Talk: Stephen Wright "Usership: Tales of Life Onboard" | SALT Galata

Good afternoon. Thanks everyone for coming on such a beautiful afternoon. There will be questions at the end, but there can be questions all the time, so anytime you feel like interjecting, you're more than welcome to do so. I will be talking about usership, which is a concept that I've developed in the book that you can see on the screen, and you can download easily at the link which I think is on the blog. But I'm not going to specifically talk about that book or that concept from a theoretical perspective. I'm going to look at it through a series of examples. So the next 40 minutes or so are going to be very example-laden, and through those examples you're going to notice that I have a very idiosyncratic way of speaking, and there's a reason for that. And it's the reason that this book is actually a lexicon, because the type of examples or the type of art-related practice which have been the focus of my research are paradoxically invisible from the perspective of the mainstream critical lexicon. In other words, they're seen — they may even be extremely and monumentally visible — but their coefficient of artistic visibility is paradoxically low. In other words, we might see them, but we wouldn't see them as art. And even when we do, when something changes, we wouldn't necessarily have available to us the necessary words, the necessary lexical toolbox, to talk about them with accuracy. And I think broadly, if that's true for these examples, it is true for others. And I think it's largely true that for our intuitions, our contemporary intuitions, the lexical toolbox which we inherited from the previous century, from modernity — which is a wonderful toolbox, wonderfully rich with all the best and most precise tools — it's also the case that those tools are just not the right tools for the job at hand. Those tools need to be adapted or re-adapted, or as I like to say, repurposed. And so the vocabulary that I'll be using is understandable, I hope, from experience, but do challenge me if you find it difficult. But it is just a little bit different than the vocabulary that we're accustomed to using in the expert culture of the art world. So kind of randomly now, we're going to run through a series of examples and maybe stop on some of the keywords that these examples have challenged me to look at in more detail. Let's see where we should start with this one. So what you see here on the screen is not an artwork by any means. It's a driver's license in the state of California, and it was issued to a Miss Christine Sue Lucas. Now it has happened that Christine Lucas is an artist. She was issued this driver's license in 2009. There's really nothing more to be said about it. But a few years later, Christine Lucas decided that she wanted to legally change her name. She wanted to renew her name. Now changing names has different regulations in different countries. In France, where I live, it's extremely difficult to change your name and very costly. It's a very complex legal procedure. Well, I don't know how it is in Turkey, but in the United States it's extremely easy. You simply go to the courthouse, you fill out a document with your old name, your new name, you sign that you're not doing this to avoid debt, and the name change goes through unless there's a problem. I mean, unless you use a vulgarity as your new name, in which case you have to go before a judge and the judge will refuse the name change. Or there's a series of rules of what names you cannot have, but they're not nearly as severe as they are in France. But the court clerks noticed something strange about Ms. Lucas's name change. She put — so you put on the form, the form says a previous name, and she put Lucas, and then the name that you're changing to, and she put Christine Sue Lucas. So the court clerk assumed that there was an error. She said, "No, ma'am, you have to put the new name here." And she said, "Yes, yes, that's right, that's the new name." "Well then the old..." She said, "Yes, well my old name, my current name, is Christine Zulu Guest, and I would like to change that name to Christine Sue Lucas." So she had to go before a judge because this was unheard of. So this is the second part of the story. Here's the New York State driver's license, and you'll notice the name here is Christine Zulukus. So she went before the judge, and the judge said, "Okay, if I understand correctly, you want to change your name but to the same name?" She goes, "Yes, but it's not the same. I want to renew that name. I want to make it mine. I want to embrace that name. This name was attributed to me randomly by some people who describe themselves as my parents, and I want it to be my name." So the judge — this is very untypical in these cases — the judge had to deliberate, and he came back and he said, "Okay, in this particular case, I'm granting your wish for a name change, but do not come back to me and ask to change your name back to your original name." Okay. So you could say this is her — she did, she's an artist, and she did this as an artistic gesture, as an artistic proposition, so that she would actually bear a name that would be like an artwork in a certain way. But it's only just a name. It's a name, but also in this case, a proposition in the name. So we'll come to see that something is different about it once we know this story about it. It may be a trivial story, and I think it is relatively trivial, but once we know this about Christine Lucas, there is something that has irrevocably changed, although nothing whatsoever has changed. This could be done with more consequence, and in order for us to better understand what has changed although ostensibly nothing has, in order to understand that actually nothing could be more different, and that as I would say, the change is merely ontological. It's a strange expression, right? "Merely ontological," because we say something is ontologically different, we mean it is different in terms of its very being. But in this case, it's only its very being which is different, because everything else, all its other properties, are identical. So let's take a in a way similar and in another way extremely different case. I think it's this one. Nope, not this one. Let me try. Yes. Now this is an identity card of a Slovenian artist, and this is the identity card of another Slovenian artist, and this is the identity card of a third Slovenian artist. They are not the same artists. There are three. They now go by the name — well, not I shouldn't say now — their names are Janis Yanchez. Now Slovenia is a little bit in this part of the world in more ways than one. So you may recall that the very populist president of Slovenia, his name is Janice Yanchez. He's not president right now, actually. He's the leader of the opposition. But for many years in the late 90s and in the 2000s, he was forever the leader of this country. His slogan as a politician was "Together we're stronger." Together we're stronger. But he was an extremely populist politician of the sort that you're familiar with. And so these three artists decided, as a political and as an artistic gesture, to officially change their names the same day but in their respective cities in Slovenia. And their choice of names was very different. They didn't change it to the same name. They changed it to the same name as the president. So they became officially Janice Yanchez, which gave them not only the ability but the obligation to speak in the name of Janice Yanchez whenever they would speak in public. For example, they would have to speak as Janice Yanchez, given that that was their official name. And they did this to great effect, as you can imagine, because you see the thing is that they didn't just say they were going to change their names like "Wouldn't that be a cool idea?" or "For the purposes of this exhibition, I changed my name." They actually walked the walk and talked the talk. They went the whole nine yards and actually changed their names. And then by virtue of being Janice Yanchez, they engaged in a number of activities. This, for example, is the slogan "We're all Janice." And so they put these posters up in the public space. They did any number of public space interventions. They of course wrote to Janice Yanchez himself as Janice Yanchez. He tried to stop them, and this is where it gets a little bit more complicated. He was unable to because they were not pretending to be Janice Yanchez. The irony is that he was pretending to be Janice Yanchez, and that's what they could have never imagined. His name is actually not Janice. It's only his adopted name. His brother's name is actually Janice, but his name is Igor or something, right? So actually, as it turns out, his political name, his public persona, is as Janice. But as it turns out, it was these three artists who began to officially, and even to this day I think forevermore, operate as Janice Yanchez. So the question is, how do we describe a kind of project like that? What kind of project is this? Well, obviously it's self-understanding is as art, but it also has a kind of deliberate over-identification with the naming device as a political tool. It's obviously highly politically motivated, but at the same time perfectly legal. And it's also a case of where art didn't simply operate on the reduced scale where it's accustomed to operating, but ramped up at scale of operations to the one-to-one scale. It is what it is, and at the same time a proposition of what it is that is an artistic proposition. Let's, before we get into that even any more deeply, let me show you a very what I think is a very useful example. I brought it up in a talk yesterday, but I'd like to share it with everyone here just in case someone could make use of it. Does everyone know this webpage? Well, it's a web page called AAAAARG dot fail. And it is the most wonderful and most useful online archive of some 775,000 PDFs and EPUBs which have been uploaded by a community of users who have organized them into a variety of shelves. And at the same time, it's a proposition of just exactly that. In other words, it is an artistic proposition. It's self-understanding is as art. It's an attempt in essence to synthesize the world of free and open source sharing of books, programming, and concept art. It was initiated by a Los Angeles-based concept artist and programmer called Sean Dochray. He actually by himself uploaded the first 500 PDFs, if you can imagine that, scanned those books and then made them available on what was at that time called an FTP site, and then invited a broader community of users to make use of this. Now I assure you, any book that will ever be referenced in this wonderful library, in this place, you'll also find them on this site. So it's like whenever you travel, if you are a user of AAAAARG, you will have a 75,000 volume library at your disposal. I warn you though, it will lead you to spending more money on books because once you have these digital versions which are searchable, you can do word searches or concept searches and so on, you'll definitely want to have the physical copies. I know this from personal experience. But many users of AAAAARG do not know that it has this ambiguous status, that its self-understanding is as art, although its functionality is simply as a wonderful online archive. Anyone can join, and if any of you would like to join, just speak to me afterwards and I'll click on that thing in the upper right-hand corner and you'll also be a full-fledged member. And if you are, I would invite you not only to download to your heart's content, but also to upload the books that you find most important to your concerns and outlooks and share them with the other community of users of that site. And moreover, to become a kind of — as becoming a user, become also a librarian, a custodian of that site, and to organize the shelves according to your own research interests. You can imagine that I have already done that according to my own, uploading them on shelves like "Usership," "Spectatorship," "Expert Culture," the sort of things that I like to talk about. And the advantage of doing that, of course, on a digital site is that if you did that in a physical library, then you would move the book from over here to over here. But doing it on a virtual site, of course, you can leave it here and put it over there. So the actual taxonomies of this library are as unlimited as the imagination of the usership. But the question for me is, so this is an example of a practice that has definite, undeniable use value. It definitely operates on the one-to-one scale and not on the reduced scale. It's not like a library that said, "Oh, here are 15 books I uploaded for this exhibition project." Hence, by extension or projection, one could imagine a full-fledged library. No, it is the real McCoy. It is the full-fledged library. But it's also a proposition of that library. And so what does that change? Well, you might say that nothing at all. But at the same time, nothing could be more different. When you learn, as many art users have subsequently after using it for some time, that Dochray has conceived this as a conceptual and collective artwork, something changes. Sometimes there's a kind of a sense of disappointment. It's like, "Oh man, I thought this was the real thing." Well, it is the real thing. But other times there's a kind of a sense of an elation. It's like, "Wow." You know, like in medieval painting, sometimes there's the trope of the halo around some saintly personage. Well, there's kind of a halo of sorts around the proposition of this kind. Nothing changes and everything does. So that's one of the things that I'm most interested in, is when art withdraws from the performative frame of the art world, when it withdraws from institutional capture, when it escapes the performative capture of those art-transforming devices in the art world and goes out to mingle with other practices, other avenues of human activity beyond the frame of art per se, it loses its coefficient of artistic visibility. Becomes very visible perhaps. It's a very visible site, but if you know about it, as visible as any other, but not necessarily as art. And so we require some piece of supplementary information to tip us off. And when we are tipped off, then something changes in our perception, in our understanding. I call that a lure. I say that the allure of the proposition changes. I take that term from Graham Harman, the speculative realist philosopher, who develops that concept really very nicely in a book called "The Carpentry of Things." And he in that book goes to great length to explain how objects change without any of their internal properties actually changing, without their molecular structure being modified, without even any of their perceptible properties undergoing any change, how they become entirely different. There's some — so this has a different kind of an allure. But that allure also goes hand in hand with a relatively low coefficient of art within the art world. And it's only, of course, by me taking this now under circumstances like this, bringing it into a space like this, that its coefficient of art is once again boosted, right? I told you there's gonna be lots of examples. So let's go straight away to another one. Here's one of my favorites. I don't suppose anybody in this room knows this one. Is this name familiar to you? Rival Pusap. It's an Estonian name, yes. And he was born in Estonia. He lived there for seven years. He's American though. He was born in a refugee camp in Estonia in 1942. His father was killed in the war. He grew up with a single mom. At seven, they immigrated to New York. He really is a New Yorker. In my estimation, he is the most important conceptual artist in North America still alive today. He's an old, a very young 73-year-old man, very spry. But it's very paradoxical to me that the most political of America's conceptual artists remains the least known. Let me tell you the story of Rival, and I'm glad you asked that question about his name because it's actually kind of part of the story as well. So I'm going to kind of trace really quickly the story of the first half century of Rival Pusap's life. So he came to New York, grew up in New York, and when as a young man he decided that he wanted to study art, and he went to art school in Salt Lake City, Utah. In the art school there, he did an MFA in Fine Arts. His best friend, who he met there and who remains his best friend until today, was the artist Paul McCarthy. Now you've probably all heard of Paul McCarthy, right? Paul McCarthy is that crazy Californian artist of over-identification who uses lots of ketchup and scandalous, scatological, and highly sexualized imagery to denounce the sordid side of the United States. Paul McCarthy, that name is fixing a little bit. So the interesting thing now, I mentioned McCarthy for a reason that you'll see a little bit later in the story. But the funny thing about McCarthy and Pusap is that they incarnate, even though they're buddies, they incarnate two diametrically opposed approaches to art in the present. There's a full spectrum that separates them, which makes it interesting. McCarthy is an artist of what Slavoj Žižek calls over-identification, in other words identifying with the norms with a kind of zeal that even the superego of power itself would never be able to muster. Because as Žižek points out, no one, the subject is never supposed to totally believe in the dominant ideology. One is supposed to pretend to believe. I'm speaking about Turkey right now. One is supposed to pretend to believe. But that identification is never supposed to be total. One is always supposed to know that something's phony. What kind of identification is that? Or someone like Roey Rosen, there's a whole current of over-identification alive, for example the Slovenian that we saw a moment ago, also based on over-identification, pretending to be more Janice Yanchez than Janice Yanchez. Okay, so that's over-identification. On the opposite pole, you have de-identification. So Pusap is an artist who completely de-identifies with art per se, in other words, or does something which is not art. This is what he does. Well, you'll see why, and you'll see why this opposition with McCarthy provides a kind of a spectrum within which to understand the whole gamut of artistic production today, in my opinion. They realize that they're not going to get to be artists in Salt Lake City. McCarthy goes off to Los Angeles where he has his career. Pusap goes back to New York. Now Pusap is one of these guys who just has this knack for responding to the horizon of expectations of the moment. He has this capacity that Pierre Bourdieu talks about, for example, in his field actor analysis, this kind of habitus, this kind of capacity to read the moment with almost a pre-reflexive kind of understanding and to respond just like that, the way almost the way a football player can respond to a configuration within a game. So he has immediate success in the art world. He's a very young artist. He has a great gallery. He's selling tons of work. He's in the first Land Art survey show in Boston with Smithson and other much more confirmed artists. But of course, for an artist for whom success is so easy, it's also very unsatisfying. He's very bored by the art world and very bored by this capacity to respond. At the same time, he's starting to hang out with a bunch of characters who create an art collective, very under-theorized, almost unknown art collective. We're talking about the late 1960s in New York, 1967, '68, '69. It's a time when art collectives were a big thing. The Art Workers' Coalition, "Up Against the Wall," and the collective that he began to work with was called Museum: A Museum for Live Artists. And it was a kind of a broad collective of artists. They would get together. Apparently their activity consisted of drinking a lot of beer. They'd get together, and if you're artists or you hang out in the art world, you're kind of relate with this experience that after a while they all started griping about the art world. "You know, it's corrupt, cronyism, you can't get ahead, it's about who you sleep with." So they had this kind of bitterness that one so often encounters amongst failed artists. And Pusap, of course, the whole time would be saying, because he had never had that experience, he'd be saying, "But no guys, it's not like that. You just do anything. That's what's great about the art world. Everything works." They go, "Shut up!" You know, it's like, "No, that's not true." So this is where it becomes interesting. Because then he develops what I think is one of the most ingenious tactics that has ever been tested in concept art, and he called it idea seeding or concept planting. It's actually the principle of good conversation, it's even the principle of good instruction, but he did it in a kind of subliminal way. His plan was this: that somewhere between the seventh and eighth beer of the evening, he would discreetly but deliberately slide into the conversation an idea for an artwork which would lead to art world recognition. But he would do it at that point in the evening so that nobody the next morning, if anybody remembered the idea at all, which would be unlikely, but if anyone remembered the idea, they wouldn't remember where the idea came from. They would think it was their own idea. The idea would have been seeded, in other words, it would have been planted. And if that seed went on to grow and prosper and that person realized the idea which he had seeded and obtained art world recognition that he could independently verify, like in a specialized press, then he would consider that his work was done. But his work was not their work. His work was the idea seeding. And on five or six occasions, beautiful idea. No, on five or six occasions, he actually was able to document a successful seeding. It's kind of like when you're eating an apple, you finish the apple, you toss the core away, and there's five seeds in every single apple. Well, mostly the core will just rot or it'll be eaten by a bird or I don't know, nothing will happen, it'll dry up. But maybe one time, I don't know, in a thousand, one of those seeds will grow and it will produce a tree. And maybe one time in a thousand, one of those trees will produce beautiful and sweet fruit. So that's the kind of — so this is a type of, I like to think of it as a kind of aesthetic permaculture, permacultural aesthetics. After two years of doing this, he had a problem. He said, "You know, this whole thing smacks of manipulation, and these people are my friends. I don't want to manipulate them. I know more about their motives than they can possibly know about themselves." So he stopped. But he stopped and he asked himself a question. He asked himself the question: "Is there not some type of human activity where manipulation is both morally acceptable and even pragmatically necessary?" And he said, "Yup. Politics." Politics is not just about a spontaneous popular congealing around an idea which is then demanded of the power. Now politics is about seeding an idea that first of all goes nowhere because everybody shits on it, but that in time may either kill it or it may fertilize it. And if it is nurtured and properly receives proper conditions, at some point that idea, that seeding, may bear its fruit and may emerge. And so he thought, "Okay, well let's test this. Let's take the skills, the competence which I've acquired, this protocol of seeding protocol from the art world, let's take it and let's apply it on the one-to-one scale in the political sphere." It just so happened that he was living at that time in a village in upstate New York called Rosendale. And this is in 1973. 1973, the United States is still bogged down in the Vietnam War. American society is more divided against itself, if you can imagine, than it is today. You've got on the one hand the rednecks who want to fight the war, kill the commies, kill the [ __ ], and on the other hand you've got the hippies, peace and love. These people can't speak. And Rosendale is the epitome of American society in this respect, because it's about a 50-50 breakdown of hippies and rednecks. The town is a disaster. He's teaching at the local art school, teaching video, but the town itself is going to the dogs. The police force is completely corrupt. The roads have potholes. The water purification system is broken. The sewage system is backing up. And to boot, the town is beleaguered by debt because it's actually too small a tax base for it to continue. He knows, Pusap, that the only solution is to dissolve legally the town and to redraw, as an artist would redraw a map, redraw the limits of the town and amalgamate it with the township next door of the same name. But he knows that if you say that, nobody will accept that idea, particularly because Rosendale was one of the 14 original townships in New England, so it goes back to the 17th century. The people there are very attached to their town. And here's why your question's important. If your name is Pusap, Rival Pusap, you're not a native to Rosendale, and so you cannot make a proposition of that kind. So who runs for mayor? But he doesn't say what his plan is. He doesn't say his plan is to redraw the town, to engage in the process of dissolution. He says, "No, you know what? I'm gonna fix the police force. I'm gonna call the cops into line. I'm gonna fix the roads. I'm gonna fix the sewage system and the water system. And you know, we're gonna move ahead here. We gotta come together, people." He's elected. He's elected. But in his mind, he's living a kind of double life, as he puts it, because in his mind he knows that as soon as he's elected, he has to begin to seed the seeds of dissolution. And that's what he does. On every single occasion at town hall meetings and discussions with the local inhabitants, debates with the newspapers and so on, he seeds the idea that the only solution is dissolution. Two years later, in 1975, he calls a referendum, and the idea is plebiscite, and 73% of the inhabitants of Rosendale vote in favor of dissolution. The next morning, Rival Pusap resigns as mayor and leaves Rosendale forever and moves actually back to Utah, because his work was done. The seed had taken. So that's an example of art operating on the one-to-one scale. But you might say, "Well, that's not really art though. I mean, he was a successful mayor. Okay, he successfully redrew the boundaries of the town. But wasn't he just a good mayor?" And if you go to the Wikipedia site of Rosendale, you'll see there's a whole list of mayors from the 17th century right up till the present. He's just one name amongst many. There's no suggestion that he was the conceptual artist mayor, because that remains relatively unknown. Well, I would agree that maybe it's not art, but I would have to say it's not not art, right? Because its conditions of possibility, as Kant would say, its conditions of possibility are entirely grounded in art. Without the use of that conceptual art protocol, without the unleashing of artistic protocol on everyday life, that would have been impossible. So the fact is, it's true that he did not perform it as art. Why? Because if he had, it wouldn't work. If he had said to everybody, "Hey, guess what? This is an art project, right?" It would have failed. It was only because he did not say that that it was a success. But at the same time, what is performance? Performance is always the performance of something, and that something, according to linguistic theory, is a performance of the competence. When we perform a speech act, Noam Chomsky describes this very nicely, but it's an idea that goes back to Aristotle. When we perform a speech act, we are performing a competence. But a competence exists without being performed. In other words, we can always have the competence without performing. We can decide to perform it at some other time or not, and that does not affect the competence at all. And so I would say that Rival Pusap here deployed his competence, his artistic competence, outside the performative framework of art, and instead planted it in the hearts and minds, basically in the public space of his community. So that still raises a bunch of questions, right? And there's lots to talk about here. But the thing is, well, how do I know this story? And how come I'm able to share it with you? And what's this thing on the screen? Well, there's only two people he told about this. He told his wife. She didn't care. I mean, she was kind of used to his ways. And he told his best buddy, McCarthy. McCarthy apparently was horrified. McCarthy was horrified because he said, "Rival, okay, this is not only is this morally scandalous, but can you imagine?" McCarthy talking about, "But it's politically ineffective." He said, "If you want to be a political artist, well, dude, you got to go out there and do it big. You got to maximize the visibility. You got to throw it in their faces." Well, this is the impossible conversation between over-identification and de-identification, because of course the whole premise of this thing was that he did not do that. That he led a double life, that he operated through a kind of secret agency, art's secret agency. A couple of years later though, he was talking to McCarthy again, and by this time McCarthy had an art publishing outfit in Los Angeles called Highland Art Publishers. They did artists' books and stuff. And McCarthy said to him, "Rival, you remember that crazy thing you did back in Rosendale, you know, where you did your idea seeding and all that? You know, that's the kind of thing that people want to know about. That's a great story. At least grad students in art school want to know about it. But nobody knows. I'm the only person who knows. Can't we publish something about this?" And so they decided to publish this little document. It's a 36-page publication that was published in all of 50 copies, in which I obtained one and then scanned here, that describes the whole process. Because of course, as a mayor, every time there was a town hall meeting, he had kept the minutes. Every time there was an article in the local press, he'd cut out the piece. Every time there was a letter exchanged between a congressman or a senator and himself, he kept a copy. So he decided to put that whole thing together with a little introduction describing the process. But the interesting thing is that in this whole document, this documentation of his time as mayor, the word "art" is never used once. I mean, why would it be, right? Because there was really nothing artistic per se. It's just about — but it documents clearly the shift in public opinion through the seeding of these ideas. And on the back page, he puts a rather interesting schematic which sort of traces what I just told you about. So it's "Evolution of Rosendale: A Public Work." His practice goes from up in the left-hand corner there, the physical dimension, the discovery pieces, the pieces that he had success with immediately in the New York art world, largely LSD-based, very much Op Art, perceptual type of work, to the social practice, in other words the influence works or the idea seeding, the conceptual seed plants in the early 70s, to the political dimension of the application of these ideas in Rosendale, a public work. And all of this is kind of somehow activated through this documentation which was published in 1980. There's very little information about this rather wonderful and true folktale of art of the past half century. When I first began to tell the story, inevitably people would ask, "Are you making this up?" There were people who were absolutely sure that I had invented this and it was part of some sort of novel that I was preparing. But I was happy enough to think that I would be so creative, but actually the most amazing thing is that it really is true. And it's a wonderful example, I think, of how art can gain traction, can contain use value, only by in some cases deliberately impairing its coefficient of artistic visibility. So sometimes a high coefficient of artistic visibility actually impairs a work's capacity to have use value, to be able to engage directly in the processes of life. So this is a practice which I associate very closely with the idea not of spectatorship — there was literally no spectator — but an idea of usership. It's an example about what Allan Kaprow, one of the few people to have met who came to the launch of the 50 copies of the documentation, who got a copy, who later referred to it as "genuine experimentation." It's a very nice phrase that Kaprow uses, "genuine experimentation," because he suggested it is an experiment, but it's not an experiment in vitro on a reduced scale. It's an experiment on the one-to-one scale. It's an experiment in vivo. So actually, the public sphere becomes a kind of laboratory, but on the full scale. Okay, so far nobody wants to like jump in and say this is crazy, or should we keep going? Okay. Well, I'd be happy to share mine. We'll share mine with you. But the originals, unless you talk to Rival himself who may have two or three left, there's none out there. There was a facsimile copy that was made for an exhibition, but so it actually may be available. In any case, this was scanned at my request by some French graphic designers and artists called Art Book Magazine, AVM, and I think you can buy a high resolution, either buy or download it. You should upload this. Yeah, that's true too. Or maybe someone has. That's a great idea for sure. Bravo. Would love that. I mean, it's easy to think about it. It's a very good point. I don't know why I — I know that one of the great happy experiences of my life was when I saw that someone had gone into trouble — well, with a recent book it is already a PDF, but the other ones actually someone had to scan page by page and upload them. And so I thought, "Wow, that's a real tribute." No, it's not a demeaning of my authorship, but on the contrary, kind of tribute is paid to it, right? So that's great. I will do that since I have a PDF, and then everybody can share it. And there's nothing to fetishize about the original, except that it is — because it was printed on very acidic paper, it's now kind of brown. It's not black and white anymore. It's sort of brown and brown. Let me show you what I think is a very similar but on the other hand apparently totally different work. Does this image speak to anybody? I don't think so. So this is a piece that also requires a little bit of storytelling, not quite as much. This is a proposition by Argentinian conceptualist and plumber by trade, Umidah. Here's the story. As you know, the last dictatorship in Argentina was between 1976 and 1983, during which some 30,000 people were disappeared. In other words, they were seized without arrest warrants, tortured in clandestine detention centers, and for the most part loaded into airplanes that were flown out over the Rio de la Plata or the South Atlantic. The doors were opened, and they were thrown out. So this is a piece that also requires a little bit of storytelling. This is a proposition by Argentinian conceptualist and plumber by trade, Umidah. Here's the story. As you know, the last dictatorship in Argentina was between 1976 and 1983, during which some 30,000 people were disappeared. In other words, they were seized without arrest warrants, tortured in clandestine detention centers, and for the most part loaded into airplanes that were flown out over the Rio de la Plata or the South Atlantic. The doors were opened, and they were thrown out.

Priest on board gave them extreme unction and they were thrown out into the air and into the water where their remains were eaten by sharks. So they were disappeared. There was never any trace. 30,000. At the end of the dictatorship, with the return to democracy, there was a law called the Final Period that said there was amnesty for everybody on both sides, if you can believe that. Both sides, right? The terrorists, right? 30,000 dead and the perpetrators of the genocide, three of whom went to jail. Right? So that's the score: 30,000 to three. In the 2000s, in 2005, there was a new regime elected in Argentina, the Kirchner regime, that decided to end the amnesty laws and to put on trial the perpetrators of this genocide for a kind of pedagogical reason. A genocide is not committed by three people, by the top colonels and a few arch baddies that do their work for them. It's an entire social process. It requires lawyers that deal with the property of the disappeared, it requires doctors to keep them alive provisionally during torture, it requires priests in the airplane to give them extreme unction, it requires pilots to fly the planes. It requires a whole society basically. And the idea was to draw attention to that whole process. So that's the context for this piece. One of the people who was arrested was a political militant in those days whose name was Julio. Julio Lopez was a builder, worked in construction, just a construction worker, but he was a political activist. He was arrested, but by a series of happy coincidences he was not killed. He managed to be released and escape out of the country, where he lived in exile for 30 years. He came back in 2005 and was the key witness in the first trial that was organized. On the evening of the sentencing of the first perpetrator of genocide, he disappeared. He didn't show up in the courtroom to hear the sentence. He'd already given his testimony, but somewhere between his home and the courtroom he disappeared. He's never shown up. So there was a lot of public outcry because that was under democracy, the left was in power in Argentina, and people referred to that as the second disappearance of Julio Lopez. There were huge demonstrations, indignation in all of the press for a while. But of course, people have to move on, life goes on, and after a few months nobody was talking about it much anymore. So people began to talk about the third disappearance of Julio Lopez: disappearance during the dictatorship, disappearance during democracy, and then disappearance from public memory. So this is where this artist comes in, whose hand do we see right here. He said, "If I can do anything about this, I will do whatever I can to ensure that Julio Lopez does not disappear until we find out what has happened to him." So he made himself a little stamper here. Lopez is like the classic Spanish name, Lopez is like Smith or Jones in English. Argentina is a country of wine drinking. I think it's number one after the Vatican. The Vatican's number one for wine consumption per person, but Argentina is number two. And the number one table wine in Argentina is called Lopez, like so many other things. So Hugo Vida was struck. He's an artist who was very interested in what you might call free signifiers in public space. When he looks around in public space, he sees number plates on cars that have dates that speak to him, or numbers that are relevant to something. He looks at signs and sees not just a sign but some meaning. Every time he'd go and buy some wine for lunch, he saw this word Lopez looking out at him. So he decided to make that stamper and to do this to each bottle on the shelf before buying one for himself. That says "Aparece vivo a Julio" and then the punchline is "read like a ready-made by Lopez." So "Aparece Julio" and he does that without asking anyone's particular authorization. It's an innocuous enough act, but each time he does it he notes it down in the logbook he calls a logbook. And he's been doing it now since 2006, since the disappearance, and he continues doing it. So you could say this is very different, right? Maybe there's something poetic about this, but it's not at all on the same scale as Rival Foosan, right? You might say, "Okay, I get it. Someone might buy that bottle of wine. Usually they would just pour the wine, they would see the intervention. Maybe sometimes somebody would see an intervention, but think, 'What's that?' Other times someone would make a connection. They would see it and they would see that notion of Lopez and it would actually speak to them. And sometimes they might be able to do something like that." So you say, "Yes, there is a kind of discrete and sublime poetry at work in this act, but it's on a very different scale than Busan." But I would allege that actually, yes, it's at the level of the local supermarket for sure, in a community. But at the same time, they are both, in my terms, on the one-to-one scale. And whether they're operating in the protected and relatively comfortable zone of the performative frame, they are acting on the scale of the real. They are, as someone once said, using the land itself as its own map. I don't know if you know that quote, but I want to share that with you because it's one of my particular favorites.