Sometimes in an art gallery or museum...

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Sometimes in an art gallery or museum, I have these really sad moments. 'Contemporary art,' I think 'is like a commercial for the artists career. It's lost the desire to speak about the world.'



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The Agenda of Curator Ditte Maria Bjerg

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I don’t really care about Theatre or Art! But I am passionately occupied with such questions as:

- How did shopping become the most aggressively promoted religion of all time?
- What does the exhausted word; Globalisation actually mean - besides providing me with more money to spend on underpaid Polish builders or Indonesian nannies?
- Are we truly on the verge of post-democracy?
- Why is feminism still the ultimate dirty word? We still don’t have equal pay, equal leave for both parents and the 20 largest businesses in Denmark are all run by men.
- Is shipping tycoon Mr. A. P. Møller a hero or a villain, when he can avoid tax laws by applying diplomacy and charisma?
- Wherein lies free democratic choice, when the only choice I’m presented with is tax-limitations or tax-limitations?
- How do I burst this claustrophobic hetero-bubble of invest-‘n’-consume families that thrive in a super-sized IKEA world? Is there an alternative to fumbling blindly for the exit, as we contemplate which sofa cushions will complete our lives?
- How do I find empathy, imagination and desire - so I can contribute in creating a new Global Citizen?
- How do I become a citizen again and not remain a consumer?
- Is theatre able to approach such subjects? Of course! Where else can you address them? It’s worth a shot! Theatre must be a free public space of dialogue and generosity welcoming genuine encounters between people – a place liberated from the chains of work and private life!

I impose that Camp X in the period 01.07.07 – 30.06.09 must:

• be a spy, a police officer and an archaeologist and NOT a performance factory
• steal from the wicked and give power to the audience
• breakdown the imprisoning heterogeneous girl-meets-boy concepts
• sail the seven seas with Mærsk to discover its secrets
• create theatre that double espresso businessmen will note up in their BlackBerries
• lie to discover truth
• cultivate the hunger for knowledge and collaborate with experts
• interfere in the rapidly diminishing public space
• sing as much as possible



Original link: http://www.campx.dk/Dagsorden.aspx



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PME-ART in Japan

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PME-ART, Unrehearsed Beauty/Le Genie des autres (Canada)

Except some reports of performers' personal experiences such as labor at Dunkin' Donuts or conversation with an American soldier, some yes-or-no questions, fragments of performances and several rock tunes, the whole space is given to audience "without rehearsal." There is a microphone in the center of "audience seats" that they can use to fill the void, but it is all up to them. An experiment that transforms theatre into a kind of open forum and explores what the notion of "public space" can be today.

Dates: March 13-15, 2003
Venue: Super Deluxe, Roppongi



PME-ART, Families are Formed through Copulation (Canada)

Humiliation and death of the best friend, an allegorical story in which a father, mother, and daughter rape each other, a man who suddenly "becomes" a "Jew" during his travel in Germany, a family therapy in the nuclear age, a computer's voice preaching that we must not have children with tons of reasons. Following the experiment in Unrehearsed Beauty as a plain answer to the question "what theatre can do" in terms of content, this "theatrical" performance straightly depicts unjustifiedness.

Dates: March 9-10, 2006
Venue: Tokyo Kinema Club, Uguisudani




chelfitsch, Three Days in March (Japan)

"March 15, 2003, when the USA was about to start bombing on Iraq, I saw at Super Deluxe in Roppongi, with a fair amount of beer, a theatrical show from Montreal that looked like a political forum called Unrehearsed Beauty. Some said the performance was not worth serious consideration, but for me it was one of the very few performances that were really striking.

To tell the truth, what made me write Three Days in March that was premiered in the next year's February was the performance experience of that day. So I am very glad being able to show the piece at the Super Deluxe in the festival that the group of Unrehearsed Beauty is in. Besides, a Japanese post-rock band Sangatsu [March], which was the source of the title, is going to play at the same venue in our performance period.

I hope that audience will enjoy the piece and the band's live concert relaxing, eating and drinking as I did with Unrehearsed Beauty. It has been three years since then, but the war on Iraq is still ongoing."

(Toshiki Okada, from the brochure of PPAF 2006, translated by Tomoyuki Arai)

Dates: March 11-21, 2006
Venue: Super Deluxe, Roppongi



Original link: http://www.parc-jc.org/projects/ppaf/?lang=en



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Thomas Hirschhorn on Collage

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To do collages is essential to me. I do two-dimensional Collages and three-dimensional Collages. Doing Collages means creating a New World with elements of the Existing World. Doing Collages is expressing the Agreement with the Existing World without approving it. This is Resistance.

Doing Collages is based on this Agreement and this Non-Approval. That is the reason why often Collages are not taken seriously. That is the Reason why making Collages is suspicious and why doing Collages is considered unprofessional. But those are precisely the arguments which demonstrate the Resistance of the medium Collages. Collages resist Facts, Collages resist information and Collages resist Documents. Collages create a Truth of their own.

Doing Collages still means working with explosive matter, doing Collages still has the ability to reach a Public – a Public which I call – the Non-Exclusive Audience and doing Collages still escapes control – escapes my own control first. Everybody has, once in his life, done a Collage. Everybody has, once in his life, the sensation that the world can be re-invented, that is so easy, that it really is possible – through a Collage. But then was told – immediately – it is too easy to do this, it is too simple and it is too evident.

This is exactly what I want to insist upon: I want to insist upon doing a simple, easy and evident work. I wanted to do a basic, rough, primitive work. I wanted to do crude Collages: Bring together what has nothing to do together; bring together – what only I think – can be brought together; bring together – what only I see – as together; bring together – what only I know – as together. I juxtapose them as a Headless Act. A Constitutive Act – done in Headlessness. I want to create the condition for an Understanding of the World – the World I am living in. I understand the World – as One World, as the One and Only World, as the One and Unique World – I am living in. I love to do Collages – and in doing it – I want to do a work which reaches Universality. Doing Collages is my tool.

- Thomas Hirschhorn, 2008



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Roy Arden on Hans-Peter Feldmann

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In 1975 Hans-Peter Feldmann sent envelopes, each containing a letter and twelve snapshots, to people with whom he was personally acquainted in the local art scene. The amateur-porn style, flash photos showed the artist engaged in a ménage a trois with two women in a deep-red brothel-like setting. The letter tells that while he wasn’t ashamed to perform such acts in private, their public display was another matter. Yet, he explains, there are much more shameful, “really sickening” things, being done in public, for which the majority feels no shame.

– Roy Arden



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Two quotes from Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory

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Spirit’s “true concern is the negation of reification.” That we make our world is the time-full “truth” that "untruth" most wishes to silence. Reification is that hardening of historically produced conditions into “second nature” – a totalizing ideological and material environment experienced as timeless and unchangeable. It is an enforced forgetting of the political “truth” that structural barbarism is not necessary, not an invariable. Collectively constructed, the given world system can be collectively changed. The practical problem of how to change it, at this point, requires radically rethinking the categories of revolutionary theory. But that the world can be changed – and that both the desire for change and the negative utopian images that provisionally orient that desire can be found within the failures and contradictions of the system itself – remains the core of “truth.” To keep this negative dialectic moving, to resist its arrest and regression, is the work and play of critical thought.

- Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory




As Heraclitus long ago showed, however, there is no pure or simple repetition. Repeating old gestures in new contexts always produces a semantic yield that exceeds that of the original model.

- Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory



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Happiness with a full awareness of the tragedy of life

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What I’m interest in is happiness with a full awareness of the tragedy of life, the potential tragedy that lurks around every corner and the tragedy that actually is life.

- Wolfgang Tillmans



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A conversation between Lenin and Valeriu Marcu

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A conversation between Lenin and the young Romanian poet Valeriu Marcu (in a cafe in Zurich, some time around 1917) in which Lenin attempts to convince the poet to 'accept his critique of pacifist opposition to the First World War':


-------------------------------------------------------


Then Lenin said to me, 'Do you know the real meaning of this war?'

'What is it?' I asked.

'It is obvious,' he replied. 'One slaveholder, Germany, who own one hundred slaves, is fighting another slaveholder, England, who owns two hundred slaves, for a "fairer" distribution of the slaves.'

'How can you expect to foster hatred of this war,' I asked at this point, 'if you are not in principle against all wars? I thought that as a Bolshevik you were really a radical thinker and refused to make any compromise with the idea of war. But by recognizing the validity of some wars, you open the doors for every opportunity. Each group can find some justification of the particular war of which it approves. I see that we young people can only count on ourselves [...]'

Lenin listened attentively, his head bent towards me. He moved his chair closer to mine. He must have wondered whether to continue to talk to this boy or not. I, somewhat awkwardly, remained silent.

'Your determination to rely on yourselves,' Lenin finally replied, is very important. Every man must rely on himself. Yet he should also listen to what informed people have to say. I don't know how radical you are, or how radical I am. I am certainly not radical enough. One can never be radical enough; that is, one must always try to be as radical as reality itself".



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Howard Becker Quote

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Even when you don't want to do what is conventional, what you do want to do can best be described in the language that comes from "conventions".

- Howard Becker



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Optimist Joke

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Two optimists walk into a bar. One optimist says “what a nice bar.” “Yes,” the other optimist says, “I think we will have a very nice time here.” Proving that optimists are actually not all that funny.



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Six Points Towards A Critical Optimism

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1. Optimism has less to do with your concrete situation and more to do with your attitude towards that situation.

There is no point in being an optimist only when things are easy or going well.

Therefore there must be possibilities for optimism in any kind of situation, no matter how negative or catastrophic. These possibilities might have something to do with one’s outlook.

The cliché version of this idea is that in rich Western countries, where life is comfortable and we have everything, people are often miserable: on anti-depressants, in psychoanalysis, etc. While in very poor countries, where they have very little, there is often much joy and a great zest for life.

This cliché may or may not be true. Nonetheless, it does illustrate how sometimes optimism has more to do with one’s attitude than with one’s material situation.



2. Focusing on the next small, experimental step instead of the big utopian dream.

Jacob confesses that he is really not an optimist. He of course has an interest in optimism but in reality can’t quite find the way.

This confession is followed by a statement. If he were to say that “the world is not going well’ many people in the audience might disagree but everyone would know what he was talking about.

Reasons Jacob feels ‘the world is not going well:

- Increasing discrepancy between the rich and the poor. More and more millionaires and multi-millionaire and billionaires and multi-billion dollar corporations. And at the same time more and more people who are desperately poor, living off a dollar a day or less, in conditions that few of us would consider humane.

- The appearance of right wings governments popping up in so many different countries. Governments that care more about protecting the wealth than they do about the lives of their own citizens. And that get elected using the techniques of advertising and emotional manipulation.

- Environmental degradation. A fear that in our lifetime clear air and clean water will become increasingly scarce. One statistic that is particularly alarming is that some time in the next twenty years there will no longer be enough clear water to grow all of the rice we currently consume. Rice of course being the major food staple of much of the planet.

Jacob could go on like this all night.

However, a deeper reason for pessimism is that so many of these crisis’s are not ‘problems that can be solved’ but are instead thoroughly integrated into the fundamental structures of our society, inseparable from the very DNA of Western thinking and culture.

The kinds of changes required for substantial improvement, real fundamental shifts in the way we live and think, seem unlikely to say the least. And in comparison, the ethical decisions we are actually capable of enacting feel out of scale with the global breadth and complexity of the situation.

So thinking about all of this Jacob feels astonishingly pessimistic.

However, if we instead concentrate on the ‘next, small experimental step’ it is true that in any given situation there is always something that can be done. It is also interesting to think of it as an experimental step. You try something today. Tomorrow you look back and decide if you want to continue down the same path or instead try something different. There is always some room for possibility.



3. A respect for the facts and for reality.

Much of 20th century art and thought was about tearing away the veil of culture and illusion and seeing what lies underneath. Of course, if ones rips away a veil of cultured, civilized illusion, what lies underneath might well seem ugly in comparison. This 20th century desire to unmask, to reveal the way things really are, is one of the main reasons that ‘facts’ and ‘reality’ have become associated with pessimism.

However, we can’t let the pessimists claim control of the facts. Optimists also need to deal in the hard currency of facts and reality.

Saying something is ‘a fact’ or ‘a reality’ is always connected to power. Stating that something is a fact is also a way of making it into a fact.

If a father tells his son, “You can’t be an artist, instead you have to work a real job, that’s just the way life is, those are the facts,” at the same time the father is promoting a specific way of looking at the world.

To say that life is hard or cruel also serves normalize hardship and cruelty. To say that hardship and cruelty must always be denounced and fought against is clearly a different position. There is really no reason not to state that things do sometimes change and that life is often beautiful.

We are interested in an optimism that looks at the world with open eyes. There is of course constant cruelty in the world, the question is: what is our attitude towards it?



4. What would it take to turn a pessimist into an optimist?

An essential point: because if some people are simply born optimists and others are born pessimists then there’s nothing to be done and no point in talking about it.

Perhaps the first step in turning a pessimist into an optimist is for the pessimist to see their own pessimism not as ‘the way things actually are’, but as a bias, a lens or screen through which he or she views the world. Seeing one’s own position as a bias might create a small opening through which other possibilities might begin to flow.

If one’s pessimism if not a fundamental reflection of the world, but is (at least partly) a bias, perhaps in some situations a more optimistic view would be more useful.



5. There is no optimism without imagination.

This point speaks for itself.



6. Resistance.

The most essential point. We have no interest in an optimism that simply says everything is going well and life is full of small, beautiful things and we should enjoy them and be grateful. (Though this is of course true.)

Because when we say ‘critical optimism’ we also mean an optimism of resistance, an optimism that allows us to fight against injustice and to fight against the abuses of power.

In developing this project we have realized that capitalism and the right wing are often extremely optimistic. We therefore need a critical optimism, an optimism of resistance, that has the strength and force to match injustice blow for optimistic blow.

In an interview with Cinemascope magazine, the American experimental filmmaker John Gianvito says:

“As far as one’s thoughts about our present predicaments or about the future, I have no difficulty understanding from whence the pessimism and cynicism springs. However, what’s critical for me is that regardless of one’s thoughts, one’s actions must be those of an optimist. Otherwise one is only further assuring that the status quo remains unchanged.”



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A strange combination of being happy and unsatisfied.

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“[...] I’ve wanted to be flexible, to disengage from marginality and, at the same time, from the mainstream, because they’re both worn-out today and don’t respond to a more complex situation. I don’t identify with any space or time I inhabit because they’re all too narrow, limiting, and all of this is a strange combination of being happy and unsatisfied, because there’s still so much to do, so much is needed. All of us need more radicalism, something that isn’t a monologue or being offended by what the other says, loving difference and having fewer, much fewer, micro-political friendships, and less respect for the surviving chieftans of the Paz eras. [...]”

- Heriberto Yépez



(As cited on Venepoetics, I believe from the website of Heriberto Yépez.)
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Friction and Vulnerability

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Just noticed this comment a few posts back from "i mate." Thought it was very much to the point:


"It's fine to initiate an event for people to 'come together'. but if there is no exploration of the ethics of an 'encounter', then it's like never starting a fire. for people to really share and touch each other there needs to be friction, and friction comes with one being vulnerable.

Your work should explore its psychological dimension if it should claim to fulfill its mandate."


Not sure about the 'psychological dimension' but friction and vulnerability are directly at the centre of the search.



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Alexander Melamid Quote

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There's a crisis of ideas in art, which is felt by many, many people... Artists now - I cannot speak for all, but I have talked to many artists who feel this way - we have lost even our belief that we are the minority that knows. We believed ten years ago, twenty years ago, that we knew the secret. Now we have lost this belief. We are a minority with no power and no belief, no faith. I feel myself, as an artist and as a citizen, just totally obsolete... Okay, it can be done this way or that way or this way, or in splashes or smoothly, but why? What the hell is it about? That's why we wanted to ask people. For us - from our point of view - it's a sincere thing to understand something, to change course. Because the way we live we cannot live anymore. I have never seen artists so desperate as they are now, in this society.

- Alexander Melamid




(As cited by Carl Wilson in Let's Talk About Love: A Journey To The End Of Taste.)
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Paul Chan Quote

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At the time, the mid-'90s, the AFL-CIO was doing college recruitment, and big labor unions were going to colleges and universities talking about how they should organize. It was thrilling. It all culminated with the UPS strike in 1997 in Chicago with Ron Carey, the Teamster president. Here's a guy who came up from the rank and file of the Teamsters, who was forced into confronting a company that refused to negotiate with the workers on a new contract. 185,000 workers walked off the job, and UPS blinked. They broke the company and got a new contract. I lived close to a UPS processing center on the South Side of Chicago, and we'd bring them donuts. It was a great moment. Then of course Carey was booted; after the strike the Teamster hierarchy voted in the son of Jimmy Hoffa as president, even though Carey had just led this insane victory, and even though everyone knew Hoffa Jr. was shady. One of the lessons you learn is that changing things often means losing your job or getting jailed, or worse.

– Paul Chan



[You can find the rest of the interview here.]



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This little square

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1.

Everything is settled. There is a specific way to do each new thing.
There is even an agreed upon way to break the rules.



2.
Maybe there will be no end, no flash, no blast,

no final show



This is your project and you must finish it

you tell yourself, you keep telling yourself

again and again

all the while knowing that it matters little

whether you finish it or not

(no one will notice, no one will care)

nonetheless you press on

this is my project, you say

this little square of irrelevance

it means something to me

damn them all

this is mine



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Art School

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While still in art school, all artists should take mandatory courses in humility.



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On Artists and Lonliness

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I was thinking random thoughts, perhaps not really thinking anything at all, when a rather concrete question randomly formulated itself, namely: am I more or less lonely than other artists? And then: are contemporary artists, as a type, particularly lonely? And then: is there any documentation on the relative loneliness, or lack of loneliness, of contemporary artists? These didn’t seem, to me at least, to be particularly engaging or timely questions to be posing but my mind hovered around them for a few brief moments and I recalled something I had read in the book Artistic Research – theories, methods and practices by Mika Hannula, Juha Suorant and Tere Vaden:

Following Rorty (1991), the question indeed is: what communities and traditions does the person undertaking artistic research belong to? The sad thing is that sometimes we are happy with the context where we find ourselves – and yet again sometimes not. The politics of the everyday – and how we can cope with it – is how we specifically handle this conflict. But Rorty continues. The other decisive question is: What is our approach to loneliness? We cannot underestimate or despise such a question. It is useless to claim that one would enjoy one’s existence maximally only if and when one is alone. Despite the journey and need to make decisions, the question is about being in the world, about the pressures and needs stemming from this and how this relationship is carried out.

I have often said that one of the things art can still do, and perhaps the thing it still does best, is help us formulate what we believe in and therefore concurrently allow us to form alliances, and perhaps even communities, with those who have similar compulsions and beliefs. If there is a work of art I like I naturally begin to think about why exactly it is that I like it. This leads me to think what questions and positions the work of art expresses that resonate with my more general world view, allowing me to further clarify what it is that I actually think and why. When I meet others who like the same work of art we have a point of departure for a discussion about values. It might turn out that we like the same work of art for completely different reasons. And these differences once again allow us to clarify what might be meaningful to us.

In an art culture of hyper-plurality, such alliances at times seem few and far between.


[Unfinished.]



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Top Twelve (Not Necessarily Released During The Past Year But Nonetheless Listened To.)

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The Wave Pictures - Instant Coffee Baby
Reiko Kudo - Rice Field Silently Ripping In The Night
Fabulous Diamonds - 7 Songs
Dirty Projectors - Rise Above
Nigeria Special: 1970-1976
Hefner - The Fidelity Wars
Tony Allen - Afro Disco Beat
Adrian Orange & Her Band
Erykah Badu - New Amerykah: Part One
Philip Cohran and the Artistic Heritage Ensemble - Singles
Icy Demons - Fight Back
Tiombe Lockhart - Queen of Doom



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Painting, Coffee, Toast

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Painting, Toast, Coffee

Does anyone still remember the end of painting, the death of painting, etc? It all seems like such a long time ago. What was it exactly that we thought was ending? An interest in strong male (possibly drunk) figures standing in front of blank canvases as if the canvases themselves were land waiting to be conquered? The feeling that abstraction was a meaningful, resonant break with representation? Art that didn’t involve video cameras?

And then another thought, another question: does anything ever really end? Do bands actually break up, or at least ever stay broken: the Sex Pistols got back together, Young Marble Giants got back together, The Pixies got back to together. Every ending is only a dull pause before the beast comes, once again, back to life.



Toast, Painting, Coffee

The colloquialism ‘you’re toast’ of course means: you’re beaten, you’re down for the count, you’re done, it’s over. I do not know the expressions origin. Should I look it up? Should I google it? Could I simply figure it out myself through common sense or logic? Bread is put into a toaster. Before it goes into the toaster it is bread, after toast. The bread is gone, of course only transformed, but somehow something that is less fresh, more burnt, now stands in its place. Perhaps, when there is discourse about things coming to an end (the end of history, the death of the novel, etc.) such things are not gone at all: they have only been toasted (I am tempted to write: toasted by over-thinking, by over-examination.) Where once there was something fresh, something straight out of the oven, in it’s place is now something that is burnt and, at any moment, ready to crumble.

Toast is traditionally eaten in the morning. “Tomorrow is another day,” is another expression that suddenly comes to mind, along the lines of: Today painting is dead but tomorrow is another day. Another day with toast and coffee and a new sunrise that will shine through the studio window. Each work will be seen in this new light. The pain and struggle, from the day before, of trying to figure how and why and what to make is washed away by such light. All you have is the work in front of you, without explanation, saying only what it chooses to say in that exact moment. Does it still choose to say: ‘you’re toast.’



Coffee, Toast, Painting

I often wonder, in an of course completely hypothetical manner, if I were to wake up one morning and there was simply, absolutely, no art left anywhere in the world, how long it would take me to notice. If I wonder about this for a while I usually come to the conclusion that it might even take a few days. However, if I were to wake up one morning and there was absolutely no coffee left anywhere in the world I am quite sure I would notice in about fifteen seconds. From this tentative thought experiment is it possible to ascertain that coffee is considerably more important than art.

You are in the studio, it is morning, a coffee in one hand, perhaps a cigarette in the other. You’re wandering around the studio, looking out the window, wondering about various random things, wondering about the next move, absent-mindedly placing the coffee cup down, picking it up again, noticing that the bottom of the cup has left a ring, a stain. The stain is a trace of this aimless moment, repeated over and over again, as if into infinity.



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Brian Holmes: "But it is to say that unconventional and dissenting ideas don’t often come out of established and conventional functions."

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Well, the problem I have, and maybe others have too, is that the formalism and the professionalism of the museum-university-festival circuit sometimes keeps you from knowing either who you are, or what you’re really talking about. This is not to say we should close the museums, picket the universities, burn the libraries, or go back to the land or whatever. But it is to say that unconventional and dissenting ideas don’t often come out of established and conventional functions. And when everybody tacitly agrees that culture production can only take place under the beneficent gaze of the market and the state, and on their payrolls, what you get in my opinion is very dull and timid attitudes combined with grotesquely simulated and overblown emotions. Or, from the more ambitious and professional types, you may get hyper-specialized discourses and elaborate aesthetic affects, this sort of highly valorized cultural production which appears irrefutable when it comes out of MIT or MoMA, but still doesn’t seem to be what you’re looking for.

To put it in more theoretical terms, there is no possibility of generating a critical counter-power – or counter-public, or counter-public sphere – when there is no search for relative autonomy, or when the self (autos) no longer even asks the questions of how to make its own law (nomos). So the importance of this kind of project is to use it as a moment of experimentation, not just in the quest for the perfect theory or the perfect procedure, but cosmologically, to rearrange the stars above your head. Such events don’t happen often, the only solution is do-it-yourself. It’s also part of the search for the outside, which has existential necessity. I think I’ve learned the most about art and social theory from counter-summits with lines of teargas-belching cops, and from those kinds of anarchist summer universities where you camp out for a week and have a hard time finding a shower, but also get to cooperate directly with people whose words and gestures aren’t totally dissociated from their bodies and their actions. Well, since those moments I have felt a need to develop more complex discourses and experiments, but hopefully not more conventional and complacent ones […]

- Brian Holmes



[The rest of the interview can be found here: Articulating the Cracks in the Worlds of Power. 16 Beaver Group talking with Brian Holmes]



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We have fought and won

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1.
We have fought and won.
You will not oppress us anymore.
We have won the right to
oppress ourselves.


2.
In every battle there is a decisive moment.
Where things could just as easily
tip one way as the other.
What if that moment were stretched out.
What if it lasted forever.


3.
Loneliness must be recruited
in the fight
against capitalism.



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The counts on which Valerie is usually convicted of failure...

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The counts on which Valerie [Solanas] is usually convicted of failure are the following: she was not a lesbian, she was a lesbian, she didn't comb her hair, she was a hooker, she was poor, she held extremist views, she was humorless, her humor was inappropriate, she picked on an artist who would become important, she was clueless about the workings of the art market, and she missed. She did not, fortunately, kill Warhol, or anyone else. By the time she got to him, William Burroughs had already shot his wife, and Norman Mailer stabbed his. Louis Althusser had yet to strangle his. Let us not even begin to speak of Carl Andre. The only woman to survive her man was Mailer's wife. Did the critical reputation, credibility, or perceived contribution of any of these men suffer more than a temporary glitch?

- Catherine Lord, Notes On Beatification: The Case For Valerie Solanas


[From the book Failure!: Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices]



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And just write anything.

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And just write anything. Because you left the book you were reading (and enjoying immensely) at home, because you are sitting in the café alone and perhaps want others to think you industrious. You have no thoughts so you write anything, not worrying that it’s pathetic or uninspired, no one will read it anyway, even if by some miracle it is published hardly anyone will read it. But you sip the last dregs of your coffee and write. This is the perfect, public loneliness. You look around the café and continue to smile.



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New PME-ART Mandate

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Through performances, installation, public process and theoretical and practical research, interdisciplinary group PME-ART confronts its contemporary practice via local, national and international artistic collaborations. Combining creation, exploration, critical reflection, dissemination and casual yet significant interactions with various publics, the work is an ongoing process of questioning the world, of finding the courage to say things about the current predicament that are direct and complex, of interrogating the performance situation.

Performing as ourselves, we create actions, conditions and speech executed with a singular intimacy and familiarity. This intimacy reduces the separation between performer and spectator, opening up a space for thinking, tension, reflection and confusion. Within this space we present meticulously prepared material in a manner that is open and loose, sliding the situation towards the unexpected, towards a sense of connection with whatever the audience brings.

Full of paradoxes and contradictions, the work is often destabilizing. Such destabilization is not only about art, but also echoes the social and personal discomfort so often encountered in daily life. We believe acknowledging uncomfortable realities, instead of pretending they are not there, is of fundamental importance for the development of critical approaches that are generous and unpredictable.

We are deeply engaged with the ethical and political challenges that arise when working collaboratively, searching for a delicate balance between the essential freedom of the performers (to create the thinking, physicality and substance of the work) and the rigour necessary to structure and gradually refine the material over the course of the process.

Drawing considerably upon literature, music, dance, visual art, critical theory, philosophy and cinema, such influences are never entirely direct, always infiltrating our practice from personal, unexpected angles.

While the style of the work may seem fragmented, and is in many ways a reflection of the fragmented times in which we live, simultaneously the work generates a deeply human experience with a foundation in basic yet ephemeral realities: people working together, dealing with the audience, simply trying to figure things out.



.

Of course it’s too easy to think this way

.



Of course it’s too easy to think this way, as if every question had the same simple answer: that the world is irredeemably damaged. These people have style but that doesn’t guarantee they lack substance. Do more people read a book when it is the only one left in the shop? Do more people commit a crime when the pertinent law seems flimsy, arbitrary or ridiculous? In every matter there is choice but rarely does freedom decide everything. Does a belief in love automatically entail a belief in couples?



.

These moments of lucidity

.



These moments of lucidity within the dumb, stupid, corrupt, venal, smug, overly-satisfied-with-itself world. And the lucidity that is little more than a stand-in for the overwhelming grayness of ones own inexplicable temperament.



.

An American Plea

.



In the upcoming American election, the Republicans (with the help of rigged electronic voting machines) will simply cheat. When you cheat it is considerably easier to win. I therefore predict the Republicans will once again prove victorious. Considering the variety of questionable, even suspicious, practices during the last two American elections, how come this possibility of imminent electoral corruption isn’t front page news every single day?

God willing, if you are planning to be anywhere near the voting machines this November, anywhere near where votes are being tallied: please, bring a video camera, film covertly and often, get something on tape. Come on America, show some fight, let’s throw some of this painful evidence up onto youtube and see what happens. What the fuck else is the internet for?

Signed, a concerned Canadian.



.

A Dream

.



We were living in a house together. The house was a lot like the place where I live now but it was located in the suburbs. We were renting videos or watching videos or maybe the internet and something happened and you died in my arms. I knew that when you were dead what I had to do, what I had been instructed to do, was go to the basement and blow up the house. I gently laid you on the kitchen floor and snuck down to the basement. I knew if I cut the gas line with your knife the house would explode. I cut the gas line with your knife then crept back up to the kitchen, took you back in my arms, and held you tight, waiting for the house to explode so we would both perish along with it. Then you awoke. You looked at me, I was startled that you were alive and said we have to get out of the house as quickly as possible because it's going to explode. We ran out of the house and dove onto the grass. You asked me what had happened and I explained everything. We sat on the front lawn for a long time, watching the house (all of the windows and doors were flung completely open to air out the gas), waiting for it to explode. Then you got very, very angry at me for blowing up your house. I knew that I was in fact in the wrong because I was only supposed to blow up the house when you were dead and clearly you were not dead. Then there was a flashback to when I was in the basement, a close up on my hands: instead of cutting the gas line I had - by mistake - cut the sugar line (the sugar line was a white straw-wrapper filled with sugar.) I suddenly remembered this, my own incompetence, could still taste the sugar on my hand, told you this new detail, and we went back inside and cleaned up the house.



.

Dear ask the experts

.



Dear ask the experts,
my life is empty
please advise
yours, lost
Dear lost,
ask the experts are not mind-readers
please send more information
yours, ask the experts
Dear ask the experts,
when I try to think up reasons to
begin anything new
or for that matter reasons
to continue on with things I am
already doing
I can come up with many
many good strong reasons
(some of which of course contradict one another)
and yet, if I consider them further,
all such reasons fail to convince
please advise
yours, lost
Dear lost,
why do you need reasons to do things,
why not just do things that ‘feel right’
and let the reasons take care of themselves
yours, ask the experts
Dear ask the experts,
without reasons I feel unable to
make decisions
if I try to trust what I feel
I realize that mainly
I feel apathetic and ambivalent
perhaps this is not ‘normal’
but it is where I stand
and I am searching for the next step
I am open to suggestions
yours, lost
Dear lost,
your desire for ‘suggestions’ is much
like your desire for ‘reasons’
you are searching for a crutch
since you have fallen out of touch
with your true desires
simplify your life, create the space
within which what you already
know you need can
gradually rise to the surface
yours, ask the experts
Dear ask the experts,
if my life was any more simple
I would be in a coma
I have simplified and found only
emptiness and loneliness
yours, lost
Dear lost,
why didn’t you mention before
that you were lonely
yours, ask the experts
Dear ask the experts,
must have slipped my mind
yours, lost
Dear lost,
loneliness is much like boredom
the solution is simply to take an interest
in something
find people who you like and
surround yourself with them
intertwine your lives with theirs
write down their birthdays in
your daytimer and make sure to
do something special for them
expect them to return the favor
your community is a mirror
in which you can see yourself
and better understand your own
true desires
yours, ask the experts
Dear ask the experts,
I am already surrounded by close,
very dear friends
who care for me and bring warmth
and friendship and community
into my life
it doesn’t help
yours, lost
Dear lost,
have you tried drugs
yours, ask the experts
Dear ask the experts,
the drugs don’t work
yours, lost
Dear lost,
it is rare for us to suggest
such radical measures
but in such extreme cases
we occasionally propose an attempted suicide
here is our reasoning:
an attempted suicide is a cry for help
you are obviously in desperate need for assistance
therefore, perhaps an attempted suicide
might bring you the help you desire
yours, ask the experts
Dear ask the experts,
I am now a ghost
yours, lost
Dear lost ghost,
please note that we had specified
an ‘attempted’ suicide
yours, ask the experts
Dear ask the experts,
it seems I overshot the mark
yours, lost ghost
Dear lost ghost,
what is it like in the afterlife
ask the experts are extremely curious
yours, ask the experts
Dear ask the experts,
it is warm here
I feel calm and at peace
all the troubles of a barely lived life
feel like the most distant,
pleasant memories
everything feels at peace
yours, lost ghost
Dear lost ghost,
so in some sense we have
managed to solve your problem
after all…



.

By self-selection became the first generation of psychoanalysts...

.



the unconventional ones
the doubters
those who were dissatisfied with the limitations imposed on knowledge
the odd ones
the dreamers
those who knew neurotic suffering from their own experience
the mentally endangered
the eccentrics
the self-made
those with excessive flights of imagination




[description, according to Anna Freud, of the characteristics of the personalities of those who, by self-selection, became the first generation of psychoanalysts]



.

It’s true, as I’ve told others...

.



It’s true, as I’ve told others, that knowing one knows nothing is the best way to be, since life, minute after minute, is never more than being inspired to rediscover what one thought one already knew. I did know it, but… No, not “but”: and I’m about to know it again, right now.

– Harry Mathews, 20 Lines a Day



.

And people started to arrive...

.



And people started to arrive

the one we didn’t recognize

the one not interested or interesting

a friend of a friend we had heard many terrible things about

the friend we really liked and the other friend who was steadily growing on us

the crazy one who sat in the corner who after awhile we forgot

and everyone brought alcohol

and the stereo was informed by a rapidly changing whatever of eclectic suggestions

and the one who lost the address and had to phone three times before finding the right doorbell

the one who three of our closest friends had dated and we knew many intimate and embarrassing details about

the couple, who we called ‘the power couple’, who seemed to do little else then support each others careers

and it was getting crowded so we felt pride – clearly word had got out

“What do you mean by political?...” we overheard, just a few feet away

“Political… as in making things possible.”

the one who was at all the parties and knew absolutely everyone

and the one who hardly ever went out and was rapidly making up for lost time

the drinkers and non-drinkers and dancers and ones who might dance a little bit later once they’d had a bit more to drink

this was goodbye, next party would be somewhere far away: new city, new problems, new friends we would someday soon describe with a similar distanced love

and remembering the last city, the last party, ten years ago, the ones we still often wrote too and the ones we long ago forgot

the ones who said they were sad we were leaving and would miss us terribly

and the ones who said we were lucky to get out of this mean-spirited backwater and they wished they could escape as well

the ones who would stay in touch and the ones who would try to stay in touch and the ones for whom such thoughts barely even occurred

“They’ll be back in a year,” we overheard, just a few feet away, but knew this was not the case

and we wondered: how many of these people would we ever see again? how many would we still remember in ten years? would we hear when they got ill, when they got married, when they had children, when they died?

we looked around the room. guessing such things had never been our strong suit, but still: one hundred? two hundred? packed into corners and perched on the edges of chairs

did we really know why we were leaving? could the friends we hadn’t made yet ever hope to match the drunks that surrounded us now



.

Notes Towards A Critical Optimism - Part Two

.



Ten Points Concerning Critical Optimism:

1. Optimism is an attitude towards reality that affects ones actions.

2. Without optimism nothing happens. Critical optimism is a desire expressed through action to make sure that not only bad things happen.

3. Optimism isn’t enough, we also require a tactic.

4. There is no optimism without imagination.

5. Optimism has less to do with your concrete situation and more to do with your attitude towards that situation.

6. The future isn’t fixed.

7. Focusing on the next small, experimental step instead of the big utopian dream.

8. A respect for the facts and for reality.

9. What would it take to turn a pessimist into an optimist?

10. Resistance.




And for Part One: http://radicalcut.blogspot.com/2007/02/towards-critical-optimism-preliminary.html



.

Maybe there will be no end

.



1.

Everything is settled. There is a specific way to do each new thing.
There is even an agreed upon way to break the rules.



2.
Maybe there will be no end, no flash, no blast,

no final show



This is your project and you must finish it

you tell yourself, you keep telling yourself

again and again

all the while knowing that it matters little

whether you finish it or not

(no one will notice, no one will care)

nonetheless you press on

this is my project, you say

this little square of irrelevance

it means something to me

damn them all

this is mine



.

I see now the problem...

.



I see now the problem is that I am a complete ideologue when it comes to theatre: always fighting for a certain, extremely specific, way of making and thinking about performance. I can be fair and reasonable and believe there is room for everyone but in my heart and blood I know that I am right. And when you are an ideologue you can never really be open and you can never, not for a second, rest. Towards my own ideology I feel only like Bartleby: I would prefer not too. But twenty years of fighting have turned me inside out. I am exhausted. No one particularly cares how or why performances are made. And when I was young, no one advised me to pick my fights more carefully. Is this what being an artist, a certain kind of artist (I suppose), in some sense, finally means? Then again, like Ranciere says, how to open a window and let in some air?



.

Hospitality Three - Promotional Text

.



Raised on a steady diet of television, recorded music and the internet, people today sometimes feel more comfortable mesmerized by recordings, or interacting through the interface of a computer screen, than they do dealing directly with real human beings. Hospitality Three: Individualism Was A Mistake will not shy away from this discomfort (a discomfort present at any live performance), rather it will honestly address it in order to deepen our understanding of what it might be like to share space with a group of people one doesn’t necessarily know.

Using the temporary community of people gathered in a room together to watch a performance as a metaphor for the wider community-at-large, Hospitality Three will provide as series of evocative examples of people working together – effectively (and sometimes not so effectively) – giving special focus to the fact that our cultures over-emphasis on individualism often makes such ‘working together’ difficult.




.

Laura Calderon de la Barca and the Anthology of Optimism

.



Dear Laura Calderon de la Barca,

I am posting this because I have now twice tried to email you and have yet to hear back.

If you are out there please contact us. We are very curious.

Hope you are not offended by anything I have written below.

Optimistically yours,
Jacob


.......


And here is the post:

On January 16, 2008 I sent the following email to Pieter de Buyser, my collaborator on the Anthology of Optimism:


.......


Dear Pieter,

Today, when I was going through my blog to send someone the link about the Anthology of Optimism project:

http://radicalcut.blogspot.com/2007/02/towards-critical-optimism-preliminary.html

I scrolled down to the bottom and read the following comment by Laura Calderon de la Barca:


------------------------------------------------


Hi, Jacob!

I enojoyed very much sharing your exploration of what opens up inside of what Critical Optimism may be. I googled up the term as part of a websearch I am carrying out for a research project called "Cross-cultural 'Larrikins' in a Neo-Liberal World: Ideology and Myth in postmodern Australia, Mexico and Brazil". I first heard it the day I submitted my PhD thesis, which I wrote in the form of psychotherapeutic session for my country, Mexico, and which contains many elements that match with your reflections and ideas, although applied in different ways. My supervisor, Prof. Bob Hodge from the Univertisy of Western Sydney, suggested I join his wife, Dr. Gabriela Coronado, himself and someone else to start a group of "Critical Optimism Studies". I was delighted with the idea, and when I joined the Larrikin project as a full-time research assistant, one of my duties was to look up material for furthering this inquiry. In what you wrote there are many points of convergence with our project: the clarity about the damaging effects of Neoliberalism, the need to find other alternatives that are neither naive nor disempowering, the need to bring in reflexivity to the equation, and how identities get in the way of this, to name a few.

I am curious about the stories you might have to share on this, and if we can establish a space of sharing that may synergically propel this approach further. My e-mail is l.calderon@uws.edu.au, and I would love to hear from you.

All the best,
Laura Calderon de la Barca


------------------------------------------------


For some reason I think that this is really fantastic. It's almost like something out of a Borges story. Pieter and I think that we've invented the term "critical optimism" and then suddenly there’s a "Critical Optimism Studies" group and what's more it's in Australia. It's like we made it up but of course we couldn't have made it up because actually it already existed. And of course the name Laura Calderon de la Barca does sound just a little bit like that of a fictional character. (I realize this reading is more than a little solipsistic, I think really I'm just being fanciful) And then I very much wonder where it will lead.

And yes, then there is another point: the "Critical Optimism Studies" group is a real thing. There are so many things in the world that would give us a greater sense of belonging if only we knew where to find them.

Optimistically yours,
Jacob


.

PME-ART New Mandate

.



Through performances, installation, public process and theoretical and practical research, interdisciplinary group PME-ART confronts its contemporary practice via local, national and international artistic collaborations. Combining creation, exploration, critical reflection, dissemination and casual yet significant interactions with various publics, the work is an ongoing process of questioning the world, of finding the courage to say things about the current predicament that are direct and complex, of interrogating the performance situation.

Performing as ourselves, we create actions, conditions and speech executed with a singular intimacy and familiarity. This intimacy reduces the separation between performer and spectator, opening up a space for thinking, tension, reflection and confusion. Within this space we present meticulously prepared material in a manner that is open and loose, sliding the situation towards the unexpected, towards a sense of connection with whatever the audience brings.

Full of paradoxes and contradictions, the work is often destabilizing. Such destabilization is not only about art, but also echoes the social and personal discomfort so often encountered in daily life. We believe acknowledging uncomfortable realities, instead of pretending they are not there, is of fundamental importance for the development of critical approaches that are generous and unpredictable.

We are deeply engaged with the ethical and political challenges that arise when working collaboratively, searching for a delicate balance between the essential freedom of the performers (to create the thinking, physicality and substance of the work) and the rigour necessary to structure and gradually refine the material over the course of the process.

Drawing considerably upon literature, music, dance, visual art, critical theory, philosophy and cinema, such influences are never entirely direct, always infiltrating our practice from personal, unexpected angles.

While the style of the work may seem fragmented, and is in many ways a reflection of the fragmented times in which we live, simultaneously the work generates a deeply human experience with a foundation in basic yet ephemeral realities: people working together, dealing with the audience, simply trying to figure things out.




.

This isn’t the work we had meant to do

.



This isn’t the work we had meant to do
but it’s work nonetheless. Muscle. Struggle.
you land in the place and just start digging
vaguely remembering other, previous plans
or you dig to forget. Or to turn the head
of past regrets, so they once again face some
present sense of semi-fulfillment

This isn’t the work we had meant to do
but it has its pleasures and its surprises
its drawbacks and its pains
other roads might have been just as hard
or harder
and what does any of that matter now
this is the road you’re on
you can of course turn back
back towards indecision
towards that lost in aimless thought
and constant undecided self-recrimination
or you can forge ahead
and between these two options
as you continue to forcefully dig
there is no real choice
this isn’t what we had meant to do



.

As far as one’s thoughts about our present predicaments...

.



As far as one’s thoughts about our present predicaments or about the future, I have no difficulty understanding from whence the pessimism and cynicism springs. However, what’s critical for me is that regardless of one’s thoughts, one’s actions must be those of an optimist. Otherwise one is only further assuring that the status quo remains unchanged.

- John Gianvito



.

The idea that...

.



The idea that we know art is in many ways fundamentally reactionary and conservative but we still want to believe that art is radical and revolutionary and within the space of this paradox there is room for a lot to happen.



.

Towards A Critical Optimism: Preliminary Notes

.




Introduction: excerpt from an email dated June 22, 2006


I was drinking with Pieter de Buyser. It looks like I will also be doing a project here in Brussels with him. Don't think I ever told you about him but I met him in London about six years ago and he's been a fan of the work ever since. I've always thought of him as one of the happiest people I know. I am so fascinated by happy people. I always wonder: are they really happy or is their happiness just a cover for some even deeper pain. But in this it is likely I am only projecting.

Pieter was very attracted to this title "An Anthology of Optimism" that I've had kicking around for the past couple of years and he wants to find money to do something with it next year. Pieter is also one of the most optimistic people I have ever met so it seems somehow appropriate that this title, this project that is not really a project but so far only a title, has finally landed here in Brussels with him.

Towards this end, we have spent the past two days speaking about optimism and what it means. Pieter says we try to experience the world directly but this is impossible so we need optimism or pessimism as a gate through which we can view reality. [Note added later: Pieter doesn’t remember saying this and in fact completely disagrees with it. He says he does in fact want to try to experience reality directly and that it is actually possible.] Pieter then denied he was an optimist; he said an optimist believes he will win and a pessemist believes he will loose but he (Pieter) doesn't know whether he will win or loose, he simply goes forward and whatever happens will happen.

But I said I thought he was wrong, if you think you will win that doesn't neccessarily mean you are an optimist, it might only mean you are a winner. Winning and losing have nothing to do with optimism. Optimism is about making decisions about how one is going to act.

Richard (who is here with Sylvie) then said that if you don't take pleasure from life there is no reason to be an optimist, optimism has its foundation in an enjoyment of life, and when he said that I thought it really got to the heart of my problems with living. A dissatisfaction with pleasure, or how for me pleasure is always so deeply mixed with doubt.



Part One: Notes from our preliminary meetings dated January 12 – 26, 2007


Optimism is an attitude towards reality that affects ones actions.

We are talking about, searching for, an optimism that is also critical.

Is optimism also connected to desire?

A critical optimist has respect for the facts: both in knowing them and in the attempt to change things.

Optimism is predicated on the fact that things have to change.

Progress?

Can you be optimistic without being naïve?

You can’t have criticism without doubt.

Q: Is there such a thing as a sad optimist?
A: Yes. Optimism has nothing to do with mood.

Q: Do optimists have a natural advantage in competition? How do they feel about strategy?
A: A critical optimist doesn’t over-emphasize strategy but certainly doesn’t want to be stupid about things either.

What would it take to turn a pessimist into an optimist?

What angers me most about the current situation is that the first world takes its wealth directly off the backs of the third world and yet in general we pretend this is not the case. Or to put it another way: we still have slaves, we’ve just moved them overseas. But whereas before, when the slaves lived in our homes, there was at least a chance that one might treat them decently (if only because one wished to take care of one’s property and protect one’s financial investment), now, with the slaves safely out of sight and out of mind, we basically treat them like complete shit.

A pessimist says the glass is half empty. An optimist says the glass is half full. But a critical optimist says that of course the glass is simultaneously both half empty and half full and the most important thing is that we keep going and keep doing things.

Identity is the enemy of optimism.

An optimist is open to possibilities.

The kind of optimism we are talking about, searching for, arises from a need for optimism, from seeing that without some sort of optimism nothing is in fact possible.

Does an optimist want to take risks for the sake of taking risks?

The fact that air and water are still sometimes free is a deep pain in the hearts of capitalists everywhere.

Critical optimism is about resistance.

Perhaps instead of “critical optimism” we might try “dirty optimism.” Somehow more evocative.

We agree that the biggest problem facing the 21st century is capitalism, that capitalism is the source of most of the worlds problems. And the thing about capitalism is that it in fact contains a great deal of optimism. So maybe one way to fight optimism/capitalism is with some other paradigm of optimism.

How about “Anti-capitalist optimism.”

Critical optimism is an optimism that understands the extent to which we are all actually part of the problem.

Marcel Duchamp’s epitaph reads: « D’ailleurs c’est toujours les autres qui meurent. » (“By the way, it’s always the others who die.”) Which I suppose is in some ways strangely optimistic. Though, thinking about it further, it is probably more ironic than optimistic.

Today Pieter and I had kind of a funny idea. Since capitalism is also in many ways very optimistic, and we want to explore what kind of optimism might be able to work against capitalism, we were thinking about what we could do in the show that would actually feel like it pushed against capitalism. And we thought, very simply, that we could give the audience their money back. Then we thought maybe we could pool all the ticket money together and give it to the person in the audience who deserved it most. Maybe the entire audience could decide together who gets the money. Somehow this idea really feels like something to me, somehow crossing a line that you're not supposed to cross.

I think the three phrases I've been thinking of most in relation to the project are “Critical Optimism”, “Dirty Optimism” and “Anti-Capitalist Optimism.” And more and more I think I like the dirty one best.

Writing about the French Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville said that the most interesting and counter-intuitive aspect was that the revolution happened not when oppression was at it’s greatest, but when the aristocracy was starting to relax it’s strictures and freedom was in fact on the rise. Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile. The same thing happened in Russia leading up to the fall of the Berlin wall. Therefore, we must ask ourselves what might the signs be that capitalism is loosening it’s strictures on humanity. Such signs are exceedingly difficult to detect since capitalism thrives on constant change and it’s remarkable ability to absorb almost any innovation or shift. But what might it feel like if humanity were able to produce a series of innovations that capitalism could not absorb, a number of innovations that were essential but which it was impossible to profit from economically. What might such innovations actually be?

The ethical decisions we are capable of making are out of scale with the global breadth of the problem.

But optimism has little to do with your concrete situation and more to do with your attitude towards that situation.

Western depression has less to do with our comfort and guilt, and more to do with the way consumer culture robs us of the emotional requirements we most need.

If two police officers were to walk in here right now and arrest me and drag me off to jail, it would be very clear what we had to fight against. We have to get Jacob out of jail, artists should have to right to speak, etc. But what we have to fight against is so amorphous and ever-changing and undefined. And yet one of the reasons it’s so amorphous is because it’s so deeply intertwined with our own behavior and actions. So we have to fight ourselves but we don’t want to. And another way of saying we have to fight ourselves is that we have to change.

At the same time there are very concrete injustices that we can see very clearly. But the concrete injustices often don’t affect us directly.

Without the abstraction of money none of the problems we are talking about could exist.

Being optimistic enough to see the value of small changes.

It is important to differentiate between optimism and necessity.

Are there certain conditions that are particularly conducive for being an optimist. Specifically, a feeling that you are part of a community in which you feel a shared sense of values?

It is incredibly easy to confuse symptoms and causes.

In the long run, critical optimism will always lead you into connection with others. But critical optimism will also often place you in opposition.

Critical optimism leaves the vocabulary of friend and foe behind and prefers to speak of barricades, obstacles, problems and solutions.

A critical optimist accepts that barricades, obstacles and problems are also part of the community.

A box filled with glitter with a rope. And Jacob will say: for every pessimistic thought I have I will pull the rope and let the optimism, represented by glitter, rain down on my head.



First draft of the ‘Anthology of Optimism’ letter dated January 15, 2007


To be taken seriously today it often seems that one is supposed to be a pessimist and we contest this premise. (And not only because we want to be taken seriously.)

Most likely one of the reasons that such a generalized pessimism currently exists is because there are so many misunderstandings about optimism: that it is only naiveté or being in a good mood.

To correct such misunderstandings we propose the phrase “critical optimism” because it seems to us evident that no matter how bad things get we still require optimism in order to keep going.

Critical optimism is willing to look at the current situation with open eyes and rigorous analysis but is never willing to let such analysis fall into cynicism or be used as a pretext to give up trying.

Our anthology will collect a series of proposals as to what optimism might mean in the 21st century. We are requesting from you a proposal along these lines. This proposal can be anything: a photograph, a piece of music, an object, a short text, a drawing or painting, a film or video, or perhaps something we hadn’t even thought of yet.


[NOTE: Sent this short, rough text to my friend K.G. and she wrote back: who are you and what have you done with Jacob the dark, brooding, defeatist man that I know and love?!]




Third draft of the ‘Anthology of Optimism’ letter dated January 24, 2007


A request for your personal contribution to our Anthology of Optimism.

An Anthology of Optimism is a pre-emptive celebration of a critical optimism we tentatively hope will increase in the twenty-first century. If it exists already, such critical optimism has so far remained relatively marginal. With our anthology we hope to spur its further development and acceptance.

If we look around today, we might notice that pessimism is frequently the unspoken assumption: if you are a pessimist you seem consequent, if you are an optimist you seem naive. Of course the main reason for this generalized pessimism is because reality seems almost to demand it, because it speaks to the facts so directly. However, we believe a secondary reason is because there are so many misunderstandings about what optimism might mean: that it represents only naiveté or being in a good mood.

Critical optimism attempts to correct such misunderstandings because it seems evident to us that, no matter how bad things get, we still require some sort of optimism in order to keep going. The critical optimist doesn’t ask why we should keep going. For the time being, life remains an ongoing concern. The most immediate possibility is to develop the attitude with which we want to live and use this attitude to fuel our resistance.

Critical optimism is willing to look at the current situation with open eyes and rigorous analysis but is never willing to let this analysis fall into cynicism or be used as a pre-text to give up trying. It is an optimism that understands the degree to which we are all part of the problem, but nonetheless believes there is always something that can be done. No system is omnipotent or absolute and therefore there is always some room for improvement.

Critical optimism is never just hoping that you get what you want because, though the extent of the involvement of love in optimism cannot be measured, it is certain that one is never an optimist purely out of egoism. With our anthology we intend to explore the full spectrum of possibilities for optimism: from our intimate personal relationships all the way to global political realities.

The purpose of this letter is to request a proposal from you. We would very much appreciate it if your proposal reflected a consequent, considered and personal contribution to the question of what optimism might mean in the twenty-first century. This proposal can be absolutely anything: a photograph, a piece of music, an object, a short text, a drawing or painting, a film or video, or perhaps something we haven’t even thought of yet.

We are sending this request to people we think can give a valuable contribution to this question from a variety of fields and points of view. We will use these proposals in a performance entitled An Anthology of Optimism.

We kindly thank you for taking the time to read this letter and very much hope you will lend a small amount of your time and wisdom to our undertaking.




.

One Year and a Day

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I have now been doing this blog for one year and a day. In the beginning I posted quite contentiously every Monday. However, more recently I have posted only occasionally and quite often not at all. What started as a fun idea has slowly graduated into a confusing chore. More precisely, I have become quite self-conscious about the relative merits of any given post. On several occasions it has been brought to my attention that the general tone of my postings is consderably bleak. Of course, I already knew my writing was bleak but there is something very specific about the process of a blog – the assumption of a diaristic/autobiographical tone, the near-instantaneous distribution into the void, the readership of friends and acquaintances who perhaps read into these musings aspects simply never (or only barely) intended – that makes me aware of this bleakness in a different light. There is a rather famous art work by John Baldessari where he wrote “I will make no more boring art” on a chalk board over and over again, like a student kept late after class, and I suspect I should undergo a similar exercise with the phrase “I will make no more depressing art.” It is this fear of posting something too bleak and dispiriting that most often keeps me from posting: a strangely specific form of self-censorship. (If E.M. Cioran had done the same he might have written nothing.)

In the current issue of Artforum, in an article about the queer collective LTTR written by Julia Bryan-Wilson, the following passage caught my attention: “Lauren Berlant, a professor at the University of Chicago, has recently proposed that negativity and depression could be politically necessary responses to the disenfranchised character of our contemporary age. Yet during an era of real despair, a time marked by hatred of all types of difference, we also need these localized moments of pleasure and unsecured possibility, moments motored not only by passion but also a willingness to fail.” It is the first part of the quote that I originally focused on, that “negativity and depression could be politically necessary responses to the disenfranchised character of our contemporary age.” And yes, as the post-Sept 11th debacle – the ever-sharpening acuity of the proto-fascist, globalized now – continues to increase, my ability to look on the bright side of things (never my strongest suit to begin with) continues to apathetically drain away into not even the image of embers. Yet as I copied this quotation into my blue notebook the second part also seemed strangely relevant, that: “we need […] moments of pleasure and unsecured possibility, moments motored not only by passion but also a willingness to fail.” Passion and a willingness to fail, the connection between them at first seemingly slight but with further consideration it grows stronger. To enter into an endeavor in which success seems likely or guaranteed requires no passion. Only under threat of failure, only under the strictures of such risk, is ones passion required to push through the limitations and break through the fear.


[P.S. For the next year, as a small challenge to myself, I will attempt to post one passionate, engaged, non-depressing text on the first Monday of every month. This proposed year of anti-depressing texts will begin on Monday October 2nd.]



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Appetite and fear are inextricably connected...

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Appetite and fear are inextricably connected; and all creatures are endangered by the fundamental project of meeting their needs. But the human creature meets his needs, in both senses; unlike every other animal. He must meet his needs in order to survive, and over time, he will have to become acquainted, too, with what he will learn to call his needs. And what he will meet, unlike any other animal, is the exorbitance, the hubris of his appetites. Indeed the stories he will be told about his appetite – explicitly in words, and implicitly in the way his appetite is responded to by other people – is that it is, at least potentially, way in excess of any object’s capacity to satisfy. He will be told, in short, that he is by nature greedy. He will discover, whether or not this is quite his experience, that he apparently always wants more than he can have; that his appetite, the lifeline that is his nature, that is at once so intimate and so obscure to him, can in the end drive him mad. He may be sane, but his appetite is not. This is what it is to be a human being; to be, at least at the outset, too demanding.

Satisfactions are of course possible but disappointment and disillusionment are unavoidable. At best one can develop a bearable sense of one’s limitations; at worst one is driven mad. Given one’s appetite – given the ways we have inherited of describing it – one becomes realistic, or one lives in the no man’s land of the tantrum and the grudge. To talk about appetite, in other words, is to talk about whatever it is that we have to complain about.

– Adam Phillips, Going Sane, p 101-102



All the new thinking, like all the old thinking, agrees that there is something catastrophic about being a person. The catastrophe is located in various places; in our being born at all, in our being condemned to death; in our vulnerability as organisms, or in our cruel injustices as political animals; in the scarcity of our natural resources, or in our greedy depredation of them; in our Fall, or in our hubris. But all these catastrophes, one way or another, are linked to our appetites, as creatures who want, and who are driven by, what is at once necessary and missing from our lives. Our wants may be ‘constructed’ – given form by the language available in the culture – but that we want is not in doubt. It is whether our wanting has catastrophe built into it - whether our wanting is such that ruinous frustration or ruinous aggression is inevitable; or is indeed a necessity to keep wanting on the go – or whether our wanting is made unbearable only by the ways in which it is responded to, that is now in question. The language of sanity and madness provides a vocabulary for asking and answering questions about appetite.

– Adam Phillips, Going Sane, p 120-121



The sane adult is protective – and not only of children, but of himself and others – in a way that avoids covertly undermining the strengths of those who are apparently in need of protection (‘The friends of the born nurse / Are always getting worse,’ as W.H. Auden wrote). The sane adult assumes that it is possible for people to get pleasure from who they happen to be, and that part of this pleasure is bound up with versions of self-reliance that are not merely a more or less bitter denial of a need for other people. The two most dispiriting forms of modern relationship are the protection racket and the sadomasochistic contract in which, respectively, one person’s strength depends on the other person’s weakness, or one person’s pleasure depends upon the other person’s suffering. The sane person’s project is to find more appealing ways of being weak and strong; or to find alternative pleasures to the pleasures of power and of helplessness. The way most people are prone to see what they call human nature now makes even the thought of alternative forms of pleasure and excitement sound hopelessly naïve. It would be part of the sane person’s sanity to want new forms of pleasure in which neither one’s kindness nor one’s excitement are overly compromised (one emblem of this might be those gay men who experiment in coming without getting an erection). The sane person knows that being able to only be a nice person is the death of sexual excitement; and that being able to only be nasty is too isolating.

– Adam Phillips, Going Sane, p 234-235



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From such frustrations...

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From such frustrations no clear thought will come. Step back, a few steps or a few miles, start slowly, gradually discover the slight, frail moments in which it is possible to pretend it is once again possible to glimpse a few precise aspects as if for the first time. Over time resentments build, one can no longer tell the thing from its distortions. And what's more, the thing slowly becomes the distortions, envelops and integrates them: one big, tangled up, fused together mess. Do not, at first, attempt to untangle. Step back, wait, perhaps over time the taste of a pattern might emerge. And patterns, even imagined ones, so often lend clarity. Step back.



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Note From The Recent Past

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[Lisbon, July 8 2006]

"Those who have never experienced the pleasure of betrayal do not know what true pleasure is." - Jean Genet

In the most beautiful city in the world I experienced the strangest emptiness. It was normal and familliar, but so deeply and consistantly unnerving I was almost on the verge of tears. I felt like a smashed bottle someone was trying to tape back together again. And I also felt like the tape.



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We never tried to force it.

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We never tried to force it.

We understood that time was the remedy for our dilemmas, time and thought, not ingenuity or revelation.

We didn’t know what we wanted. But we knew we must remain criminal.

Our cynicism was always mixed with an almost equal dose of naiveté.



[Paris, 2006]



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My philosophy is fundamentally sad, but I’m not a sad man...

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My philosophy is fundamentally sad, but I’m not a sad man, and I don’t believe I sadden anyone else. In other words, the fact that I don’t put my philosophy into practice saves me from its evil spell, or, rather, my faith in the human race is stronger then my intellectual analysis of it; there lies the fountain of youth in which my heart is continually bathing.

– Juan de Mairena as written by Antonio Machado



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And what did it mean...

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And what did it mean that we felt no true sense of direction, that we were aimless, paralyzed, confused and at the end of the day could not really say why. That we were not criminals of action but only criminals of thought. That we hungered for something new but when we saw something new felt sure it was only the same old thing we’d seen so many times before. That in the morning we waited for evening and in the evening we waited for night. That travel sounded good but staying home sounded even better. That books were written, and re-written, and re-written again, but it was so very difficult to find anyone to actually read them. That the war most certainly continued though it was often no longer possible to read about it in the papers. What did it mean that a crime could be committed and no one could care less. Or that we would pretend to care but essentially fool no one. Profit is difficult to maintain. Sensationalism still works whether or not one can easily see through it. A vague sense of menace hangs stilted in the air. The world we wanted was a world only able to change so much.


[Berlin, 2006]



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As is generally known, the figure of the art critic...

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As is generally known, the figure of the art critic emerges at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, alongside the gradual rise of a broad, democratic public. At that time, he was certainly not regarded as a representative of the art world but strictly as an outside observer whose function was to judge and criticize works of art in the name of the public exactly as would any other well-educated observer with the time and literary facility: good taste was seen as the expression of an aesthetic “common sense.” The art critic’s judgement should be incorruptible, i.e. bear no obligation to the artist. For a critic to give up his distance meant being corrupted by the art world and neglecting his professional responsibilities: this demand for disinterested art criticism in the name of the public sphere is the assertion of Kant’s third critique, the first aesthetic treatise of modernity.

The judicial ideal, however, was betrayed by the art criticism of the historical avant-garde. The art of the avant-garde consciously withdrew itself from the judgement of the public. It did not address the public as it was but instead spoke to a new humanity as it should – or at least could – be. The art of the avant-garde presupposed a different, new humanity for its reception – one that would be able to grasp the hidden meaning of pure colour and form (Kandinsky), to subject its imagination and even its daily life to the strict laws of geometry (Malevich, Mondrian, the Constructivists, Bauhaus), to recognize a urinal as a work of art (Duchamp). The avant-garde thus introduced a rupture in society not reducible to any previously existing social differences.

The new, artificial difference is the true artwork of the avant-garde. Now it is not the observer who judges the artwork, but the artwork that judges – and often condemns – it’s public. This strategy has often been called elitist, but it suggests an elite equally open to anyone in so far as it excludes everyone to the same degree. To be chosen doesn’t automatically mean dominance, even mastery. Every individual is free to place himself, against the rest of the public, on the side of the artwork – to number himself among those constituting the new humanity. Several art critics of the historical avant-garde did just that. In place of the critic in the name of society arose social critique in the name of art: the artwork doesn’t form the object of judgement but is instead taken as the point of departure for a critique aimed at society and the world.

The art critic of today inherited the older public office along with the avant-garde betrayal of this office. The paradoxical task of judging art in the name of the public while criticizing society in the name of art opens a deep rift within the discourse of contemporary criticism. And one can read today’s discourse as an attempt to bridge, or at least conceal, this divide. For example, there is the critic’s demand that art thematize existing social differences and position itself against the illusion of cultural homogeneity. That certainly sounds very avant-garde, but what one forgets is that the avant-garde didn’t thematize already-existing differences but introduced previously nonexistent ones. The public was equally bewildered in the face of Malevich’s Suprematism or that of Duchamp’s Dadaism, and it is this generalized nonunderstanding – bewilderment regardless of class, race, or gender – that is actually the democratic moment of the various avant-garde projects.

– Boris Groys



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I am currently reading Secret Publicity by Netherlands art critic Sven Lutticken...

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I am currently reading Secret Publicity by Netherlands art critic Sven Lutticken. There are many relevant quotes but here are one or two from his essay on performance:

"The conclusion from this can only be that performance art has never been a real threat to the spectacle: its integration into spectacle as media performance comes as no surprise. Yet if performance artists were to radicalize the anti-production tradition, if they were to really roll up their sleeves and take the fight against reproduction seriously - couldn't this result in a form of performance that was incompatible with capitalism? This line of reasoning rests on the assumption that 'the media' are virtually identical with advanced capitalism. Yet following Guy Debord, one can argue that the spectacular character of the capitalist economy is not primarily located in media like film, photography and video, but in commodity fetishism: commodities seem to maintain whimsical 'social' relations due to their exchange value. In the process the commodities become images, hieroglyphic representations of the relations in human society. This primary spectacle of commodities-become-images is thus the prevailing social condition, which is reflected in 'the media' in the form of a secondary spectacle of images-become-commodities, which reinforces the primary spectacle. To get rid of the society of the spectacle, it is hence not enough to get rid of 'the media'; the whole of society must be revolutionized."

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"In recent years it has become more and more obvious that the spectacle has taken a 'performative turn'. Typical of the neo-liberal performance culture is the TV programme in which a mediagenic entrepreneur like Donald Trump selects a new appointee from candidates who must perform themselves in a way that will win them a highly-paid job. The spectacle of the Situationists, which involved a distinction between a dreamlike theatre of commodities and the passive consumer, has been succeeded by a participatory, performative spectacle. Thus we have entered a phase that the Situationists themselves failed to forsee: in spite of the fact that commodities need not be objects, immaterial commodities such as services were somewhat neglected by Marxist theory, including that of SI, and the transformation of anonymous services into personalized performances is a development that was not seen or forseen by the Situationists.

The primary immaterial commodity in Marxist theory was labour power: a statistical average of the amount of labour needed to produce a certain industrial commodity, which is responsible for the exchange value of goods (contrary to the fetishist illusion that they obtain value through mutual relations). In principle, this theory of labour power can also be applied to many services that do not depend on a performer. Services too are commoodities in which labour has been invested, and in most cases the worker will be paid a wage that represents an abstraction - the amount of labour normally needed to do the job. Today, however, it seems increasingly difficult to base the value of goods on this statistical average - plus the surplus value, which the employer pockets. In the contemporary economy, value has spun completely out of control. A trendy cup of coffee may cost a small fortune because it represents an 'experience', a top manager can take home an absurdly inflated bonus because he is a unique performer: he sells a habitus with capabilities and personal qualities that are supposedly unique. The value of such performers and their performances can no longer be measured in abstract labour power. If object-commodities become images in classical spectacle, in the performative spectacle the service too turns into an image. Of course, this does not mean that the other, anonymous service jobs no longer exist, but increasingly the performative colonizes labour: even in jobs where wages are standardized (and low), the worker is expected to put his or her unique charms and qualities into the job if he or she wants to keep it. As anonymous services become performances, even abstract labour power has to be enacted in a personalized way by individual performers. This turns not only performance into a commodity, but ultimately the performer as well."

[...]

"The loose way in which contemporary critics and theorists use the notion of the performative owes much of its charm to the magical, animistic suggestion it imparts. In a culture of the performative imperative, the notion of performativity (or at least its sound-bite version) suggests a world that is infinitely malleable. If everything is performative, everything is open to influence and transformation. Performative language becomes the thinking person's magic: if contemporary society often seems to correspond to the grim picture Adorno painted of modernity as irrational and constraining as the most primitive stages of civilization, the performative alleviates this by reenacting the over-estimation of the mind's power which authors such as Tylor, Frazer and Freud considered to be typical for the earliest stages of civilization: magic as an oneric attempt at controlling a hostile environment. The transformation of the performative into magic is signalled by the refusal to investigate the conditions under which an action or speech act may be truly performative; it is nicer to dream of being a heroic performer like Beuys, than to acknowledge that one is an actor is someone else's spectacle. The first step towards preventing the further degeneration of performativity discourse into sham progressiveness is to acknowledge the conditions of the performative spectacle, which also means acknowledging that Tino Sehgal is not that radically different from Matthew Barney, or Donald Trump."



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I feel that man should not have thrown himself into this amazing adventure that is history...

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"I feel that man should not have thrown himself into this amazing adventure that is history. Everything that he does turns against him because he wasn’t made to do something, he was made solely to look and to live as the animals and the trees do."

– E.M. Cioran


"I fear the animals regard man as a creature of their own kind which has in a highly dangerous fashion lost its healthy animal reason – as the mad animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal."

– Friedrich Nietzsche



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Every impulse of renovation, at the very moment when it approaches its goal...

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"Every impulse of renovation, at the very moment when it approaches its goal, when it realizes itself through the State, creeps towards the automatism of the old institutions and assumes the face of tradition. As it defines and confirms itself, it loses energy, and this is also true of ideas: the more formulated and explicit they are, the more their efficacy diminishes. A distinct idea is an idea without a future. Beyond their virtual status, thought and action degrade and annul themselves: one ends up as system, the other as power: two forms of sterility and failure. Though we can endlessly debate the destiny of revolutions, political or otherwise, a single feature is common to them all, a single certainty: the disappointment they generate in all who have believed in them with some fervor."

– E.M. Cioran



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Nicholas Mosley quote

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"I think I must always have had the feeling (as apart from conscious idea) that words were things that, if one was to do anything worth-while with them, would be very difficult. I suppose one of the key things here might be that I stammered – when young, stammered badly – I often forget about this now, because although I still stammer a bit it's almost completely stopped worrying me. But it was hell as a child: and I suppose it put me into an odd relationship with words. They could not just be trotted out, that is: they had to be worked on. But more than this – Deep in a stammerer's psyche I think there is an unconscious outrage at the way that people use words – at the way that one is expected to use words – there is a pretence that one is using them for communication, whereas in fact people are protecting themselves, attacking others, etc., etc.; and they will not admit this. And the stammerer feels something of this (however unconscious) and in himself goes into confusion."

– Nicholas Mosley



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