For the past year and a half, I have been assiting Chris Gehman with the massive job of editing Explosion in the Movie Machine. Published by the Images Festival and the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto, Explosion is a collection of essays and documents taking on artist film and video practices in the Toronto region over the last thirty years. To launch the book, Gehman organized a panel discussion around censorship, a once galvanizing agenda that is now largely unconsidered as festivals and galleries reap the benefits of what Gehman characterizes as a truce between artists and the province’s censor board. Within the context of a discussion about censorship, and considering the fact that so much of what makes up Explosions are critical historical analyses (alongside a selection of primary documents), it raises a question about how writers can approach the literal writing of history. How can this relay of experience either reinforce or challenge structures of power that otherwise work to maintain their own perpetuation? Artist film and video often has to negotiate its relationship to the film industry, be it through access to resources or cultivating modes of viewership. Artists of colour, regardless of where they practice, have to negotiate social structures that often work to alienate or silence. Artists of diverse cultural backgrounds often have to translate between notions of what is socially acceptable or not, as when Wanda Nanibush, as part of the panel discussion, pointed out that Aboriginal communities do not necessarily share the criteria the censor board uses to judge films suitable for children. Gehman, in compiling Explosion, worked very hard to make literal room for divergent histories and the book represents a kind of solidarity, a place for critical reflection on artists’ film and video practices in this city that acknowledges the larger structures of power at play while denying that they account for all that makes this region vibrant. So, what else can we do to write history differently, in ways that surpass structural and social censorships?
My dear friend JP Kelly, commenting on the passing of Roger Ebert, has proposed a most fitting memorial. In JP’s own words, “Roger Ebert, in his review of Kids, wrote about the scene where Telly sprays Casper with a fine mist of water in the summer heat of his bedroom. Ebert used the scene to illustrate how air conditioning has killed seduction and desire in the movies. We go to cold cineplexes in the midst of heat waves when once we sat in sweltering theaters dripping along with our counterparts on the screen–Liz and Paul in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I say this summer we turn off the AC and fuck each other in the dark in honour of Mr. Ebert.”
I can think of no more fitting a tribute to someone whose utter delight in being alive is to be read so thoroughly in the work he has left behind.
To hot summer fucking in the dark, and to Mr. Ebert (and to you too JP!): love.
Maggie Nelson’s The Art of Cruelty (2011) is an attempt to work through a question about the possible connection between cruelty and the production of knowledge. Is there an inherent link between learning and trauma, or is their coincidence merely that, occurring where it may (or may not)? Through artistic practices high and low (from Marina Abramović to Jackass), Nelson grapples with the effects representations of violence, working through the different ways these kinds of images can be made productive for those who come upon them, by choice or not. In her reckoning, she offers some choice criticisms about the hubris of the idea of an artist bestowing knowledge upon their audience. ”I’d much rather the artist be thinking about his or her own experience than trying to micromanage mine,” she declares, for “the desire to catch an audience unawares and ambush it is a fundamentally terrorizing, Messianic approach to art-making, one that underestimates the capacities and intelligence of most viewers, and overestimates that of most artists” (109, 116).
So much curatorial writing around art does just this, preaching the effects on an audience of an encounter with a work instead of drawing out what it meant for a curator to encounter the work initially. I know I am guilty of this, using the “we” instead of the “I,” of generalizing outward, of making assumptions about what an instance of looking can yield. But what would my writing look like if I were to shift the frame of consequence from an imagined audience to my own body? Part of the resistance is to deny the ego or self-centredness of speaking about artworks through my specific experience. As a curator, the idea is to move the experience of a constellation of works, first felt deeply in privacy, out to others, but does this mean to literally situate looking from my seat of experience? Or, in Nelson’s terms, how can the curator remain humble about how their framing might resonate with viewers while simultaneously not attempting to predetermine the very same experiences viewers might actually have? Because the thing is, those frames–exhibitions–are very very deliberate. The conceit is that the context encourages the works to be read a certain way. But maybe the solution is to somehow incorporate the actual experience of the show back into the curatorial texts, so that, let’s say, there is an essay that accompanies the closing of a show that somehow reflects on how the work was experienced by gallery visitors. What might an investment in this type of recuperation look like? What kind of changes in the curator’s understanding of how the work functions, from opening to closing, could be mapped? And might this information be useful in understanding any of the works themselves?
But doesn’t boredom seem impossible?
Today I am wishing that I were in Amsterdam yesterday. At the city’s Goethe Institut, If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution launched their latest reader, Reading/Feeling, which departs from a series of confluent study groups that happened in Amsterdam, Sheffield and Toronto last year around the idea of affect. Toronto’s meetings were led by Jacob Korczynski, and he was there in Amsterdam at the launch, representing the strange, tender and hilarious readings of affect we generated across the ocean. Asked by Korczynski to reflect, in retrospect, on the meetings, I was struck by the possibility that affect is not only “formative to our relationships with others,” but that it might be possible to employ affect on ourselves. Sort of like a resolution asks you to be something you are not yet. Can affect be self-administered in order to generate a desired effect? I haven’t exactly got it figured out yet, but in the meantime, I am going to watch for cracks, listen for whispers and feel for strange electricities. All this with the hope of making a gap and not filling it, in the hope of holding a point of rupture tactically.
I was a child of the 1980s and ’90s. I’m not sure if it had to do with the time in particular (cable TV, VCRs, latch-key afternoons), but I spent a lot of time watching movies over and over. I swear, my sister and I memorized quite a few films over the course of our young teen years, including the epic and iconic Wayne’s World (1992). So, it is with utter joy that I have been given an opportunity to revisit it in relationship to the kind of work I do today. For the Winter 2012 issue of Monte Cristo, I was invited to write a film column for the magazine and decided to draw from popular cinema, fringe film and gallery presentations of moving images to collect works that variously consider the idea of moving on. What does it feel like, this pressing need to move anew? How do we recognize a legitimate need to change from flights of fancy? How do these kinds of impulses variously manifest, from the day-to-day to the once-in-a-lifetime? Wayne and Garth discover that despite how clear the dream may be before it finds you, there’s no telling how it’s going to play out. To complement their journey, I write about Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010) and Duane Linklater’s Reservation Dog (2008). Marclay’s 24-hour opus collages innumerable reactions to temporal passing from television and cinematic history, so that The Clock becomes an unspooling of how the urgency to move (or move on) is depicted in the stories we tell. And Linklater, crafting a parable of sorts, lets a rez dog stand in for anyone who has left one way of life for another, drawing out the hilarities and heart breaks of what it means to find your footing elsewhere. Together, these films suggest that the senses of fear and joy that accompany change do not go away once the big, flashy actions have happened. Instead–that fear, that joy–they stick around and demand a continual reshaping. And so, this is life!
In the luxury of time afforded by the holidays (when one is far from their families), I have set myself a feminist curriculum, which has meant reading Shoshana Felman’s Writing and Madness and Maggie Nelson’s The Art of Cruelty in tandem. What these two treatises share (among other things) is a formal concern around the approach of their subjects. For Felman, she wonders if there is an inherent connection between literature and madness. For Nelson, she wonders if cruelty is necessary for the production of knowledge. In both, a sort of triangulation between an area of concern (literature, knowledge), a method of production (madness, cruelty) and the beholder (us as readers, thinkers, viewers, participants).
What about these kinds of moves that take a subject and propose the necessity of something that, at first, seems utterly distant or, at least, not clearly connected? In these cases, I am struck by the coincidence of putting an ideal in relationship to something mostly undesirable. Who would wish for madness or ask for cruelty? (Well, the sadist, but then the cruelty looses a bit of its charge by virtue of the invitation.) And yet, who would not seek knowledge? Who would pass off literature?
Of course, there is no purity. Not in our ethics, not in our logic, nor in our intimacies. Understanding the terms in either of these dichotomies cannot be done without nuance, which means admitting interdependencies that spill out of identity per se to messily implicate other (related) ideas and realities. To apprehend literature or the production of knowledge is to construct a framework with many holes for those aspects of understanding beyond our own capabilities and which simultaneously accounts for the not yet articulated. And yet, these frameworks are to look closely, to listen carefully, to respond, however inadequately. This is Felman’s argument, I think, when she explains that “the literary thing is always, whatever knowledge tries to master it, the residue of explanation, the excess, or the remainder of interpretation” (260). And this is Nelson’s argument when she, after Barthes, suggests that, “a paradox is more than the coexistence of opposing propositions or impulses. It signals the possibility–and sometimes the arrival–of a third term into a situation that might otherwise appear to consist of but two opposing forces…insofar as certain third terms–however volatile or disturbing–baffle the oppressive forces of reduction, generality and dogmatism, they deserve to be called sweetness” (268-269).
As part of my feminist curriculum, then, these women reinforce the intellectual necessity of not-knowing yet trying anyway. Another way (and in my own skewed context) these women suggest that the sweetness of feminism is engaged conversation. And this, I like very much.
Prone to ritual and fond of reflection, I find myself sifting, sorting, storing so many remnants of the last year. In July, as part of the Power Plant’s group exhibition Tools for Conviviality, curated by Melanie O’Brian, I was invited to respond to the exhibition as part of a member’s event. Coming across these notes now, I realize that many of the questions I posed toward the show and its frame remain points of curiosity for me, seeing as how the core concerns have multiplied in relation to other works I’ve seen this year. What follows are the rough notes of what I tried to work through that night:
In a show whose title speaks to getting along, there are a surprising number of works that linger on the potential for hostility, at least at first glance. In particular, some of the works by Abbas Akhavan and Claire Fontaine appear to be weaponry on display, makeshift and beholding a violent possibility should the glass of the vitrines be smashed. I would like to try to puzzle through the notion of weapons being tools for conviviality.
With Tools for Conviviality, O’Brian “addresses social and individual agency in contemporary life,” by proposing that art can be an agent for change. Both kinds of potential energy or change are represented here: there are works that take on the tools of self-improvement, as a relationship to oneself in the world, and other works that propose a self in relation to others in the world.
O’Brian states that the artists and practices represented here share in common their engagement of “tools to effect change and reconsider social behaviour,” but to what end? (And a whole host of other questions rise up here such as the the essential character of agency, and the difficult task in evaluating whether or not it is being employed). In moving through this show, an important question, for me, becomes one of what kind of change I would have contemporary art effect. What kind of world would I have these practices be in service of?
What, specifically, can art do? Is the place of that doing coincident with the artworks or is it elsewhere?
For me, I wonder about the possibility for art to shift ideas in the social realm, to reconfigure or challenge or propose radically new ways of being in relation. I don’t believe in a pure aesthetics, and thus, I gravitate towards art that clearly has political pretensions, be they grand or modest.
Over the past few years, this tendency has veered toward art that takes on the immutable difference between us. My idea of the future, which I understand to be another expression of my political inclinations and priorities, holds hope for a means to productively confront difference and diversity. Here, productive antagonisms are ones that makes us aware of the import of our own subject positions while simultaneously forcing the acceptance of others.
There is a reciprocal discomfort (in relation to the troubling of our own identities) that comes from recognizing a person outside of, or in addition to, the stereotypes that follow them. In short, our identities are hybrid, nuanced. Stereotypes are only ever blunt. While I’d like to think that I can escape indoctrination by them, I can not. But what I can do is try to be aware of how they function in my own mind. I can try to make a space for another and not fill it.
How does violence play into this idea? (In regards to this exhibition, I am letting weapons stand in for the idea of violence more generally.)
Violence comes into this picture when I consider that what I do not want in the world is a tepid notion of diversity as getting along, but rather, I want a difficult translation between identities and ways of knowing that does not seek common ground per se, but insists on the space between each of us. Productivity or productive antagonisms are then the result of confrontation, negotiation and empathy, which, by the latter, I mean a state of increasing interdependence, where your way of understanding the world becomes necessary to my own.
The presence of weapons put us in touch with our real contradictions, our ugly desires, our dark passengers, and forces a choice about the kind of people we want to be and the kind of world we want to inhabit.
As Ivan Illich points out (and whose words inspired the frame of this exhibition), “A tool may accept more than one utilisation, sometimes even distant from its original use. A tool accepts expression from its user.” Consider one of Akahavan’s work: a comb whose handle has been chiseled to a sharp point. The comb is for your hair. Or for stabbing you in the juggular.
I would like to pose this idea as a question, and then see if it resonates with any of the weapon-based works in the show. Could those be tools for getting to a world where difference is respected? Or are those weapons things that shut down that possibility?
Certainly weapons are tools for social interaction, the question for me is how they can be understood as tools for conviviality.
This fall, I have been lucky for the talking. I had the immense of honour of engaging Rebecca Belmore in conversation as she moved through the research stages of developing a new land-based art work in the Sudbury region. As part of my work with Art Metropole, I conversed with Mendi + Keith Obadike and Rainer Ganahl at the New York Art Book Fair about the translation that takes place when an entity moves from “here” to “there,” which departed from their contributions to the recent publication Commerce By Artists. Amish Morrell and I wondered about how conversation produces publics at the Toronto International Art Fair, as part of C Magazine‘s Conversations series. And as part of the Living in 10 Easy Lessons exhibition on view at Gallery 44, I participated in a forum that asked members of different communities to come together and discuss the implications of the project bringing socio-economic concerns into an arts context.
This talking, it is powerful. It does things. Recall the children’s story The Emperor’s New Clothes: talk can uphold regimes, and so it stands that talk can also disrupt them. Talk, I’d like to think, is a strategy in a larger project of mine, which is to figure ways to disrupt inherited historical narratives. This project is not about making room for a particular favoured history, but rather to develop tactics that can be used in service of narratives I cannot even imagine. Power works to perpetuate itself, but it also seeks to conceal itself. I think that talking is a way to interrupt the facade of self-evidence that history presents itself behind.
There are three categorical methods at our disposal:
- Make visible those things that are hidden or denied.
- Reveal the absurdity in accepted ideologies.
- Make new responses viable.
What lurks back there, once the variable nature of history is admitted?
In different ways, all the artists I spoke with this fall were engaged in work that could be understood as disrupting social norms or rusty logics. Rebecca Belmore’s practice is very much in service of a vision for the future (a future different from the obvious trajectories of the world they way it is now). She does not employ seduction to engage her audiences in that movement, but rather against her performances they are asked to apply their own experiences of society. In the dissonance, where neither understanding is self-evident, radical imaginations creep up.
For Mendi + Keith Obadike and Rainer Ganahl, they use blatant articulation as a force for recalibrating old categories of understanding into new terms of engagement. For the former, their project Blackness for Sale calls into question the colonial language and ideological limits of a ubiquitous technology by employing racial stereotypes. But more than this, they used the limits of the medium, and media more generally, to force their audience to acknowledged the absurdity of perpetuating a commodificaton of black bodies. For the latter, with his project My First 500 Hours Basic Arabic, an imagined (or desired?) distance between cultures is collapsed through embodiment. In a sense, by playing out worn understanding, insufficiencies are revealed.
Amish and I, painfully aware of the context of our talking, tried our damnedest to insert a bit of slow philosophy into the quick market of the fair.
Finally, Linda Duvall and Peter Kingstone, through their exhibition, tried to make invisible skills visible, challenging simplistic, judgmental understandings of different kinds of lives, asking their audience to unmake the project as art by moving differently in the world outside the gallery.
And as example of why this kind of work is important, this exchange from Yo, Is This Racist?:
Anonymous asked: When I was a kid, I had this weird ass substitute teacher who came in a told us all about how the white man came and “bettered” the lives of the natives, going on and on how we were so AWESOME to them. Can you say WHAT THE FUCK? Where did she get this information? A white supremacist lab or something?
Yo, the white supremacist lab is actually pretty out in the open.
Anonymous asked: Yo, the white supremacist lab is out in the open, but they still like to hide it behind innocuous names like “school” and “my job.”
That is mad true, tho.
