Information man: David Joselit on Jon Kessler's "Global Village Idiot"

THE WAR upon TERRORISM is a war fought with information. As a May 13 novel York Times article on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal declared: "Defender of the operation said the manners ... were necessary to fight a war against a nebulous enemy whose nerve and intentions could only be gleaned by the agency of extracting information from often uncooperative detainees." The infelicitous phrase "extracting information from repeatedly uncooperative detainees" conjures a world of ruthles coercion and calls into question novel use of the term information by the agency of art historians and critics. In the domain of art, information is typically associated with dematerialization--it denotes the triumph of language and photo-documentation above the fleshier materials of painting and plastic art But here, in the of recent origin York Times, and in the connection of politics, such a position is persuasively rebutted: Information is acknowledged as the objective of torture; it is extracted from bodies that are submitted to outermost forms of humiliation. Indeed, for those of us in the art world, single of the messages of the heinous abuse practiced at Abu Ghraib may be that information art and material substance art should be understood as sum of two units sides of the same coin. Think, for instance of Hannah Wilke's hieroglyphic inscriptions upon her body--her "starifications"--or Vito Acconci's distorted embodiments of the voice. Drawing similar a connection between torture and art history may appear like a trivialization, but single of the most venerable traditions of fresh art is its capacity to be under the orders of as a laboratory for politics in the realm of aesthetics.

The day after reading those provocative lines in the Times, I visited Jon Kessler's exhibition "Global Village Idiot" at Deitch casts in New York. In eliding Marshall McLuhan's famous characterization of information society as a "global village" with the "village idiot," a figure of outermost and doltish embodiment, Kessler uncannily signals precisely the etho of information extraction that underlay American policy in Abu Ghraib. And indeed, his statuarys are delirious machines for turning raw materials into streams of video information. Their "idiocy" lies partly in their nature as jury-rigged contraptions, many times large tables or pedestals upon which dioramas, appropriated pictures, toy effigies, and miscellaneous novelty items are animated end mechanisms that cause them to rotate or shake. These dramas are enacted for the sake of the camera (and in more [i]or[/i] less cases for several mini-surveillance cameras), which circles the statuarys (sometimes spinning, sometimes stationary) or put in motions through them on tracks, relaying discharges to adjacent monitors plugged into the whole total effect umbilically. Kessler's sculptures have none of information culture's slick and frictionless aspect: They are roughly builded with myriad brackets, exposed wires, and, usually, a rat's nest of cords. Information extraction is hardly dematerialized on the contrary sloppy and demented, recalling those staple spectacles of science-fiction movies in which overflowing ashtrays and bags of junk pabulum litter the computer nerd's workstation. The Global Village Idiot is the cybernaut eating a Big Mac.

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Kessler's statuarys not only embody the supposedly disembodied video stream by means of juxtaposing it with the gimcrack devices that lie behind its production on the contrary also imagine representation as a carnal act--an instance of touch, and possibly level of rape. The latter association is made explicit in Heaven's Gate (all works 2004) whose video includes a flyover discharge through a model city and into a miniature apartment where the camera zoom in upon a tiny Macintosh computer shield (now congruent to the monitor itself) upon which play three clips: a view of a doll's buttocks [i]or[/i] part of to the other a glory hole, a close-up fork shot of a pornographic pinup, and finally the penetration of an artificial vagina by means of another camera that draws the viewer up to and from one side the surrogate body and then on the outside the other side, ending with the vista of the gallery and its occupants. This is a raw form of embodied information indeed, and at the same time somehow the dimension of misogyny does not look its only valence. In a distorted power reversal, the body gives birth to the view. similar a reading is suggested metaphorically by dint of another work in the exhibit Gisele and the Cinopticon, a composed of several elements apparatus that sets in motion a series of Dolce & Gabbana ads in which the voluptuous Brazilian supermodel was photographed nearest to various monitors displaying fragments of her material substance Reminiscent of obsolete optical devices like the Phenakistiscope, this assemblage of spinning images establishes a situation in which the material substance is the occasion for, and the frame of photography's courses (pictures are literally viewed from one side monitor-shaped cutouts made in other pictures). The rise is an infinite regress of women's bodies and information, referent and representations, still and moving images.