.
Down in Atlantis the curator showed me around the space, gesturing to invisible artworks that will soon be expensively shipped from far away to fill the room. I am the least famous and the least rich and the least well paid artist; I am paid partly in the fame of other artists. I am paid pyrrhically in the currency of my desire to be seen on my terms. My desire has almost as many social claims and credit operations on it as a straight man’s sexuality; both are supposed to justify the movements of capital that provide the basic infrastructure of contemporary art. Overdetermined, my art-making suffers the fate of all socially appointed agents of desire; it becomes intermittently impotent, and terrorized by the threat of its own softness.
- Hannah Black, Dark Pool Party
.
April 28, 2016
April 24, 2016
Hannah Black Quote
.
From Los Angeles I write, “Perhaps getting to know a person is like getting to know a city.” The plate glass windows of downtown, the way you are with your friends; the dull suburbs of a half-hidden unhappiness. On the East Coast I’m an animal and on the West Coast by a miracle I am changing back into a woman. But what kind of woman? At night I’ve found a wall inside myself and I try to describe it. I can’t stop crying! I hate myself! I’m a real girl! The wall inside is stone, it doesn’t have a body or a part time job. The person I’m considering falling in love with just as soon as I can stop crying, which should be any year now, brings me a book called Architecture without Architects to distract me from the luxury of my tears. In the book, white colonialists describe the buildings that seem to them miraculous, built invisibly, built by no one. I touch a black and white page to show that I love the image of an ancient city in the desert in Morocco. But imagine, I say, thinking of labor and domination, how terrible it was to build it. My person says, with certainty, because she is always sure, “They built it only at night.” By what light? I ask, looking at her. I can feel my eyes, which are nothing. She says, “They built it only on nights with a full moon.” My inside cracks, now it’s outside and I don’t deserve anything. There is anxiety in my touch but we are comradely now and then, both surprised for example by the thought of Hegel as a baby. Yes perhaps even Hegel can grow up to be a woman from time to time.
- Hannah Black, Dark Pool Party
.
From Los Angeles I write, “Perhaps getting to know a person is like getting to know a city.” The plate glass windows of downtown, the way you are with your friends; the dull suburbs of a half-hidden unhappiness. On the East Coast I’m an animal and on the West Coast by a miracle I am changing back into a woman. But what kind of woman? At night I’ve found a wall inside myself and I try to describe it. I can’t stop crying! I hate myself! I’m a real girl! The wall inside is stone, it doesn’t have a body or a part time job. The person I’m considering falling in love with just as soon as I can stop crying, which should be any year now, brings me a book called Architecture without Architects to distract me from the luxury of my tears. In the book, white colonialists describe the buildings that seem to them miraculous, built invisibly, built by no one. I touch a black and white page to show that I love the image of an ancient city in the desert in Morocco. But imagine, I say, thinking of labor and domination, how terrible it was to build it. My person says, with certainty, because she is always sure, “They built it only at night.” By what light? I ask, looking at her. I can feel my eyes, which are nothing. She says, “They built it only on nights with a full moon.” My inside cracks, now it’s outside and I don’t deserve anything. There is anxiety in my touch but we are comradely now and then, both surprised for example by the thought of Hegel as a baby. Yes perhaps even Hegel can grow up to be a woman from time to time.
- Hannah Black, Dark Pool Party
.
April 23, 2016
work that dares to remind us
.
"Rich and Poor is art in resistance, a work that dares to remind us of our capacity for revolutionary love..."
- Jade Colbert in The Globe and Mail
.
"Rich and Poor is art in resistance, a work that dares to remind us of our capacity for revolutionary love..."
- Jade Colbert in The Globe and Mail
.
April 15, 2016
The Stopping Number
.
I feel five books is the perfect
number of books for a
writer to publish
I have published five books
I want to stop at this perfect number
I want to stop before I ruin it
but I won’t stop
I will ruin it
five books is a somewhat arbitrary
symbol of literary perfection
but I have so much anxiety
about everything being too much
everyone doing too much
moving past strong youthful desires
continuing only out of habit
for one moment
you’re in sync with the zeitgeist
or so they tell you
then the moment is gone
one cannot simply fly into the air
to have some perfect overview
of one’s entire life and practice
one is down in the trench with it
in the muck of it
unable to fully see
what is coming from where
if, like me, you have no desire to kill
only to survive
take the risk of being where you are
you can feel the number five
is the stopping number
yet cannot ground this feeling in anything
or for that matter actually stop
the stopping number
who wants to stay in this trench forever
I finished five books
without ever looking back
and wish
as I now look back
I could turn
not to salt
but to stone
.
I feel five books is the perfect
number of books for a
writer to publish
I have published five books
I want to stop at this perfect number
I want to stop before I ruin it
but I won’t stop
I will ruin it
five books is a somewhat arbitrary
symbol of literary perfection
but I have so much anxiety
about everything being too much
everyone doing too much
moving past strong youthful desires
continuing only out of habit
for one moment
you’re in sync with the zeitgeist
or so they tell you
then the moment is gone
one cannot simply fly into the air
to have some perfect overview
of one’s entire life and practice
one is down in the trench with it
in the muck of it
unable to fully see
what is coming from where
if, like me, you have no desire to kill
only to survive
take the risk of being where you are
you can feel the number five
is the stopping number
yet cannot ground this feeling in anything
or for that matter actually stop
the stopping number
who wants to stay in this trench forever
I finished five books
without ever looking back
and wish
as I now look back
I could turn
not to salt
but to stone
.
March 15, 2016
Rich and Poor launches and events
.
I will be presenting my new book Rich and Poor at these fine events:
April 16, Ottawa:
Ottawa Writers Festival
BookThug Spring Launch with Jacob Wren and Phil Hall
The Manx, 5pm
Facebook Event
April 18, New York:
Print Screen: Jacob Wren and Close-up
Walter Reade Theater / Lincoln Center, 7:30 pm
April 21, Toronto:
BookThug Spring 2016 Launch Party
The Garrison, 7 pm
Facbook Event
April 28, Montreal:
BookThug spring launch
w/ Joni Murphy, Malcolm Sutton, Stephen Thomas & Jacob Wren
Drawn & Quarterly Bookstore, 7 pm
Facebook Event
May 6, Toronto:
Pages Unbound Festival
All Our Bad Ideas: Jacob Wren & Jordan Tannahill
Jackman Hall, 9 pm
Facebook Event
Plus:
Rich and Poor Facebook Page
Order Rich and Poor
.
I will be presenting my new book Rich and Poor at these fine events:
April 16, Ottawa:
Ottawa Writers Festival
BookThug Spring Launch with Jacob Wren and Phil Hall
The Manx, 5pm
Facebook Event
April 18, New York:
Print Screen: Jacob Wren and Close-up
Walter Reade Theater / Lincoln Center, 7:30 pm
April 21, Toronto:
BookThug Spring 2016 Launch Party
The Garrison, 7 pm
Facbook Event
April 28, Montreal:
BookThug spring launch
w/ Joni Murphy, Malcolm Sutton, Stephen Thomas & Jacob Wren
Drawn & Quarterly Bookstore, 7 pm
Facebook Event
May 6, Toronto:
Pages Unbound Festival
All Our Bad Ideas: Jacob Wren & Jordan Tannahill
Jackman Hall, 9 pm
Facebook Event
Plus:
Rich and Poor Facebook Page
Order Rich and Poor
.
March 10, 2016
To be a beast and still be happy: An introduction to The Seagull
.
[This text was written as an introduction to the production Une Mouette et autres cas d’espèces created by Hubert Colas/Diphtong Cie. This free adaptation of Chekhov's The Seagull will also feature texts from Édith Azam, Liliane Giraudon, Angélica Liddell, Nathalie Quintane and Annie Zadek]
(Note: All sentences in quotation marks are lines from The Seagull. Most of them have been altered considerably but a few I left as is. Page numbers refer to the Laurence Senelick translation, Norton edition, 2010.)
We read a quote on the Internet. In a letter to A.S. Suvorin – dated April 13, 1895 – Anton Chekhov writes: “The bourgeoisie loves so-called “positive” types and novels with happy endings since they lull one into thinking that it is fine to simultaneously acquire capital and maintain one’s innocence, to be a beast and still be happy.” Chekhov’s father was a serf and we fear today, in the year 2016, the entire world is drifting backwards towards feudalism. Wikipedia says that: “The decline of serfdom in Western Europe has sometimes been attributed to the Bubonic Plague, which reached Europe in 1347, although the decline had begun before that date.” Russia is certainly not in Western Europe. In Russia, once again according to Wikipedia, feudalism was not abolished until 1861.
Along with feudalism, when we look towards the future we see war, famine and plague. Of course, if we look at the past we see much the same thing. When we look towards the future we also see nothing, since we have little idea what will actually happen in the future, just as we have little idea what has actually happened in the past. Chekhov died at age 44 and we are also currently age 44 (in this sense the author is speaking for all of us.) There is something classical about dying. There is something avant-garde about dying. The future is always a future we will not necessarily live to see.
We are wondering what The Seagull would be like if it were a play not about art but about activism. If instead of talking about ‘talent’ they spoke of action and repression. Page 78: “New forms of protest are what we need. New forms, and if there aren’t any, then we’re better off with capitalist totalitarianism and environmental collapse.” How can we imagine what comes next, how might it transcend the bland magic of our small daily lives? If ever there was a time for us to seriously ask ourselves such questions it is certainly right fucking now. Page 85: “There is not a lot of brilliant activism these days, it’s true, but in general the level has improved considerably.” La Commune de Paris, May ’68 – are these precedents we can continue to seize and build upon or simply the last gasps of a potential lost and long gone. All over the world, at every protest, lines of riot cops in full gear, helmets, shields, tear gas: an intimidation that might almost be described as pristine. As they surround us, we find ourselves trapped in the provincial life of no longer being able to imagine a future with any further potential than the present, or any greater charm than the past. There are no riot cops in The Seagull. There are only the riot cops working the kettle – stopping the blood flow – within the cholesterol-choked valves of our hearts. (That last line was quite bad, and it’s reasonable to assume the author hoped it would be cut.)
In its time, The Seagull was of course lightly censored. In some strange way, today we long for censorship. That someone would care enough about our words to bother banning even a single one. When you are marginal artists how do you know what it means to take an axe to the world and split it in two like a rotting log? What would Chekhov have written about the Russian revolution if he had been alive for its beginning or its end? (He died one year before the Revolution of 1905.) Were the ways in which Stalin censored the arts of his time in continuity with the very same censorship Chekhov so frequently experienced? Did Stalin get the Russia he wanted? Does any leader or artist ever get what they actually want? Page 79: “I wanted to get married and I wanted to be an author, but I didn’t manage to do either one.” We wanted emancipatory politics and a sustainable future, but instead got a well-written first act in front of a serene painted lake. So many we now know want little more than to move to the country and live by the water, to be close to nature and watch the fish so brilliantly die. When we write these things we feel immature. When we speak them we feel even worse. We only feel okay when we post them on the internet.
Carl Pope writes: “In 1915, as the American economy boomed, the huge supply chain that supported horse-drawn transport – harnesses and horseshoes, wagons and buggies makers (13,000 of them), farriers and blacksmiths, hay balers and feedmills – looked like a robust and vital segment for deploying capital. 1920 was the year of “Peak Horse” in the U.S.. By 1940 it was gone. This was not “low-cost”, incremental progress. It was an economic disruption so fierce that the phrase “buggy-whip maker” became a business simile for loser.” His point is that coal and oil might soon go the way of the horse and carriage. Page 105: “Forgive me, I bow down to your talent, I’m ready to give up ten years of my life for your sake, but horses I cannot give you.” We have always wanted to live in a city with no cars. Wouldn’t it be paradise to live in a city with no cars, like a theatre that blends intimately with the most graceful and sublime aspects of daily life? Why does the automobile industry get to decide how each city is built and made? If there were no cars and no plastic, how much oil would we really need? In just twenty years, between 1920 and 1940, the horse and buggy almost completely disappeared. Things can change so quickly. Karl Marx died in 1883. He never saw an automobile. What are the things that we’ll never see? And would we even want to see them if we somehow had the chance? The future is always a future we will not necessarily see.
Page 111: “To find out how it feels to be an effective activist. How does change feel? How do you realize you’re changing the world?” Page 115: “What do you call changing the world? I’m never satisfied. Worst of all is when I become paranoid and barely understand what useful action is. I feel that if I’m an activist I have an obligation to help the people, their suffering, their future, discuss science, human rights, et cetera, et cetera, and I do help people, exhausting myself; I’m attacked from every side, I make people angry. I hurtle back and forth like a fox hunted by the CIA. I see that capitalism and surveillance keep moving farther and farther ahead, while I keep moving farther and farther behind…” To fight the beasts and still be happy, since an activist life is often also a broken one. To move to the country and live as if your most vicious enemies were boredom and your own neuroses. To fight the beasts and fail, be crushed, while the beasts eat good dinners, take luxury vacations and go to the theatre. To fight your own beast, the crypto-fascist that lurks in each and every one of us. We need new forms, while no one believes new forms are even possible. But anything is possible, or if not anything than certainly a wide variety of possibilities we spend our time working as hard as possible not to consider. How could Chekhov ever have imagined we’d be speaking these things about him 112 years after his death?
Karl Marx died in 1883. The modern automobile was invented in 1886. Anton Chekhov died in 1904. The Russian revolution took place in 1917. Oil and coal will have more or less completely been phased out by 2045. Some of the people here tonight, watching us perform this introduction, will die in 2052, 2058, 2061, 2070, 2075, and other years that we won’t bother to list. Page 128: “People with no conscience but plenty of pretensions have nothing better to do than criticize the ones who are trying to make a difference. It’s a comfort to them, I’m sure.” Have nothing better to do than list the years that complete strangers may or may not die. Because, if nothing else, the little daily dramas we incite, inflame and endlessly play out are at least a distraction from the fact that each and every one of us might in the end die. But no one will die here tonight, on stage or off, if everything goes as planned. Page 129 (or page 121, lines 11 and 12): “If ever my life is of use to you, come and take it.”
Between this sentence and the next sentence, two years will have passed. Time goes so quickly. Money is often connected to tragedy. Page 138: “It’s dark outside. Somebody should tell them to pull down that barricade in front of the consulate. It stands there bare, unsightly, like a skeleton. When I was going by last night, I thought somebody was on it, crying…” Even more than a city with no cars we would like to live in a world without money. Money is an abstraction that allows cold savagery to exponentially increase. Page 140: “If money ever burrows into your heart, you’ve got to get rid of it.” Where there’s wealth there’s exploitation, endless gradations of poverty that shred possibilities and in the end force you to kill either something inside yourself or anyone near by. But, of course, none of that matters here tonight. Reality must not be strong-armed into confronting idealism. You turn on those closest to you when no one else is in range. Things can turn so quickly. Different temperaments will view the same few facts as completely disparate realities. Page 146: “There were moments when the world showed some talent for screaming or dying, but those were only moments.” Life is only a series of moments, but moments don’t pay the rent or give meaning, so we superglue them together with narrative. A beast that tells stories, a beast that buys and sells the stories we will never have a chance to live, a beast that exposes paradoxes, paradoxes that get us thinking and therefore do not help us in any way to act. Money is the lie that makes things possible, so possible we could weep. Page 160: “Now I know, understand, that in our work – it doesn’t matter whether we protest or run for office – the main thing isn’t success or failure, the things we feared or hoped for, it’s knowing how to endure.”
How to endure, how to smile when your boss effortlessly humiliates you in front of the others, when you have to scramble, hustle or betray someone in order to get by, or settle for less, or take more at the expense of others or at the expense of the world. To be a beast and still be happy, or smile politely as you endure being some happy beasts prey. To have your children hate you but pretend they don’t because you continue to give them money. Or have your children love you, but be so broken they barely know how. This is only the introduction. The introduction comes at the beginning, when what comes after is still in the future. The future is always a future we will not necessarily get to see. But anything can be the future. We can predict the worst, or hope for the best, or use every trick in our arsenal to manipulate what comes next – but as we whittle away our lives, while telling ourselves we are doing the exact opposite – the future can, will be and remains potentially anything. And, at the same time, it is always bound to look more than a little bit like the past. Page 160: “By chance man comes along, sees, and with nothing better to do destroys… Subject for a short story.” Or subject for a destroyed play.
.
[This text was written as an introduction to the production Une Mouette et autres cas d’espèces created by Hubert Colas/Diphtong Cie. This free adaptation of Chekhov's The Seagull will also feature texts from Édith Azam, Liliane Giraudon, Angélica Liddell, Nathalie Quintane and Annie Zadek]
(Note: All sentences in quotation marks are lines from The Seagull. Most of them have been altered considerably but a few I left as is. Page numbers refer to the Laurence Senelick translation, Norton edition, 2010.)
We read a quote on the Internet. In a letter to A.S. Suvorin – dated April 13, 1895 – Anton Chekhov writes: “The bourgeoisie loves so-called “positive” types and novels with happy endings since they lull one into thinking that it is fine to simultaneously acquire capital and maintain one’s innocence, to be a beast and still be happy.” Chekhov’s father was a serf and we fear today, in the year 2016, the entire world is drifting backwards towards feudalism. Wikipedia says that: “The decline of serfdom in Western Europe has sometimes been attributed to the Bubonic Plague, which reached Europe in 1347, although the decline had begun before that date.” Russia is certainly not in Western Europe. In Russia, once again according to Wikipedia, feudalism was not abolished until 1861.
Along with feudalism, when we look towards the future we see war, famine and plague. Of course, if we look at the past we see much the same thing. When we look towards the future we also see nothing, since we have little idea what will actually happen in the future, just as we have little idea what has actually happened in the past. Chekhov died at age 44 and we are also currently age 44 (in this sense the author is speaking for all of us.) There is something classical about dying. There is something avant-garde about dying. The future is always a future we will not necessarily live to see.
We are wondering what The Seagull would be like if it were a play not about art but about activism. If instead of talking about ‘talent’ they spoke of action and repression. Page 78: “New forms of protest are what we need. New forms, and if there aren’t any, then we’re better off with capitalist totalitarianism and environmental collapse.” How can we imagine what comes next, how might it transcend the bland magic of our small daily lives? If ever there was a time for us to seriously ask ourselves such questions it is certainly right fucking now. Page 85: “There is not a lot of brilliant activism these days, it’s true, but in general the level has improved considerably.” La Commune de Paris, May ’68 – are these precedents we can continue to seize and build upon or simply the last gasps of a potential lost and long gone. All over the world, at every protest, lines of riot cops in full gear, helmets, shields, tear gas: an intimidation that might almost be described as pristine. As they surround us, we find ourselves trapped in the provincial life of no longer being able to imagine a future with any further potential than the present, or any greater charm than the past. There are no riot cops in The Seagull. There are only the riot cops working the kettle – stopping the blood flow – within the cholesterol-choked valves of our hearts. (That last line was quite bad, and it’s reasonable to assume the author hoped it would be cut.)
In its time, The Seagull was of course lightly censored. In some strange way, today we long for censorship. That someone would care enough about our words to bother banning even a single one. When you are marginal artists how do you know what it means to take an axe to the world and split it in two like a rotting log? What would Chekhov have written about the Russian revolution if he had been alive for its beginning or its end? (He died one year before the Revolution of 1905.) Were the ways in which Stalin censored the arts of his time in continuity with the very same censorship Chekhov so frequently experienced? Did Stalin get the Russia he wanted? Does any leader or artist ever get what they actually want? Page 79: “I wanted to get married and I wanted to be an author, but I didn’t manage to do either one.” We wanted emancipatory politics and a sustainable future, but instead got a well-written first act in front of a serene painted lake. So many we now know want little more than to move to the country and live by the water, to be close to nature and watch the fish so brilliantly die. When we write these things we feel immature. When we speak them we feel even worse. We only feel okay when we post them on the internet.
Carl Pope writes: “In 1915, as the American economy boomed, the huge supply chain that supported horse-drawn transport – harnesses and horseshoes, wagons and buggies makers (13,000 of them), farriers and blacksmiths, hay balers and feedmills – looked like a robust and vital segment for deploying capital. 1920 was the year of “Peak Horse” in the U.S.. By 1940 it was gone. This was not “low-cost”, incremental progress. It was an economic disruption so fierce that the phrase “buggy-whip maker” became a business simile for loser.” His point is that coal and oil might soon go the way of the horse and carriage. Page 105: “Forgive me, I bow down to your talent, I’m ready to give up ten years of my life for your sake, but horses I cannot give you.” We have always wanted to live in a city with no cars. Wouldn’t it be paradise to live in a city with no cars, like a theatre that blends intimately with the most graceful and sublime aspects of daily life? Why does the automobile industry get to decide how each city is built and made? If there were no cars and no plastic, how much oil would we really need? In just twenty years, between 1920 and 1940, the horse and buggy almost completely disappeared. Things can change so quickly. Karl Marx died in 1883. He never saw an automobile. What are the things that we’ll never see? And would we even want to see them if we somehow had the chance? The future is always a future we will not necessarily see.
Page 111: “To find out how it feels to be an effective activist. How does change feel? How do you realize you’re changing the world?” Page 115: “What do you call changing the world? I’m never satisfied. Worst of all is when I become paranoid and barely understand what useful action is. I feel that if I’m an activist I have an obligation to help the people, their suffering, their future, discuss science, human rights, et cetera, et cetera, and I do help people, exhausting myself; I’m attacked from every side, I make people angry. I hurtle back and forth like a fox hunted by the CIA. I see that capitalism and surveillance keep moving farther and farther ahead, while I keep moving farther and farther behind…” To fight the beasts and still be happy, since an activist life is often also a broken one. To move to the country and live as if your most vicious enemies were boredom and your own neuroses. To fight the beasts and fail, be crushed, while the beasts eat good dinners, take luxury vacations and go to the theatre. To fight your own beast, the crypto-fascist that lurks in each and every one of us. We need new forms, while no one believes new forms are even possible. But anything is possible, or if not anything than certainly a wide variety of possibilities we spend our time working as hard as possible not to consider. How could Chekhov ever have imagined we’d be speaking these things about him 112 years after his death?
Karl Marx died in 1883. The modern automobile was invented in 1886. Anton Chekhov died in 1904. The Russian revolution took place in 1917. Oil and coal will have more or less completely been phased out by 2045. Some of the people here tonight, watching us perform this introduction, will die in 2052, 2058, 2061, 2070, 2075, and other years that we won’t bother to list. Page 128: “People with no conscience but plenty of pretensions have nothing better to do than criticize the ones who are trying to make a difference. It’s a comfort to them, I’m sure.” Have nothing better to do than list the years that complete strangers may or may not die. Because, if nothing else, the little daily dramas we incite, inflame and endlessly play out are at least a distraction from the fact that each and every one of us might in the end die. But no one will die here tonight, on stage or off, if everything goes as planned. Page 129 (or page 121, lines 11 and 12): “If ever my life is of use to you, come and take it.”
Between this sentence and the next sentence, two years will have passed. Time goes so quickly. Money is often connected to tragedy. Page 138: “It’s dark outside. Somebody should tell them to pull down that barricade in front of the consulate. It stands there bare, unsightly, like a skeleton. When I was going by last night, I thought somebody was on it, crying…” Even more than a city with no cars we would like to live in a world without money. Money is an abstraction that allows cold savagery to exponentially increase. Page 140: “If money ever burrows into your heart, you’ve got to get rid of it.” Where there’s wealth there’s exploitation, endless gradations of poverty that shred possibilities and in the end force you to kill either something inside yourself or anyone near by. But, of course, none of that matters here tonight. Reality must not be strong-armed into confronting idealism. You turn on those closest to you when no one else is in range. Things can turn so quickly. Different temperaments will view the same few facts as completely disparate realities. Page 146: “There were moments when the world showed some talent for screaming or dying, but those were only moments.” Life is only a series of moments, but moments don’t pay the rent or give meaning, so we superglue them together with narrative. A beast that tells stories, a beast that buys and sells the stories we will never have a chance to live, a beast that exposes paradoxes, paradoxes that get us thinking and therefore do not help us in any way to act. Money is the lie that makes things possible, so possible we could weep. Page 160: “Now I know, understand, that in our work – it doesn’t matter whether we protest or run for office – the main thing isn’t success or failure, the things we feared or hoped for, it’s knowing how to endure.”
How to endure, how to smile when your boss effortlessly humiliates you in front of the others, when you have to scramble, hustle or betray someone in order to get by, or settle for less, or take more at the expense of others or at the expense of the world. To be a beast and still be happy, or smile politely as you endure being some happy beasts prey. To have your children hate you but pretend they don’t because you continue to give them money. Or have your children love you, but be so broken they barely know how. This is only the introduction. The introduction comes at the beginning, when what comes after is still in the future. The future is always a future we will not necessarily get to see. But anything can be the future. We can predict the worst, or hope for the best, or use every trick in our arsenal to manipulate what comes next – but as we whittle away our lives, while telling ourselves we are doing the exact opposite – the future can, will be and remains potentially anything. And, at the same time, it is always bound to look more than a little bit like the past. Page 160: “By chance man comes along, sees, and with nothing better to do destroys… Subject for a short story.” Or subject for a destroyed play.
.
February 25, 2016
The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information (Monthly Rework)
.
PME-ART will be presenting a The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information (Monthly Rework) twice at La Vitrola:
March 28th
April 25th
A pile of records and a record player. For every record we have a story at the ready. This performance explores the way music infiltrates our personal and social lives, affecting our understanding of love, work and how we think society works.
Création: Caroline Dubois, Claudia Fancello & Jacob Wren
Continuation : Marie Claire Forté & Adam Kinner,
Performance : Claudia Fancello, Marie Claire Forté, Adam Kinner & Jacob Wren
28 mars & 25 avril 2016
La Vitrola : 4602, boul. Saint-Laurent
Portes/Doors: 19 h
Performance : 20 h
Contribution volontaire/Pay What You Can (10 $ sugg.)
Bonus: A letter about The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information
Coproduction: FFT (Düsseldorf) Collaborations: Noorderzon Festival (Groningue), Studio 303 & OFFTA (Montréal) With the support of The Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, The Conseil des arts de Montréal and The Kunststiftung NRW (Arts Foundation of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany).
.
PME-ART will be presenting a The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information (Monthly Rework) twice at La Vitrola:
March 28th
April 25th
A pile of records and a record player. For every record we have a story at the ready. This performance explores the way music infiltrates our personal and social lives, affecting our understanding of love, work and how we think society works.
Création: Caroline Dubois, Claudia Fancello & Jacob Wren
Continuation : Marie Claire Forté & Adam Kinner,
Performance : Claudia Fancello, Marie Claire Forté, Adam Kinner & Jacob Wren
28 mars & 25 avril 2016
La Vitrola : 4602, boul. Saint-Laurent
Portes/Doors: 19 h
Performance : 20 h
Contribution volontaire/Pay What You Can (10 $ sugg.)
Bonus: A letter about The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information
Coproduction: FFT (Düsseldorf) Collaborations: Noorderzon Festival (Groningue), Studio 303 & OFFTA (Montréal) With the support of The Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, The Conseil des arts de Montréal and The Kunststiftung NRW (Arts Foundation of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany).
.
February 24, 2016
Always Closer to a Satire
.
A few weeks ago I posted on Facebook that I was seriously terrified that Trump had a real chance to win, and mentioned the history of Fascism in the twentieth century as a corollary to this fear. Then I had a few weeks of not really believing it was possible. It seemed too much like my worst fears come true, or even more improbably: a satire of my worst fears coming true. But now, once again, it seems to me that this satire is becoming more and more likely. The worst is always closer to a satire of the worst, which I suppose is what makes it so utterly terrifying.
.
A few weeks ago I posted on Facebook that I was seriously terrified that Trump had a real chance to win, and mentioned the history of Fascism in the twentieth century as a corollary to this fear. Then I had a few weeks of not really believing it was possible. It seemed too much like my worst fears come true, or even more improbably: a satire of my worst fears coming true. But now, once again, it seems to me that this satire is becoming more and more likely. The worst is always closer to a satire of the worst, which I suppose is what makes it so utterly terrifying.
.
February 23, 2016
What Pleasure Is (Unfinished Fragment)
.
1.
There are two short quotes from Jean Genet that continue to haunt me:
And:
These words express negativity. But negativity with energy, tangled up in the concurrent desire for something better. They are taken out of context, and it’s been a long time now that I no longer remember exactly where I first found them. (I believe in Genet’s final book Prisoner of Love.) Somehow, over the years, these two lines have become part of my life. I feel that I’ve betrayed people, and I feel that everything is futile, and Genet is there, somewhere in the back of my head, to tell me that all of this is almost all right. Of course, it’s not actually all right, not at all. But in such pure negativity there is will and there is struggle. Also: there are things I believe I might be able to change about myself and things it seems will most likely never change. Futility and betrayal fall into the later category. In the end, I probably have no choice.
When I write, I often try to balance it out, not let negativity always take the lead. As I do so, there is always another part of me that thinks: what if you were to completely let go, just write the most negatively, nihilistically negative texts you are capable of. What might happen then? The reason I believe I generally don’t do so is because, even though my experience of life is predominantly negative, I understand this is not the case for everyone, and I want my writing to reflect their experience as well. I want my writing to be larger than myself, to let in things that I see in the world but don’t necessarily relate to. Through editing, such things can momentarily become part of my worldview. It might be a trick but it is also strangely true. It is true as I’m writing, but when I’m not writing the negativity once again, for the most part, dominates. In writing this, I believe I’m attempting to get at something more general about art. Art is the artist plus the world, the artist struggling to let in as much of the world as possible. Or, at least, this is the art I desire. In doing do, it is more than possible that the artist betrays the world. And it is even possible that such betrayal is transformed into a kind of secular grace. Alchemists once hoped to transform lead into gold, and from this desire laid the groundwork for modern science. What do artists start with, and into what do they hope it will transform?
2.
I want to believe that activism is not futile. I know it can accomplish things. When I think of everything that successful activism actually requires, I also think of the somewhat well-known Camus quote: “We must imagine Sisyphus as happy.” (It seems my entire consciousness had been overtaken by a series of short citations.) Sisyphus can never get that fucking rock to the top of the hill. It is an eternal undertaking. There are small victories along the way, but the struggle actually never ends. What would it mean for Sisyphus to betray this struggle. He cannot. He has no choice but to keep pushing.
It is often said that artists also have no choice but to keep making art. That if they are true artists, yet for whatever reason stop making things, they will be unhappy. To keep going, to persevere regardless of the circumstances, is a kind of happiness. Or pleasure. Or betrayal of the greater happiness to be found in doing nothing.
[Unfinished.]
.
1.
There are two short quotes from Jean Genet that continue to haunt me:
Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.
And:
What is not futile in this world? I’m asking you: what is not futile in the last analysis?
These words express negativity. But negativity with energy, tangled up in the concurrent desire for something better. They are taken out of context, and it’s been a long time now that I no longer remember exactly where I first found them. (I believe in Genet’s final book Prisoner of Love.) Somehow, over the years, these two lines have become part of my life. I feel that I’ve betrayed people, and I feel that everything is futile, and Genet is there, somewhere in the back of my head, to tell me that all of this is almost all right. Of course, it’s not actually all right, not at all. But in such pure negativity there is will and there is struggle. Also: there are things I believe I might be able to change about myself and things it seems will most likely never change. Futility and betrayal fall into the later category. In the end, I probably have no choice.
When I write, I often try to balance it out, not let negativity always take the lead. As I do so, there is always another part of me that thinks: what if you were to completely let go, just write the most negatively, nihilistically negative texts you are capable of. What might happen then? The reason I believe I generally don’t do so is because, even though my experience of life is predominantly negative, I understand this is not the case for everyone, and I want my writing to reflect their experience as well. I want my writing to be larger than myself, to let in things that I see in the world but don’t necessarily relate to. Through editing, such things can momentarily become part of my worldview. It might be a trick but it is also strangely true. It is true as I’m writing, but when I’m not writing the negativity once again, for the most part, dominates. In writing this, I believe I’m attempting to get at something more general about art. Art is the artist plus the world, the artist struggling to let in as much of the world as possible. Or, at least, this is the art I desire. In doing do, it is more than possible that the artist betrays the world. And it is even possible that such betrayal is transformed into a kind of secular grace. Alchemists once hoped to transform lead into gold, and from this desire laid the groundwork for modern science. What do artists start with, and into what do they hope it will transform?
2.
I want to believe that activism is not futile. I know it can accomplish things. When I think of everything that successful activism actually requires, I also think of the somewhat well-known Camus quote: “We must imagine Sisyphus as happy.” (It seems my entire consciousness had been overtaken by a series of short citations.) Sisyphus can never get that fucking rock to the top of the hill. It is an eternal undertaking. There are small victories along the way, but the struggle actually never ends. What would it mean for Sisyphus to betray this struggle. He cannot. He has no choice but to keep pushing.
It is often said that artists also have no choice but to keep making art. That if they are true artists, yet for whatever reason stop making things, they will be unhappy. To keep going, to persevere regardless of the circumstances, is a kind of happiness. Or pleasure. Or betrayal of the greater happiness to be found in doing nothing.
[Unfinished.]
.
February 12, 2016
Introduction to Taking Care
.
[This text was originally published as an introduction to the Taking Care section of Truth is Concrete: A Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics.]
In my book Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed, I wrote about a group of activists who attend something referred to only as “the meetings.” What exactly the meetings are is never made entirely clear. However, a few things are explained. The meetings take place in a dystopian near future in which the activists in attendance have good reason to fear that, if they were to engage in effective acts of protest or civil disobedience, they would be arrested, tortured and perhaps killed. Their weekly gatherings are therefore a kind of refuge from this harsh reality. A place to talk, reflect, attempt to re-invent the left and prepare for a time when activism will be effective once again. When that time comes, because of the ongoing discussions that make up the meetings, they will have considered all options and be ready. Many readers saw these meetings as a satire on the ineffectiveness of the current left, but this was definitely not my intention. (In fact, at the end of the book, I break the fourth wall to explicitly state that I do not want the book to be read in only this manner.) The idea for the meetings had far more to do with my own personal frustration, with looking at the desperate state of the world and not knowing what to do, where to start, how real long-term change might begin and continue.
I remember first reading The Critique of Cynical Reason by Peter Sloterdijk, how I was fascinated by the concept of ‘enlightened false consciousness’, that we can clearly see all the structural inequalities we take part in perpetrating but still do little or nothing to change them. Or, on a slightly different register, I often think of an anecdote I once heard about Charles Mingus, who regularly began his concerts by playing the Duke Ellington standard Can’t Get Started. When asked why, he would apparently reply: ‘because that’s my problem in life, I can’t get started.’ All of this is a way of speaking around the fact that I have enormous sympathy for, and curiosity about, anyone who can get started. Who finds ways to break the inertia of relative privilege and set off on the endless and impossible task of improving the world. I don’t feel qualified to judge what might be more, or less, effective strategies in such matters. I fear that ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’ but, at the same time, also embody a much greater fear of my own ineffective paralysis.
We might say that all of the texts and projects in the following chapter take place on the other side of the line from where I stand. I am on this side of the line, along with much of the world’s population, where I’m definitely not doing enough (if I’m doing anything at all), and they are on the other side, where they are doing at least something, if not quite a bit more than that. On the other side of the line many strategies are invented and become possible. From WochenKlauser’s “concrete improvements of existing social circumstances” to Minerva Cuevas’s offering of “unexpected products”; from Michal Murin’s rehabilitation of his old friend Milan Adamčiak, assisting him from homelessness towards a renewed artistic practice, to Christoph Schlingensief’s equal treatment of superstar and differently abled performers; from the vacuum cleaner’s act of starting his own mental health institution and detaining himself within it to the necessary design-based paradigm shift that is Permaculture.
Again and again, I feel I am reading about events a little bit further along the path than I am. (Or, since I don’t particularly believe in progress, a little bit further around the circle that will endlessly continue unless our complete extinction cuts its short.) This feeling reminds me of the well-known last lines from Rilke about gazing at the Archaic Torso of Apollo: “for here there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.” It might be a simplified reading, but I have always seen these lines to mean that experiencing great art leads towards the realization that the way one is living is not nearly enough. ‘You must change your life’ doesn’t suggest that there is only one right answer, only one possible change, a right way and a wrong way and you must choose correctly. It is more about opening possibilities, opening up a window and letting in some air, wondering anew what can and cannot become part of our more general reality.
Notions such as care, kindness and compassion might help us find a basis for where such personal shifts can take place. Here we are in a territory of fragile humanism, about as far away from the ‘no future’ punk rock nihilism that was one of my personal entry points into art and creativity. If I can get past my anxiety that all punks become boring hippies in the end, I can see that conceptual strategies that allow for more generous social relations, to put it rather bluntly, often feel good when you take part in them. In their book On Kindness, Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor suggest that Freudian or Hobbesian conceptions of people as inherently selfish or cruel turn our gaze away from something we already know: that behaving with kindness towards others occurs continuously, on all levels of society, and is in fact highly pleasurable. We are capable of selfishness but equally capable of generosity. The suggestion that we are not, or that one quality is more prominent in human nature than the other, is little more than propaganda for selfishness.
The strategies suggested in this chapter are varied, at times in conflict with each other, very much open to every kind of criticism. When you mix art and politics you open yourself up to a barrage of difficult questions from all sides: that the work is not political enough, that it takes the wrong political position, is naïve, is only a band aid on the problem it seeks to address. Because so many projects along these lines step outside of the safety of an autonomous artistic position, the grounds upon which they can be criticized become increasingly unstable. If I criticize a painting or a novel, the forms my criticism might take are fairly well established and, most of the time, reasonable limits are adhered to. But if I criticize an art project in which addicted, homeless sex workers and politicians are placed together on a boat in order to engage in dialogue, other levels of questioning rapidly, often confusingly, arise. How do I feel about the rights of sex workers? How do I understand sex work in relation to other kinds of work? How do I feel about activists (or artists) engaging with the state? How do I understand the social role of the state? Is it possible, in a short time, to set the parameters for a long-term solution to such a complex, ongoing problem? Where does charity end and empowerment begin? For me, such works have multiple agency: they assist the people more directly involved in the situation while at the same time opening a space in the imagination, suggesting that every social problem has multiple imaginative solutions if only we change our habits of thought.
Of course, changing our habits of thought is not nearly enough. Capitalism is a way of thinking, but is also a system that enriches the lives of few at the expense of the lives of many. To state the obvious: where there is suffering, most likely there is also economic profit. I suggested earlier that ‘kindness towards others occurs continuously, on all levels of society.’ I believe this to be true on an interpersonal level, but it does little to ameliorate the fact that structural inequality will put profit before kindness each and every time. If we start with the metaphor that I am on one side of a line, and on the other side are those who have taken at least the first step towards making small or large improvements; we might also suggest that along with me, on this side of the line, are many who take a considerably more vicious self-interest in maintaining the current status quo, who are working towards building up this metaphorical line into a totalitarian-capitalist prison from which they hope we will never escape. (And who likely wouldn’t put the matter in these specific terms.) Still, obsessing over these cruelties will get us nowhere. We are clearly not going to solve all the problems of the world in one fell swoop. Perhaps the only way is to start is as close to ourselves as possible, one small step after another, working towards situations in which possibilities might increase over time, looking around and feeling where our natural desire to care might be put to best use.
Criticality has become such an unquestioned staple of theory and art. However, it seems to me, a caring attitude does not require us to call upon our most critical selves. A critical outlook is often a defensive position, a desire to rip off the veil of surface appearance and get to the real stuff underneath. Yet not all truths are hidden. At times, surface appearances might be speaking to us so clearly and directly that, obsessed with what else might be there, we do not hear them. An art project that helps a friend in need, a friend who has fallen on hard times might, in offering another alternative, reveal some of the hardness present in this constant need for greater critical insight. To see someone in need, to try to help them, does not require the sophisticated critical apparatus that is so often celebrated as the only basis for complex thought. It only requires a belief that change is possible, the very belief that certain strains of critical thinking so often undermine.
Coming full circle, returning to Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed, I can see now that part of the problem, part of the shortcomings within my own thinking, can be found in the title, since the characters in Revenge Fantasies are not truly dispossessed. They are dispossessed in the same way I feel myself to be, as a reasonably privileged, straight white male living in a wealthy country (Canada) currently being run by a government I completely disagree with. I have a certain amount of power that I could direct towards social change but cannot feel exactly what this power is or how I might use it, what other people I might form coalitions with and what specific issues we could organize around. I feel myself to be dispossessed but I don’t see how to bring myself into solidarity with those even more dispossessed than me. If I were to do so, it seems I would be setting off on an unknown path: most likely some (or many) of the people around me would change, as might my worldview. What are the things closest to me to which I can most usefully contribute? How does my misguided sense of dispossession, of alienation, prevent me from doing so? How does it short-circuit my compassion?
By each dealing with one small, yet specific, situation (and in the process bringing themselves closer to it), the projects and desires in this chapter remind us that focusing on immediate concerns, caring about someone or something within reach, can be a way of grounding ourselves. Reality is never just one thing. Luc Boltanski writes: “Reality suffers from a species of inherent fragility, such that the reality of reality must incessantly be reinforced in order to endure.” So many of the images and words that surround us continuously enforce and suggest the idea that, as Thatcher famously pronounced, ‘there is no alternative.’ There is certainly no heaven on earth we will all someday achieve. But there are as many alternatives as we are able to imagine, little pinpricks of hope, shifting moments for potential change. All we need to do is step over the line, take the first step. I wonder if some day I might.
.
[This text was originally published as an introduction to the Taking Care section of Truth is Concrete: A Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics.]
In my book Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed, I wrote about a group of activists who attend something referred to only as “the meetings.” What exactly the meetings are is never made entirely clear. However, a few things are explained. The meetings take place in a dystopian near future in which the activists in attendance have good reason to fear that, if they were to engage in effective acts of protest or civil disobedience, they would be arrested, tortured and perhaps killed. Their weekly gatherings are therefore a kind of refuge from this harsh reality. A place to talk, reflect, attempt to re-invent the left and prepare for a time when activism will be effective once again. When that time comes, because of the ongoing discussions that make up the meetings, they will have considered all options and be ready. Many readers saw these meetings as a satire on the ineffectiveness of the current left, but this was definitely not my intention. (In fact, at the end of the book, I break the fourth wall to explicitly state that I do not want the book to be read in only this manner.) The idea for the meetings had far more to do with my own personal frustration, with looking at the desperate state of the world and not knowing what to do, where to start, how real long-term change might begin and continue.
I remember first reading The Critique of Cynical Reason by Peter Sloterdijk, how I was fascinated by the concept of ‘enlightened false consciousness’, that we can clearly see all the structural inequalities we take part in perpetrating but still do little or nothing to change them. Or, on a slightly different register, I often think of an anecdote I once heard about Charles Mingus, who regularly began his concerts by playing the Duke Ellington standard Can’t Get Started. When asked why, he would apparently reply: ‘because that’s my problem in life, I can’t get started.’ All of this is a way of speaking around the fact that I have enormous sympathy for, and curiosity about, anyone who can get started. Who finds ways to break the inertia of relative privilege and set off on the endless and impossible task of improving the world. I don’t feel qualified to judge what might be more, or less, effective strategies in such matters. I fear that ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’ but, at the same time, also embody a much greater fear of my own ineffective paralysis.
We might say that all of the texts and projects in the following chapter take place on the other side of the line from where I stand. I am on this side of the line, along with much of the world’s population, where I’m definitely not doing enough (if I’m doing anything at all), and they are on the other side, where they are doing at least something, if not quite a bit more than that. On the other side of the line many strategies are invented and become possible. From WochenKlauser’s “concrete improvements of existing social circumstances” to Minerva Cuevas’s offering of “unexpected products”; from Michal Murin’s rehabilitation of his old friend Milan Adamčiak, assisting him from homelessness towards a renewed artistic practice, to Christoph Schlingensief’s equal treatment of superstar and differently abled performers; from the vacuum cleaner’s act of starting his own mental health institution and detaining himself within it to the necessary design-based paradigm shift that is Permaculture.
Again and again, I feel I am reading about events a little bit further along the path than I am. (Or, since I don’t particularly believe in progress, a little bit further around the circle that will endlessly continue unless our complete extinction cuts its short.) This feeling reminds me of the well-known last lines from Rilke about gazing at the Archaic Torso of Apollo: “for here there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.” It might be a simplified reading, but I have always seen these lines to mean that experiencing great art leads towards the realization that the way one is living is not nearly enough. ‘You must change your life’ doesn’t suggest that there is only one right answer, only one possible change, a right way and a wrong way and you must choose correctly. It is more about opening possibilities, opening up a window and letting in some air, wondering anew what can and cannot become part of our more general reality.
Notions such as care, kindness and compassion might help us find a basis for where such personal shifts can take place. Here we are in a territory of fragile humanism, about as far away from the ‘no future’ punk rock nihilism that was one of my personal entry points into art and creativity. If I can get past my anxiety that all punks become boring hippies in the end, I can see that conceptual strategies that allow for more generous social relations, to put it rather bluntly, often feel good when you take part in them. In their book On Kindness, Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor suggest that Freudian or Hobbesian conceptions of people as inherently selfish or cruel turn our gaze away from something we already know: that behaving with kindness towards others occurs continuously, on all levels of society, and is in fact highly pleasurable. We are capable of selfishness but equally capable of generosity. The suggestion that we are not, or that one quality is more prominent in human nature than the other, is little more than propaganda for selfishness.
The strategies suggested in this chapter are varied, at times in conflict with each other, very much open to every kind of criticism. When you mix art and politics you open yourself up to a barrage of difficult questions from all sides: that the work is not political enough, that it takes the wrong political position, is naïve, is only a band aid on the problem it seeks to address. Because so many projects along these lines step outside of the safety of an autonomous artistic position, the grounds upon which they can be criticized become increasingly unstable. If I criticize a painting or a novel, the forms my criticism might take are fairly well established and, most of the time, reasonable limits are adhered to. But if I criticize an art project in which addicted, homeless sex workers and politicians are placed together on a boat in order to engage in dialogue, other levels of questioning rapidly, often confusingly, arise. How do I feel about the rights of sex workers? How do I understand sex work in relation to other kinds of work? How do I feel about activists (or artists) engaging with the state? How do I understand the social role of the state? Is it possible, in a short time, to set the parameters for a long-term solution to such a complex, ongoing problem? Where does charity end and empowerment begin? For me, such works have multiple agency: they assist the people more directly involved in the situation while at the same time opening a space in the imagination, suggesting that every social problem has multiple imaginative solutions if only we change our habits of thought.
Of course, changing our habits of thought is not nearly enough. Capitalism is a way of thinking, but is also a system that enriches the lives of few at the expense of the lives of many. To state the obvious: where there is suffering, most likely there is also economic profit. I suggested earlier that ‘kindness towards others occurs continuously, on all levels of society.’ I believe this to be true on an interpersonal level, but it does little to ameliorate the fact that structural inequality will put profit before kindness each and every time. If we start with the metaphor that I am on one side of a line, and on the other side are those who have taken at least the first step towards making small or large improvements; we might also suggest that along with me, on this side of the line, are many who take a considerably more vicious self-interest in maintaining the current status quo, who are working towards building up this metaphorical line into a totalitarian-capitalist prison from which they hope we will never escape. (And who likely wouldn’t put the matter in these specific terms.) Still, obsessing over these cruelties will get us nowhere. We are clearly not going to solve all the problems of the world in one fell swoop. Perhaps the only way is to start is as close to ourselves as possible, one small step after another, working towards situations in which possibilities might increase over time, looking around and feeling where our natural desire to care might be put to best use.
Criticality has become such an unquestioned staple of theory and art. However, it seems to me, a caring attitude does not require us to call upon our most critical selves. A critical outlook is often a defensive position, a desire to rip off the veil of surface appearance and get to the real stuff underneath. Yet not all truths are hidden. At times, surface appearances might be speaking to us so clearly and directly that, obsessed with what else might be there, we do not hear them. An art project that helps a friend in need, a friend who has fallen on hard times might, in offering another alternative, reveal some of the hardness present in this constant need for greater critical insight. To see someone in need, to try to help them, does not require the sophisticated critical apparatus that is so often celebrated as the only basis for complex thought. It only requires a belief that change is possible, the very belief that certain strains of critical thinking so often undermine.
Coming full circle, returning to Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed, I can see now that part of the problem, part of the shortcomings within my own thinking, can be found in the title, since the characters in Revenge Fantasies are not truly dispossessed. They are dispossessed in the same way I feel myself to be, as a reasonably privileged, straight white male living in a wealthy country (Canada) currently being run by a government I completely disagree with. I have a certain amount of power that I could direct towards social change but cannot feel exactly what this power is or how I might use it, what other people I might form coalitions with and what specific issues we could organize around. I feel myself to be dispossessed but I don’t see how to bring myself into solidarity with those even more dispossessed than me. If I were to do so, it seems I would be setting off on an unknown path: most likely some (or many) of the people around me would change, as might my worldview. What are the things closest to me to which I can most usefully contribute? How does my misguided sense of dispossession, of alienation, prevent me from doing so? How does it short-circuit my compassion?
By each dealing with one small, yet specific, situation (and in the process bringing themselves closer to it), the projects and desires in this chapter remind us that focusing on immediate concerns, caring about someone or something within reach, can be a way of grounding ourselves. Reality is never just one thing. Luc Boltanski writes: “Reality suffers from a species of inherent fragility, such that the reality of reality must incessantly be reinforced in order to endure.” So many of the images and words that surround us continuously enforce and suggest the idea that, as Thatcher famously pronounced, ‘there is no alternative.’ There is certainly no heaven on earth we will all someday achieve. But there are as many alternatives as we are able to imagine, little pinpricks of hope, shifting moments for potential change. All we need to do is step over the line, take the first step. I wonder if some day I might.
.
We need a different...
.
We need a different vision of the world. A vision in which our survival depends on our symbiotic interdependence with other living things. A world in which, yes, we eat things, but other things also eat us.
.
We need a different vision of the world. A vision in which our survival depends on our symbiotic interdependence with other living things. A world in which, yes, we eat things, but other things also eat us.
.
February 1, 2016
Allison Hargreaves and David Jefferess Quote
.
How might we begin to imagine reconciliation beyond inclusion or loss – and instead as a transformed order of social relations? How might we come to recognize models for this transformation in what we typically understand as closed chapters or barriers? These models are articulated in treaty agreements and other nation-to-nation relations as understood in Indigenous traditions of diplomacy. Whether bonds of territorial, commercial, or political alliance and exchange, these pacts are ones for which we all inherit responsibility – Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples alike. When we, as settlers, misunderstand treaties as the lawful means by which Indigenous peoples “gave up” land for settlement and exploitative development, we legitimize what is in fact a history of theft and dispossession; when we misapprehend our position as one of inevitable ascendancy and belonging, we efface what might more productively be understood as one of profound failure: the failure to uphold historical agreements governing peaceful interactions between sovereign political bodies and their citizens. Against the nation-to-nation model, the story of “inclusion” and of “accommodation” has become the official story that gets told about our relation to one another, and about how reconciliation might work as “the ‘new’ way for Canada to relate to Indigenous people”. This is a continuation of colonial violence, as well as a dangerous violation of our own capacity to imagine and enact something different.
And so I think about barricades: the barricade as apparent threat, the barricade as unfathomable assertion, the barricade as the unwanted obstacle that stretches to its limits the tenuous fantasy of settler belonging. What if we instead understood the barricade – both as a physical barrier and as a practice of symbolic signification – less as an obstacle and threat, and more as something erected to protect “all of us”? In her recent interview alongside activist-thinkers Russell Diabo and Lisa Monchalin, non-Indigenous Idle No More activist Sheelah McLean gives the example of grassroots land protection struggles from Oka to Grassy Narrows and observes that, through such struggles and their mainstream representation, “The Canadian public are socialized to believe that barricades are violent”. As sites of seemingly irreconcilable conflict between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, the barricade is mistaken in the mainstream as the violent embodiment of this impasse rather than an opportunity for its transcendence. After all, there is no violence inherent to the barricade itself; its threat stems from its capacity to highlight the violence inherent in the colonial nation-state. Like the example of the Buffalo Commons map, then, the barricade could provide an opening onto a different relationship to land and to one another – one that both acknowledges the violence of settlement and resource extraction, and that affirms shared obligations to care-take the land for the wellbeing of future generations.
- Allison Hargreaves and David Jefferess, Always Beginning: Imagining Reconciliation Beyond Inclusion or Loss
This quote is taken from the remarkable collection The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation
.
How might we begin to imagine reconciliation beyond inclusion or loss – and instead as a transformed order of social relations? How might we come to recognize models for this transformation in what we typically understand as closed chapters or barriers? These models are articulated in treaty agreements and other nation-to-nation relations as understood in Indigenous traditions of diplomacy. Whether bonds of territorial, commercial, or political alliance and exchange, these pacts are ones for which we all inherit responsibility – Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples alike. When we, as settlers, misunderstand treaties as the lawful means by which Indigenous peoples “gave up” land for settlement and exploitative development, we legitimize what is in fact a history of theft and dispossession; when we misapprehend our position as one of inevitable ascendancy and belonging, we efface what might more productively be understood as one of profound failure: the failure to uphold historical agreements governing peaceful interactions between sovereign political bodies and their citizens. Against the nation-to-nation model, the story of “inclusion” and of “accommodation” has become the official story that gets told about our relation to one another, and about how reconciliation might work as “the ‘new’ way for Canada to relate to Indigenous people”. This is a continuation of colonial violence, as well as a dangerous violation of our own capacity to imagine and enact something different.
And so I think about barricades: the barricade as apparent threat, the barricade as unfathomable assertion, the barricade as the unwanted obstacle that stretches to its limits the tenuous fantasy of settler belonging. What if we instead understood the barricade – both as a physical barrier and as a practice of symbolic signification – less as an obstacle and threat, and more as something erected to protect “all of us”? In her recent interview alongside activist-thinkers Russell Diabo and Lisa Monchalin, non-Indigenous Idle No More activist Sheelah McLean gives the example of grassroots land protection struggles from Oka to Grassy Narrows and observes that, through such struggles and their mainstream representation, “The Canadian public are socialized to believe that barricades are violent”. As sites of seemingly irreconcilable conflict between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, the barricade is mistaken in the mainstream as the violent embodiment of this impasse rather than an opportunity for its transcendence. After all, there is no violence inherent to the barricade itself; its threat stems from its capacity to highlight the violence inherent in the colonial nation-state. Like the example of the Buffalo Commons map, then, the barricade could provide an opening onto a different relationship to land and to one another – one that both acknowledges the violence of settlement and resource extraction, and that affirms shared obligations to care-take the land for the wellbeing of future generations.
- Allison Hargreaves and David Jefferess, Always Beginning: Imagining Reconciliation Beyond Inclusion or Loss
This quote is taken from the remarkable collection The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation
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Sandra Semchuk Quote
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You knew James [Nicholas], my late husband, a Cree writer, actor and government liaison for the Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation. None of the video or photographic works that he and I did in the name of reconciliation for fifteen years ever seemed to sit still. I would think we were doing one thing and, unexpectedly, the work would turn upside down. I remember James and I talking about generosity with an elder at Waterhen Lake Cree Nation. I understood then that white government people turned things upside down by making themselves the generous ones. Generosity and power are so connected. I asked James if he could teach me how to say, in Cree, thank you for sharing the land. He responded, “You don’t understand. Sharing is the law. The land owns itself.”
- Sandra Semchuk
This quote can be found in the remarkable collection The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation
.
You knew James [Nicholas], my late husband, a Cree writer, actor and government liaison for the Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation. None of the video or photographic works that he and I did in the name of reconciliation for fifteen years ever seemed to sit still. I would think we were doing one thing and, unexpectedly, the work would turn upside down. I remember James and I talking about generosity with an elder at Waterhen Lake Cree Nation. I understood then that white government people turned things upside down by making themselves the generous ones. Generosity and power are so connected. I asked James if he could teach me how to say, in Cree, thank you for sharing the land. He responded, “You don’t understand. Sharing is the law. The land owns itself.”
- Sandra Semchuk
This quote can be found in the remarkable collection The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation
.
January 29, 2016
About Something Fragment
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I know there is something I’m searching for in art but when I try to identify it, it seems almost impossible to do so accurately. I identify my desire as a desire for art that’s “about something,” and contrast it with a feeling I so often have seeing art that’s “not about anything.” I also, at times, refer to this art that’s “about something” as art that’s connected to the world, to life, to everyday life, to life outside of art, to politics or to emancipatory struggles. And I contrast it with art that’s “not about anything” which I relate to formalism, empty formalism, technology, technique, art about art, art that focuses on a particular art historical referent or figure or art that tries to be purely in the moment. However, none of this says anything about in what way I want this art to be “about something,” and I suppose that’s where the problems actually begin. Because, for me, this being “about something” also has to be fully, yet ambiguously, integrated into the ways this art is and becomes art.
[Unfinished.]
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I know there is something I’m searching for in art but when I try to identify it, it seems almost impossible to do so accurately. I identify my desire as a desire for art that’s “about something,” and contrast it with a feeling I so often have seeing art that’s “not about anything.” I also, at times, refer to this art that’s “about something” as art that’s connected to the world, to life, to everyday life, to life outside of art, to politics or to emancipatory struggles. And I contrast it with art that’s “not about anything” which I relate to formalism, empty formalism, technology, technique, art about art, art that focuses on a particular art historical referent or figure or art that tries to be purely in the moment. However, none of this says anything about in what way I want this art to be “about something,” and I suppose that’s where the problems actually begin. Because, for me, this being “about something” also has to be fully, yet ambiguously, integrated into the ways this art is and becomes art.
[Unfinished.]
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January 27, 2016
Monomaniacal: A Confession
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Twice in the past month someone has called me monomaniacal. I believe it was the first two times I ever even heard the word. I barely noticed the first time, it was only the repetition that caught my attention. Basically, what I think they both meant is that I’m completely focused on my artistic work, that my relation to it is a kind of tunnel vision (which isn’t necessarily the technical definition of the word monomaniacal.) Others have certainly complained about this to me in the past, and I’m sure it’s something I admit to from time to time, but for the most part it’s an aspect of my life I do my best to hide. I definitely feel there’s something shameful about it, that it doesn’t reflect especially well on me as a human being. I also feel I must somehow be admitting to it more frequently these days. Maybe it’s even becoming more true over time. Part of this is a particularly intense feeling that I will die soon, and I should finish up these last few projects before I go. (I don’t have a fatal disease or anything. It’s just a feeling that I’m getting closer to the end. Perhaps only wishful thinking.) (Even more often I have the feeling that I’ve already died. A ghost wandering through a world that no longer concerns it.) As I get older, it also becomes harder to pretend that I’m interested in things when I’m actually not. I still feel an enormous curiosity about art and the world, but at the same time it does seem that certain matters in my life are more or less settled (i.e. I’m not suddenly going to develop some great interest in basketball, or cooking, or other people, or religion, or have a desire to own a car, or want children.) Then I shift to another register, since the word ‘monomaniacal’ reminds me of other recent, prominent dilemmas. This feeling that I would like to be doing less, but actually can’t stop, keep doing more. I’ve started saying I’m semi-retired and yet, at the same time, it seems to be less true than ever. (I just finished one book and already I’m half way through the first draft of another.) I wonder if being over-productive is only a bad habit. In this sense, this word ‘monomaniacal’ hits me like a punch. As I’ve frequently written: I have this overwhelming feeling of failure, and often wonder if this feeling of failure is the main engine driving me. Over-production, failure, bad habits, ongoing personal and artistic history. Ambition and the desire for success. Hunger for praise. Talent or the inability to do anything else. Full of questions and doubts but nonetheless going with things that seem to work. Full of doubts but doing things anyway. A need for money, living hand-to-mouth. Not knowing how to do anything else and realizing that now, in the time that’s left, I will most likely never learn. Is this what it means to be an artist?
.
Twice in the past month someone has called me monomaniacal. I believe it was the first two times I ever even heard the word. I barely noticed the first time, it was only the repetition that caught my attention. Basically, what I think they both meant is that I’m completely focused on my artistic work, that my relation to it is a kind of tunnel vision (which isn’t necessarily the technical definition of the word monomaniacal.) Others have certainly complained about this to me in the past, and I’m sure it’s something I admit to from time to time, but for the most part it’s an aspect of my life I do my best to hide. I definitely feel there’s something shameful about it, that it doesn’t reflect especially well on me as a human being. I also feel I must somehow be admitting to it more frequently these days. Maybe it’s even becoming more true over time. Part of this is a particularly intense feeling that I will die soon, and I should finish up these last few projects before I go. (I don’t have a fatal disease or anything. It’s just a feeling that I’m getting closer to the end. Perhaps only wishful thinking.) (Even more often I have the feeling that I’ve already died. A ghost wandering through a world that no longer concerns it.) As I get older, it also becomes harder to pretend that I’m interested in things when I’m actually not. I still feel an enormous curiosity about art and the world, but at the same time it does seem that certain matters in my life are more or less settled (i.e. I’m not suddenly going to develop some great interest in basketball, or cooking, or other people, or religion, or have a desire to own a car, or want children.) Then I shift to another register, since the word ‘monomaniacal’ reminds me of other recent, prominent dilemmas. This feeling that I would like to be doing less, but actually can’t stop, keep doing more. I’ve started saying I’m semi-retired and yet, at the same time, it seems to be less true than ever. (I just finished one book and already I’m half way through the first draft of another.) I wonder if being over-productive is only a bad habit. In this sense, this word ‘monomaniacal’ hits me like a punch. As I’ve frequently written: I have this overwhelming feeling of failure, and often wonder if this feeling of failure is the main engine driving me. Over-production, failure, bad habits, ongoing personal and artistic history. Ambition and the desire for success. Hunger for praise. Talent or the inability to do anything else. Full of questions and doubts but nonetheless going with things that seem to work. Full of doubts but doing things anyway. A need for money, living hand-to-mouth. Not knowing how to do anything else and realizing that now, in the time that’s left, I will most likely never learn. Is this what it means to be an artist?
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January 25, 2016
David Garneau Quote
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Prior to this gathering, I was not optimistic about the social engineering called Truth and Reconciliation. When first asked to work in this area more than five years ago by Jonathan Dewar, I rejected the idea. Even before seeing the testimony process firsthand, I felt that the principles of the formal TRC project continue the colonial enterprise. Individual payouts for personal testimony – rather than nation-to-nation settlements – are designed to bypass Treaty relationships, to divide and conquer. While the aggressive assimilation spearheaded by Indian Residential Schools targeted children, it was designed to ruin communities, past, present, future. The money, and the public raking up of this pain, has caused a great deal of (mostly unreported) devastation to individuals, families, and communities. I remain convinced that the official Truth and Reconciliation is primarily a non-Indigenous project designed to reconcile settlers with their dark history in order that they might live in this territory more comfortably and exploit these lands more thoroughly.
“Re-conciliation” assumes that Indigenous people and settlers once had a conciliatory relationship; that all is needed is Indigenous absolution for harmony to be restored. But there is no halcyon moment to recover, only the on-going colonial condition to become conscious of and resist. This cannot occur in the TRC bubble of structured empathy, where the pressure on survivors to forgive is enormous. The first line of the TRC’s official mandate reads: “There is an emerging and compelling desire to put the events of the past behind us so that we can work towards a stronger and healthier future” (“Establishment”). Whose compelling desire? The cruelty of this construction is that it places the onus on survivors of these internment institutions to forgive both their absent abusers and the abstract state. Following the familiar colonial script, these people are narrated as obstacles that must be overcome if we are to move forwards “towards a stronger and healthier future.” The TRC’s emotionalist structure negates resistance, reason, and discourse. The TRC is a pain generator, a testimony and tear-stained tissue collector. The federal focus on Indian Residential Schools is an effort to personalize, cauterize, and distract notice away from larger issues. It aims to direct attention to the display of individual Indigenous suffering bodies, rather than the collective wholes that were betrayed. It attempts to pay off and/or “heal” these folks rather than negotiate with their nations. And it is designed to distract both Indigenous and non-Indigenous folks from larger ongoing issues of Canadian colonization and land (ab)use.
- David Garneau
This quote is taken from the remarkable collection The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation
.
Prior to this gathering, I was not optimistic about the social engineering called Truth and Reconciliation. When first asked to work in this area more than five years ago by Jonathan Dewar, I rejected the idea. Even before seeing the testimony process firsthand, I felt that the principles of the formal TRC project continue the colonial enterprise. Individual payouts for personal testimony – rather than nation-to-nation settlements – are designed to bypass Treaty relationships, to divide and conquer. While the aggressive assimilation spearheaded by Indian Residential Schools targeted children, it was designed to ruin communities, past, present, future. The money, and the public raking up of this pain, has caused a great deal of (mostly unreported) devastation to individuals, families, and communities. I remain convinced that the official Truth and Reconciliation is primarily a non-Indigenous project designed to reconcile settlers with their dark history in order that they might live in this territory more comfortably and exploit these lands more thoroughly.
“Re-conciliation” assumes that Indigenous people and settlers once had a conciliatory relationship; that all is needed is Indigenous absolution for harmony to be restored. But there is no halcyon moment to recover, only the on-going colonial condition to become conscious of and resist. This cannot occur in the TRC bubble of structured empathy, where the pressure on survivors to forgive is enormous. The first line of the TRC’s official mandate reads: “There is an emerging and compelling desire to put the events of the past behind us so that we can work towards a stronger and healthier future” (“Establishment”). Whose compelling desire? The cruelty of this construction is that it places the onus on survivors of these internment institutions to forgive both their absent abusers and the abstract state. Following the familiar colonial script, these people are narrated as obstacles that must be overcome if we are to move forwards “towards a stronger and healthier future.” The TRC’s emotionalist structure negates resistance, reason, and discourse. The TRC is a pain generator, a testimony and tear-stained tissue collector. The federal focus on Indian Residential Schools is an effort to personalize, cauterize, and distract notice away from larger issues. It aims to direct attention to the display of individual Indigenous suffering bodies, rather than the collective wholes that were betrayed. It attempts to pay off and/or “heal” these folks rather than negotiate with their nations. And it is designed to distract both Indigenous and non-Indigenous folks from larger ongoing issues of Canadian colonization and land (ab)use.
- David Garneau
This quote is taken from the remarkable collection The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation
.
January 7, 2016
Contradictions and Paradoxes: Lene Berg and Jacob Wren
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[This text was originally published in Fillip 19.]
In 2008, shortly after discovering her work, I wrote a text about Lene Berg for C Magazine entitled “Glad the CIA Is Immoral,” focusing on her project Gentlemen & Arseholes (2007) and how it spoke directly to so many of my ongoing concerns about art, how art may or may not become political. The text ended by going a bit over-the-top, with a last line that read: “Lene Berg is the artist I have been waiting for all of my life.”
In 2011, Lene and I collaborated on the project Big Brother Where Art Thou?, a work that took place entirely on Facebook and mixed reflections on George Orwell and his work with research into how the state security apparatus uses social media to monitor the lives of those who use it. Each day for one week we sat at our respective computers—Lene in Berlin, me in Montreal—and talked on Skype as we posted material on these themes in response to each other’s posts. The Brother Where Art Thou? Facebook page still exists, an archive of a moment in time before the recent NSA scandal broke, a period in which the possibility that governments might use Facebook to infiltrate the lives of its users still seemed more like vague Orwellian rumours than reality.
It is worth noting that Lene Berg often takes a historical footnote as the source material for her projects and employs her ensuing research to reveal paradoxes and gaps in how we see history and its relation to current predicaments, for example: how an anti-communist discourse promoting modernist artistic freedom laid the groundwork for our current, considerably less free cultural field. Her work suggests that consensus views of politics, history, sexuality, etc., are often misleading, that they reveal considerably more in what they exclude, in how they leave things out, than they are able to tell us about the machinations of the world or what happened in the past.
Our conversation took place over email.
—Jacob Wren
Jacob Wren: When I first discovered your work what struck me most was how concretely you addressed the relation between art and politics. I was wondering, since you address it quite often, if you have some general thoughts about how art and politics relate? And if your feelings around these questions changed at all in and around the Stalin by Picasso (2008) scandals, when your project examining a single 1953 drawing that Picasso made of Stalin – a project that consisted of a video, a series of drawings and three public banners – had the banners unexpectedly removed, I believe we can say censored, by the presenting institutions in both Oslo and in New York.
Lene Berg: There is no clear line between art and politics. But the relationship between the two is not static and it is not always easy to spot or to define. It is full of contradictions. It changes. It can also be very specific for certain situations, individuals, or institutions.
One of my starting points for the project Gentlemen & Arseholes was the feeling that I lived in a free world, but that, at the same time, there were very strict and definite limits to that freedom. The problem was, and is, that these limits are often so ingrained that they are not perceived as limits, but rather they are regarded as laws of nature. In the beginning of the project I was stunned by how manipulatively art and philosophy were used during the Cold War by the CIA and its allies. At the same time this confirmed that there is power in these fields. The beauty is that artistic power is different from political power, even if at certain times they can collide. Artistic power is about spreading ideas, and no one controls the impact of a film, a text, or an image completely—even when one funds them.
What happened with Stalin by Picasso confirmed just how contentious, in this sense how powerful, art can be, in many ways and on many levels, but the force of the reactions against it was much stronger than I could ever have imagined. The visual illiteracy of some of the criticism shocked me. Since then, I more and more have the feeling that we in the so-called West, or in the former West, live in a quite restricted and narrow cultural environment. What is discussed within an art context, in terms of what an image represents, for instance, has not reached a broader public and therefore has very little bearing outside of the art scene (for lack of a better word). Images printed in a newspaper or art shown in a public space are still to a high degree read as propaganda or illustrations. The public and the press can in general not deal with complexities or ambiguities. This is a democratic problem as it promotes stupidity, ignorance, and manipulation.
I find the definition of “political art” problematic. As I see it artworks that address political issues are not necessarily more political than other works, they often just look critical or political, like a style or a genre. A lot of left-wing art, for example, is merely reproducing ideas that are accepted and acclaimed in the social circles of the artists and curators distributing them. As they mainly illustrate established points of view the potential impact is minimal. I do not wish to illustrate my opinion in my work—on the contrary, I try to challenge and question my views. At the same time, there is of course a relationship between how I think and what I produce. There are no clear lines. And one has to remember that art and politics are on one level only words, two abstract categories that do not necessarily describe reality very accurately.
JW: There was the incredible irony that when Pablo Picasso first made the drawing of Joseph Stalin, it upset people because it was seen as tarnishing the image or memory of Stalin, but when you showed the exact same drawing in Oslo and New York people were upset because it was seen to praise him. These are both highly charged reactions. I wonder if a strong, immediate emotional reaction to an image might short circuit a more nuanced reading. If some of the same people who denounced your work might also be able to read images in a more complex way in other circumstances. Your work often heads directly for societal sore spots: political control of art, sex work, etc. You want to be in precarious territory, but once there you provide such a complex, nuanced perspective. How do you see this dynamic between emotionally charged material and a more critical view?
LB: As a matter of fact, I did not at all foresee that Stalin by Picasso would evoke such strong feelings, which in hindsight might seem naive. I thought some people would be provoked or annoyed by the fact that Picasso had made a portrait of Stalin and that this possibly would lead to discussions around art, independence, post-WWII battles, and maybe even about the myth of the lonely genius. But it turned out that Stalin was the problem, more than Picasso. And it was in fact not so much the image of Stalin that was a problem, even if that also created some of the anger, but his role in Western history. No one wanted that history back on the table. In other words I hit a sore spot, but not exactly the one I had aimed for.
But yes, I think you are right, very charged reactions are often a product of immediate emotional responses based on second-hand information. And one has of course very limited control over the reception of one’s own work, if at all. The interpretation is more often than not dependent on one or more middlemen or middlewomen—distributors, curators, critics, etc. When the general press/media is involved there is no way to control the presentation or the discussion. After all, news journalists tend to seek controversy, not meaning or content. The media-driven nature of the discussion somehow takes on a life of its own.
For instance, a stranger attacked me quite violently at a party once during the controversy around Stalin by Picasso. He accused me of being an egotistical artist trying to deliberately smear the labour party and hurt people to get PR for myself. He had only seen a photoshopped image in the paper and read the statement from the party secretary who took down the banners. Some time afterward he apologized through a common friend as he had realized that the project was much more and quite different from the impression he had gotten from the media.
So even if I am not afraid of controversy, and even like to deal with topics that potentially are controversial, I don’t really believe in simple provocation. It often has the consequence that people close themselves off and then nothing new can enter.
JW: It’s a striking moment, this hitting “a sore spot, but not exactly the one you had aimed for.” There’s always something electric when we hit the wrong targets, when the meaning of a given work gets away from the artist. Also something distressing.
Your film Kopfkino (2012) features eight women who work as dominatrix’s telling stories about their work, seated along a table reminiscent of the Last Super (perhaps also a twist on Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party.) This is territory that could definitely offend a certain kind of person, maybe not someone in the art world, but certainly someone in the American religious right. In Kopfkino, I suspect the relation between art and politics is different than some of the other projects we’ve been discussing; that is, that it has more to do with giving these women an opportunity to speak. Was there anything the women in the film said that surprised you, or that was unexpected? From your perspective, what does it mean to have these women speaking for themselves about their work?
LB: The starting point for Kopfkino was actually questions more about storytelling and fiction than questions about sex workers or S&M. I got the idea after a dinner with one of the ladies where she told me about her work as a dominatrix. I was always interested in the function of stories, and how the structure of a story shapes the content and vice versa. Apart from being entertaining, stories are of course vehicles to spread ideas, knowledge, experience, and morality, as well as myths, lies, and propaganda. The stories Dunja Eckert-Jakobi told me that night were very concrete and very personal. Without having to force it, they automatically opened to so many charged and central themes, such as hierarchy, money, gender, social roles, and of course sex. I was also fascinated by the way she told her stories, how she described her clients and the situations, and how she built the narratives.
There is a lot of humour in the film, but some of the things the women talk about are so intricate and complex that most people have a hard time figuring them out. Such as the discussion about a pedophile client: Should one help him live out his fantasies in order to protect kids from him or will the staging of his fantasies actually make it easier for him to realize them afterward? This discussion is relevant for movie making as well as other artistic expressions. For instance, when you picture violent events, abuse, or discrimination, are you presenting a cathartic experience or are you in fact inspiring people to do the same, giving them visual examples of how it could be done as well as a structure, a story, that makes sense of such actions?
One of the themes in Kopfkino is the floating division between fiction and reality. Even if we believe we can separate the two, fiction and reality are intertwined in many ways and forms. One might say that fiction is reality as long as we believe in it. And as a culture Westerners live with a hard-to-handle cocktail: a fundamentally Christian morality on the one hand and on the other hand a capitalist ideology, which sooner or later accepts almost everything that is commercially successful even if it is morally suspect. Except maybe for prostitution, which is still illegal in most of the Western world. This fact was of course also important in the idea for Kopfkino and how to stage it. From the start I knew I wanted it to be about fiction; not fiction as the opposite of truth—on the contrary, fiction as a way of revealing something true, or perhaps rather something real. I wanted the women to speak as subjects and not as victims. I wanted to avoid stigmatization and pity. In a sense I wanted to normalize something that is regarded as bizarre and perverse. These women sell their time and their bodies, but most people do that in one way or another and I have a much bigger problem with intellectual prostitution than with what they do. Since they are dealing with things that sometimes are dangerous, sometimes disgusting, and often extremely demanding, they are forced to reflect upon their own responsibility and limits, including the role of money in their work. Does the fact that they are being paid mean that they have to deny their own pleasure? Is “a professional” not supposed to be fully present, just giving his or her services without using his or her own personality, judgment, or desire? Such questions are of course relevant far beyond the world of S&M.
JW: How do you think Kopfkino relates to feminism? In one sense, the women are empowered, have a lot of control over their lives and, within the film itself, on how their stories are told. But in another sense they are still employed by men. Do you think Kopfkino relates to feminism at all or is that a misleading way to watch the film?
LB: Even if I never try to illustrate my opinion or a specific theory in my work, I think Kopfkino fundamentally is a feminist film. But I have also met people who find it anti-feminist. It depends on how one defines feminism I suppose. And it is a tricky film to place within any category really. Some of the role-playing games described are very archaic and old-fashioned. Almost scarily so. You have to wonder how these often medieval hierarchies have survived through centuries, in the shape of sexual fantasies and desires. At the same time, the variety of female personalities, in spite of the clichés they are dressed up as, is impossible to overlook and adds other and unexpected dimensions to the picture.
I find it interesting that Kopfkino can be read in many different contexts and using different theories. The women’s stories are very rich and full of questions that are relevant to various discussions – about gender, sex, labour, power, and alienation, to mention a few. Then there is another level, which is about how they tell their stories and comment on each other’s experiences. And on another level there are questions about authenticity, staging, and reality, which lie in the way the film is shot and edited.
I personally find the mix of reality and fantasy in the stories themselves very intriguing. Since desire is one of the things one cannot fake, there is some sort of truth, or reality, to the role-playing games these women stage. There is also the aspect of shifting roles: that one individual has several possibilities to express herself or himself, including sexually. But one needs a stage, a setting to be able to go outside of one’s social role. S&M is one such scene. I also see several parallels between their profession and filmmaking. There is a certain degree of illusion and a lot of timing involved. These are hard to define skills, but they are central to human communication, to storytelling, and to acting.
What does it mean to play a role for money? Is it empowering to handle other people’s sexual desires or enslaving? I honestly don’t know, but I do not perceive these women as particularly oppressed. Some of them seem to be in possession of knowledge about their own sexuality and about sexual desire in general that I have seldom encountered in such a frank and non-idealized way. At the same time, I do think their work can be boring, degrading, and exhausting both for the mind and the body. Most of them also have other jobs or they study.
JW: I feel your work doesn’t play a game I often see in visual art: the artist keeping all the cards close to his or her chest, creating works that are unreadable without a certain amount of background information, often to be found in the catalogue or brochure. In your work, I often don’t need any other information apart from what I experience in the work itself. Do you agree with this assessment? How do you see this aspect of your practice? (Perhaps it also makes your work more difficult to write about because so much of what needs to be said has already been conveyed.) Might this directness also have something to do with your background in film?
LB: It is true that I like my works to be sort of self-contained, so that they can be seen without knowing the background discussion or my references. I try to avoid talking in codes or mystifying things, but my projects are often composed by contradictions and paradoxes, which may also make them hard to write about. When I start to work on an idea I often focus on the surface, what it will look and feel like. As the project develops this may change, but I like there to be a certain dynamic between the surface and the content, so that as one goes into the work ones perception of the surface will be altered and sometimes even completely changed in the process.
It is very likely that my background in film has shaped my way of working. Movies are in general expected to communicate immediately with everyone. This need tends to turn any content into the same kind of story or message, which is something I am trying to avoid at almost any cost. My method is probably most of all a result of the years I worked with the film company Hinden in Stockholm. We were a handful people working together on very different kinds of projects, from advertising to feature films, short films, art projects, etc. Sometimes I was directing, often not. Parallel to the practical work, which at times was quite hard and demanding, we discussed a lot of theoretical issues in relationship to what we were doing and producing. Without this mix of physical and practical work and the continuous discussions around it, I probably would have been a different person and artist.
JW: I’m still thinking about something you said earlier, about how we live “in a free world, but that, at the same time, there are very strict and definite limits to that freedom.” And how, over the past ten or so years, maybe since 9/11, my feelings around our apparent (Western) freedom have changed so much. How more and more it seems we’re no longer free to gather and protest, or how our confidence that we have privacy—for example, online or in an email—has lessened. And that the celebration of (illusory) Western freedom might have had more to do with the Cold War—with convincing the world that “democracy” was better than “communism”—than it did with any actual desire for, for example, free speech. (But then I think about McCarthyism, how little room for dissent there was during that period, and wonder if my sense of history is simply off.) Has your thinking around different kinds of freedom changed at all over the last ten or fifteen years? Do you think there’s been a significant recent shift?
LB: I had this feeling long before 9/11, but since then it has become more evident and tangible. Living off and on in New York has made it clear to me that a corporate worldview is more and more dominating. While politicians speak of pluralism and freedom, the preferred lifestyle is quite narrow and has very little tolerance for difference. Actually it is less tolerant or open now than in the 80’s when I was a teenager, which is quite surprising to me.
Sadly, what is going on now is not so different from the era of McCarthyism or pre-WWII: the law is used to suppress difference of opinion and to defend people of privilege. I suppose 9/11 made it easier to change the laws in this direction. The law is the key to rule the world, at least if you have the police and the courts to back it up, and the big corporations are better protected by the law than the individual at this point.
The West has so many blind spots in terms of what freedom actually means, or can mean, and very little consciousness about the actual conditions for freedom, or for democracy or pluralism for that matter. It seems to me that a lot of the challenges that were present at the beginning and middle of the last century are still with us. More and more often I experience how racist, sexist and nationalistic views are used as part of a social struggle as less privileged groups and individuals turn to white-supremacy, infantile nationalism or anti-gay ideas to oppose the liberal bourgeoisie, to use an old fashioned term.
JW: I now think my last question was too naive. (Though, at the same time, I’m always searching for ways to produce productive naiveté.) Something may have shifted with 9/11, but the history of Western unfreedom is such a long one. I’ve read a great deal of history, but often think not exactly that I don’t know history well enough (of course I don’t), but that I don’t feel history enough. And I did clearly feel the restrictions directly following 9/11, perhaps suggesting it’s not such an important even in generalized Western unfreedom, but was an important event within my own personal sense of it. (Much like Vietnam was a significant event for a previous generation.) With earlier works like The Weimar Conspiracy (2007) and The Drowned One (2008) you question how things enter history and what we actually know about them (versus what we think we know). Do you know how your interest in the paradoxes of writing and experiencing history first began? Can history be more or less objective? More recent projects seem to have moved away from the topic.
LB: This may sound strange, but for me history was never really my topic. I happened to discover some historical events that presented the possibility to deal with things that preoccupied me. As history is used to motivate present actions and ideas, turning and tossing historic events is a way to question the present perception and representation of things. Even if only indirectly.
I am interested in storytelling and the relationship between stories and the realities they depict. History is in a way our common story; it is used to shed light on the present. There are of course many ways to construct and tell stories, and depending on how they are told they will mean very different things and sometimes have very different consequences. That also goes for history.
Also, for some years I had problems funding my work, and I discovered that I could use found footage, archival material, collages, etc., to produce quite complex things for very little cash. It gave me a certain freedom for a while, and I will probably do projects like that again, but I needed to move on. Or actually: to move back to where I came from. I like teamwork, working with actors, sets, etc. That is what I started out doing and it has been a great pleasure to be able to return to that.
Even if my projects look different and seem to deal with very different topics, some themes run through them all. I don’t try to pin these themes down though—they are simply part of my thinking and doing however I work, for good and for bad. I like every project to have its own challenges, even its own style and expression. For me an idea for a new project is more about knowing how to work on it and how to define the elements out of which the final project will be constructed than knowing exactly what it will look like in the end.
JW: The kinds of contradictions and paradoxes in your work usually aren’t formal aspects of the work itself, aren’t contradictions you create. More often they are contradictions and paradoxes you discover in the world and then focus our attention on. In this sense your work needs to be as clear as possible in order to present the full complexity of nuance and questioning that real-life paradoxes generate. How do you see the dynamic in your work between clarity and paradox? Do you know why you’re attracted to these kinds of narratives?
LB: I seek clarity as much as possible, that is true. But I distrust one liners and beloved simplifications, or clichés, if you like. There are many mysteries in human relations and conditions, and things that are made up of contradictions and paradoxes seem real to me. Also they protect me from confirming the obvious and from reproducing automatic thinking.
The following may sound a bit pretentious but I believe the human mind is incapable of grasping the truth as it is. Not only because the truth is often cruel, but because our minds are not conditioned for it. I do believe there are facts that are beyond fiction, but they are very few and to understand them we need a system, a fiction, if you like. I believe fiction, in a broad sense of the word, is a human way of making sense. Fiction is not necessarily about lies, but neither is it about truth in an absolute sense. The question is not so much whether something is fiction or fact, but what kind of fiction it is and with what purpose it is being told, reproduced and repeated. I am interested not in disclosing another fact that can be added to the general story but in presenting my material in a form that adds something and possibly also questions a dominating fiction. Such as the macho myth around Picasso or the notion that there is no ideology in the present liberal democracies, just to mention two very general examples.
That said, I have to add that language is not of great help when I try to pin down these ideas. The words and notions used to define things like fact and fiction easily create some sort of mental labyrinth when you start to challenge them. Sometimes I enjoy being in such labyrinths, at least for a while. With a bit of experience I have learned how to get out of them, otherwise I would have gone mad a long time ago.
JW: Language can certainly complicate or obscure as easily as clarify. Tools for communication can easily flip over into defense mechanisms. But, for me, there are so many aspects of your projects that cut through art, that speak so clearly and directly to the world. Would you like this work to be less marginal?
LB: I think some of my projects relate to very small circles, such as Gentlemen & Arseholes and Dirty Young Loose (2013) whereas others, like Stalin by Picasso or Kopfkino, are projects with a much broader potential. I do not think that it is important that everything reaches everyone, but I do think the current distribution systems are limited by old-fashioned categories: a lot of things can’t reach an audience because they don’t fit established genres or boxes. At the same time, such distribution barriers are only logical in a culture built on consumption. Poetry, art, and critical thinking are luxury goods in a way. I have no problem understanding that for a lot of people these things are, or seem to be, completely irrelevant to the lives they lead.
It may be a bit far fetched, but somehow it is relevant: I saw an interview with the musician Blixa Bargeld recently. When asked why he had always been rebellious and challenging, he said he was genetically so disposed. I found that very funny. Nowadays it seems like everything is explained by genes, but you very rarely hear our genetic material used to explain eccentricities, opposition or originality. And he could be right, maybe the desire to oppose and to question is part of some human beings’ genetic material just like illnesses and hair colour? But even if this is the case, we are still part of a collective where we take on or are given different roles in relationship to others. In an individualistic culture like ours this aspect is often overlooked.
To make something public is always a suggestion for the general agenda as I see it. But if only a few are interested in what I believe is important, it is in a way not my problem. There are much more powerful economic and political interests that choose what is to be central or dominant. The fact is I never felt very in sync with my time or with my generation. It used to bother me, but it doesn’t anymore.
You can find excerpts from some of Lene Berg’s films here:
http://vimeopro.com/user18434138/leneberg
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[This text was originally published in Fillip 19.]
In 2008, shortly after discovering her work, I wrote a text about Lene Berg for C Magazine entitled “Glad the CIA Is Immoral,” focusing on her project Gentlemen & Arseholes (2007) and how it spoke directly to so many of my ongoing concerns about art, how art may or may not become political. The text ended by going a bit over-the-top, with a last line that read: “Lene Berg is the artist I have been waiting for all of my life.”
In 2011, Lene and I collaborated on the project Big Brother Where Art Thou?, a work that took place entirely on Facebook and mixed reflections on George Orwell and his work with research into how the state security apparatus uses social media to monitor the lives of those who use it. Each day for one week we sat at our respective computers—Lene in Berlin, me in Montreal—and talked on Skype as we posted material on these themes in response to each other’s posts. The Brother Where Art Thou? Facebook page still exists, an archive of a moment in time before the recent NSA scandal broke, a period in which the possibility that governments might use Facebook to infiltrate the lives of its users still seemed more like vague Orwellian rumours than reality.
It is worth noting that Lene Berg often takes a historical footnote as the source material for her projects and employs her ensuing research to reveal paradoxes and gaps in how we see history and its relation to current predicaments, for example: how an anti-communist discourse promoting modernist artistic freedom laid the groundwork for our current, considerably less free cultural field. Her work suggests that consensus views of politics, history, sexuality, etc., are often misleading, that they reveal considerably more in what they exclude, in how they leave things out, than they are able to tell us about the machinations of the world or what happened in the past.
Our conversation took place over email.
—Jacob Wren
Jacob Wren: When I first discovered your work what struck me most was how concretely you addressed the relation between art and politics. I was wondering, since you address it quite often, if you have some general thoughts about how art and politics relate? And if your feelings around these questions changed at all in and around the Stalin by Picasso (2008) scandals, when your project examining a single 1953 drawing that Picasso made of Stalin – a project that consisted of a video, a series of drawings and three public banners – had the banners unexpectedly removed, I believe we can say censored, by the presenting institutions in both Oslo and in New York.
Lene Berg: There is no clear line between art and politics. But the relationship between the two is not static and it is not always easy to spot or to define. It is full of contradictions. It changes. It can also be very specific for certain situations, individuals, or institutions.
One of my starting points for the project Gentlemen & Arseholes was the feeling that I lived in a free world, but that, at the same time, there were very strict and definite limits to that freedom. The problem was, and is, that these limits are often so ingrained that they are not perceived as limits, but rather they are regarded as laws of nature. In the beginning of the project I was stunned by how manipulatively art and philosophy were used during the Cold War by the CIA and its allies. At the same time this confirmed that there is power in these fields. The beauty is that artistic power is different from political power, even if at certain times they can collide. Artistic power is about spreading ideas, and no one controls the impact of a film, a text, or an image completely—even when one funds them.
What happened with Stalin by Picasso confirmed just how contentious, in this sense how powerful, art can be, in many ways and on many levels, but the force of the reactions against it was much stronger than I could ever have imagined. The visual illiteracy of some of the criticism shocked me. Since then, I more and more have the feeling that we in the so-called West, or in the former West, live in a quite restricted and narrow cultural environment. What is discussed within an art context, in terms of what an image represents, for instance, has not reached a broader public and therefore has very little bearing outside of the art scene (for lack of a better word). Images printed in a newspaper or art shown in a public space are still to a high degree read as propaganda or illustrations. The public and the press can in general not deal with complexities or ambiguities. This is a democratic problem as it promotes stupidity, ignorance, and manipulation.
I find the definition of “political art” problematic. As I see it artworks that address political issues are not necessarily more political than other works, they often just look critical or political, like a style or a genre. A lot of left-wing art, for example, is merely reproducing ideas that are accepted and acclaimed in the social circles of the artists and curators distributing them. As they mainly illustrate established points of view the potential impact is minimal. I do not wish to illustrate my opinion in my work—on the contrary, I try to challenge and question my views. At the same time, there is of course a relationship between how I think and what I produce. There are no clear lines. And one has to remember that art and politics are on one level only words, two abstract categories that do not necessarily describe reality very accurately.
JW: There was the incredible irony that when Pablo Picasso first made the drawing of Joseph Stalin, it upset people because it was seen as tarnishing the image or memory of Stalin, but when you showed the exact same drawing in Oslo and New York people were upset because it was seen to praise him. These are both highly charged reactions. I wonder if a strong, immediate emotional reaction to an image might short circuit a more nuanced reading. If some of the same people who denounced your work might also be able to read images in a more complex way in other circumstances. Your work often heads directly for societal sore spots: political control of art, sex work, etc. You want to be in precarious territory, but once there you provide such a complex, nuanced perspective. How do you see this dynamic between emotionally charged material and a more critical view?
LB: As a matter of fact, I did not at all foresee that Stalin by Picasso would evoke such strong feelings, which in hindsight might seem naive. I thought some people would be provoked or annoyed by the fact that Picasso had made a portrait of Stalin and that this possibly would lead to discussions around art, independence, post-WWII battles, and maybe even about the myth of the lonely genius. But it turned out that Stalin was the problem, more than Picasso. And it was in fact not so much the image of Stalin that was a problem, even if that also created some of the anger, but his role in Western history. No one wanted that history back on the table. In other words I hit a sore spot, but not exactly the one I had aimed for.
But yes, I think you are right, very charged reactions are often a product of immediate emotional responses based on second-hand information. And one has of course very limited control over the reception of one’s own work, if at all. The interpretation is more often than not dependent on one or more middlemen or middlewomen—distributors, curators, critics, etc. When the general press/media is involved there is no way to control the presentation or the discussion. After all, news journalists tend to seek controversy, not meaning or content. The media-driven nature of the discussion somehow takes on a life of its own.
For instance, a stranger attacked me quite violently at a party once during the controversy around Stalin by Picasso. He accused me of being an egotistical artist trying to deliberately smear the labour party and hurt people to get PR for myself. He had only seen a photoshopped image in the paper and read the statement from the party secretary who took down the banners. Some time afterward he apologized through a common friend as he had realized that the project was much more and quite different from the impression he had gotten from the media.
So even if I am not afraid of controversy, and even like to deal with topics that potentially are controversial, I don’t really believe in simple provocation. It often has the consequence that people close themselves off and then nothing new can enter.
JW: It’s a striking moment, this hitting “a sore spot, but not exactly the one you had aimed for.” There’s always something electric when we hit the wrong targets, when the meaning of a given work gets away from the artist. Also something distressing.
Your film Kopfkino (2012) features eight women who work as dominatrix’s telling stories about their work, seated along a table reminiscent of the Last Super (perhaps also a twist on Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party.) This is territory that could definitely offend a certain kind of person, maybe not someone in the art world, but certainly someone in the American religious right. In Kopfkino, I suspect the relation between art and politics is different than some of the other projects we’ve been discussing; that is, that it has more to do with giving these women an opportunity to speak. Was there anything the women in the film said that surprised you, or that was unexpected? From your perspective, what does it mean to have these women speaking for themselves about their work?
LB: The starting point for Kopfkino was actually questions more about storytelling and fiction than questions about sex workers or S&M. I got the idea after a dinner with one of the ladies where she told me about her work as a dominatrix. I was always interested in the function of stories, and how the structure of a story shapes the content and vice versa. Apart from being entertaining, stories are of course vehicles to spread ideas, knowledge, experience, and morality, as well as myths, lies, and propaganda. The stories Dunja Eckert-Jakobi told me that night were very concrete and very personal. Without having to force it, they automatically opened to so many charged and central themes, such as hierarchy, money, gender, social roles, and of course sex. I was also fascinated by the way she told her stories, how she described her clients and the situations, and how she built the narratives.
There is a lot of humour in the film, but some of the things the women talk about are so intricate and complex that most people have a hard time figuring them out. Such as the discussion about a pedophile client: Should one help him live out his fantasies in order to protect kids from him or will the staging of his fantasies actually make it easier for him to realize them afterward? This discussion is relevant for movie making as well as other artistic expressions. For instance, when you picture violent events, abuse, or discrimination, are you presenting a cathartic experience or are you in fact inspiring people to do the same, giving them visual examples of how it could be done as well as a structure, a story, that makes sense of such actions?
One of the themes in Kopfkino is the floating division between fiction and reality. Even if we believe we can separate the two, fiction and reality are intertwined in many ways and forms. One might say that fiction is reality as long as we believe in it. And as a culture Westerners live with a hard-to-handle cocktail: a fundamentally Christian morality on the one hand and on the other hand a capitalist ideology, which sooner or later accepts almost everything that is commercially successful even if it is morally suspect. Except maybe for prostitution, which is still illegal in most of the Western world. This fact was of course also important in the idea for Kopfkino and how to stage it. From the start I knew I wanted it to be about fiction; not fiction as the opposite of truth—on the contrary, fiction as a way of revealing something true, or perhaps rather something real. I wanted the women to speak as subjects and not as victims. I wanted to avoid stigmatization and pity. In a sense I wanted to normalize something that is regarded as bizarre and perverse. These women sell their time and their bodies, but most people do that in one way or another and I have a much bigger problem with intellectual prostitution than with what they do. Since they are dealing with things that sometimes are dangerous, sometimes disgusting, and often extremely demanding, they are forced to reflect upon their own responsibility and limits, including the role of money in their work. Does the fact that they are being paid mean that they have to deny their own pleasure? Is “a professional” not supposed to be fully present, just giving his or her services without using his or her own personality, judgment, or desire? Such questions are of course relevant far beyond the world of S&M.
JW: How do you think Kopfkino relates to feminism? In one sense, the women are empowered, have a lot of control over their lives and, within the film itself, on how their stories are told. But in another sense they are still employed by men. Do you think Kopfkino relates to feminism at all or is that a misleading way to watch the film?
LB: Even if I never try to illustrate my opinion or a specific theory in my work, I think Kopfkino fundamentally is a feminist film. But I have also met people who find it anti-feminist. It depends on how one defines feminism I suppose. And it is a tricky film to place within any category really. Some of the role-playing games described are very archaic and old-fashioned. Almost scarily so. You have to wonder how these often medieval hierarchies have survived through centuries, in the shape of sexual fantasies and desires. At the same time, the variety of female personalities, in spite of the clichés they are dressed up as, is impossible to overlook and adds other and unexpected dimensions to the picture.
I find it interesting that Kopfkino can be read in many different contexts and using different theories. The women’s stories are very rich and full of questions that are relevant to various discussions – about gender, sex, labour, power, and alienation, to mention a few. Then there is another level, which is about how they tell their stories and comment on each other’s experiences. And on another level there are questions about authenticity, staging, and reality, which lie in the way the film is shot and edited.
I personally find the mix of reality and fantasy in the stories themselves very intriguing. Since desire is one of the things one cannot fake, there is some sort of truth, or reality, to the role-playing games these women stage. There is also the aspect of shifting roles: that one individual has several possibilities to express herself or himself, including sexually. But one needs a stage, a setting to be able to go outside of one’s social role. S&M is one such scene. I also see several parallels between their profession and filmmaking. There is a certain degree of illusion and a lot of timing involved. These are hard to define skills, but they are central to human communication, to storytelling, and to acting.
What does it mean to play a role for money? Is it empowering to handle other people’s sexual desires or enslaving? I honestly don’t know, but I do not perceive these women as particularly oppressed. Some of them seem to be in possession of knowledge about their own sexuality and about sexual desire in general that I have seldom encountered in such a frank and non-idealized way. At the same time, I do think their work can be boring, degrading, and exhausting both for the mind and the body. Most of them also have other jobs or they study.
JW: I feel your work doesn’t play a game I often see in visual art: the artist keeping all the cards close to his or her chest, creating works that are unreadable without a certain amount of background information, often to be found in the catalogue or brochure. In your work, I often don’t need any other information apart from what I experience in the work itself. Do you agree with this assessment? How do you see this aspect of your practice? (Perhaps it also makes your work more difficult to write about because so much of what needs to be said has already been conveyed.) Might this directness also have something to do with your background in film?
LB: It is true that I like my works to be sort of self-contained, so that they can be seen without knowing the background discussion or my references. I try to avoid talking in codes or mystifying things, but my projects are often composed by contradictions and paradoxes, which may also make them hard to write about. When I start to work on an idea I often focus on the surface, what it will look and feel like. As the project develops this may change, but I like there to be a certain dynamic between the surface and the content, so that as one goes into the work ones perception of the surface will be altered and sometimes even completely changed in the process.
It is very likely that my background in film has shaped my way of working. Movies are in general expected to communicate immediately with everyone. This need tends to turn any content into the same kind of story or message, which is something I am trying to avoid at almost any cost. My method is probably most of all a result of the years I worked with the film company Hinden in Stockholm. We were a handful people working together on very different kinds of projects, from advertising to feature films, short films, art projects, etc. Sometimes I was directing, often not. Parallel to the practical work, which at times was quite hard and demanding, we discussed a lot of theoretical issues in relationship to what we were doing and producing. Without this mix of physical and practical work and the continuous discussions around it, I probably would have been a different person and artist.
JW: I’m still thinking about something you said earlier, about how we live “in a free world, but that, at the same time, there are very strict and definite limits to that freedom.” And how, over the past ten or so years, maybe since 9/11, my feelings around our apparent (Western) freedom have changed so much. How more and more it seems we’re no longer free to gather and protest, or how our confidence that we have privacy—for example, online or in an email—has lessened. And that the celebration of (illusory) Western freedom might have had more to do with the Cold War—with convincing the world that “democracy” was better than “communism”—than it did with any actual desire for, for example, free speech. (But then I think about McCarthyism, how little room for dissent there was during that period, and wonder if my sense of history is simply off.) Has your thinking around different kinds of freedom changed at all over the last ten or fifteen years? Do you think there’s been a significant recent shift?
LB: I had this feeling long before 9/11, but since then it has become more evident and tangible. Living off and on in New York has made it clear to me that a corporate worldview is more and more dominating. While politicians speak of pluralism and freedom, the preferred lifestyle is quite narrow and has very little tolerance for difference. Actually it is less tolerant or open now than in the 80’s when I was a teenager, which is quite surprising to me.
Sadly, what is going on now is not so different from the era of McCarthyism or pre-WWII: the law is used to suppress difference of opinion and to defend people of privilege. I suppose 9/11 made it easier to change the laws in this direction. The law is the key to rule the world, at least if you have the police and the courts to back it up, and the big corporations are better protected by the law than the individual at this point.
The West has so many blind spots in terms of what freedom actually means, or can mean, and very little consciousness about the actual conditions for freedom, or for democracy or pluralism for that matter. It seems to me that a lot of the challenges that were present at the beginning and middle of the last century are still with us. More and more often I experience how racist, sexist and nationalistic views are used as part of a social struggle as less privileged groups and individuals turn to white-supremacy, infantile nationalism or anti-gay ideas to oppose the liberal bourgeoisie, to use an old fashioned term.
JW: I now think my last question was too naive. (Though, at the same time, I’m always searching for ways to produce productive naiveté.) Something may have shifted with 9/11, but the history of Western unfreedom is such a long one. I’ve read a great deal of history, but often think not exactly that I don’t know history well enough (of course I don’t), but that I don’t feel history enough. And I did clearly feel the restrictions directly following 9/11, perhaps suggesting it’s not such an important even in generalized Western unfreedom, but was an important event within my own personal sense of it. (Much like Vietnam was a significant event for a previous generation.) With earlier works like The Weimar Conspiracy (2007) and The Drowned One (2008) you question how things enter history and what we actually know about them (versus what we think we know). Do you know how your interest in the paradoxes of writing and experiencing history first began? Can history be more or less objective? More recent projects seem to have moved away from the topic.
LB: This may sound strange, but for me history was never really my topic. I happened to discover some historical events that presented the possibility to deal with things that preoccupied me. As history is used to motivate present actions and ideas, turning and tossing historic events is a way to question the present perception and representation of things. Even if only indirectly.
I am interested in storytelling and the relationship between stories and the realities they depict. History is in a way our common story; it is used to shed light on the present. There are of course many ways to construct and tell stories, and depending on how they are told they will mean very different things and sometimes have very different consequences. That also goes for history.
Also, for some years I had problems funding my work, and I discovered that I could use found footage, archival material, collages, etc., to produce quite complex things for very little cash. It gave me a certain freedom for a while, and I will probably do projects like that again, but I needed to move on. Or actually: to move back to where I came from. I like teamwork, working with actors, sets, etc. That is what I started out doing and it has been a great pleasure to be able to return to that.
Even if my projects look different and seem to deal with very different topics, some themes run through them all. I don’t try to pin these themes down though—they are simply part of my thinking and doing however I work, for good and for bad. I like every project to have its own challenges, even its own style and expression. For me an idea for a new project is more about knowing how to work on it and how to define the elements out of which the final project will be constructed than knowing exactly what it will look like in the end.
JW: The kinds of contradictions and paradoxes in your work usually aren’t formal aspects of the work itself, aren’t contradictions you create. More often they are contradictions and paradoxes you discover in the world and then focus our attention on. In this sense your work needs to be as clear as possible in order to present the full complexity of nuance and questioning that real-life paradoxes generate. How do you see the dynamic in your work between clarity and paradox? Do you know why you’re attracted to these kinds of narratives?
LB: I seek clarity as much as possible, that is true. But I distrust one liners and beloved simplifications, or clichés, if you like. There are many mysteries in human relations and conditions, and things that are made up of contradictions and paradoxes seem real to me. Also they protect me from confirming the obvious and from reproducing automatic thinking.
The following may sound a bit pretentious but I believe the human mind is incapable of grasping the truth as it is. Not only because the truth is often cruel, but because our minds are not conditioned for it. I do believe there are facts that are beyond fiction, but they are very few and to understand them we need a system, a fiction, if you like. I believe fiction, in a broad sense of the word, is a human way of making sense. Fiction is not necessarily about lies, but neither is it about truth in an absolute sense. The question is not so much whether something is fiction or fact, but what kind of fiction it is and with what purpose it is being told, reproduced and repeated. I am interested not in disclosing another fact that can be added to the general story but in presenting my material in a form that adds something and possibly also questions a dominating fiction. Such as the macho myth around Picasso or the notion that there is no ideology in the present liberal democracies, just to mention two very general examples.
That said, I have to add that language is not of great help when I try to pin down these ideas. The words and notions used to define things like fact and fiction easily create some sort of mental labyrinth when you start to challenge them. Sometimes I enjoy being in such labyrinths, at least for a while. With a bit of experience I have learned how to get out of them, otherwise I would have gone mad a long time ago.
JW: Language can certainly complicate or obscure as easily as clarify. Tools for communication can easily flip over into defense mechanisms. But, for me, there are so many aspects of your projects that cut through art, that speak so clearly and directly to the world. Would you like this work to be less marginal?
LB: I think some of my projects relate to very small circles, such as Gentlemen & Arseholes and Dirty Young Loose (2013) whereas others, like Stalin by Picasso or Kopfkino, are projects with a much broader potential. I do not think that it is important that everything reaches everyone, but I do think the current distribution systems are limited by old-fashioned categories: a lot of things can’t reach an audience because they don’t fit established genres or boxes. At the same time, such distribution barriers are only logical in a culture built on consumption. Poetry, art, and critical thinking are luxury goods in a way. I have no problem understanding that for a lot of people these things are, or seem to be, completely irrelevant to the lives they lead.
It may be a bit far fetched, but somehow it is relevant: I saw an interview with the musician Blixa Bargeld recently. When asked why he had always been rebellious and challenging, he said he was genetically so disposed. I found that very funny. Nowadays it seems like everything is explained by genes, but you very rarely hear our genetic material used to explain eccentricities, opposition or originality. And he could be right, maybe the desire to oppose and to question is part of some human beings’ genetic material just like illnesses and hair colour? But even if this is the case, we are still part of a collective where we take on or are given different roles in relationship to others. In an individualistic culture like ours this aspect is often overlooked.
To make something public is always a suggestion for the general agenda as I see it. But if only a few are interested in what I believe is important, it is in a way not my problem. There are much more powerful economic and political interests that choose what is to be central or dominant. The fact is I never felt very in sync with my time or with my generation. It used to bother me, but it doesn’t anymore.
You can find excerpts from some of Lene Berg’s films here:
http://vimeopro.com/user18434138/leneberg
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December 28, 2015
A long and short playlist for 2015 (with commentary)
I said I wasn't going to do this anymore, because YouTube now has too many commercials, but it seems I can't stop.
I've now made YouTube playlists in 2010, 2011, Japan, 2013, 2014 and now 2015 (also above.)
The playlist for 2015 is so long (over five hundred videos) that this year I've also made a shorter one that contains some of my favourites.
In previous years, my commentary was about how things I do on the internet now seem part of, or even more interesting, than the rest of my artistic practice. But this year all I'm thinking about is my internet addiction. For the first time in my life I'm finding it difficult to read and I think it might partly have too do with how much time I spend online.
I have just managed to spend two weekends offline, and will try to keep spending weekends away from this thing for the rest of the year. I don't particularly think I'll succeed. But we'll see what happens.
I think what disturbs me most is how little interest I have in doing anything else.
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December 21, 2015
Internet Addiction
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I have decided to try to stay off the internet during the weekends. (I just managed my first weekend in more or less ever.) I will most likely fail, but I thought I would announce it here anyway. Each time I fall off the wagon I will do my best to get back on. When it comes to email, ‘it can wait until Monday’ will hopefully become my new mantra. So if you see me on social media during the weekend you will know that I am weak.
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I have decided to try to stay off the internet during the weekends. (I just managed my first weekend in more or less ever.) I will most likely fail, but I thought I would announce it here anyway. Each time I fall off the wagon I will do my best to get back on. When it comes to email, ‘it can wait until Monday’ will hopefully become my new mantra. So if you see me on social media during the weekend you will know that I am weak.
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