Starting on September 20, the 21er Haus in Vienna is hosting an exhibition titled Keine Zeit ("no time") in German and Busy in English. Dealing with the exhaustion of the self — stress, depression, burnout — in the age of cognitive and "creative" capitalism, with its ideology of relentless flexibility and its erosion of old dividing lines between work and leisure.
The exhibition foregrounds art's implication in this regime, and my catalogue essay "Autonomous Symptoms in a Collapsing Economy of Time" focuses on various forms of performance and of dance in today's "temporal economy." Continuing where my previous text "Unknown Knowns" left off, the essay homes in on the performance of symptoms and its potential and pitfalls for collaborative projects. Artists discussed include Yvonne Rainer, Jérôme Bel, Charles Atlas, Dora Garcia and Lars von Trier.
The catalogue of Keine Zeit/Busy also contains contributions by Bettina Steinbrügge/Alain Ehrenberg, Diedrich Diederichsen, Liam Gillick, and Angela Melitopoulos/Maurizio Lazzarato, among others.
Image: Dora Garcia's Real Artists Don't Have Teeth at the 2011 Venice Biennale.
Preparing History in Motion for the press is taking up most of my non-teaching time, but the slightly delayed July-August 2012 issue of New Left Review (no. 76) contains my review of a recent collection of writings by Asger Jorn, Fraternité Avant Tout, which focused on his writings on art and architecture from the late 1930s to the late 1950s. Titled "Dialectic of Dionysus," my review/essay analyses some rather unzeitgemäße aspects of Jorn's materialist critique of functionalism and rationalism: his use of the dichotomy of the Apollonian and the Dionysian and his rather questionable use of Engels's Origin of the Family. As arcane as some of Jorn's concerns of the 1940s in particular may appear obsolete; however, they not only announce concerns that he would bring into the Situationist International, but also demand attention for the way in which Jorn has worked with his medium as a writer:
"[Many] of the concerns and references dominating the essays
in Fraternité now seem archaic. Furthermore, the artist-author
often engages with other theorists not through a careful parsing of
their arguments, but by mimicking their mode of writing and détourning
their phrases, reworking their language just as he reworked flea-market
paintings. It is here that the problematical nature of these writings
becomes productive, rather than merely symptomatic. Jorn’s materialism
manifests itself in the way he reworks texts as materials, rather than
in a careful deployment of the analytical tools provided by Marxist (or
any other) theory. What is dialectical is not so much his reasoning as
his treatment of text as a kind of texture. His texts are textiles, and
in some ways they find their most perfect expression in what might
appear to be a parergon: the illustrations."
"If the essay ‘Apollo or Dionysus’ is hard to
swallow, a single page in which Jorn uses artworks to develop his take
on the Apollonian and Dionysian, and reads the mythological gigantomachy
as class struggle, prefiguring Peter Weiss, is nothing short of
brilliant. These jump-cuts are not as remote from contemporary viewing
and reading habits as the essays may appear to be; with his montages,
Jorn creates rhythms that seem more compatible with them, while still
posing fundamental challenges to the viewer/reader—as they should. More than anything, the fact that Jorn’s essays are picture essays prevents them from becoming a monde perdu—to invoke the title of his 1960 painting, with its title recalling Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, that supremely Anglo-Saxon imperialist vision of atavistic survivals."
