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Vloggers, celebrities, gods and kings: the politics of publicness in Natalie Bookchin's Now he's out in public and everyone can see

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Vloggers, celebrities, gods and kings: the politics of publicness in Natalie Bookchin's Now he's out in public and everyone can see

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Vloggers, Celebrities, Gods and Kings: the politics of publicness in Natalie Bookchin’s
Now he’s out in public and everyone can see

by

Jacqueline Bell

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS

Copyright 2013 Jacqueline Bell

ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures.....................................................................................................................iii

Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………….iv

Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………v

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………...vi

Chapter 1: Isolated users, converging publics…………....……………........…………….1

Chapter 2: The Internet as subject and site….......……….....……………………………16

Chapter 3: Conflicting common senses and the politics of publicness……........………..25

Chapter 4: Vloggers, Celebrities, Gods and Kings……........……………………………39

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………..52

iii
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Natalie Bookchin, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see, 2012………..2

Figure 2. Natalie Bookchin, Marking Time, 1997………………………………………...5

Figure 3. Natalie Bookchin, Testament, 2009…………………………………………….7

Figure 4. Natalie Bookchin, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see, 2012………..8

Figure 5. Natalie Bookchin, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see, 2012………..9

Figure 6. Natalie Bookchin, Mass Ornament, 2009……………………………………..23

Figure 7. Natalie Bookchin, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see, 2012………25

Figure 8. Natalie Bookchin, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see, 2012………28

Figure 9. Natalie Bookchin, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see, 2012………29

Figure 10. Natalie Bookchin, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see, 2012……..31

Figure 11. Natalie Bookchin, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see, 2012……..34

Figure 12. Natalie Bookchin, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see, 2012……..44

iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’m so grateful for the support of my thesis committee, and owe my deepest thanks to
primary reader Carol Stakenas. Your commitment to this project and to my critical voice
has meant so much. My sincere thanks to Rhea Anastas, for your invaluable insights and
guidance throughout the process; and to Kara Keeling, for your willingness to serve on
the committee, and for your supportive and thoughtful comments. A deep thanks also to
Noura Wedell, who has done so much to support this work, and to Connie Butler, our
fearless practicum leader. The depth of generosity this faculty has shown me has truly
been a lesson and a model.

Thank you also to Natalie Bookchin: for your support of this project, for kindly making
time to discuss the work, and for your assistance with materials and images.

Lastly, I’m grateful for the support, encouragement and critical insights of my colleagues
in the M.A. program, especially Katherine Bray and Rebecca Matalon.

v
DEDICATION

To my parents, Tyler, and Carol, my guides.

vi
ABSTRACT

Artist Natalie Bookchin’s work, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see
(2012), is both a powerful document of and reflection on contemporary notions of
publicness. This recent work should be understood in relation to Bookchin’s continued
engagement with discourses of the digital public sphere, as demonstrated by earlier work
Universal Page (2000). The work reflects on the idea of democracy in the digital age at
the same time as it demonstrates the critical role for artists in these public debates. Now
he’s out in public and everyone can see was exhibited at LACE (Los Angeles
Contemporary Exhibitions) and took the form of an 18-channel video installation
activated by a 16-minute video. Comprised of clips of vlogs (or video blogs) culled from
videosharing sites, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see is a document of
vlogger’s attempts to ‘be in public;’ a form of online visibility that is in tension with the
private, domestic sites from which they speak. Featuring clips where vloggers discuss
recent scandals involving prominent African American men, the clips also serve as
cultural documents that reflect contemporary public opinions about the causes of these
scandals – specifically, popular understandings of the relationship between race and class
in America. I rely on Bookchin’s analogy of the Greek chorus to make sense of the
relationship between the viewer, the vloggers and their celebrity subjects, and take up
Kara Keeling’s use of Antonio Gramsci’s notion of common sense in The Witch’s Flight:
The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense to theorize the
content of the vlogger’s speech. The vloggers speak to the dangers of publicness for
racialized subjects: indicating that the celebrities are embroiled in scandal because of
vii
their visibility accessing spaces of power that have historically been constructed and
reinforced as ‘white.’
1
Chapter 1
Isolated users, converging publics

At the time of writing, the search term ‘digital democracy’ generates decades
worth of entries on the website of the mainstream technology magazine Wired. The
magazine was launched, initially in a printed version, in 1993 at a time when just less
than a quarter of American households owned a computer, and when the U.S. Census
Bureau did not yet track home access to the Internet.
1
The search hits include an
influencial article by Mark Poster from 1995 titled “The Net as a Public Sphere?”,
contesting the popular conception of online communities as “nascent public spheres”
with the potential to “renew democracy in the 21st century.”
2
Another hit is an article by
Jennifer Granick from 2006 titled “Saving Democracy With Web 2.0.”
3
Its author is
equally invested in discourses around digital democracy – but participating in the debate
ten years later, casts her chips for the democratic possibilities of what is commonly
referred to as ‘Web 2.0.’ “There’s never been a better time to tap that technological ethic
to re-democratize our democracy” she writes.
4
A decade apart, the implicit questions
remain the same; what are the political possibilities of this unprecedented shift from the
television’s one-way signal to a user-generated and network-driven culture? Could the
Internet, or one of its many composite parts, change the ways we decide how we live
together?

1
“Computer Use in the United States: October 1993,” U.S, Census, accessed February 22, 2013,
http://www.census.gov/hhes/computer/files/1993/comp1.txt.
2
Mark Poster, “The Net as a Public Sphere?” Wired, November 1995, accessed February 22, 2013,
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.11/poster.if_pr.html.
3
Jennifer Granick, “Saving Democracy with Web 2.0,” Wired, October 25, 2006, accessed February 22,
2013,
http://www.wired.com/software/webservices/commentary/circuitcourt/2006/10/72001?currentPage=all.
4
Granick, “Saving Democracy with Web 2.0.”
2
These popular debates are an important cultural context when considering
contemporary art works that engage with the technologies and discourses of the Internet.
This is especially true for the practice of Natalie Bookchin, an artist who has consistently
and thoroughly considered these questions through diverse projects, works and platforms,
both on and offline. The central focus of this thesis is Bookchin’s Now he’s out in public
and everyone can see (2012), a work that marks a significant moment in the development
of the artist’s practice. Now he’s out in public and everyone can see was presented by
LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) in Los Angeles from March 8
th
through
April 15
th
2012 and took the form of an 18-channel video installation. Bookchin has often
taken the Internet as both subject and site; documenting how digital spaces are imagined,
used, and put to use by people to engage contemporary public issues. The issues explored
in Bookchin’s work have ranged from social isolation to capital punishment, with her
most recent work examining America’s poverty crisis.

Fig. 1. Natalie Bookchin, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see, 2012, 18 channel
video installation, 16 min. loop, LACE, Los Angeles. Photo by Joshua White. Courtesy
of the artist and LACE.
3
My argument is that Now he’s out in public and everyone can see is a powerful
document of and inquiry into contemporary meanings of publicness. Bookchin’s work
documents the type of dialogues taking place in the contemporary public forum of the
Internet, exploring the intimate connection between the online systems in which public
issues circulate and the issues themselves. This allows for critical reflection on the
contemporary spaces through which we voice and give voice to each other’s positions,
and for considering what the positions staked in online spaces reveal about the culture at
large. Bookchin’s work demonstrates the critical place for artists in the debates about
contemporary democracy and is exemplary of their possible role in society at large.
Comprised of clips of vlogs culled from videosharing sites such as YouTube, the
work is a document of vlogger’s attempts to ‘be in public’; a form of online visibility that
is in tension with the private, domestic sites from which they speak. Featuring clips
where vloggers discuss recent scandals involving prominent African American men, the
vlogs also serve as cultural documents that reflect public opinions about the deeper
causes and effects of these scandals. Thus, in addition to reading the work as a cultural
document in its own right, it can also be read as a literal document of popular opinions
around race and class in America. Through Bookchin’s work, an argument about the
dangers of publicness emerges; highlighting the forms of racism the celebrities are
confronted with because of their visibility as accessing spaces of power that have
historically been constructed and reinforced as ‘white.’ However, the problematic
opinions that reify this position are shown to be in conflict with others, exposing them as
constantly in a process of reification or conversely, contestation at the level of everyday
speech.
4
Now he’s out in public and everyone can see addresses viewership as constituting
a public in its own right, critically implicating the viewer as a part of the broader public
responsible for the ongoing cultural negotiations of the issues of race and class evident in
the vlogger’s speech. The forms of publicness reflected in the work should also be
understood as a part of Bookchin’s ongoing reflection on cultural understandings of the
Internet as a public sphere. This reframes the vlogger’s speech, and the very act of
vlogging itself, as part of a larger question about what we consider our contemporary
public forums and how this impacts our understanding of democracy in the digital age.
Over the course of her career, Bookchin has produced art in a range of media, and
what connects distinct bodies of work is the artist’s regular engagement with
contemporary social and political issues. Graduating with an M.F.A. from the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago in 1990, the artist also completed the Whitney Independent
Study Studio Program.
5
In the early nineties Bookchin worked with embroidery,
exhibiting at New York art spaces like Franklin Furnace.
6
Despite the divergence in
medium from her later practice, these works squarely addressed the political issues of the
time. In American Sampler (1990), produced the year of the U.S. led Gulf War, the artist
embroidered scenes and dialogue from the media; the text from the work reading, “anti-
aircraft fire lighting up the sky over Bagdad.”
7
By the mid-nineties, Bookchin had shifted
to using digital media. In Marking Time (1997), Bookchin focused on the viewer’s sense
of implication in the issue of capital punishment. The installation featured a computer
terminal where viewers moved the computer mouse over the faces of four African

5
“Natalie Bookchin – Curriculum Vitae,” Natalie Bookchin, accessed February 22, 2013,
http://bookchin.net/cv-bookchin.pdf.
6
Patricia Phillips, “Natalie Bookchin Franklin Furnace,” Artforum, May 1991, 148.
7
Review of Natalie Bookchin, Arts Magazine, February 1992, 56.
5
American men formerly on death row. At the same time, text from the guard’s notebook
detailing their last moments before the executions was projected on the wall.
8

Fig. 2. Natalie Bookchin, Marking Time, 1997, installation, Art in the Anchorage,
Creative Time, New York. Courtesy of the artist and Creative Time..

From the early 2000s, Bookchin was recognized as a central international figure
in the field of Net Art, creating works that were sited online as well as actively working
to define the field itself.
9
The artist’s practice from this period might be understood to
engage with the debates about the Internet as a place for overt, and covert, political
engagement. Projects included online games, such as Metapet (2002), a work also
commissioned by Creative Time in which the user played a corporate manager of a bio-
engineered, “transgenic virtual pet.”
10
In agoraXchange (2003), Bookchin partnered with
social scientist Jacqueline Stevens to create an online community that collaboratively
designed a multi-player game exploring “political alternatives to the present global

8
“Databank of the everyday,” Natalie Bookchin, accessed February 22, 2013,
http://bookchin.net/projects/databank.html.
9
For information about Bookchin’s project around the ‘commandments’ of net.art, see: “Introduction to
net.art,” Natalie Bookchin, accessed February 22, 2013, http://bookchin.net/projects/introduction.html.
10
“Metapet,” Natalie Bookchin, accessed February 22, 2013, http://bookchin.net/projects/metapet.html.
6
order.”
11
The online games used humour to approach political questions while also
reflecting on the politics of participation in these interactive online spaces.
By the mid to late 2000’s, Web 2.0 platforms populated by user generated content
were changing people’s relationship with the Internet and had amplified its importance in
American culture at large. Bookchin continued to reflect on these changes of use;
however, instead of generating new spaces for interaction the artist began mining from
preexisting platforms like videosharing sites. Now he’s out in public and everyone can
see is a part of Bookchin’s body of work created from this user generated content. One of
the first of these works was trip (2008), a single-channel video created from edited clips
of travel videos moving “across continents, languages, spectacles, commerce, migration,
and war” that Bookchin has described as mirroring the flow of information through the
Internet itself.
12
Parking Lot (2008) features clips of often humorous misuses of parking
spaces. These spaces are creatively appropriated and become impromptu stages for
intimate performances for friends as well as an untold number of online viewers:
complicating the question of contemporary public space through conceptually linking the
privately owned and consumer driven space of the parking lot to the increasing consumer
activity online.
13

In the series Testament (2009) Bookchin used clips from vlogs (or video blogs)
where vloggers speak to a lived experience, using the format as a platform to share about
aspects of their lives.
14
In My Meds vloggers name their prescription medications; in Laid
Off they speak about job loss in the wake of the market crash of 2008; and in I Am Not,

11
“agoraXchange,” Natalie Bookchin, accessed February 22, 2013,
http://bookchin.net/projects/agoraxchange.html.
12
“trip,” Natalie Bookchin, accessed February 22, 2013, http://bookchin.net/projects/trip.html.
13
“Parking Lot,” Natalie Bookchin, accessed March 5, 2013, http://bookchin.net/projects/parking.html.
14
“Testament,” Natalie Bookchin, accessed February 22, 2013, http://bookchin.net/projects/testament.html.
7
they document their relationship to the term ‘gay’, either claiming or renouncing the term
in relation to their described identity. Bookchin began working on Now he’s out in public
and everyone can see the same year.

Fig. 3. Natalie Bookchin, Testament, 2009, four channel video installation, Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, Los Angeles. Installation view. Courtesy of the artist.

While the works in the Testament series as well as Now he’s out in public and
everyone can see focus on vlogger’s discussion of very different public issues each also
raises the question of the publicness of the vloggers themselves. Bookchin has spoken to
this, stating, “[o]ne of the most popular forms of user-generated content is video online -
is people pointing the camera at themselves, to speak or dance or sing or do something
else. It just reveals that people have a desire to be in public. And to me that’s hopeful [...]
it shows that people don’t want to be as isolated as they feel.
15
Now he’s out in public and
everyone can see takes on the topic of contemporary publicness in the broadest sense.
The work took the form of an 18-channel video installation. Literally encircled the viewer

15
Phone conversation between the artist and author, Dec. 13, 2012.
8
in a field of screens, the installation was continuously activated by a 16 minute video that
played on loop.
16

Fig. 4. Natalie Bookchin, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see, 2012, 18 channel
video installation, 16 min. loop, LACE, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the artist.

Bookchin composed the video from clips where vloggers discuss recent scandals
involving four male African American celebrities, and though the subjects of the scandals
go unnamed, the narratives are familiar. In one section, the vloggers take on the persona
of the celebrity, describing the situation that led to a national scandal in the first person.
One male African American vlogger looks directly at the camera, and jinkles his keys,
saying, “My keys weren’t working, and I had to break into my own house.” The celebrity
we could imagine he is referencing was then mistaken for a burglar and arrested in his
home, leading to a national scandal around racial profiling that led to the infamous “beer
summit.”
17

16
“Now he’s out in public and everyone can see,” Natalie Bookchin, accessed March 5, 2013
http://bookchin.net/projects/out-in-public.html.
17
Jake Tapper, “Obama, Biden Sit Down for Beers With Gates, Crowley,” ABC News, July 30, 2009,
accessed February 22, 2013, http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=8208602&page=1.
9
Another clip features a well manicured older white woman, face close to the
camera. The remainder of the screen is filled by a drooping American flag that’s pinned
to the wall behind her. The woman holds up her birth certificate inches from the camera,
stating, “Here’s my birth certificate – where’s yours?” At the same time, another screen is
activated and an older white man loudly says, “He wasn’t born in the U.S.”
18
Over the
course of the 16 minutes, the descriptions of the individual scandals flow into one
another, highlighting the narratives around race and class that are continuous between
disparate events.

Fig. 5. Natalie Bookchin, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see, 2012, 18 channel
video installation, 16 min. loop, LACE, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the artist and LACE.

The video’s activation of the installation highlights the political dimensions of
these conflicting narratives. Often, clips on opposite sides of the room would play
simultaneously before the video’s configuration changed once again with new screens
becoming active and others going black.

10
In other moments a single clip would play before a barrage of clips would suddenly
enircle the viewer. This was made more disorienting by the changes in the vlogger’s
speech. Suddenly, multiple vloggers echoed the same phrase while at other points the
mass of vloggers seemingly descend into heterogeneous monologues, a garble of noise
that the viewer had to strain to decipher. As the work builds it becomes apparent that the
clips are constructed to indicate that the vlogger’s opinions are in contestation with one
another, fuelled by deeply held beliefs.
Bookchin’s work has previously been the subject of scholarly attention. Dating
back to a 1991 review in Artforum, Bookchin has an extensive archive of texts accessible
on her website. A number of reviews from earlier in her career are available, as well as
more recent texts since the mid-2000’s. Of particular note is “Dancing Machines: An
Interview with Natalie Bookchin” by Carolyn Kane. In the 2009 interview the artist
discusses the work Mass Ornament (2009), composed of DIY dance videos culled from
YouTube. In it, she describes a shift in her practice in 2004, when she “became interested
in the documentary potential of photographic and filmic footage” found on the Internet
“[a]t first, from cameras transmitting images, and then with material that was shared
across the Internet.”
19
As a form of documentary, Bookchin notes that Mass Ornament
“looks at the way collective attitudes and representations become social facts”; a broad
description perhaps also equally apt for the Testament works and Now he’s out in public
and everyone can see which she would also start that year.
20
Another important text for
contextualizing her recent work is “Out in Public: Natalie Bookchin in Conversation with

19
Carolyn Kane, “Dancing Machines: An Interview with Natalie Bookchin,” Rhizome, May 27, 2009,
accessed March 2, 2013, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2009/may/27/dancing-machines/.
20
Carolyn Kane, “Dancing Machines: An Interview with Natalie Bookchin.”
11
Blake Stimson.”
21
In the 2011 interview Bookchin discusses the notion of the chorus
from Greek theatre, using it to theorize aspects of the Testament series as well as Now
he’s out in public and everyone can see. The latter was also reviewed in Art in America
and the LA Times.
22

More extensive commentary on the work was available through the public
programming that accompanied the exhibition, including a public talk between Bookchin
and Dr. Alexandra Juhasz that I draw on in this thesis.
23
I also rely on transcriptions from
an Incubator event that took place at LACE titled “In and Between Screens.” The event
brought together artists, theorists and scholars using Bookchin’s work as a starting point
for discussion.
24
Among the scholars was Kara Keeling who offered thoughts on the
notion of common sense in relation to Now he’s out in public and everyone can see. My
work is indebted to her remarks, as I take up the notion of common sense extensively in
this thesis. Unavailable at the time of writing but to be published in 2013 are two new
titles discussing Bookchin’s work: An Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experience in
Art and Technology by Anna Munster, MIT Press and The Archive Effect by Jaimie
Baron, Routledge Press.
25
As this brief review of the literature makes clear sustained
critical engagement with Now he’s out in public and everyone can see is warranted.

21
Natalie Bookchin and Blake Stimson, “Out in Public: Natalie Bookchin in Conversation with Blake
Stimson,” Rhizome, March 9, 2011, accessed March 2, 2013, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/mar/9/out-
public-natalie-bookchin-conversation-blake-sti/.
22
Reviews include: Christopher Knight, “Art Review: Natalie Bookchin at LACE,” LA Times, March 22,
2012, accessed March 4, 2013, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2012/03/art-review-natalie-
bookchin-at-lace.html and Carolina A. Miranda, “Review: Natalie Bookchin,” Art in America, July 6, 2012,
accessed March 4, 2013, http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/natalie-bookchin/.
23
Natalie Bookchin and Dr. Alexandra Juhasz, public talk at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary
Exhibitions), April 8, 2012.
24
The day long Incubator event In and Between Screens took place at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary
Exhibitions) in Los Angeles, California April 14, 2012.
25
This information is from Bookchin’s biography on her website, “Bio” Natalie Bookchin accessed March
3, 2013 http://bookchin.net/bio.html.
12
In the following chapters I work to define publicness primarily through a
description of Now he’s out in public and everyone can see; taking up Bookchin’s self-
theorization with reference to the chorus of Greek tragedy and Kara Keeling’s
employment of common sense to elaborate aspects of its content and structure. I have
taken this approach to create a context for reflection on the discursive task of Bookchin’s
work itself, more pressing than drawing parallels with pre-existing theories of the digital
public sphere. However, Bookchin’s work has certainly been in dialogue with these
debates, and the following texts warrant further consideration in relation to Bookchin’s
work. These include Habermas’ seminal The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society and James Bonham’s
“Expanding dialogue: The Internet, the public sphere and prospects for transnational
democracy” (2004).
26
Chantal Mouffe is another important voice, well known for her
theory of agonistic pluralism put forward in the 1999 article, “Deliberative Democracy or
Agonistic Pluralism?” Her critique of Habermas’ rationalist conception of politics as well
as the theorist’s recent writings on the role of art in the public sphere are also deserving
of further attention.
Bookchin’s self theorization speaks to the complex relationship between the
viewer, the celebrities that are the subject of the vlogger’s speech and the vloggers
themselves; accomplished through reference to the chorus from Greek tragedy. The
chorus was a form of choir in the theatre that acted as a bridge between the audience and

26
James Bohman, “Expanding dialogue: The Internet, the public sphere and prospects for transnational
democracy,” The Sociological Review 52: 13. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.2004.00477.x.
13
actors on stage.
27
Both their mode of address and relationship to the actors was very
specific; as Bookchin noted in a 2011 interview with art historian Blake Stimson, “the
chorus speaks collectively, set apart from and reflecting on, the action or the drama.”
28

The possibility for the chorus to comment on the drama is created through their very
separation from the sphere of action. As the artist relates, “I like Schlegel's description of
the Greek chorus as an ideal spectator who watches over and comments on the action.
Aristotle also suggests that the chorus embodies the reactions of audiences and the people
against the kings and their misdeeds.”
29
In Now he’s out in public and everyone can see,
the chorus of vloggers reflect on the actions of the gods and kings of American culture,
its celebrities. The notion of the chorus also reframes the performative element of the
vlogger’s actions. Recounting and reflecting on the celebrity drama that increasing fuels
the media, the chorus perform their reactions for the webcam and imagined audiences
online – making themselves literally visible, as well as making visible the performative
element of politics that they embody.
The vlogger’s speech also requires analysis as it demonstrates the raised stakes of
publicness for racialized subjects; punishing those perceived as non-white who occupy
spaces of celebrity and power. I rely on Antonio Gramsci’s notion of common sense as
described in the work of scholar Kara Keeling to show the public dimension of the
fragments of vlogger’s opinions. Keeling’s use of common sense helps to unpack the
individual comments and their position within the larger narratives; reframing the sound
bytes as markers of culturally and historically specific forms of knowledge. At “In and

27
Natalie Bookchin and Blake Stimson, “Out in Public: Natalie Bookchin in Converrsation with Blake
Stimson,” Rhizome, March 9, 2011, accessed February 22, 2013,
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/mar/9/out-public-natalie-bookchin-conversation-blake-sti/.
28
Bookchin and Stimson, “Out in Public.”
29
Bookchin and Stimson, “Out in Public.”
14
Between Screens,” Keeling spoke briefly about considering Now he’s out in public and
everyone can see in relation to Gramsci’s common sense, stating,
Common sense is an active conception of the world always in formation with a
dynamic relationship with an ever-changing material world. It is a conception of
the world that contains within it sediment layers of knowledge including
scientific, folk, and information not yet processed as knowledge […] [W]e [can]
think about common sense as a terrain of struggle, as the struggle for hegemony.
30

The notion of common sense critically validates different types of popularly held beliefs,
allowing for the positions and opinions of the vloggers to be understood as legitimate
forms of knowledge. I’ll highlight common senses in the vloggers’ speech to elucidate
what I take as the work’s argument about the dangers of publicness for racialized
subjects, reflecting on both the present order that these culturally dominant beliefs reify
as well as imagining their possible cultural and historical roots.
In addition to identifying the hegemonic forms of common sense in the work, I
highlight conflicting common senses – opposing understandings of the scandals – that
Bookchin carefully edited into the dominant narratives she constructs. Bookchin’s
documentation of the conflicting opinions of these scandals is crucial, as it creates a
visualization of the contemporary “terrain of struggle” in America around issues of race
and class.
31
As Keeling notes, the struggle between these forms of common sense is in
fact a “struggle for hegemony.”
32
Considering it as such allows us to understand these
common sense as tools being deployed (sometimes consciously, sometimes intuitively) in
a quest for dominance; thus denaturalizing any one position. Moreover, the work

30
Keeling continued, “There are things that remain hidden within the dominant common sense but also the
common sense of subordinated groups. Those things that remain hidden may have active energy to them
that might be reactive in certain contexts. There is no guarantee that it will lead to positive outcomes. [...]
[I]t’s just that one of the dominant gets to serve as common sense and the others are delegated to folklore
and other types of stories.” Kara Keeling, presentation at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions),
Los Angeles, California, April 14, 2012.
31
Keeling, presentation at LACE.
32
Keeling, presentation at LACE.
15
indicates that this is taking place even at the site of everyday speech. There is a
hopefulness to this conception; as Keeling states in her book The Witch’s Flight: The
Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense, “[a]n investigation into
the common sense of subordinated or oppressed and exploited groups can reveal both
how common sense provides consent to the groups’ domination and how it might support
a viable alternative to their domination.”
33
By threading in conflicting or uncommon
senses being articulated by the public, Bookchin points to the seeds of these alternatives.
The work begs a simple question: why do vloggers feel compelled to share their
views with an online public? This matters for anyone committed to an idea of democracy
in the digital age. Bookchin has made the stakes clear, stating,
We have entered another level of alienation when our equivalent of a public
forum is a person alone in his or her room speaking to a computer screen. But, my
work suggests, we are not alone in our need for public conversation and debate
about the circumstances of our lives.
34

The term public forum invokes the idea of a space in which public opinions can be
debated in conversation with others, and is a term I use in place of the discourse-heavy
notion of the public sphere. Though the vloggers treat the webcam as a portal into a
public forum, the work questions what type of dialogue is indeed taking place. In Now
he’s out in public and everyone can see, publicness online and of the public as polis are
intimately and inseparably connected.

33
Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense,
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007): 20.
34
Natalie Bookchin and Blake Stimson, “Out in Public: Natalie Bookchin in Converrsation with Blake
Stimson,” Rhizome, March 9, 2011, accessed February 22, 2013,
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/mar/9/out-public-natalie-bookchin-conversation-blake-sti/.
16
Chapter 2
The Internet as subject and site

In 2000, Bookchin collaborated with well-known early Net artist Alexei Shulgin
to produce the art work and website Universal Page. The artists were both early
innovators in a subset of New Media Art that in the mid 1990’s would come to be known
as Net Art. Like many other cultural producers for whom the Internet gave unprecedented
access to likeminded artists, curators and critics around the globe the artists produced
works online.
35
The work was hosted on the museum’s virtual exhibition space, Gallery
9, and was first presented as part of the exhibition Art Entertainment Network.
36
Net Art
was made possible by a number of factors, including the advent of HTML coding
language which created the possibility for online users around the globe to interface with
one another. The affordability of personal computers, as well as widespread access to
software to create digital images, audio and video, also played a role.
37

Universal Page demonstrates how Bookchin has frequently addressed the Internet
as both subject and site. As such, it highlights the artist’s ongoing consideration of
discourses framing the Internet as a public forum: reflecting on how the Internet is
imagined as a place for public dialogue, as well as documenting how it is used in relation
to this idea. As noted, this particular conception of the Internet has been a critical

35
See accompanying interview between the artists also hosted on Gallery 9 website: Alexei Shulgin and
Natalie Bookchin, “Interview: Alexei Shulgin and Natalie Bookhin,” Gallery 9/Walker Art Center, January,
2000, accessed February 23, 2013,
http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/universalpage/bookchin_shulgin.html. For more information on Net Art
history, see Mark Tribe and Reena Jana, “Art in the age of digital distribution,” in New Media Art, ed. Uta
Grosenick (Köln; London: Taschen, 2006), 6-25.
36
The work, which was hosted at www.universalpage.org, is no longer active but was linked from the
Gallery 9 website. The section on the Walker Art Center’s Gallery 9 that describes the work and links to
various texts about the work is still active, and viewable at
http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/universalpage/. However, images of Universal Page are accessible
through the archival website WayBack Machine, and can be viewed here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20110501000000*/http://www.universalpage.org.
37
Mark Tribe and Reena Jana, “Art in the age of digital distribution,” in New Media Art, ed. Uta Grosenick
(Köln; London: Taschen, 2006),10.
17
component of the cultural narrative around the technology from the mid-nineties through
to the present. It is my argument that Bookchin’s explicit engagement with this discourse
differentiates her politically from many artists whose works are also sited online; in
taking the Internet as both subject and site, the artist allows us to consider how the beliefs
we hold about technology can either open or circumstribe its political possibilities.
Universal Page attempts no small task - described on the Gallery 9 site as “the
objective average of all content of the Web,” the work attempts to visually represent the
totality of information on the Internet.
38
However, as Bookchin has noted, the work is
perhaps more of a rhetorical gesture than a true algorithm.
39
The image on the website
was generated through a script: an automated series of commands executed by a program
that was developed by programmers to continuously search the Internet. Through a series
of algorithms, the script produces a visual representation of this ‘objective average’ of the
Web’s content, updating with each click of the ‘refresh’ button.
The project description on Gallery 9 offers a tongue-in-cheek pronouncement of
the work’s (rhetorical) accomplishment, stating,
A manifestation and proclamation of the utopian dream of world unity and the
realization of democratic global communication, Universal Page articulates the
historic and momentous effects of constant flows of creation, communication,
exchange, collectivity, connectivity and interactivity where no one with a
computer and a modem is excluded, no one with a web server is unheard, and no
one with a software client is ignored. This ultimate commemorative living
magnum opus utilizes the work, play and input of every single participant, human
and robotic, of the World Wide Web, and mandates a universal commitment to a
unified peaceful new millennium, where subjects of the world will live together in
shared harmony.
40

38
“About Universal Page,” Gallery 9/Walker Art Center, February, 2000, accessed February 23, 2013.
http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/universalpage/bookchin_shulgin.html.
39
Phone conversation between the artist and author, Dec. 13, 2012.
40
“About Universal Page,” Gallery 9/Walker Art Center.
18
The statement is both repurposing language from and responding to the debate around the
potential of the Internet as a global public forum, reflecting on the utopian elements of
much of the debate.
41
The statement, with its tongue in cheek tone, reflects the artists’
engagement of this discourse as well as their critique of the equation of transnational
online participation with a global consensus newly possible through a networked forum
for exchange.
If the language used to describe the project is tongue in cheek, it may only reveal
itself to be when viewing the website itself. The site looks very simple and was composed
of a plain, yellowish brown background covered with paragraphs of brown text; a
computer coding language illegible to most viewers. The visual representation would
change minutely from one visit to the next. The paragraphs of code were different (but
this meant little to those without knowledge of the coding language itself) and the brown
background color would appear a slightly different shade.
42
To those who have read the
project description, this might indicate that the ‘objective average’ of the Internet was in
fact is a brown soup; a neither utopian nor optimistic visualization of an unprecedented
space for public speech.
On an accompanying Gallery 9 page hosting texts about the work, writer Randall
Packer offers hyperbole laden prose on the work’s implications for these discourses. In
the essay “Eulogy for the Utopian Dream of the Net”, Packer writes,
That Lethal Algorithm has delivered the death blow to rampant Idealism by
revealing to us the profoundly meaningless nature of the homogenized,

41
Reflecting on the discourses of this era scholar James Bohman has noted, “[t]he Internet was thought to
herald new possibilities for political participation, if not direct democracy, even in large and complex
societies, as ‘electronic democracy’ might replace the mass media democracy of sound-bite television.”
James Bohman, “Expanding dialogue: The Internet, the public sphere and prospects for transnational
democracy,” The Sociological Review, 52: 13. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.2004.00477.x.
42
Phone conversation between the artist and author, Dec. 13, 2012.
19
democratizing synthesis of Web chatter, as culled by the Universal Page from
every single web page on the face of the Earth. Yes, the brownification of
Information.
43

If Packer’s reading of the work represents the Internet as a place of disappointment,
Bookchin’s interview with collaborator Alexei Shulgin also hosted on the Gallery 9 site
offers an alternative reading. The interview format itself is a testament to a more hopeful
understanding of the possibilities of the Internet as a site for connection, seemingly
conducted through a chat between the artists.
In contrast to Packer’s description of the Web’s content as “profoundly
meaningless [...] chatter,” in the interview Bookchin speaks to the unprecedented
possibilities for communication the technology offers:
44

As a means of communication, the Internet is more powerful than any other
mediated tool that I have come across -- it allows for ongoing, lengthy, and
complex communication with fairly large audiences, and also allows for
interventionist and disruptive new types of social and cultural activities for
limited amounts of money and technical expertise.
45

Later in the interview, the artist explicitly argues against a cynical reading of the work.
Replying to Shulgin’s prompt, “What would be the profound reading of the project?”
Bookchin states,“[i]t is (like you and me) a mixture of intense belief and hope in the
possibilities of this new medium (and in art in general), together with a strong distrust of
and frustration with its extensive hype and its numerous failings.”
46

In contrast to Packer’s sweeping generalizations about the failure of the
technology, Bookchin highlights its specific and potential uses; a critical shift that re-

43
Randall Packer, “Eulogy for the Utopian Dream of the Net,” 2000, Gallery 9/Walker Art Center,
accessed February 24, 2013, http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/universalpage/bookchin_shulgin.html.
44
Randall Packer, “Eulogy for the Utopian Dream of the Net.”
45
Natalie Bookchin and Alexei Shulgin, “Interview: Alexei Shulgin and Natalie Bookhin,” Gallery
9/Walker Art Center, January, 2000, accessed February 23, 2013,
http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/universalpage/bookchin_shulgin.html.
46
Bookchin and Shulgin, “Interview: Alexei Shulgin and Natalie Bookhin.”
20
establishes the political agency of its users. Bookchin’s quote is important, as it disallows
a reading of their critique as one that is also determinist. The problem, as the artists point
out through their rhetorical visualization of the totality of the Internet, is not that the
Internet failed to live up to the utopian rhetoric. Instead, it is in the very act of
universalizing about its possibilities. Whether subscribing to a utopian or distopian belief
about the Internet, the stumbling block for change is the assumption that the technology
itself will dictate the outcomes of its engagement, a textbook definition of technological
determinism. Thus, Bookchin’s frustration with the ‘hype’ – utopian or dystopian
discourses that disempower its users.
The artists’ gesture is only available through the particularities of working online,
thus requiring a methodology that accounts for the use of code as a medium and the
network as site. In an essay also from 2000, “Signal or Noise? The Networked Museum”
former Curator of New Media at the Walker Art Center, Steve Dietz, offers three criteria
for analyzing online works.
47
They are interactivity, connectivity, and computability:
behaviors that must be present in the works, highlighting their distinctive mutable
qualities.
48
Of particular importance for Universal Page is ‘computability,’ by definition,
a behavior of the computer itself that accounts for both the digital material of the work as
well as the programmed script that generates the visual image on the webpage.
49
Also
critical is the behavior of “connectivity,” accounting for the work’s literal presence in a

47
Steve Dietz, “Signal or Noise? The Network Museum,” Gallery 9/Walker Art Center, accessed February
24, 2013, http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/webwalker/ww_032300_main.html. The material was first
presented as a lecture in 2000.
48
Dietz, “Signal or Noise? The Network Museum.”
49
Dietz, “Signal or Noise? The Network Museum.”
21
network.
50
For, not only is the web page sited online like other Net art works, its visual
content its generated through the relationship between the Internet and the script.
Bookchin’s more recent work reflects technological and cultural changes brought
by the advent of Web 2.0. and much wider accessibility to the Internet in general. More
of a “paradigm shift” than a change in specific technologies, Web 2.0 is a term coined in
2004 that defines a turn towards user generated technologies as well as cloud
computing.
51
For example, in 2005 the videosharing site YouTube went live, and by
2009 reached one billion videos a day.
52
Facebook.com was also launched in 2005, and
only two years later had 30 million users.
53
Given the massive global usership of these
new platforms it is unsurprising that the familiar utopian narrative returned in the mid-
2000’s, resulting in popular headlines like “Social media – the public sphere on
steroids.”
54

In the new technological and discursive context heralded by Web 2.0 Bookchin’s
work began to explore the content users were producing. Bookchin was not alone in
mining user-generated web content to compose new works. For example, the well known
digital art website Rhizome dedicates an entire online collection to what they term
“digital archivism,” culling from projects in their online database ArtBase that reflect
diverse practices of artists “who are collecting and curating the cultural byproducts of

50
Steve Dietz, “Signal or Noise? The Network Museum,” Gallery 9/Walker Art Center, accessed February
24, 2013, http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/webwalker/ww_032300_main.html.
51
“Definition of Web 2.0,” PC Magazine, accessed March 7, 2013,
http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,1237,t=Web+20&i=56219,00.asp.
52
David Lidsky, “The Short But Impactful History of YouTube,” Fast Company, February 1, 2010,
accessed March 7, 2013, http://www.fastcompany.com/1514469/brief-impactful-history-youtube.
53
Sarah Phillips, “A brief history of Facebook,” The Guardian, January 24, 2007, accessed March 7, 2013,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/jul/25/media.newmedia.
54
See, for instance, Taso Lagos, “Social media – the public sphere on steroids,” The Seattle Times, May 4,
2012, accessed March 7, 2013, http://seattletimes.com/html/opinion/2018143386_guest06lagos.html.
22
digital living.”
55
But if Bookchin shares the strategy with other artists, such as Dina
Kelberman and Thompson and Craigshead featured in the Rhizome collection, both the
intent and implications of her actions is more specific than simply “collecting artifacts
and activities that are specific to the digital environment” as Rhizome states.
56
The artist
notes,
In Testament, a series I began shortly after I completed Mass Ornament, I started
with an idea that I wanted to represent waves of language and ideas as they flow
across the Internet, like the shared movements flowing across the net in Mass
Ornament. Once I choose a topic I want to explore, I look for patterns in the way
people talk about it: the words they choose, their tone, their attitudes, the narrative
arcs they follow. Sometimes I just look at single words or phrases. Other times I
want extrapolations.
57

Bookchin’s interest in the “waves of language” highlights the resulting works as ones that
deal with the relationality of people and ideas within the structure of the Internet.
58
From
this vantage the works serve as documents, not only of vlogger’s opinions on public
issues, but of the way this content moves through the Internet itself. We might imagine
that these waves happen for a few reasons; for one, the cyclical way in which news cycles
pick up and play out particular events. At the same time, the ‘sociality’ of social media is
predicated on the possibilities for publicly ‘sharing’ content between users.
59
Moreover,
the artist has noted that the shift in her practice also has to do the with the work’s publics:
“In the earlier work, I was working online, to think about that different kind of public, so

55
“Featured Collection Digital Archivism,” Rhizome, accessed February 27, 2013,
http://rhizome.org/artbase/collections/4/.
56
There broader shift in art production that Rhizome isolates arguably reflects broader cultural shifts in the
volume and accessibility of information brought by these recent changes in technology.
57
Natalie Bookchin and Blake Stimson, “Out in Public: Natalie Bookchin in Converrsation with Blake
Stimson,” Rhizome, March 9, 2011, accessed February 22, 2013,
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/mar/9/out-public-natalie-bookchin-conversation-blake-sti/.
58
Natalie Bookchin and Blake Stimson, “Out in Public: Natalie Bookchin in Converrsation with Blake
Stimson.”
59
It is critical to note that this sense of this flow is clearly constructed by Bookchin, even if the source
content of the work assures the viewer that these opinions are circulating in online spaces.
23
it’s more about the public in relationship to reception. And then in the second body of
work, Testament and Now he’s out in public [and everyone can see], I’m looking at the
way that people are using those spaces.”
60

Fig. 6. Natalie Bookchin, Mass Ornament (2009) single-channel HD video, 5.1 surround
sound. Courtesy of the artist.

Users are arguably engaging these online spaces to share content, ideas and
opinions because they understand these spaces as a kind of public forum: a space for
discussion about issues important to their lives as well as a space to garner attention. This
raises the question of whether these platforms are spaces of dialogue, a notion that is
integral to that of the public forum, or of something more akin to attention seeking. The
artist’s decision to create a sense of conversation from the stratified, enormous content of
platforms like YouTube should be considered in relation to this question; indicating that
the individual vloggers were not formally engaging in a dialogue. Bookchin has been
explicitly critical of the quality of dialogue happening through Web 2.0, stating, “I don’t
think it’s a community [YouTube] - so calling it social media is a misnomer. I don’t think
there is conversation to be had on it through boxes for comments, or likes or dislikes.”
61

Bookchin’s criticisms should not be confused with a distopian view of Web 2.0, but
clearly raise the question of the depth of relationality between users when filtered through
these platforms.

60
Phone conversation between the artist and author, Dec. 13, 2012.
61
Natalie Bookchin and Geert Novink, “In Conversation with Natalie Bookchin (part 1),” Institute of
Network Cultures, March 15, 2011, accessed March 4, 2013,
http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/culturevortex/category/youtube/.
24
Though at one time referred to as a “net artist,” and more recently as a “new
media artist” Bookchin is clear that she is uninterested in such labels. “I don’t know if I
would put a word in front of ‘artist’ because I think that we’re all working with all sorts
of media and I would never restrict it or limit it to – well I mean what’s ‘new media’
anyways now – I don’t even know.”
62
However, this decision is more than just a
comment on the current relevancy of a term like new media art; it also reflects a political
position. The artist continued, stating, “[I] come out of documentary because I’m
interested in the world – interested in reflecting back the social conditions of the world
where people can look at it subjectively as opposed to starting with particular formal
restrictions like media.”
63
The works discussed arguably reflect a triangulated
relationship between the changing technology, the cultural discourses that impact its use
and the ways in which users are engaging it. As a result, they offer an effective critique of
technological determinism. For again, this critique of a utopian understanding of the
connective possibilities of the Internet critically denies a determinist view of the
technology, opening conversations about where and how a technology can be used for
creative purposes, for collective engagement and as a site for public voice. In generating
an empirical space in which to consider both its discourses and its use, the artist’s work
continues to critically reflect on how the Internet is changing what it means to be a
democratic public.

62
Natalie Bookchin and Dr. Alexandra Juhasz, public talk at LACE, April 8 2012.
63
Natalie Bookchin and Dr. Alexandra Juhasz, public talk at LACE, April 8 2012.
25
Chapter 3
Conflicting common senses and the politics of publicness

Fig. 7. Natalie Bookchin, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see, 2012, 18 channel
video installation, 16 min. loop, LACE, Los Angeles. Screen shot. Courtesy of the artist
and LACE.

“There’s a line that you can’t cross”
“Tow the line, or that line will tow you”
“The system is designed to ensnare you, when you decide you want to step out of
line.”
“At what line, does it cross – ”
“If you can see the line, you’ve gone too far”
“ – when something’s considered not normal?”
“This man – ”
“ – it seems, he’s walking that line, he’s stepped out of line a few times, but that’s
ok”
“ – stepped out his door. Cardinal rule broken right there.”
64

While the question of either what this line is or how is it crossed does not feature in this
sequence from Now he’s out in public and everyone can see, Bookchin’s editing creates
an emergent consensus that the lines are real insofar as their crossing has consequences.

64
The quotations that are featured in the following two chapters are my transcriptions of the aural content
of Now he’s out in public and everyone can see. I have done my best to represent this element of the work
as accurately as possible.
26
As a flexible marker of division applied by the vloggers to a host of different situations,
the metaphor of the line functions to define the scandal. If the African American
celebrities have all somehow crossed the line (defined by one of the vloggers as what’s
considered ‘not normal’), the line itself is shown to be an ongoing cultural negotiation;
both constructed and contested through the expressions of the vloggers. For this reason
the scandalous varies both over time, and between people - eliciting similarly intense
emotions but for a host of different reasons. In sum, crossing the line might be
understood as an apt, if cliché, way of framing how a scandal is defined within the
context of the work.
In this chapter I highlight examples of the construction and contestation of
culturally coded boundaries for action that, when crossed, result in the scandals the
vloggers speak to. Many of the scandals the vloggers describe are in fact doubled: the
first scandal, breaking the cardinal rule referenced in the clip described above, and the
secondary scandals corollary to this first transgression. The cardinal rule broken by the
African American celebrities the vloggers speak about, is in fact, their publicness,
defined through the work as the celebrities’ occupation of a public position of power.
Thus, the scandals and consequences played out through the piece are a result of the
celebrities’ move into this highly visible space.
Bookchin’s work documents the contemporary politics of publicness in America.
This notion of publicness is reliant on the viewer’s understanding of the individual
vlogger’s opinions as reflecting a broader position of the American public. This sense is
generated through Bookchin’s editing; for example, in the sequence opening this chapter,
what’s striking is the prevalence of shared language being used by the vloggers to
27
describe vastly different scandals. This is indicative of the overall structure of the work,
where an aural narrative is constructed by Bookchin through multiple vlog clips. The
vlogger’s individual opinions, which perhaps are more easily dismissed when viewed in
isolation, are constructed to reflect a larger public debate. This sense is arguably
produced through, rather than in spite of, the tensions implicit in online speech. The
documentation of the physical isolation of the vloggers, each speaking from the frame of
their webcam then doubled in the frame of the monitor at LACE, is in contrast to the
frequent recitation of the same words or phrases; indicating their shared vocabulary to
explain a common belief despite their isolated positions. The work also highlights the
public dimensions of what some might consider politically irrelevant ‘celebrity gossip.’
This is important, as an increasing focus on coverage of this content in mainstream media
has been roundly criticized on the grounds that it distracts from more serious or pressing
public issues.
“Now uh, he lives in...”
“…well, let’s pick a place like – “
“FLORIDA”
“Bensonhurst”
“Cambridge, Massachusetts”
“Which is in like, you know, a SUBURB area up there”
“We’ve seen it so many times, the brother with the suitcase who moved to the
suburbs, don’t want to give back to his people in the hood, he just abandons them.”
“You know, this is a very upscale, very nice neighborhood.”
“It’s a NICE NEIGHBORHOOD”
“A predominantly white neighborhood”
“A WHITE neighborhood, if you will.”
65

65
Author’s transcription of Now he’s out in public and everyone can see.
28

Fig. 8. Natalie Bookchin, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see, 2012, 18 channel
video installation, 16 min. loop, LACE, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the artist.

The highlighted words, spoken by multiple vloggers, might be understood as forms of
common sense. As outlined in the introduction, I rely on the notion of common sense in
order to reflect on the cultural and historical dimensions of the vlogger’s sound bytes. In
this case the forms of common sense are largely clichés, like the association between
Florida and the suburban, or the suburban and white. The commonality between the
neighborhoods these celebrities call home is clearly not the geographic location. Instead,
it is their price tag – with the associated safety, ex-urban location and whiteness.
The connections drawn by Bookchin between these clichés could be read as an
argument about how a ‘nice neighbourhood’ gets its title; not just because of safety or
aesthetics, but because of the ‘sameness’ of the neighbors. But the latent racism of this
position is nothing new: the vloggers are seemingly accessing a fairly dominant, if
problematic piece of common sense. What is notable is the vlogger’s need to name the
whiteness of the neighborhood. Arguably, this becomes a fact they stress because the
29
celebrities’ position of power constitutes an affront to what is usually taken for granted –
that the power implicit in owning a home in such a neighbourhood in America has
historically been afforded to whites.

Fig. 9. Natalie Bookchin, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see, 2012, 18 channel
video installation, 16 min. loop, LACE, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the artist and LACE.

At the core of the sequence is an opposing reading of the scandal, a conflicting
form of common sense. “We’ve seen it so many times, the brother with the suitcase who
moved to the suburbs, don’t want to give back to his people in the ‘hood, he just
abandons them.”
66
While this may sound like a cliché, the vlogger’s comment is rooted in
historical fact. Ronald Jacobs makes this clear in Race, Media, and the Crisis of Civil
Society: From the Watts Riots to Rodney King, writing, “[s]ince the 1960s [...] the
formerly class-integrated black communities had become increasingly class
segregated.”
67
This was prompted a significant drop in urban manufacturing jobs, which

66
Author’s transcription of Now he’s out in public and everyone can see.
67
Ronald N. Jacobs, Race, Media, and the Crisis of Civil Society: From the Watts Riots to Rodney King,
(Port Chester, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 126.
30
have continued to steadily decline.
68
Jacobs describes the devastating effects: “[t]he result
of these structural changes has been that much of the tax base for the cities has been
eroded, leading to chronic fiscal crises in the increasingly ghettoized inner cities. This has
hurt poor blacks disproportionately. It has also encouraged middle-class blacks to leave
the inner city.”
69
Their exodus has removed what Jacobs describes as a “buffer” that
“would otherwise have been able to deflect some of the impact of poverty and
joblessness.”
70
Moreover, critical services largely funded through property taxes, like
public schools, are detrimentally impacted by this flight of capital. This counter common
sense presents a critical challenge to the hegemonic reading of the scandal offered by
other vloggers.
In another section the home is again a site of scandal. Below, capitalized words
are simultaneously echoed by multiple vloggers. The italicized text is from one vlogger
who speaks throughout the clip.
“You draw attention to yourself black man, when you go living in all white
neighborhoods, black man.”
“It’s a contradiction in terms.”
“Is he eligible?”
“BLACK MAN”
“In a WHITE HOUSE”
“My White House.”
“The police gon’ watch you – ”
“ - Cos they ain’t forgettin’ about the hood in you.”
“ - And people gon’ watch you too.”
“You’re skin’s way too dark to be livin’ in a place this good.”
“And all these bloggers, typing until their fingers get sore.”
“ - I’m watching you.”
71

68
Ronald N. Jacobs, Race, Media, and the Crisis of Civil Society: From the Watts Riots to Rodney King,
(Port Chester, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 49.
69
Ronald N. Jacobs, Race, Media, and the Crisis of Civil Society, 49-50.
70
Ronald N. Jacobs, Race, Media, and the Crisis of Civil Society, 50.
71
Author’s transcription of Now he’s out in public and everyone can see.
31

Fig. 10. Natalie Bookchin, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see, 2012, 18
channel video installation, 16 min. loop, LACE, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the artist.

Whether an expensive home in the suburbs or a top political seat, the celebrities’ highly
visible homes are understood by the vloggers as places of power. This connection is
constructed through references to both the White House and suburbs as places where
black men create scandal through simply inhabiting a home. Both figures referenced in
this section, the unnamed celebrities living in affluent surburban neighborhoods and more
explicitly Obama in the White House, are constructed as the subjects of increased
surveillance on account of their visibility as black in dominantly and historically white
places of power. Again, it’s arguable that both dominant and marginalized forms of
common sense are present in the vlogger’s speech. For some, like the African American
man stating, “You draw attention to yourself black man, when you go living in all white
neighborhoods, black man” common sense is offered as a warning about the dangers of
this visibility.
72

72
Author’s transcription of Now he’s out in public and everyone can see.
32
Through removing mention of the celebrity figures themselves, Bookchin stops
the viewer from associating particular vlogger’s responses with discreet scandals; critical
to considering the public dimensions of these individual speech acts. Though the viewer
may not have clarity on the identity of the celebrities themselves, the vloggers readily
name famous figures from previous decades.
73
By positioning the unnamed recent
celebrities in relation to named, famous African American men involved in scandals from
the 1990’s and early 2000’s, Bookchin both references and constructs a legacy of
associated public figures. In one section, the viewer is bombarded with a laundry list of
names, (“Michael, O.J., Koby”) constructed through rapidly changing clips. This bolsters
a case for understanding these scandals as continuous with larger cultural and historical
narratives, and the result of the vlogger’s reliance on longstanding common senses that
are both reified and recycled for each new scandal. Just as the removal of the names of
recent celebrities shift the perception of the vlogger’s discussion of these scandals out of
the realm of personal opinion and into the realm of a politically relevant public record,
the refusal to name the vlogger’s political positions allows for the shared forms of
common sense that underpin them to emerge. As Bookchin has stated, “I think that by
showing these articulations to be collective, rather than necessarily giving them political
force for the cause, of say Birthers, or segregationists, it distills various positions and
reveals them as scripted.”
74

Bookchin uses the term ‘script’ to point to the public’s reliance on common ideas
that are shared, recited, and relied on to respond to new events. Thus, despite the different

74
Natalie Bookchin and Blake Stimson, “Out in Public: Natalie Bookchin in Converrsation with Blake
Stimson,” Rhizome, March 9, 2011, accessed February 22, 2013,
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/mar/9/out-public-natalie-bookchin-conversation-blake-sti/.
33
situations that the celebrities find themselves in, vloggers often use identical phrasing:
indicating that the political positions themselves function as a kind of cultural script. A
new critical reading of the aural narrative in Now he’s out in public and everyone can see
is possible through connecting Bookchin’s notion of the script with Keeling’s use of
common sense. The work documents how the vloggers understand these scripts as
common sense and in turn, demonstrates how dominant forms of common sense (so often
taken to be a ‘natural’ position) are in fact culturally scripted.
‘Script’ is also clearly a theatre term: a reference that reframes the vlogger’s
performance for the webcam, as well as the performative element of politics implicit in
the work. The doubling of the vlogger’s performance, both for webcam and of a political
position, is especially clear when vloggers create what might be understood as ‘sets’ in
their domestic spaces. Some vloggers create mock news stations, taking on the persona of
a newscaster. Dressed in a suit and speaking to a microphone, the vlogger attempts to
legitimate his individual speech through performing it as the ‘official’ media story.
However, there is an irony to this performance since that the cultural scripts the vloggers
rely on have often come from the official newscasts themselves. As Bookchin has related,
“[i]n a time of instantaneous 24-hour news cycles, emotionally charged media stories
spread virally across the internet and are filtered through social media sites where
commentators make videos responding to, reenacting, remixing, and retelling the
stories.”
75

75
Natalie Bookchin and Blake Stimson, “Out in Public: Natalie Bookchin in Converrsation with Blake
Stimson,” Rhizome, March 9, 2011, accessed February 22, 2013,
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/mar/9/out-public-natalie-bookchin-conversation-blake-sti/.
34

Fig. 11. Natalie Bookchin, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see, 2012, 18
channel video installation, 16 min. loop, LACE, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the artist.

The sets are clear attempts to strengthen the persuasiveness of the vloggers’
common senses through visual references to legitimating forces: in this example, the truth
claims of the media. Despite these attempts, the domesticity of the spaces shines through.
In one clip this happens through the viewer’s recognition of a nail above the newscaster’s
head, perhaps indicating that when not the backdrop for the newscast the wall displays a
family photo. Other vloggers offer their opinions in more intimate domestic settings:
while holding a laundry basket, or in front of unmade beds. Here, the opinions are less
clearly performative, and the private space from which their public speech is offered is
fully on display. Through these varied attempts to legitimate their speech, the vloggers
are reflecting a notion of politics, not solely as an appeal to the rational, but as an appeal
to the emotional. In Now he’s out in public and everyone can see, the contemporary
“terrain of struggle” is characterized by this battle of persuasion, with the vloggers
relying on the performative and the rhetorical as key devices to convince viewers of the
35
‘common sense’ of their beliefs.
76
Bookchin’s work also points to an understanding of
politics as inherently conflictual, indicated by the vloggers’ dissensus. This understanding
of politics is coherent with my use of common sense, as it is through conflict that certain
strains of knowledge become dominant while others are marginalized in the culture’s
popular narratives.
If the vlogger’s phrases have political connotations, so too do the types of phrases:
evident in the metaphor of ‘the line’ I discussed in the introduction to this chapter.
Crossing the line might be understood as an apt, if cliché way of framing how a scandal is
defined within the context of the work. But it is not the only cliché raised by the vloggers,
even within the few examples I have outlined here. These clichés are both visual, such as
the reoccuring trope of the American flag, and verbal, like the phrase “I’m not a racist,
but...” echoed by the vloggers. This raises the question: why do clichés predominate the
vlogger’s speech? How does a cliché operate as a form of common sense, and what are
the political consequences of vlogger’s reliance on clichéd ideas to make sense of the
scandals?
In the The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of
Common Sense, Keeling discusses the cliché as a particular form of common sense as
well as outlining the political effects of its circulation in public discourse. She writes,
When directed onto a perception, a cliché, as a subset of common sense, continues
an arrested movement. During perception, memory retrieves from the past what is
useful to the present. What appears to an eye is precisely what remains useful to
the maintenance of the present. [...] Even when the present and the past are
incommensurate, common sense in the form of a metaphor can “furnish us with
something to say when we know longer know what to do.”
77

76
Kara Keeling, presentation at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), Los Angeles, California,
April 14, 2012.
77
Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense,
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 23.
36

For Keeling, the cliché serves a limiting function. Though allowing us to draw upon
accumulated experience to make sense of the present, it also limits the present’s
possibilities to our experience of the past. For this reason, the cliché is “useful to the
maintenance of the present”; an easy prompt that allows us to respond instinctually
without having to think through the effects and consequences of a new event.
78
Thus, the
cause of a new scandal is easier to describe through reliance on the well worn cliché.
However, this reliance disallows a new understanding, and the present order is
maintained. There are political consequences to this maintenance: in recirculating the
dominant common senses around race and class in America, the vlogger’s clichés reify
the present order that they reflect.
But as is clearly indicated in the racialized stakes of publicness documented
through the work, this order is far from equitable. In recycling clichés to articulate their
opinions of the celebrity scandals, the vloggers are perhaps unwittingly involved in what
Keeling has termed “the maintenance of the present,” an “arrested movement” that
reifies instead of challenges the racist public opinions documented in the work.
79
Though
a single clichéd phrase is hardly notable, through highlighting the prevalence of these
phrases in the vloggers’ speech Bookchin elevates the cliché from an instinctual response
to a political issue; raising the important question of how the cliché functions politically
in American culture. The work demonstrates how their pervasiveness defines the
contours of public debates – even if this is done unknowingly by their speakers. Thus, it
is not just a question of how clichéd media scripts influence the public perception of

78
Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense,
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 23.
79
Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight, 23.
37
these issues, but demonstrates how our day to day reliance on these ideas reify their
dominance as common sense.
The work also highlights the proliferation of the cliché in the context of Web 2.0.
Can we move past what Keeling defines as the “maintenance of the present” when
streaming Tweets, Facebook updates, and the soundbytes of mainstream media are key
sources of information?
80
As is demonstrated by Bookchin’s work, there are always
possibilities for using these technologies in ways that generate uncommon forms of
understanding. However, this does not negate the question of whether clichés proliferate
with 120 character limits or 3 minute video clips; one arguably answered by the clichéd
notions of race, celebrity and class evident in the clips. The vloggers offering their views
in isolation are perhaps especially prone to a reliance on clichéd forms of common sense
because they are not challenged through formal dialogue to account for their positions.
Instead, they are free to purport these “arrested movements,” even when their positions
reify racial inequity.
81

Now he’s out in public and everyone can see serves as a record of the political
stakes of the cliché in public discourse. The familiarity of these narratives reflects how
the cliché has become a political tool – a script recycled in the mainstream media that
serves to continue our “arrested movement” at a cultural level. In some of the clips this
reference to the role of the media vis à vis public opinion is the visual cue of a television
in the backround. In others, vloggers stage ‘alternative’ news outlets, their attempt to
legitimate forms of common sense that are in opposition to those circulating in the
mainstream. As scholar Ronald Jacobs notes, the African American press, which has seen

80
Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense,
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 23.
81
Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight, 23.
38
pronounced circulation declines since the mid-twentieth century, was historically a space
for the circulation of alternative public narratives.
82
Jacobs writes, “[t]hese losses have
weakened a set of communicative institutions which have been historically important for
the African-American public sphere: not only as spaces for protecting cultural autonomy,
but also as spaces where arguments could be crafted that would be used in the future to
engage other publics in discussion and deliberation.”
83
To quote Jacobs once again,
The outcomes of public communication depend in large part on the
communicative geography of civil society – that is, the extent and the quality of
interactions between different publics, and the forms of representation used to
make events meaningful in specific interpretive communities. Because
communication takes place within an environment of plural and partial publics, it
cannot be considered solely in terms of its ability to produce a shared
commitment to a singular vision of the good, or to some “rational” consensus; it
must also be evaluated in terms of its ability to keep a conversation going, and to
protect the possibility of opening up this dialogue to new narratives and to new
points of difference.
84

The racialized stakes of publicness in Now he’s out in public and everyone can see is a
testament to the pervasiveness of racism in contemporary America, and the urgent need
to make dominant suppressed forms of common sense. The political dimensions of the
clips indicate that this struggle takes place at the level of everyday speech; doing and
undoing these dominant positions but ultimately revealing them as negotiable. This
highlights the collective responsibility for these narratives, an argument I’ll advance in
the following chapter.

82
Ronald N. Jacobs, Race, Media, and the Crisis of Civil Society: From the Watts Riots to Rodney King,
(Port Chester, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 48.
83
Ronald N. Jacobs, Race, Media, and the Crisis of Civil Society, 48.
84
Ronald N. Jacobs, Race, Media, and the Crisis of Civil Society, 140.
39
Chapter 4
Vloggers, Celebrities, Gods and Kings

Who constitutes the public? For centuries this has remained the central question
and site of negotiation in democratic politics. Now he’s out in public and everyone can
see constitutes the viewer as a part of a common public with the vloggers, sharing
responsibility for the dominant forms of common sense articulated in the work. The
viewer is implicated in three key ways; through Bookchin’s theorization of vloggers as
the ‘chorus’ or public voice through reference to the structure of Greek tragedy; through
recognizing themselves as a racialized subject within the context of the installation; and
through the spatial format of the installation itself.
Bookchin has theorized the vloggers as a specific form of public, drawing on the
notion of the chorus from Greek tragedy. The chorus, as Bookchin has noted, historically
acts as a bridge between the audience and the gods and kings who are the central figures
in the play.
85
The chorus reflect on the actions of those with power, voicing opinions that
reflect those of the broader public, or audience, for the work. The language Bookchin
uses to describe the chorus, as providing the voice of ‘the people,’ is language that is also
typically used to describe the public in a democratic sense.
86
And indeed, the theatre more
broadly served an important role in ancient Greek democracy – a space for the airing of
civic issues as well as a place where those excluded from democratic participation would
have their views reflected.
Bookchin’s use of the chorus returns us to the question of theatricality and
politics, simultaneously positioning the vlogger’s performances for the webcam within

85
Natalie Bookchin and Blake Stimson, “Out in Public: Natalie Bookchin in Conversation with Blake
Stimson,” Rhizome, March 9, 2011, accessed March 2, 2013, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/mar/9/out-
public-natalie-bookchin-conversation-blake-sti/.
86
Bookchin and Stimson, “Out in Public.”
40
the realm of the theatrical and the political. However, the most difficult issue raised by
Bookchin’s articulation of the chorus is the stratification of power between the chorus, or
the people, and the actors themselves. Framing the vloggers as reflecting on the drama
happening center stage implies that the vloggers, as members of the public, do not have
access to power in the same way that the actors (celebrities, gods and kings) do. Instead,
they are there to speak to the drama that they are not taking part in. Though it may seem
strange to apply an ancient notion to the recent phenoma of vlogging, in doing so,
Bookchin re-positions the vlogger’s need to publicly voice their position in a very long
tradition. It also questions how we view the opinions spouted online – whether we
understand them as reflecting the divergent opinions of the broader public, or if we have
written them off as meaningless rants.
Bookchin has also theorized the Testament works in terms of the chorus. In the
work Laid Off, the gods and kings are not celebrities, but figures in the global financial
system. The chorus of vloggers speak about personal experiences of job loss following
the events of 2008, and Bookchin defines “the actors” (“that is, those that have produced
the tragedy,”) as the “heads of companies, Wall Street, Alan Greenspan, our political
system.”
87
Though actors are only heard from through the reinterpretation of their
actions, Bookchin notes that in this work, “we hear from a choir of ‘the people’ or ‘the
masses’, united in their language, as well as in their anger, frustration, and their despair
over the economic crisis and its impact on their lives.”
88

87
Natalie Bookchin and Blake Stimson, “Out in Public: Natalie Bookchin in Converrsation with Blake
Stimson,” Rhizome, March 9, 2011, accessed February 22, 2013,
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/mar/9/out-public-natalie-bookchin-conversation-blake-sti/.
88
Bookchin and Stimson, “Out in Public.”
41
Whereas in Laid Off the actors were the kings of Wall Street, in Now he’s out in
public and everyone can see they are the celebrities embroiled in scandal. The collapse of
the subjects of the Greek tragedies, the gods and kings, and the contemporary gods of
celebrity is explicitly constructed in the work:
“This guy’s a fucking God”
“Chicks and guys”
“Oh, what an icon!”
“He’s the second coming”
“He can do no wrong!”
“He’s the Messiah and he’s going to save us all…no he’s not”
“He - is - no - god!”
“Always looking for a Messiah!”
89

But despite the connections the works draw between an ancient situation of class
stratification and a more recent one, the relationships between the Greek chorus and the
actors, on the one hand, and the vloggers and contemporary figures of power on the other
are not equatable. As Bookchin notes,
They’re [the chorus] certainly debating and challenging the public figures that they’re
addressing, but I don’t think that those public figures that they are addressing are the
equivalent of the gods of the Greek choruses. Because those gods had unconditional
power and they weren’t questioned. They weren’t provisional gods, they [...] were the
dominant power. [...] In Now he’s out in public [and everyone can see], people are
debating and identifying - you actually could reach that. You think you can attain that
celebrity, or attain that dream, but I think it has more to do with people’s identifying
with people in power, wanting it, desiring it, wanting to kill the father in the Freudian
sense – and it’s always revolving around questions of race and racial identity.
90

The very fact that the celebrities are embroiled in scandals shows the differences between
the ancient gods and kings and our current ones - their power is culturally assigned, and
can also be revoked. Thus, the contemporary stratifications are mutable unlike those in
Greek tragedy: opening up the possibility for agency for the chorus to challenge divisions
of class and relations of power they afford.

89
The author’s transcription of Now he’s out in public and everyone can see.
90
Phone conversation between the artist and author, Dec. 13, 2012.
42
The question of racial identity in the work also complicates the position of the
viewer and their relationship to the ‘public.’ Bookchin selected moments where the
vloggers explicitly reflect on the notion of ‘blackness’; showing it to be both a
constructed understanding, and critically, is negotiated by vloggers regardless of their
racialized identity. Thus, the ‘public’ responsible for these common senses around race
and class also includes the viewer, who is made aware of their own position in the
installation as a racialized subject.
In the prologue to Seeing Differently: a history and theory of identification and
the visual arts (2012), art historian Amelia Jones offers a useful reflection, that, like
Bookchin, she provides in the wake of Obama’s presidency and renewed claims about a
“post-identity” phase of Euro-American culture.”
91
Jones’ urgent call to account for
identification in both politics and the visual arts is a jumping off point for her theory of
identification itself: “a provisional new model for understanding identificaton as a
reciprocal, dynamic, and ongoing process that occurs among viewers, bodies, images, and
other visual modes of the (re)presentation of subjects.”
92

Reflecting on events leading up to Obama’s election, Jones writes, “[c]olor
(visible difference) versus kind (internal, true identity). Here we find the key structure of
belief about how people identify active in US culture – and active in parallel ways in to
European and European-based (or Euro-American) cultures since at least the end of the
Second World War.”
93
Noting this as a central contention of the book, Jones continues,
“this structure of belief is absolutely pervasive: that people “appear” a certain way, can

91
Amelia Jones, Seeing Differently: a history and theory of identification and the visual arts, (New York:
Routledge, 2012), xx.
92
Jones, Seeing Differently, 1.
93
Jones, Seeing Differently, xvii.
43
be visually identified and thus given meaning or position in the social order, and yet, that
this meaning can at any moment betray the “truth” of an internal, authentic identity
(“kind”). We simultaneously cling to a belief in the veracity of visual signifiers to convey
the truth of who people are and consistently doubt what these signifiers convey.
94

Jones’ metaphor of color versus kind parallels the discussion of blackness in Now
he’s out in public and everyone can see. Jones argues that these contradictory beliefs
about identity are held simultaneously, similar to how the vlogger’s descriptions of
blackness both rely on and work against an understanding of race as biological.
95
This is
illustrated in the section of the script below:
“There’s a time and a place to show your blackness”
“Now what a person does in their own personal life, that’s there business, but he
messed up when he walked out that door. Now…”
“ - the metamorphosis started happening, right?”
“If he wasn’t never black before – “
“He, he, he, he’s changing colors!”
“- the motherfucker is black as hell right now.”
“The blackness is coming out of him.”
“You black now, honey.”
“He’s black now, god dammit.”
96

Here, ‘color’ is identified as changeable – celebrities were always visually identified as
African American but only ‘became’ black (“an internal, authentic identity”) when the
scandals erupted.
97
The vlogger who states, “if he wasn’t never black before, the
motherfucker is black as hell right now” speaks to how the celebrities marred in scandal
are perceived to be displaying a racist understanding of blackness that was their ‘internal
identity’ all along.

94
Amelia Jones, Seeing Differently: a history and theory of identification and the visual arts, (New York:
Routledge, 2012), xvii-xviii.
95
Jones, Seeing Differently, xviii.
96
The author’s transcription of Now he’s out in public and everyone can see.
97
Jones, Seeing Differently, xvii-xviii.
44
“You black now, god dammit.” The policing of a racist and biological
understanding of race is a strong faction of the chorus. In one section, a middle aged
white man, standing in a kitchen, states “you should be serving me coffee.”

Fig. 12. Natalie Bookchin, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see, 2012, 18
channel video installation, 16 min. loop, LACE, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the artist.

This phrase reflects racist scripts, or form of common sense, that code the black as
subservient or better suited for a ‘service’ position (understood, visually, as in the service
of the white male speaker). Other phrases, like the “Don’t talk to me, boy,” vehemently
spoken by another older white man, indicate a positioning of black identity as connected
with the supposed irrationality of youth. Not ‘fully a man,’ the black male is cast as less
rational or intellectually developed, who should not ‘talk back’ to the elder, and wiser,
white – ageist hierarchy co-constituting a racist one. These clips indicate a form of
common sense that re-enacts dualist scripts, fixing black identity as an essentialized
position associated with negative (and conflicting) dualist pejoratives: including infantile,
45
irrational, uncontrollable, sexually fetishized, and in literal and figurative service of the
white.
In naming the possibility of ‘becoming’ black, the discussion of these celebrities
show that ‘color’ (visual identification) and ‘kind’ (internal identity) are decoupled. But
paradoxically, they are also subject to racist common senses that link blackness with a
biological argument about race reliant on a host of negative dualisms. The fervour of the
vloggers who enforce racist common senses is perhaps because the celebrities had so
clearly flouted them to begin with: occupying both celebrity status and a form of
publicness that has been coded as white. In trouncing a racist understanding of the
biological relationship between color and kind, these celebrities posed a challenge to the
vlogger’s hegemonic position. From this vantage, the racist opinions spewed online
constitute a part of a fight for the dominance of these racist common senses within the
broader culture.
Though the issue of black male identity and its cultural negotiation is clearly
central to Now he’s out in public and everyone can see, the work differs from explicit
explorations of the topic. In Seeing Differently, Jones charts the evolving understandings
of black masculinity in contemporary art through reviewing a series of prominent
exhibitions.
98
The groundbreaking Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in
Contemporary American Art (1994) was curated by Thelma Golden and included works
by twenty-nine African American artists, including Carrie Mae Weems, Renée Cox,
David Hammons and Glenn Ligon, as well as a handful of artists that are not black-

98
Jones discusses the exhibitions in the chapter “Multiculturalism, intersectionality, and “post-identity,”
Seeing Differently: a history and theory of identification and the visual arts, (New York: Routledge, 2012),
117-170.
46
identified.
99
While Black Male focused on the construction of black male identity in
American culture, Freestyle (2001), also curated by Golden, centered around the notion
of the ‘post-black.’ Jones writes that “Golden claims to have coined [the term post-black]
in conversation with Glenn Ligon in the late 1990s.”
100
Freestyle included works by
artists Sanford Biggers, Mark Bradford, and Jennifer Zackin among others.
101
In 2008, the
exhibition Black Is, Black Ain’t was organized by Associate Curator and Director of
Education at the Renaissance Society of Chicago, Hamza Walker. In the wake of
Obama’s presidency, the exhibition “surveys a moment in which race is retained yet is
simultaneously rejected” – especially critical given the capitalization of the Right on
notions of the post-black, post-racial, and post-identity.
102

In contrast, Bookchin resists claims that Now he’s out in public and everyone can
see is specifically about black male identity: “I don’t think this piece is about what black
men are. It’s about what the fantasies that people have of what, in particular, some very
well known African American men are.”
103
Racial identity is an important issue in the
work, but this is secondary to the larger question of how racial identity is culturally
negotiated. How do the vlogger’s opinions position racial identity in relation to issues of
celebrity and class? Moreover, who is considered to be a part of these negotiations at all?
Bookchin’s work makes the viewer sense their implication in this process of
negotiation. In large part, this is the result of Bookchin’s editing: in the midst of
constantly shifting video fragments, it’s difficult for the viewer to piece together the

99
Amelia Jones, Seeing Differently: a history and theory of identification and the visual arts, (New York:
Routledge, 2012), 138.
100
Amelia Jones, Seeing Differently, 140.
101
Amelia Jones, Seeing Differently, 141.
102
Hamza Walker, “Black Is, Black Ain’t,” The Renaissance Society, accessed March 6, 2013,
http://www.renaissancesociety.org/site/Exhibitions/Essay.Black-Is-Black-Ain-t.595.html.
103
Natalie Bookchin and Dr. Alexandra Juhasz, public talk at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary
Exhibitions), April 8, 2012.
47
jumble of narrative threads. Attempting to sort out which vlogger says what, and why,
places the viewer in the uncomfortable position of making assumptions based on a sound
byte of audio and a short visual of the vlogger. With the clips changing moment to
moment, the viewer makes guesses about why a vlogger might pronounce a particular
view based on their assumed racial identity. To do so is at best, cliché, and at worst, an
almost textbook definition of racism; a fact which the viewer is likely hyper aware of
given the thematic content of the work. Through forcing this experience, the work begs
the question: how often do we fall back on clichés based on assumptions of identity as we
move through our everyday?
Recognizing the common senses and clichés both within the vlogger’s speech and
in their own internal reactions to the work, the viewer is faced with the question: how are
my own opinions and everyday speech constructing, reinforcing or undoing the dominant
common senses at work in the piece? Bookchin spoke to the importance of this sense of
implication; again highlighting the work’s political differentiation from exhibitions or
works focusing explicitly on black male identity.
So in the end its not about those men but it’s about how we contruct identities
through collective consensus, so I’m a part of those stories as much as anyone
else [...] I certainly thought about and worried about it – who am I to tell this
story? And I think the piece asks this question as I walk in the room. Who am I to
be a part of a work to understand or know to tell this story?
104

Bookchin is conscious of the question of ‘who am I’ (as a white woman) to tell this story
– arguing that she also has responsibility for her relationship to these forms of common
sense. “I am a part of that story” she states, just as the viewers at LACE are also a part of
it. “That’s where the installation and having people be in it instead [of] being outside of it

104
Natalie Bookchin and Dr. Alexandra Juhasz, public talk at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary
Exhibitions), April 8, 2012.
48
judging [...] we are all in that story because it’s always being produced and it’s our
responsibility [...] because we know the stories.”
105

The stories, narratives, clichés, common senses, opinions, hateful speech,
arguments, and good sense are in fact collective. We know them, and in knowing, they
are ours. The responsibility for the dominant forms of common sense around race and
class cannot be assigned to any particular demographic or racialized identity, as the
viewer’s recognition of the stories themselves implicates them in their continued renewal
or rejection. In sum, no one is ‘outside’ of these narratives if a part of a broader culture in
which these narratives are being negotiated. If Jones’ notion of ‘color vs. kind’ –
uncoupling a fictive notion of race and biology – has explanatory power, a next step is to
refuse common senses reinforcing racist understandings of blackness. As Bookchin’s
work also indicates, there are other perceptions of these scandals, other forms of common
sense, that can counter the dominant ideas about race in America.
The relationship between the installation and this sense of implication is also
critical. Being physically ‘inside’ the installation, within this field of screens, indicates
that the viewer is politically implicated in these stories. Furthermore, as Bookchin has
explained, the viewer’s inability to completely view the work is both purposeful and
critical to how the work produces meaning.
106
The artist has said that the necessarily
partial experience on a sensory level is integral to the viewer’s inability to ‘master’ the
narrative constructed through the vlogs. Instead, the viewer’s own subjectivity becomes
evident in relation to the opinions of the vloggers; like them, a subject with a literally and

105
Natalie Bookchin and Dr. Alexandra Juhasz, public talk at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary
Exhibitions), April 8, 2012.
106
Kara Keeling, presentation at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), Los Angeles, California,
April 14, 2012.
49
figuratively partial view.
107
This critically constitutes the viewer as a part of the larger
public represented by the vloggers in the work.
What are the stakes for contemporary democracy when the primary (or imagined)
public forum is one found online? What is the quality of formal dialogue that this forum
currently allows or disallows? What kind of dialogue is needed to check the clichéd
forms of common sense that seemingly proliferate in our culture, both on and offline?
The topic of conversation and dialogue is one of particular relevance in contemporary
visual arts discourse, with scholars working to address the aesthetics of dialogue itself. In
the recent essay “Digital Divide,” art historian and critic Claire Bishop reflected on the
topic through reference to early digital art theorist Lev Manovich, stating,
In 2001, Lev Manovich presciently observed that in foregrounding two-way
communication as a fundamental cultural activity (as opposed to the one-way flow of
a film or book), the Internet asks us to reconsider the very paradigm of an aesthetic
object: Can communication between users become the subject of an aesthetic? The
centrality of this question to social practice is obvious: Does work premised on a
dialogic, prosumer model, seeking real-world impact, need to assume representation
or an object form in order to be recognized as art?
108

Bookchin’s work answers Manovich’s (and Bishop’s) question in the affirmative.
Communication between users is possible to aestheticize – but more importantly, critical
to politicize – as contemporary conditions of public dialogue impact the robustness of
democracy. Now he’s out in public and everyone can see flips the theorists’ question; no
longer is it most relevant to ask if the conversation can be the subject of an aesthetic.
Instead, the work asks, what happens to the our understanding of ourselves as a
democratic public when we aestheticize not the conversation, but a lack of one?

107
Natalie Bookchin, presentation at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), Los Angeles,
California, April 14, 2012.
108
Claire Bishop, “The Digital Divide,” Artforum, September 2012, accessed March 7, 2013,
http://artforum.com/inprint/id=31944.
50
In the bulk of the essay Bishop takes a broader tact, opening with the question,
“Whatever happened to digital art?”
109
Claiming that the 1990s “sense that visual art was
going to get digital […] somehow never really gained traction,” Bishop notes that
counter-intuitively, this is despite the pervasiveness of digital technology in
contemporary art making.
110
The argument is that artists’ use of digital technologies is no
longer specific to those operating under the banner of New Media Art; instead, artists
working with a variety of media employ the digital at different points in their process.
111

But this does not answer the questions that Bishop is really after. Instead, the
pervasiveness of the digital only adds fuel to the fire. Noting the importance of digital
technology to all kinds of contemporary art making, she writes,
So why do I have a sense that the appearance and content of contemporary art has
been curiously unresponsive to the total upheaval in our labor and leisure
inaugurated by the digital revolution? While many artists use digital technology,
how many really confront the question of what it means to think, see, and filter
affect through the digital? How many thematize this, or reflect deeply on how we
experience, and are altered by, the digitization of our existence?
112

Bishop names a few art world figures such as Thomas Hirschorn that have successfully
done just that, but overall argues that artists have failed to reflect on how the digital has
changed the face of contemporary culture itself.
113
This claim has been fervently
criticized, with former Rhizome Director Lauren Cornell and writer Brian Droitcour
responding in their January letter to the editor, “Technical Difficulties,”: “Why does this
work remain invisible to Bishop? It is partly due—as per her own admission—to her
focus on a “mainstream,” which she defines as the art that appears in “commercial

109
Claire Bishop, “The Digital Divide,” Artforum, September 2012, accessed March 7, 2013,
http://artforum.com/inprint/id=31944.
110
Bishop, “The Digital Divide.”
111
Bishop, “The Digital Divide.”
112
Bishop, “The Digital Divide.”

51
galleries, the Turner Prize, national pavilions at Venice.” Still, we would argue that even
here the “divide” she describes is actively being bridged and, because of a critical blind
spot, she is forcing it back open.”
114

Whether Bishop’s characterization of the ‘digital divide’ is correct is perhaps
beside the point. What’s important is her call for artists to reflect on the political, social
and cultural effects of the digital age. Bookchin’s work exemplifies this role for artists,
offering a prescient argument about the nature of contemporary publicness as one that is
shaped by changes in technology, as well as user’s understandings and fantasies about the
technologies themselves. As such, Bookchin is perhaps the artist Bishop is looking for;
reflecting “on how we experience, and are altered by, the digitization of our existence.”
115

But more importantly, it is our existence as a troubled public that Bookchin’s work asks
us to acknowledge, reflect on, and change.

114
Lauren Cornell and Brian Droitcour, “Technical Difficulties,” Artforum, January 2013, accessed March
7, 2013, http://www.artforum.com/inprint/id=38517.
115
Claire Bishop, “The Digital Divide,” Artforum, September 2012, accessed March 7, 2013,
http://artforum.com/inprint/id=31944.
52
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bishop, Claire. “The Digital Divide.” Artforum, September 2012. Accessed March 7,
2013. http://artforum.com/inprint/id=31944.

Bohman, James. “Expanding dialogue: The Internet, the public sphere and prospects for
transnational democracy.” The Sociological Review, 52: 13. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-
954X.2004.00477.x.

Bookchin, Natalie. Natalie Bookchin. http://bookchin.net.

Bookchin, Natalie. Phone conversation between the artist and author, Dec. 13, 2012.

Bookchin, Natalie. Presentation at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), Los
Angeles, California, April 14, 2012.

Bookchin, Natalie. The author’s transcription of audio from Now he’s out in public and
everyone can see, 2012. 18 channel video installation, 16 min. loop, LACE, Los Angeles.

Bookchin, Natalie and Dr. Alexandra Juhasz. Public talk at LACE, April 8 2012.

Bookchin, Natalie and Geert Novink. “In Conversation with Natalie Bookchin (part 1).”
Institute of Network Cultures, March 15, 2011. Accessed March 4, 2013.
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Bookchin, Natalie and Alexei Shulgin. “Interview: Alexei Shulgin and Natalie Bookhin.”
Gallery 9/Walker Art Center, January, 2000. Accessed February 23, 2013.
http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/universalpage/bookchin_shulgin.html.

Bookchin, Natalie and Blake Stimson. “Out in Public: Natalie Bookchin in Conversation
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sti/.

Cornell, Lauren and Brian Droitcour. “Technical Difficulties.” Artforum, January 2013.
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“Definition of Web 2.0.” PC Magazine. Accessed March 7, 2013.
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Dietz, Steve. “Signal or Noise? The Network Museum.” Gallery 9/Walker Art Center.
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53
Gallery 9/Walker Art Center. “About Universal Page.” February, 2000. Accessed
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Granick, Jennifer. “Saving Democracy with Web 2.0.” Wired, October 25, 2006.
Accessed February 22, 2013.
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rrentPage=all.

Hamza Walker. “Black Is, Black Aint.” The Renaissance Society, accessed March 6,
2013. http://www.renaissancesociety.org/site/Exhibitions/Essay.Black-Is-Black-Ain-
t.595.html.

Jacobs, Ronald N. Race, Media, and the Crisis of Civil Society: From the Watts Riots to
Rodney King. Port Chester, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Jana, Reena and Mark Tribe. “Art in the age of digital distribution.” In New Media Art,
edited by Uta Grosenick. Köln; London: Taschen, 2006.

Jones, Amelia. Seeing Differently: a history and theory of identification and the visual
arts. New York: Routledge, 2012.

Kane, Carolyn. “Dancing Machines: An Interview with Natalie Bookchin.” Rhizome,
May 27, 2009. Accessed March 2, 2013.
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2009/may/27/dancing-machines/.

Keeling, Kara. Presentation at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), Los
Angeles, California, April 14, 2012.

Keeling, Kara. The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of
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Lagos, Taso. “Social media – the public sphere on steroids.” The Seattle Times, May 4,
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54
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Asset Metadata

Creator Bell, Jacqueline (author)

Core Title Vloggers, celebrities, gods and kings: the politics of publicness in Natalie Bookchin's Now he's out in public and everyone can see

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Public Art Studies

Publication Date 04/29/2013

Defense Date 04/27/2013

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Natalie Bookchin,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Stakenas, Carol (committee chair), Anastas, Rhea (committee member), Keeling, Kara (committee member)

Creator Email bellja@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-245441

Unique identifier UC11288394

Identifier etd-BellJacque-1615.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-245441 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-BellJacque-1615-0.pdf

Dmrecord 245441

Document Type Thesis

Rights Bell, Jacqueline

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA