I've never actually seen an episode of Lost, but I assume that it is both something to do with Tom Hank’s Casteway (2000) success adding along the reality television franchise expansion of Survivor (2000), Big Brother (U.S 2000), The Challenge (1998) & Fear Factor (2001). The 2000s became the golden era for survival-themed content, capitalising heavily on the thematics of isolation, harsh environments, paranoia, psychological dread & competitive elimination in the Post-9/11 worldscape.
After a quick Reddit search, I gathered enough information to establish that Lost involves a fated commercial airliner that crashes on a tropical island somewhere near the South Seas. A group unknown to one another work together to survive, whilst incidentally exposing a monstrous security system called ‘The Smoke Monster’, which is some kind of research bunker from which the DHARMA Initiative operates. I am told these are a long-term hostile group of inhabitants known as The Others. The series functions via non-linear flashbacks, flash-forwards & flash-sideways. It has 1–6 seasons, 121 episodes with a 30–50 minute run time. It takes 3 days, 16 hours, & 9 minutes (or about 88 to 92 hours total) to watch all of Lost from start to finish without stopping.
The series & seriality are two fundamentally distinct categories in the world of things. A series names a grouping of related works or episodes. A seriality names the logic of repetition, difference & succession through which those relations are produced. Seriality is not simply multiplicity between objects; it is multiplicity within the object & repetition is not fundamentally the reproduction of an identical thing. What I'm interested in is the mode of thought of which painting becomes the stake? Where serialism repeatedly gives this possibility a discrete existence. Each painted case can belong to the commercial sequence of Lost while reopening the question of its belonging to painting. Neither affiliation exhausts the object (painting). To paint on the series as a series is a pun literalised but also locates painting as a nominal designation in a language-game of its own persistence. Historically, serialism itself tends often to be articulated in the domain of music, as serial or dodecaphonic (twelve-tone) structure. Painting unfortunately has been lumbered with the Lamentable & Forlorn’d designations of Serial Art & much, much worse in the form of; Generative Systems, Process Art, Systemic Art or Systemic Painting!
László Moholy-Nagy, EM 1–3 (Telephone Picture), 1923
EM 1–3 are porcelain enamel on steel, industrially fabricated in 1922–23 by Stark & Reise sign factory in Tannroda, near Weimar, Germany. The three works repeat the same geometric composition at progressively smaller scales: EM 1 measures 95.2 × 60.3 cm; EM 2, 47.5 × 30.1 cm; EM 3, 24 × 15 cm. Each reduction approximately halves the preceding work’s height & width. These are therefore three separately manufactured realisations of a common design, whose proportional organisation can be maintained across changes in physical dimensions. Working with the factory’s colour chart & a design plotted on graph paper, he communicated with a factory supervisor who had corresponding squared paper at the other end of a telephone, with Nagy comparing this procedure to ‘playing chess by correspondence’.
Flat 22 Sofa (2026) is an epoxy resin cast of the artist’s sofa. VIMLE 3-seat sofa, with the chaise longue in Knäbäck grey-green, Kelinge dark blue—or is it Mosshed dark brown, Hallarp Beige, Johanneshov Brown-Beige, or Lejde Grey-Black?
A chair is singular; the settee is multiple & lies in the inherent capacity of its own cohabitation, that being several bodies, accumulated uses, competing claims upon the same place—but it is not a job. Sofas have mutated to become places where you spend an indefinite amount of time watching, sleeping, weeping. It is a sort of architecture of indefinite consumption. In the 00s, binge was something of a muddied word; now its temporality is akin to: Bed Rotting, Goblin Mode, Vegetation, Sofa/Bedcaved, etc., etc. W. H. Auden had this as: ‘the loose ends & jumble of our common world’.
During one of his many intoxicated script-writing scenes in Sopranos (S4 E10), Christopher Moltisanti accidentally suffocates Adriana La Cerva’s dog, Cosette, while heavily under the influence of heroin & alcohol on his sofa.
When I first witnessed this scene, it was coincidentally the first occasion I had empathy for Christopher, a man who had foisted himself into a family-run business, someone who demanded instantaneous seniority via Tony Soprano. Nepotism is what drives Christopher to write out his ‘revenge story’, in which he imagines as the subversion of Tony for not following the unwritten rules. Imagine Christopher as Hamlet, Tony as Claudius in Act 5, Scene 2, Hamlet accuses Claudius of having: Popped in between th’ election and my hopes.
In my job, I occasionally handle work by the sons & daughters of established painters. It makes me wonder whether artistic progeny inherits an audience before they have produced a work: people are already prepared to believe that something will come of them. Perhaps this is the favourable condition of a kind of aesthetic faith. In that you can believe, because other people have already begun on your behalf. Genealogy acquires the appearance of its predestination such that Christopher’s attachment to the mob has something of this very expectation, proximity to succession.
Anyway, Christopher eventually finds himself in Narcotics Anonymous due to his addiction overriding his ability to function as a Capo. There he finds an opportune brotherhood with an Emmy script-writer, J. T. Dolan; the opportunity to escape the mob comes in the vision of the artist but depends on his ability to compel another writer’s labour, largely using the tactics of the mob to absorb another’s labour in the form of debt. Christopher is therefore better described as the ‘originator’ & eventual ‘co-producer’ of Cleaver, whose screenplay is largely written under the fatalistic pressure to discharge debt.
In Specters of Marx, Derrida refers to inheritance as an active responsibility. We receive contradictory legacies & must decide what to preserve, challenge or transform. We cannot inherit everything indiscriminately; neither can we simply declare ourselves free of what precedes us. If the artworld shares something with the criminal underworld, it is a type of subcontracting, often played out as the aristocracy of cruelty and its victors are the CEO’s of Social-Darwinism tout court. Cruelty doesn’t necessarily appear as a spectacular act of sadism; it can itself become a geometry of the most ordinary of acts, most blithely executed. Bourdieu’s phrase ‘natural distinction’ from La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement, is important if not for the perverse epigraph by Alain Besançon in the first chapter conveniently titled The Aristocracy of Culture:
And we do not yet know whether cultural life can survive the disappearance of domestic servants.
What Bourdieu calls ‘natural distinction’ might also describe the appearance of artistic confidence when the conditions that produced it have disappeared from view. The aristocracy of cruelty resides partly in this misrecognition: the tendency to regard survival as proof of talent & precarity as a failure of belief.
Cleaver is therefore a meta-film of fictional disguise that lends Christopher plausible deniability in the search to relieve himself of the burden of faith. Materially, it’s a direct-to-DVD mafia-slasher film, described as somewhere between ‘Saw & the Godfather II’, or ‘the Ring meets The Godfather’, & is a story of a young man who goes to pieces, then manages to find himself again. Christopher stages his own compromised, intolerable truth before Tony, his Claudius: an accusation that can still pass as entertainment. But the fictional disguise exposes its maker too; Christopher can imagine revenge more readily than he can relinquish his faith in the man against whom it is directed. He can expose Tony as a cruel emperor, but only in spectacle, where fiction is the breach of silence & means of keeping silence, a kind of omertà of art.
by Cole Denyer
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