A*Magazine is A*DESK.’s fortnightly magazine, dedicated to the critique of and reflection on contemporary art.
Art Dis-solutions: A look at social movements and their artistic implications, through the work of Tania Bruguera in Queens, New York. XAVIER ACARIN
Allan Kaprow said that Non-art is more of an art than Art art. That the lunar module surpasses any contemporary sculptural effort, and that as such, the artist has to un-artist himself in order to flow between art and life. Something similar is happening in Queens with the Immigrant Movement International, Tania Bruguera is the initiator of a project that aims to eliminate the spectator and redefine the relations of power, between citizens and the market. Continue reading →
The Object Ethnography Project,sponsored by The Lucrece Project,investigates how objects accumulate stories as they move from one life to another. We are looking for donations of objects—any kind of object—and the stories that come with them. Members of the public will then adopt these objects during a week-long event in March, 2012. Participants will explain how they will use their adopted object in its new life before they take it home. Each story will be recorded, and the final online exhibit will include a photograph of the object, biography, and its adoption story.
We are now seeking objects! If you have an item with a story, from a sentimental oven mitt to a first generation iPod, that you would like to donate to this project, please either mail it to:
Lucrece Project
NYU English Department
19 University Place, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10003
If your object is broken, members of the Fixers Collective have generously offered fix-it workshops on February 23rd, March 8th and March 22nd, 2012 at New York University’s Kimmel Center, Room 901. If you would like to join a Fixers Collective workshop to fix any item, whether it is donated, adopted, or otherwise, please contact Vincent Lai (Vincent@fixerscollective.org).
“A technique of existence is a technique that takes as its ‘object’ process itself, as the speculative-pragmatic production of oriented events of change. Techniques of existence are dedicated to ontogenesis as such. They operate immediately qualitatively-relationally. They make no gesture of claiming ‘objectivity,’ nor do they pride themselves on their grasp of common sense. At the same time, they reject being characterized as ‘merely’ subjective. They are inventive of subjective forms in the archivist sense: dynamic unities of events unfolding. So implicated are they with the politicality of event-formation that they qualify whatever domain in which their creativity is operative as an occurrent art.” (Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event, p. 14)
I believe C. Wright Mills was advocating a technique of existence in The Sociological Imagination–particularly in his appendix (“On Intellectual Craftsmanship“).
“[W]e are in no way advocating an aesthetisation of the Socius, for after all, promoting a new aesthetic paradigm involves overthrowing current forms of art as much as those of social life! I hold out my hand to the future. My approach will be marked by mechanical confidence of creative uncertainty, according to whether I consider everything to be worked out in advance or everything to be there for the taking–that the world can be rebuilt from other Universes of value and that other existential Territories should be constructed towards this end.” (Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 134)
(Art Workers Coalition demonstration at MoMA, 1970)
The Lucrece Project: Creative Experiments in Critical Practiceis pleased to announce the three projects we have chosen to sponsor for the coming academic year. We are looking for collaborators to help us bring these projects to life–people who are creative, flexible thinkers. These are year-long collaborations culminating in a conference in April 2012, when each project will be exhibited/performed/discussed. Attached are the full calls for collaborators and details for how to get in touch with the leaders; below are three short descriptions of the three projects:
[T]he great advantage of visiting construction sites is that they offer an ideal vantage point…The same is true of artistic practice. The ‘making of’ any enterprise—films, skyscrapers, facts, political meetings, initiation rituals, haute couture, cooking—offers a view that is sufficiently different from the official one. Not only does it lead you backstage and introduce you to the skills and knacks of practitioners, it also provides a rare glimpse of what it is for a thing to emerge out of inexistence by adding to any existing entity its time dimension. Even more important, when you are guided to any construction site you are experiencing the troubling and exhilarating feeling that things could be different, or at least that they could still fail—a feeling never so deep when faced with the final product, no matter how beautiful or impressive it may be. (Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social, p. 89)
The OED ‘s definition of bastard includes: illegitimate, mongrel, hybrid, unauthorized, of mixed quality. Not a bad label for a methodology that seeks to transgress the logic of practice as dictated by particular disciplines. Bastard(ized) methodology.
The bastard is impure. As Mary Douglas points out in Purity and Danger, dirt arises as discarded residue when order is created. Dirt is matter out of place. When first discarded, dirt is not only out of place, but is dangerous to the order from which it was excluded. In this phase, dirt is powerful and harbors creative potential. Purity, in Douglas’s terms, is suspicious. Purity rejects difference and resists change. In fact, purity is hard to come by and usually implies a vision obstructed by blinders.
Pierre Bourdieu: With esthetics you are on the side of feeling, sensitivity, and pleasure. That is also true of writers. But can and should philosophers, sociologists, everyone who is on the side of the concept, of the intelligible, propose giving them pleasure? The truth is that if they do so, people think that they are after cost-free success. And it must be said, those who give pleasure often chase after success.
Hans Haacke: I don’t believe the work of a philosopher or a scientist cannot be pleasurable. There are texts I enjoy reading, and there are others I detest because of their bureaucratic and pretentious language. I don’t finish reading them, even if the subject interests me.
Pierre Bourdieu: I think your work represents a kind of avant-garde of that which could be the action of intellectuals. It could serve as a critical analyzer of the moment of transmission of knowledge in relation to the moment of the conception and of the research itself. Everything makes me think that intellectuals are not at all concerned about the moment of the performance, and that they do not make it an object of research. And it is to a large extent for this reason that they are so little effective. I think they should take inspiration from research like yours…in order to give full symbolic effectiveness to their unveiling of social mechanisms, particularly of those who rule the world of culture. (Pierre Bourdieu and Hans Haacke (1995) Free Exchange. Cambridge:Polity, p. 108-109.)
“[W]hat remains vivid, both in their practice and in the criticism they experience, is precisely the ‘critique of the spectacle’–the idea that art has to provide us with more than a spectacle, more than something devoted to the delight of passive spectators, because it has to work for a society where everybody should be active. The ‘critique of the spectacle’ often remains the alpha and omega of the ‘politics of art.’ What this identification dispenses with is any investigation of a third term of efficacy that escapes the dilemma of representational mediation and ethical immediacy. I assume that this ‘third term’ is aesthetic efficacy itself. “Aesthetic efficacy’ means a paradoxical kind of efficacy that is produced by the very rupturing of any determinate link between cause and effect.” (Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, p. 63)
“Aesthetic experience has a political effect to the extent that the loss of destination it presupposes disrupts the way in which bodies fit their functions and destinations. What it produces is not rhetorical persuasion about what must be done. Nor is it the framing of a collective body. It is a multiplication of connections and disconnections that reframe the relation between bodies, the world they live in and the way in which they are ‘equipped’ to adapt to it. It is a multiplicity of folds and gaps in the fabric of common experience that change the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible. As such, it allows for new modes of political construction of common objects and new possibilities of collective enunciation.” (Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, p. 72)
When I first met Julian Assange—thanks to lawyer and Chair of the Contemporary Art Society Mark Stephens and curator/lawyer Daniel McClean, both of the law firm Finers Stephens Innocent—we discussed ideas for various interview formats. Anton Vidokle and I had discussed the idea to conduct an interview with Assange in which questions would be posed not only by me, but also by a number of artists. This seemed only natural considering the extent to which so many artists have been interested in WikiLeaks, and we then invited seven artists and collectives to ask questions over video for the second part of the interview.
My archive now contains over 2000 hours of interviews recorded in many different places, and I am constantly attempting to discover new rules of the game, new approaches to how an interview can work. Continue reading →
Urban Undercurrents (an extension of the New School course, The City through the Body) explores sensuous encounters in and with the city with the understanding that particular smells, sounds, visions, textures and tastes mark cities as sensory environments that cultivate hedonism, pleasure, imagination and desire. The event’s installations, performances and activities ask: How can we enact mystical and imaginative readings of the city? How might these readings divine what lies beneath the surface?
Taking cities as sensory sites, Urban Undercurrents engages strategies we can use to explore the corporeal poetics (and politics) of being in the city. These ‘methods’ highlight our unconscious desire for experience and consider both the routine and the ritualistic in their search for those things that may not be clearly visible, yet palpably register as experience in the city.
As part of the event, Juan Betancurth and Todd Shalom of conceptual walks organization, Elastic City will offer a ‘special preview’ of their walk, 4ever 21. This walk will restore your natural radiance for eternal youth. Participants will ask for and receive timeless tips from Manhattan’s landmarks and lodestars as the group engages in a series of site-specific rites in Midtown. (For the walk, meet on the NE corner of 47th and 6th at 6:30 p.m. See http://elastic-city.com/walks/4ever-21 for more details. RSVP required for the walk: info@elastic-city.com).
On site at 66 West 12th Street (room 002), there will be a number of installations and performances including tarot readings by Adeola Enigbokan. These readings enact a method for feeling out resonances (in a manner analogous to the way emergency first responders might search for vital signs) between urban spaces and the affective experiences that relate people to these spaces (think for example of Cléo’s tarot reading in Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7). Mariana Luna will present her multimedia installation, Ventanas, a meditation on voyeurism, presence, and absence. The installation, a sensorial work-in-progress,sees windows as an interface to reflect on the ways cities manifest in layers and can act as mirrors of the social and the perceptual. Xavi Acarin will present the result of many walks in the city with a series of images that capture the haunted qualities and subtle violence of urban space. David Peppas will provide music and will show 16mm found footage. The event will also engage participants in Jennie Kaufman’s interactive game that explores urban experience via various registers—the imaginative, the corporeal, the sensorial, and the aspirational. Refreshments will be served. Continue reading →
I was just reading Adrian Piper’s “Notes on Funk” and thinking how a similar “cross-cultural transfusion” could be enacted with social scientists and artists. (Of course there are issues here with the whiteness of both fields, but bear with me.) Imagine, social scientists let loose and engage in alternate ways of practice with the guidance of artists. As a result, they learn to move. Maybe there would be some positive outcomes…
I used to think I needed a muse. But now I’m recognizing my mediators.
“Mediators are fundamental. Creation is all about mediators. Without them, nothing happens. They can be people–artists or scientists for a philosopher; philosophers or artists for a scientist–but things as well, even plants and animals…Whether they’re real or imaginary, animate or inanimate, one must form one’s mediators. It’s a series: if you don’t belong to a series, even a completely imaginary one, you’re lost. I need my mediators to express myself, and they’d never express themselves without me: one is always working in a group, even when it doesn’t appear to be the case. And all the more so when it’s apparent…” (Deleuze from his essay, “Mediators”)
From Tina Fey’s essay, “Confessions of a Juggler,” in this week’s New Yorker:
“I have a suspicion–and hear me out, because this is a rough one–that the definition of ‘crazy’ in show business [insert any numbers of fields, disciplines, social contexts here] is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore. The only person I can think of who has escaped the ‘crazy’ moniker is Betty White, which, obviously, is because people still want to have sex with her. This is the infuriating thing that dawns on you one day: even if you would never sleep with or even flirt with anyone to get ahead, you are being sexually adjudicated.”
If oppression is so awful, it’s because of how it limits movement, rather than because it violates eternal values. In barren times, philosophy retreats to reflection “on” things. If it doesn’t itself create anything what can it do but reflect on something? So it reflects on the eternal or the historical, but can itself no longer produce movement. What we must do, in fact, is take away from philosophers the right to reflect “on” things. The philosopher creates, he doesn’t reflect. (Deleuze, “Mediators”)
[I'm making things. Moving along. Attempting to construct what Deleuze calls "intellectually mobile concepts." Trying...]
Things without names are invisible, and the edges of the categories defined by the act of naming are significant. They, along with actions or processes of production, dialectically form our experience of the world. I think it’s important to be careful about what terms we allow into our thinking; categories, can obscure as much as they reveal.
The most interesting thing about doing a show is probably that you have to adapt to a particular set of constraints. The challenge is to make these constraints generative, rather than repressive. Too much art that is socially and politically self-aware is about monumentalizing repressive forces through overt opposition. In the end, that’s self defeating. It often results in melancholia or a kind of anomic celebration of its own lack of efficacy. Negation is the chief expression of this tendency, and every act of negation is a perverse form of preservation…You’re not going to win a direct fight with it [the museum/gallery space and its constraints], but you can redirect its emphasis and exploit its blind spots, which are like small pockets of indeterminacy within its totalizing structure…Fighting fire with fire is a kind of allegorical gesture, an allegory for art’s lack of efficacy, because it reifies the very power it is attempting to question or oppose by inhabiting its language, proposing it as the only option. I can’t accept that premise. (Walead Beshty, interviewed in Art Papers)
In social science we freely mention “correlates.” Does a correlate share qualities with analogy? With metaphor? If research is an expression (as well as an analysis), then metaphor is a necessity. If theory is a way of seeing, metaphor is essential.
“Gregory Bateson uses the word ‘plateau’ to designate something very special: a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end.” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 21-22)
In order to investigate today’s society, one must listen to the confessions of the products of its film industries. They are all blabbing a rude secret, without really wanting to…they reveal how society wants to see itself. The quintessence of these film themes is at the same time the sum of the society’s ideologies, whose spell is broken by means of the interpretation the themes. Siegfried Kracauer[1]
The new “urbanism” I am calling for recognizes that it is still art forms—those of the cinema and of literature—that have provided the most compelling urbanist archive produced in the 20th century, and it is to their oblique and infinitely rich documentary spirit, and to their examples as labors of the imagination, that we will need to adhere. Sanford Kwinter[2]
In the film Boarding Gate[3] (as with Assayas’s earlier film, demonlover), the characters are not embedded in the social worlds of the family, of the community, of the nation, but rather in a global, mobile, world characterized by relations that reflect a stark shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft. The flow of people, goods, capital—the shifting of languages, the movement across borders signals the sprawl of “non-places”[4] linked by networks of air terminals, escalators, call centers, shopping malls, office parks, luxury condos, warehouses, work sites, streets, and alleys. There is a noir-ish inflection and a sci-fi feel that are distinctively urban. The traffic of money, people, and images is punctuated and accelerated by the multiple roles given to taxis, screens, mobile devices, passports, credit cards, and surveillance cameras. As we (and our social interactions and environments) interface with screens, software, and mobile capabilities, the world is reanimated, gaining an “unconscious presence…bugged by new kinds of pleasure, obsessions, anxieties, and phobias”[5] and this film stresses the unpredictability of the future in terms of ‘everyday risk,’ our ambiguous and contested relationship with technology, and the implications for ethics.
Boarding Gate is not just a film about urbanism, but about risk society, technologized society. Risk, piracy, technology, and difficult political situations create “warm pools for urban contagions,”[6] and in the process, reconfigure urbanism itself. Urbanism becomes a disposition embodied in people, in things. Film knows/shows this. The ability of film to depict contemporary urbanism is compelling, for film uses both form and content in the representation—motion, mobility, montage.[7] Urbanism is a property of bodies and things. Through affective experience we inhabit urbanism. Urbanism exceeds the bounds of the city. This excess problematizes the city as the object of study forcing the expansion of inquiry into spatial products (shipping containers, planes, warcraft, special economic zones, etc.), networks (linkages of information and transportation), and people (as infrastructure, as transnational) that take on the disposition of urbanism. Urbanism is not only mobile and kinetic, it is also incomplete, in process, provisional. Borders are changed into fields. Continue reading →
A*Magazine is A*DESK.’s fortnightly magazine, dedicated to the critique of and reflection on contemporary art.
