2007
Future Songs
Essay by Liam Gillick
Sean Dack has made a series of subtle shifts in his work over the last few years. Yet, the viewer is always sucked into a no-time. It is a progression that shifts in pulses, where time is a material alongside a commitment to seeking out moments of clarity, where the temporal becomes concrete and back to a flow again. There are moments that are compartmentalized and others that move forwards towards no potential border. Yet within this “practice of flows” there are important markers to be found for those willing to look at what appears to be side production. Sean Dack has an ability to take the parallel histories that mark our culture, that leave traces in the future and bring them into a state of clarity and reanimation.
It might seem obvious, at this point to mention Philip K. Dick. The problem is that he is a problem. But let’s imagine that there is no contestation about the significance of his position. For this short text, I read Philip K. Dick – but this time in relation to the work of Sean Dack. And then realized that such a reading had no direct significance on the work at hand. This is a typical situation for the artist. In much of his work there appears to be a direct source, marker or starting point. Yet it is one that proceeds from a position that is caught within an excess of anesthetized surfaces.
In 1981, Philip K. Dick made a number of “predictions”. I put the word in quotation marks, as it can never be clear whether these were “visions” or straightforward projections about the near future or notes for a possible new book. One thing that features in most of them is the belief that the Soviet Union will remain a real and viable fact. For example:
“2010: Using tachyons (particles that move backward in time) as a carrier, the Soviet Union will attempt to alter the past with scientific information”.
I select this prediction as it is the one with the most critical potential. It creates a fundamental permission for all the predictions that come before it. If, in a few years time, the “Soviet Union” were to achieve such a thing, then the interregnum between the demise of the original, or “SOVIET UNION NUMBER 1” and the rise of “SOVIET UNION NUMBER 2” would be erased and the apparent problem with all the other predictions will be extinguished by the tachyon manipulation. But then again, these are just words or flows or potentials for a text. And they are self-conscious. They are the notes we would hope to find from Philip K. Dick. They are the kind of writings that indicate no boundaries between his lucid and quite precise “fictional” works and his crazed and clearly useless “factual” writings.
Rather than being overly concerned about the stunning collapse of Dick’s flow once reduced to the realm of the actual, the real, the un-self-consciously undermining, Dack turns the temporal flow of Philip K. Dick’s predictions into a temporal flow of potential. But as with his other work that ought to project disquiet or uncertainty or an inversion, Dack/Dick let’s the text live through a newly “fictionalized” strata. A terrain that is available to the artist. By placing the predictions into the context of songs from the years specified by Dick. Dack/Dick, or Philip S. Dack or Sean K. Dick defers issues of fictional and factual by slipping into an acceptance of a displaced non-judgement on the issue of the content and the carrier.
The words of Dick/Dack become the lyrics to songs from 1983 to 2000. Or thereabouts… It is a way of taking the lines of writing out of the badly designed Dick books and replacing them into a Dack book. A Dack sensibility. One that floats without judgement and without foregrounding problematic notions such as function, usability, potential and critique. This is not a detournement, or a simple replacing of one structure into another. This is a process of suspension whereby the aesthetic self-consciousness of one artist becomes a new carrier for a super-self-conscious set of delusions and games. The artist in this case becomes a responsible person, creating a book that should be around. A book that sits in 2010 as a reminder to everyone that there was a time before the tachyons were manipulated where people felt for a while that they had left the paranoia and inevitability of the Cold War period behind. As such Dack’s book is a memorial to a lost sequence of transitions. A lost series of links. A recontextualising of music as much as words. Forget what’s written and remember the song within the context of another global political set of conditions. Do not search for equivalences in our time, but lock into another moment when thoughts of progress were always matched by binarism, scientific parallels and phantom competition from two clear-cut ideological positions. Reading through the predictions, you can now sing the ones that are missing.
“2007: Young men will make bombs at home and then wear them proudly into town before setting them off and watching their arms and legs fly across the room. The Americans will not be sure what to do about it.”
Liam Gillick 2007
Essay by Liam Gillick
Sean Dack has made a series of subtle shifts in his work over the last few years. Yet, the viewer is always sucked into a no-time. It is a progression that shifts in pulses, where time is a material alongside a commitment to seeking out moments of clarity, where the temporal becomes concrete and back to a flow again. There are moments that are compartmentalized and others that move forwards towards no potential border. Yet within this “practice of flows” there are important markers to be found for those willing to look at what appears to be side production. Sean Dack has an ability to take the parallel histories that mark our culture, that leave traces in the future and bring them into a state of clarity and reanimation.
It might seem obvious, at this point to mention Philip K. Dick. The problem is that he is a problem. But let’s imagine that there is no contestation about the significance of his position. For this short text, I read Philip K. Dick – but this time in relation to the work of Sean Dack. And then realized that such a reading had no direct significance on the work at hand. This is a typical situation for the artist. In much of his work there appears to be a direct source, marker or starting point. Yet it is one that proceeds from a position that is caught within an excess of anesthetized surfaces.
In 1981, Philip K. Dick made a number of “predictions”. I put the word in quotation marks, as it can never be clear whether these were “visions” or straightforward projections about the near future or notes for a possible new book. One thing that features in most of them is the belief that the Soviet Union will remain a real and viable fact. For example:
“2010: Using tachyons (particles that move backward in time) as a carrier, the Soviet Union will attempt to alter the past with scientific information”.
I select this prediction as it is the one with the most critical potential. It creates a fundamental permission for all the predictions that come before it. If, in a few years time, the “Soviet Union” were to achieve such a thing, then the interregnum between the demise of the original, or “SOVIET UNION NUMBER 1” and the rise of “SOVIET UNION NUMBER 2” would be erased and the apparent problem with all the other predictions will be extinguished by the tachyon manipulation. But then again, these are just words or flows or potentials for a text. And they are self-conscious. They are the notes we would hope to find from Philip K. Dick. They are the kind of writings that indicate no boundaries between his lucid and quite precise “fictional” works and his crazed and clearly useless “factual” writings.
Rather than being overly concerned about the stunning collapse of Dick’s flow once reduced to the realm of the actual, the real, the un-self-consciously undermining, Dack turns the temporal flow of Philip K. Dick’s predictions into a temporal flow of potential. But as with his other work that ought to project disquiet or uncertainty or an inversion, Dack/Dick let’s the text live through a newly “fictionalized” strata. A terrain that is available to the artist. By placing the predictions into the context of songs from the years specified by Dick. Dack/Dick, or Philip S. Dack or Sean K. Dick defers issues of fictional and factual by slipping into an acceptance of a displaced non-judgement on the issue of the content and the carrier.
The words of Dick/Dack become the lyrics to songs from 1983 to 2000. Or thereabouts… It is a way of taking the lines of writing out of the badly designed Dick books and replacing them into a Dack book. A Dack sensibility. One that floats without judgement and without foregrounding problematic notions such as function, usability, potential and critique. This is not a detournement, or a simple replacing of one structure into another. This is a process of suspension whereby the aesthetic self-consciousness of one artist becomes a new carrier for a super-self-conscious set of delusions and games. The artist in this case becomes a responsible person, creating a book that should be around. A book that sits in 2010 as a reminder to everyone that there was a time before the tachyons were manipulated where people felt for a while that they had left the paranoia and inevitability of the Cold War period behind. As such Dack’s book is a memorial to a lost sequence of transitions. A lost series of links. A recontextualising of music as much as words. Forget what’s written and remember the song within the context of another global political set of conditions. Do not search for equivalences in our time, but lock into another moment when thoughts of progress were always matched by binarism, scientific parallels and phantom competition from two clear-cut ideological positions. Reading through the predictions, you can now sing the ones that are missing.
“2007: Young men will make bombs at home and then wear them proudly into town before setting them off and watching their arms and legs fly across the room. The Americans will not be sure what to do about it.”
Liam Gillick 2007
Polaroid / Inkjet