Video-instalacija na sjecištu umjetnosti, politike, književnosti i filozofije. Postpolitička stvarnost i dogmatska filozofska paljba.
Tekst u knjizi o instalaciji napisao je monumentalni Reza Negarestani.
amandabeech.com/
Draft section 1 Final Machines 2012 .mov: www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOtattv3Xq8
Amanda Beech: Final Machine, Lanchester Gallery Projects, 24 February – 31 March 2013
Review by Beth Bramich
In 1967 French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser delivered a series of three lectures as part of the ‘Philosophy Course for Scientists’ at the École Normale Supérieure, a course of initiation for non-philosophers inaugurated by Althusser and colleagues as an attempt to move philosophy from a specialist and abstract discourse towards a practical application, ‘a weapon in the ideological battle’. Delivered across the academic year they drew huge crowds from the student body, coming to a close on the eve of the eruption of riots in May 1968.
Amanda Beech’s new three-channel video installation takes the structure of Althusser’s lectures as a framework, embroiling Althusser’s political philosophy with transcripts of a CIA recruitment talk and the obsessive dissection of Hollywood realism by bloggers. These voices are interwoven into one dogmatic argument delivered by a single narrator, a gruff and urgent American, who takes aim at our trust in language and our faith in politics and art as ‘sciences’ that are capable of producing demonstrable truths.
The video opens with the crack of a gun being fired, and another, and another. The narrator is similarly abrupt and confrontational, there is no time given for orientation or explanation, as we move deeper into this indoctrination. The ‘bullet points’, auditory explosions throughout the work, both interrupt and underline his statements. On screen we are plunged through a litany of disassociated territories with a circle as a recurring figure that disrupts the screen, roving over stark exotic landscapes, at times appearing to be the lens of a covert surveillance op or the telescopic sight of a rifle.
The work tightly choreographs the viewers’ experience delivering a sensory overload that borrows from the tropes of the high-octane thriller to grip you with a different form of fear and suspense. Rather than the conspiracy of government cover-ups this is the conspiracy of reality, or at least our acceptance of a reality predicated around us. The fictional world that ‘Final Machine’ creates set us in what Beech describes as a ‘post-political reality’ where ideas are taken seriously, ‘as if philosophy was a pure and accurate description of reality’.
Beech has developed a language and internal logic across a body of work that forges a meeting point between politics, philosophy, fiction and art. ‘Final Machine’ drives forward an argument for a speculative realism that rejects any notion of order or an empiricism that supports it, specifically in an art world which props up its own truthfulness through its habitual critical modes, and moves towards a correct understanding of power.
'Final Machine' is highly demanding, running the risk of losing its audience through its opacity and intensity but it is this element of intrigue, intrinsic to the conspiracy thriller, that compels the viewer. The three sources interlock as they probe at our desire to comprehend, attempting to drag us sorry rookies out of the dark. Alongside the work’s force there is also this seduction, a hint that it is leading to what has been concealed from us, to the boundaries of the circle and a view of the Final Machine.
- www.thisistomorrow.info/
Left-leaning liberals from middle class homes should hate the discourse which runs through Final Machine by Amanda Beech. Instead it could give them a masochistic thrill. The action runs fast, the soundtrack faster. This is punctuated by gunshots, not always easy or even possible to follow the arguments. But you catch enough to get the gist. Here is a celebration of black ops. There is a justification of real politik. The American drawl adds to the flavour of tooled up expediency. Everything we know is wrong, in the world of this piece at least. But no one should be surprised if we have had to leave some of our humanistic tendencies at the door of LGP. The script, for there is a lengthy one, comes in part from CIA training lectures. And it’s been sliced together with the text of a book by philosopher Louis Althusser. So they might even trick you into signing up. Come for the Marxist theory; stay for the right wing coups. Visually the piece is just as enticing/compelling. It unfolds on three consecutive screens: red, amber, green, just as if arranged to programme us to GO. Because you will see things you won’t forget: RVs gathering to sinister purpose in the Mojave desert, modernist architecture lost in unspecified jungle, a highway running through nocturnal Miami. The impression of spy craft is enhanced by the visual motif of the moving circle behind which the action unfolds. You half expect a corrupt, brutally pragmatic Bond to appear with revolver in hand. He doesn’t but the piece goes on. The bullet reports are exhilarating: perhaps not meant for us, at least not yet. Movie goers will side with anyone, given enough aural popcorn and visual punch. - www.criticismism.com/
FINAL MACHINE is a major new three-channel video and architectural installation by Amanda Beech. It continues Beech’s examination into the nexus of art, politics, fiction and philosophy, and interrogates the realist status of the image and the contract this holds with systems of power.
FINAL MACHINE pushes the viewer through the gallery space, into a choreography of sound, visuals and physical forms and steers them under a relentless narrative of indoctrination. The audience is coerced through a formal coded system where the video manifests as architectural form. Three walls: Three ‘circle’ zones; from red, to yellow and then to green.
The video draws us into a journey with no future; a constant working upon a claustrophobic present. It navigates the wasteland of the Mojave Desert, targeted shots of arcane edifices in dense jungle landscapes, trailing cars through night-time Miami and is intersected by serene and balletic graphic imagery and abrupt aggressive ‘bullet points’. Together, the visual material emphasizes the groundless and mobile force of the negotiated image.
The metronomic tempo of the imagery is pervaded by a persistent pragmatic voice that locks the work into a hallucinatory steroid reality. The narrative interlocks the sensations of thrilling rhetorics that draw from Louis Althusser’s lecture series ‘Philosophy and The Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists’ (1968), the prose of CIA recruitment lectures, tales of the high stakes games of undercover special agents, and our obsession with reality. Together these coalesce as an experience and an interrogation of force.
The work questions dogmatically and directly: How it is possible to engage art as a site of realism that would annihilate our faith in the art and politics that we know as our bad habit?
FINAL MACHINE confronts the problem of how to predicate a politics (and an art) that is recalcitrant to its own ideological systems. The imagery, voice and political coordinates drive us towards the affects of a new dogma of life without order: A life where order is no longer sought and never existed in the first place. - lanchester.99k.org/
Final Machine
Amanda Beech
Urbanomic, February 2013
Foreword by Robin Mackay; Texts by Reza Negarestani and Bridget Crone
Urbanomic, February 2013
Foreword by Robin Mackay; Texts by Reza Negarestani and Bridget Crone
...belief in the myth of it all, the myth of
creation, the value of creation, as if you were the kinds of genius
artists who were gonna save the fucking world. Well, you'd better think
again, because that thought is over. That kind of language is just
vulgar. The creative spirit of the human mind. What the hell?! The
freedom of the creative spirit of culture. Whose church is that? Just
values that justify the sham world you are living in. What is the soul
that must be saved? What must we defend ourselves against? What is the
real threat here?...The promise of immortality, for sure.
A foreword by Robin Mackay and new essays by Reza Negarestani and Bridget Crone interpret and surround this work, extending it to politics, fiction and philosophy, and weaving these reflections through Beech's wider practice.
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