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.

Not quite dead. No quite.

Some kind of status update is in order.

While I'm still here in good old Berlin, consuming the first bubbles of summer, the other, more mobile gingerbread is travelling throughout the US of A. I hope to hear from her and her adventures into the realm of art, peanut butter and twinkies regularly.

Meanwhile, maybe even I will make myself heard a little more often. Just a little.
For I am not dead yet.

Not quite.

Re: Open Call - 7th Berlin Biennale / THAT'S HOW WEIRD IT'S GONNA BE (IV)

My first reaction was to hum the George Harrison tune, trying to figure out just how the rime goes: inverted, diverted, perverted, controlled, no – wait – they labelled and sold you. Here we go.

My second thought on Biennale curator Artur Żmijewski's call to please send in art and a statement of „... your political inclination (e.g. rightist, leftist, liberal, nationalist, anarchist, feminist, masculinist ...) ...“ was a sudden reminiscence of earlier Facebook days, when you could still state your political views by ticking the box, labelling yourself on a scale of very liberal to very conservative. The middle-ground being moderate, which to me always sounded very much like the apathetic option, or Żmijewski's alternative to giving that statement, namely being „... not interested in politics at all“. At least Facebook had the other option, too. Today, you can scribble in whatever you please, and explain – as far as the word limit may allow you – just what kind of an apathetic liberal you are, of the American or German breed - - -

To sum up, the Open Call left me thinking something along the lines of Is that a trick question? And, Let's hope it's a trick question!

As Żmijewski goes on to elaborate in his curator's statement, he deems such a process of self-labelling necessary however, because there seems to the an „invisible rule“ within contemporary art by which artists are kindly asked to produce „'political'“ art, however, from an „unindentified political position“, which – as he states, justly – simply doesn't exist. I have never heard of such a rule, nor did I ever expect an artist to live by it (neither from an art critic's, nor a spectator's standpoint) – on the contrary. But then again I am not an artist in any professional, bread-and-butter sense; I never had to answer to a gallery owner or a curator, I don't even have to answer to my editor, yet – only to the voices in my head - -
Me: „What's with all the pretentious self-indulgence?“
Me: „Hm?“

Żmijewski's goal, as he points out, is to get the artists to break that very rule and lay bare „the invisible/ hidden structure“, the „obscene background of [their] art“, their politics. And, he wants them to remember that, after all, „[p]olitics are not, as politicians would like to convince us, fights for power or dirty games. They are the language of our collective needs which people share.“ The cynic in me (or is it the realist?) wants to shriek: Aren't we beyond irony?
Żmijewski: „...the curatorial choice will [not] be based on preferred political identity [as stated by the artist] [...] [but] on intuition and ambiguity. But this time intuition and ambiguity will be a little deformed by this over-obvious political element. So, we will see what happens.“
The Cynic again: Don't we know what will happen? I read it in the newspaper on Thursday: Post-Tucson: Sarah Palin refrains from calling Obama Hitler until Monday morning. Aren't we already living in the aftermath of the deformation of „intuition and ambiguity“, read reality, by the „over-obvious political element“, read ideology, in which the vocabulary of the „language of our collective needs“ has shrunken to nothing but statements of political inclinations, even been replaced by them? It is a game of politicians calling each other names, and as Żmijewski suggests, the artist should join in, starting with himself. To make that work, i.e. to give that „little deformation“ an outcome that cuts through it all and is mind-mangling (and I want nothing less), Żmijewski will have to sign up for a serious case of short-leash / tight-rope / whiplash curating – nothing else but strangling the artists/labels/artworks until they suffocate or snap. Oh, the possibilities!

But step aside, you Cynic, and come in, Idealist, for Żmijewski is pointing to Hannah Arendt as the reference point for his call to „describe what we do as artists also in pure (sic!) political terms“. To quote Arendt: The event illuminates its own past, but cannot be deduced from it. There is no such thing as causality, only contingency. Hence, the event, the Biennale itself, the performance of all that art hanging on all those walls in 2012 will render all good intentions and inclinations, as stated, labelled or mumbled („Hm? Other?“), futile anyway. Oh, the possibilities!

- - -

THAT'S HOW WEIRD IT'S GONNA BE (IV/last installment), 2011
exhibition flyer















THAT'S HOW WEIRD IT WAS (III), 2011
still from THROUGH THE BENT BACKED TULIPS / tiananmen square 2010 06 22 (2010)













THAT'S HOW WEIRD IT WAS (II), 2010
still from THE AGE OF THE UNDERSTATEMENT (song by The Last Shadow Puppets, video by Romain Gavras, 2008)

















THAT'S HOW WEIRD IT WAS (I), 2010

//

//

THE AGE OF THE UNDERSTATEMENT (The Last Shadow Puppets, 2008)

THAT'S HOW WEIRD IT WAS. (II)
2010

Put the babblin back in binary babblin.

THAT'S HOW WEIRD IT WAS. (I)

2010

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.

Public service announcement

The other gingerbread left for Happy Communist Country two days ago.
This means I should do my best to keeps things tidy in here.
I will.

7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art

12.06.-9.8. 2011

-- -- -- -- --

Venues:
Oranienplatz 17
10999 Berlin

Artists:
Vincent Vulsma

Vincent Vulsma

ARS NOVA E5305-B, 2009
Spray paint on shrink film over pre-fabricated canvas

installation view (general design),

oranienplatz 17.

Public Talk (tba):

Manierismen der Abgewracktheit.

-- -- -- --

Re: suresafecomfortable Re: tales from beyond the bubble wrap, part 2.

there are no tales from beyond the bubble wrap I can't tell them.
there are tales from beyond the bubble wrap I can't tell them.
there are tales from beyond the bubble wrap I can tell them

from inside the bubble wrap out.

there are no tales from beyond the bubble wrap I can't tell them.
there are tales from beyond the bubble wrap I tell them

from inside the bubble wrap out
of fear of pretty houses and their porches.

there are tales from beyond the bubble wrap I can't tell them

from outside the bubble wrap in.

there are tales they tell me

from inside the bubble wrap out
// patriarch on a vespa //.

there are tales I tell them
of the effect of concrete on bubble wrap
of the effect of bubble wrap on bubble wrap

tales from beyond the bubble wrap. part 2

I've been travelling by train, too.
Travelling at 210 km/h. Made me think of Virilio and his screens once more. But I will probably talk about this some other time.

I've been travelling to a ritualistic celebration held by people I do not really know. Sun and hills and church bells, you know.

I've been watching. But I've been also taking part. Wrapped by arms that wanted to include me right away. Friendly and warm. I liked it, the way you like to look at the screen (Oh, there it is already again, I couldn't help.): Tell me a story. And it gets even better if I find myself in it, in any way.

Still, I am not inside the bubble wrap. Can't be. Those people are! I am outside. - No, this is no post-puberty lamentation about me being the misunderstood outsider. Come on! I'm past that. -
They do everything to be sure and safe and comfortable. Somehow, I would love to be/think/live this way, too. But this safety wrap obscures your vision, doesn't it?

Boo, I'm getting banal and cheesy again. Can't help. Not that my vision is un-obscured. No.

Btw: It's not a new thought, this. Not at all:

/ Wenn jemand eine Reise tut, /
/ so kann er was erzählen. /

And in the end:

(...)
/Und fand es überall wie hier,/
/Fand überall 'n Sparren,/
/Die Menschen gradeso wie wir,/
/Und eben solche Narren./

Matthias Claudius: Urians Reise um die Welt. 1774.


Addendum:
Saturday morning.
I'm sitting in my Berlin flat, looking outside at swirling particles.
I'm under water. Rays of sunlight passing through the glass that separates me from the outside. Little bubble passing by and up.
If I open the glass, they'll come in and will be soft and gentle.
Now, that's my kind of bubble wrap!

tales from beyond the bubble wrap

There are no tales from beyond the bubble wrap. I can't tell them. Yet, I can see, out there, there are people living completely different lives. I got on a train, if you want to see Germany, get on that train. I've been a tourist travelling other countries' countrysides, they look different. They are not Germany. It's something about the grass and the trees. Here There Here I am a tourist, too.
FITBW
I sit on a bench in Nowheretown, Germany, reading Rainald Goetz, Klage, from inside the bubble wrap, am I smiling, I am, I recognize the wrapping. My arm reaches out, I am trying to touch the clouds, the sky looks extremely close, close and squeezable. Ridiculously close, why is that, I am only 400 metres above sea level, here there here this is not the Alps.
FITBW
Back. On the train, Jason Schwartzman travelling through India in a perfectly tailored Marc Jacobs suit. I fell in love with a fox in corduroys. On Saturday. Familiar wrappings. I wrap myself in a train travelling through India Germany.
Back. There Here In Berlin. The sky far up, my hands rest in my lap, not tempted. Skyscrapers never touch it, too.
FITBW


foxfit, never touch ground:
saturday's corduroys through monday's slacks.