Nowiswere Issue 11

Cover commissioned by Antje Majewski, 2012

Nowiswere was founded by Fatos Üstek and Veronika Hauer in London in 2008. Copyrights of the magazine are the property of Veronika Hauer. All rights of the contributions are the property of their contributors.

Editor:Veronika Hauer Editorial Board: Adeena Mey, Martina Steckholzer.

Editorial Comments and Proofreading: Mary Jane Miltner, Mara Ferreri and Adeena Mey. Contributors: Mara Ferreri, Antje Majewski, Adeena Mey, Gaëlle Obiégly, Pierre Weiss, Rémi Bragard, Elea Himmelsbach, Anthony Marcellini, Stephanie Bailey, Georgia Holz, Laura Wollen and Patrick Hunt.

Special Thanks to: Mary Jane Miltner and Monika Hauer.

Layout: © Veronika Hauer Contact: info@nowiswere.com www.nowiswere.com

THematics: hosting texts up to 1000 words or image material of up to four pages focusing on a single theme.

EF Expecting Future is a sub section of THematics, hosting texts pointing out possibilities of future and positioning the potentials of the to-come-true. As expecting future requires awareness of the present, the section will be a gathering of the today’s variety of practices, attitutes, tendencies...

AS Artists’ Specials: hosting evaluations on or interviews with artists.

CC Critics’ Corner: hosting reviews on current exhibitions, performances, events, happenings...

SF Special Feature

TH Antje Majewski....................................................................4 EF On projective creative cities.............................8 Mara Ferreri AS Thresholds and Trajectories of Matter.

On Some Recent Work by Lauren Currie. ........................10 Adeena Mey TH Translated into Stone.......................................18 Rémi Bragard TH 93.........................................................................................20 Gaëlle Obiégly TH ‘the piss or the trail of the lemur’.................................20 Pierre Weiss TH Translated into Stone.......................................29 Rémi Bragard ‘Imperium in the Pantheon of Rome and its Pavimentum’............................32 Patrick Hunt CC Hannah Weinberger and Cevdet Erek – Sonic environments..............................................36 Elea Himmelsbach TH THE SHADOW AND ITS AFTER EFFECTS...............41 Anthony Marcellini CC A Word in Common................................................52 Stephanie Bailey CC With A Name Like Yours, You Might Be Any Shape. Part I: Between Intervention and Denial.............58 Laura Wollen Georgia Holz

Mara Ferreri

On projective creative cities My job consists of projects. Networks are my milieu. Short-term is my horizon of action. I live in cities. Like me, my city is constantly regenerating. My favourite mode of consumption is production. My pace is fast. I dwell in flexibility and urban flow.

Cities have always been full of haste, fury, traversed by hectic and syncopated rhythms. Networks, too, have always chosen cities as their favoured stage for this coming together and leaving again. Cities always had a projective component, when project was just another name for temporary encounters against a backdrop of slower, sedimented interactions. But what if the creative project filled the whole horizon, collapsing projective modes of cultural production into the creative city project?

Projects harness and re-direct fluxes that exist not just within the flexible walls of a fast dissipating creative economy - the cultural marketplace is no longer the only, or even the primary, way that the new bohemia intersects with the urban economy5- but beyond, through complex and mediated intersections of global strategies of relentless gentrification. Undoing to redo it, shinier, better: the innercity as a battlefield punctuated by crane-vultures elongating their metallic necks to pick at the remains of yesteryear. And creative projects support this constantly redeveloping creative city.

The ‘neo-bohemian’ paradigm is informed by flexibilised cultural labour in specific urban locales.

Its urban protagonists and extras are renown for claiming that both location and remuneration are beside the point. Meanwhile, cities thrive on such a In projective cities, what is new are not the means, self-less self-promotional carefully choreographed but the ends: the societal project.1 The project as self-effacing self- representation. Just like the good the normative construct and justification for all old bohemians, they make a virtue of marginality that urban dwellers should aspire to: infinite con- in an urban world constructed on creative value, nectivity, infinite temporariness, infinitely flexible redevelopment and new-build gentrification. personalities2 inhabiting reticular worlds where social life is composed of a proliferation of encounters And so, neobohemians surf precariously for years and temporary, but reactivatable connections.3 on concentric circles ever expanding from the The project is at once the occasion and the reason core to the margins, not just of contingent cities, to connect. It’s a highly activated section of many but of complex networks of interurban compeoverlapping, intertwining networks. It stands for tition. Sooner or later, most are washed ashore, dispersal, but also for accumulation. from the pulsating inner city to the outskirts, from the global centres to the global provinces, because Projects make production and accumulation pos- all too often their self-less dedication to urban sible in a world which, were it to be purely connex- cultural economies does not pay the rent. ionist, would simply contain flows, where nothing could be stabilised, accumulated or crystallised.4 How to buy time, freezing those waves that inexorably push us away after they have ever so inexoWhile temporarily accumulating some flows, proj- rably sucked us into the urban project? ects also engender another type of accumulation, the flexible accumulation of the urban project, filSlowing down, deferring, delaying, spacing – these tered but not retained by those who run the projin fact presuppose constructing temporal spaces ects. The city as a project: bodies, words, emotions, that are larger than the ‘project’[...] or providing labour sucked into a heightened redeveloping and people with the means to subsist between engagerebranding time-space that is constantly re-valoment in different project.6 rising its own image.

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Planner and critical urban theorists Peter Marcuse made the following observation on subsisting in the creative cities, candidly noting that the class identity of the ‘creative class’ proverbially sits

The projective city has come full circle. Projects become the project. Short-term marginality becomes the only mode of inhabitation. That’s why the ordinary demand for basic urban survival seems like a revolutionary, unattainable goal.

at the opposite end of the class hierarchy: struggling to make ends meet, fighting exploitation of their talents for purposes of profit, constantly defending their freedom from stulti- [Written in London. Other, more civilised cities in fying social restraints. They have experience, as the gentrifying global north still have rent control citizens, of misunderstanding, of discrimination, mechanisms.] of intolerance of difference; they can join with others facing discrimination to expand diversity and openness to difference. And they can join with others who are similarly positioned on a wide variety of critical social issues played out in the city.7 After this heart warming call to arms, Marcuse proposes a ‘very ordinary’ measure for a more just creative city, something simple and yet controversial: holding the costs of housing down, which is within the power of cities everywhere, would be a major contribution to implementing a right to a creative city—making it, to begin with, an affordable city, even for those who do not wish to devote their major efforts to the enhancement of their incomes.8 Nothing new there: breaking the vicious cycle of artist-led gentrification by controlling the flexible accumulation of cultural capital into property values.

Housing politics, that’s clear! So, who will act on it? ...

I dwell in flexibility and urban flow. Project to project, hand to mouth. The pace of my frantic networking fills my whole horizon. I can’t even begin imagining what an affordable city, a city with rent controls, affordable spaces, deferred, delayed, spaced, could look like.

1 Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. 2005: The new spirit of capitalism. London:Verso, p. xxii.

2 Holmes, 2002, Flexible Personality 3 Boltanski and Chiapello, p. 104.

4 Ibid.

5 Lloyd, R.D. 2006: Neo-Bohemia : art and commerce in the postindustrial city. New York ; London: Routledge, p. 243.

6 Boltanski and Chiapello, p. 469.

7 Marcuse, P. 2011 (unpublished paper) The Right to the Creative City – talk, Creative Cities Limits seminar, London, 29th July 2011.

8 Ibid.

REFERENCES Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. 2005: The new spirit of capitalism.

London:Verso.

Lloyd, R. 2004: The Neighborhood in Cultural Production: Material and Symbolic Resources in the New Bohemia. City & Community 3, 343-372. p.368 Lloyd, R. 2006: Neo-Bohemia : art and commerce in the postindustrial city. New York ; London: Routledge.

Marcuse, P. 2011 (unpublished paper) The Right to the Creative City – talk, Creative Cities Limits seminar, London, 29th July 2011

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Lauren Currie Handsel 2, acrylic on plasticine

Adeena Mey

Thresholds and Trajectories of Matter.

On Some Recent Work by Lauren Currie.

The question of the medium is a continuing one. If working “across mediums” has now become a common statement for a fair amount of artists, contemporary art production, in this regard, can be seen as taking place between logics of indifference, undifferentiatedness and one that maintains the medium as a working horizon. The latter, however, is less driven by a will to reflect on its formal aspects and potentialities per se. It hybridizes its material aspects and spatial possibilities and how these might be vehicles for the exploration of diverse discursive fields. The young Glaswegian artist Lauren Currie works with sculpture, painting, and film, using each of these mediums to speculate as to how boundaries in the work process itself appear, how to negotiate them as well as how and what solutions can hence be found and/or created to navigate between the different potential becomings of her work, depending on her interaction with the latter and its contexts.

cover the piece in its three-dimensionality but rather tend to “flatten” it so as to formulate, as the artist herself puts it, a “visual proposition rather than a tactile one”.

For Handsel 1, Currie created a black and white painting in her studio, whose delicate lines form a motif reminiscent of tree veins, which she subsequently wrapped around three wooden sticks. The first lays horizontally on the floor, while the third’s vertical poise is only maintained by the second, which seems to spring from the horizontal piece, the whole sketching a partial tetrahedric structure within the gallery space. Handsel 1 stems from the artist’s research into the authority of the word “sculptural”, between the latter as a signifier and the multiple artefacts through which sculpture materially exists as “sculpture” and the way the intertwining of matter and language becomes meaningful, “sculpturally”. Currie’s exploration of the possible relationships between world and word, materiality and *** language, is further exemplified through her working As part of her recent collaborative exhibition Who process. All the pieces in the exhibition Who Would You would you rather (2011, with artist Lauren Gault), at Rather were named (Handsel) before they were made.

CCA Glasgow, Currie produced the Handsel series – a This rule opened a space for the artist in which she series of objects all bearing the name Handsel – which could experiment with the performative effects of the might best illustrate her interest in the relationships act of naming on the process of manufacturing her between painting and sculpture. Handsel 2 (2011), is objects, with the intention of producing, in her own made of several piled spherical pieces of plasticine, words, things that appear both “constructed and conwhose rim were cut and planed so as to obtain several, jured”. irregular flat surfaces, each of which was monochromatically painted with primary, pastel or bright colours. The strategies Currie employs are informed by her The American painter Ad Reinhardt famously put – in reading of Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror and her foran ironic tone – that “sculpture is something you bump mulation of the notion of the abject. In this book, the into when you back up to look at a painting”, stress- Bulgarian-French psychoanalyst and writer explores ing – while reducing it – that the mode of address of possible instances of “abjection” as a reaction to “hora sculpture is the production of a physical encounter ror” – from vomit to the anti-Semitism of the writer between the work and the viewer (whose agency as a Louis-Ferdinand Céline – caused by the dissolution of viewer is by the same token obliterated). In this regard, boundaries between the subject and object, the self Handsel 2 can be seen as an attempt to subvert this and the other, that is the collapse of a “signifiable idenordering of the senses, with sight becoming the prime tity”. In the first pages of this seminal work, Kristeva means to approach this totem-like piece. Indeed, the writes: multiple colours applied are less intended as a way to AS + 11

Lauren Currie Handsel 1, acrylic on paper, plywood

Lauren Currie And for him or her the beat was ‘the world’ video

When I am beset by abjection, the twisted braid of affects and thoughts I call by such a name does not have, properly speaking, a definable object. […] The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I. If the object, however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses. (Kristeva, 1982: 1-2)

and the different visual and material regimes to which they pertain, it is necessary to subtract them from the economy of pathos and emotions at play in the theory of abjection, so as to grasp their being in their sheer materiality and physicality, and how the latter open to discursive possibilities. Hence, my contention is that Currie’s work, in the manner that it explores materiality and physicality, sets (albeit virtually) a dialogue with “new materialism” or the recent “speculative turn”, which despite the diversity of their positions all share a common concern: grasping materiality and physicality without the mediation of language (against, or after the “linguistic turn” for which there is no access to matIt is noteworthy that Kristeva’s writings also foster an- ter but through discourses about it). Moreover, Currie, other field of experimentation of Currie’s not yet men- new materialism and speculative realism reassert the tioned (and which won’t be addressed here), namely value of objects and grant them an agency. In his Forme critical writing. Nevertheless, as regards her plastic et objet. Un traité des choses, Tristan Garcia pictures a practice, I am tempted to suggest that, if it is nurtured world in which all entities, human, non-human, mateby a reading of Powers of Horror, it echoes a different, re- rial, discursive, real and virtual are all granted an equal cent philosophical and theoretical enterprise and that, “ontological dignity” so as to understand the partition moreover, it can also be read and interpreted through of the world into categories and subsequently sketch the latter. the possibility of existing as a thing among all things.

For Garcia, *** Since the thing is nothing else but the difference If the subject/object breakdown mechanism described between what is inside the thing and that which this in terms of abjection can illustrate the kinds of conthing is in, there are only thinkable things as long as tact zones and splits between painting and sculpture we keep this double meaning. [Our aim] is to keep AS + 13

And for him or her the beat was ‘the world’ video

things as precious differences inscribed within the networks through which the being of the world is distributed. To do so, we will seek to discover the meaning that circulates between things, between what composes them and what they compose, in us, outside of us, with or without us. (Garcia, 2011: 21. My translation)

the frame.The status and origin of the footage is hardly decipherable since it does not provide any visual clues and seems to revolve around the duality of a mass in motion and the motionless triangular cutter. Moreover, this sequence is further extracted from its original context by the subtitles added by Currie: an imaginary dialogue between characters in Milan Kundera’s novel Slowness, a meditation on man’s fascination for speed, The question thus concerns the plurality of existence, leading to the oblivion of slowness and its virtues and the diverse intensities of being, as well as the way one the loss of memory. After a few seconds during which thing can or cannot be another or the same thing, dif- we hear the original pedagogic commentary (“the ferently. bonding of metal to metal…”) and see arrows appearing to create a visual support to the statement, the *** second sequence starts. It shows an ice-skating couple performing a dance on the rink. If we first recognize Handsel 1 can be said to exist cinematically: its form them as human figures, the whole become abstract by and treatment of visual texture are reactualised into capturing their movements and body parts in close-ups. a filmic “version”. Indeed, the concern with materiality Adding to that, a general blurriness is created by the and physicality that inform Currie’s sculptural projects frosted paper through which the scene is filmed. Conis also at the core of her film And for him or her the tinuity with the first sequence is only signalled by the beat was ‘the world’ (2012). The work opens with a se- scrolling subtitles, which continue until the third and quence of scientific footage re-appropriated by the art- last sequence –found scientific footage also – showing ist, representing the process of cutting metal. From the a crumbling substance, perhaps microscope views of left-side, a chunk of half-solid half-melted metal moves mutating cells or tissue. slowly towards the centre where it is cut and split by the spike of a large cutter. While one part of the chunk *** continues to move to the right, at the bottom below the cutter, the other bit is held up by the latter’s ascen- The connection to Handsel 1, or we could say its partial dant face and hoisted up to the upper right angle of reincarnation into a moving-image form, appears in the AS + 14

And for him or her the beat was ‘the world’ video

first sequence of the film with the triangular process resulting from the cutting of the metal chunk. Indeed, not only does it re-enact the tetrahedric structure of its sculptural (qua painting) counterpart, but somehow also shares the same visual texture. If the film is composed of sequences showing highly material, physical and “thingy” things, they are only present(ed) thanks to a chiasmic gesture: as a matter of fact, Currie’s interest for film lies in its potentiality for de-materialising what it shows. As a meditation on Kundera’s book, And for him or her the beat was ‘the world’ suggests that speed and rhythm are disembodied. Pure speed denies the material contingencies of life and its rhythm is dictated by the imperatives of neo-liberal forces. Moreover, this disembodiment of speed is parallel to the artist’s conception of film as a dematerialising medium. If filmic images were traditionally defined by their indexical value and as bearing the trace of the world in the materiality of the film-reel, the digital has put this paradigm into crisis. And while contemporary regimes of visuality are less defined by the indexical image but by a shift towards a “symptomatic image” (Alloa), Currie’s position might constitute one of its testimonies.

Hence, her explorations on physicality and materiality do not lie so much in the actual physical and material properties of the mediums she employs – painting, sculpture or film – but in the very gaps formed by her hybrid propositions and in the way she transfers and translates such qualities from one work or medium to

another. Her strategies thus sketch a diagram between objects – material and physical, discursive, embodied and disembodied – which ultimately raises the following question: when does the work take place, and where? Of her film, Currie says that what she has to offer is “a set of images, each incomplete or never quite reaching a final destination or endpoint”. By extension, it could be said that she opens matter and objects to their multiple, possible becomings, be it as sculpture, as painting or as film.

REFERENCES Alloa, Emmanuel (2010) “Changer de sens. De quelques effets du tournant iconique” in Critique, numéro spécial A quoi pense l’art contemporain? Editions de Minuit, Paris.

Garcia, Tristan (2011) Forme et Objet. Un traité des choses, Presses Universitaires de France, Collection Métaphysiques, Paris.

Kristeva, Julia (1982) Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection, Columbia University Press, New York.

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Lauren Currie Handsel 1, acrylic on paper, plywood

Remi Bragard Translated into Stone 2012 Pages: 18, 19, 29-35 accompanied by “Imperium in the Pantheon of Rome and its Pavimentum�

by Patrick Hunt

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Pierre Weiss ‘the piss or the trail of the lemur’ Photographs by Marina Faust. Pages: 20, 23 and 25

In October 2011, I was asked to meet with a group of teenagers in Clichy-sous-Bois. Their teacher in French literature had invited me - they were studying one of my novels. To go to this neighbourhood, a Northern suburb of Paris, isn’t very pleasant. Although not too far from the city, it takes quite some time and energy to get there.

The entire district is a neglected enclave. Victor Hugo made this place famous, sadly enough, since ‘Les Misérables’ is set mostly there, a place which back then wasn’t called ‘93’ yet, 93 being the number of the French department it is located in. It’s a territory of poverty and violence.

But there is also a kind of beauty to it...

a former meat factory, and barely covered the walls. He had spent several weeks in the empty space. And then he put up a number of transparent boards on which he drew lines. Those lines were surrounded by existing lines. Underneath, in the transparency, appeared a yellowish trace, lending the piece its title: ‘the piss or the trail of the lemur’. The enigmatic presence of an invisible animal has an obvious link to language. This work of Pierre Weiss reflects the essence of language. The duty of language is to represent what isn’t really there.

What struck me most was Pierre Weiss’ ability to create a hidden presence by using transparency. And that is exactly what language is: transAround the same time that I was invited to do parency and darkness. my workshop in the ‘93’, I heard that the artist Pierre Weiss had a show in the same district. His Gaëlle Obiégly. work has always had a strong link to the threat of violence. He has expressed this obsession in films, paintings, sculptures as well as in his writings. So I was curious to see how he would deal with his ideas in situ. He didn’t fill the space, TH + 20

93

93

Gaëlle Obiégly.

Gaëlle Obiégly.

Aus dem Französischen von Monika Hauer

La première fois que j’ai été en contact avec un Arabe, j’étais déjà grande enfant, dix ans peut-être. C’était un homme réservé, mince et plus petit que sa femme, Thérèse, une Française qui avait l’élégance d’une professeure d’anglais. En fait, elle était chauffeure de taxi et lui aussi. Il n’avait pas de nom, on le désignait d’une drôle de manière, on l’apostrophait, et il ne se défendait pas – me semblait-il. Non seulement il ne se défendait pas mais en plus il riait et il revenait régulièrement dans notre village très éloigné de la ville où il vivait avec Thérèse, une ville qui s’appelait Nanterre et qui se trouvait encore plus loin que Paris. Un jour, je me suis aperçue qu’il se forçait à sourire et j’ai compris que ça voulait dire qu’il était seul, hyper seul, ça donnait mal à la gorge, son sourire, son sourire permanent. A table, quelqu’un lui a proposé du vin rouge. Il a dit non. Son refus a déclenché une crise de rire. J’ai pensé qu’il prenait des antibiotiques. En un instant, les hommes se sont alliés pour le faire boire. La honte m’est tombée dessus, et c’est ce sentiment qui m’a donné la conscience politique. Le désir de ne pas faire partie de la communauté qui malheureusement m’échoit m’a fait prendre conscience que j’étais de ceux qui m’horripilent. Mais plus tard, voyant écrit le prénom « Larbi », j’ai entendu autrement ce que grande enfant j’avais pris pour une désignation méprisante, « l’arbi », un genre de mot comme « polack » qu’on nous adressait des fois.

Devant les enfants, adolescents de Clichysous-bois qui m’invitent dans leur classe, quelle communauté je représente, à leurs yeux? Adulte, blanche, chrétienne, intellectuelle (par opposition à manuelle). Mais une communauté suppose un lien. Or je m’emploie à n’en avoir aucun avec aucun

Das erste Mal, als ich mit einem Araber Kontakt hatte, war ich ein Mädchen von etwa zehn Jahren. Er war ein reservierter Mann, schlank und kleiner als seine Frau, Thérèse, eine Französin, welche die Eleganz einer Englischprofessorin hatte.

Tatsächlich aber war sie Taxifahrerin, und ihr Mann auch. Er hatte keinen Namen, man bezeichnete ihn auf eine komische Art und Weise, und er verteidigte sich nichtso kam es mir vor. Nicht nur, dass er sich nicht verteidigte, er lachte sogar und kam regelmäßig in unser Dorf zurück, das sehr weit entfernt war von der Stadt, in der er mit Thérèse lebte, eine Stadt die Nanterre hieß und die noch weiter entfernt war als Paris. Eines Tages wurde mir bewußt, dass er sich zum Lächeln zwang und ich verstand, dass er einsam war, unbeschreiblich einsam und dieses Lächeln, sein ständiges Lächeln verursachte Unbehagen. Bei Tisch bot ihm jemand Wein an. Er lehnte ab. Seine Ablehnung löste allgemeines Gelächter aus. Ich dachte, er nehme Antibiotika. Sofort taten sich die Männer zusammen um ihn betrunken zu machen. Scham überkam mich und genau dieses Gefühl führte zur Entwicklung meines politischen Gewissens. Das Bedürfnis, nicht Teil dieser Gemeinschaft zu sein, der ich leider zwangsläufig angehörte, hat mir bewusst gemacht, dass ich eine von denen war, die mir auf die Nerven gingen. Aber später, als ich den Vornamen „Larbi“ geschrieben sah, nahm ich das, was ich als Kind für eine abwertende Bezeichnung gehalten hatte, anders wahr, „l’arbi“ eine Bezeichnung wie „Polack“, die man manchmal für uns gebrauchte.

Vor den Kindern, den Jugendlichen von Clichy-sous-bois, die mich in ihre Klasse einladen, welche Gemeinschaft repräsen-

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représentant ni même avec personne. Sauf avec eux, au moment où je leur parle. Ils se parlent à présent de choses dont ils ne parlent jamais entre eux, quand ils se sentent entre eux. Il faut un intrus pour ça, pour créer un « nous autres ». Ils sont assis autour d’une grande table, dans la bibliothèque du collège qui les accueille pour des recherches et des colles. Je suis arrivée en retard, à cause du bus numéro 601. Ils disent oui, c’est fréquent. Les gens se bagarrent, les chauffeurs reçoivent des coups de poing, après ils n’ont plus envie de conduire.

A l’arrêt de bus, une femme noire, volumineuse, grattait des tickets de loterie. Ses jambes tremblaient, sa nervosité contaminait le banc de l’arrêt de bus sur lequel nous étions quatre assis serrés. Devant elle, deux filles aux cheveux tressés comme souvent les petites Africaines, l’une est encore un bébé, l’autre est déjà mélancolique. Celleci, la grave, elle pose sa figure sur les cuisses de sa mère qui la repousse violemment, la réprimande. L’affection de l’enfant, de son enfant grave, l’agresse. La fille la regarde au visage. La mère accuse la fille de lui avoir fait mal et elle montre son index, c’est là qu’est son mal. Au bout de l’index, elle a une coupure invisible. Mais sur les peaux noires les plaies cicatrisantes se voient à peine. L’enfant dit qu’elle est désolée. Avec tendresse elle ferme le manteau de sa mère dont les tremblements ne sont pas causés par le froid, ce que l’enfant paraît ignorer, mais par la nervosité. La mère dit que ça va tomber avant le soir. Et la fille regarde le ciel blanc. De la neige, maman, demande l’enfant, ou de la pluie? La mère secoue sa main droite, c’est l’annonce d’une paire de gifles. La fille s’excuse et elle regarde au loin les rails du RER. Où aller ? A l’école, en attendant. Mais le collège, comme la famille, ressemble à une prison, ressemble à un labyrinthe, comme le présent.

Vu du ciel, remarquez, le collège a la forme d’une banane. Du ciel peut-être mais nous, on est dedans. Il faut passer des grilles pour

tiere ich in ihren Augen? Erwachsene.

Weiße, Christin, Intellektuelle (im Gegensatz zu Manuelle). Eine Gemeinschaft aber setzt eine Bindung voraus. Ich jedoch tue alles keine zu haben, weder mit einem Vertreter noch mit sonst jemandem. Ausgenommen mit ihnen, wenn ich zu ihnen spreche.

Sie sprechen dann von Sachen über die sie nie miteinander sprechen wenn sie unter sich sind. Dafür braucht es einen Eindringling um ein „ wir Andere“ zu schaffen. Sie sitzen an einem großen Tisch in der Schulbibliothek, in der sie recherchieren, aber auch nachsitzen. Ich bin zu spät gekommen, wegen des Busses 601. Ja sagen sie, das kommt oft vor. Die Leute raufen, die Chauffeure bekommen Faustschläge, danach haben sie keine Lust mehr zu fahren.

Bei der Bushaltestelle rubbelte eine korpulente schwarze Frau Lotterielose. Ihre Beine zitterten, ihre Nervosität übertrug sich auf uns Vier, die zusammengepfercht auf der Bank der Haltestelle saßen. Vor ihr zwei Mädchen mit zu Zöpfchen geflochtenem Haar, wie man es oft bei den kleinen Afrikanerinnen sieht. Die eine ist noch ein Baby die andere schon melancholisch.

Diese, die Ernste, legt ihr Gesicht auf die Schenkel ihrer Mutter, welche sie brutal wegstößt, sie zurechtweist. Die Zuneigung des Kindes, ihres ernsten Kindes macht sie aggressiv. Das Mädchen schaut sie an. Die Mutter beschuldigt das Mädchen ihr wehgetan zu haben und sie zeigt ihren Zeigefinger, dort tut es ihr weh. An der Fingerspitze hat sie einen unsichtbaren Schnitt. Aber auf der dunklen Haut sieht man die Schnittwunden kaum. Das Kind sagt, dass es ihre leid tue. Zärtlich schließt sie den Mantel ihrer Mutter, deren Zittern, was das Kind nicht zu wissen scheint, nicht von der Kälte sondern von der Nervosität kommt. Die Mutter sagt, dass, noch vor dem Abend etwas kommen wird. Und die Tochter schaut auf den weißen Himmel. Schnee oder Regen, Mama, fragt das Kind. Die Mutter schüttelt ihre rechte Hand, das bedeutet

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Pierre Weiss, ‘the piss or the trail of the lemur’. Photo: Marina Faust

aller dedans, en sortir. Les élèves hurlent, ils se tapent dessus, se poussent contre les murs carrelés. On leur dit qu’ici se joue leur avenir. On leur dit que c’est beau d’être jeune. On leur dit profitez de votre chance.

Ce n’est pas la première fois que je remarque ça, l’agressivité des bâtiments actuels où l’on concentre les collégiens. Celui-ci se trouve en face d’un commissariat grand comme un hypermarché, ceint d’une paroi de métal artistiquement rouillé. On croirait un vestige d’après une guerre. Le commissariat imitant la ruine vise à se fondre dans la désolation des lieux. Les rats courent sur les poubelles, les ordures amassées au bord de la chaussée. Les balcons sont encombrés de sacs en plastique remplis de choses qu’on ne peut pas faire tenir dans les appartements surpeuplés dont des vitres sont cassées. Aux écoles on a donné le nom « groupes scolaires ». Le long de leurs grilles se tiennent des femmes très couvertes, qui n’ont pas l’air d’avoir des jambes et des cheveux, elles attendent leurs enfants. Ils ont peur du collège, les enfants, ils se sentent tout petits devant lui. Et quand ils y sont élèves, ils ont peur encore. C’est ce qu’ils ont à en dire, et que ça sent l’eau de javel, que la cantine est pas mal, que les professeurs sont gentils et méchants. L’un d’eux montre les arbres de la cour et constate sans soupir : il y a des arbres mais ça sent pas la forêt. Mamady à moitié couché sur la table soulève son torse, il trouve qu’il faut des fleurs. On n’en voit nulle part dans cette ville dont le nom évoque le monde végétal. Mais le langage sert à représenter ce qui n’est pas là toujours. Les mots sont des vestiges, ils marquent la présence de ce qui réellement n’est pas là. Toute phrase écrit une fiction. Les élèves réagissent. Ils ne lèvent plus le doigt pour obtenir la parole. Orphée demande si alors tout ce qui est écrit est imaginé. Non, ce n’est pas le point de départ qui est fictif mais ce qui résulte de l’expérience. Rendre compte par écrit d’une expérience c’est déjà incontestablement déserter le réel.

ein paar Ohrfeigen. Die Tochter entschuldigt sich und betrachtet in der Ferne die Eisenbahnschienen des RER. Wohin soll sie gehen? In die Schule. Aber Schule wie Familie gleichen einem Gefängnis, gleichen einem Labyrinth, wie die Gegenwart.

Vom Himmel aus gesehen hat die Schule die Form einer Banane. Vom Himmel aus vielleicht, aber wir, wir sind drinnen. Man muss durch ein Gittertor um hinein und hinaus zu gehen. Die Schüler brüllen, sie schlagen zu, stoßen einander gegen die gekachelten Wände. Man sagt ihnen, dass sich hier ihre Zukunft entscheide. Man sagt ihnen, dass es schön sei jung zu sein. Man sagt ihnen nützt eure Chance. Nicht zum ersten Mal bemerke ich sie, diese Aggressivität, die in den heutigen Schulgebäuden steckt. Dieses hier befindet sich gegenüber eines Kommissariates von der Größe eines Supermarktes, umgeben von einer kunstvoll verrosteten Metallwand. Man könnte sie für ein Kriegsrelikt halten. Das ruinenähnliche Kommissariat fügt sich in die trostlose Umgebung ein. Die Ratten laufen über die Mistkübel, über die Abfälle am Straßenrand. Die Balkons sind vollgestopft mit Plastiksäcken, gefüllt mit Sachen, die man in einer überbelegten Wohnung mit zerbrochenen Fensterscheiben nicht aufbewahren kann. Den Schulen hat man den Namen „Schulgruppen“ gegeben. Entlang ihrer Zäune stehen verhüllte Frauen, die weder Beine noch Haare zu haben scheinen. Sie warten auf ihre Kinder. Die Kinder haben Angst vor der Schule, sie fühlen sich ganz klein vor ihr. Und wenn sie dort Schüler sind, haben sie immer noch Angst.

Das haben sie, wie man so hört und auch, dass es nach Javelwasser riecht, dass die Kantine nicht schlecht ist, dass die Professoren nett und unangenehm sind. Einer von ihnen zeigt auf die Bäume im Hof und stellt ohne einen Seufzer fest: es gibt Bäume, aber es riecht nicht nach Wald. Mamady, der auf dem Tisch lümmelt, richtet sich auf. Er findet, dass es Blumen braucht.

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Pierre Weiss, ‘the piss or the trail of the lemur’. Photo: Marina Faust

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Nous parlons depuis une heure, nous faisons ainsi l’expérience de l’intelligible, des uns et des autres, nous nous comprenons, nous nous comprenons nous-mêmes. Et survient une dispute dont l’enjeu m’échappe. La classe entière est maintenant happée par les gesticulations et les interjections de deux garçons. Des deux, Ibrahim me semble le plus actif, et fautif. Il jure que non, il jure sur le Coran de La Mecque. Il appelle une puissance invisible à la rescousse. L’irréel fait irruption. L’autorité des adultes est contestée par une autorité plus haute, sans chair, sans visage, comme la sirène qui annonce la fin du cours. Nous nous séparons.

Mehdi vient me parler d’un mot qui l’a choqué dans le livre que le professeur leur fait lire, un livre que j’ai écrit. Je dis ah bon, quoi, c’est quel mot ? Il le prononce et il cache son visage dans ses mains. Je le prononce à mon tour. Mehdi prend sa tête entre ses mains, cache ses oreilles. Je comprends que ce mot-là amène en lui la violence, la honte. Mais peut-être pas. Nous nous assoyons face à face. Ibrahim nous rejoint.

Il a enfilé un sweater noir sur lequel figure la carte de l’Afrique où il n’est jamais allé.

Tous les élèves, après avoir dit leur prénom et leur âge, quatorze ans, ont indiqué d’où il venait bien que je ne leur aie demandé que leur prénom. L’endroit d’où ils viennent, la plupart ne l’ont jamais vu. Ils ne le connaissent que par la fiction, mais ils prétendent être de là quand même. Ibrahim a le regard droit, une expression espiègle. Mehdi est taciturne, enfoui, accablé par le mot qu’il ne peut entendre. J’invente ce que pour moi ce mot évoque, un paysage, des contes, les mathématiques, les dromadaires. Mais Mehdi, tout ça ne lui dit rien. Ce à quoi le mot fait référence ce sont les mauvaises notes, les immeubles noircis par le feu, ce qu’on entend à la télévision, c’est toujours le mal. Le mot « arabe » lui est insupportable. Ibrahim, lui, le mot « noir », il s’en fout. Ils sortent avec notre discussion.

Dans la cour de récréation, je ne peux pas être des leurs.

Man findet nirgends welche in dieser Stadt, deren Namen an die Pflanzenwelt erinnert.

Aber die Sprache dient dazu etwas zu beschreiben, was nicht immer vorhanden ist.

Die Worte sind Spuren, sie zeugen von der Anwesenheit dessen, was in Wirklichkeit nicht vorhanden ist. Jeder Satz schreibt eine Fiktion. Die Schüler reagieren. Sie zeigen nicht mehr auf um sprechen zu dürfen.

Orphée fragt, ob also alles was geschrieben ist erfunden ist. Nein nicht der Ausgangspunkt ist fiktiv, sondern alles was aus der Erfahrung resultiert. Schriftlich über eine Erfahrung zu berichten bedeutet sicher die Realität zu verlassen.

Wir sprechen seit einer Stunde, wir machen so die Erfahrung des Verständlichen, wir verstehen einander, wir begreifen uns selbst. Und es kommt zu einem Streit, bei dem ich nicht weiß, worum es geht. Die ganze Klasse ist jetzt mit dem Gestikulieren und den Einwürfen zweier Burschen konfrontiert. Von den beiden scheint mir Ibrahim der Aktivere und auch der Schuldige zu sein. Er schwört, dass es nicht so sei, er schwört auf den Koran von Mekka. Er ruft eine unsichtbare Macht zu Hilfe. Das Irreale kommt ins Spiel. Die Autorität der Erwachsenen wird von einer höheren Autorität angezweifelt, einer Autorität ohne Körper, ohne Gesicht, wie die Sirene, die das Ende der Stunde ankündigt. Wir gehen auseinander.

Mehdi kommt und spricht mit mir über ein Wort, das ihn in dem Buch schockiert hat, das der Professor sie lesen hatte lassen. Es war ein Buch, das ich geschrieben habe. Also gut sage ich, was, welches Wort ist es denn. Er spricht es aus und vergräbt sein Gesicht in seinen Händen. Ich spreche es nun meinerseits aus. Mehdi hält sich die Ohren zu. Ich begreife, dass dieses Wort in ihm Gewalt, Scham auslöst. Aber vielleicht auch nicht. Wir sitzen uns gegenüber.

Ibrahim kommt dazu. Er hat ein schwarzes Sweatshirt angezogen auf dem eine Karte

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von Afrika abgebildet ist, wo er noch nie war. Alle Schüler gaben, nachdem sie ihren Vornamen und ihr Alter, vierzehn Jahre, genannt hatten, an, woher sie kamen, obwohl ich sie nur nach ihrem Vornahmen gefragt hatte. Die Gegend aus der sie kommen haben die Meisten noch nie gesehen. Sie kennen sie nur aus ihrer Vorstellung und dennoch behaupten sie von dort zu sein. Ibrahim hat einen offenen Blick, einen schelmischen Ausdruck. Mehdi ist schweigsam, in sich gekehrt, gequält vom Wort, das er nicht hören kann. Ich überlege, was ich mit diesem Wort verbinde, eine Landschaft, ein Märchen, die Mathematik, die Dromedare. Aber Medi sagt das alles nichts. Für ihn bedeutet dieses Wort schlechte Noten, vom Feuer geschwärzte Gebäude, was man im Fernsehen hört, ist immer das Schlechte.

Das Wort „Araber“ ist für ihn unerträglich.

Ibrahim, ihm ist das Wort schwarz egal. Sie gehen mit unserer Diskussion hinaus.

Im Pausenhof kann ich keine von ihnen sein.

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Remi Bragard Translated into Stone 2012 Pages: 29 - 35 accompanied by “Imperium in the Pantheon of Rome and its Pavimentum�

by Patrick Hunt

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Imperium in the Pantheon of Rome and its Pavimentum.

Few great buildings in the world have a history parallel to the Pantheon; none are so glorious to better represent the genius of Roman architecture. Even in its altered state where much of its outer decoration has been stripped over the millennia and its incredible interior modified, the Pantheon still exemplifies the Roman aim for perfection in structural integrity and philosophical harmony.

Three points are notable at the outset of this essay: The Pantheon is a remarkable achievement of 1) Roman engineering, 2) sacred geometry and cosmography and 3) as a statement of political imperium and Roman stability. Dio Cassius (c.

220 CE) said, “thanks to its dome it resembles the vault of heaven itself”.

But it is mostly the floor, the pavimentum - that will be newly interpreted as a statement of imperium in this brief architectural essay.

The Pantheon temple to all the gods [pan theon] was originally part of Augustus Caesar’s plan to rebuild Rome in his image. Marcus Agrippa, friend and general of Augustus, likely designed the first Pantheon, and his inscription still fills the architrave above the portico from when he (son of Lucius) was consul in Rome for the third time [M” AGRIPPA” L” F “ COS “TERTIUM “FECIT]. Agrippa originally built it as an ovatio (non-military triumph) to Augustus but the philhellene emperor Hadrian transformed and finished the rebuilt monumental temple a century later around 122-24 C.E. He envisioned it as a personal Pythagorean philo-

sophical summation of what a Roman monument should entail and mean in its Greek name and cosmopolitan Roman structure as an imperial statement of power. Hadrian also intended the use of Agrippa’s memorial to show his own connection to former Augustan glory.

In its sacred geometry, it has three main architectural components. A rectangular portico or porch with its triangular pediment connects to a cylindrical drum in the cella or main temple structure, and is surmounted by a rotunda or dome. Thus it contains the basic Pythagorean units. Viewers could see the sacred geometry of the cosmos in the triangle of pedimental portico roof, rectangle of portico and hemisphere of roof that actually becomes a full sphere in that space between roof and marble floor. This is a perfect 44-meter [around 150 ft.] sphere matching the 44-meter width of the cylindrical main cella. Hadrian intended its mathematical polygons to be harmoniously integrated, although the portico may not be as carefully connected to the drum as is the marvelous rotunda. The 9 meters (around 30 feet) diameter oculus in the ceiling serves as a mirror of the round heaven appropriately open to the sky - and its graduated ribbed ceiling coffers immediately below corresponded to the five planetary gods.

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For its engineering genius, the Pantheon’s construction includes composite materials such as brick, concrete, tufa, basalt, pumice, granite columns, and leaded bronze roof, with much of the structure veneered inside and outside with marble over seven arched alcoves. The primary external marble veneer was white whereas the interior veneer was multi-colored. Well-planned foundations are of basalt, with walls of tufa, brick and concrete, and coffered ceiling of light pumice covered with leaded bronze sheets. Basalt is the optimum foundation stone with its great compressive strength; pumice concrete equally understood as optimum for ceilings with its durable lightness. Thus the structure proceeds from bottom to top in ever lighter materials which have served it well for durability.

In its statement of imperium, even the marble inlaid opus sectile floor shows stone from all over the empire, even though such use of these marbles is by no means the earliest example of these individual marbles, rather it is more important that all are used simultaneously in this and other earlier as well as contemporary Roman contexts. The specific marbles here suggested as related to the idea of imperium include purple Imperial Porphyry from Egypt (Mons Porphyrites), Docimian pavonazzetto from Asia Minor (Marmor docimenium) and yellow Giallo Numidiana marble from Carthage (Marmor numidicum) and - perhaps to complete a Mediterranean “square� - an as-yet unprovenanced gray Granito Grigio probably from the northwest (Pyrenees, Gaul or the Alps?).

Thus all four corners of the Roman Mediterranean (Mare Nostrum) world could be shown on the pavimentum floor as a squared circle as in the geography of Ptolemy, much like the Pantheon floor patterns. These opus sectile patterns are in repeated squares and circles that echo the overall structural geometric shapes of the building design.

This geographical stone representation from the four corners of the empire is also significant because these floor stones can be understood as spolia expressing conquest of Egypt, Asia, Carthage and Gaul. Conquest of Greece is implied as well in the green Lapis Lacadaemoni[u]s bands (seen in the walls parallel to and including the frieze units in the arced and pedimented aediculae), truly a government program translated into stone.

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Patrick Hunt

Elea Himmelsbach

Sonic environments Hannah Weinberger If You Leave, Walk Out Backwards, So I’ll Think You’re Walking In 29.01. – 18.03.2012 Kunsthalle Basel Cevdet Erek Week 13.01. – 04.03.2012 Kunsthalle Basel Cevdet Erek, Week / Installation view, Courtesy the artist.

Photo: Serge Hasenböhler. © Kunsthalle Basel, 2012

There is something about exhibiting sound in the museum that heightens one’s awareness of the surrounding environment. Traditionally, exhibition space is home to visual culture and engages vision as the active agency. Replacing visual information with sound introduces a sense of self-awareness when walking through the galleries that complements and/or substitutes a more traditional visual focus of spectatorship. Such an alliance between sound, body and space resonates in both past shows at the Kunsthalle in Basel.

malist aesthetic inherent in the exhibitions’ minimalistic design, emphasises the perception of being immersed in the large, white space of the museum’s neo-classic architecture. However, the effect of the exhibit’s setup renders the show’s intended content somewhat ambivalent. It soon becomes evident that each showcase clearly develops its own logic.

Hannah Weinberger’s sound installation ‘When You Leave, Walk Out Backwards, So I’ll Think You’re Walking In’ unfolds across the entire five galleries of the KunAt view are two monographic exhibitions: the first sthalle’s lower floor. It is composed of eleven different is composed by the young Basel-based artist Han- sound loops, which are distributed across the exhibinah Weinberger and her sound installation ‘When You tion space. They create an open-ended sonic environLeave, Walk Out Backwards, So I’ll Think You’re Walking In’. ment within the given spatial condition of the location The second is by the Turkish artist Cevdet Erek and and produce new boundaries between individual sound his triptych ‘Week’. Both exhibitions engage using elec- loops from one speaker to the next. Weinberger’s intronic sound and have a plain design in common con- tent is that the spectator walking about the installation sisting of black high-tech speakers and white curtains, creates her own soundscape depending on her chosen which are set up to control the echo. This shared for- path. This is induced by the spatial distribution of the CC + 36

Cevdet Erek, WEEK, 2012 16 x 64 LED Display 16 x 128 cm Courtesy the artist. Photo: Serge Hasenböhler © Kunsthalle Basel, 2012

Hannah Weinberger, «When You Leave, Walk Out Backwards, So I’ll Think You’re Walking In» Installation view / Various dimensions, Courtesy the artist. Photo: Gunnar Meier. © Kunsthalle Basel

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sound loops that accentuate an ambiance inviting the viewer to experience this installation as a permanent re-mix. The different tunes coming out of the speakers are tied together by one timbre in which major and minor keys harmonise to form a pleasing sound pattern.

From a purely musical perspective, the overall composition is insignificant and it is evident that Weinberger’s interest in sound and composition is not defined by music as such; it is the method of creation and perception that are more central to her concept. Her tunes are appropriated from software applications that offer generic sound elements for remixing. According to the exhibit’s press release, Weinberger’s sound concept refers to the DIY culture of the YouTube generation.

One is tempted to read the structuring principle of her work through the perspective of ‘relational aesthetics’, since the idea of an overall composition only exists in instable fragments and builds on the spectator’s active engagement.The installation is in constant flux because the spectator can only perceive a part of the whole to which she contributes. In this way the installation generates an imaginary holistic composition that simul-

taneously achieves and loses its integrity through the participation of the spectator. Even though Weinberger shares these formal attributes with ‘relational aesthetics’, it is doubtful whether she would subscribe to their ideology. She belongs to a new generation of artists who set out with a new frame of reference, in which the participatory structure innate to the digital age is a given reality and no longer a part of a critical concern.

The afterthoughts left behind by the installation is a mix of curiosity about the direction in which the artist’s future work will evolve and the impression that the arrangement’s rehearsed perfection leaves little room to perceive what it is meant to problematise.

While Weinberger’s sound-installation follows an openended logic drawing on a participatory museum experience, the encounter with Erek’s installation Week is unrelenting. His installation represents the surface of a modern, ordered, hierarchal and mappable reality. Monday,Tuesday,Wednesday,Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday... One is first confronted with Erek’s work in the monumental neo-classical, sky-lit upper floor gallery. In

Cevdet Erek, Week, Kunsthalle Basel, 2012 / Installation view Oak wood floor grids from the skylight hall/Oak, 48 x 100 x 4.5 cm Courtesy the artist. Photo: Serge Hasenböhler, © Kunsthalle Basel, 2012

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Hannah Weinberger, «When You Leave, Walk Out Backwards, So I’ll Think You’re Walking In», 2012 12× JBL Control CRV, 3× Ultrasound audiobeams, 3x Sub-bass Systems, 9x Sound exciter, 4x HK elements in quadrophonic constellations, 2x HK elements as stereo-couple, 1x HK elements as mono-source, Signal distribution via audio network.Various dimensions, Courtesy the artist. Photo: Gunnar Meier. © Kunsthalle Basel, 2012

a space left bare, white and empty you find yourself face to face with a totem-like sound-system column. A monotone voice recites the unrelenting beat of time: Monday,Tuesday,Wednesday… underscored by a regular and minimal hard beat. The recital of the weekdays is followed by a few beats – 5 + 2, 5 + 2 – before the voice resumes the mantra.The impact of this piece feels both enchanting and oppressing. This impression is further reinforced by the sheer monumentality of the room that obliterates any sense of owning the space. An industrial materialistic taste hinges to this work, which is provoked by the uniform dictatorial repetition of the weekdays. But this sonic installation is only part of a larger body of work that continues behind a pair of white curtains in a showcase of objects: a small wooden score, replicating the pattern of the chant visually, and two small drawings of a drum kit symbolizing the beat. This part of the installation concludes with a blue illuminated LED panel entitled DAY (2012). The spectator is informed that this digital panel shows an everchanging pixel combination programmed to represent the changing length of daylight during the entire length

of the show. The counter part of this panel is installed above the main entrance of the Kunsthalle and depicts an illuminated red LED sign entitled ‘WEEK’. The Kunsthalle’s interpretation of Erek’s work is slightly alienating as it suggests seeing the work and the ‘WEEK’ sign as a reference to club culture and the notorious Weekend club in Berlin. However, the encounter with the installation is hardly able to evoke any reminisces of a club culture. More so, the harsh rationality of this body of work appears to eliminate any possible twilight zone. In this strict arrangement that annexes or structurally and aesthetically feeds from modernity’s defining temporal structure, no hiatus can be produced. In it, we hear the spirit of progression and experimentation that set out to impose a rational order, and embraces technological efficiency and machine production.What we are left with is the merciless beat of time that calls to attention the constitution of a civilisation trapped in the loop of production.

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Anthony Marcellini The Shadow and Its After Effects drawings and photography by Anthony Marcellini 2012

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The Shadow and Its After Effects

By Anthony Marcellini

The Passage Appears I begin with a kind of dream or hallucination; Roberto Bolaño is sitting at a table surrounded by books that tell stories about shadows. There is: The Shadow by Hans Christian Andersen, Art and its Shadow by Mario Perniola Marcel Duchamp, appearance stripped bare by Octavio Paz Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp by Pierre Cabbane The Republic by Plato Fourth Dimension by Charles Howard Hinton A selection of essays by Jean Baudrillard, And Alenka Zupancic’s, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two And from amongst this panorama of influences the following passage appears.

And yet your shadow is not following you anymore. At some point your shadow has quietly slipped away. You pretend you don’t notice, but you have, you’re missing your fucking shadow, though there are plenty of ways to explain it, the angle of the sun, the degree of oblivion induced by the sun beating down on hatless heads, the quantity of alcohol ingested, the movement of something like subterranean tanks of pain, the fear of more contingent things, a disease that begins to become apparent, wounded vanity, the desire for just once in your life to be on time. But the point is, your shadow is lost and you, momentarily, forget it. And so you arrive on a kind of stage, without your shadow, and you start to translate reality or reinterpret it or sing it.1

That is the way I imagine it. An author buried under research, produces this passage, a passage that separates itself from the book and somehow begins to operate on its own, independent and autonomous, its presence a confrontation. It pokes and pinches me, questioning like a child why, why, why…and yet, I am pleasantly unhinged?

Once a part of the book, now somehow also its projection, it has built its own space, or perhaps a non-space, a void opened up somewhere between the real and the fictional. Or, a reflection, a kind of mirror of the uncertainties of the subject, a kind of accursed reflection, not passive but a thing that directly engages when I read the words.

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Sure, they are Bolaño’s, but the voices and the imagery are mine. So, I photocopied it, excerpted it, removed it from the book, scanned, enlarged, printed and placed it on a wall, to see how it acted, separated from its context, to see if these words create their own space when they become form. And there it hangs, crudely taped behind me, a presence, some kind of reconstituted shadow.

Silhouette Portraits Our shadows are our bodies projected upon the tangible world; beyond representation they are an articulation of the subject upon reality. In this way shadows are a kind of double of the subject. Whether a representation of the soul or of the subject’s consciousness, the shadow is a projection that acts as a mirror of the subject, but also, because it is different than the projection of ones’ self produced in the mind, it is one that is unknown or other, and questions or plagues the subject with its uncertainty. The me that is unfamiliar, confronted with a specter of myself.

As Jean Baudrillard puts it, “The double is an imaginary figure that, like the soul or one’s shadow, or one’s image in a mirror, haunts the subject with a faint death that has to be constantly warded off. If it materializes, death is imminent.”2 This threat of the unknown, or for Baudrillard death, that the shadow represents is no better played out than in the short story “The Shadow” by Hans Christian Andersen. In Andersen’s tale an unnamed man, referred to as the ‘learned man’ looses his shadow one quiet night while playing with the projection of his silhouette onto an unoccupied house. The next day the ‘learned man’ realizes his shadow has left him. Slowly a new shadow grows from the roots of the old and he forgets about his loss. After a time his initial shadow returns, now a fully tangible and successful man.

Their reunion is amicable, but as time passes and the shadow becomes more successful, fatter and more corporeal, the ‘learned man’ becomes thinner and thinner, less man and more shadow-like, until he submits to act as the shadow’s shadow.

The story concludes when the shadow, in his drive for full existence, can’t bear the ‘learned man’s’ knowledge of his former servitude and dependence, and thus kills him.

If the shadow is a kind of articulation of the ‘learned man’, a materialization of his external existence, or the other of ‘the man’, when he separates from his external self, lending his shadow autonomy, he is confronted with his own mortality as other, death is imminent3. “To lose one’s shadow is already to forget one’s body.

Conversely, when the shadow grows and becomes an autonomous power…it is so as to devour the subject who has lost it, it is a murderous shadow, the image of all the rejected and forgotten dead who, as is quite normal, never accept being

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nothing in the eyes of the living.”4 The individual cannot accept the self externalized. Like Dr Frankenstein he is haunted by his subjectivity, his thoughts his consciousness given form, now monstrous and unrecognizable in its separation.When the creature asks Frankenstein, “Who am I?” his answer is simply, “I don’t know.”5 The Work and The Event

Perhaps we can apply this understanding of the shadow, to everything the individual creates. All our productions are, in a sense, our selves externalized. In our products we see ourselves; what we see is what we are, and what we are capable of. This is not a new thought, it is there in Marx’s notion of species-being, which suggest that it is the consciousness of our labors that makes humans different from ani-

mals and gives us our sense of self. Marx states, through production “nature appears as his [man’s] work and his reality. The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species-life: for he duplicates himself not only, as

in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created.”6 We can of course extend this notion further, beyond products per say and onto ‘the text’ or the work of art as types of shadows, articulations of the self—acting upon the world. As Baudrillard aptly describes it, The shadow is precisely not the reflection of an ‘original’ body, it has a full part to play, and is consequently not an ‘alienated’ part of the subject, but one of the figures of exchange. In another context, this is precisely what poets find when they question their own body, or interpolate words in language.To speak to one’s body and to speak to language in a duel mode beyond the active and the passive (my body speaks (to) me, language speaks (to) me) -to make each fragment of the body and each fragment of language autonomous, like a living being, capable of responding and exchanging -is to bring about the end of separation and the split, which is only the submissive equivalence of each part of the body to the principle of the subject, and the submissive equivalence of each fragment of language to the code of language. 7

I have proposed that the object of labor, whether creative or mechanistic is an extension of the subject; the self externalized and reflected back. It is also a shadow for it is fleeting (at least in appearance), only visible in the right conditions, and disappears when light is not shown upon it, when the subject is not aware of the presence of the thing, which is most of the time. If the individual acknowledges the thing’s autonomy it gives it presence, or perhaps presence is indelible to a thing but when the subject becomes fully aware of it, it materializes as the shadow of the subject. With presence the shadow becomes an actor, an event that acts upon the world.

Nietzsche has a notion that within every thought there is an event or act. Within every declaration or gesture there is an action carried within it, for the declaration once made creates the conditions for their enunciation. The declaration preempts further events, begins a stage of actions/reactions. But this twofold nature of the declaration, of the declaration/event or gesture/action, suggests a kind of split akin to the notion of the shadow. As Alenka Zupancic suggests, the event is precisely the conceptual name of the something that simultaneously separates and links the two subjects. It names the ‘in-between’ or the ‘border’s edge’ between the two subjects.”8 She continues, “the subject is, at one and the same time, that which makes a place and time for the event as well as that which (only) arises from the event.The flip side of this is that the

first subject becomes a subject only if and when the second subject emerges.”9 In other words the subject is double, as I have above proposed, and holds within it both declaration (a statement) and an action (the event). They are mutually dependent on each other. Without one the other does not take place.

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Duality and the An-artistic Marcel Duchamp’s artworks are not exactly art, nor are they exactly anti-art, but exist somewhere next to art. His Readymades are to art like the shadow to the ‘learned man’, they are the shadow of art made autonomous. Because these Readymades are abstracted from their use, yet have no distinguishing marks indicating their authorship, they have a somewhat independent existence, as if the context of art gives them a reason to continue to exist outside their familiar context but without purpose.

The curator Helen Molsworth has demonstrated this duel status by calling Duchamp’s sculptures part object part sculpture in her exhibition by the same name10.

They are both things removed from purpose and without history, while at the same time monuments, works entangled within an art historical canon.

In turn, for the poet Octavio Paz, Duchamp’s work is an-artistic11 continually caught in the process of formation, coming into being as art, active, changing, transforming and becoming. For Paz, Duchamp is “not the maker of things; his works are not pieces of workmanship—they are acts.”12 Pure action without end, somewhat like a game where the rules and the board are always changing form. His works are things that manifest a ceaseless conversation between declaration and action. They are the object, of the Nietzschian event.

In Bolaño’s 2666, Duchamp shows up when Amalfitano, a philosophy teacher plagued by ontological and existential questions, who earlier lost his fucking shadow, inexplicably hangs an unclaimed geometry book on a clothesline outside his house. When questioned by his daughter, who asks for a reason behind this gesture, Amaltifano claims it is not his idea but that of Duchamp. It is a reenactment of the “Unhappy Readymade”, a wedding present from Duchamp to his sister whose marriage he was unable to attend. Amalfitano says he is reproducing Duchamp’s work to see if the geometry book “learns something about real life”.13 When Amalfitano hangs the book on the clothesline he is testing both the existence of the thing, and his own existence; the book is his shadow. This act-as-rupture is followed by a split within his character. Amalfitano begins hearing a voice—a split personality, another instance of the double of the subject. This voice carries on several existential conversations with him, “have you ever thought seriously about whether your hand is really a hand,”14 and so on. And pushes him into a kind of questioning of his own immediate reality and social situation within a murder-torn town in northern Mexico, in which death is ever present (and as we already know death is important). When he returns to the book on the clothesline and notices its shadows appearing like coffins, he is reminded of the death that his shadow represents, the other, The Real, a dimension beyond this one.

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For Lacan, as described by the philosopher Mario Perniola, The Real is the domain of the unknown, the unexplainable, the domain of the shadow, and most notably of death. It is a stage or dimension, “radically different from the true. It is extraneous to language and to the symbolic dimension. In fact, it is precisely what resists symbolization.

Impossible to symbolize and to imagine, it presents those characteristics of opaque irreducibility to thought…It is absolutely ‘without cracks’ that is, it is alien to any dialectical articulation, extraneous to any opposition, including that between presence and absence.”15 The Real resists or perhaps completely ignores the human; it is completely beyond anthropomorphization, culturalization, civilization and socialization. The Real is neither anti nor pro-human, both infinite and finite. Real life is real death, there is no border, and like death, all attempts to understand it will ultimately fail. Is it the book or Amalfitano who really encounters The Real?

Flux and the Fourth Dimension In a photograph and in one painting16 from 1918 we are presented with shadows of Duchamp’s Readymades. Duchamp was experimenting with the appearance of his productions in other dimensions, other spaces, other times, 3D made 2D. One can imagine the artist playing in his studio, shining a bright light on the readymade objects that hung about the room, producing silhouettes, elegant and dusky, creating a flat double of the original. In an interview by Pierre Cabanne, Duchamp explains his actions: I thought of the idea of a projection, of an invisible fourth dimension, something you couldn’t see with your eyes. Since I found one could make a cast shadow from a three dimensional thing, any object whatsoever-I thought that, by simple intellectual analogy, the fourth dimension could project an object of three dimensions, or to put it another way, any three-dimensional object, which we see dispassionately, is a projection of something four dimensional, something we are not familiar with.17

This is Duchamp’s attempt to view his work in several dimensions.To paraphrase Paz, their form is only one of many possible manifestations; their real reality is always other.18 Just as the Duchamp’s ‘hat rack’ is a shadow or drawing in the two-dimensional world, the three-dimensional ‘hat rack’ is the shadow of an unknown being in the four-dimensional. What the shadows of the Readymades indicate is the instability of their existence. The shadows suggest that the thing has a two-dimensional existence very different from its current one. And its four-dimensional is completely unknown, existing in some other space of presentation, where ours is the shadow.

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In a well-known allegory Plato tells us about men living in a cave chained together who are only able to perceive the shadows of themselves and things projected onto an adjacent wall. He uses this allegory to explain the relationships between truth and illusion. If these men can be liberated from their chains they can see the world as it actually is, a world beyond the weaknesses of the human senses. The early twentiethcentury philosopher Charles Howard Hinton, who Duchamp may have read, takes this analogy and applies it to the fourth dimension. Hinton suggest that just as Plato “imagines a world which is lower than this world, in that shadow figures and shadow motions are its constituents; and to it he contrasts the real world. As the real world is to this shadow world, so is the higher world [the world above or four-dimensional world] to our world…As our world in three dimensions is to a shadow or plane

world, so is the higher world to our three-dimensional world.”19 If the shadows on the wall of the four-dimensional world are our objects then Hinton is suggesting that the idea of solid and unchanging things is an abstraction (which of course we know from high school physics and chemistry classes, all things are an accumulation of particles of matter). In our world there is not the fourdimensional thickness, the addition of time and space, which renders a thing multiple and transitory, a thing that is both inside and outside at the same time, both in one space and in another. The fourth dimension is the realm of shape shifters who accept that nothing that appears solid is fixed. Beyond acceptance they live it, a space of constant transmutation and reorganization.

Mistakes, Shock and After Effects While transcribing a quote by Nietzsche I place my hands in the wrong position on the keyboard, just one letter off. When I finish and look up, I am shocked to find that it is complete nonsense. It is so illegible it seems absurd that by a slight shift of hands such incomprehensible words could have been produced.

Lkfgoemlodmotoj feam foomwet dodfdes kjl promalyl dffojyr givn uer thei nith eopmoienfi.

Yet they are my words, I made them, and here they are talking back to me but in a completely foreign Language. This is a moment of shock, of horror, which only a mistake, an accident or an error makes visible. Like a drunk confronted with the destruction from the night before, I ask myself, who made that, not me,

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how could I have done that? It is clearly an event, which seems to occur outside the subject and therefore is alien and alarming. An event constructed by some disembodied actor playing the part of my hands, but severed from the nerve channels to my brain like Thing from the Addams Family.

Mistakes are important. It was, after all, a mistake or game lost, which led the Learned Man’s to lose his shadow. Duchamp too was fond of mistakes, errors or the uncertainty of chance operations.When they occurred he often chose to claim them as his work and sometimes, in the case of The Large Glass20, they were almost claimed for him. While lecturing or watching his students write, Amalfitano also experiences a series of errors. He draws a series of almost unconscious philosophical diagrams and

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afterwards, is completely unable to decipher his own work. He treats them as though they were made by someone else, or some other part of his psyche and begins to suspect he is loosing his mind.

Mistakes or chance indicate the unknown, the other, what lies beyond the perfection of appearance, or the chaos that stands next to order. They are intrinsic to everyday life, the destiny of things to breakdown. Perhaps this materialization of disorder and fracture suggests the fluctuations of objects in the fourth dimension or events that occur within The Real, in the realm of the shadow. They are breaks with human linearity and these moments requires attention. When things malfunction we are forced to investigate what is occurring in front of us, to consider the malfunctions for what they are. And what are these errors if not marks, inscription or signatures of some unknown? What are they? They are the after effects of the shadow.

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1 Roberto Bolaño, 2666, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: Picador, 2009) 121 2 Jean Baudrillard, Seductions, trans. Brian Singer ( Montréal: New World Perspectives, 1990) 168 3 ibid 4 Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. lain Hamilton Grant (London: Sage Publications, 1993) 142 5 Kenneth Branagh, Director, Frankenstein, 1994 6 Karl Marx, “Estranged Labour” in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Mulligan (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959) http://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm . My brackets.

7 Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. lain Hamilton Grant (London: Sage Publications, 1993) 140 8 Alenka Zupancic, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two, (Cambridge: MIT Press 2003) 24 9 ibid 25 10 Part Object Part Sculpture, Wexner Center for the Arts (2005) curated by Helen Molesworth 11 Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp, appearance stripped bare, trans. Rachel Phillips and Donald Gardner (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1990) 22 12 ibid 23-24 13 Roberto Bolaño, 2666, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: Picador, 2009) 195 14 ibid 210 15 Mario Perniola, Art and It’s Shadow, trans. Massimo Verdicchio (London: Continuum 2004) 6 16 Shadows of Readymades and Tu m’ both from 1918, presenting most prominently the shadow of the Porte Chapeau or hat rack and Sculpture de Voyage (1918) or sculpture for traveling, and a corner of the Bicycle Wheel (1913).

17 Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, (Paris: Editions Pierre Belfond 1967, English Translation 1971 Thames and Hudson) 40 18 Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp, appearance stripped bare, trans. Rachel Phillips and Donald Gardner (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1990) 19 Charles Howard Hinton, Fourth Dimension (London: George Allen & co., ltd., 1912) 3-4, My brackets.

20 The Large Glass or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 1915-23, was cracked in 1926 when it was moved from a collector’s home to an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. Duchamp described the work as “one hundred times better with the cracks.” Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, (Paris: Editions Pierre Belfond 1967, English Translation 1971 Thames and Hudson) 75

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Stephanie Bailey

Sharon Hayes, From in the Near Future, 2005, image courtesy of Art Tattler

A Word in Common “There has been a constant search for a term to describe a human being in the widest sense.”

--G.L Brook,Words in Everyday Life1 A lot has been said about ‘the commons’, often defined as natural resources managed and distributed in common, as outlined in Elinor Ostrom’s 1990 Nobel Prize winning publication On Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. In the text, Ostrom investigates sustainable practices in the governance of common pool resources – fisheries, water basins, irrigation systems – that works against a popular “presumption that an external Leviathan is necessary to avoid tragedies of the commons [which lead] to [the] recommendation that central governments control most natural resource systems.”2 Ostrom’s text was in part a reaction to Garrett Hardin’s influential 1968 essay, The Tragedy of the Commons, in which Hardin observes “[Thomas] Hobbe’s parable of man in a state of nature [as] a prototype of the [comCC + 52

mons tragedy]: Men seek their own good and end up fighting one another.”3 The notion that man, in the governance of shared resources by a central power, needs to be protected from self-interest – Thomas Hobbe’s Leviathan or social contract – is something Ostrom sought to overcome in her text. Ostrom used the inshore fishery at Alanya, Turkey, as an example of a common pool resource organised as a managed territory: fishing sites are allotted to local fishermen using guidelines based on the fair and equal distribution of fishing grounds designed by the fishermen themselves. It is a map of sorts that defines the fishing grounds as a site of constant negotiation managed according to the needs of the stakeholders existing within it, a view of the commons that is closer to Lewis Hyde’s own reading of a “A true commons [as] a stinted thing.” As Hyde wrote: “What Hardin describes is not a commons at all but what is nowadays called an unmanaged common pool resource.”4 Indeed, for Hyde, one of the greatest misconceptions is that the commons is a free-for-all. Reading the evolution of the commons through land distribution in the Middle Ages – when villagers held collective rights to common lands – Hyde explains how historically, the commons and markets were managed to suit social and moral ends, where “no one was left to follow his or her own ends without regard for the group.” Hyde recounts historian E.P Thompson’s citing of a 1768 pamphlet emphatically protesting against the supposed liberty of every farmer to do what he likes, stating that this would be a ‘natural’ rather than ‘civil’ liberty.5 As Hyde wrote: “To these eighteenth century eyes, a stinted market, one constrained by moral concerns, is a social market, while a wholly free market operating without limits is savage.”6 Such tensions between ‘civil’ freedom and ‘savage’ freedom are also present in the management of the cultural or information commons. As Michael Hardt points out, there is a tendency to take information, cultural products and codes as “quasi-natural or at least given”, like natural resources. Thus, the same issues of control seep into the management of such resources.

In these cases, notes Hardt, the commons function as “a critique of how assigning property rights to immaterial goods prevent them from being shared.”7 This view feeds into the debates on the Creative Commons and online file sharing, now under threat by increasing In-

ternet legislation. And yet, as Brad Lichtenstein notes, the cultural commons are first and foremost something that is created together, and secondly a space that creatively “embraces values like sharing, community and stewardship as opposed to privatization, enclosure and exploitation.”8 Here, we see the drive to horizontally manage cultural or information commons in a way that reflects Ostrom’s example of Alanya’s inshore fishery. In this sense, management of common resources, from water we drink to information we transmit via the Internet, creates an image of the commons as a materially or immaterially defined territory upon which terms of agreement and common modes of being are negotiated and established. This could include the management of energy resources in physical territories, to social media networks, to national institutions, to the ownership of publicly funded artworks, and even to the management of an ideology, from Socialism, Communism, and Democracy. If that is the case, let us consider Kareem Rizk’s 2010 work, YOU ARE FREE NO. 5. The statement comes with a disclaimer, ‘*terms and conditions apply’, suggesting either a civil contract – a stinted freedom managed in common – or a savage freedom: an autonomous, unhinged, capitalist state of being, the type of individualist freedom that Hobbe’s Leviathan was formulated to constrain.

At this point, Rizk’s sign becomes a common of sorts, a space of contention – a territory – that echoes Hardt’s interpretation of Jacques Ranciere’s definition of the common (le commun): “The common, of course, is not the realm of sameness or indifference. It is the scene of encounter of social and political differences, at times characterized by agreement and at others antagonism, at times composing political bodies and at others decomposing them.”9 Indeed, when it comes to Rizk’s statement, the question is this: under whose terms and conditions are we free? Under what parameters is freedom defined?

What does it mean to be free and who could describe the true meaning of freedom? Even the very act of defining freedom begs the question: to whom does our freedom belong?

For Jean-Paul Sartre, one aspect of freedom is that it is a metaphysical absolute – something that is inherent

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Hank Willis Thomas, I am a Man, 2009, image courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery

in all of us, preceding even essence. His description of intentional action illustrates the act of being free as a moment of toil: “It is strange that philosophers have been able to argue endlessly about determinism and freewill, to cite examples in favor of one or the other thesis without ever attempting first to make explicit the structures contained in the very idea of action. The concept of an act contains, in fact, numerous subordinate notions which we shall have to organize and arrange in a hierarchy: to act is to modify the shape of the world; it is to arrange means in view of an end; it is to produce an organized instrumental complex such that by a series of concatenations and connections the modifications throughout the whole series finally produces an anticipated result. But this is not what is important for us here. We should observe that an action on principle is intentional.”10 The description shows action to be a moment of organization, even management: a moment one enters the role of craftsman in the arrangement, even modification of the world’s shape. This description recalls 20th Century American poet and social activist Langston

Hughes, who was closely associated with the Harlem Renaissance. In the poem, Freedom’s Plow, America is identified as a land created in common, driven by a dream nourished in common. Hughes writes that from free hands, slave hands, adventurous hands to indentured hands, “All these hands made America,” as he implores readers to be patient for the day that everyone in America is free. The land – a natural resource – becomes a metaphor for the freedom Hughes fought for, both for himself, and for those who sought such an existence in a land that promised to provide it. Here, America is the representation of an immaterial commons– the very idea of freedom itself, as shaped by the hands that built it.

Freedom’s Plow recalls the opening work in Glenn Ligon’s solo show, America, at the Whitney Museum in 2011: Hands, 1996, a screen-print of a photograph taken from the 1995 Million Man March against wage and employment disparities between black and white Americans and lack of black representation in the US government’s political agenda. The hands recall those who worked to build America, hands that carry a history wrought with tension between master and slave, linking to another work included in the show, a sign, I

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AM A MAN, 1988, referencing a protest sign used in a 1968 strike by African American sanitation workers in Memphis. The two works suggest an imbalance– an inequality that recalls, as Sartre would describe it, an instance in a society when one class deprives members of another class their freedom in order to simulate their own.11 It is what one might call a mismanaged commons –one that is not managed in accordance to moral or social interests.

And what Ligon suggests in the two works, is that such mismanagement of such common resources as equality and liberty, prevails in society defined by the concept of America, a hierarchy of governance that extends onto gender. Consider the image of Sharon Hayes holding the ‘I AM A MAN’ sign in New York City in 2005 performance, From In the Near Future. The statement, ‘I am a man’, like Rizk’s, ‘you are free’, becomes a place upon which politics might be deconstructed and reformed, as outlined in Hardt’s reading of Ranciere’s definition of the common. Such loaded statements force individuals to contemplate the meaning of such given notions of manhood and freedom within their own subjective experience of the contemporary status quo. Is a woman a man? Am I free? The signs expose words as a territory in their own right, open to multiple claims of

ownership, belonging and ultimately, definition.

If that is the case, could words and their definitions be seen as common resources that must be managed and distributed in common, too? As G.L Brook notes: “Words are conventional symbols [that] bear [] the meaning which the speakers of a language have at any given time tacitly agreed to assign to it.”12 In other words, to form notions, build meaning, and construct realities based on ideas, a general consensus is required that would enable the establishment of such notions in practice. Thinking back to Ostrom’s use of the inshore fishery at Alanya as an example of the spatial (or territorial) distribution of the commons organised collectively, and the idea of common word definitions as moments of consensus, could a word or a concept such as freedom thus require the same management, care, and protection as a natural commons?

Here, Steve Colbert’s definition of “wikiality” proves useful. Defined as a reality that becomes truth if enough people agree with a notion and define it, usually via a Wikipedia-like system, “wikiality” is a 21st century “reality as determined by general [online] consensus.”13 If so, what kind of reality is unfolding in a 21st Century where material and immaterial resources are either

Glenn Ligon, Hands, 1996 and I Am a Man, 1988, image courtesy of Regen Street Projects

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Kareem Rizk,YOU ARE FREE, NO.5, 2011, image courtesy of Phonebooth Gallery

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concentrated in or are falling into the hands of the few? As Massimo De Angelis noted in an interview with De Archtectkur for E-flux: “Especially against the background of the many crises that we are facing today—starting from the recent global economic crisis, and moving to the energy and food crises, and the associated environmental crisis— thinking and practicing the commons becomes particularly urgent.”14 This urgency extends into the general question of what is and should be recognised as common today. In that discussion, let us not forget to include the concept of freedom, and how it is (collectively) defined, distributed and managed in common.

1 Brook, G.L. Words in Everyday Life (1981). London: Macmillan, 85 2 Ostrom, E. On Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (1990). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 9 3 Ostrom, E. On Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (1990). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3 4 Hyde, L. Common as Air: Revolution, Art, Ownership (2010). New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc, 35 5 Ibid. 36 6 Ibid. 36 7 Hardt, M. On Production and Distribution of the Common.

A Few Questions of the Artist. Courtesy of Foundation Art and Public Space: http://classic.skor.nl/article-4111-en.html 8 Lichtenstein, B. Presentation at the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture conference: http://www.namac.org/ node/9207 9 Hardt, M. On Production and Distribution of the Common.

A Few Questions of the Artist. Courtesy of Foundation Art and Public Space: http://classic.skor.nl/article-4111-en.html 10 Sartre, J-P. (tr.) Barnes, H.T. Being and Nothingness (1984).

New York: Washington Square Press, 589 11 “...exploitation of man by man . . . characterized by the fact that one class deprives the members of another class of their freedom” (Notebooks, 562, courtesy of Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: http://www.iep.utm.edu/sartre-p/) 12 Brook, G.L. Words in Everyday Life (1981). London: Macmillan, 3 13 Urban Dictionary: Wikiality: http://www.urbandictionary. com/define.php?term=wikiality 14 An Architektur, On the Commons: A Public Interview with Massimo De Angelis and Stavros Stavrides (July, 2010).

E-flux Journal #17. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/on-thecommons-a-public-interview-with-massimo-de-angelis-andstavros-stavrides/ CC + 57

With A Name Like Yours, You Might Be Any Shape Part I: Between Intervention and Denial.

Unknown Artist, A Meeting in Lupe Marìn’s Apartment in in 1938: not identified man, Frida, Jacqueline, André Breton, Lupe, Diego, and Lya Cardoza

On October 11th, Laura Wollen* wrote to her friend, fellow artist Alex S.: (...) After an early and rude awakening by the construction workers on Santa Fe Ave we decided to go on a road trip and ended up in a weird part of Orange County. It consists of a few streets, laid out perfectly in a grid, two or three diners, and a gigantic university campus. We went to see a show there that left me puzzled, one piece in particular sparked quite a few questions. It was a series of group portraits of famous and not so famous artists, nothing special at first glance, black and white photographs, maybe shot in medium format (9 x 14?) with bland, black frames, hung on the wall left of the entrance I recognized some of them; the one depicting Mexican and French Surrealists gathering at Lupe Marin’s in the 1930’s or 40’s, and “The Irascibles” at Betty Parsons from the 1950’s. Others were new for me, this amazing shot titled “Cunningham’s World Tour” (early 60’s) with Cunningham and his friends standing behind a helicopter prop, Rauschenberg and Stockhausen pushing from below to help it “take off”. Hilarious!! Or a really strange and calm shot of the Velvet Underground at The Factory (late 60’s I guess,

including my dear Stephen Shore at the beginning of his career. What a smart move to become the in-house photographer of the whole crew, wasn’t it?!). After staring at the portraits for a while a detail caught my eye: One particular guy appeared in all of these portraits! Sitting beside Frida Kahlo, intensely listening to André Breton, standing more ghostlike next to William Baziotes, hands in his pockets, looking all dapper in a dark suite; Smiling, excitedly next to David Reed in the plane prop, and then re-appearing behind Lou Reed staring back at the spectator in slight amusement. Even though this unknown man blended extremely well into his famous “backdrops” he remained recognizable due to the serial structure of the piece. His identity was not revealed, as the exhibition text referred to him simply as a “not-identified man.”

But there was another thing that remained in the dark; the actual authorship of this piece as the walltext stated “Unknown Artist” as the series’ creator. Now I do know that some of these pictures were shot by quite famous photographers so I could immediately tell this was a scam, or

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Unknown Artist, Cunningham world tour 1964: (above, from left to right) Carolyn Brown, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, not identified woman, David Tudor, not identified man; (below) Steve Paxton, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Robert Rauschenberg

in this context a gesture of re-appropriation. The Unknown artist and the not-identified became one, and I don’t know if the artist intended this (but do I care?). He oscillated between a real person with a specific physiognomy, and the literal stand-in for every other unidentified and unknown artist in history. This struck me as quite an unusual move to direct attention to one’s multiple appearances in time while retaining anonymity and thereby defying all desires that circulate around authorship, identity, the artist as genius-persona, and the artist’s signature which guarantees the highly-valued original. And speaking of temporality: it seemed as if there were different layers of time conflated in this piece, the decades in which the pictures were taken, the time of producing the actual piece and finally there is the here and now of the actual spectator who has to decipher the perfect “punctum,” a simultaneous presence, and is thereby thrown back into her own contemporaneity.

A simple joke at first glance, the never-aging face of an omnipresent stranger. But the longer I thought about it, the work became more and more complex and far from only presenting a gesture to align and identify with these famous artists. The insertions also created a dilemma whereby belonging to these “groups” of artists could only be achieved by actually erasing another known person. And there was also an unidentified woman in the Cunningham photo which pointed to the whole gender aspect of this identity-game (you

remember Virginia Woolf’s “Anonymous was a woman” that Miram [sic!] used as festival-catalog title?). (…)

So of course this sparked questions about the culture of (re)appropriation. Can the insertion into history only work at the expense of another person? Does this point to the capitalist notion of an easily replaceable workforce (or am I overinterpreting it)? How do you claim a place (and time) for your work without playing the game of originality that is nothing but restricting? And you know I have been asking myself these questions for a while now. I failed in my attempts to work with them when I actively pursued my career as an artist, somehow only succeeding when I gave it up to do something else. It seemed impossible for me back then to make work and claim my status as an artist without surrendering to the market and institutionalized concepts of individualism.

After I dropped out the stakes got even higher, economic crises, market bubbles, a billion dollar diamond-encrusted skull … but at the same time the boundaries between “low “and “high”, “pro” and “anti” became more blurred. Alliances and practices became less dogmatic, allowing artists nowadays to confuse, play and redefine various assumptions about artistic production without giving up their integrity. What does this mean?

I consider it as ethics, the ethics of living the “good or the beautiful life” as Mayakovsky proclaimed 100 years ago, or the “right life” (to try Adorno once again). Or like the female voice-over says

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Unknown Artist, From left to right: Nico, Gerard, Maureen Tucker, Danny Williams, Sterling; second row: Stephen Shore, Andy, Lou Reed, not identified man; on top: John Cale

in the Bernadette Corporation video, also in the show, “We want the chaos of our lives!” (It’s from 2003. Remember, we saw it at their solo-show at The Hammer!)? This piece, by the way, represented an interesting antithesis to the photos because this unidentified woman was speaking with the reverse effect! Being already part of the group (the corporation) she defied her identification as an immediate gesture of protest.

The strategies laid out in the piece (and throughout the show) involved simultaneously appearing and disappearing, the multiplication of identity, loosing oneself in some sort of collectivity, presenting yourself as the perfect foil for various projections of desire (including your own), and masquerades and tricks (the Duchamp effect, a bit too self-evident for a woman, isn’t it?). For me, the group photos also seemed to provide a guide or meta-text for the exhibition itself. As I walked through and looked at the objects again a whole new configuration of meaning and different potentiality presented itself. It was like looking at these optical illusions or ambiguous figures. After discovering both figures in a drawing, you can’t reduce the signifiers anymore; you inevitably end up seeing two faces or forms. So I was not exactly sure what to make of Donelle Woolford’s sculptures or reliefs in this context. They are great assemblages, clearly come from a cubist lineage with their mixture of wood and cheap cardboard, and look like gigantic puzzles to train toddler’s motoric skills. But I am sure there was something

else going on. Maybe she collaborated with one of the other artists in the show? Did she pose for one of Zoe’s series? What is the denotational surplus of Belgian surrealist Justine Frank’s psychedelic paintings? The close spatial proximity to Rosen’s video confessions, or another more subtle confusion of object and subject? You know from my history that I have serious doubts about collectivity and collaborations but ideologically they are the only refuges against individualization and as such, they MUST be defended!

Sorry Alex, I know this sounds a little dense and overly ornamental but I haven’t seen a show in a while and got carried away … But I will call you soon and we can chat more using “the vernacular”.

Love, Laura Edited by Claudia Slanar

* Laura Wollen is an ex-performance artist who was part of the Feminist Art Program at CalArts from 197173. She decided to drop out of the art world not much later and currently lives at an undisclosed residency in Europe, occasionally publishing on performance art and edible gardens.

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With A Name Like Yours, You Might Be Any Shape Part I: Between Intervention and Denial.

Roee Rosen, The Confessions of Roee Rosen, 2008; Stills, Courtesy the artists.

Georgia Holz Art history and the art market have always been and still are dominated by a desire for names and their related (mostly male) artistic subjects as they still guarantee authorship and authenticity, and serve commercializing and profit oriented strategies.

The exhibition With A Name Like Yours You Might Be Any Shape, at UC Irvine’s Contemporary Art Center gallery suggests to critically address these mechanisms through the question of authorship or more precisely, by the absence thereof. But how can such considerations be transferred into an exhibition format without reproducing similar desires for an institutionalized art production and its habitual setups? The absence of artists’ biographies in the press release seems to be a first strategical hint at these considerations, as well as the list of participating artists, which includes not only well-established positions like Bernadette Corporation, Roee Rosen, and Claire Fontaine, the pseudonym of a Paris-based artist collective that adopted the name from a brand of French notebooks, but also “The Unknown Artist”. At this point, one could suspiciously ask which names are real and which are fabrications? Does Roee Rosen exist at all or is it just another pseudonym?

Furthermore, neither within the exhibition’s display nor on its labels is any information given as to which work is affiliated with which artist, and this leaves one puzzled again. It is precisely these uncertainties, that intend to shed light on the (artistic and curatorial) concerns of claiming pseudonyms, alter egos and inventing fictional artists as strategies to question and challenge traditional notions of authorship. A problematic task, to be sure, which seems to be approached primarily through questions like the following; “Are current artistic strategies to contest authenticity and to form collective authorship solely intended to confuse audiences and art dealers alike, or a means to resist the post-Fordist pressures of individualization”? (quoted from the press-release) Two positions most convincingly emphasize the show’s theoretical approach while illustrating the broad range of artistic strategies represented.

First is Roee Rosen, the Israeli art scene’s enfant terrible well known for inventing a cast of fictitious artist personae. He not only creates “their” artworks and books but organizes shows and even writes reviews for his protégés. Consequently,

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Roee Rosen, The Confessions of Roee Rosen, 2008; Stills, Courtesy the artists.

confessions of his roguish tricks and authorial violations seem to be long overdue. But the video Confessions of Roee Rosen will disappoint all those keen on watching a complete plea of guilt or a scandalous autobiography. Instead of the artist himself, three undocumented female workers in Israel perform the first-person narrative in Hebrew. Because they don’t actually speak Hebrew they are forced to read the phonetic transcription from a teleprompter, stuttering, with a visible lack of confidence. Their act of speech is thereby rendered embarrassing, its structure similar to the utterances of someone who is possessed. It remains unclear if the infamous anecdotes and erotic episodes are real or belong to the realm of fantasy. However they are mixed with explosive comments on politics in Israel and stories from the precarious everyday life of the illegalized immigrants.

A moral dilemma is revealed by the artist’s decision not to inform the performers about the actual content of their parts as it strips them of agency, turning them into victims again. In this context, it is the confession itself that represents the actual misdemeanor the artist could be considered guilty of. In his opening manifesto Roee Rosen1 states, “Those of you who heard of me know that I have built my entire career on lies, scandals, obscene pictures, fake identities. I have pretended not to be myself.” Rosen not only blurs the boundaries between documentation and fiction, truth and lie but also those between the various identities that are performed.

Bernadette Corporation, an anonymous international group of artists founded in1994, provides the second central position of the show. Up to this point their interventions have mostly critiqued our globalized culture in which identity is constructed and replaced by consumerism and branding.

Amongst their various activities and productions they have established an underground fashion label that gained cult-status in the late 90s. They have collectively written the novel Reena Spaulings (2005) and made numerous videos starring a mixed “in-crowd” from Sémiotexte founder Sylvère Lotringer to actress Chloe Sévigny. The latter also appears in the video Get Rid of Yourself from 2003 that gained relevance again in the light of last year‘s Arab Spring protests and the current Occupy movement. In this “anti-documentary,” footage from the 2001 G8 protest in Genua and interviews with members of the Black Bloc Anarchist Group are interwoven with the anti-narrative strand of a series of “screen tests” of Chloe Sévigny rehearsing protestors’ statements, and philosopher Werner von Delmont’s (an alter ego of artist Stephan Dillemuth) comments on the protests’ aftermath.

For Bernadette Corporation the video is a cinema-excerpt that associates itself with the burgeoning forms of resistance of the anti-globalization movement while trying to challenge its own form as filmic document. Through the aesthetic of cheaply made home video and sound effects the medium is foregrounded, which points to the collective, anonymous status of the authors; a

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strategy that has become crucial in the realm of political protest.

“Getting rid of yourself” thereby stands as a political and aesthetic suggestion which provides a reading for the whole show. These practices are a means to obtain sovereignty in the artistic and socio-political fields, not merely indicators of a lack of power. It seems to be time for a positivistic reconsideration of the unstable, shifting subject that allows for doubts and questioning.

Or to quote Bernadette Corporation again: “They say, another world is possible. But am I another world? Am I possible”?

Translation from German by Claudia Slanar and Seth Weiner

Unknown Artist, The Irascibles at Betty Parsons Gallery, New York City, 1951

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Claudia Slanar and Gabby Messineo performing Laura Wollen’s A Gesture, 2011. Photo: Seth Lower

Laura Wollen, A Gesture (Jackson Pollock Series), 1968

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Stephanie Bailey is a writer, artist and educator who divides her time between the UK and Greece, while she undertakes an MA in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths College, London, while teaching concurrently on the Foundation Diploma in Art and Design at Doukas Education, Athens. As a writer, her work has appeared in Art Papers, Aesthetica, Art Forum online, Frieze, Naked Punch as well as LEAP and Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. Rémi Bragard lives and work in Marseille, France. http://www.polymorphe.fr Lauren Currie is an artist based in Glasgow. Recent exhibitions include You aren’t anything, you are everything, the duchy, Glasgow 2012; Who Would You Rather? Intermedia, CCA Glasgow 2011; PULL The Old Hairdressers, Glasgow 2011; and a forthcoming exhibition and ongoing collaborative project with artist Lauren Gault, The Motorcycle Showroom, Bristol September 2012. Recent publications include The Skin It’s In, Garageland Paint 2012 and To Have & To Hold, Kismet Projects 2011. Lauren Currie is also co-founder and director of the duchy, a non-profit gallery and project space based in Glasgow.

Mara Ferreri. Researcher and writer. After studying art theory, fell in love with geographical thinking and became a PhD candidate at the School of Geography (Queen Mary, University of London). Currently writing a thesis on the time-space of pop-up art projects in London and trying to grapple with the political implications of work and life precarity for the production of contemporary urban spaces.

Elea Himmelsbach is an independent researcher and curator based in London. She holds an MA in Media Arts Philosophy and Practice from the University of Greenwich and an MFA Curating from Goldsmiths College. She has travelled widely and was a lecturer at the Department of Applied Arts and Design at Boxhill College, Kuwait. Most recently she curated the exhibition: ‘bAsel HimBeer Marmelade 88888888’ with the artist duo boyleANDshaw at Basel, Switzerland.

Georgia Holz is an Assistant Curator at the Generali Foundation and works independently as a writer and curator based in Vienna. She holds an MA in Art History from the University of Vienna.

Patrick Hunt lives and work in Stanford, USA. http://www.patrickhunt.net/ Antje Majewski is an artist, working in Berlin. Her work involves painting, video, performances and texts; and she likes to collaborate with others. Her show “The World of Gimel” in Kunshaus Graz in autumn 2011 focused on our relationship to objects. One of the objects exhibited being the “Steel Egg” (also called “Imperial Chicken Egg”) by the legendary Polish conceptual artist Pawel Freisler. The ‘Steel Egg’ had also been central to a performance with Agnieszka Polska, a series of photos, an extensive email exchange (reprinted in the exhibition catalogue) and other events, not all

of them made public.

Anthony Marcellini is an artist, curator and writer. His practice is centered on exploring the ways that things/objects/events act in the social field outside clearly defined conceptions. He explores an expanded notion of the social by examining the ways that words, objects, gestures, people, images, text, films and actions shift our conceptions and reinscribe the world, acting as agents or things-with-power. His work has been shown at Apex Art, New York City (2002), Kunsthall Fridericianum, Kassel (2003), Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York City (2004), Deitch Projects, New York City (2004), Etc. Galerie, Prague (2010), Guest Projects, London (2011), Sequences Art Festival, Reykjavik (2011). And he has held residencies at Sparwasser HQ, Berlin (2010) and the Valand Centre for Artistic Research, Gothenburg (2012).

Adeena Mey is a critic and researcher. He has an MA in Aural and Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths College, University of London and an MA in Sociology/Anthopology from the University of Lausanne. Currently, he works for the research project “Swiss Film Experiments” based at the Zurich University of the Arts and the University of Lausanne. In this context he researches the history of experimental and artist’s film and has recently co-organised “Hors-Cadre” colloquium/screenings at the Swiss Film Archives (2012). Publications include a co-edited volume (with François Bovier) on expanded cinema for the film studies journal Décadrages (2012 forthcoming) and Christian Marclay’s Christmas Tales (Helvetic Centre Editions, 2010). “He gathers material on contemporary art in Cambodia and from its diaspora at http://cambodiacontemporary.tumblr Gaelle Obiegly was born in France in 1971. She lives in Paris, writes fictions.

Claudia Slanar is an experimental scholar, curator, and writer who currently lives in Los Angeles. She holds an MA in Aesthetics and Politics as well as an MFA in Creative Writing from the California Institute of the Arts. Her projects have included exhibitions, publications and performances, among the most recent ones: James Benning, Austrian Filmmuseum, 2007; Womangarden, Museum of Jurassic Technology, L.A. 2010; Golden Crest Retirement Tours/Art in the Parking Space, (curated by Warren Neidich/Elena Bajo) L.A. 2012; and the upcoming With a name like yours, you might be any shape, (w. Georgia Holz) CAC gallery, Irvine, 2012. She has lectured on film, video and contemporary art and has been part of several collaborative projects and artist groups, the most recent one being Los Angeles-based Untitled Collective.

Pierre Weiss was born in Belgium in 1950 and grew up mostly in Vienna. He lives in Paris. In the last thirty years, he had many shows in European galleries and an exhibition in the museum of modern art in Paris. His last show, in April 2012, took place in “le musée imaginaire de Catherine Millet”, musée du Louvre, Paris.