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:

1. Make visible those things that are hidden or denied.
2. Reveal the absurdity in accepted ideologies.
3. 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.

In the Autumn/Winter 2007 issue of Afterall, Anthony Huberman shared a manifesto of sorts against information. Here is an excerpt:

In art, what matters is curiosity, which in many ways is the currency of art. Whether we understand an artwork or not, what helps it succeed is the persistence with which it makes us curious. Art sparks and maintains curiosities, thereby enlivening imaginations, jumpstarting critical and independent thinking, creating departures from the familiar, the conventional, the known. An artworks creates a horizon: its viewer perceives it but remains necessarily distant from it. The aesthetic experience is always one of speculation, approximation and departure. It is located in the distance that exists between art and life.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what this proposition might mean, playing curiosity as the currency of art against speculations of what the currency of other endeavours might be (for instance, is care the currency of social work?), wondering if something about what we understand as currency in our particular fields of work or research prohibit us from understanding one another across disciplines. Taking a note from Luis Jacob’s introduction to Commerce by Artists, “commerce occurs if the identity of some thing has flowed or transformed to become another identity, a different role within a given field… ‘Commerce’ points to the various ways in which entities relate, interact, press upon and transform one another, and thus create networks of exposure and influence” (2-3). On Jacob’s understanding, commerce, in fact, can enable understanding.

So, how does one get from the surety of what they take to be legitimate currency to the “mutual transformation of the things related”? (Jacob, 3). Does it make sense to ask how currency becomes commerce? Taking seriously Huberman’s claim as to how curiosity functions in the art world, the further claim, if commerce is desired, must be that curiosity be not only a framework to approach the world, but also recuperation, somehow, of what is encountered. If an artwork is able to evoke my curiosity, then it is my responsibility to follow that pull. Maybe that looks like further reading. Maybe it looks like sustained relationships with others. Maybe it looks like the work living in my intimate spaces. Maybe it means outrage. As Huberman would have it, “the best art makes us not understand, which corresponds to a state of sustained curiosity that provokes us to change something about ourselves in an effort to understand.” Instead of remaining steadfast to what we feel is sure, rather we can halt the tyranny of information (which is often the ego in pretty dress, no?) by exchanging our currency for commerce, and really commit to feeling the bend of doing so.

There is an honour in being asked to compose a Best Of list–it assumes a certain expertise. A Best Of All Time list assumes an encyclopedic expertise. Of course one would be flattered to asked to distill greatness within a field, and of course there would be a certain instinctual response, something along the lines of “these just happen to be my favourite films,” which would affect, at least, the rough draft of excellent contenders.

But there is something else at play in composing these kinds of lists, and that is a contribution (however small) to the construction of cannons. It is a big fucking deal to tell someone that this or that is “the best,” especially “the best of all time.” Value judgments are at play, informed by experience as much as social indoctrination. For instance, Alfred Hitchcock made stunning films, but the fact that his name appears so predictably on Best Films of All Time lists is as much a fact of his skill as it is the fact that historians of cinema tell us his films are great. While I have nothing against Alfred Hitchcock’s films, the opportunity to compose a Best Of list is an opportunity to challenge the authority of received wisdom. A Best Of list is a concrete, tangible opportunity to acknowledge other kinds of greatness, and to make room for artists + histories + works + narratives that are otherwise silenced by the mechanisms of power that seek to replicate themselves through the writing of history. What an amazing opportunity! In fact, I believe it is a moral imperative to at least try to conceptualize the world beyond one’s experience of it, or to try to understand the interrelation of one’s subjectivity to another’s, especially when making claims that aim to behave as history. We are all impacted by cannons, but that is no justification for replicating them.

In Solidarity with Pussy Riot

The following letter comes by way of Fillip, and I would like to add my name to the sentiment of support expressed here:

Dear Friends and Fellows,

While a group of three brave young women sit confined in a Moscow prison for taking to the streets in protest of a system we all know to be rigged, tyrannical, and murderous, we sit out here, not apart, but in solidarity.

Charged with “hooliganism” after a “punk prayer” performance, Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Ekaterina Samoutsevitch, alleged members of the feminist punk collective Pussy Riot are on trial, facing a seven-year sentence following their arrest in the Spring of 2012 for an action Pussy Riot performed at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. We encourage you to answer, in equally impatient and unreasonable terms, the Russian government’s excessive use of force specifically as well as its intimidation towards all forms of dissent in general, especially against artistic and political freedom of expression.

It is important here to highlight why these women are incarcerated and why we stand with them. As culture workers, they have facilitated a relationship to the everyday and reconsidered the world around them and their place within it. And so will we. As culture workers, they have created a space for open and vigorous questioning despite the lackthereof within their immediate environment. And so will we. As culture workers, they have sought to dissolve hierarchy in favor of movement, voice, and vision. And so will we. As culture workers, they have moved towards enriching the landscape where our collective, civic voice can move, grow, debate, and generate a desire and belief in the right to individual autonomy and equality regardless of difference. And so will we.

As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr once famously wrote: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere… Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

And so, the actions of Pussy Riot are our actions.
As culture workers we fight for generative chaos.
We conjure questions.
We demand a RIGHT TO THE IMAGINATION!

Free Space!
Free Desire!
Free Expression!
Free Pussy Riot!

Organize! Question! Celebrate!

In solidarity with cultural workers everywhere for the
cause of Peace, Freedom, and Anarchy for true Equity!

crystal am nelson (Art Practical Contributor)
Larissa Archer (Actress, Writer)
Dena Beard (Curator)
Aja Rose Bond & Gabriel Saloman (The STAG)
Alex Cuff (Writer, Teacher)
Randy Lee Cutler (Emily Carr University)
Courtney Dailey (Red76/Mildred’s Lane/Project Mobile Livre – The Book Mobile)
Joseph del Pesco (Kadist Art Foundation)
Jamie Emerick (Artist)
Luke Fischbeck & Sara Rara (Lucky Dragons)
Christian L. Frock (Invisible Venue)
Amy Fung (Cineworks)
Dylan Gauthier (Red76 / Mare Liberum – Free Seas)
Randy Gledhill (LIVE Biennale)
Sam Gould (Red76)
Makiko Hara (Centre A)
Aaron Harbour (Editor, Art Cards)
Katie Hargrave (Artist)
Keith Higgins (UNIT/PITT Projects)
Rachel Higgins (Artist)
David Horvitz (Artist)
Jessica Jackson Hutchins (Artist)
Am Johal (Cultural Worker)
Jackie Im (Independent Curator/Editor, Artcards)
Doug Jarvis (PAARC, President)
Packard Jennings (Destructables.org)
Alystyre Julian (Artist)
Jeff Khonsary (Fillip)
Patricia Maloney (Editor, Art Practical)
Brian McBay (221A Artist Run Centre)
Heidi Nagtegaal (Hammock Residency)
Michael D. Neville (Esq.)
Magnolia Pauker (Fillip)
Byron Peters (Lower Mainland Painting Co.)
Demian Petryshyn (Artist)
Kristina Lee Podesva (Fillip)
Zachary Royer Scholz (Artist)
Lisa Schonberg (Musician)
A.L. Steiner (Artist)
Althea Thauberger (Artist)
Joseph Thomas (Artist)
Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.)
Jen Weih (Artist/OtherSights Board Member)
Jacob Wick (Information Department/overca$h)
Amy Zion (Fillip)
cheyanne turions (Fillip/Art Metropole)

Taken from the Frieze Blog:

11 Statements Around Art Writing

by Maria Fusco, Michael Newman, Adrian Rifkin and Yve Lomax

‘Eleven Statements Around Art Writing’ is co-authored by the teaching team –Maria Fusco, Michael Newman, Adrian Rifkin and Yve Lomax – of MFA Art Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. It proposes a moment in contemporary production: writing as art practice.

Art Writing emerges as a practice.

Art Writing is a possible form of the liberty of the image.

Art Writing names an approach within contemporary culture that, in wanting new potentials, embraces writing as a problematization of the object of art, its dissemination and forms of exhibition.

Art Writing does not take modalities of writing as given, rather it tends to, and experiments with, non-division between practice and theory, criticism and creativity.

Art Writing sustains all forms of art criticism, including the experimental and the hybrid. The art work may be intensely engaged with, or it may be the starting point for fictional and poetic developments.

Art Writing is in the situation of a fulcrum.

Art Writing is an anthology of examples.

Art Writing is re-invented in each instance of Art Writing, determining its own criteria.

Art Writing addresses material literary forms, which draw attention to the spatiality of writing and the physicality of its support, but the interests of Art Writing diverge from those of literature.

Art Writing involves relations between people, as discursive. In so far as it is art, Art Writing can engage public space no longer sustained by ground, including that of truth.

Art Writing institutes such public space without truth, and sometimes disappears into it.