Made In Heights Aporia In These Streets 1

Plunderphonics/graphics is the art form of copies, of "the already played," where art objects dance in our imagination, pretending toward the Phallus yet deliriously never authenticating an experience of the Real. What we can realize through such a ludic praxis is that the Real is now something different than a reality full of discrete objects to which we think we've been annexed through language or symbology. Instead the Real is the annexation to a world of copies. We live in the immateriality of language, in a highly combinable space strewn with indeterminate pulsions we turn into arrows and objects. We mistake language as distinct from that which it posits. Simulacra are real and all that is real is simulacrum. The Real is always a fabrication dependent upon socially determined variables. In this case objects are only unique if that uniqueness is a characteristic intrinsic to their creation, if that is the specialness of their identity. It is a characteristic of production that it is now always possible to make several copies of any one thing. And so, the idea has become the only locus of originality. The bastion of the art object's aura, Benjamin's aura of originality, surrounds the concept. The necessary conclusion, the realization and materialization of the concept in a concrete form, is nothing more than ephemeral detritus fallen from a unique and insubstantial object. We moved the aura from an illumination of praxis through techn into our minds where it only shines around the most unique of ideas. What we get in the conceptual art object made manifest is an echo. We still privilege uniqueness and originality but our definitions of how these terms apply to an art object has changed to suit our reality. The aura has no place in our everyday experience and the wake of its withdrawal into thought and immateriality only highlights the ordinariness and drabness of our received cultural surroundings: concrete, functionality, lawns, gardens, etc. If our reality is entirely constructed from simulacra, then DJs and artists such as Goldsmith manipulate facets of culture with a facility heretofore only intimated in modernist and postmodernist art practices without succumbing to the mind-numbing castration anxieties of our previous generations. They dramatize the process of the Real in their annexing practice. The aura that would have existed around the cultural products they manipulate now enshrouds the activity of manipulation, and in this case, the act of plunder.

The idea of transporting a quotidian and time-sensitve object such as the newspaper into a posterity-ridden space like that of the book challenges our sense of utility. Words are meant to be read. Words don't have expiration dates. So, a newspaper that is two days old is already redundant by the simple fact of the two intervening days' issues of the newspaper that are each supposedly up-to-date up to their respective dates of issue. Books are meant to blanket the social aporia generated by newspapers' attempt at total coverage and provide a retrospective, albeit revisionist picture of a given historical moment. Books are meant to be read at any time, irrespective of 'when' they are written or published. But the deceptively honest question remains: how fruitful is it to read a newspaper as a book when it is continuously more and more out-of-date? Should such a book be read at all? I realize to some people it is almost sacrilegious to suggest that a book should not be read, that a book's function is other than to be read, but the question nonetheless remains. Duchamp challenged our notions of art and utility, of the height of the objet d'art's preciousness and the lowness of the objet quotidienne with his readymades. Goldsmith's Day functions similarly to Duchamp's Fountain in that it is still a newspaper as much as Duchamp's Fountain is still a urinal. Both are functional. But who wants to piss in Duchamp's fountain? Maybe the text of Goldsmith's Day exists otherwise than as a semantic outlay provided by a reader's dutiful reading of the words contained within the book (or on the back cover)? His text exists much like a DJ's mix: in the ephemeral space of experience, the concept, disassociated from but reliant on objects, created in transformation and left there, haunting the annex of the Real, created through an act of plunder, created by sampling the culture. And the book is an independent artefact of the process, a urinal, a recording.