Give me absolute control Over every living soul…
Won’t be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore.
Leonard Cohen, from The Future, 1992
Thirty years ago, a technical innovation in product management, the universal product code or bar code, was introduced, giving a number and universal user language to every consumable product. With this innovation, society lurched a little closer towards Cohen’s future, in which everything and everyone is quantifiable and able to be optimally analyzed and processed.
For Gerald Vaandering, the bar code stands as a significant symbol of the economic and technological forces that control contemporary life. Perhaps more than the introduction of the social security number, the ubiquitous bar code has become the foreboding icon of the age of digitalization the beginning of the computer ‘age infiltrating our every endeavor, where the reduction of values to quantifiable zeroes and ones, or bars of light and dark, stresses quantities over qualities. There isn’t anything you can’t put a number on, nothing measurable outside of bars of black and white.
In Heart and Soul, Vaandering continues a philosophic exploration of the effects of this technological development from earlier paintings and installations. This work presents a polemic dialogue between the light and dark bars. Here, the dark bars equal the reductionist information we process: seemingly useless or unintelligible to the viewer, they “imprison” the light areas potentially filled with human identity, character and meaning. The dark bars randomly slice through this crowd the frail community, fracturing whatever bonds exist between these passersby. In this installation, based on photos of rush hour commuters, Vaandering emphasizes the solitary, alienating effect of work lives reduced to careers and crunched numbers, rather than relationships. You’re never so alone as in the large urban environment, and the dark slashes suggest the fiscally obsessive corporate culture is to blame.
Heart and Soul takes its title from John Ralston Saul’s The Unconscious Civilization, in which he critiques our conformist and corporatist society, and argues that “the heart and soul of our 2500 year old civilization” lies in economics and the dictates of the marketplace.1 This is Vaandering’s central concern: our community values have been abandoned for a “survival of the fittest” rational. Our economy no longer serves us; we serve our economy, where the company or corporation is the new “family.”
The human figures left behind by Vaandering’s slicing bar code are certainly a desperate lot, if not, as in Saul’s terms, fully unconscious. Expressionless businessmen, here and in earlier works, are reminiscent of Rene’ Magritte’s surrealist images. They are people full of dread, and overshadowed by a menacing material object or framework. Someone talks on a cell phone, staring out blandly, as if oblivious to or incapable of communication with those directly around him. Another is only identified by a branding logo. This is what’s left of community: a collection of solitary souls trying to keep up with the pace of technological change and its promise of Nirvana or a New Jerusalem, where hell is other people. Some of these figures are so depersonalized, striated by the overriding work-world concerns, they literally become shattered unrecognizable smudges. Vaandering is painting the antiaesthetic of the rat race, countering the glossy image of advertising: the reality is, you are just a blur, lost in the shuffling numbers.2
In Vaandering’s 2000 companion installation piece, Cultural Landscapes, bar codes not only parody the way our culture reduces our labors to an economic common denominator, but suggest that we can’t quite escape this pressure to commodify our abilities, talents, qualities. A large image of a crowd was broken down into component panels or production elements, each bearing its own bar code, which were sold off and removed even as the exhibit went on: a public exhibit of art is one thing, but business is business. It was a humorous way for Vaandering to state that even the artist can’t get outside the box we’ve imposed on our culture – the box of economic concern over any other value.
Here in Heart and Soul the bar code expands to become the very work itself. Filling an entire room, it’s a reductio ad absurdum: you can almost imagine it expanding to fit the world itself, a barcode for the planet. On this scale, of course, like Magritte’s famous painting of a pipe with the ironic inscription “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” this is and is not a barcode. From the middle of the room, the alternating black and light bars become a mesmerizing swirl of photographic stills, with the same eye grabbing intensity of rapid-fire edits in contemporary music and advertisement videos.
Whether intentional or not, Vaandering is referencing the two great technological influences on culture of the past century: the computer in the barcode, and the camera with its representational realism in these flickering images. Indeed, scan the room, and the flickering dark and light processing of numerical information morphs into a filmstrip negative. Vaandering’s rendering of photo based images in green gray monotones reflect the monotony of these people’s lives, and the sepia yellow tonal values remind us of the anonymity of subjects in historical or ancestral
photographs, reinforcing our sense of disconnection from community.
But stare for a while at the single frames looping around the four walls, and this filmstrip comes to life. It’s a strange beauty, yet provocatively disturbing, not unlike the time lapse photography of flowing crowds in the seminal film Koyaanisqatsi (Life out of Balance). Heart and Soul contains the same alluring, repetitive rhythms of these undulating commuters, an attraction and repulsion. There is a familiar ugliness to this repetitive flow of human economic endeavor. Familiar in thinking we must be competitive and follow the herd. But strange in its beauty – why?
Certainly there is a beauty in the simplicity of the bar code itself; it is an efficient tool, an icon of human ingenuity to categorize and organize information. Yet this very efficiency corrupts meaning in emphasizing our quantifying talents over qualities, numbers over names.
But there is an aspect of Vaandering’s exploration that suggests hope. Stylistically in his craft, he is reclaiming the role of the artist’s medium as a means of expressing ideas and truth, a role commandeered by the inundating camera image and all of its false guises of representation be it an advertising seduction or “reality” television. Thematically, he offers the same dissident and disillusioned circumspection of our commercial culture like our pop song heroes such as Cohen, or our populist cinema of Koyaanisqatsi, Fight Club or The Matrix – even while participating in that very industry of consumerist and entertainment media. And hopeful, because we know we can stand back from these patterns and reflect on our place and participation in society’s overarching emphasis on economies and efficiencies.
And perhaps art is the only way to do so: it was the Canadian prophet and media guru, Marshall McLuhan, who said that the artist is the enemy, that “the artist has become the very basis of any scientific power of perception or making contact with reality.”3
It’s in our nature to want to control and measure every dimension of human affairs, until there is nothing left to measure. But the hope for an artist like Vaandering is that it is never too late for that which lies in the heart and soul to undergo a spiritual renaissance, where we can imagine a different path for our individual and communal lives.
Vincent Cherniak Independent Writer
Saul, John Ralston, The Unconscious Civilization. House of Anansi Press Led.: Concord, One., 1995; p.3.
2 See Saul’s discussion on the loss of community in “The Shape of
Human Genius” in On Equilibrium. Penguin Viking: Toronto, 2001.
3 Quoted in Robert Hughes, “Culture as Nature” in The Shock of the
New. BBC: London, 1980: p.362.
Won’t be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore.
Leonard Cohen, from The Future, 1992
Thirty years ago, a technical innovation in product management, the universal product code or bar code, was introduced, giving a number and universal user language to every consumable product. With this innovation, society lurched a little closer towards Cohen’s future, in which everything and everyone is quantifiable and able to be optimally analyzed and processed.
For Gerald Vaandering, the bar code stands as a significant symbol of the economic and technological forces that control contemporary life. Perhaps more than the introduction of the social security number, the ubiquitous bar code has become the foreboding icon of the age of digitalization the beginning of the computer ‘age infiltrating our every endeavor, where the reduction of values to quantifiable zeroes and ones, or bars of light and dark, stresses quantities over qualities. There isn’t anything you can’t put a number on, nothing measurable outside of bars of black and white.
In Heart and Soul, Vaandering continues a philosophic exploration of the effects of this technological development from earlier paintings and installations. This work presents a polemic dialogue between the light and dark bars. Here, the dark bars equal the reductionist information we process: seemingly useless or unintelligible to the viewer, they “imprison” the light areas potentially filled with human identity, character and meaning. The dark bars randomly slice through this crowd the frail community, fracturing whatever bonds exist between these passersby. In this installation, based on photos of rush hour commuters, Vaandering emphasizes the solitary, alienating effect of work lives reduced to careers and crunched numbers, rather than relationships. You’re never so alone as in the large urban environment, and the dark slashes suggest the fiscally obsessive corporate culture is to blame.
Heart and Soul takes its title from John Ralston Saul’s The Unconscious Civilization, in which he critiques our conformist and corporatist society, and argues that “the heart and soul of our 2500 year old civilization” lies in economics and the dictates of the marketplace.1 This is Vaandering’s central concern: our community values have been abandoned for a “survival of the fittest” rational. Our economy no longer serves us; we serve our economy, where the company or corporation is the new “family.”
The human figures left behind by Vaandering’s slicing bar code are certainly a desperate lot, if not, as in Saul’s terms, fully unconscious. Expressionless businessmen, here and in earlier works, are reminiscent of Rene’ Magritte’s surrealist images. They are people full of dread, and overshadowed by a menacing material object or framework. Someone talks on a cell phone, staring out blandly, as if oblivious to or incapable of communication with those directly around him. Another is only identified by a branding logo. This is what’s left of community: a collection of solitary souls trying to keep up with the pace of technological change and its promise of Nirvana or a New Jerusalem, where hell is other people. Some of these figures are so depersonalized, striated by the overriding work-world concerns, they literally become shattered unrecognizable smudges. Vaandering is painting the antiaesthetic of the rat race, countering the glossy image of advertising: the reality is, you are just a blur, lost in the shuffling numbers.2
In Vaandering’s 2000 companion installation piece, Cultural Landscapes, bar codes not only parody the way our culture reduces our labors to an economic common denominator, but suggest that we can’t quite escape this pressure to commodify our abilities, talents, qualities. A large image of a crowd was broken down into component panels or production elements, each bearing its own bar code, which were sold off and removed even as the exhibit went on: a public exhibit of art is one thing, but business is business. It was a humorous way for Vaandering to state that even the artist can’t get outside the box we’ve imposed on our culture – the box of economic concern over any other value.
Here in Heart and Soul the bar code expands to become the very work itself. Filling an entire room, it’s a reductio ad absurdum: you can almost imagine it expanding to fit the world itself, a barcode for the planet. On this scale, of course, like Magritte’s famous painting of a pipe with the ironic inscription “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” this is and is not a barcode. From the middle of the room, the alternating black and light bars become a mesmerizing swirl of photographic stills, with the same eye grabbing intensity of rapid-fire edits in contemporary music and advertisement videos.
Whether intentional or not, Vaandering is referencing the two great technological influences on culture of the past century: the computer in the barcode, and the camera with its representational realism in these flickering images. Indeed, scan the room, and the flickering dark and light processing of numerical information morphs into a filmstrip negative. Vaandering’s rendering of photo based images in green gray monotones reflect the monotony of these people’s lives, and the sepia yellow tonal values remind us of the anonymity of subjects in historical or ancestral
photographs, reinforcing our sense of disconnection from community.
But stare for a while at the single frames looping around the four walls, and this filmstrip comes to life. It’s a strange beauty, yet provocatively disturbing, not unlike the time lapse photography of flowing crowds in the seminal film Koyaanisqatsi (Life out of Balance). Heart and Soul contains the same alluring, repetitive rhythms of these undulating commuters, an attraction and repulsion. There is a familiar ugliness to this repetitive flow of human economic endeavor. Familiar in thinking we must be competitive and follow the herd. But strange in its beauty – why?
Certainly there is a beauty in the simplicity of the bar code itself; it is an efficient tool, an icon of human ingenuity to categorize and organize information. Yet this very efficiency corrupts meaning in emphasizing our quantifying talents over qualities, numbers over names.
But there is an aspect of Vaandering’s exploration that suggests hope. Stylistically in his craft, he is reclaiming the role of the artist’s medium as a means of expressing ideas and truth, a role commandeered by the inundating camera image and all of its false guises of representation be it an advertising seduction or “reality” television. Thematically, he offers the same dissident and disillusioned circumspection of our commercial culture like our pop song heroes such as Cohen, or our populist cinema of Koyaanisqatsi, Fight Club or The Matrix – even while participating in that very industry of consumerist and entertainment media. And hopeful, because we know we can stand back from these patterns and reflect on our place and participation in society’s overarching emphasis on economies and efficiencies.
And perhaps art is the only way to do so: it was the Canadian prophet and media guru, Marshall McLuhan, who said that the artist is the enemy, that “the artist has become the very basis of any scientific power of perception or making contact with reality.”3
It’s in our nature to want to control and measure every dimension of human affairs, until there is nothing left to measure. But the hope for an artist like Vaandering is that it is never too late for that which lies in the heart and soul to undergo a spiritual renaissance, where we can imagine a different path for our individual and communal lives.
Vincent Cherniak Independent Writer
Saul, John Ralston, The Unconscious Civilization. House of Anansi Press Led.: Concord, One., 1995; p.3.
2 See Saul’s discussion on the loss of community in “The Shape of
Human Genius” in On Equilibrium. Penguin Viking: Toronto, 2001.
3 Quoted in Robert Hughes, “Culture as Nature” in The Shock of the
New. BBC: London, 1980: p.362.