any question regarding how the so-called new media shape my work means at the same time how best to use them to interrogate their power, a role that the psychoanalyst and cultural theorist Jeanne Randolph has described as "the work's potential to change the conditions into which it has been received. "
(1)But the process of looking back has its own imperatives. Given over to the deceptions and revelations of memory, I find myself re-entering the psychic space of my early years as an artist, experiencing again as if for the first time the formative impact of the media I came to regard as second nature, always, it seemed emanating from and returning to video in one form or another: installation to broadcast, web-site to stand-alone tape. And I began to see in retrospect the mix of circumstance, ambivalence and longing that constituted the force-field around my practice, the cultural climate of the time and place in which, as an immigrant daughter of refugee parents, I found myself.
No one interested in the arts could be young in the Toronto of the 60's and 70’s without being aware of the presence in that city of Herman Northrop Frye, the great literary scholar who, in works like The Anatomy of Criticism, The Secular Scripture, and The Great Code traced the role and structure of myths in shaping our lives, and our programmed re-enactment of them; and of the man referred to then as the pop philosopher of media, author of The Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media, The Medium is the Massage, Herbert Marshall McLuhan, and the gang of noisy accolytes hanging around the old coach-house on Queen's Park Crescent that served as his centre of operations.
Frye and McLuhan, Herman and Herbert, formed the twin poles of intellectual exploration that permeated the life of an otherwise puritan town where in those years you had to sign your name, address and phone number on a pre-printed form before the Ontario Liquor Control Board could be persuaded to sell you a bottle of wine.
Frye's gravitas and McLuhan's love of the verbal trapeze, elephant and flea, lion and unicorn, Henry James and H. G. Wells, -- no longer part of our everyday reality, their antinomic presences nevertheless still haunt the spaces, both literal and figurative, that they respectively inhabited in different corners of the city. Victoria College on the one hand and the Coach House on the other are populated differently now, and a woman can make art, even (or especially) using video and other new media without feeling like an alien intruder into another species’ terrain. At the time, working without elders or exemplars, or any exterior reflection of my concerns, it's perhaps not surprising that I found myself making works centred on the nature of absence.
(SLIDES: String Games Inter-City Improvisations; 1978 - 90 Survey. )
While Frye's work steadily attracted more and more respect, McLuhan’s name, today a synonym and label for a certain kind of insight, prompted less positive reactions in his home town then. It seemed as natural as breathing to profess a healthy skepticism towards the fervid Utopian- and Dystopianisms that characterized the media debates emanating from Marshall's weekly seminar. Having fun with and acknowledging the thrill of ideas was un-Torontonian. A wave of chic rock clubs, bistros and discothèques calling themselves The Global Village opened and then closed again. There were endless newspaper and television interviews, many now lost. While it was suspected that McLuhan’s ideas were being taken seriously in other countries, this error of judgement was regarded, in time-honoured Canadian fashion, in the same way as France's love affair with Jerry Lewis -- as a curious foreign enthusiasm. It didn't mean we had to comply. Yet we discerned creeping into our discourse a number of tenets that are re-emerging in the current debates as axioms to be cracked open: The notion of a global village, media as extensions of the body, each new medium cannibalizing its most recent predecessor, the medium as message, all of which now seem quite plausible and self-evident, at the time were sudden, surprising sparks in a stolid intellectual milieu, and the McLuhan phenomenon was regarded as suspect in his home town -- and still is in some quarters. We left it to the Americans and the Europeans to return him to us with vine-leaves in his hair.
Fast-forward from then to now, and meet the young men I sometimes work with who are in thrall to dreams of cybersex and drawn to delusions of media-based power. I hear them discussing knowledgeably and earnestly the prospect of virtual intimacy with this or that voluptuous celebrity, while others, making gallery art and debating yet another alleged death and re-birth of painting, view me and them with suspicion.
Situated in space and time between these two brotherhoods; the Herman - Herbert force-field on the one hand, with its world of intellectual passion, and the current young men's fantasies of seducing a virtual Marilyn Monroe on the other, with its smart cyber-talk, I was protected by the curious twin invisibilities that accompany being a woman and a Canadian. For such a person, a person off the map, so to say, there were no expectations, and therefore no rules. I found myself working with the kinds of embedded assumptions carried by popular literary formats like the romance or the suspense thriller, finding these useful vehicles of inquiry into the questions that interested me. As you saw in the quick slide survey, I began to make videotapes, situating these inside installations, which I then used as sets within which I shot the next tape, each re-creating the world for the next.
(SCREENING: Excerpts from Signs of a Plot: A Text, True Story & Work of Art; The Secret Life of Conrelia Lumsden: Her Room in Paris. )
The climate I had inhaled before then, in Montréal, included the aura that lingered even two generations later of Rutherford's historic experiments in particle physics at McGill University, my Alma Mater, and the news from up the street at the Montreal Neurological Institute, of Wilder Penfield’s and Donald Hebb’s successes in mapping the precise locus in the brain of where we store those structures we call parts of speech . The biologist Desmond Morris, who later wrote a not so interesting book called The Human Ape, was finishing his rather more rigorous doctoral dissertation, The Biology of Art, in which he reported his field studies on the differences between artist and non-artist chimpanzees, finding in the animal kingdom evidence of what was hitherto assumed to be quintessentially human, and undoing those assumptions.
Other experiments of the day suggested not only that chimps and orangutans could be observed to invent culture but that they knew how to transmit these invented behaviours to other members of their band. The anthropologist Margaret Mead, one of the few women, with Ruth Benedict, whose work was widely known at the time, remained active and effective despite the standard mockeries of male colleagues ( now entering a new posthumous phase, in which all her work is being called into question). Among other things, Mead was doing studies of "handedness", tracing the relationships between open and closed-handed carrying of infants to the larger cultural beliefs in those same societies that seemed to echo or form these behaviours. Michael Polanyi was looking at the human-machine relationship and writing in the magazine "Science" about systems of dual control, and Expo '67 in Montreal marked a national coming of age and an international presence, encouraging the notion that all these frontiers could and would be effortlessly traversed.
Somehow, in the process of mapping borders between human and animal, human and machine, these boundaries were conceptually dissolved and art-making became part of a greater multidirectional continuum than I could have supposed from the artist-as-martyr-hero recruitment myths that had originally drawn me into studio practice.
As a child of the old world, marked by the consequences of World War II, and a stranger in this new world where, for example, newspapers were mostly advertisements, the evening news was brought to me by Lipton's chicken soup, and any reference to The War was taken to mean Viet Nam, I had a sense all along, despite being engaged in the turmoil of the civil rights and anti-war movements, of looking in at a diorama of complacency. The profoundly optimistic Montreal Expo '67, and its cynical Vancouver echo in Expo '86 bracketed a climate which featured a predominant lack of political passion among artists and writers punctuated by the occasional outburst of cultural nationalism, earnest or expedient, and the persistent, continuously bewildered narrative of the unformed Canadian identity which continues today. To a visitor, all this seemed both strange and exotic.
By now women thinkers and doers had emerged in Canada whose writings and actions entered the debates: physicist and engineer Ursula Franklin; gallerist Dorothy Cameron; artist and Canada Council Art Bank founder Suzanne Rivard-Lemoyne; political journalist Christina McCall. Against an ever more interesting background, which included the work and influence of artists like painter Joyce Wieland, sculptor Irene Whitttome, performance artist Gathie Falk, and video maker Lisa Steele, a whole weatherfront of poets and novelists flourished, from P. K. Page and Margaret Laurence to Margaret Atwood and Marian Engel, with many shining stars between; and a generation later, on the new media front, psychoanalyst and art critic Jeanne Randolph, mentioned earlier; historian and cultural theorist Dot Tuer; media artists Nell Tenhaaf, Catherine Richards, Nancy Paterson, to name only a few. Peopled with gifted women, the void between the two brotherhoods was not so vast and I was less alone in my thinking.
Looking back I see that the role of the stranger, however complex and sometimes difficult, served as a useful antenna in my own work, and is at the root of a body of work begun in those years described by Dot Tuer as:
"creating an electronic landscape in which it is the structure of memory rather than the structure of information that is reconfigured . . . an ongoing interrogation of how remembering and forgetting are cast into flux by the new technologies, and questioning what was forgotten and what was unspoken in the impending ascendancy of simulacrum over reality. " Art, she continues, that is characterized by:
"the destabilization of narrative conventions, engaging the viewer in an active process of piecing together meaning from fractured points of view. . ",
(2) something I am asking you to do again today.The cultural fractures of the immigrant experience found their echo in the discontinuities of the analogue-to-digital shift, both migratory conditions underscoring the fact that nothing would ever be the same.
There were a number of reasons, looking back, why I chose to study anthropology. But mostly I wanted to understand the role of art and art-making in the largest possible sense. I also wanted to be able to look at the world I live in with some perspective, or, more accurately, from multiple perspectives. One of the few statements of Herbert that I remember taking seriously was in an interview, with Patrick Watson, I think, in the now-legendary CBC Television programme, This Hour has Seven Days. The interviewer asked McLuhan if he could tell the viewers why he was so interested in new media. "It’s not that I'm especially interested in new media, " said Herbert thoughtfully, leaning back in the studio armchair. "I just feel that it's my job as a philosopher, my obligation, to examine the juggernaut as it rolls over me. "
This unexpected remark stayed with me and helped to form my choice of video as a gateway to some sort of understanding of the world and to characterize my approach.
Sometimes, in the midst of an intense discussion, considering the shape of what I am hearing and saying, I’m able to see my companion and myself as informants, living testimonies to the culture by which we were shaped. I don't succeed, of course, in quitting the culture and I don't mind not succeeding, but it is perhaps this awareness that enables me to enter the various worlds of new media with more curiosity than evangelism. This curiosity has allowed me to work, for example, on a project on the subject of the unrealized Hitlermuseum in Linz as diagnostic of the implications of the Kunstpolitik of the Third Reich and of Hitler's cultish promise of millennial triumph; or more recently, to begin preparing a video-Web soap opera on the travails of a large cultural institution, enabling me in both cases to consider material that might otherwise be too painful.
(SLIDES: The Body Missing Project)
At the mid-point between the '67 and '86 world fairs, in an essay on the question of identity, "Haunted by Lack of Ghosts", Northrop Frye wrote of the impact of technology and the resulting change in our perception of the landscape leading to its seeming annihilation:
". . . Consciousness of nature as a territory but not as a home . . . . goes with the feeling that improved human communications means a straighter and therefore less interesting path through nature, until with the airplane, the sense of travelling through nature itself disappears. "
(3)Accompanied by both real and perceived disappearances of nature, and a sense of working in and around what Cocteau, in his 1957 speech to the Oxford Union cheerfully described as "the fecund dark" with its intriguing unknowns, I developed, in my student days at McGill, a deep interest in the phenomenon of so-called cargo-cult practices. Whatever are the metaphors that come to mind when discussing new media, from frontier to Frankenstein, from nervous system to Faust, any of the conceptual or technological models by which we try to understand what we are doing and through which to discover whether we are inventing or being invented by the machines we devise, -- I am nevertheless drawn to the notion of the cargo-cult and its millenarianism as a useful model for understanding what is happening, made all the more poignant currently by the tiresome rhetoric and hollow civic and national opportunism, and occasional touch of real awe, surrounding the onset of the year 2000.
The phenomenon of the so-called cargo-cult has at its centre a belief in, or longing for, the return of ancestors who would initiate a promised thousand years of bliss, the Millennium. Some of you have heard me talk in another context, about the cargo-cult phenomenon in relation to the Kunstraub policies of the Third Reich but today I want to raise it as an instance of the ritualization of false consciousness and a question regarding the ways in which new media are perceived and used.
In cargo-cult practices, though there was variety in the ceremonial ways in which the ancestors were to be encouraged to return in order to effect their rescue, all approaches had in common a level of ritualized self-deception that seemed necessary and helpful to the protagonists, but was in fact delusional, and in many cases even destructive to the tribe or group.
For purposes of discussion, I would like to suggest for example, that the widely shared aim of a computer facilitated intimacy with Marilyn Monroe and the work invested in achieving this, falls, for me, into the realm of cargo-cult practice, where the imagined objective, overwhelmingly desirable as it may seem to some, fuels conduct that grows more and more arbitrary and self-referential.
Following from this, the image and the idol being seen in some circles as one and the same, and given what Jeanne Randolph calls the computer's unlimited capacity for forgery, it is tempting to speculate as to the nature and extent of contemporary idolatry in another sense, in the addiction to representation manifested in the dreams of animators and special effects enthusiasts or, for example, in the centralizing of power over visual sources in the ownership of representation rights by the Microsoft Corporation image archive.
And yet, to be fair, there are other ways of viewing the questions raised by proposed uses and effects of new media than just falling into a cautionary tale of the hazard of bliss fictions. Dot Tuer has written that "the desire to reach out and touch each other across time and space is central to the exploration of new technologies. " David Rokeby, the brilliant Canadian artist-programmer has written in another context: "Perhaps it is only within the complex subjectivity of the body that we can question and resist our desire for all-embracing models, " and, saying this in another way: ". . . alternative ways of reflecting on the body create a fragmented vision of (it) that breaks the stranglehold of broadcast notions. "(4) (Breaking the stranglehold of broadcast notions seems to me both a real and a metaphoric arena for general as well as feminist reconsideration of received ideas. It is, after all, not only women's realities that are jeopardized by that stranglehold. ) Whereas on the one hand Francine Dagenais writes enthusiastically about the capacity of virtual reality to provide the participant with the illusion of moving through space bodiless, Rokeby says again, soberly: "Because we find ourselves alienated from our bodies we effectively abandon them. They are appropriated by our culture, and they become public property. "(5)
And while we are absorbing that, there is the claim of Gottfried Hattingen that "Each living being will become a molecular machine consisting of Wetware and Software; of damp biological life machinery and gene technology control programs. "(6) Reading these last words, which I admit I find annoying, I'm obliged to admit that it has been my fate with media and the ideas they provoke, as it has been in my relations with men, that if my first response is suspicion, it is quite possible that I will find myself before too long quite deeply involved.
And, as this is a memoir, I can tell you that that is exactly what has happened in a number of instances where I have found myself making work in response to unique invitations or challenges or unexpected circumstances. You've seen some of the results of this mix of curiosity and suspicion of new media, such as String Games: Improvisations for Inter-City Video in 1974, where I had access to Bell Canada Teleconferencing facilities between Montreal and Toronto; or Attention: Lost Canadian a project for Expo '86 in Vancouver, in which I was invited to try out developing versions of Amiga software in a work which appeared on a succession of 48 monitors; or in 1987 when, as artist in residence at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, I found myself living and working in the former Playboy Mansion and wrote and directed Trust Me, It’s Bliss: The Hugh Hefner/Richard Wagner Connection a multi-disciplinary performance for the Mansion's ballroom, using Hefner's tailor-made 35mm projection equipment left behind in his exodus to the West coast, the tape from which I am still hoping to be able to afford to do before the raw footage rots; or in 1990, in the midst of a project on the relation between consumerism and messianism -- seeing both as akin to cargo-cult practices -- was given the opportunity to use the Piccadilly Circus Spectacolor Board and being unable to resist.
Invited to make a work at documenta IX in 1992, the first documenta since the Berlin wall came down, it seemed to me important to address in some way that we live in a period of the greatest migration in human history, and this was acknowledged in the work I made there, . . . from the Transit Bar, a six-channel videodisc installation and functional piano bar. Later, at ISEA95, as a new kid in cyber-space, I found myself transmuting the video material and launching the prototype for the Body Missing Web site, an extension of a site specific multi-channel work on the Hitlermuseum first shown in Linz, in 1994.
(SCREENING: Body Missing; one of the six tapes. )
In none of these instances did I set out with the idea of working in a particular medium or in new media in general, and yet I found myself again and agai drawn to the video camera, the monitor, the special relation with co-workers and with the community which these permit. Each new circumstance presented its own possibilities of content, place, means, to which I responded. As the situation unfolded, it would reveal to me yet again the speed and complexity with which new approaches could be conceived and remind me with what strain and awkwardness their realization is often accompanied.
But what enabled me to respond as freely I did was, I think, in part the result of years of invisibility at a time of fierce cultural transition. Inhabiting the aforementioned fecund dark, isolated from the governing art milieu, the only thing to do was to follow one's heart. The opportunity to use Bell Canada’s 1974 fledgling teleconferencing facility introduced me to video, and my first tape -- three separate Montreal - toronto transmissions, or nine hours on four monitors. It felt like second nature, and I’ve never looked back. Redemption, if that was a concern at all, had little to do with hoped-for magical interventions of returned ancestors or the increasing power of machine memory, but with redeeming the citizen-self, the self as citizen, through observation, transgression, contradiction, subversion, interrogation and the ongoing critique of cult practices from art theft to cyber-sex, in short through the process of bearing witness. And the fact that I became an artist at a time and in a place where the rules, whatever they might be, seemed to dissolve into a continuous flux, made present to the imagination a real epistemological shift, and revealed orthodoxies in general, including orthodoxies regarding new media, as being deeply unattractive, if not dangerous, constructs.
Further on in the essay "Haunted by Lack of Ghosts", writing this time about Canadian poetry, Northrop Frye quotes the critic Milton Wilson on the advantages of a poetry such as ours that is less than a hundred years old:
"Having begun a millennium too late, there is not much point being correctly fashionable. " There is freedom in these words, though perhaps just the freedom of invisibility, a condition that women, Canadians and Cocteau in rather different ways, all recognize. In the same passage, Frye describes as well the advantages of
"being able to look down at tradition all at once, instead of being pushed ahead of it like a terminal moraine or a glacier. " (7)
Keeping in mind Herbert Marshall McLuhan's penetrating scrutiny from his perch below the new media juggernaut, or picturing Herman Northrop Frye looking down from the clouds at "tradition all at once", there is a story Herman tells which Herbert might have enjoyed: Herman is listening to a friend in the Arctic recount a tale of a doctor from "the south" -- south here meaning any urban Canadian centre more or less along the friendly U. S. border such as Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg or Vancouver -- who was travelling the tundra with an Inuit guide.
As Frye tells it, recalling his friend’s words,
‘A blizzard blew up, and they had to bivouac for the night. What with the cold, the storm, the loneliness, the doctor panicked and began shouting "We are lost!" The guide looked at him thoughtfully and after a minute said quietly, "We are not lost. We are here"
(8)We are here; you, me, Herman and Herbert.
There is, it seems, no lack of ghosts . . .
I look forward to our discussions.
(c) Vera Frenkel, 1999, Toronto
(1)
"Influencing Machines: The Relationship between Art and Technology" in Psychoanalysis and Synchronized Swimming, YYZ Books, Toronto, 1991(2) Dot Tuer, "Threads of Memory and Exile: Vera Frenkel Retrospective", Images Festival Catalogue, Toronto, 1997
(3) Re-printed in Mythologizing Canada: Essays on the Canadian Literary Imagination, 1977, edited by Branko Gorjup, Legas Publishing, 1997, pp 120, 121)
(4) Bioapparatus, Banff Centre for the Arts, 1993, pp 41, 42
(5) Ibid. , page 41
(6) Ibid. , page 44
(7) Ibid. , Page 117
(8) Ibid. , Page 172