Re: [-empyre-] Re: Critical Spatial Practice

[Danny Butt <db@dannybutt.net>]

Enjoying this thread a great deal more than I have the capacity to  
contribute, but two brief thoughts from a deconstructive vein that  
has been productive for me recently:

Firstly, given how thoroughly I tend to agree with them usually, I am  
a little surprised at Ryan and Kevin's concerns with escaping art as  
context in the service of art as process (to be a bit ham-fisted  
about the summary, please correct me if I have this wrong), as if  
interdisciplinarity and the refusal to locate practice allows flight  
from the power relations of assimilating cultural institutions. It  
reminds me of a certain repetition of Conceptualism in the new media  
arts sector; and also (as Brett perhaps suggests) a new media studies  
repetition of "criticality" which seems not-well-enough-connected to  
previous debates on the limits and exclusions inherent in the  
critical enterprise's attempts to find distance from power. This is  
not to say that I am not interested in institutional critique, but my  
reading of post-60s critical artistic practices is that they are  
marked with the recogniiton that it is precisely in the moment of  
recuperation that one's criticality finds its disruptive effect in  
the fabric of disciplinarity/genre/institutional practice.  (I am  
thinking especially of US feminist work from the 70s and 80s, inc.  
Lacy as Kevin mentioned, included/reframed/assimilated in the recent  
MOCA feminist art restrospective which I didn't see but would love to  
hear more about w.r.t. this discussion from those in the LA area, and  
also thinking of Faith Wilding's comments on the problematic of  
reprising "Crocheted Environment" in a new institutional site). (In  
fact, this whole point seems heavily gendered). In the end, surely,  
we have to choose our sites of participation with a much more modest  
sense of our capability to escape the power relations that pre-exist  
our participation in whatever cultural scripts we are performing. For  
me, the power of interdisciplinarity is in the "and/against", rather  
than the "not just".

So to take that out to the broader questions of sensation in space  
that Christiane, Sally Jane, Catherine have opened up in Kevin's  
"instruments" for us; our ability to comprehend and control  
instrumentalising behaviour (as Sally Jane points out, not deserving  
of a purely negative connotation) might be less voluntaristic than  
some of this discussion might imply. We are having these  
conversations within heavily over-determined embodied subjectivities  
which to me DO make the de Certeau-esque tactical walk seem romantic  
in its assumption that sensitivities to one's own body are  
communicated intersubjectively through conversation or co-presence.  
My experience is that, contrarily, difference is made more visible.  
Just think about race, body and law enforcement/policing. [This is  
simply Spivak's critique of the baseline assumption of a shared  
subjectivity in Deleuze's flight from the subject outlined in the Can  
the Subaltern Speak? essay].

Perhaps instead, I'd suggest, one's movement through space is instead  
developed the way one learns a language - very slowly, and the  
effects on one's native bodily "language" will never quite be  
understood as one attempts to learn another way of being in space,  
yes through the infinitesimal mechanisms described by Kevin -  
experience is irreducible - but requiring a much longer period of  
time than the logic of the "intervention" seems cut out for. Here  
then, with the question of time, we have to attend to the history of  
the psychogeographic walk's intimate relationship with exploration/ 
anthropology; and this raises the fundamental aporia between the  
subjectivities of the explorer and their informants, and their  
different temporal orientations to the encounter. My take on the  
history of the debates in anthro is that there is a clear ethical  
decision to make when we travel: we either focus on our own  
experience and what we can extract for those "back home" in our  
disciplinary/subjective locations; or we test our own desire to enter  
different spaces by giving ourselves over to the maintenance of  
someone else's pathway, where our bodies do not "learn" but instead  
give us away constantly, but through our inability to ever be  
adequate (or critical ;) ) to this situation we develop our ability  
to attend to the exclusions embedded in our own practices/being.

Mieke Bal's work on travelling concepts is perhaps pertinent here.

Reading back on this it doesn't seem like I've said anything useful,  
but I'll send it anyway. Many thanks for all the stimulating  
contributions.

x.d

--
http://www.dannybutt.net


On 11/09/2007, at 6:17 AM, Ryan Griffis wrote:

> Sorry, i meant to also reiterate Kevin's pointing to Nick Brown and  
> Ava Bromberg's "Just Spaces" program (if i may shamelessly promote  
> some friends), as it is deliberately, i think, inclusive of  
> practices other than Art. Or to paraphrase Matthew Fuller, projects  
> that are "not just art" (or architecture, or planning, or activism  
> for that matter). Which leads to some of the concrete concerns  
> about the shifting of power when structurally exclusive cultural  
> institutions attempt inclusion...
> best,
> ryan
> _______________________________________________
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