Jordan Crandall
Jordan Crandall is an artist and media theorist. Recent solo exhibitions include the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum in Graz; ARTLAB-Spiral Gallery in Tokyo; the Museo de Arte Carillo Gil in Mexico City; the Centre d’Art Contemporain de Basse-Normandie; the Kunst-Werke in Berlin; the Kitchen in New York; and (in cooperation with V2_Organization, Rotterdam) the TENT Centrum Beeldende Kunst in Rotterdam. Group exhibitions include InSITE in San Diego and Tijuana; Net_Condition and CTRL(SPACE) at the ZKM in Karlshrue; Media Connection at Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome and La Triennale, Milan; Greater New York at PS1 in New York; and Documenta X in Kassel. Crandall is currently preparing his fourth solo museum show, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki.
Drive, an anthology of Crandall’s projects and critical writing on technology and culture, will be published in 2002 by Hatje Cantz Verlag. Crandall’s current books are Suspension (Documenta X, 1997) and Interaction: Artistic Practice in the Network (New York: D.A.P., 2001), of which he is co-Editor. Crandall is also founding Editor of
Blast and is currently developing a new journal called Positions, to debut in late 2002.
Crandall has written on technology and culture for a variety of media, including Artforum, Atlantica, TRANS>arts.cultures.media, Arconoticias, documenta documents, and CTHEORY. He lectures widely on the cultural and political dimensions of new technology, including such institutions as Columbia University in New York; Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Vienna; the Washington Project for the Arts/Corcoran Museum in Washington DC; the University of Sao Paulo and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sao Paulo; the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris and the Université Paris 8; and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. He has participated in many international conferences including ARCO in Madrid; Artifices4 in Saint-Denis; Object vs. Pixels in Amsterdam; the film+arc Biennial in Graz; the Festival of Computer Arts in Maribor; the Conference on Internet and Society at Harvard University; Media Arts in Transition at the Walker Art Center, Global Circuits at the Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA), London; and the Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium at UC Berkeley. He has organized many online conferences including Networks and Markets, in conjunction with the Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA) in London, and Artistic Practice in the Network, in collaboration with Eyebeam Atelier in New York. He holds a seat on the Advisory Board of Social Movement Studies: a journal of cultural, political, and social protest (Routledge). He regularly serves as a visiting critic and has recently served as Visiting Professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris.
Crandall’s videos have been presented at many international film and media festivals including the World Wide Video Festival in Amsterdam; the Transmediale International Media Art Festival Berlin; the Montreal International Festival of New Cinema and New Media; the Video Archeology Festival in Sofia, Bulgaria; the MIX Festival in New York City; the Berlin Biennial; the European Media Art Festival in Osnabruck, Germany; Cine y Casi Cine at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid; the Kasseler Dokumentarfilm und Videofest; and the Rotterdam International Film Festival.
Jordan Crandall's website
Abstract
American military machine is deeply reshaping international affairs. In the midst of the largest defense buildup since the Reagan Administration, where the US currently spends more on its military than the next 10 nations combined, we are faced with a situation where it is no longer productive to think of economy and culture without acknowledging their constitutive military dimensions. These dimensions are more than simply driven by economic concerns, and they move beyond contemporary conceptions of power. As they are allied with ever more sophisticated technologies of control and submission, they twist ever more deeply into psychosexual imaginaries, spawning countless new kinds of groundlevel practices that slip under the radar.
Contemporary artistic or aesthetic practices need to ventriloquize these dimensions, moving toward a revived politics of seeing. But in order to do so, we need to move beyond (or below) visuality and representation, toward a deeper understanding of aspects of the human psyche and its acts of observation and display, where “networks of looks” fuel new power dynamics. Especially in this post-9/11 world, what is needed is not only a study of militarized dimensions of seeing, but also, for example, of all of the factors that join to give rise to an American “militant masculinism” and its eroticisations of conquest.
My presentation will focus on this emerging American “military industry” as an institution writ large. It will address militarization as it fuels economy and culture, and particularly as it helps to generate new formats of representation. However, rather than taking a critical distance, I will rather plunge into the subjective depths of these mechanisms. As an artistic strategy, I want to offer an alternative to “critique” in calling for a recognition of the complexity of human relationships and impulses, which rarely fit neatly into our analytical categories. Through addressing such issues as aggression, eroticisation, and power, I aim to open up new vectors of political endeavor.
