<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=Windows-1252">
<style type="text/css" style="display:none;"><!-- P {margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;} --></style>
</head>
<body dir="ltr">
<div id="divtagdefaultwrapper" style="font-size:12pt;color:#000000;font-family:Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;" dir="ltr">
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0"></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">Greetings!
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman""><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">My apologies for joining the conversation at the eleventh hour. Many thanks to Renate for the invitation to participate this week. I’ll proceed
in fragments.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman""><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" style="text-align: center; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;">
<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">***<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman""><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">What is the opposite of contamination? Containment? Container-ization?
<s><o:p></o:p></s></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman""><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" style="text-align: center; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;">
<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">***<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" style="text-align: center; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;">
<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman""><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">Regarding mushrooms, I want to draw your attention to the Vietnamese court’s decision yesterday to uphold the verdict against the popular
blogger “Mother Mushroom.” In July 2017, </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; background-image: initial; background-">Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh was given a ten-year prison sentence for “conducting propaganda against the state.” At the time, Bennett
Murray wrote in <i>The Guardian</i>: “Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for the New York-based Human Rights Watch, said her involvement in protests against the Taiwanese-owned Formosa Ha Tinh Steel plant in north-central Vietnam, which was linked to a catastrophic
fish die-off in 2016, was the last straw for the authorities.” See:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; background-image: initial; background-"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; background-image: initial; background-">https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/jul/09/mother-mushroom-how-vietnam-locked-up-its-most-famous-blogger
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; background-image: initial; background-"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; background-image: initial; background-">Environmental contamination here intersects with claims about free speech and what others this month
have described as “social contamination.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); background-image: initial; background-"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" style="text-align: center; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); background-image: initial; background-">***<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" style="text-align: center; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); background-image: initial; background-"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); background-image: initial; background-">I’d like to say more about social contamination and artistic work that strive
to represent its effects and affects (and thus return more or less to my above questions). </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); background-image: initial; background-"><br>
</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); background-image: initial; background-">Rahul beautifully detailed some of the elements of documentaries about which
he is writing. My attention was drawn to the opposition he stages between “the indexical facticity of the documentary image (restricted)” and the need/drive “for the whole debilitated body” to speak. In my
<i>REMEX: Toward an Art History of the NAFTA Era</i>, I consider greater Mexican tactics of
<i>undocumentation</i>. For the purposes of this month’s contamination theme, I’d describe this work as conceptual, as “contaminating” or “corrupting” documentary strategies that privilege factual accuracy, verisimilitude, transparency, even flow charts of
accountability; that consciously plumb the limits of “indexical facticity.” <o:p>
</o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); background-image: initial; background-"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" style="text-align: center; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); background-image: initial; background-">***<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); background-image: initial; background-"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); background-image: initial; background-">The tactics I reference, formally speaking, are hardly unique to Mexico
and United States (in some regards they represent the norm for post-1980s documentary cinema and a documentary aesthetic in the visual and literary arts). The subject matter of the work I address is site-specific, however. At the close of the book I consider
several undocumentaries before looping back to other art works that I addressed in the book. For this conversation’s purposes, I want to focus on one work in particular.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); background-image: initial; background-"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" style="text-align: center; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); background-image: initial; background-">***<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); background-image: initial; background-"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); background-image: initial; background-">Some of you may be familiar with Mexico City based artist and forensic scientist
Teresa Margolles’s <i>Vaporización</i>. I bring up this installation because it speaks to fabricated divides, including the above of contamination/containment, suggesting that contamination subsumes any would-be opposite of itself. I cut and paste:<s><o:p></o:p></s></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); background-image: initial; background-"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">True to its title, Margolles’s
<i>Vaporización</i> (<i>Vaporization</i>), runs disinfected water taken from the washing of corpses in the Servicio Médico Forense (SEMEFO; Medical Forensic Service), Mexico City’s central morgue, through a fog machine. Those brave or curious enough to proceed
into the gallery housing the installation, step into a thick fog that converts them into participant-observers—you cannot not inhale.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman""><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">In an artist’s talk associated with the Brooklyn Museum’s show
<i>Global Feminisms</i> (2007), Margolles devoted the lion’s share of her presentation to a detailed and radical recontextualization of scientific descriptions of the water cycle. She observed that morgue water already enters the “great river of Mexico City,”
evaporates, and rains down on its inhabitants; that the world’s citizens daily imbibe, inhale, ingest one another.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman""><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">Nearly contemporaneous with her reflections, the Mexican government offered its own poetic platitudes regarding ambience. In 2006, in cooperation
with the Bush II administration, <span style="color:#252525">the (Felipe) Calderón administration fired its first shots in the Mexico’s Drug War. By 2008, the numbers of dead—collateral damage—across Mexico skyrocketed. In response to public outcry, the administration
offered a damning domestic narrative that re-gendered the hypermasculinity of the narco-aesthetic: “If you see dust in the air, it’s because we’re cleaning house.” Actions like
<i>Vaporización</i> that had been deemed extreme assumed new significance; were retroactively reevaluated as prescient of both a more pervasive extreme labor situation and the “contamination” qua complicity of all.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman";color:#252525"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" style="text-align: center; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;">
<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman";color:#252525">***<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" style="text-align: center; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;">
<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman";color:#252525"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman";color:#252525">Speaking of the above remarkable alibi for Mexico’s ongoing Uncivil War offered by the Calderón administration, I finally want
to go in another direction (which may harbor some kinships with what already has been posted, e.g. observations by Melinda or Ian Alan’s interactive contribution to the dialogue). Specifically I’d note that the will to contaminate (the self, the text)—the
desire to seek a form to represent contamination made manifest in a variety of procedurally generated texts by visual artists and poets as of late. I refer to tactics like erasure, redaction, strikethrough, grayscaling. In my own case, in my second collection
<i><s>FANNIE + FREDDIE</s>/The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography</i>, I still “see” the first half of the book’s title struck through despite the publisher’s refusal to do so (because of metadata issues). Elsewhere, I have sought to represent contamination
with a “contaminated” text. See my response to a photograph by Tina Modotti:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman";color:#252525"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman";color:#252525">https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2012/06/a-berlin-no-mexico-city-childhood/<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman";color:#252525"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" style="text-align: center; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;">
<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman";color:#252525">***<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" style="text-align: center; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;">
<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman";color:#252525"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman";color:#252525">I’d welcome others’ thoughts on/reactions to any of the above.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<br>
<p></p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0"><br>
</p>
<div id="Signature">
<div id="divtagdefaultwrapper" dir="ltr" style="font-size:12pt; color:rgb(0,0,0); font-family:Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif,Helvetica,EmojiFont,"Apple Color Emoji","Segoe UI Emoji",NotoColorEmoji,"Segoe UI Symbol","Android Emoji",EmojiSymbols">
<p>---------------</p>
<p>Amy Sara Carroll</p>
<p>2017-2018 Society Fellow</p>
<p>Cornell University</p>
<p>Society for the Humanities</p>
<p>A.D. White House</p>
<p>27 East Avenue</p>
<p>Ithaca, NY 14853-1101</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<hr style="display:inline-block;width:98%" tabindex="-1">
<div id="divRplyFwdMsg" dir="ltr"><font face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-size:11pt" color="#000000"><b>From:</b> empyre-bounces@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <empyre-bounces@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of Ian Alan Paul <ian.paul@stonybrook.edu><br>
<b>Sent:</b> Friday, December 1, 2017 10:22:30 AM<br>
<b>To:</b> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au<br>
<b>Subject:</b> [-empyre-] CONTAMINATE! MANIFESTO</font>
<div> </div>
</div>
<div class="BodyFragment"><font size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;">
<div class="PlainText">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------</div>
</span></font></div>
</body>
</html>