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Viewer Responsibility Notice
Alejandra Labastida

The side effects of watching this video are your own responsibility. Smith’s work frequently contains a layer of irony and dark humor that can make us swing towards laughter. In this piece, however, the rhythms and strategies of visual seduction we’re used to, incorporate a high degree of violence. On the one hand, the video can be seen as an extended update on the Rorschach test—that psychodiagnostic technique based on the interpretation of ink blots—in order to read the current planetary crisis. On the other, and perhaps more accurately, it functions like the Ludovico technique, the conditioning therapy that uses a mixture of music, images and psychotropic drugs to inhibit violence, presented in the movie A Clockwork Orange. What does Smith wishes to exorcise through this tension between narrative and image?

Don’t be fooled. The chaos we observe has been designed down to the millimeter. As a pandemic self-portrait, the video’s conditions of production are as eloquent as its content. Digital images were selected through a long, deliberate, precise process: a unique temporal condition imposed by the quarantine. None of these images reached Smith by chance. This was not a passive fishing expedition born from the visual bombardment that characterizes the contemporary experience of life, but a hunt through the nearly infinite universe of image banks.

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Generic, standardized images distanced from any authorial relationship, available to anyone who can pay for them. Smith sought those that conserved—against all prognostics—a personal accent. In the artist’s words, “it was like making a movie backwards.”

Despite the piece’s sui generis production conditions, the questions that have accompanied the artist’s career remain present. Continuing her long relationship with the production of palimpsests and mixed media, Smith’s digital editing borders on the analog, using layers, crossfades and densities where the color, transparency or velocity of the original shots have been manipulated and conceal other images below the primary one. A frame with a secret. There also appear those couplings Smith creates between concepts and colors that have long been paired in her mise-en-scènes: green-nature, blue-technology, pink-body and orange-fire/ecological disaster. Her questioning of travel as a method of image production goes back to Skype (2016), which was recorded remotely. Nevertheless, it takes a more assertive tone upon another possible image economy in the context of the pandemic.

Smith traffics with art history. This video appeals to pop art and op art while rejuvenating the eternal question of the sublime. What do we talk about when we talk about the sublime in our times? Could it now be found in negotiations of scale? In this piece, the tension between scales—from the universal to the microscopic—that have always been present in Smith’s work, takes on a vertiginous rhythm, offering us the texture of the incomprehensibility that envelops us.

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Smith oscillates between establishing an union of the mind and the world, and proposes its divorce through that which conceals itself, so that visual coherence can arise. She is interested in tracing the real that survives signification. Along the way, she asks: What can the contradiction between narrative and image tell us about abstraction?

Let’s go back to exorcism. Images of riots accompany the offscreen voice that asks us to breathe deeply; a man screams in desperation while the same voice tells us to find inner peace. During a psychedelic parade of graphs, images and colors, it asks us who we really are. Bewilderment, omnipresent anxiety and the eternal return of the mental obsessions of a species that destroys its own habitat, are the affects that inhabit Fifteen Minutes of Sublime Meditation. Can it be a form of atonement to avoid  the paralysis of guilt?

Ultimately, this video is a trap that illustrates an even greater trap: the extension of biopower into biomorality. Such is the splendor of the mindfulness industry that it has earned the nickname McMindfulness. The neoliberal order has turned a Buddhist tradition into the perfect tool for outsourcing its responsibility for the mental health and welfare of its worker-consumers.
 

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For decades, the World Health Organization has forecasted that depression will be one of the most serious problems in the societies of the near future. Even the U.S. Army has invested millions of dollars in mindfulness-based training programs. The systemic conditions that generate this stress are camouflaged by the autoregulatory capacity of each individual. Stress is privatized and happiness becomes just another commodity, produced, extracted and exchanged as an economic resource for maximizing productivity.[1] I insist, any stress or reduced productivity that this experience may cause you is your responsibility.




[1] Zack Walsh, “Mindfulness Under Neoliberal Governmentality: Critiquing the Operation of Biopower in Corporate Mindfulness and Constructing Queer Alternatives”, Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion, 2018. DOI: 10.1080/14766086.2017.1423239

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to know but not to feel
no sadness no mood no boredom
absent without leave
By Melanie Smith

stuff DOT feelings and thoughts about stuff DOT tune in DOT listening DOT breathe in DOT remain detached DOT blending in DOT green seamless abstract shine 81961576 DOT getting close to the ungraspability of things DOT heap of gravel 91535172 DOT non joining of feelings DOT from the comfort of your own home DOT people walking by a canal in India 35567 DOT hot boredom = anxiety DOT cold boredom = sort of don’t care DOT minds that coexist with  thoughts that coexist with hallucinations that coexist with brains DOT [...]


COMPLETE TEXT HERE

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Melanie Smith, Fifteen Minutes of Sublime Meditation, 2020-2021
Video
15’ 04”

Melanie Smith (Poole, United Kingdom, 1965; she lives and works between London and Mexico City)
Smith’s production has been defined by a certain rereading of the formal and aesthetic categories of avant-garde and post-avant-garde movements, problematized at the site and horizon of heterotopies. Although Smith does not describe herself as a painter and uses a great variety of media, her work is impregnated with a singular, persistent reference to painting. Smith employs a continual tension between farse (in the sense of the absurd, mockery, parody) and artifice (understood as artificiality and deception and, ultimately, as the “artifice of reason”). She applies these concepts to contemporary society and what has been called “Baroque modernity.” The artist herself has defined her work as being a “gigantic palimpsest.” A travelling retrospective of her work was exhibited between 2018 and 2020 at MACBA, Barcelona; MUAC, Mexico City; Museo Amparo, Puebla; and Marco, Monterrey. In 2011, Smith represented Mexico at the 54th Venice Biennial. Her work forms part of important institutional collections in Mexico and abroad.

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Curatorship: Alejandra Labastida
Texts: Alejandra Labastida, Melanie Smith
Content Direction: Ekaterina Álvarez, Cuauhtémoc Medina
Curatorial Coordination: Ana Sampietro
Digital Management: Ana Cristina Sol
Content Editing: Vanessa López, Javier Villaseñor
Spanish translation: Alexia Halteman
English Translation: Julianna Neuhouser
Press: Francisco Domínguez, Eduardo Lomas