Tale#4 Mythology
Dear readers,
Given how much Tale(s) likes to tell stories and take you on journeys to other worlds, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity of doing a special Mythology issue!
Myths — formative or not, ancient or contemporary, realistic or fantastic — are nevertheless not simple tales. Beyond the coherence and esthetics of narrative structure, characters or universe, myths remain astonishing tools to represent and comprehend the great human epic stretching back to the beginning of time. But they’re highly imperfect imitations, endlessly fictionalizing reality. They must draw upon both imagination and lucidity to avoid falling into blind faith or repeating imprecise language.
Tactical games of construction and deconstruction? Of dressing or undressing reality? Character factories?
As always, Tale(s) embraces its independent spirit and calls upon yours to skillfully navigate your way through these 80 pages of fashion and music, art and architecture, images and knowledge…
Raphaële Bidault-Waddington
Sophie Lebas de Lachesnay
Melody champagne
Tale(s) #4
EDITORIAL
Dear readers,
Given how much Tale(s) likes to tell stories and take you on journeys to other worlds, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity of doing a special Mythology issue!
Myths — formative or not, ancient or contemporary, realistic or fantastic — are nevertheless not simple tales. Beyond the coherence and esthetics of narrative structure, characters or universe, myths remain astonishing tools to represent and comprehend the great human epic stretching back to the beginning of time. But they’re highly imperfect imitations, endlessly fictionalizing reality. They must draw upon both imagination and lucidity to avoid falling into blind faith or repeating imprecise language.
Tactical games of construction and deconstruction? Of dressing or undressing reality? Character factories?
As always, Tale(s) embraces its independent spirit and calls upon yours to skillfully navigate your way through these 80 pages of fashion and music, art and architecture, images and knowledge…
Tale#4 Mythology
Raphaële Bidault-waddington
Melody Champagne
Sophie Lebas de Lachesnay
jean charles valienne
narcisse by Raphaele bidault waddington
Me myself and you
Melody champagne
By Malindi pender
THE BIRTH OF A MODERN MYTH
At the FIGRA documentary film festival held in March in Touquet, there was no end to the variety of subject matter—from ecological disasters to American bounty hunters. This film genre, which documents the life and life forms of our world, was celebrated in all its forms. In a time where the Internet is used increasingly for personal research and fact-finding missions, we find ourselves hard-pressed to filter our findings, often rife with disinformation. The documentary is thus a jewel in the Information Age, a presenting and preserving of truths, of life as it is.
THE FAUX DOCUMENTARY
So it is of special concern when the documentary genre is misused. One film at the festival investigated just that: Stéphane Malterre’s “11-Septembre: Enquete sur la theorie du complot.” (9/11- Investigation of the conspiracy theory.) In this documentary Malterre examines an American-made faux documentary called “Loose Change,” which charges the Bush administration with orchestrating the attacks of September 11, 2001. The BBC, The History Channel, National Geographic and the magazine Popular Mechanics have also thoroughly investigated and debunked the claims made in the film.
WHO IS THIS KID?
The maker of the film, Dylan Avery, is a young man from Oneonta, in upstate New York. He is currently 26 years old. The story is that he was denied admission twice to film school, whereupon he set out to make a fictional thriller about 9/11. Amazingly, while making the film, he realized that it was true…
Dylan and his friends claim that their motivation is to seek the truth and to encourage healthy skepticism. After the first version of Loose Change met with success in 2005, they have made updating and releasing new versions of the film their full-time jobs -- and they can. Having attracted a distributor with its previous underground successes, the 4th and most recent version, “Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup” was released September 2009 and had a budget of $1 million U.S. dollars (the budget for the first version was $2,000). It was distributed by Microcinema International, based in California, where Dylan now lives. A far cry from Oneonta, population 14,000.
DUBIOUS SOURCES
The massive online success of “Loose Change” is alarming. It has been translated into hundreds of languages. Its premise, that the 9/11 was an inside job, has resonated with audiences worldwide, regardless of that facts that a) no serious journalists are associated with or support the theory, b) the conspiracy argument has been debunked by various credible media outlets and science journals, and c) sources used in the film are more than questionable.
For example, the film cites articles in the American Free Press, an anti-Semitic newspaper that has been classified in the United States as an “active hate group.” It also uses many news clips, broadcast and print, from the first few days after the attacks, during which very little was known and news coverage was rife with speculation.
The “documentary” has no actual investigation. In order to make a convincing documentary format, the film is a veritable stew of journalistic offenses: Quote-mining, cherry-picking, and other transgressions that would get any reporter fired or blacklisted. (The Web-site ScrewLooseChange.com is dedicated to exposing these errors and more.) The modus operandi is to create doubt and insinuate guilt; to ask questions, but not to actually look for the answers.
In a televised debate with Popular Mechanics editors and authors of the book, “Debunking 9/11 Myths,” (David Dunbar and Brad Reagan), Dylan and his colleague start by accusing Dunbar and Reagan of being themselves part of the conspiracy, and accuse them throughout the debate of being “liars.”
Dylan and his colleague’s behavior and argumentation during this debate is so butt-clenching and pathetic it is hard to watch. They become increasingly hostile as their credibility is shredded before them.
And yet despite ALL this, and more – faulty investigation, dubious sources, a black-hole of credibility, as well as copyright infringements -- the film continues to find a receptive audience. How on earth can we explain this phenomenon?
A GIANT UBER-MEME?
A “meme” is a unit of cultural ideas, spread through imitable phenomena. It could be propagated by writing, by speech, by ritual -- or by Internet. The word was coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, and refers to something that is imitated or repeated.
A meme’s survival, whether it’s a fashion trend, a catch-phrase or any idea, depends on many criteria: the level of proliferation, the ease by which it can be imitated or repeated. The Internet is the biggest propagator and diffuser of memes in human history. A meme can spread like a virus, experiencing various mutations. It’s a kind of “thought contagion,” when an idea is repeated and repeated. Through such repetition ideas gain credibility in people’s minds.
BIRTH OF A MODERN MYTH
In order for the meme to proliferate, it has to have some attractive quality. It must resonate with existing notions and beliefs. In this case, the widespread mistrust of the US government and in particular the CIA, for example, or a long-standing and widespread belief in Jewish power conspiracies, which likes to hold up the US-Israel relations as evidence.
Some memes mutate, lose so much integrity that they either find new life in their mutated forms or die out. The 9/11 conspiracy theory has become a giant uber-meme. Loose Change is, in effect, the crystallization of the ideas spawned by various loosely organized conspiracy-theory groups. The fact that the film can be viewed on-line and passed on without being modified – which any story would inevitably be subject to in an oral tradition – means that the myth maintains perfect integrity and due to such exponential repetition, this one has grown to mythic proportions.
IS LIFE A GOOD THRILLER WITH A CIA SUBPLOT?
Have we all seen too many movies to be able to separate reality from fiction? Are we so hungry for a good story that we’ll set aside intellectual rigor?
The fact is that those who deem themselves “not naïve enough” to buy the official version of the events of 9/11 are even more naïve by accepting the “truth” presented by a young filmmaker who may be well-intentioned but whose credibility is unknown.
The younger, the more tech savvy is axiomatic of our time. Using editing software to make a convincing faux documentary without ever leaving home is getting easier and easier. It used to be safe to assume that a compelling documentary was the result of a huge commitment of time, energy and resources, and therefore was executed in adherence with certain standards. No longer…
sophie Lebas de lachesnay
Elisa Valenzuela
Steeve Beckouet
Annabelle Jouot
pringle of scotland. eighty forty five. postweiler hauber.
damir doma.
boris bidjan saberi. 3.1 philip lim. boris bidjan saberi.
, damir doma., Postweiler Hauber. petar petrov.
jil sander men. petar petrov.
romain kremer.
, petar petrov. fabrics interseason.
,
tim hamilton homme.
vilsbol de arce.
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Hélène Bidard @ Artlist
Yacine Dhallo @ Artlist
Sven Ghule @ Bananas Mambo et Hans Hatt @ Major
Jennifer Clemson
Emma Pick
Marion Chambrette
Gilles de Givry
Kiddycar
Christian Rainer
Viva models management paris
Helmut Lang
Les Petites
Johnny Gembitsky
Annett Monheim at streeters
Pamela love
Speed and obesity
fashion
photo
mode
new york
Freyja déesse scandinave
greg conraux
iris hatzfeld
eres
givenchy
philip lim
lanvin
repossi
alexander mc queen
Raphaële bidault waddington
“Brand-name mythology and symbolic economics in the arts.”
Faith or Credit?
For decades now, certain artists have chosen to organize and orchestrate their process(es) in the form of — sometimes real, sometimes fictitious —enterprises. Those brands, propelled by artistic or critical motives rather than commercial ones, are giving shape to an astonishing symbolic form of economics that invites infinite narrative speculation.
Rethinking the Myth of the Artist
Global ethereal economics and Richard Florida’s “Creative Class” theories are the order of the day. The world of tomorrow is in the hands of creators (of form, process or knowledge). Thus redefined in today’s society, the myth of the artist as marginalized or dependent upon government subsidies loses its meaning. As such, artist-entrepreneurs become an interesting area of experimentation on a recurrent behavior pattern — that of social beings who certainly keep the critical distance necessary to realizing a particular vision or practice art in general, yet attempt to officially or conceptually fit into or interact in economic affairs. “I quickly figured out that a brand name, as opposed to a personal name, was a very effective means of bringing together company logic and social life,” said Iain Baxter, a pioneer artist in this field, who founded the N.E. Thing Company in Vancouver in 1966. In 1971, he drafted an clearly theoretical artistic manifesto detailing his position. It read, “The objective isn’t personal profit, but the development of a structure and method by which products, functions and power can directly change the value of societal systems.”
Toward a Saga of Brands
Since then, art history has seen an entire sphere of influence of artist-entrepreneurs and of artist brand names flourish across the four corners of the globe, offering that concept in a variety of forms of prototypes and one-of-a kinds. The artistic venture adopts business codes and language, uses slogans and logos, justifies its art-world reason for being with issues of an economic nature, but once they’re “transposed onto another field, they’re reevaluated and formulated according to esthetic, ethical and social criteria,” as Rose-Marie Barrientos states in Les Entreprises Critiques (Cité du Design, publishers).
Playing with parody and the fictitious, these artists appropriate the business model — name, labeling, brand, status, graphic image, operational style, marketing or production… They make us conscious of the role of brand names and corporations in our society. These postures go far beyond the one-time commercial or economic game.
Dutch designer Joep created the Atelier Van Lieshout (AVL) in Rotterdam in 1985 to confront a growth industry and oversee the multidisciplinary staff that gradually took form around him. AVL’s production is, above all, the fruit of team work, a synergy of creative minds, a dynamic commercial strategy. All of AVL’s objects and art works are sold directly by the Atelier.
German artist Dida Zende, who founded FIT (Freie Internationale Tankstelle) in 2001, reclaims closed or abandoned gas stations and renovates them, turning them into creative stations where anyone can come to refill their tank with psychic energy and form a genuine social dynamic around them. FIT is truly symptomatic of the artistic enterprise’s way of manufacturing social bonds and its powerful effect on society, as British artist John Latham claimed back in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
He and Barbara Steveni cofounded APG (the Artist Placement Group), coining the phrase, “The Incidental Person” to describe the artist who is socially engaged and able to collaborate with industry, governmental bodies, or any organized social entity. Veritable contemporary temples, gathering places devoted to human creation in absolute freedom, Dida Zende’s stations — be they temporary or permanent —leave their mark on the locality and recharge the symbolic imagination of the public space.
The Artist As Brander of Society
Staunchly committed to the social realm or the universe, soberly present in art circles, the artist-entrepreneur refuses narcissistic withdrawal, fervently tackling the issues of the times in an attempt to follow and shed light on them.
Take for example BP, the artist-enterprise that emerged in France in the late ‘80s — the boom time of brand names as publicity tools — which appropriated, and symbolically distorted, the infamous oil company’s moniker. That artistic duo created sublime sculptures out of gas cans and dark oil and operated a kind of counter-ad — as critical as it was poetic — depicting the fascinating speculation on black gold as generic material of a future, synthetic world.
But the world changes. Environmental problems transform our vision of natural resources. To better preserve its commitment as tracker of the contemporary world, BP — now reduced to the figure of Renaud Leyrac — has reinvented its own brand. The eponymous exhibition “Before Present” [see details below] refers to the principle of carbon 14, the substance used to date materials. With that semiotic device — a semantic inversion that art is quite adept at — BP has refashioned its own myth and bounces its own history off the real...
Société Réaliste, an artists’ cooperative founded by Ferenc Gróf and Jean-Baptiste Naudy in 2004 — and based on Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s production theories, as adapted to art — is another exercise in symbolic economics set in motion by an artistic enterprise. Their EU Green Card Lottery walks the fine line between politics and economics, parodying an American website that has promoted a lottery to win the coveted American Green Card for the past fifteen years. Their lottery-site’s prize is a fictitious European Green Card.
False Hope
Appropriating and twisting the official nature of government and its habitual codes (hospital green, intricate forms, type face, iconography adopting Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty symbols), the website offers a passport to freedom for the global migrant. A European American fantasy promising “A European Dream,” the formative myth of a superpower that compels the world to revolve around it. By doing so, Société Réaliste reveals a complex symbolic value system in which speculation, hope and faith operate.
Beyond even the symbolic credit these artists create via their methods and structures, Goldin+Senneby, a pair of Swedish artists, question the very foundations of the real economy and its unit of currency — money. Inspired by the theories of the astonishing, sadly overlooked French philosopher, Jean-Joseph Goux, their The Decapitation of Money project [see details below] reveals the wide range of esthetic interpretations and faith in our mechanisms for creating financial value, leaving room for all kinds of fictitious extrapolation and economic, as well as symbolic, speculation. Moreover, that project includes contributions/interpretations by economist-geographer Angus Cameron, as well as the nonexistent writer K.D.
Goldin+Senneby call to mind the accursed tendency of Georges Bataille to latch onto black holes in the comprehension of financial mechanisms in which those vast forgotten values are lodged. Speaking of which… we’re tempted to turn to the work of Gabriel Tarde, the late 19th century anthropologist-economist recently exhumed in Bruno Latour’s The Science of Passionate Interests: An Introduction to Gabriel Tarde's Economic Anthropology (La Découverte, publisher). You’ve really got to believe that economy goes hand in hand with art.
Conspiratorial Theory or
Theoretical Conspiracy
The Myth of Ithaca
An Introduction to Palimpsestuous Ithaca by Sébastien Marot
Sébastien Marot launches us into an incredible theoretical epic, reviewing the history of contemporary architecture and suggesting that “everything may have been played out” in Ithaca, NY — the small mythic city nestled in the north-east corner of the United States and indelibly linked to the prestigious university known as Cornell.
In this labyrinthine rhetorical exercise, he stirs up a putsch against conventional urban theory, which he gleefully turns upside-down in his discourse on “suburbanism.”
Tapping into both the history and artistic imagination of that city, Marot expands and aestheticizes the intellectual landscape of his thoughts, to the point of turning his very serious thesis into an investigation worthy of The Back Dahlia.
•••
In 1978, Rem Koolhaas published Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. That simultaneously theoretical and poetic masterpiece, which may be considered the manifesto on contemporary sur- or superurbanism, describes a project in which programming leads to the creation of a site. My ambition is to illustrate a form of poetics that is the opposite of suburbanism (the site creates the programming) by proceeding to the laudatio urbis of an earth island — the small city of Ithaca, home to Cornell University, in the rural heart of New York State — which is the geographical opposite of Manhattan (lake/island).
A fluke of history saw to it that this tiny city was founded by the creator of the Manhattan grid (geographer Simeon De Witt) and that Koolhaas moved there in 1972 to begin to weave his Manhattanesque legend. By overexploiting that detail, my aim is to suggest that superurbanism is only one moment in suburbanism. My argument is developed in three stages.
The first is a geographical thesis, setting the scene of Ithaca’s vertical landscape. It is, in particular, devoted to the University’s three founders — Ezra Cornell, a self-taught engineer; Andrew Dickson White, an architecture aficionado; and Liberty Hyde Bailey, an extraordinary botanist and ruralist, today considered one of the fathers of American environmental pragmatism.
Then I move onto an urban-planning antithesis, closely following the trajectories of three European architects — Colin Rowe, Oswald Mathias Ungers and Rem Koolhaas — up to the moment when each came to construct the theoretical intrigues of their respective manifestos in Ithaca. The goal of this comparative genealogy of Collage City, “Berlin as Green Archipelago,” and Delirious New York — all three of which were published in 1978 — is to pinpoint the ingredients of a comparative manifesto on suburbanism, which chose to play itself out on the very landscape all three men flew over, en route to their dream — one from Rome, another from Berlin, and a third from Manhattan.
The study concludes with a poetic synthesis devoted to a few great figures from the art and literary worlds, each of whom found their Northwest Passage in “Cornell country” — earth artist Robert Smithson (whose work came to maturity in Ithaca), “anarchitect” Gordon Matta-Clark (the best student Colin Rowe ever had at Cornell), and Vladimir Nabokov (who took inspiration from Ithaca to create one of the most fascinating hyperlandscapes in contemporary literature).
In short, the gist of this undertaking may be summed up in an enigmatic line of dialogue delivered by the eponymous hero of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, “I am planning something geographical.”
REIKO uNDERWATER
Gloria Pedemonte
THE KNIFE
TOMORROW, IN A YEAR
The Knife, Mt. Sims and Planningtorock invite us to accompany them into a terribly terrestrial and completely disconcerting space opera. Their common itinerary? The life of our old pal, Charles Darwin. 2010: A Species Odyssey.
First Contact
Anyone who expected a sequel to The Knife’s last album, Silent Shout, may be bewildered, or indeed disappointed. It’s a 180° turn-around, gazing in the opposite direction — off into space. No more “Heartbeats” pop melody; instead it’s an opening onto the interstellar world of the palpable. Here we rub shoulders with all life forms — past, present and future. In total weightlessness, tugged between the aurora borealis, pigeons, the sound of the wind and the smallest pebble. Completely held in thrall by Kristina Wahlin’s voice, we drift off, without the slightest concern about our destination. We float by Kubrick’s monolith and confer with forest animals.
The album seems to escape time; Socrates could have listened to it as easily as Korben Dallas. Textures stretch out, tear; we have no reference point. Gods seem to touch humans, the two universes connected by a luminous ectoplasm. And then comes the evolution of the species. Darwin’s theory is sublimated, put forward, extrapolated, studied, exploded. We move into a world that’s no longer really real. The astral fetus is about to be born, consciousness stretches out. From this point on, no world can resist our force ever again. We are the composite of all entities, in osmosis with the earth and the universe.
Tomorrow, In A Year wears it’s name well. This 1-hour-37-second aural experience is a window onto the world — or rather the universe of tomorrow or even the day after tomorrow. We’ve just passed Jupiter, the first disc ends in an astral breath that segues into an intermission, before plunging into the second part of the album.
The Colouring of Pigeons
Now it’s time for the main event. Available for free listening on the band’s website, “Colouring of Pigeons” is an 11-minute-1-second statement. It begins with the dawn of humanity, with tribal percussion and Kristina Wahlin’s ever-present voice performing an opera for primitive Man. Her onomatopoeias gradually lift us up; monkey becomes Man, and he levitates. Jonathan Johansson and Lærke Winther enter and join in the dance. Then all three begin to speak, explaining the world and its makeup to us. We even witness the birth of the first pigeon. Statuesque and celestial. He reveals himself to be a quasi-deity — omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient.
The piece ends, once again in a shrill breath — the end of the world, the pigeon takes flight, merging with ancient mythology, to flourish and become the last living being in the galaxy. All we can do is erect statues in its effigy that will traverse the ages.
The Cosmos and Beyond…?
The second disc continues but begins to run out of steam a bit. If at first we were blown away by each track, now we slip into redundancy, repeated rhythms. We abandon ourselves, lulled by more trivial melodies. We’re reaching the end of our journey, everyone’s tired and Morpheus guides us to our final destination. Fortunately, Kristina Wahlin’s voice returns to keep us afloat, then segues into the last track on the album, which harkens back to earlier Knife productions. As we feel ourselves floating back to earth, we become human again and the statues of pigeons we erected just moments earlier begin to fade from our memory.
The Knife’s fourth album, in collaboration with Mt. Sims and Planningtorock, Tomorrow, In A Year is surprising. This kind of risk-taking and subject matter certainly won’t draw a mass audience, but you can’t accuse the band of not trying something new or of not being full of surprises. Bon voyage!
popo el sangre
gloria pedemonte
reiko underwater
1) The Rolling Stones – Their Satanic Majesties
2) Al Cooper – I stand Alone
3) Amii Stewart – Knock on Wood
4) Betty Davis – They say I'm Different
5) Blind faith – Blind Faith
6) Bow wow Wow – Teenage Queen
7) Deep Purple – Storm Bringer
8) Dionne Warwick – Very Dionne
1) Jane's Addiction – Nothing' Shocking 2) Gladys Night and the Pips – Visions 3) Glider – Glider 4) Jefferson Airplanes – Crown of Creation 5) Jimi Hendrix – Electric Ladyland 6) John Lennon and Yoko Ono – 2Virgins 7) Led Zeppelin – Houses of the Holy
8) Lightnin' Strikes – Lightnin'Hopkins 9) Shiva's Band – Take me to the Mountains 10) The Call– Modern Romans 11) The Moby Crape – WOW 12) Quincy Jones – The Deadly Affair 13) 14) Sacha barclet sabina kangerud mathiey cesarski
The Steeve Miler' Bandb– Sailor
Graham Nash – Wild Tales
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