Statistic, Series, Signature
And here’s Kathryn Smith, sandwiched by James Sey and Jane Taylor, at a WSOA (Wits School of the Arts, University of the Witwatersrand) Research Seminar.
James, our fearless leader, read a paper about the network of psychical relations that arises as the experience of time and space becomes statisticalised in order to co-ordinate industrial society and in particular labour productivity. I’m not sure exactly what this, from his abstract, means, but his paper drew some very interesting parallels between the tedium of writing – and attention to detail that came into play around writing practice during the age of industrialization – and the work of serial killers.
The conscious replicability of traumatic experience enabled by technology carries the ‘massification’ of industrial production into the realm of the aesthetic and the psychical, a mode of contemporary identity most readily and dramatically revealed by writing technologies and disorders of writing. The most extreme of these disorders is that of serial killing. As ‘The Grey Man’, ultra-pathological paedophilic serial killer Albert Fish put it, explaining why he had written a letter to a mother detailing the atrocities he had committed on her young daughter, “I had a mania for writing”.
Kathryn’s response was more in the vein of her own work, which related such tediousness to artistic practice. Only after speaking to her, did I realize just how many artists in the world are obsessed with serial killing as an art form.
From my experience, I’ve found research like this absolutely compelling, and (Kathryn’s work aside) artwork about it mostly boring – an extreme eroticization of that which we wish we could do, even if only on some obscene level. Am I wrong? What makes it cool? Smart? Does the endless research show through the work? Does turning murderers into rock stars make sense? This is not a moral question – perhaps a naive one, moreover. If the words do it for me, and I am more than willing to engage, why does not the art (on most occasions, anyhow)?
Perhaps Mapplethorpe’s politics (art in a different vein), and Smith’s intertextuality, open their work up for me where the others fail; hell, one could easily say that most art about (fill in the ____blank____) is crap (especially in my own field of The Digital). I just know that, as an artist, I hate to say ‘I don’t get it’.
