ror's research blog

Colonial curio’s

Rachel — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:36:35 +0000

I suspect I might be posting a bit (more) associatively over the next couple of months as I process the trip back to Australia to visit my father who has been diagnosed with a pretty tough batch of cancer. I assume I don’t have that many readers that aren’t already aware of this. But anyway, the point would not be to broadcast or dramatize or even ‘ reflect’ on the situation in public, but more to understand and observe certain scenes and philosophies under stress and on the move.

Colonial curio’s (with that additional apostrophe) is the name of the major craft shop in my home town shopping centre where I used to buy my mother weird tiny plug-in waterfountains for her birthday (at her request) to ease the sound of stress in her muscles. I promise any posts will be more interesting than this.

what my father couldn’t quite explain he delivered through the cd player

Rachel — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 23:48:17 +0000

I have been pulling up his favourites on youtube all weekend. Reciting all the lyrics now, I think that he ended up delivering quite a lot. Even if he often got them wrong, those lyrics, himself, he always found the right music for the message I think.

EMDR – Description

Rachel — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 19:32:42 +0000

Note to self: One of the best description of EMDR that I have read so far, is actually in the prologue to Silvan Tompkins ‘Affect Imagery Consciousness’:

…The trained EMDR therapist asks the patient to concentrate on a specific target image, usually the noxious scene (stimulus-affect-response sequence) that has either precipitated the request for treatment or is considered by the patient most representative of that person’s dysphoria; one is instructed to allow into consciousness all of the negative affects associated with this scene. Next, the patient is instructed to….

now-cultural-poesy

Rachel — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 15:51:54 +0000

This interview (intro below) with Joan Retallack gets almost exactly at the certain familiarity, (excitement, and confusion) I experience reading certain affect-theoretical poetics as/via/through a whole range and history of mostly forgotten (by me, by you?) experimental (modern and post-) literary practices, as consciousnesses of bounds of the literary. How to think about this? And why am I so interested in wondering this how? It seems to cut across so many of my supposed theoretical and aesthetic interests, or more accurately, my “i” seems to cut across all or a lot of “this” in rather vague and unconscious ways. She says as she spends the weekend downloading Phd history/theory and MFA applications concurrently.

–

RO: In the introduction to your interviews with John Cage you say that there came a time in your life when you no longer wanted literature to be a fictive time machine that would whisk you away. I wonder if you could say something about that change in your attitude to reading?

JR: That comment actually had a couple of sources, the major one being the use to which I put literature as a child and teenager. I read fiction heavily as escape, to have some rest from the pressures of the world but I also thought I was learning a lot about the world from it. I started in my mid-twenties to discover that I wasn’t learning much at all about how to live from novels, that I was instead learning a lot about characters locked in a very closed system. I realized that what I was experiencing was one person’s mind, the mind of the author. So at some point—I didn’t frame it this way early on—I really began to see that kind of work as having to do with a vanishing point perspective, that everything was moving toward the last punctum where the conflict—the conflict that had been artificially imported in the first place—would be resolved, would disappear. It seemed to me that all this existed outside of real time in some consequential way.

ridiculousness and politics.

Rachel — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 17:27:59 +0000

1. Why hasn’t someone kept alive a deconstructionist alternative to dating?

2. Hilarity: the apparent anarchartistic developmental lifespan seen from the completely random and fictious Liberal party-political point of view.

Hegel, ptsd, and brain plasticity

Rachel — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 10:55:54 +0000

The shelved project. But interesting link here, with Hegelian absolutes, I think/thought/suspect, kicking in around step 3….

Enough flagellating

Rachel — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 10:41:42 +0000

This is awesome.

ethical self-presentation, sensibility, and unreliable cognition

Rachel — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 19:42:31 +0000

My ex here always have this thin layer of moisture shimmering across his large eyes, as if he’s always hovering between laughing and crying, being so attached to the sensory world. He has heaps of friends (someone like me would say “too many” to manage), sees them alot, and makes sense of the pervasiveness of himself through american fiction, and architectural and design problems; a kind of way of being that makes him happy, and that works for at least 81/2 months of the year. He also suffers from a rare form of bipolar 2 that like clockwork, affects him for the whole three months of every summer. For those 3 months he has trouble getting out of bed, feels the need to sleep and rest most of the time, can’t handle very much stimulation of any kind, can’t even walk past the outside of a nice book or CD shop without his mood rapidly swinging to hopelessness/aversion/alarm, about how much information it contains that he can’t cognize. He can’t stay in for too long, or it gets worse, so he has to make decisions about when/how to go out, where his strategy is just to ‘follow’: his friends, a flow, whatever will have him brush up against external energy without risking too much of his own.

He knows he’s like a non-cognising, zombified, lilting version of an only slightly more fixed but much stronger, charming self that he has a much more ordinary hold on for the rest of the year. He manages this disconnect, for the most part, very well, with small sighs and small non-obvious quittings of images and things. That is, he can still remember himself, and perform himself, and every now and again take an item or task out of the the vastly expanded ‘too hard’ basket But he doesn’t really know what can realistically be taken out of it, and completed, and what of his behaviour might just appear, even to himself, to be an empty performance, bound for incompletion, and just a meaningless gesture within a fairly masculine denial that he’d be suspicious of all year round. Meanwhile, there is the matter of being a fulltime employee.

Sunday I spent helping him write a letter to his work, informing them, (again) of his bipolar 2, the exact symptoms that affect his work, as reasons for his absence, slowness, for not being able to multi-task and “just get many different projects done at the same time”. i.e. the ordinary demands of unrealistic expectations, exacerbated by the fact of him being, temporarily, a rather unordinary model employee. We talked about the bleeding together of so many different larger than work issues to do with privacy, optimism, guilt, shame, solitary suffering and unreliability, to himself, to the ‘team’ identity of the kind of work he does, his not wanting to be taken off the most interesting projects (which his brain responds best to because of their novelty). About the idea of responsible relationships. We drew up personality charts of his different supervisors and colleagues, so we could tell which of them would need to know which parts of the story, which of them might be unaccommodating or more accommodating, which of them are easier or more personal/personable in the office.

Mostly though, we talked about what a strategy looked like that could account for the pretty high possiblity of this happening for three months of every year for the rest of his life. i.e. the impossibility of “not telling”, and hoping that things might anyway turn out. Yet the need to leave and manage some sort of paradoxical hole, or piece of space, for the possibility of things being better, or “not as bad” in some other future time. Indeed, he is trialling yet another break-through med this year, which has him seeming “better than last year, or when I’ve seen you this time of the year” to his closest friends, which has made it hard for him to determine and remember how much better that–this–actually is.

We surmised that his position, in his own university as workplace, surrounded by mentors and people who had employed him even after supervising his masters thesis over the course of a previous summer’s episode – that difficultly witnessed – that he was in a position, perhaps, only perhaps, for his condition to be factored in to his contract somehow, during this time of the year. Or for an actual strategy to be discussed. The senior creatives also hate admin, appreciate his sense of humour, and already oversaw his very outlandish masters thesis, and his difficulty writing it during a previous summer, before even giving him the job. He knows, more recently, that there are to be no cancelled contracts in the near future. That his job – albeit prior to declaring temporary cognitive disability – was safe for the time being. What has he got to lose? So after 5 hours, and naps, and food, we went to the state library, where it took him just as long to translate back in to dutch the official and considered letter that we came up with. I hope that he goes okay.

Schechner, Kraus for Anna

Rachel — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 16:53:56 +0000

“In 1973, in the pages of the avant-garde theater journal TDR, the well-known theorist and director of the New York-based Performance Group Richard Schechner called for an increased use of the theories and methods of the social sciences to understand the nature of performance. “I believe that the convergence of the social sciences and the performing arts and the creation of performance theory is an antecedent to an avant-garde movement just taking shape. This movement will be more iconographic that iconoclastic; more conservative than prodigal; and more based on sheer observation and analysis than intuition and feeling. The movement will be radical not in the political sense of the late sixties but in the manner in which it attempts to go to the roots.” (Schechner 1973, p. 4). (from article attached). PerformativeTurn_brief

Anna: I have had a copy of Schechner’s Performance Theory on my shelf for the past 2 months, given to me as part of a bag of stuff during the cleaning dump/move out from the student containers, from a girl whose only relation to me before the dumping-exchange was that I once admired her combo of second hand getups on the driveway. Re-(re-)reading Kraus’ Aliens again and there he is – the traumatizing NY performance teacher. Of course he’s everywhere, still, I can’t help but consider it one more coincidence relating to the horizonal (i wrote horizontal, which it probably is at this time) kraus project.

We’ll have to read him, or at least I will be – a kind of out of control new age structuralist, thinking performance from the neuron to Indian Dance (which I must say he gets pretty right, both. Which is not to say there aren’t whole chapters that aren’t irksome). Such a gesture to write him off, among so many others, and so key to thinking through Kraus’ “writing” as performance theory doubled back upon theorist.

Ranciere’s emancipated spectator

Rachel — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:14:24 +0000

Aesthetic experience has a political effect to the extent that the loss of destination that it presupposes disturbs the way in which bodies fit their functions and destinations. What it produces is no rhetoric persuasion about what has to be done. Nor is it the framing of a collective body. It is a multiplication of connections and disconnections that reframe the relation between bodies, the world where they live and the way in which they are ‘equipped’ for fitting it. It is a multiplicity of folds and gaps in the fabric of common experience that change the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible. As such, it allows for new modes of political construction of common objects and new possibilities of collective enunciation. Now this political effect operates under the condition of an original disjunction, of an original effect, which is the suspension of any straight cause-effect relationship. The aesthetic effect first is an effect of des-identification. The aesthetic community is a community of des-identified persons. As such, it is political since a political subjectivization goes through a process of des-identification. An emancipated proletarian is a des-identified worker. Now there is no measure of the des-identifying effect. On the one hand, the effect escapes the strategy of the artist; on the other hand, the artistic strategy completes the process of des-identification beyond the point of political subjectivization toward the ‘song of the earth’, that is to say toward the construction of new forms of individuation – the Deleuzian haecceities- that cancel any form of political subjectivization. …The Deleuzian identification analogy between the torsion of the work, the cry of men and the song of earth both evinces and neutralises itself that tension between the aesthetic effect of des-identification and its own neutralisation. The same reason that makes the aesthetic ‘political’ forbid any strategy of ‘politicization of art’.

That tension had long been concealed as the politics of art was identified with the paradigm of ‘critical art’. Critical art plugs the gap by defining a straight relation between its aims and its means: its ends would be to provoke an awareness of political situations leading to political mobilization. Its means would be to produce a sensory form of strangeness, a clash of heterogeneous elements prompting a chance in perception. This means that it wants to include the aesthetic break in the representational continuity. When Brecht represented the Nazi leaders as cauliflower sellers and had them discuss their vegetable business in classical verse, the clash of heterogeneous situations and heterogeneous languages was supposed to bring about the awareness of both the merchant relations hidden behind the hymns to the race and the nation and the forms of economical and political domination hidden behind the dignity of high Art….(but) there is no reason why the sensory strangeness produced by the clash of heterogeneous elements should bring about the understanding of the state of the world, no reason why the comprehension of the state of the world should bring about the decision to change it. There is no straight way from looking at a spectacle to understanding the state of the world, no straight way from intellectual awareness to political action. What occurs is much more the shift from a given sensory world to another sensory world which defines other capacities and incapacities, other forms of tolerance and intolerance. What works out are processes of dissociation: the break in a relation between sense and sense – between what is seen and what is thought, what is thought and what is felt. Such breaks can happen anywhere at any time. But they can never be calculated.

That distance between the pretensions of critical art and its real forms of efficiency could hold so long as there were patterns of intelligibility and forms of mobilization strong enough to sustain the artistic procedures that were supposed to produce them. When those patterns or forms are eroded by the weakening of political action, the undecidability of the critical procedures appears in full light. It happens that the artists play on that very undecidability. The struggle against the ‘society of the spectacle’ and the practice of ‘détournement’ are still put on all the agendas and they are supposed to be implemented in standard forms such as: parodies of promotional films, reprocessed disco sounds, advertising icons or media stars modelled in wax figures, Disney animals turned to polymorphous perverts, montages of ‘vernacular’ photographs showing us standardized petty-bourgeois living-rooms, overloaded supermarket trolleys, standardized entertainment or refuse of consumerist civilisation, etc., etc. Those dispositifs keep occupying many of our galleries and museums with a rhetoric assuming that they make us discover the power of the commodity, the reign of the spectacle or the pornography of power. As nobody ignores anything on those topics, the mechanism ends up spinning on itself and capitalizing on that undecidability, as is shown by this piece, by Charles Ray, presented in an exhibition called Let’s Entertain in Minneapolis and Beyond the Spectacle in Paris, a piece entitled Revolution Counter-Revolution, both because the mechanism of the merry-go-round is disjointed from the movement of the horses and because it evinces the double play of ‘critical art’, while still capitalizing on it.

When the critical model comes to this self-neutralisation, other attempts at overcoming the aesthetic disconnection come to the fore. If the break cannot be anticipated, what is anticipated is its effect, the production of a new being-together. A lot of engaged contemporary works set out in that way to show itself in the space of exhibition as working outside the museum, in ‘real life’ and to produce the work as a visual equivalent of the being together produced by that way out. For instance, at the last Biennales of Havana and Sao Paulo, one could see the video-installation of the Cuban artist René Francisco. This artist had used a grant from an artistic foundation in order to make an inquiry in the poor suburbs of Havana. Then he had selected an old woman and decided, with some fellow artists, to refurbish their home. The final work shown in the biennale presented the viewer with a cloth screen printed with the image of the old woman, hung so that she appeared to be looking at the ‘real’ screen of the monitor, where a video showed the artists working as masons, plumbers, or painters. Other works make the artistic invention a metaphor of its own ‘extra-artistic’ outcome. This is what happens ‘outside’ with artistic inventions such as Lucy Orta’s collective clothes that are used both as a ‘home’ and as a form of collective link, in order to forge ‘lasting connections between groups and individuals’. The same anticipation of the being together is documented ‘inside’ by the big mosaics or tapestries representing the multitude of anonyms that are among the favourites in many international exhibitions. Let us look for instance at that tapestry called ‘the people’ and made by the Chinese artist Bai Yiluo, out of one thousand and six hundred ID pictures sewn together. The tapestry aimed to evoke ‘the delicate threads which unite families and communities’. So the work presents itself as the anticipated reality of what it evokes. Art is supposed to ‘unite’ people in the same way as the artist sewed the photographs that he had first made as an employee in a studio. The photograph tends to be at the same time a sculpture which already makes present what it is about. The concept of metaphor, omnipresent in the rhetoric of the curators, tends to conceptualize that anticipated identity between the being together signified by the artistic proposition and its embodied reality.‘Apart we are together’. There are two interpretations of the formula. On the one hand there is that anticipation of the being together of the community in the being apart of the work that I have just evoked. On the other hand, there are works that try to explore the very tension between the two terms, either by questioning the ways in which the community is tentatively produced or by exploring the potentials of community entailed in separation itself. On the first side, I am thinking here of Anri Sala’s work Dammi colori [I love this work] that used the powers of video to question an attempt to use art directly in order to frame a certain sense of community. The work deals with the initiative of a ‘political artist’, the Mayor of Tirana, an artist himself who implemented a project that is much reminiscent of the Schillerian ‘aesthetic education of Man’ since he decided to have the facades of the houses in his town repainted in bright colours in order to bring about a new sense of aesthetic community among the citizens. The movements of the camera of Anri Sala confront the discourse of the ‘political artist’ with both the shabby aspect of the muddy street or the apparently unconcerned circulation of the inhabitants and the abstractedness of the patches of colours on the walls. This means that the resources of ‘distant’ art are used in order to question a given politics of art, which is a direct attempt to fuse art and life in one single process.

On the other side, I am thinking of the work of the Portuguese film-maker Pedro Costa who dedicated three films to the life of a group of young underdogs, poised between drugs and little business, in a poor suburb of Lisbon. I would examine here a fragment of the second film of the trilogy Vanda’s Room that shows his characters as they are preparing to leave the shanty town that the Caterpillars are slowly tearing down. While relational artists are concerned with inventing some real or fancy monument or create unexpected situations in order to provoke new social relationships in the poor suburbs, Pedro Costa paradoxically focuses on the possibilities of life and art specific to that situation of misery: from the strange coloured architectures that result from the degradation of the houses and from demolition itself to the effort made by the inhabitants to recover a voice and a capacity of telling their own story, amidst the effects of drugs and despair. I would like us to focus on a little extract that shows three squatters preparing their move. One of the squatters is scratching the stains on the table with his knife; his fellows get nervous and tell him to stop because they will not take the table with them anyway. But he goes on because he cannot stand dirtiness. Perhaps the complicity between the aesthetic sense of the film maker that does not hesitate to exploit all the ‘beauty’ available in the shanty town and the aesthetic sense of the poor addict gets more to the heart of the question than the project of the mayor. By setting aside the ‘explanations’ of the economical and social reasons of the existence of the shanty town and of its destruction the film sets forth what is specifically political: the confrontation between the power and the impotence of a body, the confrontation between a life and its possibilities. But this way of addressing the ‘truly political’ does not for all that sidestep the incalculable tension between political dissensuality and aesthetic indifference. It does not sidestep the fact that a film remains a film and a spectator, a spectator. The wretched addict keeps cleaning a table that never was his table and will soon be smashed by the Caterpillars. The film maker pays homage to his aesthetic sense as he makes a beautiful still-life like shot out of the arrangement of the table. He makes a film while being aware that it is only a film that will be scarcely shown and the effects of which in the theatres and outside the theatres are fairly unpredictable.

Film, Video art, photography, installation, etc. rework the frame of our perceptions and the dynamism of our affects. As such they may open new passages toward new forms of political subjectivization. But none of them can avoid the aesthetic cut that separates the outcomes from the intentions and forbids any straight way toward an ‘other side’ of the words and the images. My inquiry in the constitution of the aesthetic regime of art has often been suspected of proposing a return to the fairy times and fairy tales of aesthetic utopias and aesthetic community, which either have brought about the big disasters of the 20th century or, at least, are out of steps with the artistic practices and the political issues of the 21st century. I tried to suggest that, on the contrary, this inquiry points to the tensions and contradictions which at once sustain the dynamic of artistic creation and aesthetic efficiency and prevent it from ever fusing in one and the same community of sense. The archaeology of the aesthetic regime of art is not a matter of romantic nostalgia. Instead I think that it can help us to set up in a more accurate way the issue of what art can be and can do today.
Jacques Rancière
June 2006, from:
http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n1/ranciere.html