Hito Steyerl, in conversation with Rosemary Heather, offers up a provisional definition of art as being that form of information able to create a productive uncertainty, the emphasis being on “productive.” So, what is that then, a productive uncertainty? A simple way to chart productivity is through action, so that the measure of art would be its consequential, tangible effects upon the viewer, as in their own making or acts of protest or even their dancing in response. A subtler measure would be the internal, ideological resonance whereby an art work sparks lines of flight in the mind of the viewer. I recall, in high-school, a fervent debate in philosophy class about the importance of thought versus action. I was on the side of action, taking the position that action presupposed thought, which was really just argumentative short-hand for not taking a position at all because in the trick I could have both. But I think of this conundrum now in relation to a question of what constitutes productivity and while having a rigorous understanding of one’s motivations for action is helpful, so often the thoughts stop at their own articulation. These are all the late-night conversations that go nowhere. They are lame. What use is a coherent logic if it is not felt in the world?
Planningtorock’s “The Breaks” makes everything make sense.
How can performance art occupy the space and time of exhibition in ways that exceed documentation? Marina Abramović’s 2010 retrospective, The Artist is Present, employed a number of tactics including the re-performance of her works by other, specially trained performance artists. Spanning over forty years of her practice, the exhibition was sprawling not only in terms of the cast of collaborators who embodied her works, but was anchored by an intense durational performance by Abramović that saw her in the space of New York’s Museum of Modern Art for every hour of every day that her retrospective was open to the public. So, one way to anchor performance in the context of exhibition is to simply be there, literally. But how else?
The trap I keep coming upon is that a short temporal event within the context of a longer, larger show quickly disappears. How can the traces left behind not merely point toward the now missing event? Or, if the traces left behind somehow emerge as their own works–a film or series of photographs, say–then why not have those objects be the desired effect? Why bother with the artifice of performance?
I have no satisfying means of circumventing this dilemma, and as a curator I have a limited amount of experience working with performance, but I wonder if there is a way out of the circle by considering the object of an art practice to be a central idea as opposed to a medium. By shifting the focus from the specificities of a medium, and concentrating instead of the many aspects of an idea that can be brought out using different tactics, then the means employed become in service of deep reading, not just a pale reiteration of a revered moment.
In “The Cure by Love,” Kaja Silverman’s intricate and tender analysis of Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), she suggests that it is the necessary participation of the viewer (of the film, but it is easy to extend the idea outward) that allows for the past to be redeemed in the present, and therefore, any such redemption hinges on the spectator’s willingness to employ their own memories in service of revivification.
By making this subjective appropriation exemplary of true vision, Hiroshima, mon amour teaches us a lesson that runs directly counter to all of our usual assumptions about what it means to treat another person, another culture, or another nation with respect. It indicates that the basis for an ethical relation to the Other is not distance, but its exact obverse…Hiroshima, mon amour shows us that it is only by making something our own that we can set it free, bring it to “its authentic appearance.” This film also gives the lie to the assumption that through our revisions and reconstruction of the past we cannot help but betray it. It suggests that it is only through reconstituting what we have loved in a new form that we can be true to it.
The obverse of distance, as Silverman would have it, is incorporation. I am trying to set this idea of hers alongside that of Rancière’s, and what for the last year has been a rallying cry in my research and thinking, namely that “distance is not an evil to be abolished, but the normal condition of any communication.” In an ethical relation to another, are these two propositions incompatible? They certainly seem so on their surface, but so long as Silverman’s appropriation maintains the difference of the past from the present, then subjectivity becomes a tool used in communication, implicating speaker and listener, or self and another. It puts difference in relation to a concrete sets of experiences, instead of defining it in terms of an abstract notion of what is common or normal.
As part of the Mostly What is Unsaid conversation series, I am excited to participate in the launch of the publication Fluiten in het Donker, to channel absence by way of presence.
A polyphonic reading with the present and absent voices of Absalon, Samuel Beckett, Pierre Bismuth, Maze de Boer, Tania Bruguera, Jasper Coppes, Leon Ferrari, Sara van der Heide, Jenny Holzer, Geert Jan Jansen, Luciana Lamothe, and Monika Sosnowska.
Saturday, 21 January 2012, 14:00
Art Metropole (788 King Street West, Toronto)
I am here because of what I have said. I am here for having spoken. I have spoken, I speak, and I shall continue to speak.
Many have kept silent, but not Pim Fortuyn, not Theo van Gogh, and not I. I am obliged to speak. There is a threat which is a danger to all of us. Indeed, I am here with an unpleasant message, with a warning. Wake up Canada.
Freedom must prevail, and freedom will prevail. Ladies and gentlemen, we will never apologise for being free. We will and should never give in.
Silence is treason. That is why I have spoken, why I speak and why I shall continue to speak. Freedom and truth. I pay the price every day.
This is not the first time our civilization is under threat. We have seen dangers before. We have been betrayed by our elites before. They have sided with our enemies before. And yet, then, freedom prevailed.
Truth and freedom are inextricably connected. We must speak the truth because otherwise we shall lose our freedom. That is why I have spoken, why I speak and why I shall continue to speak.
Franz Kafka said: “one sees the sun slowly set, yet one is surprised when it suddenly becomes dark.” We must tell people, without fear, what is at stake. The lights are going out all over Europe.
I have spoken, I speak, and it is my duty – I cannot do otherwise – to continue to speak.
Thank you.*The Curator
*This text is composed of a series of quotes gleaned from the speeches of Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch PVV from his address to the British House of Lords in London (March 5, 2010), his speech at the Canadian Christian College in Toronto (May 9, 2011) and his final remarks at his trial in Amsterdam (June 1, 2011) where he was acquitted of charges of criminally insulting religious and ethnic groups and inciting hatred and discrimination.
Fluiten in het Donker is an exhibition and publication project by Marie Frampier, Natasha Ginwala, Jacob Korczynski, Javier Villa, Rieke Vos and Vivian Ziherl as the de Appel Curatorial Programme 2010/2011.
The publication is the trouble mirror of a curatorial research—a collection of texts and images related to the exhibition that was on view at de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam from May 21 to June 26, 2011.
It is guided by the evolving internal dialogue of a fictive curatorial narrator which here in Toronto will be embodied , multiplied, and spatialized by six readers standing in for the absent voices of the artists and curators. Fluiten in het Donker by de Appel Curatorial Programme 2010/2011 is supported by SKOR | Foundation for Art and Public Domain in the framework of the institutional alliance between SKOR and de Appel.
Made possible with the generous support of Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK).
Mostly What Is Unsaid is an open structure of public conversations initiated by Art Metropole, FUSE and Scapegoat, motivated by our shared conception of publishing as a political praxis, rather than a form of publicity or mere representation. Engaging in conversation amidst the monologue of the neoliberal status quo demands that we attend to gestures, hesitations and omissions as much as words. Through this programming series, we will pursue the critical role of the unspoken and the unspeakable across a spectrum running from the macro- to the micro-political.
I love music, I really do. In a previous life, where visual art is now, there was sound. I still love music, it’s just that I happen to write about different things these days, these other preoccupations. But there are brilliant others out there, crafting silly + gorgeous ruminations on our soundtracks. Wallace Wylie, a frequent contributor to Everett True’s Collapse Board, is my new favourite. A recent essay of Wylie’s makes a compelling argument for “Why Pop Music Matters (No Matter What Age You Are).” And here’s an example, from that piece, that demonstrates why I feel so enamoured by this man’s words:
Pop music is…free-market driven. Those who imagine that pop music pushed through important cultural gains, for instance viewing MTV’s decision to play Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” video as a watershed moment in race relations in America, are actually outing themselves as cheerleaders for neo-liberalism and market-driven change. Postmodernism’s embrace of pop as a stick to beat academia and serious critics with presents a huge contradiction in terms of postmodernism’s supposed aims, i.e. the breaking down of accepted cultural norms about Western Civilization. It exposes postmodernism for what it is, an in-house coup by one set of academics at the expense of another. Neo-liberalism is merely the next phase in Western Civilization’s obsessional belief that freedom and the free market remain inexplicably linked. The fact that postmodernism is willing to embrace that belief shows that postmodernism is merely the next link in the chain of Western thought rather than a serious attempt to undermine it. Postmodernism bows down before the power of the market as much as any neo-con and, as such, it props up the single most important and dominant aspect of Western culture, the very one that Western armies and corporations are forcing on the rest of the world as we speak.
Wylie’s contention is that postmodernism does not rescue pop music from charges of frivolity that critics would have be pop’s undoing. But further, postmodernism and pop cannot be bedfellows for their antithetical relationship to the status quo:
Pop took the artistic inclination to experiment and pumped it full of business-think steroids so as to keep the music in a constant state of revolution. It put those opposed to pop’s agenda in the unenviable position of either championing artistic conservatism or endorsing deliberately unmarketable product as a means to sneer at the novelty-driven desires of the pop music aficionado. In other words, pop outflanked all of its critics by making them extreme traditionalists or anti-populist cranks. The deep, dark secret at the heart of the pop experience is this: pop music doesn’t need an intellectual framework, it doesn’t need postmodernism, and it certainly doesn’t need this essay. It lives, breathes, and devours all in its path regardless of whether you approve or not. It doesn’t care whether you give your endorsement with an ironic smirk or with a heartfelt scream. Pop music is smarter than you are.
Wylie concludes by making an argument for paying attention that is hard to ignore: To seek out pop music that moves you is to perform that moment of the verb, to be alive, to resist calcification and feel yourself beyond your otherwise predictable boundaries. Like good pop music (and like good art), this writing makes me feel alive. It makes me wonder what we’ll become, which is the best kind of wondering to be left with.
In light of a recent lawsuit brought against Richard Prince for copyright infringement related to his use of Patrick Cariou’s photographs of Rastafarians, without permission, in a series of collage and painting works, The New York Times published “Apropos Appropriation,” a take on the situation by Randy Kennedy. Prince’s defence rested on the idea of fair use, a clause in copyright law that allows the use of “someone else’s material for certain purposes, especially if the result transforms the thing used.” This is the mechanism that allows for parody and critique, which implies that the new work that results from an exercise of fair use should “relate to the historical context of, or critically refer back to, the original work.” In the particular case of Prince, this is not obviously the case (his justification for using the images amounted the fact that he was compelled by them, not that he aimed to mount some sort of constructive critique around the images proper), but should this lack of theoretical engagement with the appropriated work be a limit on fair use? What is the purpose of copyright law? Is the sole purpose to secure financial gain (assuming there is any gain to be made), or is it also in the service of ego? Art lawyer Virginia Rutledge’s suggestion in The New York Times article that “the problem facing the art world was as much a ‘cultural attribution crisis’ as a legal crisis and that the problem could be at least partly addressed by cultivating a stronger climate of simple acknowledgement and credit” seems to point toward the potential that copyright is as much an appeasement of individual pride as anything else. So, what is the idea of authorship in service of? Is it chiefly a means of stoking one’s sense of self-satisfaction and social regard? Why do we so maniacally attach our names to things, or insist that others do so, or get so bent out of shape when they do not?
A thought experiment creates the intellectual conditions of playing out the consequences of a situation that need not be possible to construct in reality. In the case that the hypothetical situation is not possible to engineer, the conundrum is profoundly felt. There is no way to verify your stake, and any conclusions drawn are met with the caveat of fundamental uncertainty. The experiment develops only so far as the imagination is willing to play.
This holiday season, I have indulged in the secret pleasure of Stephen King. His new novel, 11/22/63, takes time travel as its premise and explores the effects of both intimate and large-scale alterations to the course of history. In the first case, you can try to imagine the grand discrepancies between your life having met your lover and your life had you not. In the latter case, you can try to imagine a world with atomic weapons and a world without. While I can easily entertain the idea that my life has been radically affected by certain people and events, it is harder to imagine a world markedly different than the one we’ve got because, at a social level, major transformations seem inevitable. Had Einstein not articulated that E=mc², then certainly some other brilliant mind would have, and still we’d be living with the sick threat of atomic warfare. It’s harder to imagine changing the course of the world than it is a single life if only because the zeitgeist of an era is dispersed, and though history attributes certain findings or events to individuals, I can easily imagine that the intellectual, political and cultural conditions of the time make these findings or events, in a certain way, inevitable.
But like all good thought experiments, I only get more wrapped up in the seeming contradictions of these questions the more I consider them. Surely some historical events are the product of a singular mind, and the awful, easy example to consider is the Holocaust. If it were possible to travel back in time and murder Hitler as a small child, it might be possible to avoid the Holocaust. But, if the Holocaust was as much a product of bureaucracy as it was a demented and hateful individual, would some other horrific genocide occur, an inevitable result of bureaucracy run amok? There’s no way to know these other worlds, only the weight of knowing that given what we’ve got, there is a moral obligation to reflect and act accordingly for the future. And yet, I wonder, do some lessons really need to be learnt? Could we not just avoid the whole mess altogether? And yet…
I am heartened by recent actions at the Musée de l’Elysée where a clear line has been drawn between corporate sponsorship on the one hand, and the autonomy of artists and institutional integrity on the other. When Lacoste, sponsor of the Lacoste Elysée Prize, decided to withdraw the work of Larissa Sansour from the shortlist of eight artists for allegedly being off theme, the museum responded by cancelling the prize altogether (but not before misstepping and suggesting Sansour falsely claim she withdrew her nomination). There is much speculation behind Lacoste’s motivation for excluding Sansour, revolving around an alleged phone conversation Sansour had with the museum’s director where the artist was told that, “Although the work is not directly anti-Israeli, it is too pro-Palestinian for Lacoste to support.” From my vantage point here in Toronto, in a city where so many major cultural happenings are controlled by major (banking) sponsors, it is good to know that institutions are willing to stake an ethical and political claim on money reaching too far.
Says Gregg Bordowitz in the midst of “The Artist Is a Currency,” a conversation turned article that takes as its starting point a question around the location of the subject in contemporary art, “By changing my disposition to objects–provoking, teasing, seducing, repulsing, withholding–the work of art amplifies and/or diminishes the proportions of my world and in so doing produces a new relation to it.”
But then Andrea Fraser chides that, “I don’t think art has any more capacity to produce radical change than any other sphere of human activity.”
I am unabashedly committed to the idea that art can change the world, as can so many other forces, but the thing that art has that other activities don’t is a freedom from fidelity to the world the way it is. Art is a space of imagination, where wild hypotheses are taken seriously and played out. It may not be that art has more capacity to produce change than other activities, but it does do something different than politics or economics, which is nurture the unrealistic and improbable. Art produces illusions that seep back into the daylight hours.
