Re: Liam Gillick: Contemporary art does not account for that which is taking place // Re: post-contemporary

#manifestomonday

Liam Gillick: "Contemporary art does not account for that which is taking place"

(e-flux journal # 21 – 12/2010)

NOTICES OF DISCHARGE, A MANIFESTO.

Preface (I): The State of the Contemporary

“The term 'contemporary art' is marked by an excessive usefulness. The contemporary has exceeded the specificity of the present to become inextricably linked to the growth of doubt consolidation. […] It does not describe a practice but a general 'being in the context'.” (Gillick)

This being is marked by, so Gillick,

1. a “complicit alongsideness”, i.e. the evasion of “fundamental ideas” and “key political questions” by “irony and coy relations to notions of quality”
2. an all-encompassing “inclusiveness” that “has helped suppress a critique of what art is and more importantly what comes next” (“authoritarian tolerance”)
3. a mode of production, of “[m]aking things with an awareness of all other things”, which is specifically linked to notions of a networking urban-ness, a chattiness which manifests itself in simultaneously answering “questions about [the artwork] itself and all other contemporary art” (all the time in every artwork)
4. WIP, i.e. a mode of production in which the “attempt to work is the work itself”, [u]nresolved is the better way, leaving a series of props that appear to work together”
5. the dominance of self-referentiality through the merging of “politics and biography”, subjectivity and work, i.e. a “coming-into-being through work”

Preface (II): The Post-Contemporary

“Not working at all is very hard to do. So the answer is to keep working ...” (Gillick), and look into

• “a boycott of the subjective”
• “the aggressive option of neo-objectivity”
• the separation of “life and action from contemporary art”.

NOTICES OF DISCHARGE

1. I'm discharging myself from the contemporary. I will account for what is taking place.
   
   
2. I'm discharging myself from therapy. I'm giving up on the past. I won't retract the probing needle from my head. I will stop pulling at it.
   self-medication Nowheretown/Germany
   
   
3. I'm discharging myself from the biographical. I will refrain from further exorcisms.
   biographical exorcism
   
   
4. I'm discharging myself from Germany. I have no talent for it. I will stop trying to look through Schlingensief's eyes.
   Schlingensief Nowheretown/Germany remnants
   
   
5. I'm discharging myself from the idiosyncratic. I will stop trying to convince you of its good intentions. I will not boycott the subjective. The next time you see me, I will wear a wig.
   
   
6. I'm discharging myself from the asylum. I have no talent for functioning madness. I will give sanity another try. I'll be the sanest person waiting for the bus in LA.
   (in)sanity
   
   
7. I'm discharging myself from rephrasing the fundamental questions. They have been answered in non-fundamental terms. I will not answer them in fundamental terms. I will stop talking about not answering them. 
   
   
8. I'm discharging myself from clarity. It is a shell and a knife. I have no talent for it. I will try to forget where the self-destruct buttons are. I will let them be pushed by accident again. I'm putting down the knife. The next time you see me, we'll shake hands.
   bubble wrap concrete

9. I'm discharging myself from daring you with the unresolved. I will not stop producing props. I will finish the plays I stage. I will account for what is taking place.
   Banksy told you not to.

Re: CQN #4. Totally Idiosyncratic, Totally Transparent. The word is manifesto, have I convinced you yet?

I have been writing manifestos for a belletristic journal then. CINE QUA NON, as it has been characterized by Margarida Vale de Gato in the magazine's latest edition, is a space for ponderings, wonderings beyond the limitations of the norms of academic writing in the Humanities. I wrote a fictional play for paper dolls; it was published in the essay section after all. CQN is providing a playing field for the personal, the ambivalent, the self-reflective; I wandered off into it, forcefully, drunken on its possibilities, the artistic freedom to self-indulge, daring the editors to fence me in, until I could dare them no further. Looking for a cliff to fall off of, I asked “Have I convinced you yet?”, until finally I heard it uttered, “No”; a process of negotiating that is nothing else but what Tiago Patrício describes as the “attempt to understand if [you] are concealing under a mantle of virtue something that does not have a fit of creativity” (CQN #4, 132). I have been writing for CQN from inside out of my head to a forever invisible audience, arguing with them, trying to convince, convert them; when they did not answer, the only way to go was to sharpen my tools, that is to sharpen my words, often times shorten them, organizing them according to the rhythm of a song whose title I did not reveal to them or a visual pattern that only followed the shadows on my desk, tightening the rhetoric. It is the road to the totally idiosyncratic, which strives for the totally transparent; my indulgence was only meant to be enticing, my pretentiousness only meant to be infuriating. To borrow from Julian Hanna's piece on “Avant-garde Manifestos and Guerilla Advertising”, the articles wanted to be “machines to generate discourse” (66), or I should say, less cryptically and more straightforwardly, I wanted them to be just that; or the fuel at least; or the oil. No trace of the distrust in the word here that has left so much of contemporary theatre breathlessly stranded in performance/video art-land, looking around for an audience that is already gone from the balconies, has headed to the gallery or the movie theatre (see Krystian Lada on “Image Dramaturgy”, 32ff.). The word is manifesto, a manifesto for the word.

Even if it's a paper doll, in and out of CQN.

P.S.: I need to apologize to João Botelho in advance who equipped me with the ultimate definition of cinema or life and what's the difference again, it's all “lights and shadows and suffering human beings in between them trying to get out of the darkness and into the light” (116). I gonna use it and abuse it and finally forget it was you who said it in the first place. I am sorry.

Put down the glue gun. And the noodles. And Andy. Put. Andy. Down.

#manifestomonday









MY 2nd GRADE ART TEACHER WOULD GIVE ME AN A+*
*ONLY I AM NOT IN 2nd GRADE.
noodles, metallic spray paint, a poster and doodling on canvas
30x40cm
2010
(pixeled, blown up and edited, 2010)

Actually, this is the perfect Andy-quote as a comment on Mr. Brainwash. Isn't it?
And I wanna see this atwork of yours in the flesh before I say any more about it. (d.g.)

Watching EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP reminded me of the fact that I still had that poster somewhere and that it was in dire need of some proper framing. Yet, it's hard to contain. For what does the 'getting away with it' actually entail? The neatandtidy answer being soup as canon ///
Institutionalisation/commodification/commercialisation/etc.. R€nt mon€y. Uncle artcrust. A write-up in LA Weekly. A quote by Banksy on your art. Noel Gallagher at the opening of your show. ///
MindMangling – your own (self-medication) and that of others – preferably Carl Barât's, on the Arsenal's rooftop terrace, in green shiny pants /// /// (a.h.)

Put the shiny green pants back in binary babblin.

//















//


Alright then: I was told that Vaginal Davis is looking for a new flat. (Contact her via her blog if you know anything up to 250 Euro warm.) Why though, I do not know. Maybe a rent increase?

Two thoughts to this news: I am awfully sad about the prospect of losing Miss Davis as a neighbour and shopping companion. And: Has gentrification reached die Rote Insel already if such a famous queen of the glittering world like her has to leave it? (d.g.)

Put the babblin back in binary babblin.

THAT'S HOW WEIRD IT WAS. (I)

2010

Put the binary back in babblin.

Afterthoughts, on what will be and the things that are

not waiting outside
on whom they are not waiting for
on bubble wrap
on the way out
on the effects of baseball bats on art
on the history of brainpicking
on Church Builders
on obituaries
on remnants
on resilience
on the effect of concrete drywalls
on the effect of concrete.

In CINE QUA NON #2, Ana Luisa Valdeira da Silva reviews the 2009 Young Creators Show, organized by the IPJ-Portuguese Institute of Youth and the CPAI-Portuguese Club of Arts and Ideas in Évora and Portel. She asks:


//- Can I get inside one? Yes - // In a giant object that was also intended to be alive, in the work The Way Out is Through by Manuela Pacheco, a selection in the visual arts area. An enormous plastic bag keeps itself inflated through the airflows that enter it. There’s a hole through which you can get in, dressing yourself as a bubble, and inside it a realtime projection of what’s happening outside. We’re inside, cocooned inside the bubble, watching what’s going on outside on a canvas of living plastic. // [...] //- Can I crush it? Yes - That was André Neto’s suggestion when he talked about his work Branco Esterilizado (Sterilized White). And so I did or at least I tried. I step into his structure made of drywall with an edge of about 8.2 feet, pick up a baseball bat that was resting on a corner and hit one of the walls pretty hard. There’s an audible blast which reverberated for quite a few seconds. Lots of sound but the structure, already full of holes, made to represent a sort of an art gallery space, didn’t even suffer a dent. It turns out I didn’t apply enough power to it. Right away, the lady that was supervising the exhibit looked at me with astonishment on her face and said: only the author can destroy it. The young creator wasn’t there neither to allow me to destroy it nor to destroy it himself, there was only me trying to punch a hole through the drywall in front of the Creator, right at the altar of St. Vicente's Church. //

cf. CQN # 2, p. 94ff.

Scrapbook. part 1

#manifestomonday

#1
The doors are barred with boards. Enter through the cellar.
A supporting construction hovering above me. Is it supporting, itself? Or is it supported? - Enter: Two hens. Bourgeois hens, I'm told.
The smell of fresh paint. White. And black.
The windows are barred, too. But I'm inside, not even seeing the boards.
Noise, a naked man sleeping. He's just pretending, I'd say.
Photographs, photographs, projections.
My head has started to ache.

#2
A decaying building.
A Former department store. Former furniture store. Former "Real" market.
A real market of the real again now.
A mock wardrobe which is not a mock wardrobe. Or is it?
Beautiful black paintings which are not paintings but pretend to be hidden behind curtains.
Remnants of an old pleasure ground seen from the staircase.
A carpet made of salt and one with words and some more carpets above.

#3
A dark and empty salesroom.
I'm standing with my back to the window, looking out of a window, seeing pedestrians passing.
An artist's flat and workspace.
He is absent.
Lots of knives. Two old sausages. A caligraphy letter.
Now my back is aching, too.

To be continued.

carpe diem (yeah I know)

show me the words that
reorder the world

and I spell check them in

my dictionary.

#manifestomonday


Colin Firth is trying to find a comfortable position for shooting himself in the head. Amongst them: in bed, wrapped inside of a sleeping bag. He lets the gun slide along his cheek, puts it in his mouth, readjusts the angle. The scene triggers a memory - Wednesday nights, watching suicide tales in a sticky seminar room. The outcome, an angry paper, angry at Alain, angry at the protagonist of Louis Malle's LE FEU FOLLET (I/F 1963). Warm summer days spent indoors writing agitated verses, after having read too much Sartre. Alain, you are objectifying yourself by your own gaze, you turn yourself into an easy prey to the judgemental eyes of your predators, Alain, I warn you, project yourself. Otherwise, Alain, the future is always already dead. Look, Alain, the past is chewing you up, it already ate the present. Sartre is angry: I am nothing but my own project, alive. Suicide is absurd (what good shall come from it, you gonna be dead) and btw, it's pathetic.
The warnings hit me right at the beginning, Tom Ford's A SINGLE MAN (USA 2009) might make my skin crawl. For one, there are fiddlers, fiddling a score without pause. For two, a protagonist voice-overing, dancing on the edge of the redundancy cliff. Maybe I just cover my ears and get by. But then again I would also have to cover my eyes, because three, there is beauty. Beauty everything. Beauty everywhere. Pretentious bullshit, anyone?
No. No, I get silenced. No need to be warned. Ford's gaze silences me. Its persistence to set the world on fire. Not burn down, but glow, simmer, gaze by gaze. It's hungry, tender, it zooms in. It looks, pushing back a past that is trying to suffocate the present. A gaze under which ballerina shoes turn ice cream blue (or is it summer sky pool water blue) and lips crimson red, skin gets sun-burnt. Under which James Dean is not dead. Nick Hoult's pullover one overflowing tactile sensation.
A gaze which says, matter-of-factly, carpe diem. And not because life is so thorougly short, but because. Because, look, // Awww! //.

carpe diem (top), project: the future is always already dead.

Alain, LE FEU FOLLET.

carpe diem (bottom), project: trigger, ignite.

Colin Firth, A SINGLE MAN.

Dis-count

#manifestomonday
Would have been yesterday.

Time for some official figures you need to have.

Devide the current number of hairs on your head by the sum of digits of your date of birth.
Multiply the minutes you slept last night by your working hours.
Take the result and add it to the last six digits of your account number.
Measure the length of your right index finger and multiply it by the number of appointments you have in your pocket diary.
Devide your social security number by the age of your firstborn child. But you mustn't devide by zero! Haven't you learnt anything at school?!
In case you don't have a child, simply devide the money your earn in halves. In case you don't earn any money,
Take your postal code and flip it backwards to get the approximate number of wrinkles you'll have on your forehead on the day you die.

End of line.

RLBR

I could have been a painter/
I could have been a crook/
a real live bank robber/
cos is it that what it took.

#manifestomonday

I read about Damien Hirst's early days in Berlin. Before that auction that coincided with that Lehman Brother's downfall. Does it answer the question, the old one, about art changing the world, or merely the art world. Cut it out already.
I spent Friday afternoon trying to wrap my head around those 22 000 000 000. A man on the radio said that it is against the law. I don't know the man and I don't know the law. I nodded though for a bit until my head got dizzy. Maybe I had been shaking it after all.
In Greece, the Communist Party is sitting in the bleachers awaiting the pre-revolutionary collaps. Imploding Capitalism Inevitable. 0508110905072010
Somewhere I read that it took our dear Guido 20 semesters to finish his studies. (d.g.)
On Wall Street, internet porn is thriving amongst the employees of the SEC. // PornRelaxant // I hear about PIGS and haircuts and lobster ratings and ramschfilme and ramschstaaten and the tickling of the boiling water. Cock shots in a Jack Smith movie. // a fix of lust for a herd of impotent souls //

Disclaimer: I stole everything, especially // that last line // from Jorge Vaz Nande and his Spoiler in CINE QUA NON #2.

There's too much confusion,
I can't get no relief. (d.g.)