Genealogies; Frameworks for Exchange

06/05/11—04/06/11 Genealogies; Frameworks for Exchange Edited by Alex Martinis Roe & Gavin Murphy

Alex Martinis Roe Affirmations: The Scene Aluminium and glass, 1.8 Ă— 1.8 Ă— 1m, 2010

On the edge of untranscribable intimacy Thoughts for Alex Alex Martinis Roe has a propensity for philosophical thought. She gravitates to it like a magnet and then pushes and pulls at its informing forces on her art practice in the attempt to make it un-stuck and more palpable at a distance. By inviting the reader and writer to reverse roles and exchange the communicative acts of transmission and reception, Alex presents propositions for tracking the ‘unseen’, inter-personal connections latent within the textual.

I’ve recently begun to read Roland Barthes The Pleasure of the Text. His concentrative paragraphs propose that an eroticism forms between printed words and their reading. He suggests the importance of slowly revising and enveloping words so that they are lived with and become apart of one’s emotional life. The transference of meaning between text and reception is a constant, ‘erotic’ unknown. To understand this space is to signal the distance that compels us to interpret. Alex is working within this dynamic of distance – which the frame of art so aptly articulates – to question whether it is possible to bridge the disconnect, and give form – and in turn formalise – the space of the inter-subjective. Further, Alex is asking what can be constructed out of this act of interpellation and its dissemination. Previous projects have involved the viewer in assembling an exhibition display (Affirmations, Light Projects, Melbourne 2010), participatory writing exercises (Free Associations, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne 2010) and the accumulative transcriptions of personal conversations with the artist modelled on the non-writing works of artist Hanne Darboven (Encounters: Conversation in Practice, Limbus Europae, Berlin 2010). Throughout, Alex has been working with ‘feedback’ as material, and positioning its mirroring effects – distortions and absences of collective meaning, illuminations and deepening connections with the self – on display.

Alex’s work has a basis in the thinking of Luce Irigaray, a philosopher determined to re-think subjectivity as conditioned by the inter-subjective (informed by relating to one another’s difference, described as the exchange between the masculine and the feminine). Irigaray takes the fable of Alice in Wonderland’s journey to model the transitional space occupied by the feminine unconscious – the personal

and the collective – to reinvent a position from which to “speak herself”. Irigaray’s Alice reflects: ‘So either I don’t have any ‘self’ or else I have a multitude of ‘selves’ appropriated by them, for them, according to their desires’. To avoid the fixed identity woman is given through the patriarchal lens, Irigaray suggests that ‘the articulation of the reality of my sex is impossible in discourse, then women must learn to speak through the cracks in the mirror as Alice did, to riddle the proper meanings of words, in order to suggest the feminine unconscious which language attempts to repress’1.

Barthes speaks of becoming aware of the necessary edge of rupture in any text; ‘a means of evaluating the works of our modernity: their value would proceed from their duplicity. By which it must be understood that they always have two edges. The subversive edge may seem privileged because it is the edge of violence; but it is not violence which affects pleasure, nor is it destruction which interests it; what pleasure wants is the site of a loss, the seam, the cut, the deflation, the dissolve which seizes the subject in the midst of bliss. Culture thus recurs as an edge: in no matter what form’2.

For this project, Alex presents an invitation for two women to register the casual inflection of conversation as a way to see the self-mirrored and double. The exchange is hinged on reversing the power dynamic of writer-transmitter and reader-receiver, and this dynamic reveals the interconnectivity of knowledge (and of being). Further still, the work resides in the transcribed records that speak to another form of splintering again, one of recollection.

Irigrary proposes that the ‘seen’ is privileged over the ‘unseen’ in a masculine order, and suggests mimesis as a strategy to deconstruct and (re)discover a possible space for the feminine imaginary. Similarly Alex’s project is giving form to the ‘unseen’ and personal dialogues that constitute discourse. The form her work takes is not found in the presentation of an object as a placeholder of cultural value, but rather resides in the document. The inter-subjective space her work frames remains personal through a strategy of mimicking the archival record – printed words placed in libraries and recordings presented in the museum – to deter the possibility of getting close to, of ever really knowing, the encounter. Alex describes her project as travelling through ‘intertextual genealogies explored through inter-personal relations’; I wish to propose that her work is an exploration of intimacy; both as an imagined connection and as the actual yet untranscribable consequences of traversing subjectivities.

To give an image to this introduction (an interpretation presented on Alex’s project at a distance) I wish to offer a work of art from history that knowingly conveys these enfolding spaces of the inter-subjective, the eroticism of textual encounter and the propositional politic of the object as document. As a writer I return to this image with ‘pleasurable’ ambivalence.

1 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. C. Porter, Cornell University Press, New York, 1985.

2 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text. trans. Richard Mille. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975. p7.

Dialogue of Hands, elastic moebius band collaborative work by Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, 1966.

Please see above. It is the highly circulated document of Brazilian artists Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica performing Diálogo de Manos (Hand Dialogue) from 1966. The depicted wrists are linked by a möbius sculpture forged by Clark. The image is an intriguing document of a connection, and further, a punctum picture of intimacy. It depicts two right hands. This doubling implies both a mimesis and reliance on the other, and by being bound together, a silencing of function.

To read this image as a trace of biography is to weave a web of historical relationships on a moment where sculpture expanded its terms. Art history tells of Oiticica fusing Modern European geometric abstraction to Brazilian vernacular culture.

Together, Oiticica and Clark perused a disruption to the privileging of vision and metaphysical knowledge with ritualised knowledge, encoded in the body. Clark’s work was particularly interested in presenting a metaphor for women’s connectedness to others, and the self as being defined by the inter-subjective. This in turn challenged the traditional role of the viewer and the status of the art object, confronting the process in which art institutions determined the identity of the artist and the idea of authorship.

Clark used the möbius strip as a metaphor for an expanded notion of the art object as paradoxically without beginning or end. Reversible, continuous, limitless.

(Resonant of Irigrary’s words on femininity). Clark’s works had no intrinsic value in and of themselves; rather the implicit meaning of the work focused on how they were to be used and in their relation with the participant. She referred to these actionbased works as “propositions”, and as proposals, they presented a space to reflect on a Brazilian context as it was forging a political democracy and reconciling its own relationship to modernity.

Alex Martinis Roe Hic et Nunc encounter 10 minutes duration, 2009 (video still)

Looping the history of Hand Dialogue into the present of this project is to link the image of the möbius to the dialogical event that Alex instigates when she invites a conversation between two women-writer/readers of philosophy. Her project also has a politic – though not so much geographically bound. Significantly the context for these curated conversations is the intangible site of the internet. It is a space of temporality, and a place where intimacy is hyper reflexive. Alex is utilising the online capabilities of video conferencing as a way to image the mediated space of a personal exchange, and stresses the inter-personal, intangible, hyper-linked relations that underpin the construction of modalities, disciplines and dimensions of thought. Although these concepts are not related exclusively to technological approaches, the online environment can succinctly convey the paradox of the document as a text in the act of becoming. This, it seems, is her politic. By re-inserting feminist texts into the forum of contemporary art knowingly, Alex demonstrates the discourse. She sets up situations that perform the act of communication as an act of documentation, which in turn acknowledges that the text can only ever be a pre-text for, or a post-text of, aired relations.

To bring attention to the inter-subjective relations underlying textual genealogies, to indeed invite them into form, is inextricably tied to the development of aesthetics beyond the fixed immutable object. As Clark’s and Oiticica’s legacies poignantly illustrate the art work acts as a proposition to be received, enfolding the conceptual and perceptual, the material and immaterial, the embodied and the disembodied experience3. Alex’s transcriptions loop this pre-text once again with a potent feminist reform.

Laura Preston Wellington, New Zealand

3 Simone Osthoff, Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica: A Legacy of Interactivity and Participation for a Telematic Future http://www.leonardo.info/isast/spec.projects/osthoff/osthoff.html

03/02/11

Dear Luce Irigaray, I am writing to interest you in the project I mentioned in our phone conversation this morning. When we had lunch in London we briefly spoke about my project that was part of the Sexuate Subjects Conference programme. I am extending on this project for my next solo exhibition, to be held at Pallas Projects (a publicly-funded contemporary art gallery) in Dublin in April–May this year.

As an artist primarily concerned with relations between people, and the way these relations are both produced by and are productive of language, I have long held an interest in your work. I exhibit situation designs, conversation pieces and installations.

In this work, I try to allow the specificity of the relations between interlocutors (including “viewers”, participants and myself) and the spatio-temporal context of their encounter to negotiate the production and historicisation of the artwork.

I am currently researching modes of both opening up and directing ways in which genealogies of authorship are historicised. I am attempting to create transcripts of discursive exchange, which actively enter authorial genealogies into an archive that both directs and highlights its own means of production. In my recent and current projects I have been trying to design exhibition experiences of these transcripts, which are informed by formal modes of theoretical exchange and discourse, in a bid to both reconsider and reshape the activity of the art viewer.

For this project, I would like to facilitate a discursive exchange between yourself and Elizabeth Grosz, using a video conferencing software programme like Skype. I feel it is important, as your audience, to see engagements with your work directed not only toward future interlocutors, but also toward you. I would like to facilitate a discursive encounter, in which Grosz (who has already agreed to participate) presents some thoughts on genealogies to you, as a singular audience. After her initial address, I hope that the Skype format will enable you to respond and converse. I propose to record the video of this encounter between you, but not the sound. As the content of your address and the following dialogue would remain private, I hope that this would enable you to use language in ways that would be most useful and appropriate to the situation; so you don’t have to think about other audiences. I want to then publicly exhibit a projection of the Skype videos of yourself and Grosz at Pallas Projects. I hope that you would be willing to

comment afterward on your experience of the situation and perhaps some aspects of the content you shared, so that I can provide my audience with some context for the video of your encounter.

My interest in the use of video conferencing is manifold. Firstly, I think it is important to note, that I was present at a video lecture you gave at a Melbourne University Law School last year, and I was struck with the intimate quality of this format of embodied theoretical exchange. As someone who has also heard you speak in person, I further noted the significant difference the “live” video presentation produced in my engagement with the content of your speech. Furthermore, as an event which would always, already be video, I see particular relevance in exploring the “liveness” of Skype as archival material.

In short, the embodiment of theoretical production and reception, as it could be transcribed by video conferencing programmes, is something I would like to explore in both art and academic contexts.

For this exhibition in Dublin, I would like to produce an expanded transcript of this encounter between yourself and Grosz. By expanded, I mean that your comments and the embodied visual recording of your exchange would be encountered as a kind of spatial and temporal choreography, allowing engagement and reflection on different aspects of your affect upon one another during the exchange. The exhibition will then be split across a library exhibition context and the Pallas Projects gallery.

I hope very much that you are interested in my proposal, and that you also see it as an initial framework very much open for negotiation and further discussion.

With very best regards,

Alex Martinis Roe Berlin, Germany

22/04/11

This conversation was strange and intense for several reasons. Firstly there was the awkwardness of Skype, the weird combination of immediacy and distance. Not to mention its intrinsic lack of alignment, which gave rise to delays that interrupted the spontaneity of the conversation and lead to numerous apologies for ill-timed interjections. Then there were the orchestrated arrangements of the exchange – the anticipation built into the occasion because it was for Alex’s project with its explicit expectations. And finally, what was most exciting, the exchange itself. This I’m sure was due to Tamsin’s generosity. The same generosity present in her writing, in the way she not only elucidates the work of Irigaray and Deleuze, but also opens up a discussion between their ideas. These can be such obscure ideas, and in venturing into the terrain of their associations and differences Tamsin embraces their formless potential.

In the same way she engaged in the formlessness of our conversation – generously improvising responses and exploring potential strands. I was particularly interested in the connections Tamsin explores in her writing between Irigaray’s evocation of a sensible transcendental, with its emphasis on touch and the world’s proximity, and Deleuze’s notion of becoming-imperceptible, which delineates various engagements with nonpersonal forces. Both these approaches to an outside or virtual frustrate the limits of thought, and seem to suggest an irrecuperable exteriority that is nonetheless immanent.

This is an exteriority I have tried to argue is encountered in experimental artworks as an effect of the work of their materiality, where the disordering effects of material relations produce a space of un-knowing that confounds interpretative finality. By risking habitual ways of being in the world to experiment these artworks make implicit previously unrealized potential, which can open up new ways of relating, thinking or speaking. In a sense this is what became obvious through the conversation that Alex had orchestrated, in that it made explicit the effects of an exchange between writing and reading.

Terri Bird Melbourne, Australia

05/04/11

I sat myself down between walking my dog and picking up my nine-year-old daughter to meet someone that lived halfway around the world. Switching from home-mode to the conceptual landscape I inhabit when thinking about my writing in relation to someone I had yet to meet was a little odd. I think of writing as putting a vector of force into the world that will, hopefully, touch someone in a way that can spark off thoughts and actions that will be somehow helpful. Philosophy has been both an adventure and a consolation to me. I was intrigued to meet one of those faceless readers that had maybe been touched in some way by my work in the way that I had been touched by the work of others.

I was relieved that I was immediately comfortable talking with Terri. Although I couldn’t pretend to know where our interests converged or how much of our conceptual landscapes overlapped, what mattered more to me was that we were able to find a few moments of contact. I found it interesting that Terri had had both Elizabeth Grosz and Claire Colebrook as teachers. Thinkers I had come to know on paper, she had learned from in person. And then my intersection with their ideas had touched Terri at a particular point in her own theoretical work.

My last book – the book that Terri had read – came out over ten years ago and I’ve recently finished another book. My ideas have pushed forward with time, just as Terri has moved on from her initial contact with my book. She was drawn to Derrida and Bataille before moving onto Deleuze and has brought to her reading questions informed by her practice as an artist while I’ve traveled a different route. Our conversation could only intimate some points of convergence between two lives. Watching the sun coming up in the window of her room on my computer with the afternoon sun coming in through the window of my living room seemed a fitting comment on those intersections. Revisiting that earlier work in conversation with someone who pursued her own trajectory and finding our way to some common ground while knowing how much unknown territory lay between us was another instance to me of the Deleuzian temporality in which I’ve immersed myself in my conceptual meanderings – a temporality that is not linear, but always unfolding through the creative connections of a durational whole.

Tamsin Lorraine Philadelphia, United States

17/04/11

25/04/11

Speaking with Wendy Webster was very interesting and served to further inform my research. We started with me explaining my work and what it is about.

This helped me a great deal and allowed me to ‘iron out’ and streamline my project.

Through talking about my study and its purpose, it made what I was doing clearer and more concise to me, let alone Wendy.

After explaining my research, we explored notions of gender and space with regard to oral history and female genealogy.

Wendy was able to provide many new perspectives on my work that I just hadn’t thought of; she was able to give me some of the knowledge of her work, which is greatly appreciated.

I enjoyed talking to Razia. It was a long conversation and ranged mainly over interests that we shared — in migration, oral history, ideas and experiences of home and exile. Language gets mentioned several times and, listening to the conversation, it would have been good to pursue this further, and to give more time for Razia to talk about the female culture of songs, recipes and herbal remedies which are at the heart of her research.

I was grateful to Razia for doing all the techno-work to set the recording up.

Although part of Razia’s face gets cut off occasionally, I like the way we’re both in the same frame.

Razia Parveen Huddersfield, United Kingdom

Wendy Webster Preston, United Kingdom

Frameworks for Exchange, Workshop on Genealogies and Spaces Between Authorships, at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane – Alex Martinis Roe, assisted

by Karl Burke, Siobhan Mooney. Participants: Emily Aoibheann, Colette Fahy, Jessica Foley, anonymous, Anna-Lena Dubé Fuller, Ruby Wallis.

Published for the exhibition: Alex Martinis Roe Genealogies; Frameworks for Exchange Pallas Projects, Dublin 6th May – 4th June 2011 www.pallasprojects.org

This exhibition was preceded by Frameworks for Exchange, Workshop on Genealogies and Spaces Between Authorships, at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane. A box file of additional material is catalogued and available in the library of Goethe Institut, Dublin.

ISBN: 978-0-9554819-2-5

Acknowledgments: Thanks to Barbara Ebert, Monika Schlenger, Michael Dempsey and the staff of Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Karl Burke, Rowan McDonagh, Eoin Duggan, Mark Cullen, Gillian Lawler and the intern staff of Pallas Projects, Luce Irigaray, Razia Parveen, Terri Bird, Tamsin Lorraine, Wendy Webster, Elizabeth Grosz, Carla Cruz, Francesco Ventrella, Melanie Sehgal and Alicia Frankovich.

Published for the exhibition: Alex Martinis Roe Genealogies; Frameworks for Exchange Pallas Projects, Dublin 6th May – 4th June 2011 www.pallasprojects.org

This project is kindly funded by:

Supported by: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; CAVS (Corporate Audio Visual Services); Kunsthaus KuLe, Berlin

Design: Conor & David

The Arts Council; Dublin City Council; Goethe Institut