A Critique
Imaginary Corporations: Jay Critchley’s Art of the Virtual and the Real
We are all engaged in social rituals in our daily activities and by remaining unaware of their artistic ritual propensity, we remain ‘in conformity.’
Trinh T. Minh-ha
Introduction
In Imaginary Economics: Olav Velthuis asks, What happens “when the dichotomy of criticism versus affirmation, which has dominated the structured many interpretations of the relationship between art and economics for quite some time, no longer functions?” Velthuis’ Imaginary Economics sparks a new or re-thinking about art and economics. Imaginary Economics is represented by economics as play. In Jay Critchley’s world, we examine the affirmation of economy as art.
Let us now turn to our second theme, that which we will call the performative. We will draw upon the work of Jon McKenzie entitled Perform or Else, From Discipline to Performance. In this piece, McKenzie emphasizes the performative as a normative force.
Judith Butler’s Critically Queer borrows from J. L. Austin’s work on performative speech acts. Butler notes that speech creates both action and binding power. “The power of discourse to produce what it names is linked to the question of performativity.”
Critchley’s imaginary corporations are imbedded in this paradox.
McKenzie argues that we live in a new command culture in which performance can be viewed as both experimental and normative. Critchley’s art extends the front on the culture wars by performing various social rituals. We will call these imaginary corporations, which may be considered normative and experimental events.
Critchley’s art operates with strategies of artistic adaptation of economic processes and performativity. On the one hand, Critchley’s imaginary spaces involve both strategy, analysis and parody of economic processes. We may think of the legacies of Marcel Duchamp (the Tzanck Check, 1919), Yves Klein’s (transfer zone of immaterial pictorial sensibility, 1962) and Joseph Beuys’ social sculptural projects, such as (Energy Plan for Western Man). Current artists, such as Jeff Koons, etoy and Nobumichi Tosa’s the (Maywa Denki Store, 2004) continue the tradition.
To illustrate: the brothers Nobumichi and Masamichi, run an electronics store. Dressed in company suits, they offer performances that look like product demonstrations. This calls to mind, Critchley’s Old Glory Condom Corporation.
Then of course, there are the Tosa brother’s handmade products, the Nonsense Machines, which are offered for sale on their business website. Maria Anne Parolin offers yet another example, with her (Parolin Products Nature Series, 1999), which is packaged and placed on sale racks.
Critchley’s art operates normatively and performatively. His art is about the manner in which we name and perform the name. His work probes us. We become sites of visibility or invisibility while we perform various power relations within a given normative setting.
1990: New Hampshire Investors Meeting. Jay Critchley as President of the Nuclear Recycling Consultants (NRC, and, the Nuclear Realty Corporation), is invited by a group of New Hampshire investors to present his condominium project proposal for the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant. Investors eagerly assemble to listen to this new investment idea: A nuclear condo complex with louver lead window treatments. He has been invited by these investors to discuss his business proposal. He recognizes early in his career what Jon McKenzie, years later in Perform or Else, From Discipline to Performance, describes as the normative side of performativity.
Power and knowledge is not simply the question of who possesses these, but rather, when and where they are performed. McKenzie argues, performativity in the global age “generates a networked desire, the simulated control of libidinal subjectivities whose paths mingle, collide, and transform one another.”
No one at the Exeter, New Hampshire meeting laughs. Presumably everyone understands the performance. However, everyone misses the main point. They fail to understand that they, are in fact, the performance. All agree to that which is being named and verbalized.
Critchley’s proposal sounds good. “If one never laughs with them or at them, or, more seriously still, never laughs at oneself, then one has closed off an immense affective realm of experience and learning,” notes McKenzie.
“Speculatively, we are entering the age of global performance, an age in which the entire world is challenged forth to perform. To explore the power of performance, our machine plays back readings of the performative principle, performative legitimation, and punitive performativity.” (McKenzie)
No one laughs because Jay Critchley’s imaginary corporations are real.
His long established work with imaginary corporations examines the manner in which we speak and see. His work concerns the possibility of re-evaluating values. Thus, it is at that moment when his critical project becomes play, play understood as being, that he becomes the “fiction added to a deed,” as Judith Butler contends. Critchley is corporate performativity.
Butler argues that there is no “being” behind doing, effecting and becoming. Fracturing and re-inscribing power “as fiction added to deed”, Critchley performs as corporation, or often, multitudinous corporations. He takes himself very seriously, drawing attention to the way we annunciate ourselves in a normative setting. “Performatives and performance are our system and our style, our ways of saying and seeing,” says McKenzie. His art appropriates corporate global communications without turning them inside out. His posture is not outside, since there is no longer an outside. Instead, corporations proliferate, mingle and transform, thus, re-describing the world from within.
1989: The Old Glory Condom Corporation. At M.I.T.’s List Visual Arts Center, Critchley launches the corporation that will market condoms with a logo based on the American flag. Standing in front of this new corporate logo, The Old Glory Condom Corporation, he stylistically transmutes himself into various identity checks through citation and self-displacement. These actions consort with his own “coming out” both as artist and gay man. He admits that the former is the more difficult of the two.
We live in a culture of citational networking, incessant archiving, transformation and transmission of statements and practices. Critchley launches his corporation, Old Glory Condom Corporation, with both a logo and a product (condoms “worn with pride country wide” in these times of AIDS activism). His pitch to investors, believers, consumers and players displays a citational network of statements and practices.
McKenzie contends: “The very process of self-referentiality that generates a system’s coherence also renders it systematically unstable, incomplete, sometimes disoriented. The outside turned inside, can turn the inside out.”
Critchley is not so much the gay activist as the imaginary corporation. Therein lies his activism. He does not distinguish between different concepts of performance, those mechanisms of resistance one transgresses in the daily realm of Goffmanesque performances that constitute the fabric of our social lives. All normative performances of the real can only be understood against a background of specific normative behavior. He blurs borders. He plays the trickster, challenging the political concept of resistance as the only political style appropriate to transgress. In New Hampshire, as in all imaginary corporations, we must ponder the performative location. Who is the imaginary character of the act? Between the “as if” and the “it is”, where and who is he? We may conclude that Critchley’s claimed “real” performances play up that distinction.
McKenzie remarks that our age is marked more and more by global performance. It is no longer about a world picture but about performativity itself. Critchley, indeed, achieves this in numerous ways. His imaginary corporations perform.
Why does one believe what one believes? Does believing indicate reality? Critchley’s identities appear quite real. His is the real of all performed identity. He pushes the conventions of the imaginary and the real, those theatrical and social spaces demarcated by modernity.
In Critically Queer, Judith Butler reminds us that it would be the ultimate error to confuse performance with performativity. She warns us not to distinguish between embodied and discursive performance. Critchley’s art leads our attention toward the discursive style of the work. We take in all embodied aspects of this creative-in-the normative.
P-Town, Inc. – Formerly Provincetown: “You’ll swear you were really there” 1997-present, and Martucket Eyeland Resort and Theme Park, 2005. Critchley markets Provincetown as P-Town, Inc. Extending his corporate activities, he recommends a theme park as part of the proposed “Wind Farm” in Nantucket Sound off Cape Cod. His proposal wins a special citation from The Boston Society of Architects, 2006.
What happens when various normative performatives meet across their respective boundaries? As we know, The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to whom Crtichley submitted his proposal, engages in performing the real. Will they perform well? Do a good job? Generally, they do. That is, they do until they must perform legal judgment on an art project. Everything is fine until the normative performance of the real no longer grasps the divergent challenges of the performative real. Many, as for example the U.S. Army Corps, do not understand Critchley’s performative power. His discursive performance generating the social norm, escapes them.
National Public Radio’s Living on Earth’s focus on Critchley’s dispute with the U.S. Army Corps does not recognize the various regimes of normative performance. These remain invisible to them. Devoid of laughter, they are left with uncertainty.
McKenzie writes: “Performativity, in contrast with discipline, constructs and proliferates de-centered subjectivities and highly unstable object fields.” Critchley’s work both de-centers and draws attention to the performative production of all power. In creating unstable object fields that look real, the instability of reality becomes evident.
Why question if Martucket Eyeland is real? Is reality made one way and not another?
The U.S. Army Corps meets itself reflecting the persona of a corporate proposal to establish a theme park called Martucket Eyeland. Why would they not support such a wonderful project?
Critchley invites the “host” to live off him. Or, is it perhaps the other way around? We can not be sure which is which. To force the point would be to reveal a poor attitude, for we know he is earnest. Each proposal, each idea, functions around the real and the virtual. We must continue to trust despite our non-trusting culture. Society operates in accordance with the law of simulation and invention. In selling non-art, in retailing people to each other, his art is part of the performance.
Olav Velthuis’ Imaginary Economics, Contemporary Artists and the World of Big Money discusses the manner in which various artists, such as Duchamp, Klein, etc. engage in imaginary economics. Role reversals by artists and businessmen, “give rise to strategic alliances between artists and businessmen.” (97)
Now, McKenzie implies, the distinction between performances are blurred. “During the nineties some artists and businessmen also expected art to be helpful in bringing about an innovative, reflective and change oriented business culture.” (Velthuis)
However, Critchley’s art does not do this. We have learned that his work, though linked to those of other artists working in fictional economies, is not in partnership.
2001: Outermost Alms Museum, part of P-Town, Inc., a new museum established in Provincetown. A street installation, exhibition and court case, 2001-2002. When Critchley entices a property owner – Outermost Alms Museum, 2001 – to see his derelict building as artwork, we discover the owner’s lack of wit and intelligence. Conditioned by his own coercive performativity, this property owner can not see the parallel performance of art and economy. His lawsuit against Critchley reveals that he can not see that the art is not normative. Furthermore, he can not recognize that like Critchley, he too, is performing.
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International Re-Rooter’s Society (IRS), 1983 – present. The IRS, like the NRC, engages in sundry corporate presentations and has been active since the early 1980’s. One moonlit night, on the sand flats of Provincetown harbor, a small procession of people walks from the beach to the sand flats. They gather to listen to proclamations that mimic political spectacle and ritual. Although the participants are cold, they are aware of their part in a staged, theatrical moment in which the political is performed and displayed. The IRS, with its burning Christmas tree/boat exists among the frigid, lapping waters, in those closing moments of the night
At a different level, Critchley’s work illustrates the extent to which we experience political loss in our micro-managed, manipulative age of sameness. Whether corporation, self-appointed spokesperson, or ventriloquist, He speaks, not for the species, or of social problems. Instead, he makes the practice of performativity a space of hope. He does not instruct us to do anything political, for politically speaking; there is no action to take. All he asks is that we laugh at the boundaries of meaning.
Conclusion:
Critchley’s corporations allow us to affirmatively laugh. His performing the performative draws attention to its normative force. When we abandon the event, or rather, the name, we find ourselves present in the performative. One notes, his laughter on the other side of laughter. Each persona he conjures may appear separate. However, they are all moments of the normative and the real. He reminds us of our obligation to perform. We can only make sense of this when we observe the meta-languages at play. We can do this not in speaking about opposition but rather, that creative innovation in which those languages are nudged from their regular orbit. His real is always about how we perform in other’s speech and why one is willing to believe. At Critchley’s behest, we ponder the questions of what and whom to believe.
Bibliography
Perform or Else, From Discipline to Performance, Jon McKenzie, Routledge, 2001.
Imaginary Economics, Contemporary Artists and the World of Big Money, Olav Velthuis, Nai Publishers, 2005.
Critically Queer, Judith Butler, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly 1 (1993).
The Digital Film Event, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Routledge, 2005.
Tim Norris is a lecturer, theorist, and multi-media performance artist who received an MA in Aesthetics and Art Theory from Middlesex University, England, a MA in Arts Administration from Lesley University, and is a PhD candidate at University of Birmingham, England. He is currently working on the multimedia project Good-bye Beethoven: Why Philosophy is Not a Symphony. He presented The Acoustics of War at the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association, in 2003, and The Ghosts of Communication and The History of Static at the Philosophy/Interpretation/Culture Conference, Binghamton University, NY, in 2003. Strangers on a Train, Hegel and Hitchcock, was presented at the eleventh Performance Studies International Conference, at Brown University, 2005.
-Tim Norris
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