Crimes Against Reality: Speculation and the New Red Order

This article has been peer reviewed.

It was the winter of 1637 and tulipmania was in full swing. In Holland, the price of tulips – an exotic new export from Central Asia – soared to record highs. Bulbs were being sold for more than most farmers’ houses, as fortunes were won, lost, and gambled anew. This period of financial frenzy lasted from 1634-1637, when the tulip market abruptly collapsed, initiating the fall of the first so-called “economic bubble” in recorded history.¹ However, to say that tulips were the object of tulipmania would be a misnomer. While their bulbs changed hands hundreds of times and did, indeed, provide the material currency for this social revolution, the blooms of these rarified commodities were not, themselves, the end goal.² Tulipmania depended on something far more abstract: speculation.

A speculative bubble takes shape through an unlikely series of events.³ First, an object emerges that is said to hold acute pecuniary value. Critically, this newfound belief has little to do with prior valuations of said object, thus contradicts traditional economic logic. In this sense, the object of the speculative bubble is always an anomaly. Who makes this declaration, and why, is not always important. What is important is that this sudden anointment of value is circulated widely and believed by many. Speculators then trade and invest in the object, driving up its market value. Momentum builds. The space between the object and its market value swells to dramatic heights. Until, suddenly, the bubble bursts. Contracts cease to roll over; settlements are indefinitely suspended; debts left unresolved. The object returns to its secular status.

The aberration of the bubble brings the alchemical nature of capital into the foreground. In Jean Baudrillard’s well-known work on simulations, he argues that all “capital asks of us is to receive it as rational.”⁴ Despite the abnormalities inherent to the concept of the speculative bubble, capital normalizes its flaws. Similarly, in David Graeber’s analysis of early capitalism he addresses the fact that “money has no essence. It’s not really ‘anything.’ […] Bankers are creating something out of nothing.”⁵ The dominant collective acceptance of capitalism as a seemingly unbreakable social contract is itself a simulation, albeit on a scale so monumental that it is difficult to comprehend.⁶ This point is further substantiated by the fact that speculative bubbles have existed since the dawn of capital itself. According to Thomas Piketty, “they are consubstantial with its history.”⁷  If one chooses to play the market – an all but required element of living under capitalism – the enduring drive to speculate remains.⁸ Filling the gaps between known and unknown variables of the market are speculations: the materia prima of laissez-faire economics.⁹

The narrative of tulipmania reveals problems for the market and for representation. In Bernhard Siegert’s chronicle of Dutch still lifes in the 17th century, he argues that a fundamental reconfiguration of the relationship between figurative and representational space was underway. Focusing his analysis on the work of Jan van Kessel, Siegert shows that paintings of this time exhibited unprecedented transgressions between “imaginary pictorial space” and “the real space of the reader/observer.”¹⁰ Discrete objects gave way to optical planes of “hallucinatory excess,” disturbing the governing orders of representation.¹¹ The development of the 17th century Dutch still life can be understood in analogous terms to the coeval emergence of the speculative bubble, as each phenomenon depended on a newfound alliance between “visionary and vision” – representation and hallucination.¹²

Still life of tulips, roses, poppy anemones and an iris in a glass vase, Jan Van Kessel (c. 1660)

Protocols of vision evolve according to the norms of capital.¹³ Speculation as a practice of seeking profit based on the rise and fall of the market emerges in the late eighteenth century, in tandem with the inception of modern capitalism.¹⁴ Prior to this merger, the evolution of the term speculation is an etymological hall of mirrors, oscillating between proleptic images and profitable imaginings. Speculation shares its linguistic root with the terms specular and spectacle. It is crucial to note that the word specular itself does not denote unmediated sight. Specularity is not vision, instead it is “of vision: obtained by reflection only; not direct or immediate.”¹⁵ Its articulation in the form of “spectacles/specs” highlights this fact; it is mediated, reflected, structured through surfaces and distance. Speculation inherits this optical instability. Similarly, the term spectacle denotes both an event “of a more or less public nature” as well as “a thing seen or capable of being seen.”¹⁶ Anything whatsoever can be a spectacle as long as it is visible; visibility dictates the ontology of the spectacle. Speculation’s visual ambiguities are compounded by its enigmatic teleology, situated between the present and future tense, i.e. speculation is both “a conclusion […] reached by abstract or hypothetical reasoning” and “the conjectural anticipation of something.”¹⁷ Speculation fuses perception and prediction, binding vision to value.

Speculative images are bifurcated, irretrievably produced through some form of mediation, be it direct (mirrors, glasses) or theoretical (predictions, hypotheticals).¹⁸ As such, perhaps it is impossible to perceive speculation, per se, only to represent it.¹⁹

This article offers an account of speculation’s aesthetic values and their complex interface with capitalism. Focusing on the work of the New Red Order, a collective of Native American artists and their “accomplices,” we look to a genealogy of speculative cultural techniques that have worked to make and unmake the corporation as capitalism’s defining icon.²⁰ Capital has always required visibility to survive; legibility dictates consumability. The NRO exploits this reality, remodelling the visuality of consumer culture into a speculative testing ground for Indigenous futures. Underlying our analysis is an inquiry into the potential of speculation as an anti-capitalist aesthetic genre. Drawing on media histories ranging from Indigenous “visual sovereignty” to maximalist “culture jamming,” we look to a brief lineage of artists, including Âhasiw Maskêgon-Iskwêw, Coco Fusco, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Gretchen Bender and Peggy Ahwesh whose work offers an instructive framework for thinking with the NRO in relation to late capitalist regimes of representation.²¹ As Jolene Rickard makes clear, there is no singular or unified notion of Indigenous sovereignty.²² Rather, it is articulated through multiple, at times conflicting, conjunctures of nationhood, citizenship, and self-determination. The NRO extends these formulations by staging sovereignty as a speculative performance, reconfiguring the conditions of hyper-visibility and Indigenous self-determination through a diverse array of media strategies that move beyond critique towards intervention.

Culture, Capture, Speculation

The work of the New Red Order hinges on speculative images. The NRO is a “public secret society,” composed of Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys as its core members.²³ In Never Settle: The Program (2018-ongoing), Jim Fletcher, “award-winning actor and reformed Native American impersonator,” leads the viewer through a series of instructional tutorials for prospective accomplices. In the video, non-Native informants deliver staged/fake testimony about the restorative powers of the NRO. As one woman extols: “Ever since I’ve been working the program, I feel so much better. It’s the best investment I’ve ever made in my life.” Intermixed with idyllic stock footage and catchy infographics, Never Settle appropriates the visual rhetoric of corporate advertising and self-help tutorials to promote its own brand. Where commercial aesthetics seek to corporatize individuals for the advancement of capitalism, the NRO’s advertisements aim to do precisely the opposite: to extract settlers from the colonial superstructures of capitalist society in order to assemble a public that supports Indigenous growth. The NRO does not relegate capitalism to the outside, their work hijacks its power from the inside out. Never Settle confronts the natal intertwinement of cinema and the commodity form through remediation, disorder, and joy.²⁴

Never Settle: The Program (The New Red Order, 2018-ongoing)

The relational character of what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism” derives from its seemingly endless capacity to subsume even the most transgressive forces.²⁵ For example, Indigenous land acknowledgements have become so thoroughly incorporated into the fabric of capitalist communication that their value has effectively been redistributed. With the token of a land acknowledgement, capital can get back to business without reproach. Accordingly, Never Settle begins with a series of apologies and land acknowledgements, offered by the presidents and prime ministers of countries founded on Indigenous genocide, that eventually become overtaken by Laura Ortman’s liberatory violin performance.²⁶ Ironically (or not), during a presentation of Never Settle at the Whitney Museum in 2018, this antagonistic preamble was followed by a land acknowledgement.²⁷

The participants in Never Settle – ranging from lawyers and anthropologists to film professors and massage therapists – each take a specific performative approach.²⁸ All of their gestures, words, and actions are exaggerated just beyond the pale of realism. They are not quite real, but also not quite unreal. When Emily Allan says, “I think, for a lot of people like me, there can be some cognitive dissonance with the whole living on stolen land thing,” one could say that she is doing two things at once. While the performative (vis-à-vis fake) nature of the sentiment is plainly obvious, it is through this very quality of superficiality (vis-à-vis real) that her performance enacts its politics. She is a hollow archetype of blind white privilege, and at the same time she is at the forefront of an Indigenous sovereignty movement. Put bluntly: If she can do it, so can you! Allan goes on to offer her confusions in a mock share circle, where non-Native participants take turns passing around a ceremonial object – in this case, a feather – speaking their respective truths. She starts to cry. “I just felt so bad. I didn’t even realize until I was a teenager that, like, I’m a settler. It’s like me, you know. It’s my ancestors. It’s so fucked up.” Generic music fades in. She hugs the white circle leader. Cut to stock footage of a little girl scrolling on her phone, followed by an unhoused man asking for change (also while scrolling on his phone). The program continues on.

Never Settle: The Program

The New Red Order’s persistent reappropriation of stock footage offers an instructive analytic for how to understand their precise brand of corporate exploitation.²⁹ To use stock footage is always already an act of appropriation. There are two principal categories of stock footage: retroactive and productive. The first category can be defined as a piece of footage derived from an existent film/video that is retroactively made available for purchase. The second category are moving-images – often single, uninterrupted, shots – expressly produced to be used by the general public, i.e. images produced as stock, as opposed to images that are retrofitted to become stock. Here, we use the term “productive” in two ways: to denote both its staged/produced character, and its economic function as a commodity. Productive stock is made in order to be transacted. As such, its exchangeability is embedded in its form: its images are open-ended by design. Wading through an archive of productive stock footage enacts a kind of corporate Kuleshov effect whereby relations between shots are dictated less by cinematic interpretation than by keywords, metadata, and algorithmic sorting of audiovisual cues.

For example, when inputting “corporation” into Shutterstock, one is presented with images of people typing, shaking hands, looking up, comparing notes, walking with suitcases, clapping, toasting champagne; digital overlays of corporate icons atop people sitting in front of their computers (e.g. firewall shields, email envelopes, rising arrows); CGI that portrays various abstract formats of flux and positive motion. The results merge into what David Joselit calls an “Epistemology of Search,” wherein new content is replaced with the endless “reformatting of existing content.”³⁰ If circulation dictates value, the sheer ubiquity of stock footage across platforms makes it one of capitalism’s most concentrated media expressions.³¹ In a contemporary political landscape where “speaking the same language” has become almost exclusively dependent on one’s chosen digital ecosystem, the New Red Order makes recourse to capitalism’s most generic forms. The more generic, the more transposable – and, ultimately, the more valuable.³² 

Still from shutterstock.com database search

The appearance of one particular protagonist in Never Settle, Peggy Ahwesh, helps elucidate an important facet of the New Red Order’s documentary practice: the transformation of imperial icons into decolonial media environments.³³ For the last thirty years of her career, Ahwesh has interrogated the manifold apparitions of corporate media. She Puppet (2001) famously infiltrated the virtual reality of Lara Croft, turning Tomb Raider (1996) into a dark tale of estrangement in a world defined by patriarchal artifice and repression. More recently, The Falling Sky (2017) exposed the extent to which corporations have directly infiltrated the body, both in life and in death. Digitally reproduced humans scan QR-codes of gravestones to view images of their deceased loved ones; a baby’s retina is scanned for its barcode; two men shake hands and synthetically exchange their social media handles. Similarly, in Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality (2020), the NRO animates James Earl Fraser’s End of the Trail (1894) into a state of gooey transfiguration. The sculpture, a recurring spectre in the NRO’s oeuvre, falls into a glass vitrine, sublimating into a blob of raw amorphous energy – anticipating its remobilization in the hands of their well-meaning accomplices. Rather than simply reappropriating this icon of both “noble” and “vanishing” Indigeneity, they redirect its energy to the ongoing work of decolonization.³⁴ The NRO’s oeuvre is a systematic reconfiguration of the museological narratives that have relegated Indigenous subjects to the outside of anthropological time.³⁵ While cinema’s dominant forms, indeed, continue to participate in capitalism’s cruel reconceptualizations of time, this confederacy is subject to change.

Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality (Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, Jackson Polys, and Driftnote, 2020)

The New Red Order’s construction of a speculative media landscape – replete with its own internal language, visual codes, and modes of address – builds on Indigenous media practices that created alternative environments for the representation of Indigenous life. CyberPowWow (1997-2004) was among the earliest Indigenous-led online platforms to explore “an Aboriginally determined territory in cyberspace” during the early years of the World Wide Web.³⁶ The project was a “cyber friendship center” where Indigenous artists could gather, experiment, and produce their work outside of the “white cube,” and instead within a self-determined digital environment.³⁷ CyberPowWow was composed of two online spaces: a website and a multi-user chat environment known as “The Palace,” which allowed multiple participants to access shared rooms in real time. Cree/French Métis artist and curator Âhasiw Maskêgon-Iskwêw was among those who participated in CyberPowWow, experimenting with the rhizomatic and non-linear nature of hypertext and the spiderweb-like topology of the web.³⁸ The site was designed to be traversed rather than looked at. Users could select a unique avatar, playfully reimagining new identities, while trespassing across stereotypical representations of Indigeneity. In contrast to the technocratic fantasies of the internet as a universal space of “technical equity,” CyberPowPow offered a portrait of what the internet might look like within its own borders of virtual control.³⁹ To quote Jolene Rickard’s essay, published online as part of the multimedia artwork: “Somehow when you exit this site you definitely know you were in Indian territory.”⁴⁰ 

CyberPowWow did more than transpose Indigenous identity into a digital space – it asserted control over the conditions of its own visibility and its circulation.

Mom_and _Me (Âhasiw Maskêgon-Iskwêw, 200)1. Screenshot, 2022, The Palace 3.5.0 on Windows XP SP2. Courtesy of the artist and Rhizome

The internet’s early rhetoric of a liberatory, open network obscured what was effectively a newly digitized era of colonial control. For Indigenous artists, this was not a new or aberrant condition but a long shadow of ongoing struggles over land, sovereignty, and representation. Utopian claims, such as cyber-libertarian John Perry Barlow’s assertion that cyberspace existed beyond state sovereignty, obfuscated the material realities of networked systems.⁴¹ This includes an increasing reliance on fibre optic infrastructures that have to be embedded in the earth – dug and laid through extractive processes across state and Indigenous territories alike. Data centres are contemporary monuments to the ongoing process of expropriation and extraction. As Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues, the internet does not transcend space so much as reorganize relations between people and place. The idea of “cyberspace” is both “a metaphor and a mirage,” masking the physical infrastructures and technical processes through which networked communication occurs.⁴² 

CyberPowWow was one of many examples of what Rickard has termed visual sovereignty: a form of sovereignty forged through “direct action” by kin relations and Indigenous artists as opposed to a social contract dictated by “the legal sphere.”⁴³ Across CyberPowWow, media was treated as a revolutionary system capable of reshaping how Indigenous discourse could be produced, interpreted, and circulated within contemporary technoculture. While the project itself depended on digital infrastructures that remain unevenly governed, the work engaged with these structures of power as a “matrix of domination.”⁴⁴ The same can be said of the New Red Order, with their continued dissemination via the art market. CyberPowWow and the NRO endure in a state of productive antagonism towards their respective contexts of possibility. 

What distinguishes the New Red Order is not only their style of ethnographic inversion or archival critique, but their extension of these strategies into the visual infrastructure of contemporary capitalism itself – stock image economies, corporate branding, and networked media circulation. Where earlier Indigenous and postcolonial works often confronted colonial power at the level of display – the ethnographic gaze, the museum, the archive, the exhibited body – the NRO inherits these strategies, but transposes them into the generic image-world of late capitalism. Stock footage, self-help rhetoric, public relations, and corporate branding become the primary sites of intervention, revealing how settler colonialism persists through the speculative circulation of images that organize social and economic life. Their work thus shifts critique from the scene of representation to the infrastructures of mediation and value production that generate said representations. To this point, we are indebted to J. Kēhaulani Kauanui’s reappraisal of the notion of settler colonialism not as a unitary event of expropriation, but a structural tension that continues to shape the concept of Indigeneity in contradistinction to race, ethnicity and nationality.⁴⁵ From this perspective, settler colonialism can be viewed as an ongoing site of contestation in which Indigenous life continues to resist, persist, and reassert itself. It is precisely within this tension that contemporary institutional practices, including those of cultural institutions and media, take their aim. 

Images After the News

Speculative schemes are not restricted to financial markets. What the artists heretofore explored ultimately confront is a media environment that is already structured by the intertwined logics of spectacle and speculation. The concept of the spectacle has been elaborated, and complicated, by the history of speculation. In Jonathan Crary’s essay, “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory,” he traces the evolution of Guy Debord’s theories of the spectacle in relation to the rise of broadcast television – a watershed development in the history of speculative media. For Debord, the spectacle of 1967 reflected a widespread alienation between society and its image – produced by capitalism.⁴⁶ In his words: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation among people mediated by images. […] The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images.”⁴⁷ The image world was not only permeating the social, but it was also becoming an active force of domination in tandem with capital.⁴⁸ While Debord’s initial conception of the spectacle reflected a society of separation, or structural dis-unification, his later work signalled a bleak situation of re-integration. Writing during the early years of the 24-hour news cycle, Debord announced “the disappearance of all objective historical knowledge.”⁴⁹ In its place: a “perpetual present,” void of the necessity for a before or an after.⁵⁰ Former antagonisms towards the image became outstripped by its totalized assimilation into the public and private spaces of social life. For Crary, this poses a semiotic problem, wherein “sign-value” eclipses “use-value.”⁵¹ Things are no longer what they seem. A relentless present, with all of its images, continuously asserts itself, as the recent (and especially distant) past no longer holds commensurate value. All the while, speculation reigns, continuously in circulation with itself – an unreal engine for the realities of fantasy.

Throughout their work, the New Red Order reappropriates the public forum of broadcast news. Never Settle doubles as a corporate infomercial and a commercial to be viewed from the comfort of your own home. In doing so, the NRO illuminates the highly speculative nature of the news itself. Following the “golden age” of television came the era of 24-hour news: a relentless display of increasingly partisan intelligence masquerading as neutral (thereby definitive) mass communication.⁵² As cable networks like CNN and Fox became dominant players in the American media landscape of the 1980s and 1990s, popular expectations of the news shifted dramatically. The “CNN effect” shifted journalism’s imperative from delivering the news as it happens to before it happens, resulting in a bizarrely conjectural media landscape where anything whatsoever has the potential to become newsworthy.⁵³ In a paradoxical twist, while exposure to the news increased, public trust in its image eroded. In Jeffrey E. Cohen’s account of the changing relationship between news media and presidential approval, he attributes this critical development to an infiltration of “entertainment values” into “news formats.”⁵⁴

Never Settle: The Program

Holding the public’s attention on a 24-hour basis required far more than more news. It required a fundamental transformation in what constituted “the news,” specifically through the promotion of hours-long speculative series featuring alluring appeals to a network’s dominant audience. Thus programs like Crossfire (1982-2005) and The O’Reilly Factor (1996-2017), wherein political pundits espoused ideology as news, slowly became the norm.⁵⁵ To retain its public, 24-hour news had to become more stimulating, and consequently more biased, albeit beneath a thin veil of pluralist “common sense” thinking.⁵⁶ In Cohen’s words, “producers and journalists could substitute their own definitions of news without much economic effect.”⁵⁷

Fellow multimedia artist Gretchen Bender understood that history was being written at the speed of broadcast television, flooding viewers at all hours of the day and night, whether via live transmissions or endless re-plays and re-runs of old content.⁵⁸ 24/7 news coverage of events like the Challenger explosion in 1986, or the Gulf War’s aerial bombing campaign in Iraq in 1991, were pivotal moments in the growing conflation of news and entertainment. The wall-to-wall framing of history, and the velocity with which it was delivered and consumed, was becoming something that could be manipulated according to a given network’s financial and ideological agenda.⁵⁹ Bender materialized this state of affairs in two large-scale artworks. TV Text & Image (1986-1997), an iterative site-specific installation, superimposed her own text atop live television streams from local news networks. Employing the volatile logics of the Kuleshov Effect, Bender aimed to produce a glitch in America’s televisual system of mass communication. Total Recall (1987) – choreographed across a multi-channel array of twenty-four television monitors and three projections – showcased her distinctive rapid-fire editing style, intercutting layered fragments of TV programs, advertising, and news media, culminating in an immersive and assaultive, visual experience.⁶⁰ Her work reflected an overwhelming image-world, where viewers were becoming increasingly unable to disentangle themselves.⁶¹ For Bender, news networks collectively formed a coalition of narrative control, shaping public perception through speed, repetition, and spectacle.

Gretchen Bender’s Total Recall (1987), in her posthumous solo exhibition, Tracking the Thrill at The Kitchen, New York City, 2013

Bender’s multivalent methods of short-circuiting capitalism’s dominant formats of mass communication resonate with both the video and installation work of the New Red Order. Their maximalist installation, Recruitment Station (2020-2021), can be viewed as a decolonial transposition of Bender’s interventions into the televisual space of the late twentieth century. However, the NRO take their project one step further. Rather than yielding to the exhausting, hallucinatory, states of television – the “NARCOTICS OF SURREALISM” – the NRO proposes their own kind of social control, albeit through the ethical stewardship of land and property.⁶² The NRO, too, preys on the interplay between entertainment and news values, amplifying the representational power of speculation. The ideological tilt of 24-hour news has been monumental, signalling progressively more opaque relationships between sign and signified, conservatism and fascism, speculation and reality. Filling the time between “breaking” news segments are endless arrays of speculations. In the absence of an event comes speculation about the next event, ad infinitum, as speculation itself becomes the event of late capitalist life.⁶³ The NRO is here to help. To heal the afflictions of settler colonialism and its concomitant economics of capitalism. They do so by making capitalism, and its media, work for them. And, as their decolonial infomercials make clear, for us!⁶⁴

The New Red Order’s Recruitment Station (2020-2021), on view at EFA Project Space. Made in collaboration with Gailė Pranckūnaitė, Inpatient Press, and Emmett de Muzio

The New Red Order’s experiments in corporate and televisual simulation enact the aesthetics of what Carrie Labert-Beatty calls parafiction. As she details in her definitive explication of the genre, parafiction is not an arbitrary combination of fiction and facts. It is a technique whereby “real and/or imaginary personages and stories intersect with the world as it is being lived.”⁶⁵ Parafiction involves a dynamic, often taut, interplay between rhetorics of truth and speculation. The NRO’s work is parafictional to the extent that it actively interrogates Western desires for Indigeneity, contemporary and historical, while at the same time reappropriating their most acute formal expressions. Like the artists Lambert-Beatty chronicles in her study, e.g. Michael Blum and The Yes Men, the NRO seizes the authority of capitalist aesthetics as a means of diverting the medium’s critical potential. By short-circuiting the tactics of corporate aesthetics, or what might be called capital media, the New Red Order aims to reroute the power of capital towards decolonization. Though, despite their formal focus on genre and reappropriation, their videos are not neatly categorizable as “anti-ads,” nor are they examples of “brandelism”: their style exceeds farce, as well as institutional critique.⁶⁶ Instead, through aggressive attempts at harnessing the audiovisual techniques of capitalism, the NRO refashions their cinematic potential towards altogether divergent ideological ends.

On the NRO’s recruitment website, they ask us: “Do you want to realize your fullest potential? Be your truest self?” The answer? Rematriation!⁶⁷ Through these zealous semiotic manoeuvres, the NRO replaces self-help with Indigenous futures. In a similarly comical linguistic reversal of “settler-colonialism,” “never settle” is both a command and an appeal: (1) do not settle on Indigenous land, and (2) do not settle for anything less. Given that what the NRO is ostensibly selling in their promotional videos is Indigenous prosperity, the sales pitch format seems only appropriate. Likewise, the about-face from “crimes against humanity” to “crimes against reality” proposes that the violence of settler colonialism was inflicted not only on people, land, and lifeworlds, but also onto representation.⁶⁸ This explains why the parodic characters in Never Settle aren’t people per se. The talking heads that populate Never Settle are corporations – quasi-stock caricatures of humanity living in a capitalist dystopia.⁶⁹

The New Red Order’s dynamic recruitment process, documented in Never Settle, culminates in a three-part parafictional system: Contract, Concealment, and Capture. After informants are adequately schooled in the values of the NRO, a treaty is signed to consecrate their commitment to the cause. Concealment is a procedure whereby informants create custom-fit, anonymizing silicon masks to keep them shielded from identification during the final step of the intake process. Guiding us through each step of the way, Jim Fletcher explains:

Among the New Red Order’s many multifaceted initiatives, culture capture is a small speculative step toward rectifying the violence committed by museum archives and the settler-colonial icons that guard them. It allows settlers to move through institutions and see familiar symbols with [a] new perspective.⁷⁰

Clad with their synthetic masks, accomplices move out of the NRO incubator into the real world. Wading through colonial museums, recruits high-speed capture objects with iPhones and motion-capture lasers, mutating monuments into bizarre fleshy surpluses of matter that slowly disintegrate into combustible energy. Through this process of “capturing back,” the NRO exploits, and disarms, Western fantasies of Native Americans as imaginary beings – “impossible subjects,” outside of time.⁷¹ The practice of capturing back, or reappropriating, does not discard these fragments of colonial loot. The NRO capitalizes on (and profits off) colonialism’s icons, exhausting them to the point of a total epistemological breakdown.

Crimes Against Reality, or the False Semiotics of Speculation

Visual, narrative, and performative techniques make the corporation legible. Corporate aesthetics work to enliven an abstract legal fiction into an affective presence, belonging to what Reinhold Martin calls “a plastic economy of insides turning out and outsides turning in.”⁷² Corporations must be branded, or seen, through what he describes as a “technics of embodiment”: beginning with the head, a voice, and a name which culminate in a felt presence for the public imaginary.⁷³ It is because the corporation has “neither a soul to damn, nor a body to kick,” that it must be continually reanimated through aesthetic-corporeal procedures.⁷⁴ In Realizing Capital, Anna Kornbluh argues that economic forms like money, bookkeeping, and credit instruments hold no inherent value. Instead, they acquire meaning, and accrue investment power, through psychological acts of “symbolic mediation.”⁷⁵ These abstract structures persist and dominate despite their intrinsic vacuity. In this sense, if a corporation is a kind of fantasy of form, then it mirrors the speculative logic of capitalism itself: generating value through the promise of future profitability.

The New Red Order takes aim at the narrative structures of corporate personhood by infiltrating institutional sites both historical and contemporary. The NRO’s 2023 installation, The World’s UnFair unveiled an expansive satire of the ongoing Western phenomenon of the World’s Fair – a corporate-sponsored aesthetic tradition founded on Indigenous exploitation and exhibition.⁷⁶ Perhaps the most iconic example of the traditional World’s Fair format is the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.⁷⁷ The fair was widely regarded as the first large-scale public display of anthropology in America.⁷⁸ The Department of Ethnology included live exhibitions, referred to as “human zoos,” of Native Americans performing everyday activities in reconstructed habitats, in addition to an entire procession of ancestral remains instrumentalized as evidence of eugenic ideals of racial hierarchy.⁷⁹ One can imagine the profound ontological hurdles that a spectator would have experienced while wandering between these displays of Indigeneity, portrayed as exotic curiosities both in life and in death.

One hundred years after the WCE, to mark the quincentenary anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival to the Americas, Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña placed themselves into a steel cage, staging themselves in numerous institutional contexts in a series of performances from 1992-1994, entitled The Couple in The Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West.⁸⁰ One of their chosen sites was the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago – initially called the Columbian Museum, it was established to house the archives of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.⁸¹ Performers were accompanied by satirical scripted captions and everyday readymade objects like a TV, Boombox, and Coca-Cola bottles.⁸² By both miming and disrupting the exhibition practices of the WCE, Fusco and Gómez-Peña un-fixed the display’s power to function as a display, stripping the ethnographic spectacle of its authority over Indigenous lifeworlds. The New Red Order inherits these strategies of subversion and performative critique, relocating them within contemporary media formats. Rather than intervening primarily at the level of the body, their work pushes corporate aesthetics to its limits as a system of value, opening onto ongoing, ceaselessly volatile arrangements of Indigenous vision and power.

Documentation photograph from Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, The Couple in the Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992-1994)

The semiotics of speculation are dictated by specific configurations of capitalism and its visual culture – both of which collectively mediate claims regarding reality versus fantasy. Images can be useful to the ongoing propagation of capitalism, but they do not have to be. Images do not need to participate in capitalist oppression, nor act as signs in its system of communication.⁸³ An image can be useless to capital in at least two ways. Images can be rendered to be resistant to the dominant economy, i.e. non-commodity images.⁸⁴ Or, one can co-opt the economic system which dictates their value and redirect its commodity-images elsewhere. The New Red Order performs the latter procedure, not the former. The NRO’s hybrid works – crossovers of branded content and decolonial advancement – produce a specific kind of speculative verisimilitude that is both liberating and iterable.

In our present era of post-truth politics, such experiments in dissimulation are critical to the preservation of the real. Or, more precisely, to the forms of reality worth preserving. Contrary to its appearance, parafictional performances like those of the New Red Order actively work “against notions of failure of reference.”⁸⁵ They are more real than unchecked displays of Native Americans in colonial museums; more real than land acknowledgments, corporate personhood, and other fraudulent metaphors. The tulip bulbs that catapulted speculation into the public consciousness accrued value by making a fantasy into reality. The NRO reverses this paradigm by integrating fantasies into the fabric of the real.⁸⁶ Returning to Crary’s swirling dyad of “sign value” versus “use value” in the age of 24-hour news, the NRO offers an incisive response: by exploiting the aesthetics of “use value,” what emerges is an experimental laboratory for a kind of speculation which is no longer at the mercy of capital.

What next? Give it Back: Crimes Against Reality (2023) offers a formal response.⁸⁷ In the video, the New Red Order arranges a staged episode of MTV Cribs (2000-ongoing) alongside testimonials from individuals who have engaged in voluntary real-life efforts of Indigenous land return. Fletcher walks the crew around his bedazzled Fifth Avenue apartment, replete with Native American art and artifacts, explaining his decision to return the property as part of the Land Back movement with total zeal. “Empire State of Mind” by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys plays in the background, as MTV’s familiar tropes of speeding up time and zooming through space are enacted. Later on, the tone shifts––Angelo Badalamenti’s theme from Twin Peaks (1990) emerges – as Kim Bergel, the Mayor of Eureka, CA, recounts the story of the city’s historic return of over 200 acres of land to the Wiyot Tribe.⁸⁸ More stories follow, speculative and real, coalescing on the same ontological plane – just like real life. 

To learn more about what it takes to become an informant, visit the NRO’s website today: newredorder.org.

Our deepest gratitude to Adam Khalil for his support with this project.

Endnotes