Open Boxes & Sealed Vessels
eternally partial parts
Wednesday 21 August 2013
Measuring sticks
Back in April I wrote a review for the reincarnated Glasgow Review of Books. The piece covered Mark Fisher and Justin Barton's On Vanishing Land, and Jessica Warboys's film Paegant Roll. There is some great writing on the blog, which anyone would do well to have a look at.
Friday 1 February 2013
Robinsonism
I submitted this piece, which in many ways ties in with the review posted below, to the Frieze Writer's Prize competition last year. I suppose it was quite an unambitious exhibition to review, and the style is a bit sober for the length of the piece (limited to 700 words), but I do still think that Keiller's work, in terms of its critical reception, needs to be pulled in some new directions. He's certainly a comfortable artist for many (and no doubt my own writing shares a relation to his work that lacks a sufficiently disjunctive tension). The winning entry was very good and you can read it here.
Patrick Keiller, The Robinson
Institute
The
peculiar situation of Tate in the nexus of ‘contemporary’ art – at least as
that concept functions as a coherent critical category – is that no Tate
Contemporary exists. Yet this absence of any explicitly institutional
embodiment of the contemporary as a temporal category leaves the Tate
collection itself open to any artistic, critical or curatorial agency that
might contemporize it appropriately. It seems that this is what Patrick Keiller
has attempted to do in The Robinson Institute, which spans the Duveen Galleries
at Tate Britain. The success of this first Tate Commission lies in its
construction of a set of conditions for contemporary art, and in its appropriative
embodiment of the idea of the contemporary itself.
The fatigued suggestion that Keiller’s work gains its productive potential from failure or absence will weary those familiar with the body of films for which he is most famous. Nonetheless, in this commission, Keiller adapts some of the strategies pursued in his cinematographic work to enormously intelligent effect. Notably, Keiller’s use of fictionalization pits this commission on the same level as the work of groups as diverse as the Bernadette Corporation, The Atlas Group, and Claire Fontaine – fictional collectives (or collective fictions) whose precarious existences nonetheless figure something of contemporary experience itself, given that this category – spanning the spatial and temporal disjunctions produced by globalized capital – is always, necessarily, something to be constructed.
Keiller’s films stage models of collectivity at the smallest level, the coupling of Robinson and an unnamed narrator, a strategy that allows the structural significance of correspondence to manifest itself clearly. This reveals itself in the first of Keiller’s ‘stages’ at Tate, entitled ‘Robinsonism’, although a further, retroactive fictional twist is the Institute’s presentation as the somewhat ecstatic findings of a group of researchers. These stages – some of whose titles (‘1795’, ‘1830’) bear meaningful comparison to the ‘plateaus’ of the second volume of Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia – certainly fulfill the exhibition’s promise to manifest new relations between disparate historical, scientific and artistic phenomena, yet Keiller’s strategy rejects, or successfully ironizes, this often consensual framework.
The fourth platform (‘The non-human, the post-human’) hints at a disposition verging somewhere between the respectful and the pathological in its invocation of Robinson’s ‘Biophilia’. If this concept somehow displaces Deleuzo-Guattarian ‘vitalism’, Keiller appears to be hinting that a conscious ironization is the only artistic means by which to approach life’ and ‘the molecular basis of historical events’. Here, the curatorial juxtaposition adds a necessary dose of what the artist-critics of Jena romanticism – to which Keiler is indebted – theorized as Witz: a non-eidetic flash of ironic understanding that nonetheless held in check its etymological other, Wissen (scientific-poetic knowledge).
The Institute’s final stage, whose accompanying text deals most explicitly with the present financial crisis, also appears paradigmatic in the role it accords to text itself. In this context, all of the potentialities and ambiguities contained in Braco Dimitrijevic’s This Could Be a Place of Historical Importance (1972) congeal, harbouring the concomitant dialectic of melancholic resignation and tautological hope that characterizes contemporary practice. Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Quin Morere (1991) and Turner’s proto-abstract An Imaginative Historical Subject (1827) offer further textual ruminations on history, whilst Jiri Kovanda’s Two Little White Slats and Three Little White Slats (1980) figures the critical model of art history that Keiller’s whole project seems to valorize.
The Robinson Institute’s somewhat arbitrary ‘destination’ focuses, however, primarily upon the area of urban studies (via Debord and a video about Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon) in which Keiller has emerged as a somewhat canonical figure. The fundamental concerns of Keiller’s commission (whether explored through history, biology, astronomy or agriculture – or Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit, for a final, conceptual throw of the dice) are articulated by Henderson and Paolozzi’s Untitled (Study for Parallel of Life and Art) (1952), a collaborative work made for an exhibition at the ICA, only six years after its foundation, in which the artists acted as ‘editors’ alongside civil engineer Ronald Jenkins and architects Alison and Peter Smithson. Keiller hasn’t in mind postwar brutalism’s nostalgia for the future and its own ‘contemporary’ situation, however. The exhibition’s anti-clockwise ‘journey’ is a subterfuge: visitors are drawn towards the pleasingly open reading space at the gallery’s centre, in which the truly contemporary, geopolitical resonances of Keiller’s engagement with writing are to be found.
The fatigued suggestion that Keiller’s work gains its productive potential from failure or absence will weary those familiar with the body of films for which he is most famous. Nonetheless, in this commission, Keiller adapts some of the strategies pursued in his cinematographic work to enormously intelligent effect. Notably, Keiller’s use of fictionalization pits this commission on the same level as the work of groups as diverse as the Bernadette Corporation, The Atlas Group, and Claire Fontaine – fictional collectives (or collective fictions) whose precarious existences nonetheless figure something of contemporary experience itself, given that this category – spanning the spatial and temporal disjunctions produced by globalized capital – is always, necessarily, something to be constructed.
Keiller’s films stage models of collectivity at the smallest level, the coupling of Robinson and an unnamed narrator, a strategy that allows the structural significance of correspondence to manifest itself clearly. This reveals itself in the first of Keiller’s ‘stages’ at Tate, entitled ‘Robinsonism’, although a further, retroactive fictional twist is the Institute’s presentation as the somewhat ecstatic findings of a group of researchers. These stages – some of whose titles (‘1795’, ‘1830’) bear meaningful comparison to the ‘plateaus’ of the second volume of Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia – certainly fulfill the exhibition’s promise to manifest new relations between disparate historical, scientific and artistic phenomena, yet Keiller’s strategy rejects, or successfully ironizes, this often consensual framework.
The fourth platform (‘The non-human, the post-human’) hints at a disposition verging somewhere between the respectful and the pathological in its invocation of Robinson’s ‘Biophilia’. If this concept somehow displaces Deleuzo-Guattarian ‘vitalism’, Keiller appears to be hinting that a conscious ironization is the only artistic means by which to approach life’ and ‘the molecular basis of historical events’. Here, the curatorial juxtaposition adds a necessary dose of what the artist-critics of Jena romanticism – to which Keiler is indebted – theorized as Witz: a non-eidetic flash of ironic understanding that nonetheless held in check its etymological other, Wissen (scientific-poetic knowledge).
The Institute’s final stage, whose accompanying text deals most explicitly with the present financial crisis, also appears paradigmatic in the role it accords to text itself. In this context, all of the potentialities and ambiguities contained in Braco Dimitrijevic’s This Could Be a Place of Historical Importance (1972) congeal, harbouring the concomitant dialectic of melancholic resignation and tautological hope that characterizes contemporary practice. Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Quin Morere (1991) and Turner’s proto-abstract An Imaginative Historical Subject (1827) offer further textual ruminations on history, whilst Jiri Kovanda’s Two Little White Slats and Three Little White Slats (1980) figures the critical model of art history that Keiller’s whole project seems to valorize.
The Robinson Institute’s somewhat arbitrary ‘destination’ focuses, however, primarily upon the area of urban studies (via Debord and a video about Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon) in which Keiller has emerged as a somewhat canonical figure. The fundamental concerns of Keiller’s commission (whether explored through history, biology, astronomy or agriculture – or Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit, for a final, conceptual throw of the dice) are articulated by Henderson and Paolozzi’s Untitled (Study for Parallel of Life and Art) (1952), a collaborative work made for an exhibition at the ICA, only six years after its foundation, in which the artists acted as ‘editors’ alongside civil engineer Ronald Jenkins and architects Alison and Peter Smithson. Keiller hasn’t in mind postwar brutalism’s nostalgia for the future and its own ‘contemporary’ situation, however. The exhibition’s anti-clockwise ‘journey’ is a subterfuge: visitors are drawn towards the pleasingly open reading space at the gallery’s centre, in which the truly contemporary, geopolitical resonances of Keiller’s engagement with writing are to be found.
Tuesday 29 January 2013
An old review
This is a review I wrote in the last year of my
undergraduate degree, for the impossibly fleeting Glasgow Review of Books, which is due an exciting resurgence I'm told.
I cringe a little reading some of it, but it was written with a genuine sense of
excitement, fuelled by a mixture of ridiculously unstructured theory-intake and
the heady air of the 11th floor of Glasgow University's library near exam time,
which I've come to miss against all expectations. It also reminds me of meeting
some lovely people and friends - which rather saddens me, as I've been terrible
at keeping in touch.
I've
only edited one part, where I accidentally
referred to Sylvère Lotringer as an 'artist'. I never saved it, but a
commenter
retorted from LA correcting me and, in that strange genre of
personalized spam, criticising the
whole review's naivety (which was partly intended I'm sure), and Kraus
herself.
Around the same time, coincidentally (or perhaps not!), I received an
email from
the author, who somehow stumbled upon the review and offered
some
extremely kind words. There are quite a few things I'd do differently
were I to review (or indeed read) this book today, but I suppose that's
always the way.
Chris Kraus, Where Art Belongs
Semiotext(e), 2011
Glancing over the titles and subtitles of the four
essays which comprise Chris Kraus’s Where Art Belongs, one could not be
blamed for hastily situating the text within a discourse of epistemic
lassitude: ‘You are invited to be the Last Tiny Creature’, ‘No More Utopias’,
‘May ‘69’, ‘The Failed Collective’. A professor at the European Graduate
School, Kraus is also a film-maker and author, whose publications range from
the epistolary novel I Love Dick to the reader Hatred of Capitalism,
which she co-edited with Sylvère Lotringer (a protagonist of this text also). Where
Art Belongs is the eighth in a series of semiotext(e) ‘interventions’, the
first of which, The Invisible Committee’s Coming Insurrection,
carried a revolutionary, declarative impetus that seems a far cry from the not
entirely dissimulating sense of ennui readers initially encounter here. Yet
Kraus’s writing ruptures the linear temporality of artistic and theoretical
historiography. Whilst manifestos play a central role in connecting the
seemingly disparate projects that the book attempts to coalesce, their role is
not necessarily that ineluctably performative and creative one that engendered
so much activity in the wake of The Coming Insurrection.
In the opening essay on Tiny Creatures, an
influential Los Angeles gallery that enjoyed a brief and prolific existence
between 2006 and 2009, an artist, analyzing the project’s denouement, explains
to Kraus:
You know the book Auto-Dissolution of the
Avant-Gardes by René Lourau? Instead of publishing the manifestos written
when they start, he compiled the manifestos of why they need to end their
projects. I don’t know. I remember feeling sad about it that night – like,
that’s the last time I’ll be young, and I mean by that a more ambiguous
relationship with time and productivity.
‘Time and productivity’ are indeed central themes
throughout Where Art Belongs. A defamiliarizing temporality is part of
its strange economy of intratextual and extratextual dynamics, which see the
book commence: ‘In the winter or spring or maybe the summer – depending on who
and when you ask – of 2006, Janet Kim moved into the storefront at 628 N.
Alvarado that would become Tiny Creatures.’ One might justifiably contest that
such ambiguity already appears nostalgic, if not affected, in an era in which
social media relentlessly records every semblance of an ‘event’. If art should
exist or ‘belong’ to the world, however, the role that Kraus assigns it here is
one that accords a singular degree of autonomy, from the constraints of
everyday time as well as from our long-standing preconceptions about the roles
or responsibilities of art’s makers. An essay on the collaboration between
fashion photographer David Vasiljevic and artists involved in the Bernadette
Corporation - a protean collective working collaboratively behind this
fictional, corporate façade - discusses a project where ‘cut adrift from their
commercial function, the images matter-of-factly expose fashion photography’s
potent but limited bag of tricks for conflating youth and “lifestyle.”’ It’s a
conflation that Kraus’s prose delights in, albeit one that can appear slightly
dislodging when, after reading the book’s blurb – an excerpt from Kraus’s
description of a Vasiljevic fashion shoot (‘the white girl’s clothes are
arranged to display soft bulges of fat’) displayed, like a context-less art
object on the book’s neon cover – one encounters in the opening pages the
idiosyncrasies and hedonism of LA’s art and music scene in the late 2000s.
Nonetheless, Kraus’s prose itself - sometimes detachedly laconic, occasionally
joyously visceral - is always alluringly anecdotal and self-reflexive,
harbouring quotations from Wikipedia and details of the author’s Googling
habits alongside elongated treatises on film, illness, homosexuality, and
globalization. Although, as Anne K. Yoder noted over at The Millions,
less personal than her previous collections of criticism, the style of Where
Art Belongs, with its sudden changes in tone, perspective and tense,
embodies that ‘ambiguous relation’ mentioned initially, that acts as a
harbinger for Kraus’s analyses of a dozen or so projects from the last decade.
The fourth, last, and shortest essay, appropriately entitled ‘Drift’, ends the
book - save for an extremely short but important addendum on the impossibility
of ‘a failed utopian community’ – in diary form, mimicking the textual dynamics
of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. When we remember
that the initial version of Joyce’s semi-autobiographical novel took the name Stephen
Hero, this structural allusion highlights the theme of heroism, pertinent
throughout Where Art Belongs, a topos that is, in the realm of
aesthetics at least, inextricably bound up with a distinctly non-standard time.
The Bernadette Corporation’s collaborative ‘epic’
poem, A Billion and Change, provides a model that delineates the book’s
most pertinent themes. Investing in a definition that she takes from poet
Eilleen Myles – ‘the world is an epic poem’ – Kraus suggests that ‘the job of
the poem […] is to describe the present’, aligning her project alongside a continuum
of modernist writers, from Baudelaire to Bergson to Badiou, who have conflated
ideas of the epic and the subjective immediacy of the present moment. For the
author, a transposed fashion shoot, or ‘art direction’ in general, can
similarly accede to heroic novelty through the instantaneous coherency of the
camera’s ‘freeze’. Although Kraus’s title is never explicitly alluded to, those
approaching Where Art Belongs from a literary background will perhaps
deduce that it is literature, and more specifically poetry, that finds itself
torn asunder from its comfortable habitat, and transposed into the distinct
otherness of the gallery space. Kraus relates how the Bernadette Corporation
alienated friends and supporters with their intransigent refusal to capitulate
to poetry’s mapped boundaries in the twenty-first century, boundaries which
reside not in physical books, of course, but in the deterritorialized space of
instantly available, repeatable, and distributable texts: ‘No press copies, no
posting online, no Xeroxed handouts.’ The format, which the artists hoped would
prevent, ‘that effortless transmission’ belies a strategy that is more adherent
to the necessary and arguably ‘emancipatory’ distance between artwork and
audience outlined by Jacques Rancière’s recent writing, than the vigilance
against ‘consumption’ preached by his Situationist predecessors, Guy Debord and
Raoul Vaneigem, that has dominated efforts to break down barriers between
artists and audiences in recent decades. Contributor Antek Walczak reminisces
that ‘a lot of people weren’t sure if it was an art object, and that was good’.
Although deliberately designed to evade genres, however, the poem does not seem
to strive towards the elevated status of Gesamtkuntswerk either;
poetry’s engagement with art has less lofty implications. Ever weary of the
quotidian reality behind epic heroism, Kraus contests that art criticism – more
precisely, ‘churning out art reviews and catalogue essays’ – is a primary
source of income for contemporary poets and writers of fiction, a pragmatic
reality that she herself evidently faces.
The ‘where’ of A Billion and Change is
located precisely in its conceptual existence within ‘The Complete Poem’, the
exhibition presented at New York’s Greene Naftali gallery in 2009, or – even
more closely – in the tables on which the 130-page manuscript was displayed.
Extending the locus of art and literature into the sphere of commodity
marketing represents a break from a merely critical or ironic syncretism of these
domains. Kraus traces the pivotal influence of Mallarmé in the work of the
Bernadette Corporation: ‘In its 2001 videotape Hell Frozen Over, critic
and theorist Sylvère Lotringer stands on a frozen mid-winter lake describing
the white space of Mallarmé’s poems while the image-track cuts to a
fashion shoot in a loft and this is never ironic because all forms of blankness
contain some kind of beauty.’ This axiom of ‘never ironic’ permeates the
projects appraised (or at least informs Kraus’s readings); indeed it often
appears, less as a manifesto for engaged or committed art, than a precondition
arising from the always-already secondary nature of these artists’ sources.
Marginal texts of the nineteenth and twentieth century avant-garde are more
often than not the explicit influence for the installations scrutinized. The
indebtedness of the Bernadette Corporation to La Dernière Mode –
Mallarmé’s enigmatic fashion magazine - is highlighted, as is the influence of
Walter Benjamin’s correspondence with Gershom Scholem on contemporary
photographer Moyra Davey. This definition of ‘texts’ appropriable for modern
art stretches beyond written material, incorporating (highly aestheticized)
lives themselves; and again it is the marginal that attracts both Kraus and the
artists subject to her exegesis. Inspiration is found not least in failed,
quasi-imperialist misadventures. The work of Austrian self-portraitist Elke
Krystufek is read in light of a structural myth of modernity, the ‘romance of
disappearance’: she draws on Bas Jan Ader’s vanishment at sea in 1975, the
German Expressionist Max Hermann Pechstein’s exile to Palau following his
banishment from the Berlin Brucke group, and Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘literary
suicide’, his personal embodiment of his own poetic maxim, ‘I is an other’,
during his years spent as a ‘trader, explorer and Arabist’ in North Africa.
Kraus’s hostility to the ironic distancing that
marks melancholic and disengaged late-capitalist critique extends to a
passionate defence of sixties counterculture, in which the author once again
centralizes the prominence of time. After May ’68:
Structural change of course proved impossible. What
remained was a widespread desire to reclaim the personal freedom inhaled –
first-hand or vicariously – during those days, over time, outside the
tempestuous bubble of revolutionary action/reaction. New modes of living were
needed, new definitions of “normal”. [Emphasis in the original]
This historiography finds reflection in Kraus’s
somewhat irresolute antipathy towards psychoanalysis, that couches a concern
for the virtual vanishing act performed by anti-psychiatry and its protagonists
(R.D. Laing, David Cooper, Félix Guattari) from the theoretical scene. ‘What
would happen if people took sex less seriously?’ is a question whose
evaporation Kraus laments, at the same time as she rues the closure of the
universe of discourse surrounding the issue of liberation: ‘Why is it that to
this day every sexual libertarian movement in history is viewed with a wink, if
not a chastising sneer?’ In line with her insistence upon returning to the
aporias and vacillations present in marginal texts, Kraus finds in the
short-lived magazines of the late sixties effective models of resistance, whose
strategies are again laid out in resolutely idiosyncratic manifestos. Of a
special issue of Recherches, entitled ‘Three Billion Perverts’, Kraus
tells us that ‘no one will ever be sure if the drawing of a penis wrapped in a
turban was made by Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Fanny Deleuze, Jean Genet,
Guy Hocquenghem, or one of the less well-known contributors whose names
appeared on the masthead.’ Kraus pays fidelity to these sexual revolutions with
her own performances during the Sex Workers Art Show, to which she dedicates a
chapter of the book. Here, poetry, art, performance, and sex work infiltrate
each other in a mutually destabilizing way: Kraus describes one act as ‘a very
pure form of the V-effect’, and asks of her own literary piece (she was herself
a topless dancer), ‘Where else except, perhaps, pre-glasnost Russia or Poland
could a writer of literary fiction read to standing-room only crowds of 600
people?’, a pressing question in the age of e-readers and online reading
groups. Kraus regards the perennial question of ‘Are you for or against
sex work?’ as absurd (‘It’s like asking if someone is “for” or “against” global
capitalism’): we can deduce that, in the cultural conditions of neoliberalism,
art can belong in unfamiliar and unwanted places, the residue of a heroism of
liberation never fulfilled.
Although privy to the almost ubiquitous whitewash
of the radical and theoretical projects of the sixties, Kraus is willing to
qualitatively differentiate. She is critical of the Situationist dérive
(‘rather programmatic and dry’), and stresses the limitations of the methods of
institutional critique pursued by the New Left. One is reminded that Rancière,
whose recent publications have focused heavily on contemporary art, turned away
from the scientific Marxism of Althusser, largely because of his former
master’s reluctance to support the spontaneous eruptions of May ’68, and from
the pedagogically restrictive conditions that arose in the aftermath of les
événements. Perhaps the most vital essay from Where Art Belongs is
Kraus’s engagement with Moyra Davey’s photography and writing. Kraus witnesses
in Davey an active alternative to what she perceives as stale Situationism: her
works ‘insert the psycho in psycho-geography.’ Describing Davey’s work
as ‘a kind of gestural poetry – an ability to respond to the present – that can
be expressed in various media’, Kraus traces what is also, demonstrably, a
novel ability to respond to written texts. Davey describes her Cage-inspired
reading practice as ‘flânerie’, and the results garnered appear as a truly exciting
antidote to the stagnation that can occur, particularly perhaps in the locus of
literature departments, when texts are sanitized, if not canonized, within a
coherent and teleological history of ‘theory’. Kraus maps the contours of the
photographer’s obsession with one particular letter of Walter Benjamin’s in
which he admits ‘I now write only while lying down’, and appears fascinated by
a clock. Recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, the image instigated
Davey’s ‘work about writing, illness, sleep, and the view from the window’.
Whilst most will be familiar with the Benjaminian impetus to turn the past into
ruins, to make it other in order to recognize it as the past and engage with it
as such, Kraus suggests the need to recognize – in, for example, ‘the promise
of a permanence that never arrived’ that she witnesses is Benjamin’s ‘Unpacking
My Library’ - these lost visions of the future in a way that is subjective,
active, and engaged. In other words, she emphasizes ‘correspondence’ as
‘the aspect of Benjamin’s work I see transmitted most clearly in [Davey’s]
epic, heroic writing.
Kraus assigns contemporary art with a central role,
rather than a marginal or secondary one. Describing Krystufek’s ‘commitment to
forging continuity between disparate, disjointed systems’, Kraus deduces that,
‘in this sense, she’s a philosopher, pushing the situations that she creates
towards a zany syncretism.’ To read Where Art Belongs is to witness this
procedure in action. Unlike The Coming Insurrection, we will probably
never see the book being waved deliriously by Glenn Beck, as footage from
rioting banlieues competes for screen space with flashing headlines
about imminent urban collapse. Kraus’s text is not a collective call to arms,
but an incitement to find art, to read in a heroic way, to create a moment – as
an individual or within a group – where one’s relationship to the past is
dictated only by the chance nature of what the present has thrown at you.
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