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: Scenes from a play [no title, WIP], including ramblings + Re: Joana Craveiro, CQN # 3.

I got myself a book for Christmas full of AWKWARD FAMILY PHOTOS. I skimmed through it over the Holidays like a sociologist on the prowl – or a screenplay writer eagerly looking for characters and fictionalisations, in both cases equally fascinated by what others make of the term 'family'; how they choose to project themselves as a family, both inwards to its core members and outwards towards an audience beyond the front door. Although a lot of the pictures were taken by professional photographers within the space of a studio, these projections are filled with slip-ups – misplaced gestures and looks; they seem to come apart, open up space for speculation, theory, therapy where there should be the calm unit of the nuclear family after all. The AWKWARD lies in the fact that no, this is not the SIMPSONS' annual Christmas family portrait in which Bart makes it abundantly clear, year after year, what is just going on behind that front door. No, on the contrary: everybody was told to behave and they did, and still, that's what they got.
There are very few pictures of my core family, my parents, my brother and myself – come to think of it, there might be not one family portrait. We never went to let it be taken by a photographer and – as my father used to take all our pictures– he is missing in all of them. There are however pictures of my broader family, a potpourri of myself with different pairings of relatives. Page after page of them going yellow in photo albums, twenty years weighing down on them. A handful from the past ten years, scattered around somewhere, in drawers, on harddrives.

„I will let go of the memory of Germany twenty years ago, all of Germany...“
(Joana Craveiro, 10PM: FINDING ANOTHER WAY OUT, CINE QUA NON # 3 [summer/fall '10])

Thumbing through these albums, I don't feel less like a sociologist or a story-teller, maybe even more so – scrutinizing myself. I don't recognise her, I don't remember her, I don't know why she's having that look upon her face. It is as if more than one life has come and went by in between her and me, all discarded and replaced at one point; I do remember odd ends, memory stroboscope, flashes of something or the other, celluloid snippets piling up underneath the editing table.

„All autobiographical work as I practice it is a fiction. Because I edit, [...] , omit, unsay. Autobiography doesn't hurt me. Rather it saves me, ...“
(Joana Craveiro, OPEN LETTER ABOUT ALL THIS, ibid)

Of course I know her and of course I know the story; I made it up. Of course I know why I am sitting at that table next to my grandmother. It is my grandfather's 70th birthday, 1989. He is sitting at the head of the table, flanked by an equal number of relatives on both sides. Closest to the camera, there is my grandmother next to myself on the left hand side, my mother next to my brother on the right. I am 4 years old, my brother is five. My father decided to document the moment. I smile, a bit cautiously; my brother is leaning forward towards the table, a flash of enthusiasm. Both my grandmother and my mother smile at him, albeit as well cautiously. It is a behaved smile that mirrors their hands, which rest shyly in their laps; they sit up straight as not screen myself and my brother from the camera. The scene is very symmetrical, dignified (as the occasion calls for), Last Supper-ish even (as there is food spread out on the table), calm, yet cheerful-ish - -
No, it is AWKWARD. In the foreground, on the center stage, at the other head of the table facing my grandfather, there it is on display, prominently on a plate, holding my father's place so-to-speak. A chicken leg. A chicken leg, the meat nibbled off. It is mocking us in its bony factuality. And we tried so hard and yet you might just put the picture in the book and call it: In commemoration of grandpa's 70th birthday and that chicken leg, what a yummy one - - - - -
And above my grandfather's head is all that space, all that wall paper and those hands in the sand, just barely touching, a reprint of Walter Womacka's AM STRAND ('On the beach', 1962). Two people, a man, a woman, fingertips, everything that goes on between them, is it careless not to look at one another- -, lovers, // thick as thieves //. It is not a photo op, it's not a couple, it is not honeymoon at the beach. It is not AWKWARD, its perspective is screwed, the ocean is behind them, and what are they looking at- -, it is an idea of that, of what - -.

„I would like to make a toast to the fact that we enact each other constantly...“
(Joana Craveiro, BEING PORTUGUESE, ibid)

The reprint has been hanging over my grandparents' brown nubbly couch me and my brother used to sleep on whenever we visited them as small children for years. I looked at it for the first time then and saw hands. I inherited it after my grandfather's death and looked at it for the first time. I took it from my parents when I moved out and looked at it for the first time. It had been standing on my wooden floor for years before I looked at it. And saw them. I found out that it was the most re-printed painting in former East Germany and so I finally looked at it and saw hands. I made that story up so many times, I cannot remember when it was true.

„I will definitely [...] give up the past, the songs I have been listening to for the past twenty years, the books I have been quoting from for the past twenty years [...], stop recording [...] the same [...] Velvet Underground song.“
(Joana Craveiro, 10PM: FINDING ANOTHER WAY OUT, ibid)

I re-enacted it in acrylics and filed it under biographical exorcism as if it had always been there, painted myself as her on a concrete rooftop in NY, Brian Kinney by her side and everything is flat and they are faceless and there is just her hand on the concrete. I looked at it yesterday and I didn't recognise them anymore - - And I wrote scenes for a play that I didn't give a title for I only toyed with the idea of it, of them, two paper dolls, one fictional/living, the other dead/dead, Andy Warhol, as dead as you can be, being a paper doll and all - - and in my head I still have a movie about two people, one sitting, one lying on the concrete, and it is so still, and there is all that static and crackling from a bad-quality CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION YouTube-rip played at a torturously slow speed in the background, and you'd only know that you're watching a movie after all by the sun's flickering reflection in the glitter around their eyes. It is Jack Smith in a James Benning movie - -

„It is me. But I wear a wig. Two wigs. And in the end I make an assay.“
(Joana Craveiro, OPEN LETTER ABOUT ALL THIS, ibid)

Or an essay or ramblings or a cut-up

ODD ENDS/ STROBOSCOPE/ HANDS

(the fictional/dead, the fictional/living and everybody in between)

2011.

In lieu of a cake: lying in the bathtub with Bill Hicks, increasingly pruny.

How does the saying go about history and farce? History, history, beware of your farciness? I have been listening to Bill Hicks' ARIZONA BAY album, his tales about surviving Bush and the Fundamentalists in the White House. About dinosaurs as God's way to test their faith – God, the old prankster, burying bones all over to be dug up and sow doubt in the belief of the non-believers of evolution. About how the Democrats won, finally, after having aimed at the Republican elephant for so many years. The elephant that sold the weapons to Iraq and as soon as the cheque cleared went on to test the quality of its products. Only Hicks is talking about the early nineties. Clinton is president, pre-Bush II and pre-Iraq II. Now, another Democrat is sitting in the White House, and it looks as if the elephant might win over Congress in November – again. Meanwhile, the Fundamentalists are tea-partying and that freak parralel universe in which Sarah Palin might run for president is actually our own.
What would Bill Hicks say if he were alive today? Bloody murder? Or would he put his head under water – if we gonna get all pruny, then at least evenly?
In face of it all Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are going to RALLY TO RESTORE SANITY AND/OR FEAR next weekend in Washington. In face of Germany's own autumn of discontent – the Leitkultur-debate is making its reappearance (aka how to keep the 'German' in German angst) – Christine Lemke-Matwey called out to Germany's own Dichter/Denker to get their heads out of the bathwater sand, and say something. If Christoph Schlingensief were alive today, as she suggests already nostalgically, he surely would have to say something – and clear the air, hopefully.
Living abroad in 2008, I was pondering upon that German angst myself and wrote about Schlingensief's WIEN-AKTION (BITTE LIEBT ÖSTERREICH), his 2000 Austrian take on this season's debate:

// Is this real? Is it real theater? Real art? Or indeed real life? For those who witnessed Schlingensief's work BITTE LIEBT ÖSTERREICH commissioned for the Wiener Festwochen festival in Austria, it was in fact difficult to decide upon the nature of the spectacle: the work featured a large container installed on a square next to the opera house in Vienna. In line with the concept of the Big Brother TV program, twelve participants, who were announced by Schlingensief as seeking for asylum, moved into the container for one week, being under video surveillance on a 24 hours basis. The public could follow the life of the container inhabitants on television and the Internet and were asked to vote for the candidates, whereby those two receiving the most votes would not only definitely have to leave the container, but also putatively have to leave the country, having lost the competition of seeking for refugee. Whereas this account frames the work as a rather straightforward piece of performance art, the introduction of elements such as a banner stating 'Ausländer Raus' ('Foreigners Out'), a slogan used by neo-nationalist parties in Germany, and flags alluding to the right-wing populist Austrian party FPÖ rooted the work within the current political discussion, pointing to its potential as being an actual political campaign.
Hence, interpretations of Schlingensief's work indeed ranged from it being a critique of policies towards asylum seekers and the populist strategies used for their implementation to being a meta-critique on the increasing event character of all politics and the crucial role of the media apparatus. Criticism towards the WIEN-AKTION ran on the very same axis: Schlingensief's re-enactment of the spectacle of politics through yet another spectacle turns artistic practice into an act of populist event management, which dismisses art's potential to say something meaningful about reality by turning it into a piece of virtual reality itself.
Yet, within the framework of this exhibition [MARTYRS. CLOWNS. BIOGRAPHICAL EXORCISMS] the term virtual reality seems the least appropriate to describe the nature of Schlingensief's artistic project, which is marked by his ever-lasting possession by the demon called Germany. His works then appear as performances of political introspection which insist on a place for his own biography within, against, towards and in spite of the reality of German history – PLEASE LOVE AUSTRIA is after all a call for subjective engagement. The audience in Vienna reacted to the initial display of the 'Foreigners Out'-banner with applause – Art, life and true romance are never virtual. //

I don't know if Schlingensief would want to participate in the current debate, too. Or if he would feel that you can only state the obvious for so many times. I don't even know if I want to. The fact that to Seehofer and company the Leitkultur-debate is no farce at all (and that they are not asking to Please love Germany either) leaves me a bit breathless. I think I'm already holding my breath under water with Bill. 'Germany', neat and tidy within its lovely 'borders', home of the 'Germans' and their 'Christian-Jewish tradition', reading Grass or better yet, watching TATORT on Sundays. I have no clue.
I am German, yet nothing but a patchwork, my biography a succession of actual physical and/or cultural displacements, migration, refuge, adaptation, weirdness. My grandmother was born in a country that doesn't exist anymore, my parents were, I was. Germany just turned twenty. Or two-hundred, but then again, I have no idea either way. I'm living in Kreuzberg now, where nobody is from here, everybody came from somewhere, including patched baggage.
The only time I ever got a glimpse at what that concept 'Germany' might mean (that icing apart from the actual cake, the Grundgesetz) was when I lived abroad back then in 2008. And then I only realised it in the way other people looked at me and told me, that yes, I am German, even if in denial. And in the way the Germans at the Goethe-Institute in Amsterdam explained it to my fellow Dutchmen. I listened to Feridun Zaimoglu talking about GERMAN AMOK, I read Christian Kracht's FASERLAND, I found Schlingensief in a dark room at the De Appel gallery. I even enjoyed the familiarity of their geographies, Heimat. But then again, they looked a lot like Kreuzberg.
So I have an idea after all. Last week I asked for political and cultural asylum again nevertheless. Not that I'm headed for greener pastures (see above). Just pastures. If L.A. has fallen into the ocean by then, I'll be heading out to ARIZONA BAY.

Sunday, February 14, 2010.

// it's Valentine's Day and Christoph Schlingensief is performing, HAU, Berlin, the Berlinale program says he's showing L'INFERNO, commenting on it, he's commenting on it alright, I don't know if he's showing it, he says Ulrich and Erika Gregor wouldn't call that showing a movie, at least not properly or cinephily or, he's fast-forwarding through the opening credits, then rewinding the whole thing, I don't know, is he giving in, he's showing that one frame with the director's name in it, smugly perhaps, here you go, proper and all / he's fast-forwarding again, all the while reviewing what he's not going to show us, then a sudden halt, he's showing a scene now, he's mixing sounds to go with it, then, is he losing faith in the act, he's turning down the volume, he's commenting on it again, or rather, telling an anecdote about some gallery opening in Berlin, only it's not an anecdote, but a lecture, or a parable perhaps, on the state of Berlin's art scene, I'm thinking L'INFERNO alright, he's fast-forwarding again /
first balcony, knees up to my chin, I'm euphoric, he's getting away with it, he came to do what, infuriate, agitate, convince, self-indulge, ask for money for his opera house in Africa, and he does it and he's going to get it, why, because art history and the art market have long decided, yes, we let him get away with it, but well, the audience came in disbelief of it all, smugly too, so he is performing and he's mangling minds and he's getting away with it, the audience is going away with their minds mangled /
I'm sitting in the bleachers, I am sad, there is something so utterly sad about him on stage, he's so done with cancer, he says it, I'm done with you, cancer, I think he always was, even when he was still showing off his X-ray images / he's done with the name-calling, and maybe that's what is so utterly sad, that there is still that fierceness with which he stated, cancer, you are an asshole, I refuse you, but something else is creeping in, something desperate, desperation, he says it, straightforwardly, it's so plain it hurts, he says, I want to be well / I want to be alive
there's no point in being dead, there's no point in being a dead artist /
the next day, I'm talking to Delphine, I'm telling her about the sadness and the desperation, I ask her, what will happen to his art, what does it mean to be a dead artist, a dead performance artist, a dead biographical exorcist, what will be, she asks me, are you of little faith, I shrug, his art, it will be, it is now with him and in spite of him, it will without him
there is consolation in there, somewhere //

Christoph Schlingensief died on Saturday, August 21, 2010.

the blinding

concrete, brownstone.
(a.h. 2010, acrylics on canvas, 70 x 80 cm)

d.g.: "...it seems possible that they are in fact looking at the source of the light, their features maybe even erased by its intensity."

- - -

On a rooftop, in between the concrete and the brownstone, they are standing, the wings of their paper clothing fluttering around their backs. A throat is cleared, then "I guess we didn't get the eyes so we stop argueing whether or not we're a bit dead behind them - and get on with it."

IntoxicatingMe, IntoxicatingYou

Apropos Christoph Schlingensief's INTOLLERANZA II, his music theatre opera performance at the Festival des Arts in Brussels:

„Der Künstler, hat Georg Seeßlen jüngst in einer Laudatio auf Schlingensief gesagt, sei ein Mensch, der Dinge tut, die ihm vollkommen entsprechen. Das stimmt. Die Frage ist nur, ob das, was dem Operndorf-Begründer und Lungenkrebspatienten Schlingensief entspricht, auch andere etwas angeht. Und ob seine Kunst Kunst genug ist, stark genug, poetisch und reich genug, dass diese anderen sich ein eigenes Bild machen, von sich und ihren Todesängsten, ihren Träumen.“
(Christine Lemke-Matwey, Tagesspiegel, May 17, 2010, p. 23)

Apropos Schlingensief's installation INNOCENCE 1965-2008 at the de Appel arts center in Amsterdam in Spring 2008, I wrote last fall:

„Let's chain the artwork to the artist and behold another therapeutic session...“

I did not answer the question, but merely rephrase it. The question being, again, Is his art art enough, is it strong enough, poetic enough to be more than sheer self-medication, more than a publicly exercised therapy session which does not have to, can't, won't be of anybody's concern because, not only in the end but from the very beginning, he is only talking to himself?

„...standing in front of the triptych, I could only gasp and utter Oh my God. Oh my God. This is pathetic. So it is then, truly is. Oh my God. For here, Schlingensief's insistence on the reality of the possession by one's own biography [...] has been turned into the insistence on the reality of the possession by one's own tumorous biology, leaving behind the exorcism's inherent oscillation between authenticity and spectacle, as its circular folly can once and for all be dissolved into a confirmed medical diagnosis – memento cancri.”
(CINE QUA NON #1, fall 2009, p. 14f.)

Did I imply no? Not art enough?

- - -

Later on, I did say yes, stubbornly. Yes strong enough, poetic enough, and I turned to my own therapeutic session. Its every frame an act of self-medication or an imitation thereof, intoxicating enough, I save myself.

Stills from EXORCISM OF THE LAST GAME I EVER PLAYED (D 2009, 10')

- - -
Last night on the phone, talking capitalism with my father, he is as agitated as I am. We are both shouting, then he says I should cancel that paper subscription. I say This is all so wrong, he says Why vote for one when you can start a party, I mumble uh huh.

Not enough, not nearly enough.