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'It is possible to think of the INS as a cultural narrative, a viral
entity that exists due to a growing number of participants
and collaborations with fellow artists and writers.
Many people fail to see the point of the INS's weird
research and read it as an ironic joke or a ridiculous
mission of mapping death in the style of an expedition
... Without addressing allegations of necrophilia [the
INS] considers death only as a space of representation,
a realm to be explored and brought out by means of a
set of practices such as drawings, maps, texts and speeches
(craft as the INS calls it) ... As a tactical and philosophical
hybrid between Futurist farce and agit-prop manipulation
of the communications network, the INS functions as
a complete artwork. The combination of ananchronistic
artistic models like the manifesto ... the recuperation
of discourses obsessed by control structures (governmental
agencies, secret services, party committees) all represent
a parody of a totalising project about knowledge, not
death.' (Untitled) |
Full text:
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love
the Bomb by Diana Baldon
As the stepdaughter of a world-wide sect of Pynchonphiles,
I am certain of one thing: my encounter with the International
Necronautical Society has necrotised my perception of art.
I wish to clarify how I learned to stop worrying about the
‘necro’ side of things and started to love this
fictional organisation, founded in London in 1999. Tom McCarthy,
the movement’s founder and INS General Secretary, is,
as a writer, a great devotee of the American novelists William
S. Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon. It’s no surprise that
the birth of the INS as an artistic project, currently disseminating
like rumour in the art world, can be commented in the light
of these two cryptic Masters of illusion. With Pynchon in
particular, whose mysterious whereabouts - having ‘disappeared’
in 1963 – have called into question his very existence,
theories abound: an interviewee thought of having seen him
in drag in his store in the 60s, but couldn’t be sure;
other say he might have turned up to their look-alike contest
in a New York bar.
I like thinking of the INS as a cultural narrative, a viral
entity that exists in virtue of a growing number of participants
and collaborations with fellow artists and writers. Many people
fail to see the point of the INS’ weird researches and
read it as an ironic joke or the ridiculous mission to map
death in the style of an Argonauts’ expedition, giving
it no value from an artistic and literary point of view. McCarthy
describes his society as the ‘…appropriation and
re-purposing a variety of cultural 'moments', in particular
the now-defunct structures and procedures of early 20th century
avant-garde.’ Rejecting allegations of necrophilia,
he considers death only as a space of representation, an alternative
realm to be explored and brought out by means of a set of
artistic practices such as drawings, maps, texts in the art
of newspaper’s obituaries and reports, events in the
form of pseudo-bureaucratic residencies, hearings and inspections.
But, as a tactical and philosophical hybrid between Futurist
farce and agit-prop manipulating the communications network,
the INS is, in my opinion, one of the most refined and complete
art projects I have come across in recent years.
The combination of anachronistic artistic models like the
manifesto, the Surrealist and Futurist traditions, the nostalgic
recuperation of literary genres obsessed by control structures
- governmental agencies, secret services, military committees
-, all these figures represent, for the INS, the parody of
a totalising project of knowledge, not of death. Through the
release, ironic, of a loud and bombastic manifesto, they intend
to renew the cross-over between politics, art and literature
that characterised the 20th century avant-garde: Should art
be political? How can art be political? Their declarations
are overloaded, yet a rhetorical pastiche constructing an
irritating half-corporate half-Soviet-style fiction, in the
urge to command and infiltrate the unknown space of death
(and not that of the living dead or Death Metal).
Indeed scandal was in its heyday at the beginning of the 20th
century, and it now comes back as a dead loop. The reframing
of the disordered network of images in Filippo T. Marinetti’s
Futurist Manifesto (1909), together with the ‘revolutionary’
irrational imagination described by André Breton in
his First Surrealist Manifesto (1924) are valued by INS as
metaphors, rather than political statements. These in fact
appear within highly staged settings that vaguely recall the
New York Happening for their improvised genre of spectacle
sitting between art exhibition and theatrical performance
and, nonetheless, an outraged audience. I think there are
some interesting parallels to be made here between how Susan
Sontag has described this art form and the practice elected
by the INS: both are, in her words, ‘animated collages’
or ‘trompes l’oeil brought to life’. Orbiting
around the core concerns of territory, marking and erasure,
the INS’ assessments, examinations, hearings and reports
look back at the twentieth century avant-gardes not as art
movements but as modes of sensibility cutting across all arts
of the past century. Replaying their will to destroy conventional
meanings to create counter-meanings, their appreciation for
the derelict bits of modernity, atmospheres of entombment
and - why not - insanity, the INS construct is the extension
of such ideas: an elaborate set of allusions, repetitions
and self-references that, if it does refer to something, that
would be the experience of making art and literature itself.
A template frequently used by the INS in their last projects
is an extract from the 1950s re-elaboration of the Orphean
myth by poet, artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau where Orpheus
is feverishly listening to signals sent by mysterious radio
announcements. Later the poet will be seduced by Death who,
rather than a scary skeleton with a scythe, is a beautiful
princess riding in a magnificent Rolls Royce escorted by motorcycle
police and controlled by the Committee of the Underworld,
which is a city ruined by an aerial bombardment. Like Cocteau,
the INS intends to expose issues relating the production of
art, inspiration, imagination and, in particular, frequency.
This has resolved in the complex re-enactment of the cinematic
passage which took place last April at the London’s
Institute of Contemporary Arts under the heading Calling All
Agents and involved numerous Transmission Agents, Dactylographic
Assistants (as they were called) and other personnel recruited
among writers, artists, producers and cultural critics. The
passage embodies the INS’ plan to find an unknown ‘frequency
of discourse’, acting on people's minds, between their
fantasies and paranoias, and occupy it. Visually inspired
by Ken Adam’s view of the Pentagon’s underground
‘War Room’ looking at model planes over the world,
the reconstruction of an INS radio station didn’t read
into Kubrick’s parody of Cold War but paid homage to
Burroughs and Pynchon’s ideas of media going haywire.
Calling All Agents was the set up of a broadcasting unit,
namely ‘the crypt’, where freshly-recruited ‘INS
agents’ were instructed to source information out of
all available media — telephone, TV, radio, internet,
press — to be cut, juxtaposed and broadcast it back
together by the INS Communications and Encodings Subcommittee.
Translating Pynchon’s belief that every medium is a
drug taken from the communications stream, and his scenarios
made of agents running around, hallucinating and praying for
their daily chimera, the INS associates turned London’s
complex surface into a ‘transmission site’ that
resembled a WW2 French Résistance cell, or Burroughs’
control room of his Rewrite Department. The latter’s
‘cutup’ method — an extension of the collage
and montage techniques employed since the avant-garde to interventions
in other media — helped the group to find the buried
codes, the ‘pockets of resistance to reality’
(Derrida) that ‘operate and dwell within a space which
is already dead.’ Refining the understanding of the
work of art as a process, the re-arrangement of scripts, prose,
data and pop culture at large occurs behind signals and noises,
full of lost messages and encrypted meaning. Whether in the
role of participants, viewers, witnesses or Dactylographic
Assistants, we are all INS agents because, in one way or another,
we must search for the codes that navigate through culture
or simply try to find out what the hell this organisation
is about. The thing is, if we ask ourselves: Is this art or
non-art? Information or dis-information?, we-cum-receivers
can find a strange but true reality where the most unlikely
facts pop up out.
Going back a year in time, this ambitious project was announced
at Cubitt with the Second First Committee Hearings: Transmission,
Death and Technology in November 2002. This preliminary convention
cross-examined depositions by practitioners from the fields
of sound, wireless communication and cryptography in view
of laying ground for the INS radio transmission. Inspired
again by the interrogation scene in Cocteau’s film,
Laura Hopkins, the INS Environmental Engineer, conceived a
‘Hearings Chamber’ where the Delegation —
consisting of, INS General Secretary McCarthy, INS Chief of
Propaganda (Archiving and Epistemological Critique) Anthony
Auerbach, and novelist BBC broadcaster Zinovy Zinik —
sat behind a table on a raised podium facing the ‘witnesses’.
These included, amongst others, artist Cerith Wyn Evans who,
having employed Morse code light pulses in his practice, is
an expert translator of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s
interpretation of the notion of encryption from Freud’s
case study The Wolf Man, and cultural critic John Cussans
for his interest in the technologisation of spiritualism throughout
the twentieth century. The findings have been later published
in the booklet Calling All Agents. General Secretary’s
Report to the International Necronautical Society in which
McCarthy has mapped the motif of the crypt in relation to
the Freud-Abraham-Torok triangle via Hergé surreal
masterpiece Tintin and the Cigars of the Pharaoh and Leo Marx’s
lessons of coded poetry lines to British agents parachuting
themselves into France during World War II.
The image of the crypt mentioned by Wyn Evans suggested the
perfect INS model, which reminds me of ‘Collossus’,
the device built in the UK during World War II to crack the
enigmatic Nazi radio signals and bombing targets of the Luftwaffe:
not yet interpreting but tuning in, listening, transmitting
the hidden associations that appear in the background Rausch,
that crackling domain between radio stations that is just
as mystifying as revelatory as the rush of dope. This feeling
undeniably echoed in Manu Luksch and Mukul Patel’s evidence
of their experiment at Ventspils International Radio astronomy
Centre, in the Latvian forest, where they picked up and re-transmitted
phone conversations through the giant satellite dishes of
the former Soviet spy base.
What truly amazes me is how the INS dares to mimic the formalism
of a hierarchical, totalitarian structure that exploits authoritarian
propaganda and hyper-bureaucratic language. Indeed their scheme
is to replay the avant-gardes’ appropriation revolutionary
organisational structures, from the conspiratory cell to the
party committee, and re-enact Burroughs' paranoid theories
of a universe made up of pre-recordings. But while speech
is subordinated to a world of controlling files, activities
and visual products are forced into black and white photographs
and abstract diagrams, maps that seem inseparable from the
attendant notion of imperialistic domination. The conceptualisation
of space is confident: it determines existing and invented
locations, pilot scripts, manoeuvres of things moved by the
strategic convention of the arrow to show the orientation
of trends that are secretly at work in the world. But the
pursuit of the group, both humorous and serious, is not to
realise but interrupt these signifiers, and keep conducting
absurd researches that are, in the end, a distillation of
that Symbolist paranoia described by the poet Gérard
De Nerval who thought of bringing into sight the forces around
us, later formalised by the Surrealists not without a certain
dose of ‘black humour’. Breton and his fellows
from the Bureau des Recherches Surréalistes believed
their movement was ‘…a cry of the mind turning
back on itself’. They defended the absence of all control
by reason in the same way the paintings of Max Ernst, who
invented compulsive ‘collage novels’, presented
a strong resistance not only to the eye but also to the mind.
Outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations, he ‘pulled
Beauty down on his knees, found her embittered and cursed
her’ (Arthur Rimbaud) just like the INS’ enquiries
present images which systematic displacement is packed with
allusions to art, history, science, psychoanalysis that make
apparent that the only way to understand them is through silence
and repetition.
Isn’t this perhaps what we experience today? These artists’
comprehensive approach, their method of hunting down extra-literary,
extra-ordinary, associations keep reminding us that life and
art cannot be so easily confined to what is considered ‘real’
simply because it appear so. I am not talking about a post-Situationist
détournement of signs, images, sounds or films that
enjoy solid places in contemporary culture, but about what
Heidegger, in The Way to Language, says: ‘…before
it comes to be said, that is, spoken – the poet’s
work is only a listening.’ We shall therefore accept
that Necronautism, as any other creative venture, is ‘the
annunciation, performance and repetition of a craft which
does not work to be entered into eyes and mouths wide open
so that they may be filled from the deep wells of the Unknown.’
(Tom McCarthy)
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