There have been so many things going on in the last six months. It has been difficult to think of what people need and what my art needs to communicate. I began to focus on plurality and not taking sides. It was a singular focus on working within my means and abilities. It was a kind of narcissism that I took pleasure in. Then I began to see things played against the environment I got close to and I felt it was my turn to take the lead and cause disruptions. Rhizomatic disruptions through language and more essentially poetry. There was hardly any obfuscation within the traditional art practices in school. I wanted to play with language. At first there was a lot of conflict within the templates created by institutions. But the moment I sang, started to shred away. This performance has gone through three iterations. Each of them working with different set-ups. The first one was too layered they said. The second was too aggressive. The last one was home at the magazine launch. The dissonance finally became becoming more of a discourse.
Talking about books at lunchtime #4 - Marcos Becquer and Jose Gatti (1991) “Elements of Vogue”, Third Text, 5:16-17, pp. 65-81 Michael Asbury, Staff I chose that essay because it had quite a profound influence on the way I approached research and writing, in short, the way I thought about art. The authors questioned terminology, in that case hybridity, arguing its semantic limitations and proposing an alternative. The way in which that alternative, syncretism, was proposed seemed very pertinent indeed, both as a strategy for subverting power relations but also as an example of a critical methodology. Analysing the etymology of the term, arising in ancient Crete, the term was then applied by the authors to a contemporary case study, the vogue dance fad amongst marginalised LGBT Latino communities and its subsequent appropriation within mainstream pop culture. Historical analysis and a critique of contemporary culture went hand in hand, avoiding what seemed to me to be the predominant method (at the time and to a certain degree to date) of attributing influence and locating its transmission. The essay thus offered to me the possibility of thinking more productively about the notion of influence within art history, in such a manner as might be described as decolonial.
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I enjoyed the informally of the meeting, and the 'round the table' atmosphere afforded by the library setting. I strongly encourage the organisers to continue the series.