1
* *
LUCY BEYNON THOM DONOVAN BIRTE ENDREJAT LISA JESCHKE LUKE MCMULLAN YATES NORTON SOPHIE SEITA JONAS L. TINIUS STEVE TOMPKINS EBEN WOOD
CONTENTS Synaesthetic Appeal
JONAS L. TINIUS
3
Un-Manifesto
*
6
Abstract / Argument
LISA JESCHKE & LUCY BEYNON
8
What My Smartphone Taught Me About Johan Grimonprez's Inflight
EBEN WOOD
12
Back Figure
THOM DONOVAN
17
Negative Knowledge; or, A History of the I, Done in Language
LUKE MCMULLAN
18
Failure to Vertical: Upadhyay's 8 feet x 12 feet
YATES NORTON
21
Interview: ‘Instructions for a Setting’
* & BIRTE ENDREJAT
23
The Third Interview
SOPHIE SEITA
27
PLATES Mobile Auditorium
STEVE TOMPKINS
Insert
Impressions
YATES NORTON
22
Cambridge, UK February 2012 All material is the copyright of its respective authors.
JONAS L. TINIUS
Synaesthetic Appeal SYNAESTHESIA — the (very) fact of ‘the production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body’i — is a flaw in a cognitive imperative of differentiation, is the body whose cells grow anew a new body every seven years, is the stretched and recreating tissue of quotation without inverted commas.ii Necessarily points SYNAESTHESIA a finger, shivering in awe, at the contingency of ‘a kind’, genre, inter=penetration of in=formation, imagination, experience. [I hasten to complete my list before I am interrupted. In the green group there are alder-leaf f, the unripe apple of p, and pistachio t. … Dull green, combined somehow with violet, is the best I can do for a w. I casually remarked to her that their colours were all wrong. …We discovered then that some of her letters had the same tint as mine and that, besides, she was optically affected by musical notes. … My mother did everything to encourage the general sensitiveness I had to visual stimulation. … How many aquarelles she painted for me.]iii WE don’t want to stop at the frame’s end, but lean our bodies over the threshold abyss between earth and firmament like a traveller in the Flammarion engraving. Ill-contained, memories that you anticipate, anticipated retrospectives, taking photos only to archive them, remembering the forthcalling and before-taking that is provocation and anticipation. You wake up dreaming. And of colours that stain wake night wanderings. Wander off, wander through, wander with, wonder about, oh wonder! Vot zapomni [now remember]!iv LET US be Nabokov’s mother and the painting of encouragement, encouraging paint, flowing in all directions, veins, nerves, pores, saliva, LUST in your fingertips. I am your fingertiptiptiptoed. [Skin on skin becomes conscious. …Without this folding, without the contact of the self on itself, there would truly be no internal sense, no body properly speaking, coenesthesia even less so, no real image of the body; we would live without consciousness; slippery smooth and on the point of fading away. … Those who do not know where their soul is to be found touch their mouths, and they do not find it there. The mouth touching itself creates its soul and contrives to pass it on to the hand which, clenching itself involuntarily, forms its own faint soul and then can pass it on.]v Let us be regressing from consciousness to unconscious, but pass on consciousness from mouth to hand, to … Do you agree? Let me be your fingertip then, a lip touching lip, skins peaking on skin speaking. Hit still watery surface with flat hand, just enough to delve into the responding mould, and then then then, you ascend majestically with new wave form under your shocked palm. Or in the post-coital clasp, skin involuntarily forms its own faint soul, crusted salty soul. Let me be meetingpoint then, cut surface in shapes of leaves covering the cut-surface(d) leaves. Surfaced forms expressed impression expressed impression in itself leaving, flowing, streaming, tidal. Tidal. Full stop. [He explained that the Earth — the Deterritorialised, the Glacial, the giant Molecule — is a body without organs. This body without organs is permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all directions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities,
by mad or transitory particles. … There simultaneously occurs upon the earth a very important, inevitable phenomenon that is beneficial in many respects and unfortunate in many others: stratification. Strata are Layers, Belts. They consist of giving form to matter, of imprisoning intensities. … Strata are acts of capture. … They operate by coding and territorialisation upon the earth. … But the earth, or the body without organs, constantly eludes that judgement, flees and becomes destratified, decoded, deterritorialised.]vi Let me listen to you, tell me, show me. Let us pick flora and see fauna, let us forget names, typologies, and relearn, recreate, reclassify to declassify. Free association. Like a jail door closing, like a male whore dozing. And so on.vii I awe. I reverberate. I become. Many. Let us be and come, let us become. Many. [The proliferation of concepts, as in the case of technical languages, goes with more constant attention to properties of the world, with an interest that is more alert to possible distinctions, which can be introduced between them.]viii If you quarrel, amongst your selves, spanning tin can telephone threads between playfully longing ears, let one be poetry and another philosophy, let them twist and knit strands until denser curls pull nodes closer together until the net works for itself. On the other side of the planet, someone does the same and doesn’t like it. Allow a thrown dice to determine paths untrodden. One fine afternoon, somebody will say that nothing of the memorable crisis will have taken place. Let’s be quick, even when standing still.ix Let’s be mothers, azure spreading coloured letters. We all know that genres used to exist.x
Notes ‘Synaesthesia’ in The New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd ed., ed. by E. McKean (London/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). ii Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 160. iii Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (New York/London: Everyman's Library, 1947), p. 21f. iv ibid, p. 25. v Michel Serres, The Five Senses. A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (I), trans. by M. Sankey and P. Cowley. (London/New York: Continuum, 2008 [1985]), p. 20. vi Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, ‘10,000 BC.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?)’, in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London/New York: Continuum, 1988 [1980]), p. 45. vii Tom Waits, ‘I look like hell but I’m going to see where it gets me.’, Interview by Tim Adams, The Guardian, October 23, 2011. viii Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘The Science of the Concrete’, in The Savage Mind, trans. by G. Weidenfeld (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966 [1962]), pp. 2-3. ix Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Introduction: Rhizome’, p. 45. x Tzvetan Todorov, ‘The Origin of Genres’, in Modern Genre Theory, ed. by David Duff (Harlow: Pearson Education, 1999 [1976.]), p. 194. i
THE MAGAZINE IS DEAD!
LONG LIVE THE MAGAZINE!
LISA JESCHKE & LUCY BEYNON
Abstract i This rests on restraint. This is for a limited period of time. Austerity measures. ii I would hereby like to address you. I think I can say I am speaking for all of us when I – speak. iii Black.
Argument iv Again! In parts, division into parts. Nothing? Nothing. Nothing? Nothing. This is entirely linear. It would be one thing to say: x is x, another thing to say: William Shakespeare is not William Shakespeare, and an entirely different thing to say: Adolf Hitler was Adolf Hitler, but really all of these amount to the same old thing, namely what? What. What? What. Even refusal of speech must be uttered. Again? Still? Still? Still. Still. Again! Even refusal of speech must be uttered if it is to lay claim to territory. This is entirely linear. It would be one thing to say: I refuse to speak, another thing to say: Nothing, another thing again to say: nothing, another thing again to say: –. Again! All of these are just examples of what could be said if one imagined oneself as someone who spoke. Further examples must follow, if they must. v Black. vi Again. I would hereby like to address you. I think I can say I am speaking for all of us when I – speak. Speech. Examples, examples of speech: whenever there is a choice, the choice itself is limited. Words: there are those that could be imagined, but these (here!, hear) are real, that is, here, here. Is this what could be expected? Now, not this: is it possible to write about concentration camps in anything but black and/on white? This is getting worse. Is it possible to write about anything in anything but black and/on white? What? What exactly is this? Nothing, nothing, –,
EBEN WOOD
What My Smartphone Taught Me About Johan Grimonprez's Inflight I. The user’s manual for my BlackBerry® Torch™ 9850 smartphone is titled “Master Your Device.” I love the masculine clarity of that injunction, the desire concealed in its performative command, but I haven’t read the instructions that follow. Check your Hegel: it’s precisely by mastering your device that the device actually masters you, because in that process the dependency of the master is revealed. Or rather, by mastering the device we mean taking its place as the subservient Other that authorizes our mastery, identifying the coordinates of desire, an identity that’s always elsewhere (“I want! I want!” wrote Blake in a 1793 engraving, and the stars become holes). This particular device, my Torch, embodies communication and informationprocessing, exemplifying the paradox of digital identity, the binary of yes/no, either/or, one/zero. In this case it’s not the device itself that we must master in order to come home to ourselves, but what it contains or represents: the binding of objects and systems (carriers, functions, “third-party services and applications”) of which the device is merely instrument and symbol. According to the OED, the word magazine comes into English from the Spanish almagacen, derived from the definite article and original Arabic word, makhzan, or storehouse. Its original use in English, now rare, was for “[a] place where goods are laid up; a storehouse or repository for goods or merchandise; a warehouse, depot.” The word subsequently took on a still-current meaning, for a “building in which is stored a supply of arms, ammunition and provisions for an army for use in time of war”; Edmund Spenser first uses the word this way in his infamous A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), arguing that the British military presence in that troublesome colony must dig in for the long haul of occupation (I’m thinking about those murals on the wall between East and West Belfast, depicting the Israelis and the Palestinians as a corollary binary to Protestant and Catholic). By the early 17th century the term was being used in the titles of books to denote a “storehouse of information on a specified subject or for a particular class of persons.” Finally, by the 1730s, magazine had come to signify a “periodical publication containing articles by various writers; chiefly a periodical publication intended for general rather than learned or professional readers […].” This is, I think, a telling derivation, echoing—avant la lettre—the closely intertwined development of film and military technology throughout the 20th century, bellwether of a more general militarization of culture. In a similar migration across borders of experience and knowledge, a strategic move congruent with the proliferation of artistic practices after the 1960s, the work of Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez is difficult to categorize. It’s not that Grimonprez’s work seems initially puzzling or offputting, but rather that it’s so immediately reminiscent of something deeply familiar: not so much a specific thing but a whole world. That work is reassuringly like something one has seen before, yet the closer one gets to it, the longer one spends with it, the more alienated—and alienating—it becomes. Simply put, as I approach, it retreats. From his earliest films, in the artist’s transition from his student period at New York’s School for Visual Arts in the early 1990s, to his breakthrough “documentary,” dial
H.I.S.T.O.R.Y. (1997), with its supplemental objects and installations, to his most recent film Double Take (2009), Grimonprez situates his work within the objects and systems of a post-Cold-War, globalized media culture. This is, I think, media as the Alpha and Omega of history, its beginning and its end. This is particularly true of one of the most static or contained works in the artist’s oeuvre, an apparent pastiche of airline in-flight magazines reflecting the miragelike archive of texts and images that appears to lie behind dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y. but that is equally anarchival, a projection of the film’s de-centering or ex-centric desire. For the launch of Inflight at the Deitch Projects in October 2000, and invoking the necessary absence or lack of an actual airline but invoking its intended passenger, the system for which the in-flight magazine is device, Grimonprez also created a retro-kitsch lounge that recalled a “golden age” of aircraft travel, the 1960s, whose futuristic iconography already looked ahead to the time in which jets would be replaced by spacecraft, when the global networks established by the modern airline industry would become putatively universal. As summarized by the Deitch Projects’ publicity material, while hilariously synthesizing the aesthetics of those glossy magazines found in the seatback pocket of a commercial aircraft with the supermarket tabloid, the magazine broke a basic convention of sky reading by focusing our attention on the history of airline hijacking. An obsessively researched collection of articles took us on an exciting detour from the seamlessly peaceful world of showbiz chats and international recipes usually provided to relax air passengers. By sourcing 30 years of news archives on the subject, Grimonprez also subtly scrutinizes the media’s influence in shaping our understanding of polemic world events. It reports that today the hijacker character has virtually vanished from our screens. With a growing fear of the political unknown, attention on aliens is up! We were Skyjacked in planes, now spacenapped in UFOs and cyberjacked over the net.1 In this incarnation, the artist transformed the domestic video-viewing room, in which dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y. appeared originally at Documenta X, into a slick, commercial airline departure lounge, containing copies of the magazine, “hijack-o-rama” timelines and wall maps covering the histories of air piracy, sabotage, and cyberjacking as well as specific geographies of political conflicts in which hijacking played a constitutive role (reproduced within the magazine), and the user-activated video library entitled (quoting Bart Simpson) “Maybe the sky is green and we’re just colorblind.” The glossy Inflight mirrors the appearance of its conventional or commercial Other, but the pixelated cover photo of an airliner exploding on Jordan’s so-called “Revolution Airstrip” in 1970 as well as a quick glance at the table of contents shows how askew that mirror is: “No Man’s Land”; “The Skyjacker’s Profile”; “Supermarket History”; “No Place Like Home”; “<hacktivism>”; “The Revolution of Everyday Pies”; and “Passenger Information.” The closer one gets actually to reading the contents of these sections, to examining further supplemental items contained in the magazine (an aircraft evacuation chart and motionsickness bag), the further alienated Grimonprez’s magazine becomes, burrowing into the cultural ideas or representations (memes) for which dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y. functions as ambiguous index. The uneasy fact of doubling, the uncanny likeness that partakes of the larger “culture of the copy” at the same time that it poses as that culture’s immanent critique,
marks Grimonprez’s larger project, but also the ambiguities of its operations. The longer history of Western “print culture” is familiar enough, the twin rise of periodicals and other printed matter alongside—and contributing to—the revolutionary European bourgeoisie but also of the concepts of democracy and civil society on which that bourgeoisie’s subsequent claim to political legitimacy rests. That fairly straightforward history is complicated by the recognition, emblematized by the socalled Habermas debate and neoliberalism’s privatization of the public sphere, that comparison on the basis of likeness or resemblance is really a colonial extension of the particular into the general, of the individual into the collective, the latter functioning as the former’s Other even while posing as its alibi. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, affirming the concept of corporate personhood (in which a corporation is held to possess the same civil rights as a human being), directly expresses this mimetic problem. “Master your device,” I’m told, and like Goebbels I reach for my smartphone. II. As I’ve noted elsewhere, the absorptive, universalizing experience of the mass media too easily bleeds into a universalizing rhetoric of its critique, so that while “we” always and everywhere seem to share the same experience, “we” also can apparently be assured of the same critical capacity to transcend and reflect upon that reproductive logic.2 Even in Grimonprez’s dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y., participation is a key concept, as viewers experience simultaneously their roles within and outside the media of which they’re both product and consumer, winding through mirror-like binaries: personal and public, domestic and global, memory and history. Through the interstices of his archival sources, tracing the intertwined histories of television and aircraft hijacking, Grimonprez works his own artistic hand, a disjunctive series of non-archival images that, accompanied by doctored excerpts from Don DeLillo’s novels White Noise and Mao II, constitutes a banal narrative thread: a disembodied visual perspective (its authenticity guaranteed by its poor resolution, its shaky, handheld quality) descends from the bedroom of a middle-class, suburban home, arrives in a taxi at a large urban airport, checks luggage, passes through a terminal with the blurred voices of official announcements hovering overhead, views docked aircraft through the windows of a departure lounge, takes off on what appears to be an overnight, presumably transoceanic flight, crammed into an economy seat and fed a skimpy meal and a Hollywood action film. This is the hand that would pull Inflight from the seatback pocket and flip through it, distracted by the arrival of the Duty Free cart, free snacks and soft drinks, and pay-as-you-go alcohol. To say that “we” are all familiar with this same narrative in the same way, outside of its mediated image, is simply incorrect, as the smooth transitions from bourgeois domestic space to departure lounge to a seat in Economy Class of a modern jetliner mark a very specific—if global—geography of cultural, social, and economic privilege. The coordinates of this geography construct a subjectivity in their interstices, a subjectivity that defines itself first by mirror-like opposition or negation, and finally by identification, in which opposition is mediated by symbolic difference. For Lacan, this is a gradual differentiation of the subject from originary Ego (“undifferentiated ‘a-subjective’ being”) to Imaginary (in which the subject has learned to say “I” but really means the “he” or “she” established in binary opposition to the “real Other” of the mother and to the “symbolic Other” identified at this stage—falsely—with the father) and finally to the Symbolic (in which the subjective “I” has “passed from the subject-object, object-object relationships of the Imaginary into a thoroughly system
atic and symbolic intersubjectivity”).3 In Anthony Wilden’s fascinating early account of Lacan and cybernetics, this final stage constitutes the subject of digital knowledge, in which objects—and the subject that (mis)perceives them as “Other” through the paradox of identity and autonomy—have been replaced by a system of signifiers. “Because of the overvaluation of the digital in modern industrial society—a valuation which is intimately connected with individualism, atomism, competition, and the historical development of capitalism and technology—modern man is constitutionally divided from himself.”4 In my view, Johan Grimonprez situates his work, at least from dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y., in precisely this symbolic stratum, in which he articulates terror not as what is outside the system but its supplement, that which continually confirms a constitutive lack, a continual—and systematic—deferral. Inflight is a specific example of this supplement, lying outside of the film to which it clearly refers but in doing so actually confirms or projects the absence of the corporate/corporeal entity that the film’s allusive archive seems to reflect. This machine-like entity, constructed across the different films, objects, and environments of Grimonprez’s rhizomatic practice, asserts that “society is the true reality and the individual the abstraction,” a concept common to Saint-Simon, Comte, and Marx, but also to the films of Vertov, Godard, and others; that practice does so against “the projection of models derived from technology—mediated by ‘science’—into the social dimension” (Wilden 129). The material politics of Inflight is not what it “fills in” from dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y. but its refusal to foreclose on the film’s supplemental production of its mediating logics. Indeed, Grimonprez’s object is to make those logics visible. Interviewed five weeks after 9/11, Jacques Derrida described terrorism and anarchy as the constitutive supplements of Western democracy and the media that subtends it in all their cultural and historical embeddedness, easy words that obscure the vascular functioning of a global post-binary. The word “anarchy” risks making us abandon too quickly the analysis and interpretation of what indeed looks like pure chaos. We must do all that we can to account for this appearance. We must do everything possible to make this new "disorder" as intelligible as possible […]: an end of the "Cold War" that leaves just one camp, a coalition, actually, of states claiming sovereignty, faced with anonymous and nonstate organizations, armed and virtually nuclear powers. And these powers can also, without arms and without explosions, without any attacks in person, avail themselves of incredibly destructive computer technologies, technologies capable of operations that in fact have no name (neither war nor terrorism) and that are no longer carried out in the name of a nationstate, and whose "cause," in all senses of this word, is difficult to define […].5 As if commenting on this atmospheric causality, the End of History as a thorough digitalization not just of culture but the subjects that reproduce it, Inflight’s supplemental materiality deepens but also de-centers the archival references of which dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y. is an airborne storehouse (you see the loop, the end and beginning of the circuit, approaching). Of a lengthy interview with Palestinian hijacker Leila Khaled, reprinted in Inflight under the title “What do you do with a Boeing once you’ve stolen it?”, Grimonprez has said, “I wanted to republish an interview Leila Khaled did with Der Spiegel in Germany, and I had to call her and get permission. And I also wanted to talk with Ricardo Dominguez of the group Digital Zapatismo, and he said, ‘If you call me and email me, you’re gonna be on the blacklist.’ I gave the book to a gallerist, he wanted to take it back to Europe, and it was confiscated by Homeland Security.”6 This
is media device as afterlife, index of a closed circuit from system to subject to system. The idea, as Grimonprez has given it to us in Inflight, is that history is the middle passage from indifferent event, already structured by real-time global politics, to the instrumental oppositions described by Derrida, to the indifferent wastes of the symbolic. In flight, these words appear utterly proximal, utterly familiar in their otherness, and in that sense reassuring, until the very moment we master them. October–November 2011 Brooklyn, NY
Notes http://www.deitch.com/projects/sub.php?projld=126 See E. Wood, “Grimonprez’s Remix,” in Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo, ed. P. Schneck and P. Schweighauser (London/New York: Continuum, 2010), 110-29; revised and reprinted in “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards”: On the work of Johan Grimonprez, ed. B. Detalle (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011), 247-265. 3 Anthony Wilden, System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange (London: Tavistock, 1972), 21. 4 Ibid. 75. 5 http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/derrida/derrida911.html. For the complete interview, see Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2003). 6 http://dailyserving.com/2011/03/history-and-ownership-interview-with-johangrimonprez/ 1 2
THOM DONOVAN Back Figure R端ckenfigur in reverse Her hearse reviews Give me the back Spoken like a true muse In starving time Speaks to power What names our name Withdrew Through embroidery An effort to send These names renewed Into time say my name Motherfucker be mine Lapse from relic to Wanting you Earth is our studio So you want to be said Into history so you want That gaze to be for you All turned around Capsized from the cross All revolving things which Devolve to an act of anthem Like seeing you wasn't Simply enough Like hearing you blew My ears off I, you, and we, We have become disenfranchised equals this Desire to see your actualstatuary-backside Of the face you are naming Power with Speaking truth to sunset By seeking out shadows Folds of your robe If with a backward look Took'd from that flatbed.
LUKE MCMULLAN Negative Knowledge; Or, A History of the I, Done in Language i forgetting what is social which is a social attitude anyway this is not a discussion of what is social is an attitude of totality attitude to what out of totality? something you have to forget to be negative knowledge towards totality from out of what is not from out of the imagination, finding its bite marks in the social but its teeth retracted in the private jaw we crunch down on our desire spit in the form which is a package sold back this is not metaphor this is negative knowledge unpinpointed not even found in the freedom from lucid material space that is the constitution of a line break this is not metaphor this is the constitution of a line break constituted out of freedom towards negative knowledge which is not an attitude to be found in the brochures of capital that is every brochure constituted by attitude as i was forgetting in the social space and telling you a gesture discovered by others these are the terms you have found
ii to be social and subject to sentence we hand down where language has a distinctive role in a model of social process to a central space assigned in the end of a sentence where ‘you’ circles ‘me’ in gentle insomniac neon ghostly projections on the wall of patrolled day corralled by the specific ‘I’ we hand down subject to sentence distinguishing a model of social progress in the encircled central space the polynomial preclusion in situ of unknown diameters we speak ‘you’ of-many-names which is a central epithet the history i express ( the voluntary paradigm has been inadequate ( ) ) the perimeter of occupation is well established in dispute the rightness of the wager the wager’s end forgotten in accordance with the state meant yes what is social we assent defeat ‘you’ your cry the perimeter of the subject the diameter maintained in the private jaw
iii the individuum they made up of your hypostasis it will be said you wanted it this way by a dismissive gesture the accidens essential to the social space we must return again unroot the speechless obliteration of difference they said was a blessing of hypostasis beyond the calculations of cold form the quiet snow shoes the lost manoeuvre into unchartable regions and move about more or less as is wanted in postlapsarian tones the hereafter clad in hi-vis and your knowledge is replete with surfaces my loved ones when you move in a line it is what we call true which holds to the map aforementioned we move about return this technocracy of the heart our enneper love
YATES NORTON Failure to Vertical: Upadhyay's 8 feet x 12 feet Here is a schizophrenic house that contains and disperses, uncannily playing with that fear of haptic and optic proximity whilst signifying distance in broad fields of vision. Inviting delicate touch in the handling of the model tower blocks and shacks, hysteria in the compulsive repetition of these standard urban morphologies, and optical trajectories as the eye follows the glinting surface and shadowy substratum, Hema Upadhyay’s 8 feet x 12 feet estranges the viewer through the simultaneous experience of antithetical modes of seeing and exploring. If its uncanny nature dominates—a gleaming inter-uterine space that invites as much as repulses the viewer in its disorientating spatial excess—then Upadhyay has staged that introjection of the urban realm in the increasingly pathologised interior shelters of the sprawling metropolis that characterises contemporary urban experience. Interrogating the interaction between private and public space and the modalities of their representation and experience, Upadhyay’s piece plays with the spatial dynamics of urban living that elide secure cognitive mapping or description. Is the experience of this space a jouissance in the simultaneity of antithetical states, of proximity and distance, agoraphobia and claustrophobia, macro- and microscopic views? Is this visual and imagined spatial excess a dissipation of policed borders, a labyrinth with no centre and one that reflects itself en abyme? It is neither and both: there is a border, a confining cell and a vision of an endless city spreading chronically like mould, enclosure in a womb-like ‘domestic’ space and far-reaching optical journeys across and through the city. Upadhyay’s city seems to extend beyond the limits of the walls, even when it is so sutured to them. A refracted signifier of a house that contains the paranoiac space of the city, weirdly beautiful and meticulously covered with a mapped city inside its walls, Upadhyay’s 8 feet x 12 feet at once attempts to map, locate, point to and signify an absent site (the city) and self-referentially enclose itself within its three walls and ceiling. Where are we in this object-site? Within the city, literally beneath and clasped by it? Within the shack enclosed by a city or within the shack that itself encloses the city? In the moment of our exploration of Upadhyay’s piece, we find ourselves trapped in an endless web of urban space that seems to disseminate the body amongst it, dissolving our integrity even though when approaching the work, the receding perspectival lines of the box-structure seem to privilege our occupying the centre. Yet once inside, we find that there is no such thing as a centre, no privileged point of view from which the whole can be grasped and totally comprehended. Inscribing the walls and ceiling with a view of an endless city, Upadhyay establishes this urban space at once cartographically and metonymically by the 8 x 12 foot structure - the average dimension of a typical shanty hut in Mumbai. We confront the city above, to the left, the right, in front. Uncannily reconfiguring scale and distance, the aerial view and its encompassing and macroscopic mode of vision is brought within the remit of intensely close optical inspection. The hegemonic, organising and Archimedean eye of the cartographer—the Miltonic God of modernity who himself uncircumscribed retires—is dissolved and re-assimilated into the endless web of space from which it tried to disassociate itself. Usually allied with the imperialist gaze, Upadhyay’s recoding of the mapping convention as bringing order and accountability to heterogeneity, displaces this mode of vision to a fragmented and uncertain position of viewing. Ironically, the very symbol of the removed eye/I—the tower block—is now subsumed into the grasp of the shanty city around it. These towers hang upside down or horizontally—all wrong positions that deny the possibility of their ever achieving the presupposed stability of the vertical axis. If we think the visitor gains superiority above these ludic subversions and inversions of the city’s fabric, then we find ourselves uncomfortably aware of our body by its enclosure in the disori
entating field of vision. The visitor—now no longer voyeur—cannot attain the purity of the disembodied point of view, for now our ability to map and measure the space is destabilised by our ‘somatic’ spatial experience. Our body gets in the way. The disjunction between what is conceptually comprehensible and exact—the precise measurement of 96 square feet—and what is bewildering when physically explored and experienced, is precipitated by this bodily intrusion: exactitude and numerical precision are rendered unstable and imprecise at the moment of their embodied interaction. No more the uncircumscribed and detached axis of organisation, the cartographer’s view is fragmented within the excess of the visual field that is above, around and in front of it. At once a sort of optical flaneur tracing the streets of the miniature city, and a body incarcerated in the small dimensions of the room, the viewer is confronted with the superimposition of an almost frenetic motility of the eye and the claustrophobic enclosure of the body. The tectonic simplicity of the shack does not help to orient ourselves either. A sort of parody of that fetishised symbol of ur-architecture—the primitive hut with its structural clarity and architectonic integrity—Upadhyay’s shack actually renders a space that seems to exceed and deconstruct the basic forms of the room in the overlay of claustrophobic and agoraphobic space. The spaces of these standard urban neuroses are inverted—the agoraphobic view of the entire urban fabric is situated with the claustrophobic space of the shack, renegotiating the spatial relationship between the interior, private and domestic space with that of a broader urban fabric. The private is constructed according to the actual dimensions of a shanty structure, whilst the public is rescaled to minute proportions. Here the public is seen intimately, and the intimacy of the shack is literally redressed as the site of broader urban and public views. Yet Upadhyay does not attempt to sublate the dialectic between public and private. She simply concentrates them in their interaction, overlay and subversion. To perceive the vast public space of the city we have to enter a private space: the home is no longer a site of escape from the precipitous confusion of the public realm, but is itself the very point at which the psycho-spatial thematics of the urban realm are crystallised. It is the room which circumscribes and contains the city, not the city which contains the room. In this inversion, the urban life world is inscribed onto that of the domestic one, making fungible their differences and boundaries. Like the schizophrenic, the hut is nowhere and everywhere, an object and a site. The visitors find themselves homeless, impossibly occupying several spaces at once and faltering in an attempt to find a secure and static point of view from which the endless space of city and home can be considered. If this space is an uncanny hut or inter-uterine space to which we may long to return, it offers no protective enclosure from the spatial orders of the world from which we have come. For if it is our desire to rise above the web of urban space with a proud and vertical I, then we find ourselves helplessly spread into its space and the prospect of extending out of it becomes an impossibility. Like the delicate tower blocks which fail to rise vertically, the visitor finds the tyranny of a single, directional gaze futile in the psychic and spatial excess which surrounds them. And even if we imagine occupying the privileged vertical axis which the tower blocks fail to do—after all is it not the visitor who stands tall and straight compared to the horizontal and upside-down buildings that surround it?—we are only confronted with the fragility of this position as ready as the buildings to be subverted, inverted and caught within the city’s clasp.
Yates Norton. Impression of 8 feet x 12 feet.
Interview with Birte Endrejat
* It seems that in your work—and I am thinking here in particular of ‘Instructions for a Set-
ting’—specificity is very important, seems almost to operate as a confirmation of the acts the work instructs. Could you talk a little bit about that part of your work?
B.E. This is correct, specificity is an important aspect. I would say even at several levels. First with the maps I ask a place questions about its uniqueness with regard to the happenings that take or took place only once at a precise moment. In addition, by focusing on the unity of action (that can be translated as performance) I try to give the place its own face to underline its own reality. This can be compared to experiences that each of us has already had in these public places. I try to release the place (a place that exists in different forms and variations almost everywhere in the world) from its ‘icon’, to make the place specific again, and to sharpen the onlooker’s vision, and to lead this vision back onto the one place/object. That means that by reading the instructions for the various settings, new as well as familiar images are provoked in the beholder which can be confirmed or overruled. Exact and specific description is how this oscillation is made possible.
* You were involved in VIVA! Art Action 2009. What are the implications of an art that ‘reste toutefois peu connu du grand public’?*
B.E. Difficult question. In my opinion there are different reasons why many works of art stay undiscovered or unknown. I think that works that have a rather complex structure demand more time, attention and interest and will therefore at first have more difficulties to find a * ‘remains unknown to the general public’
wider public. I cannot say this, however, for all works of the festival. The impacts are finally as different as the works themselves. Some allow new points of view on known/familiar situations, others repeat art-historical positions which already 40 years ago only reached a small circle of spectators. I think that all this has its validity/justification, but can also be called into question.
* What was the context in which your specific work was presented, and how do you see that context interacting with the work itself?
B.E. In this piece, like in (almost) all of my works, the frame with its conditions becomes part of the work. In this case the frame was a ten-day performance festival for which different art institutions set up a programme. The contribution of Skol (Centre des arts actuels) explicitly sought perspectives that connected actions in public space with a reference to the gallery space. Actions did not have to be staged; they could also happen unannounced. The exhibition room was opened daily for visitors and could be used by us (the selected artists). From these set conditions I developed the structure for the work. The idea with which I had applied for the participation was an intention to observe people in public places and develop protocols from these observations. But I included further conditions/constraints as follows: for every day that the gallery was opened I developed a map (based on the parameters—size, folding, typography, structure, coordinates—of the map of the public transport company of Montreal). The observations and the developing of the instructions were first of all motivated by the question about the notion of ‘performance’ and tied up with the understanding of performance itself. It also questioned the very idea of a ‘performance festival’ and to expose/document/show this reflective process. Mostly I wondered what distinguishes a performance from other actions. The final form of my piece refers to the time structure of the gallery. I included the documentation as an essential (but not exclusive) part of the art-work from the beginning. The documentation becomes the means of communication and the only ‘material’ product of the project. The maps were exhibited individually and always one day after the observation, as if one had only just missed the event. Another thing I was interested in was the edition. The print shop requested a general fee so that the costs of 11 came to the same as a single one. As I had to have each one printed on different days, I decided on an edition of ten and offered it for $9.95 at the bar of the gallery (the normal price of a Montreal city map). To collect the whole edition one had to come daily to the gallery.
*
How do the contradictions within the idea of the ‘performance document’ (for example transience/record) give it a special status?
B.E.
The specialty about the places selected is that one can go there at any day and more or less always find the same things happening. It is the place itself that requires certain behaviour. Therefore it has a continuity. In pointing out a special situation it suggests that there might be something ‘other’ or unique happening. Which is in the end the case, of course. But generally nothing particular happened at all. So I think the transience of the selected settings, and probably of the design of our lives, is quite limited as it is so comparable and implies a lot of continuity (if you regard it from an overview perspective). The document goes in both directions (pointing out the one moment as well as the generality of the setting). Eventually I think in the same sense it contradicts the fact of performances being ephemeral and unique but also capable of being re-staged. Even when being staged the individual perception of the same situation will be different. For me this is very much a way to articulate my own struggle with documentation. Knowing from the beginning that any documentation will eliminate possible approaches in perceiving a work, but is necessary for further communication of a project, I am happy to develop forms that express this impossibility. In offering precise but sparse visual material I imagine the work being created in people’s minds and not just being pre-made and consumed.
*
Your particular approach to the ‘performance document’ (as in ‘Instructions for a Setting’) seems to be to make that document itself a performance. Can that performed document then itself be documented in a more permanent form? (I have, for instance, the .pdfs on my computer, which seem to suggest permanence at last.)
B.E.
What is performance in the end? Is thinking about a performance a performance already? Does anything have to happen at all? Does anything have to be set up for a performance? Does a performance require anything other than ‘a space’? These are some of the questions stressed by this work and I am satisfied to see you working around them. I don’t provide answers here, but wonder about the meaning of the term ‘performance’. I find it highly imprecise and feel uncomfortable using it in the context of my work. The documents offer/suggest a more permanent form. They might be anything but a performance. They are made from concrete material (paper), they don’t change, can be read anywhere, can be carried around, are not fixed to a moment or place which I guess is what performance is about. The work is the document and reflects itself as such.
*
Do the .pdfs now on my computer have any bearing on the 2009 artwork entitled ‘Instructions for a Setting’ which is now being further documented in this interview?
B.E.
To me this question reverts to a question about the end of an artwork. Seeing a work that was developed by constructivists in 1920 in a museum today—is that still the same work even if it didn’t change form? I would be satisfied to see that a work of mine is discussed over time from different angles. That somehow renews the work and makes it live on. With performances this question is particularly delicate. Makes me think of this piece by Silvia Kolbowski (title: an inadequate history of conceptual art) where she asked witnesses of happenings to recount them from memory. To my point of view this work questions very much our sources of art history and eventually of history itself. What becomes the base for us to create our history from? Which document would be acceptable to prove something has really happened? Is an oral report nowadays as arguable or believable as a written text, a photo or a video?
* This artwork is figured as a document of events that explicate themselves in space (happen-
ings). What is the meeting-point between the static, temporary document on the gallery wall, and the imaginary events being documented on the maps?
B.E. Is the paper on the wall the source for your imagination or the documentation my perception (thoughts)? Isn’t your body where everything comes together and where the memory mixes with actuality? When leaving an exhibition don’t you always just take the memory with you—not the work itself? So eventually artworks will be recalled from beholders' memories rather then re-watched. That challenges me to create works that take form in someone’s thoughts where they will stay, or be forgotten but perhaps leave a trace.
* Where is the virtual, imaginary space of this e-mail in this scheme? B.E. Which scheme?
* Do you find these conditions artificial and strange? B.E. Which conditions?
The Third Interview BIRTE TEXT BIRTE TEXT
Where am I? Yes. What? Hello. [Awkward silence.]
BIRTE TEXT BIRTE TEXT BIRTE TEXT
Mother? – There’s something I cannot quite Figure out? ? That’s something. [As if the before had not occurred.]
BIRTE TEXT BIRTE TEXT BIRTE
TEXT BIRTE TEXT BIRTE TEXT BIRTE TEXT BIRTE TEXT BIRTE TEXT BIRTE TEXT BIRTE TEXT BIRTE TEXT BIRTE TEXT BIRTE TEXT
How do I remember what I have learned? How could you not? But does it all make sense? Sense is a construction. Malleable. The one whole almond in the pudding. [Titters.] Sorry? Sorry. What if I What if I miss an important What if it is all ‘If’ is only a grammatical aid to a possibility. Have I changed? See p. 1. Why did you leave me, mother? Ah, that one. [Impatient.] Why? Did I? Why did you leave me? Leaving is not leaving behind. Never a letter. — Never an answer. Never just ‘answer’. I need an answer. A self-help book is, strictly speaking, not self-help. [Indignant.] I wouldn’t want that. No.You wouldn’t want that. Will I be OK? I think so. You think? I think.
BIRTE TEXT
THEN DO. — [Silence.]
TEXT
[With a smirk.] ‘Investigative rigour’. [Hold out your palm and I’ll tell you — ]
BIRTE
TEXT BIRTE
TEXT BIRTE TEXT BIRTE TEXT BIRTE
TEXT BIRTE
[Looks at BIRTE.] Nothing? I can read. [Reads.] But if you don’t speak to me Never spoke to me. Speaking doesn’t need a tongue. There are always more and more questions. I don’t know where to begin. Where do I look first? Where next? Above here? Beneath there? Open a cupboard, lift this — Always more. Good. ? That’s something to be embraced, not feared. I don’t hear you. Shall I say it again? No answer. [Listens.] I’m talking to myself. Myself Always Alone. BIRTE? I ask (politely) – no difference, I ask a little more clearly, no, I plead (more insistently now), nothing. I cry. Nothing. [Impatient silence.] Do I need to go back? Please don’t tell me I need to go back And ? All over Again? [End of Interview.]
_______________________ * This is an extract from a novel.
Biographia
Birte Endrejat studied fine arts in Bremen and Montreal. Her work has appeared in Italy, Sweden, Thailand, and elsewhere. She is part of the artist collective mark. In 2011 the artist book Before the Curtain | Avant le rideau was published by Passenger Books. ‘I try to unfold situations to approximate their inner reality: every fragment of an investigation can become material’. www.birteendrejat.com. Lisa Jeschke & Lucy Beynon have been working on performances, drawings and texts together since 2007. Based in Berlin between 2008 and 2011, they've just returned to Cambridge and London. For upcoming performances and more information, see crowinstigated.blogspot.com. Luke McMullan is a poet who lives in Cambridge. He is currently writing and working on the Mobile Auditorium Venture. Yates Norton is an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge. Sophie Seita is a poet and graduate student at the University of Cambridge. initialseita.wordpress.com. Jonas L.Tinius studies social anthropology at the University of Cambridge, U.K. He works on theatre, environment, and space near his hometown in the Ruhr area of Germany. To his liking are beginnings, pauses, photographs, and translations. Selected other rumblings can be sensed on www.assemblingaffects.blogspot.com. Steve Tompkins is a director of London architects Haworth Tompkins. His completed performance work includes the Royal Court, the Almeida theatres at Kings Cross and Gainsborough Studios, the Young Vic, Snape Maltings, the Bath Egg children's theatre, the Oxford North Wall, and the Bush theatre. He is currently working on projects with the National Theatre, the Liverpool Everyman, Chichester Festival Theatre, the Donmar theatre, Tara Arts, and Battersea Arts Centre. www.howarthtompkins.com EbenWood is an Associate Professor of English at the City University of New York. A former Fellow in NonFiction Literature at the New York Foundation for the Arts, his most recent publications include a study of Johan Grimonprez’s dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y., a scholarly article on the poetry of Muriel Rukeyser and Robert Hayden, and fiction in BlackWarrior Review and Variations.
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