Work in Progress: Curatorial Labor in Twenty-First-Century American Fiction

217 Pages·2019·12.612 MB·English

by  Rieke Jordan

Work in Progress Work in Progress: Curatorial Labor
Work in Progress
thinking|media
Series Editors:
Bernd Herzogenrath
Patricia Pisters
Work in Progress
Curatorial Labor in Twenty-First-
Century American Fiction
Rieke Jordan
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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First published in the United States of America 2019
Copyright © Rieke Jordan, 2019
For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. vii constitute an extension
of this copyright page.
Cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray
Cover image © Paolo Sanfilippo
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Contents
List of Figures vi
Acknowledgments vii
Preface: When the Internet Dropped Its Capital “I” viii
1 Work in Progress: Curatorial Labor 1
2 A Tale of Two Buildings: Chris Ware’s Building Stories 39
3 The Broken Record: Beck Hansen’s Song Reader 81
4 Kentucky Route Zero’s Netherworld of Slowness 125
Coda: What’s the Matter, Media? 163
Bibliography 175
Index 188
Figures
2.1 Building Stories’ box 40
2.2 Building Stories, spread out 40
2.3 Overlapping panels or inset panels 61
2.4 The zoetrope in Jimmy Corrigan 64
2.5 The Multi-Story Building Model 73
3.1 Song Reader 84
3.2 Beck Hansen and his puppet doppelgänger 88
3.3 “Title of this Song” cover of sheet music song 110
3.4 Hambeck’s “Paper Beck and with Cameron” (2009) 122
3.5 Paper Beck assembly manual 123
4.1 Kentucky Route Zero screenshot 134
4.2 Limits & Demonstrations screenshot 142
4.3–4.5 The glitch in Kentucky Route Zero 147–148
Acknowledgments
This book used to be a clutter of Word and Open Office documents or maybe
even TextEdit files that used to be Notes on my phones or notes scribbled
on legal pads and the back of envelopes. Once the process is a product, well,
I guess that’s the moment of letting go.
My own work in progress could have not ever be turned into a book
without the generosity and support of Laura Bieger and Frank Kelleter, to
whom I am deeply thankful for their encouragement and trust throughout
the years. Gabi Bodmeier, David Bosold, and my colleagues and fellow
cohort members of the Graduate School of North American Studies have
been supportive since I started working on this project in 2012. Thanks to
my students and colleagues in Frankfurt for their fresh perspectives on old
ideas. Johannes Voelz and Bernd Herzogenrath have given me new thoughts
and inspiration for this project—and for projects to come. Thank you to
Patricia Pisters. At Bloomsbury, thanks to Katie Gallof and Erin Duffy. For
my family and my friends: thank you for taking care of me. Thanks to the
wonderful Joshua Rahtz. Thank you to Maria Sulimma for rocket coffee and
units. Unending modern thanks to Sarah Wasserman; your help and support
means more than you can imagine.
I am grateful for having been able to present my ideas during workshops
and conferences at FU Berlin, Johns Hopkins University, Ohio State
University, University of Freiburg, University of Delaware, University of
Erfurt, and Goethe-University Frankfurt.
Copyright acknowledgments
Chapter 2: Images of the Multi-Story Building Model used with permission by
Drawn and Quarterly (thanks to Peggy Burns)
Chapter 3: The cover of “Title of This Song” from Song Reader used with
permission by McSweeney’s (thanks to Kristina Kearns); Beck cut outs used
with permission by the artist (thanks to Ham); Creative Commons licensing
for the Beck concert photograph (image by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid—
laughingsquid.com)
Chapter 4: Screengraps from Kentucky Route Zero used with permission by
Cardboard Computer (thanks to the Cardboard Computer team)
Preface Preface
Preface: When the Internet
Dropped Its Capital “I”
On June 1, 2016, a New York Times headline proclaimed, “It’s Official: The
‘Internet’ Is Over.” “Oh no,” I thought, looking up from the news app on
my beaten up iPhone 4—screen cracked, loading time slow like honey,
storage full. But the internet did not fall out of style in the summer of 2016,
instead, The New York Times joined The Associated Press in a changing of
their style rule: to lowercase the term “the internet.” This small change, so
the announcement went, facilitates a smoother reading flow for the peruser
of the newspaper. But the choice to lowercase the term signals a broader
shift in the understanding of the internet in everyday life. It suggests that
the internet is not a “new” medium anymore: it is “a common tendency
to capitalize newly coined or unfamiliar terms. Once a term becomes
familiar and quotidian, there is a tendency to drop the capital letter,” as the
announcement says (Corbett 2016, n.p.). The dropping of its capital letter
by the year 2016 marks the moment the internet turned into a familiar and
commonplace medium that orchestrates life, love, and labor—it is not new
anymore but has created routines, habits, and addictions for many users. In
this book I turn toward cultural objects that emerge around this very moment
when the capital letter “I” slowly made way for the lowercase “i,” when the
internet started to be culturally coded as commonplace and ordinary.1 I am
interested in this shift toward a restructuring of an ever-present present, or,
rather, a present that keeps on refreshing itself. Work in Progress: Curatorial
Labor in Twenty-First-Century American Fiction aligns a conceptual rock
album, a glitchy computer game, and an incomplete graphic narrative that
toy with the dichotomy of staging themselves as digital media that remain
decidedly offline and retro, working with the implications of commonplace
media and retro newness.
The three case studies I turn to in this book incorporate and reject digital
forms and practices—they borrow what they need not to replicate online
experience, but to make it both legible and unfamiliar. In each chapter, I
attempt to tease out the traces of earlier forms that reside in the newer ones:
nineteenth-century sheet music in a twenty-first-century DIY musical release;
1 It should be noted that not all English print outlets adhere to this new standard that was
suggested by The Associated Press. The Guardian adopted the style change too, but as of
August 2018, The New Yorker and The Washington Post still use the capital “I.”
Preface
Preface ix
the antiquated paper cut out inside a digitally reproduced graphic-novel-in-
a-box; DOS code from the 1980s appearing on the screen of a MacBook—
these are medial oddities that become visible when we pay close attention by
excavating the old from within the new. This helps to fully understand the
layers of meaning that these objects encode and the experiences they make
available: It is my assertion in this project that we must think of the object
and the reader as flirting, knowingly or unknowingly, with the ghosts of the
past. This relay between old and new is not limited to the texts’ mediality.
As decidedly contemporary texts, they combine recent innovations in
printing, computing, and distribution with familiar modes of storytelling
and reader engagement. Whether or not the reader of Beck Hansen’s Song
Reader knows much about nineteenth-century sheet music, the practices
of reading, rehearsing, or performing nonetheless recall earlier modes of
musical production encapsulated within practices enabled by YouTube or
MP3s on our mobile devices. Whether or not the reader of Kentucky Route
Zero is able to write code or is savvy in earlier computer technologies, she
still surreptitiously, maybe unbeknownst to her, reproduces online activity
by selecting pre-given options on the screen. She may easily be overwhelmed
by the meandering plotline and the design of the computer game; she will,
however, rely on familiar reading strategies of character identification, suture
and closure, and following the plot.
But how does one begin even theorizing and interpreting works
that emerge in this very moment of lowercasing the internet? What is
the appropriate method for a “first responder”? It has been tempting in
examining these texts from 2012 and 2013 to rely on Fredric Jameson’s
famous mandate to “always historize.” In Work in Progress I do indeed often
trace the historical developments—technological or aesthetic—that have led
up to these current objects. But in the process of excavating the meaning from
these texts, I have come to see that thinking in timelines and historical arcs
may in fact be inadequate. These texts, when they are invested in the past, are
invested in modes that cannot be neatly called “nostalgic,” “historical,” and
“retro.” Instead, they are often all of these things at once, while also staging
themselves as hip and new. I am therefore less concerned with how a given
work might have developed from a previous one and more interested in how
a contemporary work might be said to contain an earlier one. This cadence
of meaning is indicative, and I take my methodological cues from recent
work in media studies by scholars such as Wolfgang Ernst, Lisa Gitelman,
and John Durham Peters. In her book Always Already New (published in
2008), Lisa Gitelman claims that media are always historical subjects. By
historical Gitelman means that “even the newest new media today come from
somewhere” (Gitelman 2008, 5). But she also insists that media are historical