The Architecture of Control: A Contribution to the Critique of the Science of Apparatuses

Back Cover: Through six meditations on the ideology of architecture, Grant Vetter is able to give us an entirely new set of coordinates for understanding social control in the 21st century. Moving between historical precedents in the east and the west, Vetter's work reveals a hybrid order of architectural power that acts on subjectivity from within rather than without. Whether characterized as a process of indo-colonization, social ionization or a sub-atomizing social physics, Vetter's account of architectural subjectiviation requires a complete rethinking of power/knowledge as invested in producing 'perfected' subjects rather than 'normative' ones.

This new paradigm can be described as a sovereign power inasmuch as it acts directly on the body through enterrogatory discipline, inferrogatory infomatics, modulated (in)dividualism, auto-effective attunement and incentivizing injunctions. As a critical rejoiner to the discussion of Panopticism, The Architecture of Control is essential reading for everyone who is interested in new modes of resistance to the designs of biopower and imperial democracy.  

Available at: Amazon

• Larry Madrigal and the Aesthetics of Relief (Nicodim Gallery)
• Caroline Estelle: A New Image of Americana Beyond Repressive Sublimation (ASU Step Gallery)
• Oracles of the Other (Modifed Arts)
• Carrie Marill and Protected Vulnerability (Lisa Sette Gallery)
• Art & Legend at TCA (Tempe Center for the Arts)
• Mary Meyer: An Art of Conscience and Consequence (Mesa Arts Center)
• Thinking about Civilation and its Creaturely Discontents: New Works by Lauren Strohacker and Kendra Sollars (Chartreuse Gallery and PHICA's Rhetorical Galleries) 
• Marla Breuer: A Retrospective Review in Four Parts (Bentley Gallery) 
• Clarita Lulic and Inter-relational Aesthetics: Intimacy, Inquiry and the Interpersonal Refrain (Night Gallery)
• On Speaking in the Name of Minimalism: A Survey of Propositions, Commitments and New Departures (Bentley Gallery)

Writing Archive: Link

Ab-Extradition is a catalog covering more than a decade a work by Grant Vetter. Essays by the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, Canadian art critic Christabel Wiebe and internationally reknowned poet Marko Zlomislic all contribute readings of Vetter's work that show how abstraction is a process that is intimately connected to social, economic and political conflict. 

Excerpts

• "Vetter's paintings graphically illustrate the marriage of form and concept in fusing the corporeal and the political. Vetter's work is a tricky proposition in relation to history, calling up numerous and seemingly dissonant issues such as the history of Abstract Expressionism, America's involvment in doubious and bloody acts on foreign soil, and the museological critique inherent in a suite of paintings entitled Internment, Collateral, and Vestige." - Christabel Wiebe
• "It is this meeting of agreement and disagreement which allows the aesthetic experience to be politically significant." - Jacques Rancière
• "...there you already feel skeleton underneath the varnished skin trying to leap through tissue, sinews, frayed nerves amd muscle... The Real seeps in through  the cracks of the imagination to leave its stain."  - Marko Zlomislic 

BOOKS

RECENT ART REVIEWS

Book Reviews 

• "Vetter's work is a timely inquiry into the dynamics of power associated with techno-Panopticism." - Mark Poster, Author of Marxism and Foucault 
• "Grant Vetter's book is remarkable not only for its brilliant mapping of neo-Panoptic architectures and the evolution of intensive controls over life and social energies, but for its deep and sustained meditation on the historical relevance and potential of Feng Shui as a creative and practical mode of resistance." - William Bogard, Author of Simulation and Surveillance                                                                                          
• "Confronting cartographies of subjectivation, Vetter presents an exciting and timely series of meditations on the development and implications of surveillance architectures. Guiding the discussion is a quest for emancipatory potentials in the relationships betweeen people and the architectonic forces shaping contemporary life. In this book one will encounter the obvious figures, such as Bentham and Foucault, as well as Batman and Japanese horror films. An important discussion of how subjectivity can be understood and how that can be controlled is opened here." - Paul Boshers, Co-editor of Continent Journal  
• "Vetter’s Architecture of Control is an ambitious book that uses a number of colourful cultural references (The Dark Knight, and Nightmare on Elm Street among them), to achieve an accessible “architectural drawing” of our contemporary control society. It provides a thought-provoking analysis of how neo-panopticism, as the apparatus of hyper-capitalism, has achieved the total colonization and commodification of public and private spaces. As such, it is a compelling read for any Foucauldian, but particularly for academics working in the field of security studies, or on critiques of our contemporary control society, outlining a “complete” understanding of this contemporary phenomenon, its totalizing web, and its material, subjectivizing effects." - Josh Bowsher, Interstitial Journal

RECENT CATALOG ESSAYS