The Artist as Cuckoo
A reading of the artists’ role with reference to Farid's ‘Don’t Hate The Rich – Be One Of Them!’
by Simon FaridA few weeks ago I watched the final episode of David Attenborough’s BBC nature series Life Story. One of the narratives focused on in the episode was that of a cuckoo fraudulently infiltrating the nest of another bird called a drongo. The cuckoo did this by laying an egg in the drongo’s nest that closely resembled the drongo’s eggs. Once hatched, the baby cuckoo was then raised by the drongo, believing the cuckoo chick to be her own offspring.
The behavior of this cuckoo was completely new to me, but my partner informed me that this act of deception by cuckoos is very well known. That same night I also enjoyed reading the news of Andrew Mitchell MP (plebgate) losing his libel case against the British newspaper ‘The Sun’. While browsing these news reports I took an interest in the images of Mitchell walking outside the court. During this walk of shame, a person had followed Mitchell holding up a religious text behind him, anticipating that Mitchell was about to be photographed extensively. There is more than a passing relationship between these two incidents. In both cases, we have an agent (the cuckoo egg layer, the person carrying the sign) who operates tactically, making use of an existing situation for their own ends. Their infiltration of events does not disrupt the working of the existing system; the press conference continues, the mother bird still feeds a chick. Rather, by understanding the coming processes central to each specific system, their interventions cause the systems to carry out the agent’s desired task for them; the cuckoo chick is fed, the religious message is disseminated. What may be most productive to note here is that cuckoo and sign holder need to make use of these systems to achieve their goals. Apparently the cuckoo cannot raise her own chicks and the sign holder definitely does not possess the means to disseminate their opinions so publicly otherwise. This question of hijacked dissemination has recently come up in my own work mimicking Michael Green. As Green I tweet extensively, mostly inane #InternetMarketing tips lifted from his various questionable ebooks. Whilst an informed viewer will pick up on the joke and journalistic tendencies of this action, a number of others take these tweets at face value, and why not? Green was a successful Internet marketer after all. So these tweets are then retweeted by two distinct audiences, with two distinct intentions; those that are engaging with Michael Green knowing him to be a satirical entity and those engaging with Michael Green as a real(?) ‘Internet marketing guru’. These latter tweets could be characterized as a cuckoo egg, inviting unsuspecting drongo/internet marketers to grow its cultural impact through retweets and favorites. But this hijacked dissemination has a wider impact than these manual retweets. Another thing I have noticed are instances in which my texts written as Michael Green are picked up and repeated by algorithms. This has happened in two forms. The first can be found embedded in Michael Green’s original webpage www.howtocorphelp.com. This is now a site containing German filler text, but it also contains a Facebook widget that syncs up with the Facebook company page I made for HowToCorp. This must surely have been due to some level of automation, with the algorithm searching Facebook for a page that resembled howtocorphelp and placing it into the website. So through falling for a cuckoo egg, this automated system has inserted my work into another persons website with a high residual and crucially relevant audience. The second form of dissemination through hijacked algorithmic process can be seen as closer to the sign holder in terms of riding on an information-spreading tool intended for other goals. Sending ten tweets as day with the hashtag #InternetMarketing, one soon finds oneself subject to an interesting practice that I have only come across in the online affiliate marketing community. This is that of the personalized newspaper (called things like ‘The Bill Douglas Chronicle’), which again is the result of an automated system, this time created by websites like http://linkis.com. These work by lifting content publicized by specified relevant twitter feeds and putting them together on a site that resembles a newspaper. This is done to encourage engagement from those reproduced in the ‘newspaper’. There have been a number of instances where, as a result of tweeting as Michael Green, information about HowToCorp has been included in these newspaper simulations. This has led my collaborator on this Michael Green work, John-Paul Treen, to speculate that using automated information-distribution systems such as those encountered in the personalized newspapers could be done on a much larger and more intentional scale, infiltrating the text lifting-and-copying softwares that fill up a large part of the lesser seen parts of the internet with artwork that resembles the kind of text that is lifted, but that is actually doing something more complex and subversive. Whilst such an action is in the early planning and exploration stage for us, the program of production it proposes may be a more immediately useful thing to take from it right now. This hacking through mimicry of an automated information distribution system positions the artist at an overlapping point between cuckoo and sign holder, taking the cuckoo’s use of mimicry and using the mimicry to take a ride on a dissemination system like the sign holder. While both these actions can be understood in terms of traditional artistic avant-garde figures like that of the hacker, rerouting a system for one's own end, Michel De Certeau’s tactician working from the position of weakness but utilizing specific circumstances for ones personal goals, certain understandings of the trickster as read by Lewis Hyde and even elements of Situationist détournement in terms of subversively appropriating ones surroundings, the artist as cuckoo could offer a more specific program for the contemporary artists’ position in a culture of information overproduction, financial scarcity and increasingly defined, influential and prescriptive centers of power. The artist as cuckoo is a figure who works in contemporary mimicry (a figure that incidentally [or not?] recalls the role of mimesis throughout art history, quintessentially that of the painter looking to mimic the world). Using all the media available to the contemporary artist, this mimicry now takes place inside culture, rather than facing it, and exists unregistered within the system that carries, copies and spreads it. This is an artist that understands that culture will reproduce things that look right, regardless of more complex content contained with, artwork operating as a reverse undercover agent, infiltrating up the power structure. Artists utilizing information-spreading systems designed to encourage a uniformity of output to disseminate their subversive cuckoo eggs. The specific contextual program that the artist as cuckoo proposes could prove a productive blueprint for a kind of artistic intervention going forward, not least in situations where explicit dissent may prove dangerous, culturally unrepeatable or merely where and when an artist does not possess the necessary tools of cultural reproduction or dissemination to distribute their work otherwise. Simon Farid is currently working on ‘Don’t Hate The Rich – Be One Of Them!’. It is a primarily online rolling performance re-enacting, speculatively and verbatim, an identity called Michael Green, who was formerly the online alter-ego of current United Kingdom Conservative Party chairman Rt Hon Grant Shapps MP. This performance involves mimicking the now unoccupied identity Green through text and images on Twitter and Facebook, verbatim re-creating his now deleted website HowToCorp and devising and performing a series of live-streamed performances (or ‘webinars’) on a new page here.
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Pamphlet. Magazine - 2014 -