“Rabbit season! No — duck season! No — rabbit season!” Michael Bell-Smith’s solo exhibition at Foxy Production, borrows its title from a scene in a 1951 Looney Tunes cartoon, in which Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck try to evade hunter Elmer Fudd’s murderous intent by changing a placard to indicate that it’s the other critter that should be hunted. Modifying the existing sign is a surprisingly fast and easy game-changer, but also a necessary one: for Bugs and Daffy, their life depends upon it.

Bell-Smith is interested in the malleability and instability of images. Like other Post-Internet artists, he delights in the tsunami of stock digital imagery that engulfs us, presenting itself so promiscuously, as if dying to be interfered with and repurposed. Computer desktop wallpaper, libraries of textures, browser views, 3D software demo scenes are the readymade raw materials that Bell-Smith melds into questions about the nature of our universe of images.

Six vinyl on aluminum prints, each 31 x 23 inches, riff on the familiar statement “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member,” setting that text in what appears to be an uncompleted layout for a magazine ad. The quote (actually uttered by Groucho Marx) is misattributed to various celebrities and historical figures. It’s amusing to observe the quote’s meaning slide politically left or right as it is passed from mouth to mouth: when Ayn Rand says it, it’s a conservative’s kiss to the unregulated market; from Thomas Jefferson, a vision of liberty; from the different-thinking Steve Jobs, a call to individuation via shopping.

The series “Standard and Life” (2014), comprised of three 47-by-35-inch vinyl-on-aluminum prints, appears as tasteful AbEx allovers. But they’re clever simulations: each mark is a vector-graphics representation of a hand-made gesture, like Roy Lichtenstein’s Benday dot images of brushstrokes. There’s a digital prank here. The same marks re-appear identically in each image, that is, every image is only a rearrangement of one set of messy components. Bell-Smith mocks the modernist sincerity of a gesture, like Jackson Pollock’s shamanesque paint-flinging, by re-imagining it as an algorithm running an equation with arbitrary variables. It’s a re-evaluation of expressive art-making as little more than what Vilem Flusser termed a “combination game.”

The exhibition’s richest work is the five-minute video Rabbit Season, Duck Season (2014). Like Oliver Laric’s Versions (2012), it’s a theoretical inquiry in Internet-friendly form. The rigor of an essay film is mated with the easy WTF-ness of an animated GIF. Bell-Smith montages hyperreal but unnatural 3D renders, Shutterstock images, and close-ups of fabrics, while subtitles ruminate on questions like, “This / that? Norm / alt? Cool / uncool? Visible / invisible?”

The question “rabbit season or duck season?” might be best interpreted as, Do you side with Adorno or Benjamin? Do we swing high or low? Do we locate ourselves outside, in reasoned critical distance, or inside the contradictions of lived experience?

In his video, Bell-Smith stakes out a uncommitted, centrist position: ”The conversation is cyclical. It could last forever, ping-ponging back and forth across time. …I’m tired. I don’t want to make any more decisions today.” If all is arbitrary, then little is demanded of us. While it’s true that there is energy in the pendulum swing to the opposite pole, and that to be human is to move between contradictory positions, the easy relativist stance misses out on what any fully-inhabited position provides access to: a type of ethics and/or belief. Disappointingly, Bell-Smith refuses to join any club that would have him as a member.

Has any Post-Internet artist made his or her work with Bugs and Daffy’s attitude of absolute conviction, not merely playing a low-stakes game, but struggling desperately for survival? The genre has not yet identified its Elmer Fudd.

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Richard Prince uses Instagram, but not in the way most people do. While you or I might dip into that infinite stream of pixels for idle diversion or cheap thrills, what we see or say is usually inconsequential and ephemeral. Prince goes on Instagram, and somehow the result is important and enduring art. With an alchemist’s touch, what was worthless becomes precious. It couldn’t be easier: Prince trawls the app for selfies of young female hotties (famous or merely Internet-famous or totally amateur), posts a comment on the photo, captures the screen, and has an assistant inkjet-print it onto canvas at 65 x 48 inches. He calls these 40 images “paintings”; you might object, but collector dollars speak louder than you do.

Is there a reason to interpret the endeavor as anything other than some simple economic activity devoid of other meaning, like, for example, printing money? This easy explanation is tempting, in exactly the way a late-afternoon nap on the couch is tempting. Are we obligated to try to avoid “following the money,” even if that requires a true-believer devotion to art as a realm beyond politics?

Since his emergence in the late ‘70s as part of the Pictures Generation, Prince has always been the naughtiest of appropriators. Unlike Cindy Sherman, he has little respect for history; unlike Louise Lawler, he takes little interest in the art world; unlike Jeff Koons, he doesn’t fetishize craft or expensive raw materials (two of the most universally accepted indications of artistic value). With Prince, it’s just take, take, take.

In 2011, a US District court judge ruled that Prince’s appropriation of Patrick Cariou’s photographs for his 2008 “Canal Zone” exhibition constituted copyright infringement. His New Portraits can be read as Prince’s response to this defeat, by implying that his transgressions are no worse that the common and familiar act of re-posting images on the Internet. He just happens to re-post on the walls of Gagosian, that’s all.

It’s not news that digital data can be reproduced perfectly with little effort, and that many of us take and share it freely. If a press release asserted, “Prince’s appropriation holds a mirror to our contemporary moment,” we’d probably agree without much thought. Prince is merely commenting on the way images circulate in 2014, someone might argue.

It’s advisable to think harder. What Prince and Gagosian are up to isn’t a game; massive amounts of capital are being created and accumulated here. Artnet reports that between January 2011 and August 2014, $106,995,896 worth of Prince’s art was sold on the secondary market (placing him at #7 among living artists for this period, ahead of Damien Hirst and Peter Doig). Thus Prince’s modus operandi is not analogous to the common man’s copyright-blind illegal downloads and shares, which serve to disperse valuation instead of concentrating it. What it really resembles is Facebook’s profiteering strategies, which convert what is freely given into a valuable commodity.

It’s become evident that the Internet is a tool more for consolidating power than dispersing it. It has made our economy more “efficient,” meaning that it concentrates more wealth in the hands of fewer individuals and corporations, faster and with less effort. This, precisely, is what Prince mirrors — though the work itself gives little space for reflection.

The readymade recently had its centennial, so the gesture of re-photographing is hardly transgressive. And yet Prince may occupy a sort of radical position, in that his work is so morally untenable. When an artist like Santiago Sierra performs unethical acts in creating his work (such as hiring 30 day laborers and arranging them in a gallery according to their skin color), the work intentionally brings the evil within the art into dialogue with evil in the world. Instead, Prince’s cynical but collector-friendly exploitation exists within a vacuum. It presents the viewer with a challenge: do we carry on with the business of art-consumption as usual when to do so means a tacit affirmation of the ethos of “greed is good”? What if the zombie ghost of the avant-garde walked among us as nothing other than Mark Zuckerberg’s lack of ethics and our complicity with it?

Should art be more than expensive clickbait? Though Prince did not take any of the Instagram photos, his selection of them and his appended comments act as a signature for these portraits. Like the best comments on the Internet, they are funny, rude, and passive-aggressive. On a shot of a spread-legged Kate Moss in the forest, he writes, “I remember this so well, glad we had the tent.” Under an image of a black woman with rainbow dreads, Prince writes “DJ Trippy Headrin” (a pun surely lost on her demographic). It’s an occasion for a 64-year-old man to demonstrate his impressive mastery of a specific Internet argot: troll-speak, those booby-trapped non sequiturs which first parse as a “like,” but on second glance are revealed to be a total diss.

Perhaps Prince was always a king-size troll avant la lettre. His snarkiness couldn’t really blossom until its true medium, the Internet, was invented. And, the Internet attains its quintessence in the heteronormative blue-chip mind-fuckery of this most accomplished of trolls.

Instagram’s Community Standards FAQ helpfully explains:

Instagram is a place where people can share beautiful moments from their lives, and when you engage in self-promotional behavior of any kind on Instagram it makes people who have shared that moment with you feel sad inside.

Would most people have a problem if their Instagram selfie popped up for sale in Gagosian? If yes, then the consummate post-Modernist Prince has accomplished a feat any Modernist would be proud of. His New Portraits make the thinking viewer feel sad inside.

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Harun Farocki, who died on July 30^th, was the master of the conceptually precise essay film. An insightful and prescient documentarian with a light touch, he was no editorialist or propagandist, but rather a critical thinker with a deep political commitment. Unlike many other artists born of May ’68, Farocki avoided both Bertolt Brecht’s proscriptive didacticism and Jean-Luc Godard’s love/hate of conventional narrative. Farocki observed, and observed well. Simply by placing a camera where something interesting was occurring — a worker being trained, a TV advertisement being filmed — Farocki was able to give capitalism just enough rope to hang itself. There’s a mirroring of form and content in his work: the films examine freedom and labor, and are constructed in a way that grants the audience an unusual degree of freedom in their construction of meaning. Farocki’s method is the cinematic manifestation of Hemingway’s advice, “Show, don’t tell.” To enjoy a Farocki film is to be the loser in a jiu-jitsu match: it’s not the filmmaker’s efforts, but rather the workings of the viewer’s own intelligence, that lead one to arrive at the filmmaker’s conclusions.

A crucial moment in Farocki’s oeuvre is the opening sequence of his Inextinguishable Fire (1969), an anti-Vietnam War salvo created when he was only 25 years old, having recently been ejected from film academy for his radicalism. The filmmaker is seated at a desk, in the manner of a TV news anchor. He reads to the camera:

“How can we show you the injuries caused by napalm? If we show you pictures of napalm burns, you’ll close your eyes. First you’ll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you’ll close your eyes to the memory. Then you’ll close your eyes to the facts. Then you’ll close your eyes to the entire context. If we show you someone with napalm burns, we will hurt your feelings. If we hurt your feelings, you will feel like we’d tried napalm on you. We can give you only a hint of how napalm works.”

Then, he stops speaking. How does napalm work? In close-up, we see Farocki press a lit cigarette into the skin of his forearm, without flinching.

Farocki’s Inextinguishable Fire (1969)

It’s a visceral demonstration of the uncompromising political commitment that would animate a career spanning over 120 films and installations. (Unlike those who consider clicking a Facebook like-button to be political activism, Farocki clearly “had some skin in the game.”) It’s many other things as well: a declaration of solidarity with victims of the Vietnam War; a critique of the pretense to neutrality of TV news; a work of transcendently masochistic performance art pre-dating both Chris Burden and Marina Abramovic.

The “hint of napalm” can be seen as a metaphor for the artist’s entire project. The art arises from the necessity of finding a “hint,” a soft alternative to a reality too harsh to express directly. The artist doesn’t want to hurt the viewer’s feelings, doesn’t want her to close her eyes — thus a new strategy is needed. Jacques Ranciere proposed that political art often fails because the politicized artist presumes he has specialized knowledge that his audience lacks; its tone can’t help but be patronizing. Farocki usually side-stepped this kind of didactic or pedagogical stance: his work is concerned with making its point, but is equally concerned with affirming the audience’s ability to figure things out for themselves. And this occasion for respectful affirmation becomes, in itself, a political act.

One strategy for “hinting” is to focus on the mundane as entry point to the profound. The subject of Zum Vergleich (“In Comparison,” 2009) is, at first glance, “How are bricks manufactured in different parts of the world?” One would assume this is a spectacularly boring topic, but in fact, the film presents nothing less than a feat of time-travel. In Africa, bricks are individually shaped by hand; in India, by plopping handfuls of mud into molds; in Morocco, by simple assembly lines; and in Germany, by massively efficient automated production facilities. Each location represents a distinct moment in the history of capitalist production, from pre- to post-industrial. Besides demonstrating technologies from primitive to complex, the film lets us examine how different the experience of work is for the laborers in each location. Long takes, beautifully composed, give the viewer time to feel the worker’s daily experience. In comparison with the community of joyful women of Burkina Faso, infants strapped to their backs, who sing in unison as they rhythmically mold the raw earth, the lone German factory worker paces aimlessly, at a loss for what to do, as he helplessly oversees the huge machines in their mighty and flawless production. In Farocki’s hands, this lonely figure becomes the tangible embodiment of alienated labor. It is no small feat to make such an abstract and slippery concept so plainly visible.

An excerpt from How to Life in the German Federal Republic (1990), by Harun Farocki

Another of Farocki’s preferred indirect methods is to examine moments of simulation: the play-acting that naturally occurs whenever anyone tries to teach something. When Farocki films, for example, a group of children made to practice crossing an imaginary street, the activity becomes denaturalized; the training appears as the process of the construction of subjectivity. In the absence of the actual, the ideology around what the actual might be becomes foregrounded. While Brecht believed that the conditions of life were revealed when the theater made its mechanisms obvious, Farocki sought the same reveal in the impromptu moments of theater that occur within real life. With a title that jokingly implies the film will explain capitalism to residents of former East Germany, How To Live in the Federal Republic of Germany (1990) is a compilation of a great many of these bizarre scenarios of dress rehearsal, suggesting a world in constant preparation for a reality that never arrives. Two policemen practice making an arrest, with one assuming the role of the bad guy. As a form of therapy, anorexic women pretend to eat imaginary meals. In one particularly odd sequence, a man coaches a woman on how to perform a strip-tease, his obvious male chauvinism complicated by the way he demonstrates stripper moves. Indoctrination (1987) documents a five-day workshop in which corporate middle-management executives are drilled in the art of self-presentation. These aspiring ladder-climbers rehearse performing a degree of competency they don’t actually possess, so that they may better “sell themselves.” We can tangibly observe ideology spreading contagiously, and that the effect of absorbing an ideology is a variety of contortions within a person’s mode of being.

A trailer for Farocki’s Videograms of a Revolution (1992), compiled by Spectacle Theater

Whereas Brecht was a firebrand true-believer Communist, and poet-auteur Godard a son of Marx and Coca-Cola, Harun Farocki was simply a deeply intelligent and humble man of the left, whose hopes and fears for our world were born not of dogma, but of a timeless humanitarianism. His profoundly committed artistic and political vision will remain forever inextinguishable.

5 Recommended Films by Harun Farocki:
Videograms of a Revolution (1992) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108489/
Zum Vergleich http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1380817/
Serious Games 1-4 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2793502/
How to Live in the Federal Republic of Germany http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0277794/
An Image http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0360426/

A 2012 interview with Farocki by the Goethe Institute http://vimeo.com/40929381

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