Holy Grail/Quail

This summer I found out that Tris Vonna-Michell included a copy of the Holy Grail issue of the HTV, which I guest-edited, in one of the installations/performances in his 2007 Witte de With show. The piece in question is Finding Chopin: In Search of the Holy Quail (2006), which centers, or circles, around sound poetry guru Henri Chopin. This happens to be one of those rare Witte de With exhibitions that I didn't see. Since it's always nice when obscure projects turn out to have some sort of unexpected use-value, it would have been interesting to see how this publication functioned in Vonna-Michell's web of references and allusions. Not having been in the right place at the right time, I can only try to piece together a composite picture of this non-event (for me, at any rate) through photographs and the writings of others, such as Sam Thorne in Frieze:

"Vonna-Michell’s modern day picaresques unfold within dimly lit installations, comprising projections, arcane ephemera, personal correspondence and scattered photocopies. The sparse props in these indeterminate spaces are less the detritus of ‘events frozen in time’ than points in a hyperactive dot-to-dot puzzle, a mind-map of postwar Europe, gleefully hopping either side of the Berlin Wall.
"The young artist’s surname is an unlikely one for his home town, the English seaside resort of Southend, and it is Vonna-Michell’s search to understand the oddity of this familial displacement that generates the journey retold in Finding Chopin. ‘Why was I born in such a place?’ asks the young Tris. ‘Ask Henri Chopin – all you need to know is that he loves quail eggs, lives in Paris, and is 82 years old,’ replies his father, gnomically. So starts the desultory trip, with Vonna-Michell the protagonist, which skips between Glasgow, France and Norfolk on the trail of the eponymous concrete poet, whose relocation to Essex purportedly influenced the Vonna-Michells’ move. While this pursuit can appear aleatory, like the antic questing of Herbert Stencil in Thomas Pynchon’s V. (1963), the overarching narrative is driven by a search for sense, frequently governed by associated sounds, puns and repetitions." (http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/tris_vonna_michell)

The entire Holy Grail issue can be found in the online archive at http://www.htvnews.nl/
Image: installation shot of Finding Chopin at Witte de With.

Omer Fast: The Casting

The MUMOK in Vienna has published a small book on the occasion of the exhibition Omer Fast: The Casting. For this book, Fast has once more collaborated with designer Manuel Raeder, resulting in a publication that functions like a typographic remix of Fast's new video installation, The Casting, which is itself a reenacted remix of two different episodes narrated by a US soldier: an encounter with a disturbed girl in Germany, and an ambush in Iraq.

The book contains an e-mail conversation between Omer Fast and myself, which focuses on reenactment in his work and in general. Exchanging these mails was very stimulating, and the text contains some suggestions that I hope to expand on next year, when the idolatry project is finished and I'll be able to focus on a new book. Publications (and the exhibition Life, Once More) that are labeled "History in Motion" relate to this potential book on the contempory production of history through film, TV, and other moving images.

http://www.amazon.com/Casting-Omer-Fast/dp/386560403X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244463825&sr=1-1

Roy Villevoye: Detours

From June 14 to August 10, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen shows Detours, a retrospective of Roy Villevoye's work from the late 1980s to the present. The catalog includes numerous essays, including one by Villevoye's frequent collobrator Jan Dietvorst (a number of co-directed films are part of the show), and my own essay The Art of Exchange from Secret Publicity. It is unfortunate that it has not proven possible to have the show travel to other locations/countries, but hopefully the publication will find its way to some addressees outside of Holland.

http://www.amazon.com/Roy-Villevoye-Detours-Photographic-Installations/dp/9069182297/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244462988&sr=8-1

Unknown Knowns

BAK, basis voor actuele kunst in Utrecht just published On Knowledge Production: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art (edited by Binna Choi, Maria Hlavajova and Jill Winder). This reader contains both newly commissioned and anthologized writings in art as a site for the production of knowledge. Included is my essay Unknown Knowns: On Symptoms in Contemporary Art, (pp. 84-107), which is a sequel of sorts to my earlier essay Theory and the Sphinx, and which discusses works by artists including Martha Rosler, Jeff Wall, Andrea Fraser, and Omer Fast. From the introduction:

"Artistic “research” often functions as a parody of instrumentalized academic knowledge production, falling short of even its eroding criteria. However, this may not be a bad thing, at least not entirely. The failure to meet a dubious standard always holds the potential to erupt into a questioning of that standard. In this respect, it is interesting to note the place held by the symptom in what passes for artistic knowledge production. While the rhetoric and practice of artistic knowledge production can themselves be seen as symptomatic of the social constraints to which autonomous art is subjected, the work of some artists actively engages with the symptom as an alternative to the empire of signs created by academic disciplines—as pointing both backwards and forwards in time, beyond the current order of things.

"By definition, symptoms are unintentional and uncontrollable, unproductive and even counterproductive—the result of repressed drives seeking an outlet. Recent practices that stage physical or linguistic symptoms can be seen as undermining the sham logocentrism of contemporary discourse even while taking advantage of the symbolic status of theory and research. Such approaches need to be distinguished from historical modern art, especially Expressionism and Surrealism: if these movements simulated symptoms, it was because they valued symptomatic scribbles and movements as authentic and autonomous expressions, and sought to liberate the symptom from a clinical or analytical context. By contrast, today’s artists are not so much interested in using the symptom as a model for a quasi-symptomatic, expressive, and convulsive art, but rather a reflexive symptomatology that produces dubious knowledge about knowledge’s other.

"Building on a famously rambling epistemological statement by Donald Rumsfeld, in which the then US Secretary of Defense mused about the “known knowns,” “known unknowns,” and “unknown unknowns” in the war on terror, one could say that such practices articulate the “unknown knowns” of society—its ideological unconscious, its repressed knowledge. Such active symptomatology is in contradistinction to the theoretical tendency to read art’s formal characteristics as symptoms of the conditions and contradictions of artistic production, revealing more about society than the artist may have realized. Symptomatological approaches in recent art depend on an actively critical role for the artist; however, it is important to remember that critical intentions have their own unconscious, their own unknown knowns."

images: pages from Manuel Raeder's typographic version of Omer Fast's Godville.

http://www.bak-utrecht.nl/?click[id_news]=94

Open no. 14: Sacred Sites

Issue no. 14 of Open, a publication on "art and the public domain"edited by Jorinde Seijdel, is dedicated to art institutions and the reinvention of publicness. This issue contains contributions by Chantal Mouffe, Nina Möntmann, Jan Verwoert and Bik Van der Pol, among others, as well as my essay Exhibiting Cult Value: On Sacred Spaces as Public Spaces and Vice Versa (pp. 38-55 in the English edition). The text analyses the relations between museum, cathedral and mosque, arguing against the popular tendency to either define museums and other art spaces as bullwarks of "Western"secularism or demand that they become so. An extract:

"For Enlightenment fundamentalists, mosque and museum are radically opposed to each other, while the cathedral is politely or opportunistically ignored. If the Qur’an is seen as the enemy of Western “free word” and its media, the mosque stands in a similar opposition to the museum, the home of “free art” that is under threat from sinister fundamentalists. In this way the mosque comes to be opposed to the museum as representative of the secular public sphere. Recently, when the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague refused to exhibit photographs that showed gay men wearing masks representing Muhammed and Ali, his son-in-law, the museum was attacked for betraying its mission to be a space of secular freedom against theocratic tyranny. Thus there are two opposed interpretations of the museum: in contrast to the authors who argue that the museum is too sacred, that it is insufficiently profane, others ideologize the museum as a prototypical space for Western secularism, for free words and images. Both positions are militantly secularist. In both cases, the sacred as such is seen as ominous.

"Emile Durkheim noted that “[t]here are two kinds of sacred, one auspicious, the other inauspicious;” for Enlightenment fundamentalists, there only seems to be bad sacrality. But does not the concept of the secular itself come to play the part of the “good” sacred? After all, the Enlightenment fundamentalists effectively sacralize “the Enlightenment”, “the West”, “free speech”, “free art”—while using such slogans to avoid any discussion of Western complicitness in the situations they denounce, in the Middle East and elsewhere. If secularization means the questioning of dogmas and stifling celestial and earthly hierarchies, a revolt against a culture of fear and taboo, then secularization is indeed crucial, but many secularists seem intent on sabotaging this process by nurturing Manichaean dichotomies. This goes for art-bashers as well as for Islam-bashers; while the latter use the bogeyman of Evil Islam to prevent a serious contestation Western neoliberal policies and economic imperialism, the former seem intent on disabling whatever potential for dissent art may still have. Yes, the museum needs to be critiqued, but Ulrich’s “profane” museum, which is no longer distinct from the surrounding culture, would itself be as critical as Fox News.

"Perhaps the museum’s insufficient secularization, its elitist and mystifying form of publicness, also enables critical practices that would not be possible otherwise. And did not churches, at various moments in history, function as public places that enabled the articulation of dissenting practices and forms of resistance, both from a Christian and from a post-Christian perspective? No doubt some mosques deserve to be eyed with suspicion, and there are many obstacles to be overcome, but one can give a positive twist to the mosque’s difference from (and in) the current order, as in the case of the museum. Some works of art stage a tentative dialogue between art context and mosque. Lidwien van de Ven’s photo of a Viennese mosque, in which men are seen from behind, praying with their faces to the wall, is pasted directly on the wall of the white cube; thus one space of concentration, however myth-ridden, is presented as an extension of the next."

Image: Lidwien van de Ven, Islamic Centre, Vienna, 2000.

The complete text is online here: http://www.skor.nl/article-3635-nl.html?lang=en

En de nederlandse versie is hier: http://www.skor.nl/article-3635-nl.html?lang=nl


[Correction: Although in recent years Lidwien van de Ven often shows her photographs in the form of poster prints glued directly on the wall, the picture of the Islamic Center in Vienna has not been shown in this way yet.]

Texte zur Kunst no. 69: Abstraction

I served as guest editor of issue no. 69 of Texte zur Kunst (March 2007), alongside regulars André Rottmann and Stefanie Kleefeld. The contributions gathered behind a rather unfortunate cover by David Lieske are dedicated to abstraction in modern and contemporary artistic practices and aesthetic theory, particularly in relation to the economic conditions of art. The texts aim at establishing an understanding of abstraction that exceeds the historical limitation of this generic term in art-historical parlance by decidedly expanding its implications beyond the realm of (neo-)formalist preoccupations with aesthetic surfaces, especially in painting. Instead of prolonging this notion’s reduction to self-reflexive forms of modernist medium-specificity, the various contributions seek to explore abstraction in the context of the socio-economic upheavals of modernity, in which “all that is solid melts into thin air”—as two nineteenth-century art theorists put it.

The "thematic" part contains texts by Sebastian Egenhofer, Melanie Gilligan, Isabelle Graw, Sabeth Buchmann, Ina Blom, Alice Creisher/Andreas Siekmann, and myself. My essay Living With Abstraction (German version pp. 46-59; English version pp. 132-138), which contains materal from from chapter 4 of my book-in-progress Idols of the Market, starts as follows:

"For his 2002 poster project commemorating the attack on the World Trade Center, Hans Haacke produced an edition of monochrome white posters from which the silhouettes of the Twin Towers had been cut out. These were glued onto New York poster walls, with the underlying printed matter partly visible in the outlines. For the design of his “negative” poster, Haacke used an advertisement for a Broadway production from the New York Times Magazine as background, and on the city's poster walls it was likewise fragments of ads that were visible in the towers' silhouettes — often ads for shows, films or records. Although ostensibly commemorating 9/11, the project in effect problematized and questioned the destroyed building itself, which had made visible the abstract, aniconic tendency of advanced capitalism in the form of a spectacular icon. As an image of deterritorialized streams of capital, in Haacke's project the destroyed WTC becomes the empty frame of commodity-images which, according to Marxian theory, are themselves merely pseudo-concrete manifestations of abstract exchange-value: as Terry Eagleton put it, “the commodity erases from itself every particle of matter; as alluring auratic object, it parades its own unique sensual being in a kind of spurious show of materiality.”

"In a process that is as liberating as it is destructive, capitalism extracts people and goods from feudal social bonds, replacing them with the abstract bond of exchange value. This means that all modern — commodified — art is fundamentally abstract, regardless of whether it consists of squares and rectangles or represents cute kittens: “As uninteresting as obsolete postage stamps, and offering as little variation as these, literary or artistic productions are now signs of nothing but abstract commerce.” Formal abstraction thus would seem to offer no privileged insight into a society where abstraction is triumphant. In 1937, Meyer Schapiro argued that there are problems with theories that derive abstraction in art either from the forms of industry or from “the abstract nature of modern finance, in which bits of paper control capital and all human transactions assume the form of operations on numbers and titles,” since abstract art did not emerge in the most industrially advanced nations or in the main centres of finance — and moreover, many early abstract artists positioned their work squarely in opposition to what they perceived as the "materialism" of modern society.

"One way out of this quandary was offered by Adorno's sophisticated argument that formal abstraction is the result of a new “interdiction” of representation stemmed from the imperative for the work of art to absorb its “deadliest enemy, exchangeability”, resisting abstraction by representing it negatively. Abstract art is thus positioned as perhaps the modern art par excellence — its “windowless monads” showing the abstract nature of society by refusing to represent its glimmering surfaces, or even its dark underside, giving back a blank stare rather than attempting to adjust traditional representation to a post-traditional world. However, this negative theology of abstraction — of which Gerhard Richter's reading of the gestural abstraction of art informel as befitting a post-traditional world is another instance — has increasingly been challenged by practices that seek to give a more precise social and political meaning to abstract structures. This development occurs at a time when capitalism seems to abstract itself beyond recognition, entering a post-visual, “conceptual” phase in which even pseudo-concrete appearances are abandoned. In the 1970s, Baudrillard used the “binary” towers as signs for the transition from a regime of production to one of pure semiosis, of capital becoming coded information circling the globe — the ultimate abstraction. Can such abstraction still be made visible, however inadequately, now that Baudrillard's double icon is gone?"

http://www.textezurkunst.de/

Images: Frank Stella, Madinat As-Salam I, 1973, and Hans Haacke, design for Commemorating 9/11 poster project, 2001.

Artforum, March 2008

The March issue of Artforum contains a short text on Werner Herzog, in particular his new film on Antarctica, Encounters at the End of the World (pp. 117-118). The text was and should be titled Encounters in End Time, but Artforum changed this to the cringeworthy Truth and Beauty.

Some extracts:

"In one scene, the director tries to make a reputedly increasingly misanthropic and shy scientist relax by asking him probing questions about sexual deviancy among penguins. The bemused expert ventures that, while he knows of no gay sex, there is some evidence of threesomes and "prostitution." This all-too-human behavior leads Herzog to ask whether there are cases of mental derangement among these birds. Some penguins, it turns out, become insane and abandon their group; we see footage of one penguin who stays put as others go on their way, and who eventually waggles, alone, toward the bluish-white horizon-where, Herzog's voice tells us with a hint of barely suppressed glee, "certain death" awaits. This brings to mind various other Herzog protagonists, those played by Klaus Kinski in particular, who subordinate everything to some overriding vision and therefore act in socially unproductive ways. If anything, such "deranged" outsiders allow us to see the insanity of business as usual more clearly. [...] But in a film that repeatedly gives voice to the concern of scientists over global warming, the larger implication is that humanity itself, like the deranged penguin, is marching toward certain death.

"Indeed, although Herzog is highly critical of Al Gore's pimped-out PowerPoint presentation, An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Encounters takes up many of the same motifs, albeit in a more imaginative way. In what may well be one of the staged scenes that Herzog includes in his documentaries in order to go beyond what he has, speaking of cinema verité, called "superficial truth, the truth of accountants," Encounters shows a marine biologist and his colleagues watching the trailer for the 1954 film Them! on a computer monitor. In Them! natural history is out of joint, as nuclear explosions beget a race of giant monster ants. All of Herzog's sci-fi films in fact have similarities to this film-they are disaster (if not monster) movies, showing landscapes full of industrial junk or otherwise ravaged. [...]

"Media coverage of global warming often implies that the process is so radical as to be all but unstoppable, and thus it often serves to breed passivity, even when accompanied by ostensibly actionist rhetoric. This is the effect of one scene in Encounters, in which a computer screen displays a time-lapse animation of icebergs moving northward, where they will inevitably melt. The film as a whole, however, opposes such intimations of inevitability with a rich and varied rhythm, a temporality that counters linear scenarios with spiraling movements between men and penguins, between the "cathedral" under the ice and the edge of an Antarctic volcano. By proposing time as something malleable, Herzog suggests that today's unnatural natural history is still open to intervention-that there are possibilities for action in and beyond entropic end-time."
http://www.artforum.com/

Image: Werner Herzog, Encounters at the End of the World (2007), production still.