See spread
published in: catalog for Wade Guyton, Seth Price,
Josh Smith and Kelley Walker at Künsthalle Zürich, Zürich 2006

Pump Up the Jam1

Ah pump it up, while the jam is pumpin'

Mr. Smith, Mr Price, Mr Guyton, Mr Walker pump it up, make my day! Make my, make my, make my day.

So pump it up Mr. Smith

Josh Smith, Josh Smith, Josh Smith. Who is JOSH SMITH, he is john doe upper case. S then H, blending first and last name. Don't keep it quiet. Spell it out all directions, it is anyhow not what it means. I'm gonna sign the shit out of that painting. Circularly pump it up. Dot it up! Machine and gesture in one. Looking like lyrical attempts, a chronic indifference of mass production and forgery of painterly, expressionistic signs.

Empty pumped up muscular gestures, spread around, not well hung... on the floor, on the furniture. A little here, there and everywhere, like an art bazaar hanging it all on the line. Drawings on the stools for us to put our asses on 'em. Make my day Mr. Smith, 'Make it Plain'! Gluing posters onto wooden boards, a delirious activist who lost direction of up and down.

I am Josh Smith, this is my name. It can be any name, anyone. John Doe, the expressionist - eternally, solipsistically, self-referentially pointing back onto himself, no outwards worldly reference, no need to do that Pollock dance. Invitation posters all over, as if spread by a madman (savant), with more names, dates of the occasion in which they appear, re-emphasizing now, again circling in onto the situation itself. The content is not pointing elsewhere in a look-a-like relation to an object, but resides in another kind of gesture. The figure disfigured, go figure.

Warhol's pee paintings, and the gesture... only men can gesture in this way, women make puddles squatting, no stroke is physically feasible. Make my day! According to Ronnie Cutrone2, W's assistant at the time, disappointed by the lack of brush stroke W. precluded Woman access to make no mark onto these canvases.

Prefabricated obsessional neurosisęstuttering the idea of the signature. By itself, the marker of authenticity, in this mechanized way, it starts to erode the fetishism of originality while reifying another kind of "difference"ęa difference produced by the sameness in the imprint. Repeat strokes turns into mud, puddles of paint, writing over writing. Smudging several fold; while hanging hard, strike a stroke.

Looking the other way, Mr. Smith has derived a series of pieces from the residue, the mess on his palettes, palette paintings, surfaces for the making of others. Promoting the puddle in murky colors. How long can one keep up one's disinterest, leaving out intentionality and gesture as we know it? These are no surrogate images. Secondary items, whose outcome was pre-decided by use and non-fixation, made via a process set-up for something else to occur. Fake factory-line gestures echoing back. So pump it up now! Mr. Smith goes dancing.

Get your boody on the floor tonight, make my day

It's 2006 Mr. Price! Make my day. Put on your golden jacket, Jacko! All things considered, Jump, staged Yves Kleinan į la 2006! A glossy time stamp in plastic wrapping. Protruding breasts and fists. Power of flower, I don't need a place to stay!

Ropes from boats-men, cowboys, craftsmen, something ancient like Lascaux. Dark cave needs day-glow lift. 'There is nothing worse than an image of a falling horse'. History painting re-distributed, this time fluorescent green. Make it mean, beyond data stream, photocopy, closer to old-school mimeograph purple with young student high from the fumes emanating from the printouts. Slow, communicate slowly. Mechanical duplication, producing copies by pressing ink onto paper through openings cut in a stencil. Distribution method: handouts. Distorted images of beheaded hostages slowed down, made real. Mr. Price, what is abstraction anyway? See cos that's where the party is at, if you'll find out if you're too bad.

Flimsy see-through set up, held up by shot through rivets. Heads are rolling. Nothing is holding them erect, up right, an impotent scaffolding, What runs through, ropes soft and limp, how can one pump 'em up, make them stiff, create a structure, where all is sliding, falling out from behind.

White fucked up molds, all traces of production left behind, sagging against the wall. These imprints, more than a photograph, amateur 3-D scan. Some objects wouldn't affix, gliding out of focus, hint of motion blur. Sometimes leaving the real object behind, indexical function overdrive. Backsides all but hidden, flashing what we are not supposed to see, empty signifiers on display, there is nothing there, no climax for understanding entire scenarios, no explanation, just sensuous thin surface show-off, like the perfect commercial without a peak. All is pornographically, explicitly showed. When the moves are transparent and flaky, all the more reason for suspicion.

Mr. Price doubling up, the palettes, here inscribed with various signatures generically written in imitational brush scripture - first names of well-known female artists: Martha for Rosler, Sherrie for Levine, or Lee Lee Lee as in Krassner, Lozano and Bontecou. Mr. Price, the first person address ambivalently hovers between a cheering salute and an informal familiarity verging on irreverence, you can call me Saddam. Mr Price, - authenticity re-used, shifted sideways, who's shoes are you in?

Your feet are stompin' and the jam is bomping. Looking for support to hold on to, sliding points of reference surround. Warped images of warped events - slippery times indeed, horses don't fall, they slide around on slick surfaces, history image rebound. Lascaux on plastic - the next tourist souvenir. Latest model 2006. Hurry up. Make my day! The pornographic excitement of see-through, what are you selling? All seems even more opaque. Distributed imagery re-circulated, the effect becomes a focus on the slides of signification, rather than on societal issues. The medium is not the message, its relational effects, co-dependent items, not an isolated event.

Now, pushing of meaning and encoding in (post) capitalist information society, nothing is what it seems (but it is nothing else either); an eternal circulation of rhetoric or ways of saying "it". First cut off the throat so we can't say "it", then smoke 'em out. It is 2006 baby, a figure of speech, only an image. If there is smoke there must be fire.

Yo, pump it up.

Mr. Guyton, pump it up U. U shapes in polished stainless steel, comes in different sizes, lower case to caps. 'Sesame Street' for grown-ups who forgot how to play with language, or Alphabet Art starting on the wrong end of the line. The U as image as sculpture as letter shape resembling a U, not necessarily being a U. Make my, make my day. Playing after Smithson's site/non-site rupture of the naturalized bond of resemblance between language (piece) and world, between the sign and the signified. The metaphorical connection has been severed. A make-belief realist 'representation' in tasteful steel, excellent resemblance! Truthful to reality, what is a realistic u? It can only be compared in a series of signs parallel to other signs, with no reference point. Read as a pronoun, the omni-directional address of the U nomadically creates its own non-site, pluralistically pointing somewhere else, acting more like the personally addressed letter from the Chase Manhattan Bank, all identically mechanically signed.

Stripes; a bad scan, a failed print, with no mark or gesture from the hand - plenty of printer effects, such as bleeds, drips, stripes from dirty printer heads and residue of ink from working with the wrong materials, suggesting 'bad behavior' and even violence during the printer process. Overtrumping technology while playing it low. 'This stripe is not a stripe' - looked at and read simultaneously, the distinction between to show and to name, to shape and to say, to reproduce and to articulate, to imitate and to signify, has been perverted, slid, even eradicated. The border between language and image is seriously set out of focus.

Looking homologically like any other stripe, cutting free in an endless line of reproductions, the illusion of pictorial realism has been disturbed in a similar way to the U shapes. To Foucault3, Magritte's work - especially the calligram in This is Not a Pipe (1926) - inaugurates a play of transferences which proliferate; this is a pipe in mimetic representation has become the this is not a pipe of circulating similitudes, throwing us back and forth between the modes, where text and image dizzily and confused trade places. The stripes refer to nothing but them selves, beyond original and less and less faithful copies, there is no swap, referent and reference united, the incommensurability between plastic imagery and discourse temporarily resolved, the marriage is done.

These visual puns or language games breaks discourse's action of naming and fixing the referent to the sign. In the paradox performed by both accepting and rejecting the piece as text or image, representation slides around unsettled like a co-opted advertising space. Representation re-presented as non-representable - a fluctuating target, appearing and disappearing at indiscernible locations, in a meaningless monosyllabic babble, past a distinction between content and form; conceptual formalism no more. Here is the fire! Fiery U's floating freely in a non so flame proof amorphous space of un-pronounced construction, with digital flames upside down and dripping ink puddles generated by the printers' assisted mecano-expressionistic dance. Oh so hot! Pump it up a little more!

If only we had text to indicate if we are to read them as U, no surround letters, apart from the Xes of course, if that's what they are. The reference may be to a U on a white board at the optometrists. Pretty bad sight for that one, going for retinal surgery. Vision became an X-rated display with a fuck-U in mind. Not as in Stripe, but S as in ace or ass. Mr. Guyton, thank you for stealing the site of signification. Around a fire place, U and u in an X-rated positions. The jam is dripping, sweetly running off the painting. Make my day!

The Jam is pumping and the product is jumping

Braniff Airways Ad campaign, long gone 70s' celebrities side-by-side, Mr. Walker lines 'em up two and two. Printed, slided off, mis-matched color layers, cyan, magenta and yellow. What normally keeps the image all together; the registration mark as a space-cadet, a free-floating target. Red, Yellow and Blue, who's afraid of it? Printing failed, out of focus like odd 3-D appearances, drunk on sweet bourbon. Comes in two, Dali and other no longer recognizable personalities, seeing double or just repeated? Free posters, Warhol-Liston coupled up, candy given away - this time scanned bars of chocolate, sugar honey, with digital Stars on top, easily generated Photoshop effect - hard edge brush #2004. Stripes scanned from the fabric of the plane chairs. Sugar baby love, or who's afraid of cmyk, Virginia wolf, or who's actually afraid of flying at all? Socialites and symbols of society, Richard Branson, twice in person, make my, make my. I am cmyk. I can flaunt any color!

Woman, black, then red, yellow, blue. Squirting around whitening toothpaste to clean doesn't make the chocolate go away. Beneath the layer of toothpaste, sprayed directly on to the flat scanner bed, are layers with scanned covers of the behinds of Black and Hispanic divas. Keep Photoshop layers separate for infinite flexibility in your image processing. Multiple versions will do. Jacko mug shot rotated 4x90º, sneaky visuals with identity information on display, inverted sugar-daddy Warhol. Don't forget to recycle! The ethnic colors of United colors of Benetton are limited, as in Yellow for minority category Chinese. By re-using the tropes one opens up for significant sliding in and out of pre-determined positions. Dirty talk with sweet voice to break out. Then clean your mouth!

Coca cola red, race riot red picture, all silk-screened, thinking of sugar daddy again, chocolate on top, puddle look-a-like, no pool of blood. This is what the background is for. Repetitive splashes, rotated, screened and turned around, nuanced in dark, milk and white chocolate. It stinks milk. What about politics, a race riot? No, content swaps place for surface value, the smeared looking non-gestural brown mess, the inedible chocolate. An inoperative component doing double duty as both 'form' and 'content'. The potency is in the puddle, formlessly defacing the surface. One image, over and over, iconically rotated 90º at a time. Half-way, at 180º, Coca-Cola sign reversed - aloC acoC - 'Oh look a cook!' Plenty of such in the image; sailor, cop, black man overtaken. Village People hovering over the 'Loca Coco' situation, with raving dog, all across the walls. Pretty loaded for an empty image... Advertising gone haywire, the gaze of the gallery visitor is co-opted into the craving eye of the late night 7-eleven customer. In an oversaturated visual culture, any tricks allowed.

Transparency and opacity are inter-exchangeable, arriving at no ordinary transcendence. In an allegorical reading5, one text is read through another, through layers, shifting location from which meaning is relayed. Sequentially layered depth rather than working across, depth here is virtual (not even a quarter inch thick), making for surface readings of layers flattened for production. The layers of the image rampage over layers of tropes and possibilities for meaning-production, suggesting no one will be THE one, no closure at sight. The literacy of the audience is exploited and abused to the point where prolific ejaculation of signification and sense is expelled with the force of an allergic reaction like toothpaste discharge.

We encounter our pseudo-conscious, mass-cultured consumer minds already thoroughly excavated. One recycles a used item and so decides its path to dissolution. Mr. Walker's recycling of images and sense-making compromises the viewer into partaking, shifting subjectivity into multiple locations, by playing with the expectations and the rules of circulation. Submitting us to re-enactment therapy, here meaning is re-use, wrong use, or any use and the effects become the message. This eco-art looks like mock-play without hygienic Green Peace pieces, obstructing construction of meaning. The work echoes worn out representational strategies, but instead of dialectically affirming or being usurped, it cuts the layers loose to endlessly re-circulate known sign-to-sign-relations. Like flies attracted to Jam, bulemic repetition and sugar addiction frantically pumping. No satisfaction in sight. Pump it up a little more!

Look at here the crowd is jumpin'

Stars and Stripes, oh America. KKK on the Marlborough pack, red and white, maybe an upside down horse or a dick on the Camel one. It's getting hot, more than subliminally so - image trafficking for consumer recruitment. We don't see what we see, a scanned stripe is not a printing mistake. A rope is a rope and a stroke is a stroke. All is conceivable, but not visible, it's all in the hanging. This is no 'rebus art', although it may seem as if knowing that this is an image of the beheading makes you feel sane and temporarily in control - more on the right side of history - as if having ceased the circulation of possible significations. Clear gestures are not useful in understanding this information, as for a puddle of paint, this logic is murky and warped. Seizures of free-floating signifiers multiplying into subversive, perversive, persuasive, mutative, manipulative displays of hanging.

So how's it hanging?

Remember, I'm a woman, I wouldn't know how to answer that question. Structural dis-placements, gridded 90º rotations, flimsy behavior or what so ever positions, all over, doubling up. I can only pump 'em up.

Make my, make my, make my day, make it slide, flipping sides, trading places, means and ends.

Everybody, a little harder, get the party going. Pump it! Pump it! Pump it!

1 Technotronic, "Pump up the Jam" on the album "The Album", Capitol, 1989
2 Andy Warhol, "The Complete Picture", Channel 4 Television MMII, 1999
3 Michel Foucault, "This is not a Pipe", trans. James Harkness. Berkely: U of California pp.44., 1973.
4 See for example Lev Manchovich, "The Language of New Media", The MIT Press. pp.xxvi-xxviii., 2001. The emergence of New Media with it's use of
   digital effects are compared to the making of Dziga Vertov's film Man with a Movie Camera, where Vertov turned the plethora of visual effects into
   a contemporary relevant artistic language, using the new cinematic possibilities for a new modality of life.
5 See for example Craig Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism - Part 2," October 13 (Summer 1980) pp. 58-80.