[-empyre-] introducing Conor McGarrigle on "Bare LIfe" - introductory comments

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

dear -empyre-

Conor McGarrigle is joining us from Paris where he is living this  
month.  He's asked me to forward to you his initial reflections on  
'what is bare life?"... these follow his short bio here.

--cm



Conor McGarrigle is a net artist based in Dublin. He is the founder  
of online arts space Stunned.org . In 2002 as part of the Irish  
Museum of Modern art project he started the net art open: the  
uncurated open submission net art show in which all entries are  
accepted. His art has dealt with themes of surveillance (Spook...) ,  
identity (PLAY-lets) and art activism (IrishMuseumofModernArt.com),  
often involving fictional identities with an element of prankstavism  
never far away.  He is currently working on an extended narrative  
work about artists in Dublin based on Joyce's Ulysses  (Cyclops,  
Proteus episodes completed to date)  and has recently developed an  
interest in mapping resulting in Google Bono :  a google maps /  
surveillance camera mashup.

His work has been widely exhibited internationally including the  
Seoul Net FEstival, File Sao Paolo, FILE RIO, Thailand New media arts  
festival, Fundacio La Caixa Barcelona, SIGGRAPH, ReJoyce Festival  
Dublin, Arthouse Dublin,Project Arts Centre Dublin, The City Arts  
Centre and  Intermedia Cork .

He is currently studying for an MFA at the National College of Art  
and Design Dublin.


Introductory comments

First of all I would like to thank Christina for inviting me to  
partake in this discussion, it's a great honour particularly to be in  
such good company.

In reflecting on bare life the work of Georgio Agamben and his key  
concept of Homo Sacer are unavoidable.   Agamben bases his concept of  
bare life on an obscure point of ancient roman law; when a condemned  
person was banned from society and had their rights as a citizen  
removed, thus becoming Homo Sacer, the living dead whose killing was  
not a crime, excluded from the protection of the law but still  
subject to the law, living in a state of exception.  Obviously the '  
unlawful combatants' of Guantanemo Bay, those subject to  
'extraordinary rendition' and held in secret prisons around the world  
stripped of all rights and at the mercy of the state of exception are  
modern day Homo Sacer.  There is even a school of thought which holds  
that liberal democracy is a mask and that ultimately we are all Homo  
Sacer.

What does this mean for art and in particular for the possibility of  
political art? Around 2000 I was interested in surveillance online  
culminating in my Spook... . Project. The central conceit was that it  
placed a military server which had visited my site under surveillance  
and was able to track where it had been on the web using very basic  
techniques.  While  exposing the amount of data  left behind as you  
surfed  Spook... implied that online surveillance was a two way  
street and that such surveillance  was a haphazard affair not to be  
taken too seriously. What was a little naive even then today  looks  
like a charming period piece which raises questions about the role of  
political art. It's obvious that  political art is needed now more  
then ever  but how can we challenge this  growth in the state of  
exception, of rule by decree – think of all the special anti- 
terrorism legislation being enacted all around the world –  
artistically? On what criteria do we judge this art and would the  
effort not be better spent in some sort of direct action that has a  
better chance of being effective?  These are questions I ask myself,  
not questions that I raise just to be controversial and I look  
forward to everyone's thoughts.

There is another more optimistic aspect to Bare Life. Agamben notes  
that Bare Life is " a form of life over which power no longer seems  
to have any hold" which opens up possibilities for a "lyrical or even  
ecstatic" dimension.  Colin McQuillan in his essay 'The Political  
Life in Giorgio Agamben ' argues that Agamben  "defines this politics  
in terms of “a life directed toward the idea of happiness and  
cohesive with a form-of-life” in which “the single ways, acts, and  
process of living are never simply facts but always and above all  
possibilities of life, always above all power.” and that “Agamben’s  
conception of the political life is the result of a radical  
rethinking of the potentiality of life, and life as
potentiality.”

I have had a long term interest in Joyce and Ulysses in particular  
and have recently embarked on the (foolhardy) task of attempting a  
series of narrative based works structurally based on the chapters of  
Ulysses. This aspect of bare life seems to me to echo many of Joyce's  
concerns or certainly that aspect of Joyce that I find of particular  
interest.
While Joyce is  often seen as the austere high priest of modernism it  
is the humourous Joyce, the lyrical Joyce, the politically conflicted  
Joyce who abhorred the absolutist position and most of all the Joyce  
who believed that the highest form of art was to be found in the  
everyday lives of ordinary people, that I find of most interest and  
that informs my recent work. I am interested in the idea that  by  
focusing on simple everyday things like walking through a city, we  
begin a process which clarifies what we do and how we relate to our  
world and reveals greater truths about ways of being in the world.   
It is of necessity an open ended process one for which the result is  
not clear. For me this ties in with this dimension of bare life the  
idea that  stripping life down to it's essentials  opens up  new and  
unexpected possibilities.

Which brings me to the idea that art can dissolve the “radical  
separation between painful subjection and joyous liberation” .  An  
ambitious and honourable aim.. but can it be realised ?   I look  
forward to the debate.

On a personal note I'm doing this on what was going to be a computer  
free break in Paris. I will be using internet cafes so my responses  
will not be super fast and I apologise in advance.