Long Live Failure!
	Quite clearly the world is no better, and neither does it seem that the foundations of the capitalist system that underpins liberal society have cracked even a little, despite all the efforts of certain artists and a whole host of malcontent creators and thinkers. The fact is that no matter how much Johnny Rotten strained his vocal cords (in a manner of speaking) screaming ‘God save the Queen and her fascist regime’, the Queen is still there and her regime doesn’t seem significantly less fascist, unless you happen to believe there is a substantial difference between Thatcher’s friendship with Pinochet and Blair’s collusion with Bush in invading Iraq in a kind of crusade launched in the name of God for the sake of oil. For radical thought, the very idea of the state is repressive, and these are no more than subtly nuanced versions of the same kind of fascism. Perhaps it is a consequence of the inability to draw fine distinctions which tends to characterize a school of thought that likes to see itself as anti-establishment that we end up concluding that, no, nothing has changed much, and neither have we succeeded in doing anything effective to make it change. So perhaps we have to go along with those who, from the Left as well as the Right, have decried the lack of pragmatism of the malcontents, and agree with the arguments of people like Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter when they rant against the Western countercultural tradition (and that tradition covers a lot of ground: Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols, of course, but also much more). The Rebel Sell: How the Counter Culture Became Consumer Culture is the title of their book — a title so explicit that in itself it summarize their whole thesis, in which they mount a general critique of the countercultural’ for its lack of efficacy, for its willingness to sell itself and, in short, for its complicity. As if to leave no room for doubt, the cover of most editions of the book features a picture of a mug (the paradigm globalized mug) emblazoned with the portrait of Che Guevara, a telling example of a culture that, for all its pretensions to being critical and countercultural, has served only to sell more mugs manufactured in China with a right-on logo. In other words, while one lot proposed to free the mind and the other lot declared their anti-system, anti-society credentials by wearing their hair in red or green spikes, nobody was taking care of basics: not only did that counterculture neglect the serious political objectives but it was also, in the form of mugs and T-shirts, actively in cahoots with extended capitalism. On the subject of efficacy, radicalism and a lack of nuances, in Welcome to the Desert of the Real —a text first published in 2000— Slavoj Zizek explained a strategy used by the conservatives and the political Right to outflank the Left, and with the benefit of hindsight, not only is his analysis still relevant, it has been amply confirmed and vindicated. Zizek outlines the crux in which the radical Left finds itself caught, in which the class-based discourse that is traditionally its own, directed at the workers, has been appropriated by the extreme Right. This is an old story; the same kind of appropriation was practised by the Nazis in Germany, the fascists in Italy and even the Falange in Spain. In fact, this is the same language that back in the 1930s produced so much —let’s call it confusion— in the minds of certain intellectuals in France. Thus, Drieu La Rochelle and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, to give two examples, heard the ‘socialism’ more distinctly than the ‘national’ part of the phrase National Socialism. They thought it was simply a version of Socialism for western Europe, and became committed Nazi collaborationists. And in this context it is also worth recalling the pact between Hitler and Stalin, and such important details as their common anti-Semitism. However, to return to Slavoj Zizek’s text, in its populist language the present-day extreme Right has also embraced opposition to globalization and set itself up as a bastion against the forms of late capitalism. Of course the democratic parties, especially in a European framework in which the extreme Right is overloaded with history, have been mobilized against it and placed it on the fringes of democratic process: it is the adversary and it is criminalized. But that criminalization of the extreme Right is also applied to its arguments, effectively excluding them, too. And here lies the crux for the radical Left. Because the critique of the forms of late capitalism or of capitalism in its expansionist phase, globalization included, is the Left’s primary argument. It is the radical Left that is antiglobalization, not Le Pen. But if it is now the argument of the extreme Right, and if not only the extreme Right but also its arguments are the enemy, what options does the Left have? Either to share a space of marginalization in the unsavoury company of a bunch of neo-Nazis, or to give up some of its arguments and make its way back to the fold of democratic ‘normality’. In other words, either the Left, too, places itself beyond the pale of democracy and occupies a supposed exterior space along with the extreme Right, to end up sharing the same package of anti-system radicalism with those it most abhors, or it abandons its own arguments, renouncing radicalism in politics and thought, to become a Leftist accomplice of extended capitalism. Given that we only write for our allies and our enemies, for all that I have been citing a radical Left, allies and enemies alike will recall that all of this started with the strategy of the conservatives and the political Right. What Slavoj Zizek identifies —because what Zizek, like all good thinkers, does is identify things, take note, describe what the rest of us see but don’t know we are seeing and, most importantly, situate it in relation to other things that we also see— what he outlines is not only the crux of the radical Left but also the basic strategy of the conservatives and the Right that has pushed it out to the fringe. He describes the bases of this bland reality, constructed with firm values, moderation and centrality, in the face of which any thought that aspires to be critical is condemned to be banished to the margins, reduced to a supposed radicalism in which everything is simplified because, as we all know, the extremes meet. This is the desert of the real that we share. A Pain in the Arse The phrase ‘Welcome to the desert of the real’ that Slavoj Zizek used as the title for that text and a subsequent series is a quote from the film The Matrix. When Neo, the hero, chooses the green pill and wakes up in the supposed real world in which humans are farmed in plantations and used as an energy source by the machines, Morpheus, Neo’s mentor, welcomes him to the desert of the real. Later in the series of Matrix films, a long time after Neo has been ‘set free’, a long time after his welcome to the desert of the real. when it has been clearly established that he is The One (in fact the whole of the first film in the trilogy is devoted to demonstrating that this is the case), in the second instalment of the saga our hero has a crucial encounter with the Architect. In the plot of the films, the Matrix is the vast programme that simulates reality, into which our minds are connected and in which we believe that all our sensations and impulses are real. This is where Neo appears as a saviour to reveal the truth to us. The Architect, the creator of the matrix, would then be something like the nucleus of the system (the kernel?). By the time Neo has his interview with him he has already put the system to the test, he is a rebel, he seems to create new problems for the system every day, breaking rules and freeing minds while in the desert of the real, on the other side, a definitive assault is being prepared to put an end to the tyranny of the machines. In his audacity, Neo has managed to get to the Architect, in order to tell him ‘here I am I, I am a rebel, we are going to change the system and liberate reality’. At this point the old guy reveals to Neo, somewhat cynically and slightly sadistically, that he is not the first rebel to have got this far. In fact, he assures him that the whole thing had been programmed, and that though he is indeed the famous One, his function is merely to channel the system’s energy losses. Neo is entropy, necessary to keep everything running smoothly, and when they have finished with him, another one will come along to perform that entropic role of necessary energy loss, the disorder that ratifies order. To put it in other, somewhat cruder terms, he is the pimple on  the bum, the pain in the arse. Neo’s failure is a question of efficacy: what world change is possible beyond living like leeches? What effectiveness is possible beyond being a pain in the arse? This was precisely what Malcolm McLaren was trying to do with the Sex Pistols: people were to hear ‘God save the Queen and her fascist regime’ on the very day of the celebration of the 25th anniversary of her coronation, and see four unemployed adolescents (one of them known for stealing instruments from the groups he played with, another a heroin addict) splashed all over the front pages of the British papers for swearing on live early-evening television. ‘Fuck!’ In case there were any remaining doubt that the music was the least of it, that the point and the purpose were quite different, in 1979 Malcolm McLaren assembled what was left of the band plus one or two others to record ‘No One Is Innocent’. In 1978 the Sex Pistols had started a tour of the United States that ended in San Francisco. At that gig Johnny Rotten quit the group, left the stage and went off to Jamaica to listen to reggae. Sid Vicious began a short-lived solo career, recording a version of ‘My Way’ before being charged with murdering his girlfriend and then being found dead of an overdose. A curious fact: in the audience at that gig was the Californian writer and critic Greil Marcus, who a few years later was to commence his book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century with a reminiscence of Johnny Rotten rolling his Rs when he sang ‘Anarchy in the UK’ at what was reckoned to be the Sex Pistols’ worst ever performance, but one that made a great impression on Marcus. With Steve Jones (guitar) and Paul Cook (drums) now all that remained of the group, Malcolm McLaren sent them to Brazil, where they would record ‘No One Is Innocent’ with Ronnie Biggs on lead vocals and ‘Martin Bormann’ (in fact played by the actor Henry Rowland) joining in on the chorus. Ronnie Biggs was the famous escaped train-robber, probably Britain’s most wanted criminal, whose whereabouts had only recently been discovered, while Martin Bormann was a Nazi wanted for war crimes who was believed by some to be in hiding in Brazil. Jamie Reid designed the poster for the single: under the words No One Is Innocent appeared the remaining members of the Sex Pistols, Britain’s most hated group; Ronnie Biggs, the most wanted criminal, and ‘Martin Bormann’ in SS uniform. Malcolm McLaren’s intention was obviously, undisguisedly to be a pain in the arse, and to make money out of it. ‘No One Is Innocent’ was McLaren’s last attempt to turn a profit from the Sex Pistols. The big issue behind the operation is in that poster and in the title of the song, in that ‘nobody is innocent’ hovering over the heads of a sneak-thief who stole his fellow musicians’ instruments, a train-robber and a Nazi as representatives of a much-detested pop group. The point is not that they are not innocent, it is that nobody is innocent. It is a matter not of their guilt, but the guilt of all of us. And this is where provocation is entwined with the desire to rock the boat, to expose false innocence. There is one last element in the story of Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols that has a lot to do with the rejection of correctness and is directly related to one of the obsessions in current debates on art: the transparency of the curatorial process, showing the working dynamic, generating complicities and making these visible. The relationship between the manager of the Pistols and the members of the group was anything but transparent, anything but the product of positive synergies. In due course Johnny Rotten/Lydon took McLaren to court over the rights to the name ‘The Sex Pistols’. McLaren always and quite flagrantly exploited the lads in the band, and they always resisted the manipulation of their crafty manager: the whole object was to turn outrage into cash. Most purists will be happy with the fact that Malcolm McLaren lost the case in 1986, the judge ruling in favour of the actual members of the Sex Pistols. Since then he has attempted on numerous occasions to come up with some other provocative bombshell, the most recent being ‘chip music’ — music made with a modified GameBoy (?). Meanwhile his ex-wife Vivienne Westwood, who sold her designs in her shop Sex, where Johnny Rotten and the others used to hang out, and who was also involved in the creation of the Sex Pistols, has gone on to become an icon of British fashion — so much so that in 2004 the Victoria & Albert Museum in London devoted a major exhibition to her. Perhaps it is not so much a matter of talking about ideas, about how they should be developed, how their processes should be presented and so on as simply of having ideas and putting them into practice with sufficient intensity. Search Me! At the height of the scandal following the famous live television broadcast during which the Sex Pistols’ guitarist Steve Jones swore several times on peak-time TV, various tabloid journalists went to interview Johnny Rotten’s mother. When they asked her what she thought about what her son was saying and doing, and about his friend Steve Jones calling a popular TV presenter a ‘fucking rotter’, she replied that what she found really shocking was the situation of the young in Thatcher’s Britain, unemployment, the lack of opportunities and the complete indifference of the government to this hopeless situation. Malcolm McLaren was also interviewed and also faced the cameras, albeit more cynically, remarking with a sarcastic grimace that he didn’t understand what all the fuss was about and declaring that what was scandalous was the state of British society. Francis Bacon gave a very similar response to David Sylvester in one of the many conservations he had with the critic over the years. Sylvester asked Bacon about his conception of the world, about whether he rejected any kind of transcendence, whether he felt there really was no hope, whether in fact we are nothing and life is brutal. Bacon assented to all of this until Sylvester asked him if he therefore thought that his paintings were also brutal, reflections of that hopelessness, that horror, to which he answered no: he did not think that his paintings could be as brutal as life, that compared with the reality around them they were innocuous, that in any case they were beautiful; of course he had tried, but all of his painting was a failure. The faces of Malcolm McLaren and Johnny Rotten’s mother failing to understand what was so scandalous or Francis Bacon’s face announcing that compared with reality his paintings were happy express the impossibility of competing with reality because reality is always worse. This places them in a state of deliberate innocence: however bad I may be I can never be worse than they are. This conviction that compared with reality I really haven’t done anything bad is a commonplace of despairing critical thought. Take Bret Easton Ellis, for example, recalling in Lunar Park that at the press conferences he gave to promote American Psycho he used to say that in many ways the novel seemed to him to be very realistic. Amid the media hullabaloo he said that what was scandalous was not his yuppie murderer but 1980’s America with its get-rich-quick Reaganite society and its culture of unbridled selfishness. What would the Che Guevara mug guys, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, make of this? While Naomi Klein has managed to sell even more mugs printed with some antiglobalization icon and to have the H&M chain sell socks with the phrase ‘No Logo’ (the title of her book, at the cutting edge of antiglobalization), it appears that Bret Easton Ellis is a very socially aware writer. As Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols told him, No One Is Innocent; it is other people who have evil minds, not me... I haven’t done anything! That could be one of the arguments or strategies of a critical thought that sought to be anti, perhaps because it is there that the contrary, a thought anchored in conventionality, attacks defensively. It is not a matter of efficacy —perhaps failure is the best way of being effective— but of exercising a critical thought, a thought that can only be unbelieving, can only think ‘anti’, against the grain and the wrong way round. And of course it is always wrong. Wrong At the ARCO art fair in Madrid of 2005 the group of artists known as El Perro presented a realistic sculpture that reproduced the famous photo taken in the US military prison at Abu Ghraib showing Private Lynndie England with an Iraqi prisoner on a leash, on all fours, like a dog. The sculpture is part of a wider project, The Democracy Shop, which seeks to publicize the ‘Democracy’ brand, and is just one of the series of elements that make up an authentic advertising campaign: US Army in Iraq T-shirts with the brand name Democracy printed in typefaces used by pop groups or Walt Disney posters, promotional videos, games for the computer or PlayStation, and other sculptures. The images and objects in The Democracy Shop originate in and are a development of some of the scenes, photographs and icons that the Second Iraq war has generated. This is the case with the photograph of Private Lynndie England converted into a promotional sculpture, and also of a photograph of an American soldier skateboarding in the middle of the Iraqi desert as a model for skateboarding with the Democracy brand name, or the large sculpture that recreates another famous image from Iraq of prisoners on all fours balancing on top of one another to form a house of cards castle while a kid jumps over them on his skateboard, or the group of videos in which kids wearing The Democracy Shop T-shirts skateboard inside the graffiti-covered walls of the old Carabanchel prison in Madrid. On their Website (www.elperro.info) El Perro offer a description of The Democracy Shop and a declaration of the intentions of the project: ‘what we perceive when we see the photos of the humiliated Iraqi prisoners on our screens, in our newspapers, is precisely a privileged vision of the values of the civilized world.’ In other words, the photos of torture in Abu Ghraib prison do not throw democracy into crisis, as some people seem to be saying, but in fact represent the values being sold to us as democracy today. There is not a trace of irony here; instead, The Democracy Shop is essentially about the straight representation of the facts. That representation wastes no time splitting hairs making abstrusely nuanced distinctions between who is more and who is less innocent, saying yes to this democracy and no to that one, Abu Ghraib or Carabanchel; it simply notes that the chain of distribution of the idea of Western democracy is directly linked to the legal practice of torture. Johnny Rotten’s mum didn’t have much time for subtle nuances, either, and nor did she see anything very scandalous in the members of her son’s group swearing, or in what they sang on a boat on the Thames, simply because ‘God save the Queen and her fascist regime’ is basically no more than a description. Similarly, in 1976 when Ant Farm and TR Uthco recreated the assassination of US  President John F. Kennedy in Dallas and recorded it on video they included a statement that converted the apparently fake documentary that constitutes The Eternal Frame into the demonstration of a fact. In effect, The Eternal Frame documents the reconstruction of the shooting in the actual location of the real events, with a group of artists playing the roles of the President, Jackie Kennedy and the retinue. The video also captures the reactions of the passers-by attend who witnessed this new assassination of the iconic President of the United States. Afterwards the whole group went to the JFK Memorial Museum, with Doug Hall, got up as Kennedy, greeting the visitors. The video also includes some footage of the members of Ant Farm and TR Uthco getting ready to interpret their characters, and at the end there is a short scene in which the fake JFK addresses the nation on television: 'Like all Presidents in recent years, I am in reality nothing more than another image on your television sets. I am in reality only another face on your screens. I am in reality only another link in that chain of pictures which makes up the same total information accessible to all of us Americans'. Thus there is no parody of the dead President here because quite simply they are all parodies. The Eternal Frame is a documentary, a document. It sets out to give an account of certain facts (even if these are apparently parodied) and as such it forms part of what has become a myth of conceptual art: the act of recording. From Joseph Beuys to Bruce Nauman by way of Vito Acconci and Richard Long, there is a tradition of wanting to bear witness, and that commitment is the point of reference for the entire the series of projects of Antonio Ortega, all of which share the generic title Record of something. On the one hand, then, Registro de Caridad [Record of Charity] brings together a collection of documents and photographs testifying to the use that Antonio Ortega made of the money that the Fundació “la Caixa” gave him to produce his exhibition in the Sala Montcada. The money served to sponsor a pig for a year, keeping it alive on a farm in London. In addition to the pig, well looked after on its farm, with a name and an optimum diet paid for with money from a savings bank’s cultural foundation, Antonio Ortega also decided to feed some birds in the back yard of his house in London: what he offered them was his own vomit. So on the other hand Record of Charity documents eighteen minutes of trying to vomit and the moment when the birds decide to come down to feed. The piece set out not to pass judgement but to document (record) facts, events. At the same time it sought to put our preconceived ideas of charity and generosity to the test with a simple question: what is more generous — feeding with vomit that is the result of twenty minutes of effort or transferring money from one bank account to another? How should generosity be measured: by the effects it produces or by the easiness of one’s conscience? Asking questions is always troublesome. And it is so in noting, looking at a particular place and holding it up to view, and asking more questions. This taking stock of things has something impertinent about it. Gustave Flaubert found this out when it was tried for the publication of Madame Bovary. He had simply portrayed the life of an ambitious, adulterous provincial girl who tended to let herself be carried away by the cheap novels she read; she also committed suicide. But by doing so, by pointing out the unhappiness of petty bourgeois society in the France of his day, Flaubert was being impertinent. In his next novel, Salambó, set against the background of the Punic Wars and the Roman conquest of Carthage, he only appeared to have abandoned his former impertinence. Flaubert’s correspondence makes it clear that the fact of having to ‘travel’ to a far-off place and a distant time, the Mediterranean in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, to one of the longest and most remote struggles in history, in order to find something of interest demonstrates how disgusted he was with his own time. It is simply a question of having a critical conscience and making use of it, although that is no guarantee of success. Mafia Ending At the end of Martin Scorsese’s film Goodfellas, Henry Hill, the character played by Ray Liotta, gives evidence against his former Mafia companions and goes off to start a new life on a witness protection programme. From the streets of Long Island in New York that have been present all through the film the camera jumps to a suburb in the middle of nowhere. We see Henry Hill again, coming out of one of the countless identical houses with garden. As he comes out in his bathrobe to collect his newspaper his voice ‘off’, as if that of the narrator, says: ‘Right after I got here, I ordered some spaghetti in marinara sauce and I got egg noodles in ketchup. I'm an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook’. As he finishes the phrase the version of ‘My Way’ that Sid Vicious recorded after leaving the Sex Pistols begins to sound — a performance of ‘My Way’ in which, in a kind of primitive pop video, Sid Vicious finishes up by shooting into the audience. It is curious, the link that Martin Scorsese traces between a gangster, the Mafia and the punk by ending a film about Mafia gangsters with Sid Vicious singing none other than ‘My Way’, the most famous version of which is by Frank Sinatra. As if what he really wanted to talk about in Goodfellas was not so much the Mafia as the price of rebellion. After all, to rewind for a moment, the film opens with a statement of intent by the main character: ‘As far back as I can remember, I've always wanted to be a gangster’. As if it all came down to the choice between being a cop or a gangster, between being for order or for disorder. David G. Torres
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