[-empyre-] Tacticality: 4 Anna
sdv at krokodile.co.uk
sdv at krokodile.co.uk
Thu Apr 30 04:02:30 EST 2009
anna,
what does "Nonrepresentability is not a quality but an effect" and "you
can't attribute some 'thing' a nonontology!" mean ?
Especially important give what an ontology is.
steve
Anna Munster wrote:
> Actually I am not calling for 'strategy'. I am not calling for
> anything deterministic like 'how artists should respond' or 'what
> someone on this list must do'!!! I am asking,instead, for
> thoughtfulness among some people on the discussion this month!!
> Thought, requires effort, it requires looking into things and all I am
> suggesting is that these things are already all around us and indeed
> have been for many years in the form of very interesting engagements
> between artists and (as Simon has also suggested) a long period/series
> of crises.
>
> ...and while I am fully cognisant of the military overtones of that
> word, I was simply using it to collectively denote a diversity of
> practices that have an 'investigative' thoughtful and hopeful response
> at their core. Some of these practices are also tactical – in the
> sense of tactical media, tactical biopolitics and so forth. Many are
> not. Many rely on affect and sensation as their means and end, in
> which case they are nonrepresentational and are certainly not aimed at
> some determinant outcome ie representing the nonrepresented. Rather
> they set off or produce affective environments and sensations that
> might also provide space for thought. Others might use this 'strategy'
> as well as critique - Hito Steyerl's 'Lovely Andrea' at the last
> Documenta for example...
>
> Nonrepresentability is not a quality but an effect, btw...you can't
> attribute some 'thing' a nonontology!!
>
> One thing I have learned from this month's discussion is that
> speculative reason and speculative capital have never been more in bed
> with each other. When thought takes the form of arrogant
> generalisations it performs in similar ways to speculative capital.
> Forever trying to hedge itself against its own precarity and
> inevitable collapse.
>
> Anna
>
>
> On 29/04/2009, at 8:14 AM, Michael Angelo Tata, PhD wrote:
>
>> Or maybe what Anna is calling for is not strategy, which is primarily
>> totalizaing and singular, but tactics, which are fragmented,
>> dspersed, plural and framed in the absence of the God's-eye-view
>> perspective without which there are no totals, only partial sums? I
>> am thinking again of Michel de Certeau.
>>
>> *******************************************
>> *Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA*
>> *http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/* <http://www.michaelangelotata.com/>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2009 11:09:05 -0700
>> From: editor at intertheory.org <mailto:editor at intertheory.org>
>> To: empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au <mailto:empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
>> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Artists' responses to the so-called "crisis"
>>
>> dear anna...interesting comments, though I wonder if your
>> representation of the non-representable is not a bit too theological
>> for my taste? And transformation is such a magical enterprise...
>> alchemically speaking, I do not suspect that attribution of a quality
>> such as 'non-representabililty' adds or subtracts to the strategic
>> authenticity or legitimacy of politics, responses or art, for that
>> matter. Strategies, in other words, are always fatal...to their
>> object, or to themselves. We all try to catch the falling the knife
>> with each attempt at becoming, no?
>>
>> Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D
>> Editor, Kritikos
>> http://intertheory.org <http://intertheory.org/>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> *From:* Anna Munster <A.Munster at unsw.edu.au
>> <mailto:A.Munster at unsw.edu.au>>
>> *To:* soft_skinned_space <empyre at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> <mailto:empyre at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>>
>> *Sent:* Saturday, April 25, 2009 3:48:56 AM
>> *Subject:* Re: [-empyre-] Artists' responses to the so-called "crisis"
>>
>> Sorry Nikos but as to your rhetorical 'no' below, I resoundingly
>> reply NO WAY!!. There is a world of difference between responding
>> (rather than reacting which is really what Joseph is talking about)
>> to a social, economic and political crisis using aesthetic strategies
>> and techniques vs. the 'arts' of finance, government or whatever
>> other institution you want to aestheticise.
>> (a la Benjamin et al).
>>
>> The examples that Nik and Marc are talking about (and also what Brian
>> Holmes has been involved with) are emphatically not abut knee jerk
>> response or reaction but are about using nonrepresentational
>> aesthetic strategies - among a multitude of strategies which also
>> include activist, semiotic, political, social and affective ones –
>> to /transform/ subjective and collective situations. These are
>> immanent, critical, positive and productive relationships with crisis
>> ie they do not respond /to / crisis but rather work amid, through and
>> via crisis to work with what might be transformative about crises.
>> And these aesthetic strategies are absolutely everywhere both in and
>> out of the 'art world' eg Critical Art Ensemble, Harwood and
>> Mongrel,16Beaver, rebublicart project, The Senselab, eipcp, Make
>> World, edu factory, The Thing, Serial Space (sydney -based for all
>> you North Americans who need to get out more ;-) etc etc etc. And
>> these are just the artists/collectives/projects - there's also a
>> wealth of brilliant art theory around this - try Hito Steyerl, Gerald
>> Raunig, Brian Holmes, Matthew Fuller, Florian Schneider, Brian
>> Massumi all the FLOSS+art etc etc etc
>>
>> There is NO relation between these kind of politics, responses and
>> aesthetics and the 'art' of finance - except a relation of revulsion.
>> On the other hand, if you want to find out about a really fantastic
>> installation that engaged directly with the stock market and in fact
>> used a gambling syndicate's money to trade stocks as part of the
>> actual art work - have a look at Micheal Goldberg's documentation of
>> his 2002 work 'Catch a Falling Knife'
>> (http://www.michael-goldberg.com/main.html - go into Projects and
>> select the title of the piece).
>>
>> Just another point I'd like to make about this month's discussion - I
>> have found some of the posts scary and stupid in their absolute lack
>> of knowledge about anything that is going on about contemporary art,
>> aesthetic strategies and politics. I really think some people need to
>> do a bit of preliminary research and investigation before they start
>> sounding off about how boring or naive the concept of aesthetically
>> responding to crisis is,
>>
>> Best Anna
>>
>> On 24/04/2009, at 10:36 PM, Nicholas Ruiz III wrote:
>>
>>
>> nk...another aspect of interest is the way in which the financial
>> realm in itself is a creative act, and artful...with all of the
>> discussion revolving around the perception/reading parallax, I
>> wonder how people in the artistic/academic community may not
>> perceive/read financial creativity as art at all...I suspect such
>> financial activity is a form of art, which contains all of the
>> aspirations, triumphs and failures that any art project may
>> enable, no?
>>
>> nikos
>>
>> Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D
>> Editor, Kritikos
>> http://intertheory.org <http://intertheory.org/>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----
>> From: nick knouf <nak44 at cornell.edu <mailto:nak44 at cornell.edu>>
>> To: -empyre- <empyre at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> <mailto:empyre at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>>
>> Sent: Thursday, April 16, 2009 1:07:11 PM
>> Subject: [-empyre-] Artists' responses to the so-called "crisis"
>>
>> Dear empyre,
>>
>> It's strange that it's the 16th of the month (at least where I
>> am), yet
>> there has been little sustained discussion of present-day artistic
>> responses to this so-called financial "crisis"--one that exists in a
>> mythical realm of numbers-that-we-cannot-perceive, but that sadly has
>> very real impacts on people. Responses by students, academics, and
>> activists have not been limited to the resignation of acceptance, nor
>> abstract theorizing in and of itself, but rather have taken, at
>> times,
>> forms of protest and occupation throughout the world, as well as
>> direct
>> actions against banking institutions. (See, in particular the
>> story of
>> Enric Duran:
>> http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20090319182858556 and
>> http://17-s.info/en .) How then might we understand these actions
>> within the context of our own theorizing activities?
>>
>> This should reflect a special concern as to the impact of this
>> "crisis"
>> on academic and cultural institutions. Indeed, the occupations and
>> protests at schools---NYU, the New School, University of Rochester,
>> institutions in Italy and France and Spain and...---suggest the deep
>> worry that many have regarding how the "crisis" might ultimately
>> move to
>> transform culture and learning into more and more reified situations
>> governed by numbers and the market. (The Bologna process is
>> coming to
>> the
>> states: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/education/09educ.html .)
>> In response there have been discussions and interviews about how
>> we can
>> use this time of "crisis" to develop new models that exist in
>> parallel
>> to concurrent struggles to force governments to provide for the basic
>> needs of people. (See in particular "Interviewing the Crisis":
>> http://www.interviewingthecrisis.org/ .) How might we then
>> reconsider
>> actions and activities of the past and present and future---TAZs,
>> tactical media, pirate radio, and many, many, more---in light of
>> calls
>> for more standardization and more "accountability"?
>>
>> And whither the academic institution? Corporations have fairly free
>> reign in many departments at colleges and universities in the United
>> States. Are we to expect even more of these so-called
>> "public-private
>> partnerships" in the future? What is the role of the institution in
>> producing the people who created the "crisis" in the first place?
>> Who
>> will follow the links between the powerful actors in order to map
>> their
>> impact?
>>
>> I present here a recent project of mine that is my own attempt to
>> face
>> some of these issues. MAICgregator (http://maicgregator.org
>> <http://maicgregator.org/>) is a
>> Firefox extension that aggregates information about colleges and
>> universities embedded in the military-academic-industrial (MAIC)
>> complex. It searches government funding databases, private news
>> sources,
>> private press releases, and public information about trustees to
>> try and
>> produce a radical cartography of the modern university via the
>> replacement or overlay of this information on academic websites.
>> MAICgregator is available for download right now:
>> http://maicgregator.org/download . If you want to see what
>> MAICgregator
>> does to a website without downloading it, you can look at some
>> screenshots: http://maicgregator.org/docs/screenshots . This is its
>> first public release, so expect that things might not work properly.
>>
>> I have written an extensive statement about MAICgregator that
>> tries to
>> contextualize it within discourses of net.art, the
>> military-academic-industrial complex, "data mining", and activist
>> artistic practices. As the statement is rife with embedded links,
>> please read it online:
>>
>> http://maicgregator.org/statement
>>
>> I welcome any feedback or discussion that this might provoke; if you
>> want to e-mail the project authors directly, please e-mail info
>> --at--
>> maicgregator ---dot--- org.
>>
>> http://maicgregator.org/
>>
>> nick knouf
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au <mailto:empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
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>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au <mailto:empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
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>>
>>
>> A/Prof. Anna Munster
>> Assistant Dean, Grant Support
>> Acting Director Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics
>> School of Art History and Art Education
>> College of Fine Arts
>> UNSW
>> P.O. Box 259
>> Paddington
>> NSW 2021
>> 612 9385 0741 (tel)
>> 612 9385 0615(fax)
>> a.munster at unsw.edu.au <mailto:a.munster at unsw.edu.au>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au <mailto:empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
> A/Prof. Anna Munster
> Assistant Dean, Grant Support
> Acting Director Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics
> School of Art History and Art Education
> College of Fine Arts
> UNSW
> P.O. Box 259
> Paddington
> NSW 2021
> 612 9385 0741 (tel)
> 612 9385 0615(fax)
> a.munster at unsw.edu.au <mailto:a.munster at unsw.edu.au>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
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