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Loneliness must be recruited in the fight against capitalism.
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April 9, 2009
March 23, 2009
the art market is an extreme example of what Marx termed commodity fetishism...
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Every exhibition tells a story, by directing the viewer through the exhibition in a particular order: the exhibition space is always a narrative space. The traditional art museum told the story of art’s emergence and subsequent victory. Individual artworks chronicled this story – and in doing so they lost their old religious or representative significance and gained new meaning. Once the museum emerged as the new place of worship, artists began to work specifically for the museum: Historically significant objects no longer needed to be devalued in order to serve as art. Instead, brand new, profane objects signed up to be recognized as artworks because they allegedly embodied artistic value. These objects didn’t have a prehistory; they had never been legitimized by religion or power. At most they could be regarded as signs of a “simple, everyday life” with indeterminate value. Thus their inscription into art history meant valorization for these objects, not devaluation. And so museums were transformed from places of enlightenment-inspired iconoclasm into places of a romantic iconophilia. Exhibiting an object as art no longer signified its profanation, but its consecration. Duchamp simply took this turn to its final conclusion when he laid bare the iconophilic mechanism of glorification of mere things by labeling them works of art.
Over the years modern artists began to assert the total autonomy of art – and not just from its sacred prehistory, but from art history as well – because every integration of an image into a story, every appropriation of it as illustration for a particular narrative, is iconoclastic, even if the story is that of a triumph of this image, its transfiguration, or its glorification. According to the tradition of modern art, an image must speak for itself; it must immediately convince the spectator, standing in silent contemplation, of its own value. The conditions in which the work is exhibited should be reduced to white walls and good lighting. Theoretical and narrative discourse is a distraction, and must stop. Even affirmative discourse and favorable display were regarded as distorting the message of the artwork itself. As a result: Even after Duchamp the act of exhibiting an object as an artwork remained ambivalent, that is, partially iconophile, partially iconoclastic.
The curator can’t but place, contextualize, and narrativize works of art – which necessarily leads to their relativization. Thus modern artists began to condemn curators, because the figure of the curator was perceived as the embodiment of the dark, dangerous side of the exhibiting practice, as the destructive doppelganger of the artist who creates art by exhibiting it: the museums were regularly compared to graveyards, and curators to undertakers. With these insults (disguised as institutional critique) artists won the general public over to their side, because the general public didn’t know all the art history; it didn’t even want to hear it. The public wishes to be confronted directly with individual artworks and exposed to their unmediated impact. The general public steadfastly believes in the autonomous meaning of the individual artwork, which is supposedly being manifested in front of its eyes. The curator’s every mediation is suspect; he is seen as someone standing between the artwork and its viewer, insidiously manipulating the viewer’s perception with the intent of disempowering the public. This is why, for the general public, the art market is more enjoyable than any museum. Artworks circulating on the market are singled out, decontextualized, uncurated – so that they have the apparently unadulterated chance to demonstrate their inherent value. Consequently the art market is an extreme example of what Marx termed commodity fetishism, meaning a belief in the inherent value of an object, in value being one of its intrinsic qualities. Thus began a time of degradation and distress for curators – the time of modern art. Curators have managed their degradation surprisingly well, though, by successfully internalizing it.
– Boris Groys
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Every exhibition tells a story, by directing the viewer through the exhibition in a particular order: the exhibition space is always a narrative space. The traditional art museum told the story of art’s emergence and subsequent victory. Individual artworks chronicled this story – and in doing so they lost their old religious or representative significance and gained new meaning. Once the museum emerged as the new place of worship, artists began to work specifically for the museum: Historically significant objects no longer needed to be devalued in order to serve as art. Instead, brand new, profane objects signed up to be recognized as artworks because they allegedly embodied artistic value. These objects didn’t have a prehistory; they had never been legitimized by religion or power. At most they could be regarded as signs of a “simple, everyday life” with indeterminate value. Thus their inscription into art history meant valorization for these objects, not devaluation. And so museums were transformed from places of enlightenment-inspired iconoclasm into places of a romantic iconophilia. Exhibiting an object as art no longer signified its profanation, but its consecration. Duchamp simply took this turn to its final conclusion when he laid bare the iconophilic mechanism of glorification of mere things by labeling them works of art.
Over the years modern artists began to assert the total autonomy of art – and not just from its sacred prehistory, but from art history as well – because every integration of an image into a story, every appropriation of it as illustration for a particular narrative, is iconoclastic, even if the story is that of a triumph of this image, its transfiguration, or its glorification. According to the tradition of modern art, an image must speak for itself; it must immediately convince the spectator, standing in silent contemplation, of its own value. The conditions in which the work is exhibited should be reduced to white walls and good lighting. Theoretical and narrative discourse is a distraction, and must stop. Even affirmative discourse and favorable display were regarded as distorting the message of the artwork itself. As a result: Even after Duchamp the act of exhibiting an object as an artwork remained ambivalent, that is, partially iconophile, partially iconoclastic.
The curator can’t but place, contextualize, and narrativize works of art – which necessarily leads to their relativization. Thus modern artists began to condemn curators, because the figure of the curator was perceived as the embodiment of the dark, dangerous side of the exhibiting practice, as the destructive doppelganger of the artist who creates art by exhibiting it: the museums were regularly compared to graveyards, and curators to undertakers. With these insults (disguised as institutional critique) artists won the general public over to their side, because the general public didn’t know all the art history; it didn’t even want to hear it. The public wishes to be confronted directly with individual artworks and exposed to their unmediated impact. The general public steadfastly believes in the autonomous meaning of the individual artwork, which is supposedly being manifested in front of its eyes. The curator’s every mediation is suspect; he is seen as someone standing between the artwork and its viewer, insidiously manipulating the viewer’s perception with the intent of disempowering the public. This is why, for the general public, the art market is more enjoyable than any museum. Artworks circulating on the market are singled out, decontextualized, uncurated – so that they have the apparently unadulterated chance to demonstrate their inherent value. Consequently the art market is an extreme example of what Marx termed commodity fetishism, meaning a belief in the inherent value of an object, in value being one of its intrinsic qualities. Thus began a time of degradation and distress for curators – the time of modern art. Curators have managed their degradation surprisingly well, though, by successfully internalizing it.
– Boris Groys
.
March 12, 2009
Writing in Spanish
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Roberto Arlt (Argentina) - The Seven Madmen
Juan Carlos Onetti (Uruguay) - Let the Wind Speak
Ricardo Piglia (Argentina) - Artificial Respiration
César Aira (Argentina) - An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter
Horacio Castellanos Moya (Honduras) - Senselessness
Alvaro Mutis (Columbia / Mexico) - The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll
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Roberto Arlt (Argentina) - The Seven Madmen
Juan Carlos Onetti (Uruguay) - Let the Wind Speak
Ricardo Piglia (Argentina) - Artificial Respiration
César Aira (Argentina) - An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter
Horacio Castellanos Moya (Honduras) - Senselessness
Alvaro Mutis (Columbia / Mexico) - The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll
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March 11, 2009
graceful and ridiculous, lecherous and angelic, happily lost
.
I remember my walk from the Solar to the movie theatre where Land in Anguish was playing. It must be said that I found the film even more uneven than Black God, White Devil. [Both films by Glauber Rocha.] The lamentations of the main character – a left-wing poet torn apart by conflicting ambitions to achieve the “absolute” and social justice – were at times frankly sub-literary. In addition, certain intolerable conventional shortcomings of Brazilian cinema – high society parties staged unconvincingly, female extras encouraged by directors to enact deplorable provincial caricatures of sexy glamour, an overall lack of narrative clarity – these were all in painful evidence (though less intensely.) Yet as in Glauber’s previous films and a great many other Cinema Novo productions, suggestions of a different vision of life, of Brazil, of cinema, seemed to explode on the screen, overwhelming my reservations. The poet-protagonist offered a bitter, realistic vision of politics – in flagrant contrast to the naïveté of his companions – as he resisted the recently imposed military dictatorship. The film stages the moment of the coup d’état as a nightmare he has at the moment of his death: a confusing spectacle evoking at once Buñuel’s La fièvre monte à El Pao (Republic of Sin), mixed with some of the bad habits of the New Wave and strokes of Fellini’s 8 ½. But that chaos contributed to the parodic force of the film. And the effect was not entirely a disservice to the character, even though his desperate attempts at maintaining a critical perspective on his political objectives while sustaining the will to carry them out – the kind of dilemma that would lead so many to madness, mysticism, or the trenches of the opposition – lead, rather gratuitously, to his death. It is touching to think, today, how such a series of events might provide, with slight variations, a succinct biography of Glauber himself.
The film was naturally not a box-office success, but it scandalized the intellectuals and artists of the Carioca Left. Some in the audience – leaders of politically engaged theatre – jeered as the lights came up. One scene in particular shocked them: During a mass demonstration the poet, who is among those making speeches, calls forward a unionized worker and, to show how unprepared the worker is to fight for his rights, violently covers his mouth, shouting at the others (and at the audience), “This is the people! Idiots, illiterate, no politics!” Then a poor wretch, representing unorganized poverty, appears from among the crowd trying to speak, only to be silenced by the point of a gun stuck in his mouth by one of the candidate’s bodyguards. This indelible image is reiterated in long close-ups.
I experienced that scene – and the indignant, heated discussions that it provoked in bars – as the nucleus of a great event whose brief name I now possess but did not know then (I would try to name it a thousand ways for myself and for other people): the death of populism. There is no doubt that populist demagogues are sumptuously ridiculed in the film: they are seen holding crucifixes and flags in open cars against the sky above the Aterro do Flamengo, a wide modern road by the sea, lined with landscaped gardens. There they are in their gaudy mansions, celebrating the solemn rites of the church and Carnival that touch the heart of the masses, and so forth. But it was their essential faith in the popular forces – and the very respect that the best souls invested in the poor man – that here was discarded as a political weapon and an ethical value in itself. It was a hecatomb that I was facing. And I was excited by the prospect of examining what drove it and anticipating its consequences. Tropicalismo would have never have come into being but for that traumatic moment.
This assault on traditional left-wing populism liberated one to see Brazil squarely from a broader perspective, enabling new and undreamt-of critiques of an anthropological, mythic, mystical, formalist, and moral nature. If the scene of the poet and the worker that incensed the communists charmed me with its courage, it is because the images that came before and after it were trying to reveal something about our condition and ask questions about our destiny. A great cross on the beach overshadows a gathering of politicos, transvestites dressed to the nines for a ball, and Carnival Indians; one feels the presence of the grotesque and with it the revelation of an island always newly discovered and always hidden – Brazil. Among the multitude at the rally, a little old man is dancing samba, graceful and ridiculous, lecherous and angelic, happily lost – the Brazilian people captured in a paradox. One does not know whether they are meant to seem despairing or suggestive; political decisions are discussed on cement patios with black lines dividing the floor, asserting a denial of the comings and goings of the characters. The camera weaves among groups of four, five, six restless agitators, who express disagreement over tactics through their body language, all shot in black and white with enormous areas of light threatened by ominous, looming shadows. It was a political dramaturgy different from the usual reduction of everything to a stereotype of class struggle. Above all, here was the rhetoric and the poetics of post-1964 Brazilian life: a deep scream of pain and impotent rebellion, but also an updated vision, nearly prophetic, of our real possibilities to be and to feel.
– Caetano Veloso, from Tropical Truth: A Story of Music & Revolution In Brazil
.
I remember my walk from the Solar to the movie theatre where Land in Anguish was playing. It must be said that I found the film even more uneven than Black God, White Devil. [Both films by Glauber Rocha.] The lamentations of the main character – a left-wing poet torn apart by conflicting ambitions to achieve the “absolute” and social justice – were at times frankly sub-literary. In addition, certain intolerable conventional shortcomings of Brazilian cinema – high society parties staged unconvincingly, female extras encouraged by directors to enact deplorable provincial caricatures of sexy glamour, an overall lack of narrative clarity – these were all in painful evidence (though less intensely.) Yet as in Glauber’s previous films and a great many other Cinema Novo productions, suggestions of a different vision of life, of Brazil, of cinema, seemed to explode on the screen, overwhelming my reservations. The poet-protagonist offered a bitter, realistic vision of politics – in flagrant contrast to the naïveté of his companions – as he resisted the recently imposed military dictatorship. The film stages the moment of the coup d’état as a nightmare he has at the moment of his death: a confusing spectacle evoking at once Buñuel’s La fièvre monte à El Pao (Republic of Sin), mixed with some of the bad habits of the New Wave and strokes of Fellini’s 8 ½. But that chaos contributed to the parodic force of the film. And the effect was not entirely a disservice to the character, even though his desperate attempts at maintaining a critical perspective on his political objectives while sustaining the will to carry them out – the kind of dilemma that would lead so many to madness, mysticism, or the trenches of the opposition – lead, rather gratuitously, to his death. It is touching to think, today, how such a series of events might provide, with slight variations, a succinct biography of Glauber himself.
The film was naturally not a box-office success, but it scandalized the intellectuals and artists of the Carioca Left. Some in the audience – leaders of politically engaged theatre – jeered as the lights came up. One scene in particular shocked them: During a mass demonstration the poet, who is among those making speeches, calls forward a unionized worker and, to show how unprepared the worker is to fight for his rights, violently covers his mouth, shouting at the others (and at the audience), “This is the people! Idiots, illiterate, no politics!” Then a poor wretch, representing unorganized poverty, appears from among the crowd trying to speak, only to be silenced by the point of a gun stuck in his mouth by one of the candidate’s bodyguards. This indelible image is reiterated in long close-ups.
I experienced that scene – and the indignant, heated discussions that it provoked in bars – as the nucleus of a great event whose brief name I now possess but did not know then (I would try to name it a thousand ways for myself and for other people): the death of populism. There is no doubt that populist demagogues are sumptuously ridiculed in the film: they are seen holding crucifixes and flags in open cars against the sky above the Aterro do Flamengo, a wide modern road by the sea, lined with landscaped gardens. There they are in their gaudy mansions, celebrating the solemn rites of the church and Carnival that touch the heart of the masses, and so forth. But it was their essential faith in the popular forces – and the very respect that the best souls invested in the poor man – that here was discarded as a political weapon and an ethical value in itself. It was a hecatomb that I was facing. And I was excited by the prospect of examining what drove it and anticipating its consequences. Tropicalismo would have never have come into being but for that traumatic moment.
This assault on traditional left-wing populism liberated one to see Brazil squarely from a broader perspective, enabling new and undreamt-of critiques of an anthropological, mythic, mystical, formalist, and moral nature. If the scene of the poet and the worker that incensed the communists charmed me with its courage, it is because the images that came before and after it were trying to reveal something about our condition and ask questions about our destiny. A great cross on the beach overshadows a gathering of politicos, transvestites dressed to the nines for a ball, and Carnival Indians; one feels the presence of the grotesque and with it the revelation of an island always newly discovered and always hidden – Brazil. Among the multitude at the rally, a little old man is dancing samba, graceful and ridiculous, lecherous and angelic, happily lost – the Brazilian people captured in a paradox. One does not know whether they are meant to seem despairing or suggestive; political decisions are discussed on cement patios with black lines dividing the floor, asserting a denial of the comings and goings of the characters. The camera weaves among groups of four, five, six restless agitators, who express disagreement over tactics through their body language, all shot in black and white with enormous areas of light threatened by ominous, looming shadows. It was a political dramaturgy different from the usual reduction of everything to a stereotype of class struggle. Above all, here was the rhetoric and the poetics of post-1964 Brazilian life: a deep scream of pain and impotent rebellion, but also an updated vision, nearly prophetic, of our real possibilities to be and to feel.
– Caetano Veloso, from Tropical Truth: A Story of Music & Revolution In Brazil
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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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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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March 9, 2009
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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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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March 2, 2009
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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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
.
February 23, 2009
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
.
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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February 20, 2009
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
.
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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February 16, 2009
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
.
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
.
February 11, 2009
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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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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February 10, 2009
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".
.
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".
.
February 5, 2009
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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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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January 27, 2009
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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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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January 17, 2009
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.”
.
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.”
.
January 16, 2009
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.)
.
“[...] 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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January 15, 2009
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.
.
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.
.
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.)
.
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.)
.
January 14, 2009
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.]
.
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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