Valentine’s Day 2002

Valentine’s Day 2002
oil paint and wax on newsprint & mat­te board
2002

“[I]f we turn to the news­pa­per as cul­tur­al prod­uct, we will be struck by its pro­found fic­tive­ness. What is the essen­tial lit­er­ary con­ven­tion of the news­pa­per? If we were to look at a sam­ple front page of, say, The New York Times, we might find there sto­ries about Sovi­et dis­si­dents, famine in Mali, a grue­some mur­der, a coup in Iraq, the dis­cov­ery of a rare fos­sil in Zim­bab­we, and a speech by Mit­ter­rand. Why are these events so jux­ta­posed? What con­nects them to each oth­er? Not sheer caprice. Yet obvi­ous­ly most of them hap­pen inde­pen­dent­ly, with­out the actors being award of each oth­er or of what the oth­ers are up to. The arbi­trari­ness of their inclu­sion and juxtaposition…shows that the link­age between them is imag­ined. This imag­ined link­age derives from two oblique­ly relat­ed sources. The first is sim­ply cal­en­dri­cal coin­ci­dence. The date at the top of the news­pa­per, the sin­gle most impor­tant emblem on it, pro­vides the essen­tial connection–the steady onward clock­ing of homo­ge­neous emp­ty time…The sec­ond source of imag­ined link­age lies in the rela­tion­ship between the news­pa­per, as a form of book, and the mar­ket… In a rather spe­cial sense, the book was the first mod­ern-style mass-pro­duced indus­tri­al commodity…the news­pa­per is mere­ly an extreme form of the book, a book sold on a colos­sal scale, but of ephemer­al pop­u­lar­i­ty. Might we say: one-day best-sell­ers? The obso­les­cence of the news­pa­per on the mor­row of its printing–curious that one of the ear­li­er mass-pro­duced com­modi­ties should so pre­fig­ure the inbuilt obso­les­cence of mod­ern durables–nonetheless, for just this rea­son, cre­ates this extra­or­di­nary mass cer­e­mo­ny: the almost pre­cise­ly simul­ta­ne­ous con­sump­tion (‘imag­in­ing’) of the news­pa­per-as-fic­tion. We know that par­tic­u­lar morn­ing and evening edi­tions will over­whelm­ing­ly be con­sumed between this hour and that, only on this day, not that… The sig­nif­i­cance of this mass ceremony–Hegel observed that news­pa­pers serve mod­ern man as a sub­sti­tute for morn­ing prayers–is para­dox­i­cal. It is per­formed in silent pri­va­cy, in the lair of the skull… What more vivid fig­ure for the sec­u­lar, his­tor­i­cal­ly clocked, imag­ined com­mu­ni­ty can be envi­sioned? At the same time, the news­pa­per read­er, observ­ing exact repli­cas of his own paper being con­sumed by his sub­way, bar­ber­shop, or res­i­den­tial neigh­bours, is con­tin­u­al­ly reas­sured that the imag­ined world is vis­i­bly root­ed in every­day life.…[F]iction seeps qui­et­ly and con­tin­u­ous­ly into real­i­ty, cre­at­ing that remark­able con­fi­dence of com­mu­ni­ty in anonymi­ty which is the hall­mark of mod­ern nations.” (Bene­dict Ander­son, Imag­ined Com­mu­ni­ties, London/NY: Ver­so, 1983 (2002), pp. 33–35)